Love and Shame and Love

by Peter Orner

  “Ah hell, Alexander, don’t you know you’ve got it all? You know it’s a hoot. I see Brezhnev at the driving range—he doesn’t play, he only scowls at the bourgeoisie—and I say, ‘Hey, Lenny, loosen your balls a little, huh? It’s all over now. There’s a McDonald’s across the street from the Kremlin.’ Talk to me, kid. You think getting here was easy?”

  “Do you remember Kat?”

  “Funny girl? Had a tongue, that one. I always liked her. Bleedyheart, but all you dopes are bleedyhearts.”

  “She left me for someone she hadn’t met yet. Then she had the baby, ours. Your great-granddaughter—”

  “And all this time I thought you were a poof!”

  Popper gets out of the cart and heads to his ball in the sand.

  “A what?”

  “A poof! A fagela!”

  “Oh. No, that’s Leo. Why are you shouting?”

  “Leo’s a poof?”

  “I think he’d object to poof. He’s lived with Ahmed for six years. They’re both lawyers in Washington. Leo works on the Hill.”

  “Ahmed?”

  “They met at Tufts.”

  “Well, I knew some in the service. Never had a thing against them as long as they were discreet about it. Some of the very best men in the navy were poofs. And your papasha?”

  “My what?”

  “Phil, my boy, thrill of my loins, the old son of a gun!”

  Seymour’s eyes are still calm, mild. It’s only that mouth—it’s like one of those freaky fist puppets from the seventies that would talk in slow motion.

  “You and he spent entire decades at each other’s throats.”

  “Fathers and sons. But there’s warp and woof all over, isn’t there? Even, it’s true, in the leading corporations. Go to a board meeting someday. And yet how it appears to outsiders isn’t always how it is with people in their heart of hearts, if you know what I mean. Between Phil and me there was a lotta—”

  “Heart of hearts is a phrase of my mother’s.”

  “You think I never knew Miriam?”

  “You’re rewriting history.”

  “Shucks. Who do you think wrote it in the first place? You replace my lies with yours and call it what happened? Who cares. Tell the little tiger I miss him, roar! Roar!”

  Above, the honk of geese. Little green shits plop from the sky. Seymour in the golf cart, his feet up on the little hood, his yellow socks. Popper in the sand trap. He swings at his ball and misses.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Last year, Dad had a heart attack at Brooks Brothers.”

  “Don’t laugh at your own father.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  His mouth will not move. “Stop it. Honor thy!”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “It’s cruel.”

  Seymour gets out of the cart and joins Popper in the sand. His bald, sunburned head. His face begins to cave in. Eyes and nose fall inward, mouth and jaw disintegrate. He lies down and begins to pull sand over himself until all that’s left of him are his hands and forearms and the mush of what’s left of his head.

  “I thought you knew. He’s buried right—”

  “When did you become cruel?”

  A PLEASURE DOME

  Highland Park, 1972

  Coleridge by flashlight. Philip doesn’t try to sell the poem. He just tells it, and though there are parts he has long since memorized, In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, Philip repeats the words as if he doesn’t know them at all, as if this is the first time he’s heard about any of this, as if he’s reading about the Kubla Khan’s fantasies out of today’s news, and Popper lingers on the bluff of sleep, his father’s voice faint, as if from miles away.

  Kubla Khan telling his slaves, Listen, I want you to build me a good-time dome down in Xanadu. I want sunsbine and I want ice. This place is going to be so fantastic even the rocks are gonna dance, follow me? And hey and I want this thing built fast, I’m getting word from people in the know that there’s war coming, I want to have some excellent times before all hell breaks loose in the kingdom.

  Later, Popper will learn that it was all some freaky English dope dream and Xanadu was no more real than the town of Bedrock, but that will never take away his father knowing the story but reading as if he didn’t know a thing about it, like he’d never heard of any Khan or any pleasure dome deep in a hole in the earth—which is the only way to reread anything.

  His mother’s voice: Is he asleep, Phil? Quick touch of her lips on his eyelids. He can’t raise his head off the pillow. Soundlessly, he shouts, I’m not asleep!

  TO: Ella

  FROM: Your Father

  RE: Conception

  Your mother and I have told you that you were conceived during a heat wave. The verb conceived makes it sound as though we knew what we were doing, but the fact is, we had no idea. The heat wave killed hundreds of old people. This was in the summer of 1995. It shouldn’t have happened. Not in our city, not anywhere. But what I want to tell you is that your mom and I used to say, quietly, only to each other, that of all those people who died, one of them came back as you. God knows where we got this idea. Maybe it’s Buddhist or something. You know how much eclectic reading your mother does. She must have read it somewhere. I leave it to you to decide if it was ridiculous or whether we were on to something. My only point is that we used to talk, your mom and I, and this was just one small thing out of the thousands of other things we said. I tell you this only so you know that you were born out of that talking. One other thing. I remember looking at you when you were still only a blur of tissue on a computer screen. The lab technician pointed out the pumping of your aorta. It looked like a yapping mouth in a tiny skull. I’ll never get over this.

  December 3, 1945

  Other than what to do with all these Jap prisoners stinking up my deck, the next most important topic around here is the making of a home—and getting a job—All the officers but one are recently married—They’ve never had a home, of course, and you should hear them talking about buying furniture and pots and pans—It’s really a scream—

  THE LEANING TOWER

  The architect who designed it used a postcard of the real one, and he didn’t do that bad a job. It leans. Except this leaning tower is only three and a half stories high and next door to a used-car lot in Niles. On their way home from cards at Twin Orchard Country Club, Bernice Popper and Gert Zetland always stop at a coffee shop across the street. Just a stupid funny thing. A whim of Gert’s. Always made her think of her honeymoon in Italy, although they never made it to Pisa. Milt’s stomach acted up in Rome. All that rich food.

  They are sitting at their table by the window and Bernice is listening to Gert yatter on about her nephew Jerry, the maverick tort lawyer. They’ve both ordered egg salad sandwiches. Cars whiz by on Touhy Avenue. Occasionally someone slows down, someone who hasn’t seen the tower before, and there’s all kinds of honking.

  What do you want to look at that fake thing for? Move it, move it. What are you, a tourist? In Niles?

  “Did you hear Sid Kaufman died?” Bernice says.

  “How could I not have heard?” Gert says. “It’s like the Pope has passed. I’m waiting for the white smoke to rise from the Standard Oil Building. I mean, the man was a professional gossiper, for God’s sake. Now listen, Beanie, you’re not going to believe this one…”

  Gert’s voice, after all these years, has become an almost pleasant background gurgle. Occasionally Bernice sighs over one of Jerry’s triumphs. Hears none of it. She watches the busboy clear away the cups and crusty soup bowls, a young man with tapered black hair and invisible buttocks. She wonders what he sits on. If it hurts in the bones he doesn’t even seem to have. Maybe he never sits. Maybe he never sleeps. Clears tables. Clears tables. There is no end to the clearing of our tables. Mexican, he probably crawled across the border in his underwear.

  Gert reaches and pinches Bernice’s forearm. “And so they offered eighty t
housand to settle and Jerry says to them, ‘Blow it out your nozzle.’ Oh, I know he said something far more off-color, but that’s what he told his delicate-eared aunt, always trying to protect me from anything untoward. He thinks I was born in the seventeenth century. Even people born in the seventeenth century weren’t born in the seventeenth century. Blow your eighty thousand out your nozzle! Can you imagine?”

  “Nozzle?”

  “Nose, Bernice, nose. Blow it out your nose. What’s wrong with you?”

  Bernice waves her off. She sighs appreciatively over Jerry. Gert’s hair frostier than usual today. It looks like if you touched it, you’d get snow on your fingers. She thinks of mountains. God knows where they were, somewhere north of here where there’s mountains, Michigan maybe, and Seymour said, Look, Bernice, look what the wind did. Like somebody came up here with a paintbrush. He was right, Seymour, for once. The snow didn’t even look cold. It looked like sugar. And she remembers being vaguely afraid of those trees, remembers thinking that the snow was cruel to be so deceptive. How long ago? Seymour insisting we go walking in the snow in the mountains, of all the cockamamie things, and us getting in the car and driving for hours. Were the children with us? I can’t even remember.

  “Why don’t they tear that thing down already?” Bernice says.

  Gert pauses her Jerry narrative and looks curiously at Bernice. “What thing?”

  “That.”

  Oh, the tower. Gert laughs. Well, the tower. Who gives a damn about the tower? But Gert leans forward and looks into Bernice’s glossy eyes and nearly gasps. She’s withering. Poor darling. First Esther. Then Seymour. Then Philip. It’s too much.

  “And you know, I saw the real one,” Bernice says. “And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It’s taller, but every inch as dull.”

  “Dear—”

  Bernice ignores her, honks into her napkin, and says, “In fact, I hated Italy.”

  “You did?”

  “They say the French are bad. Seymour said it was impossible, that nobody in their right mind had ever hated Italy, that nobody on the face of the earth had ever once hated a single thing about Italy—”

  “Dear—”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you ogling the busboy?”

  “What if I am? I’m an old bitty.”

  What do you say to that? Nothing, Gert thinks. You don’t say anything to that. You let it go. These days you let a lot of things go.

  “You know, during the war I had a man.”

  “Oh, Beanie, during the war everybody had a man. Milt was 4F and even I had a man.”

  Bernice looks down at her sandwich. “It was Sid.”

  “You and Sid Kaufman?”

  “He didn’t only go for actresses. Dancers also. Even washed-up ones. And I thought he was dashing until I knew him better. What a blowhard!”

  “How long did it take for you to realize Sid Kaufman was a blowhard?”

  “I almost left Seymour. Isn’t that funny to think of now? I almost packed up the children and left and ran away with Sid. Hours and hours we’d talk about it. But he wasn’t here to leave. How could I leave him if he wasn’t here to leave?”

  Gert watches Bernice, who is once again staring at the busboy, except she wasn’t seeing him anymore. She was staring past him at someone or something or someplace long gone. She seemed asleep, everything about her seemed asleep except for her eyes.

  “Bernice, aren’t you going to finish your sandwich?”

  THE OTTER

  Chicago, 2001

  Lincoln Park Zoo, October leaden-eyed sky, nobody around, father and daughter sit huddled, shoes touching, watching the otter. Occasionally the otter rises from the water, croaks, gnaws its teeth a little, squirms up over the lip of the pool, swaddles forward along the rocks, croaks some more, gets back in the water, swims, loops, climbs out again. Bury me, Popper thinks, at Lincoln Park Zoo, in the autumn, amid these scrawny trees and old copper-topped pavilions, all the sad animals. He wonders if he donated money he’ll never have, if they’d let him rest from his labors here. Just a little patch of grass in some out-of-the-way corner by the flamingos.

  Ella watches the otter with an attention he can’t match. She slumps against him, how easily she slumps against him.

  “I can’t get enough of these fake volcanic rocks. Can you?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Did you know that the land we are sitting on was formed by the recession of Wisconsin Glacial Episode? I’m not sure this involved any volcanic activity, but science, as you know, has never been my strong point. I’ve decided to try to learn something new every day, because I feel like I’m losing my memory, that moments are slipping through my fingers and that by collecting cold hard facts—Ella?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  When Ella learned to talk, Popper tried to unlearn, but it hadn’t taken.

  “In Xanadu, what did Marco Polo do?”

  “He went to the zoo,” Ella says.

  “Want to go to the lion house?”

  “Stay here.”

  “Polar bear? Fat feet against the glass?”

  “Nope.”

  “Want a Moderama?”

  “Nope either.”

  “You don’t want to see Kumba?”

  “Later.”

  “The farm in the zoo? The goats, the sheep?”

  “Closed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Here last week.”

  “With Mom? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because the zoo is your thing.”

  She rarely calls him Dad. Sometimes she says it with her eyes, rarely out loud. Sometimes she adds it invisibly to the end of sentences.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “I’m never cold.”

  I’ve sired a Chicagoan. If I am weak and my daughter is strong, does this not make me the father of strength?

  The otter swims, sleek and eelishly through the water, that graceful surge, not ever having to think about it, surging forward and upward, rising above the surface without effort.

  “You know, there’s this concept in law called adverse possession. It’s one of my favorites. It means if you stay in a place you don’t own long enough, that place can become yours simply because you stuck around. So if we keep sitting on this bench for the statutorily required two years, this otter pond could be all ours.”

  “They’d kick us out. Security.”

  “Not if we remained very still. They’d think we were a couple of statues, Chicago’s full of—”

  Ella unslumps against him and blows into her hands.

  “Where are your mittens?”

  “Dunno.”

  She was constantly shedding clothes, dropping hats—So long, hat.

  “Mittens cost money.”

  “I know.”

  “Ella?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Leave here. At some point, when you’re old enough. Your Mom and I will always be here and you can always come back to this city but I want you—”

  “You just said—”

  “I changed my mind. Go forth, kid.”

  “Wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “It’s raining harder, Ella.”

  “Otter’s not done swimming.”

  December 21, 1945

  I just saw Meet Me in St. Louis—That little girl was so cute, she reminded me so much of Esther I almost cried—What do you say, another one? Two? Well, baby, the rumor is now “Meet Me in San Francisco.” And you’re going to be there when we pull in—at the government’s expense, too—My tongue is positively hanging out to see what you’ve done with the house—It was so cute of you to send those wallpaper samples—I’ve been walking around with them all day—the guys like the one with the tulips—Sweetheart, hold tight—We are going to have so much happiness in the future it’s going to feel like e
xquisite torture—We’ll never want to go to sleep—

  Capt. S. Popper

  LST 504

  F.P.O. San Francisco

  January 16, 1946

  Darling,

  Today I surely expected a cable saying to meet you, but so far no such luck. Everyone is home now but you, that is all the people we know that went in the service, but of course that was not too many people.

  Nothing new here. There’s a meat cutters’ strike on. We went to a concert at Orchestra Hall yesterday. Philip came downtown all by himself. Esther had her dancing lesson in the afternoon. Later, we all met Sid and Babette at the Blackhawk for dinner.

  All the kids talk about is your homecoming, how they’ll act, what they’ll say, all the stories. You know, you left two babies almost two years ago—you’re coming home to two almost-grown people. All I can say, darling, is that please forget any notion you might have about more family, frankly I am finished. I hope we will see eye to eye on this and most other things. Well, darling, here’s hoping to hear from you quickly, I am waiting patiently for news.

  Bernice

  MIRIAM

  Highland Park, 1979

  She gets up early and sits at the kitchen table without coffee—coffee would come later—and faces not the graying windows but the rest of the house, where everyone lies asleep. No stranger here, but even so this isn’t her house. She sits at the table wearing her frayed orange morning sweater. I’ve lived here eleven years? You leave a place long before you leave it. You float through the door a thousand times before you finally open it. She remembers the first time she saw this house, the long lawn stretching to the street, the iron benches outside the front door. The garage had these little red-and-white-striped curtains over the two small windows that had reminded her of the tablecloths at a roadside place her father used to take her for fried clams on Cape Cod, just on the ocean side of the Sagamore Bridge.

  She thinks of Philip testing the drawers. “See this smooth slide? You can always judge the quality of a house by the bearings in the drawers. Do you like it?”

  Yes, yes, how could anybody not like it? It’s a wonderful house, Phil.