I brushed the rubber nipple across his mouth and he reacted instantly, reached for it with all of his tiny body. He opened his eyes and he began to suckle.
“He likes it,” the nurse exclaimed.
He certainly did. He was an incredible sucking machine. I cradled the bottle at a comfortable angle and I slowly rocked some more. Emotion swept over me. I felt like I had just trudged through a high pass and looked out to find that life was spread out endlessly in front of me in a giant, expansive valley. Tears rolled down unwiped, unabated. I continued to rock.
“That’s your daddy,” the nurse said softly to Caleb as she retreated to the doorway to leave me alone with my son whose eyes, however new and unfocused, seemed to gaze lovingly at me.
Chapter 5
I am propped against the arm of Nick’s dirty beige sofa with my feet up, feeling somewhat better under the mild beneficence of ibuprofen. Around me are books and almost nothing else. Double stacked in shabby, mismatched tumble-down bookcases, piled high on the floors and on windowsills and overflowing the file boxes that are strewn around the room. If there is any order to them, it escapes me. Nick enters with a book in a raised hand and an expression like he has never seen a book before as he presents it to me with a lilt. It is a hardback copy of The Million Dollar Mermaid, Esther Williams’s autobiography.
“What is it?” I ask, dutifully assuming the position of the unworthy pupil to his master teacher. I know that the book came out about four years ago, was a brief bestseller and made a small sensation with chapters on her love life and a revelation about Jeff Chandler’s cross dressing. A clean copy sells for about five dollars on Amazon so I don’t know why he’s showing it to me.
“Look!” Nick says proudly as he opens the cover to reveal Esther Williams’s oversize, feminine signature. I respectfully examine the flowery script on the title page.
“She never signs. She had one little signing at Brentano’s when it came out and that’s all,” says Nick. “And it’s a first,” he adds pointing to the tiny words “First Edition” under the publisher information on the opposite page. “There are two signed copies on AbeBooks. The cheapest is eight hundred dollars. The gay boys love her. She’s like Mae West in a bathing suit.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“She signed it for me. I been trying for six months.”
“But you said she never signs,” I say, rising ritually for the bait as Nick’s face widened into a Cheshire Cat grin. “You use the cancer thing?” I ask.
One of Nick’s favorite ploys is to send the book in the mail with a fan letter and a picture supposedly of himself, but really of a cousin who had contracted Hodgkin’s disease and was bald and emaciated from treatment. In the letter Nick proclaims how much of an inspiration (famous author’s name inserted here) has been to him and how it would fortify him in his fight against his Stage IV cancer if only he could occasionally open the book to see the signature and be reminded of the author. This worked in the past with both Lauren Bacall and Lillian Gish, but I know that flinty Katherine Hepburn remained immune to Nick’s charms to the end.
“Nah. They’re getting too many sob stories these days. I mean there’s real competition out there and there’s nothing some of these scum won’t do to get a book signed.”
I examine the signature until Nick pulls it away.
“So what did you do?”
“All right. But don’t tell anybody.”
“Who would I tell?”
“I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t want this to get around. I’m telling you and nobody else.”
Is he sincere? Is he telling only me? One thing about Nick is that I never quite know. He is an onion with alternating layers of sincerity and duplicity and you never know what you might find in the core and I am nowhere near experiencing Nick’s aromatic core.
“I know this Bev Hills hairdresser, Rupert, who sometimes gets me some of the Taschen art photography books—you know, like the erotic wrestling stuff and the fetish stuff—he’s got a source and he gets them for me sometimes for cheap. I don’t ask him where they come from, but sometimes he gets me a hundred-dollar book for ten bucks. He wears nipple rings under his shirt. I wouldn’t bend over in front of him but he’s an okay guy. He’s always bragging about his celebrity clientele. But they’re all from TV which I don’t watch on account of I’m so busy and I like DVD movies better. He tells me their names and I never heard of them. I know he comps them just so he can say he cuts their hair as if somebody cares. So one day I’m picking up the small Helmut Newton portrait book from him—ten bucks which is not that great a price ’cause the book is devalued lately and you’re lucky if you can get fifty for a copy even though Newton’s been croaked for years and he tells me in the course of a conversation that he cuts Esther Williams’s hair. Rupert says she comes in on the second Wednesday of every month unless she’s away on a business trip. She’s got this big swimsuit line they sell in Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and all those places.”
“How old is she?” I ask, trying to form a picture of what she might look like not on a diving board.
“She’s eighty-three in February. So I say that I’d be interested in her signature and he says she’s coming in the next Wednesday but that she’s a pretty crusty old broad and she doesn’t like being bothered. I ask him what time and now he’s getting nervous. I mean what’s he got to be nervous about? She’s eighty-three and he cuts her hair for free anyhow. What’s the big deal?”
“Just tell him, Nick,” Doreen cuts in.
“So I show up Wednesday a little after eleven. He walks up to the appointment desk where I slip him a twenty and he points her out sitting at his chair. He pretends to answer the phone and I meander over in her direction.”
“What did she look like?”
“Like somebody’s grandmother. She’s eighty-three.”
“What did you do?”
“I turned on the charm.” When Nick “turns on the charm” he affects an unctuous, servile, rodent quality. No doubt there are some people who find his Dickensian persona pitiable and respond kindly. Most simply scan for an exit. “I ask her if she’s Esther Williams and she nods yes and then I tell her how much I love her movies, but I’m trying to come up with the name of one.”
“Million Dollar Mermaid,” offers Doreen.
“Thanks for telling me now.” He scowls at Doreen and then continues his story. “But I can see she’s not warming to my routine. And then I tell her that my wife won’t wear anything else but one of her swimsuits cause of the way they fit and the way they’re made. That goes over a little better and I think I’m getting her and I say that it’s this amazing coincidence ‘cause I have a copy of her book in the car which I have read cover to cover and it’d mean so much to me if she were to sign it.” He paused.
“So?” I prod reflexively.
“She looked at me like I was some kind of worm that crawled into her nectarine. And she says that she gets a zillion requests so she has a policy that she doesn’t sign any more. She says she’s sorry. Like I care she’s sorry.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I don’t know. I just keep talkin’. You know me. Brain wired straight to my mouth. I started talking about how I saw her on Turner Classics in some swim sequence with big blue pools and how great she was, but I could see that was going nowhere fast. Then Rupert comes back and he got real nervous and twitchy about what was going down. And I guess I must have been talkin’ too much and then I start telling her about Doreen and about how good the swimsuit fits and I was thinking about maybe telling her Doreen has got Hodgkin’s or something, but I had the feeling that nothing was gonna work. She’s definitely getting this pissy kind of look on her face. So I tell her again how much I would appreciate it and Rupert’s saying, like, ‘It was nice of you to drop by, Nick,’ and starts pushing me out the door. But I’m sticking it out. And then she says out of nowhere ‘I wouldn’t sign a book if you came in wearing an Esther Williams swimsuit.’”
“Tell him what Rupert said,” says Doreen.
“So Rupert says, ‘Sure you would.’ He’s got this big faggy grin on his face. ‘How could you say no to that?’ he says to her. And she smiles like out of the corners of her mouth. So before she can change her mind I say, ‘How long you gonna be here?’ She doesn’t answer, but Rupert says she’s gonna have to spend a half hour under the dryer and then he’s gonna have to comb her out. Maybe forty-five minutes.”
“You didn’t?” I say.
“I jump in the car and run over to Macy’s in the Beverly Center which is a couple of blocks from there and I find the biggest size Esther Williams swimsuit and I buy it. It costs sixty bucks, but I figured I can return it any time.”
“You can’t return swimsuits,” Doreen adds sagely.
“What do you mean you can’t return swimsuits? I got it at Macy’s for Chrissakes.”
“You can’t return swimsuits. It’s a law. It’s unsanitary.”
Nick looks to me to adjudicate. He knows I went to college and for him that qualifies me to settle the issue.
“I don’t know. I think maybe Doreen’s right.”
“Are you kidding me? I spent sixty bucks on the fucking thing.”
“Did you wear it?”
“Of course I wore it.”
“He wore it in front of Esther Williams.” Doreen affirms proudly.
“I put it on in the car. I was parked out on San Vicente Boulevard and I had to wait until there was nobody walking on the sidewalk and then I scrunched down in the seat. It was made out of some kind of stretchy stuff so it kind of stretches to fit, but it was murder getting it to cover my balls. I had to like scrunch my nuts back inside. I got myself all squeezed into this thing and then I marched into the salon with the book and the pen in my hand. Rupert’s combing her out. Everything in the place stops. She looks at me like the freak that I was, but you can get away with more in a Bev Hills beauty salon than you can in a whorehouse in Bangkok, so she kind of chuckles and takes the pen and she signs it. And then I walk out—Jesus fucking Christ, Doreen. Are you sure I can’t return the suit?”
I laugh and it feels like daggers going into my bruised, maybe broken ribs. “Did she say anything?” I ask, attempting to speak without actually moving my distressed diaphragm.
“She said, ‘You look good.’ I don’t think she was being sincere.”
“She’s got millions,” Doreen says in a Doreen-style non sequitur.
“That’s ’cause she’s smart,” says Nick. “Some of them actresses from the forties now they’re living in studio walk-ups in Van Nuys, but Esther Williams—she had brains to go with the looks.”
I wonder if Esther had invested in the internet. I imagine that her investments are limited mostly to bonds, blue chips and real estate. As she dives confidently off that high board that is life I believe that she is endowed with the preservation skills and wisdom that belonged exclusively to a previous, superior generation.
Outside I hear the buzzy sound of a small motorbike in the driveway. The little engine shuts off with a hiccup. I look up at Nick, he rolls his eyes. “Shit!”
“What?” I ask.
Nick goes to the window, looks out, and then turns to me.
“It’s fucking Helmet Head.”
“He knows where you live?”
“Last year I Craigslisted some discard inventory out of my driveway. He showed up.”
Someone knocks insistently at the front door and Nick leaves the room to answer it. I overhear the conversation.
“Kak pozhivaete?”
Although I can’t see from my sofa perch, I know from the voice that its origin is a short guy with nervous, darting eyes wearing a beat-up, half-dome motorcycle helmet clumsily spray-painted red, with dirty curls of stringy, dark hair spilling out from its perimeter, and the chinstrap flapping loosely at his neck. The ensemble is always completed with a ratty army jacket, greasy work pants and worn-out sneakers. He wears the helmet whether he is on his bike or off, indoors and out, but he never, as far as I can tell, fastens the chinstrap.
“I don’t speak Russian,” says Nick coolly.
“I thought your parents were Russian.”
“Yeah. But I was born in New Jersey.”
“You should learn it.”
“What do you want, Hector?”
Hector, we assume, is his given name. It is the only alternate to Helmet Head that I have heard. Other book scouts say that Helmet Head wears his fiberglass chapeau to bed each night. It is also said but unsubstantiated that Helmet Head is a twice-convicted felon, a candidate to be locked up forever under California’s three-strikes law if he gets caught out of line with the law in the smallest way. Also, he has a compulsive twitch that emanates from around his chest and moves to his shoulders. It’s kind of like an oversized shrug, and it seems to appear unheralded every several minutes if you are unfortunate enough to be in his presence long enough to notice.
“I heard about Ralph.”
“I told him not to go to Anaheim,” says Nick grimly.
“Did he say what it was like down there? Was there good stuff?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I heard they had unsorted bins down there.”
“I wouldn’t know.” I know Nick is trying to close the door on him.
“Unsorted” means that nobody has gone through and pulled out the good books. On the bright side of sorted bins is that they put ex-junkies and winos on the early morning sorting duties and mostly what catches their eye are big coffee-table books, which mostly aren’t worth anything anyway. A big old, omnipresent Abrams art book on Matisse with appealing large pictures sells for about four bucks on Amazon and you lose two on the shipping.
“So where is he? That’s his car out front, right?”
“He’s lying down.”
“So he didn’t say anything about what it was like?”
“I gotta go, Hector. I gotta pack my orders.”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“I’ll tell him you were concerned about him.” But Helmet Head already has his foot in the entry and pushing forward, sees me on the sofa.
“Hey Ralph! I heard you had trouble in Anaheim.”
I see him but don’t want to engage him. Nobody in his right mind ever wants to engage Helmet Head. Nick intervened for my sake.
“He’s resting, but he’s okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
Helmet Head ignores Nick, calls to me. “So was it the big guy with the buzz cut? They think they own the fucking place down there.”
I try to summon appropriate hostility as I respond.
“I don’t feel like talking now. Okay?”
Helmet Head, uncharacteristically, seems to accept my rebuff. He backs away.
“Sure, Ralph. You get yourself together, man.”
He exits my field of view. I hear the door close, then Nick returns.
“What a fucking fruitcake he is,” opines Nick.
Sometimes I wonder how Nick talks about me after I have gone.
“He speaks Russian?” I ask.
Nick ignores my question as he perks up his ears, listening for the sound of Helmet Head departing.
“Take a look and make sure he’s leaving,” he says to Doreen.
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I asked you.” Doreen sighs and walks to the window just as we hear the sound of a kick starter and then a moped dropping into gear.
Helmet Head is a mystery to other sellers. Where he lives, how he sells his books and where he came from are all subjects of conjecture but no one has hard knowledge. He shows up on his moped at every Saturday morning garage sale and library sale. With wild-man eyes he will rudely push his way to the front. Most people give him a wide berth.
“He’s a fucking thief, you know,” says Nick to me.
“What a fruitcake,” echoes Doreen.
“Did you lock Ralph’s car?” Nick demands of Doreen. She hesitates because she hasn’t and Nick sh
akes his head with conviction. “Jesus fucking Christ!” He goes to the window, stares outside at my Volvo with the spare tire on the back wheel.
“I hope he didn’t fucking take anything.”
Chapter 6
True’s father had been a family doctor in Rapid City, South Dakota. He was a saint of a man who healed the children of struggling farmers and sometimes took his pay in tomatoes or chickens. I always felt humble in his presence. True’s mother died in an automobile accident when True was fifteen. Her father never remarried and as far as anyone knows remained loyal to her mother.
Just as True’s father didn’t seem impressed by my prep school and Ivy League credentials, he didn’t seem at all deterred by my dark complexion. True said that when she first told him about me, she felt obliged to tell him of my mixed heritage. She said she sensed a hint of hesitation, but not a word of complaint, and then he said that he trusted her judgment and looked forward very much to meeting the man she judged worthy of her affections.
Five years ago, shortly after Caleb was born, True’s dad was diagnosed at sixty-six with pancreatic cancer and died within a few months. There was a tearful and touching memorial service at the Lutheran Church attended by phalanxes of dedicated friends and grateful former patients. I stood stalwartly at True’s side and, as the good husband I was, helped nurse her through the depression that followed his death. The house and a rental property were sold and True split the proceeds with her older brother, Adam, a barrel-chested ex-frat boy lawyer who lived in Denver with his family. Adam was always uncomfortably cordial with me as if I were a guilty client that he had agreed to defend. It was clear he didn’t like me for his sister and that color was undoubtedly part of the equation. I wondered what the conversation was between True and Adam when she told him we were getting married. Although he had yet to deal with the possibility of having a partially black niece or nephew, I believe he regarded my having any control over his white family’s inheritance as financial miscegenation.
Some Books Aren’t for Reading Page 6