Someday, he’ll become a detective and he’ll see the dead bodies of superheroes, and yet now we’re sitting here, hand in hand, with coffee on our breath. Our mother’s face is beaten because of a burgeoning suspicion and our father is holed up at home, like a restless animal, waiting for her to come back. “Bruce,” my brother confessed. “It all seems so wrong.”
*
I left Dennis and our mother at the hospital and headed to my parents’ house. The morning shone on Clifton. Irritable buses sailed down the road towards New York City and snappy cars halted at intersections and tore away again, leaving puffs of exhaust in the air behind them. A couple of bored kids watched me from the rear window of a car. A young girl punk walked towards the bus stop, solitary, proudly out of place, her face dotted with a constellation of piercings. I stopped at a diner with the idea of getting breakfast, but I was unable to gulp down more than another cup of coffee.
Once I got to the house, I shoved the back door open. At first, I couldn’t find my father. The kitchen was empty, steeped in a razor-sharp silence. His jacket lay abandoned on the table. I slowly climbed the stairs and walked down the dimly lit hallway to the threshold of my parents’ bedroom. I stopped. I had already seen this picture. Maybe that was what all my life was about. Maybe my life was a single scene repeated ad infinitum, that scene, the same scene, the scene of someone peering, fearfully, into his parents’ bedroom. The door swung open. There my father stood, before me, studying me with a cloudy gaze.
Both our bodies stiffened. For an instant, it seemed we were going to face off, and that each of us was about to swing a punch. He was bigger than me. No question, he’d have laid me out, but I still might be able to get in a punch of my own. At least, a fist to his face. He seemed to read my mind. He shook his head and looked at the floor. He cleared his throat and asked: “How is your mother?” His voice was hoarse. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and repeated, without looking at me: “How is your mother?” There was something worn-out looking about his skin, and his shirt was rumpled, open at the chest, letting a tuft of hair emerge.
“She’s at the hospital. With Dennis,” I replied. “She’s going to have to get some X-rays. I think she’ll be home in an hour or two.” He seemed to have a hard time taking in my words. He swayed for a moment and rested his shoulder against the door jamb. “Is she going to file a complaint with the police?”
“She said she fell down the stairs.”
He ran a hand through his short hair. “Christ,” he breathed. “Christ.” There was a pained expression on his face, the closest thing to an expression of repentance I’d ever seen from him. He straightened his shirt and ran a hand through his hair again. “I need some air,” he said.
I followed him down the stairs. We passed through the front garden and crossed the street. On the other side of the street a strip of grassy waste ground was wedged between the houses. Even though it wasn’t exactly a park, the local kids went there to play, and both Dennis and I had spent our share of afternoons there when we were little. A strip of ground. My father and I walked along the grass.
I wondered what excuse he’d used to skip work that day. I wondered what we would say to each other now, the two of us, a father and a son who hadn’t had a conversation of more than a couple of sentences in the last few years. We’d never been very good at this. Even when we lived in the same house, we inhabited different worlds. And most of all, I wondered what would happen if from the strip of waste ground we saw some guy, an unsuspecting client coming to see my mother, knock on the front door.
I felt my chest contract like a pump. A flow of unexpected courage seemed to surge through my body. “I don’t want to know what made you do it. I just want you to assure me that you’ll never do it again.”
My father froze. He appeared astonished. When he tipped his head to study me, the sun glinted off the silvery stubble that lined his cheek. His gaze had hardened. “Your mother’s hiding something.” He stroked his chin before going on: “I think she’s having an affair with someone. What else could it be? Your mother keeps denying everything. That’s what made me lose it with her.”
I struggled to look him in the eye. “Do you have any proof?”
“No,” he replied. “Just sensations. If I ever do find out she’s having an affair…” He broke away from me to put an end to the topic and walked a few yards along the grass. He spread his arms and took a deep breath. He lifted his face towards the sky, like a prophet in contact with the depths of the heavens, as the sun lit up, again, the specks of silver on his face. “Air,” he said. “When we came here to live, I felt there was so much air. I felt it was easier to breathe.”
I took a deep breath myself. I could still feel my chest contracting, but the sense of courage that had surged through me a short while before was gone. The air filled my lungs. I stood motionless, filled with air and uncertainty, as my father headed back towards the house. I didn’t know whether to follow him. I watched him go. “Dad,” I called after him.
He turned around. When he realised that I had nothing to say, he gave me a chilly glance and stuck his hands in his pockets. He seemed to hold the pose for a few moments, an Italian man in his early forties, with the street of an American suburb in the background. For a few moments he didn’t move. He gave me enough time to register the harsh lines of his features, the hostile power in his eyes. “Someday you and I will have a reckoning of our own,” he said.
I gave a start.
“You can’t really think that I swallowed your story about working at a bar. I still don’t understand what you live on, but one day I’ll find out.”
He walked off again. I watched him walk in that light, across that grass. I watched as he got further away. He wasn’t in good shape; there was a heaviness to the line of his back and to the way his arms dangled at his sides. And yet, there was a tenacious strength in him, a sort of icy, vaguely obtuse fury, something he had brought along with him from the beginning, over the years, perhaps from Italy, across the ocean and across time. My father. However unpleasant, the conversation that had just ended was one of the most substantial we’d ever had.
*
My eyes opened wide with a start. I lay there breathing, open-mouthed, as the world around me regained consistency: the smooth fabric of the sheets, the pillow under my head, the breeze through the open window. Alyson breathing next to me. From the rhythm of her breathing I could sense she was awake. She said nothing, having decided by that time to stop asking what was tormenting me. She would just wait for me to talk to her about it. She would go on waiting. The whole world, in that period, seemed to be waiting for a turning point.
Outside, day was dawning. I could perceive the aroma of coffee from some early-rising neighbour, and the great damp peace of dawn filtering in through the window. I blinked repeatedly. I got cautiously out of bed.
“Where are you going?” Alyson sighed. “Stay here with me.”
“Wait for me,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Barefoot, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, I left the apartment and walked upstairs. I let my disquiet guide me, step by step, until I emerged on the deserted roof. From up there, I watched the sun rise. The city, motionless and majestic, received the miracle of the new light. I stood there in the glowing sunrise, practically naked, feeling full of a mysterious force, and at the same time completely helpless.
Today I know: daylight wasn’t the only thing that sprang to life in that sunrise. Something new was beginning to stir in me, something that at the time appeared nebulous and that only with the passing of the years would I come to recognise. Now I know that my mother gave me more than just some of her facial features, more than just the shape of her dark eyes. A spark of the secret flame that inhabited her body had passed into mine, lived in me, under my skin, in the tiniest interstitial spaces of my flesh. I too had strange powers. But back then it was still too early to understand that.
For several weeks after
the episode of my mother’s beating, there were no new deposits in my account, and I scraped by on my last savings. I had almost come to believe that it was all over and that she had stopped prostituting her second body. I felt a clump of contrasting emotions in my throat. Then the deposits began again and it all went on as before, day after day, week after week.
It was summer by then, and I had summer session courses to take.
I only saw my mother one more time. It was on a quiet June afternoon. In order to avoid disagreeable scenes, I had alerted her to my arrival. She welcomed me with an angelic smile. My father’s violent hands had left no marks on her, and I was afraid to ask her how things were going, almost as if any reference to what had happened might threaten to reopen, through some frightful spell, the wounds on her face. I sat down at the kitchen table while she made me a glass of iced lemonade. Even from a distance I could smell the perfume of her hair.
I suggested that perhaps the time had come to put an end to it. I hinted at a couple of possible jobs that I’d looked into. When the school year started up again, I could just attend classes part-time. I could give it a try. I could make it work. “If what you’re doing is just for me,” I said, “I don’t want you to keep doing it.” I think my voice was shaking as I told her these things. My hands were perspiring onto the wooden tabletop.
She shook her head like someone listening to a child talking nonsense. She turned up the volume on the radio. It was playing one of the golden oldies that she loved so well. “I just adore Stevie Wonder,” she said in an elusive, nostalgic tone.
“Mama. Did you hear what I said to you?”
She kept listening to the song on the radio, nodding her head to the beat, singing along with one of the verses: I’ve got something that I must tell… Last night someone rang our doorbell.
“Mama.”
At last her gaze met mine. Her pupils seemed to contract and a spark of panic flickered in her eyes. She dried her hands on a dish towel. She gave me the glass of lemonade and slumped onto the chair across from me. “Oh Bruce,” she said. “It’s too late, don’t you understand? Too late for everything. Too late to change, to turn back, it’s even too late to ask for help.”
Her air of resignation frightened me. She seemed to look at me from a sorrowful distance, then she went back to moving her head in time to the song. Stevie Wonder’s voice on the radio. The scent of freshly squeezed lemons. Hundreds of tiny, sharp ice fragments bumped against my lips as I took a sip from the glass. I made that sip last a long time. We both kept our eyes downcast in palpable embarrassment, as the afternoon light began to catch fire, enveloping us in a sombre, gilded glow.
I couldn’t stand that atmosphere. I clutched the glass tight in my fist. I set it down on the table and contemplated the traces of my fingers on the fogged glass surface. “Hey,” I said, improvising a playful tone. “Let’s see if you’ve heard this one. Do you know what goes: riiing… riiing… riiing… aargh!”
She peered at me in confusion, then it dawned on her what I was doing. “I can’t believe this. You’ve never been good at telling jokes.”
“Come on,” I urged her. “What goes riiing… riiing… riiing… aargh!”
She conceded a faint smile. “No idea.”
“Riiing… riiing… riiing… aargh!… It’s Stevie Wonder answering the steam iron instead of the phone.”
It took her a while to get it. “That’s the stupidest joke I’ve ever heard in my life,” she groaned, but her smile was spreading, shyly at first, then more emphatically, until the smile blossomed into laughter, strained, then deeper, a laughter that shook her body like a coughing fit, until she threw her head back. “My God,” she said.
Sure, it was a stupid joke, but I felt certain that Stevie Wonder would have forgiven me.
A short while later I said goodbye. I brushed her cheek with a kiss. I walked out of the door and through the front garden, striding too fast, without turning around. Once again, I felt that bizarre and alarming sensation. The same feeling that had driven me up to the roof of my apartment building one morning a few days ago. It was the beginning of my ability of presentiment, I believe, and what I was sensing in that period, with growing clarity, was a foreshadowing of my mother’s fate. I could feel it. I couldn’t believe it. How could I believe in such a horrible premonition?
I had no idea what was happening to me. My superpower and my love for her were intertwined, they sprang one from the other and they each negated the other.
I shouldn’t have run away like that. I should have stayed there and admired the yellow rose bushes in the front garden, the ones she watered once a day, and the pale colour of the low wall around the garden. I should have lingered to look at the windows from outside, clean, bright, and the gingham curtains that I’d seen hanging on those windows since I was a child. I should have stared at the front of the house. I should have memorised that homely scene in detail, in all its peace, before that apparent peace was overturned roughly once and for all.
I slunk away. I walked down the street. I was already a hundred feet or so away when I heard her call my name, and as I turned I saw her running towards me, her hair tossed in the air, lithe as a girl, so beautiful and desperate in the cruel light. She caught up with me and threw her arms around me, panting against my neck. “Mama…” I said in embarrassment, wondering if anyone was watching us.
She didn’t let go of me. I could feel her heart beating against my chest. “Make me laugh,” she begged. “Make me laugh again,” she whispered, holding me tight, as I stood there, silent, mortified at the realisation that I had no more jokes, no way of making her laugh again.
*
I remember that on that day, the day after my last visit to my mother, Alyson and I spent the afternoon at the Met. We entered the museum with a donation of fifty cents each, with the brazen cheek of penniless students, and we wandered through the halls with a solemn gait, as if we were guests at a royal ball.
In a certain way it was a perfect afternoon. I remember how our voices echoed through the halls of the museum, and the sound of our footsteps on the marble floors, and the warmth of Alyson’s body as she leaned lovingly against me while looking at a piece of art. It was the first time we’d gone to the museum together. We showed each other our favourite rooms. Alyson took me into the African art section, leading me by the hand as though to protect me, revealing to me the beauty of the dark wood sculptures, shaped like so many spaceships. When it was my turn, I led Alyson into the hall of medieval armour, where men who had turned to dust centuries ago seemed to have left behind their shining, metallic carapaces.
We slid effortlessly towards Greek and Roman art, and the absorbing nudity of those white sculptures, and I confessed to her that as a boy I had found myself getting aroused in those rooms. I remember how Alyson burst out laughing. “You little pervert,” she kidded me. “I have to say that I lingered here myself. Beautiful bodies. Such perfect asses.”
“The breasts. The white breasts of these statues.”
“Too bad about the male sculptures. Have you noticed? The penis is always the first thing that breaks off.”
We laughed together. We laughed a lot that day, foolishly, with perhaps just a hint of melancholy, laughing without being able to stop, on the verge of hysteria, laughing like little kids, laughing like in the throes of a giddy madness. Later, we tried to stop. We talked about things that seemed important, plans for the rest of the summer and beyond. Alyson was about to start an internship at a small news weekly. It was a great opportunity. I would continue to take summer courses and look as well for a newsroom internship. Everything seemed decided, nailed down almost to an excessive degree: the coming weeks, the coming months.
“Jeez,” I confessed. “I’m starting to realise that I don’t like talking about the future after all.”
“What are you saying?”
“The word future makes me think…” I searched for the proper comparison. “I know what, it makes me think of a flavour
less exotic fruit. White flesh, seedless. Possibly juicy. Partly poisonous. Impossible to say how you’re supposed to peel it.”
Alyson started laughing and I laughed with her.
Later, we headed home. We took a southbound subway train. I remember the trip back. I remember I could almost sense the train’s effort, the train that was conveying us with a hesitant motion, pitching and yawing, lurching, as if afraid of its own destination. As we left the station, a shiver ran down my back. I was used to shivering suddenly like that. As soon as we got home the phone rang and my throat went instantly dry.
It was a summer evening, and my girlfriend and I had just returned home, coming back from our first trip together to the Met. We’d paid a dollar for the two of us, we’d laughed about the missing penises of the Greco-Roman statues. That’s all it was. My girlfriend was going to cook a vegan dinner, we’d smoke a joint, then we’d lie down on our mattress, and the next day we’d go to our summer session classes. Nothing more than that. The phone went on ringing. I remember something snapping inside me, a capsule of inconceivable anticipatory grief. Frightened, I looked at Alyson. I don’t remember if I said anything. I was imploring her to answer it, or maybe not to.
In the end, I was the one who reached for the phone. It wasn’t hard for me to guess that it was Dennis calling, the way he had a few weeks earlier, when he called to tell me that something had happened to our mother. And in fact that’s who it was. It was my brother on the phone. The news was about her.
*
My brother would tell me what had happened. From the way he told me, it was easy to guess that he knew the truth about our mother, and he’d always known—perhaps he’d known even before I did. My brother was almost sixteen when he witnessed the final scene. He saw everything, he saw it forever. From that day on, his eyes seemed to become irritated, filling up with a road map of vermilion capillaries, an effect that at first appeared temporary, then a chronic disturbance, as if the blood that had flowed to his eyes had decided not to flow away again, or had been unable to find a way back.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 31