The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  What followed over the next few days was a workshop in hysteria. I called the store. I phoned other stores, in other states. I wanted to know from the Dux community what I could do to join in, to make myself on my bed feel the way they said they felt on theirs. Pamela, the manager of the store on East Fifty-eighth Street, lost patience eventually and told me that she would take the bed back — immediately! Against company policy! She’d make an exception in my case! Though not for a full refund! Did I want the bed? Did I want the bed or not? Alone at night, I sank into the bed and tried to want it. And the farther I sank into it the closer I came to knowing what the bed was. It was the last bed I would ever buy. It was the bed that would deliver me into my fate. It was the bed that would marry me again to my mother, the bed Louanne and I would share. When I moved, the bed moved, talking back to me through the echoing of coiled springs, telling me that there would be no rest for me. The bed was alive. It was alive with my mother. I sank into the bed, and it was as if I were sinking down into her arms. She was not beside me on the bed, she was inside the bed, and I was inside the bed; and she was pulling me down into the bed to die with her. It was my deathbed. It was a coffin. It was a sarcophagus. I didn’t want to die. Did I? If only I could get the bed to stay still. Why wouldn’t the bed leave me alone? Why wouldn’t the bed be my bed?

  In the daytime I worked the phones. A woman in a southern state referred me to a man in the same southern state who had sold these beds for twenty years. This man knew everything about the beds.

  “What kind of floor is your bed on? Is it a wood floor?”

  “Yes, it is a wood floor.”

  “There’s your problem.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sometimes on a wood floor these beds can be very reverberant. Do you have carpet under the bed?”

  “No.”

  “You need carpet under the bed. That’ll damp the springs.”

  “I don’t have any carpet.”

  “Go out and get yourself a set of those felt-and-rubber furniture coasters. You’ll need six, because on a queen-size bed there are those extra legs supporting the middle of the bed.”

  Coasters? It was too late for coasters. The bed had to go back to the warehouse! It had to go back the next morning! The large man and the less large man were coming to haul away the bed that I both wanted and did not want, that I both needed and did not need in order to continue being a man who was both better and worse than other men. I ran out, minutes before the stores closed, bought the coasters, ran back home, and shoved them under the legs of the bed. I bounced on the bed. I hadn’t slept in days. Nights. And on and on the night went: My mother. The bed. My mother. The bed. Morphine. The bed. I’d failed her by living. I’d killed her with negligence. Comfort was forbidden. Except in death. In the morning, the men were coming to cart away our bed. I pulled up the covers and sank into the bed and drifted restlessly in that half-awake dream world where I could live and die with and without my dead mother, and I waited for the men.

  Then it was morning and the light through the windows was hurting my eyes and I had a cigarette of my own going, and the buzzer rang and they tromped up the stairs and began packing the bed. They took off the legs and broke it down and wrapped it up, and just like that the bedroom was empty, and my mind without sleep was suddenly empty, too.

  “Wait!”

  They waited.

  “This isn’t right!”

  “What’s not right?”

  “Everything! All of it!”

  I told them the story of the bouncy, springy bed. All that sleeplessness. All those phone calls. The store managers, the furniture coasters. It all poured out. Not about my mother, though. Nothing about Louanne. The men stood in my empty bedroom, listening, paying attention. The large man, who had, I think, a firm grasp of reality, said, “I see that there is a problem. But I have to tell you, I’m just the driver.”

  I went to the telephone. I called the number for the Swedish president of Dux Interiors in North America. What in the world was I going to say to him? What did I want from him?

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Is this Mr. Gustafsson?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Hi. My name is Donald. I’m a customer? I have a bed that’s being picked up and returned.”

  “Returned?”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “You don’t like the bed?”

  “I like the bed. I like the bed. It’s just that there are problems.”

  “Problems?”

  The large man stepped forward. He took control. He said to me, “Let me talk to Bo.”

  I gave the large man the phone. He stood in my ravaged, empty bedroom and did the talking. He talked for a long time. When he was finished speaking with the president, he passed me my phone. He told me, “Bo wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Is it Donald? Hello. Let me ask you something. What size bed do you have?”

  “Queen.”

  “Ah. And you say it is too bouncy?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s reverberant.”

  “Reverberant? Explain.”

  “I mean you can feel everything. When you’re on the bed. When you’re in bed. You feel too much. I feel too much.”

  “Well. I don’t know what to tell you. There are many springs in that bed. That is how it works. All the springs work together. There is going to be some movement. Maybe to get a good night’s rest you need your own sleeping area. Maybe you need the king.”

  “I don’t have room for a king.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. You have to decide if you want to keep the bed or not. I cannot decide for you.”

  “I know.”

  “The bed is a good bed. I am sure that if you keep it you will get used to it. These beds take some getting used to.”

  “I know.”

  “Good luck.”

  I hung up the phone. I saw the men standing in my house. I saw the crated bed by the door. I saw the sunlight coming through the windows. I saw myself standing there seeing these things. I was a man whose need for love and sympathy had led him to telephone a Swedish executive in the middle of the morning. Perhaps, at some point, the story of my mother and the bed becomes the story of my mother and father, the story that remains to be told, the story, you could say, of the queen versus the king.

  The bed went away. I let it go. R. was right. I could get another bed later. I stood in my empty room. In place of the bed was — shame? In place of the bed was a question, a question that is at once too simple and too complicated to answer.

  PART II

  For a time when I was a boy, my father’s brother, my uncle Eldridge — a man, as I think of him now, both like and unlike other men — became my friend and companion. Today I cannot think of my uncle without remembering his car and the things he carried in it. In the backseat he kept a bicycle with the front wheel removed. I never saw him put the wheel on and ride. Next to the bicycle was a golf bag holding woods and irons, balls, tees, pencils for scoring, golf gloves, a visor. Adjacent to the clubs were a couple of beach chairs folded and jammed between the car’s front and backseats, and wedged on the seat were towels and a cooler chest, into which he loaded, every day or two, ice, beer, and strawberry, grape, and orange sodas. In the car’s trunk, as I remember it, were his tennis racquets with their protective covers zippered on, and a tennis bag like those the pros carry onto the court, stuffed with balls in cans, cotton sweatbands, shorts, shirts, tennis shoes, socks, and a hat. There was a football for playing catch at the beach, and a pump for pumping up the ball. There were baseball mitts and a baseball; and there was fishing gear — a takedown rod stored in its elegant cylindrical case, and a small tackle kit packed with hooks, lures, and line — and there was swimming and, sometimes, I recall, scuba equipment, including a mask, fins, a snorkel, a dive knife, a depth gauge, a regulator, a buoyancy vest, a weight belt, and, shov
ed up into the back of the trunk — though in order to make space for it, he might have been forced, in a gesture of triage, to sacrifice other items — a small tank that actually belonged to me. In the event that he had occasion to dress nicely on land, he had what was minimally required. Pressed trousers. A clean shirt. A tie, rolled up. Changes of underwear. Thin socks. A belt. Black shoes with shoe trees inserted in them. Shoe polish. A rag for polishing. There was a shaving kit holding a razor and soap, shampoo, talcum powder, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush and a comb, and plenty of the English Leather cologne he splashed on at intervals throughout his day. There was a battery-operated portable record player, and Everly Brothers, Clancy Brothers, and Smothers Brothers records to play on it. For reading, he carried a collection of hunting, tennis, golf, and archery magazines, Playboy and Penthouse, and books by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell. For shooting, he kept, in a space near the tire well, a.22 pistol in a leather case; and sometimes there was a double-barreled shotgun; and, when he had the shotgun packed in the car and planned to do some shooting with it, there might also be a cardboard box containing clay pigeons, many of which I threw for him, using a spring-loaded contraption designed for manually launching the fragile yellow disks. There was no shortage of ammo. And there were many things relating to the maintenance of the car in specific and to safe travel in general: spark plugs, antifreeze in a jug, motor oil in a can, socket wrenches, jumper cables, sulfur flares. There was tanning lotion; and there were Band-Aids and other medical supplies, including an Ace bandage; and writing materials and postage stamps; and, tucked here and there in nooks and crannies, golf shoes, an umbrella, a rain poncho, a thermos, a Swiss Army knife, bottle and can openers, a pair of binoculars, a Frisbee.

  On days off from his job, loading Canada Dry delivery trucks at a warehouse near the airport in Sarasota, Florida, he used to golf or lie on the beach or play tennis at the municipal courts with his friends from work, and sometimes he’d drive to a secluded place in the woods, where he would set up one of the folding beach chairs, place beside it the cooler and a handful of his books and magazines, put a record on the record player, and sit listening to folk music, flipping through the magazines, looking at the world through his binoculars, sipping beer, and, every now and then, shooting pistol rounds at empty cans he’d propped on tree branches or rotting fence posts in the distance. One day, according to my mother, state and federal agents surrounded him, then handcuffed him and took him into custody, because he had been spotted by surveillance teams sent in advance of President Nixon, who was about to land in Sarasota on Air Force One. When the agents took him to the local police station, the chief of police told them, “Oh, that’s just Bob Antrim, he doesn’t mean a bit of harm,” which was true enough; and so they promptly let him go.

  His name was Robert Eldridge Antrim. He was known in his family as Eldridge to distinguish him from his father, also Robert, and among his friends as Bob, but he was also occasionally called Sam. The name Sam in relation to my uncle first appeared in the mid-fifties, in the sports pages of a Sarasota newspaper, in an article glorifying the Sarasota High School golf team, for which Eldridge was a star player. In fact, it was Eldridge who had reported his name as Sam, presumably because he had grown tired of Eldridge. It was a joke; and the joke stuck, though by the end of his life the only person still calling him Sam was my mother, who was with him at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital when he died, in 1992, of acute alcohol poisoning. When I was young, I knew my uncle as Eldridge. For a few years, when I was a teenager, he was a hero to me. Today, when I think of him, he is Bob, and I think this transformation from Eldridge to Bob by way of Sam has something to do with the effect he had on my life, in particular the effect of a single incident that took place when I was fourteen years old.

  We were living in Miami, my mother, my father, my sister, our absurd cats — Zelda Fitzgerald and the neurologically impaired Siamese, Justine — and I. Eldridge, during those years, the early seventies, lived up the Gulf Coast in Sarasota, in a suburban tract house he shared with his mother, my grandmother Eliza. The story of Eliza’s life is, in some ways, unusual for a woman of her time. She grew up during the early years of the twentieth century, in Richmond, Virginia, in what was, according to my father, a strict Episcopalian home ruled by a patriarch who was stern with his sons and possessively doting toward his only daughter, who nevertheless managed to escape to nearby Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and then to Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in Spanish. During her years away at school, a medical student from San Juan, Puerto Rico, took up residence — I don’t know the particulars of the arrangement — in her father’s house. Over the course of her vacations at home, Eliza fell in love with this man, and even went so far as to board ship and sail with him to Puerto Rico to visit his home. Rafael was, according to family lore, the love of my grandmother’s life. I imagine him as a person formed in a certain European mold: erudite and very likely soft-spoken, a man wearing clothes made to draw attention away from his physique, from, as it were, his person — not in order to obscure the fact that he is, in my mental picture of him, neither tall nor fit but, rather, to hide, out of sheer politeness, his intrinsic attractiveness, which is to say his unsuitability as a life partner for a young woman brought up in an essentially Victorian household. About matters so far removed in time and sensibility from one’s own, one can only guess. My father told me that when Rafael’s stay in America ended he begged Eliza to marry him. She made it clear that she loved him but could never marry a Catholic. And that, apparently, was that. Her lover went home without her. They saw each other once or twice again over the years. And then, when she was very old and in failing health, as if bearing out the eroticism inherent in loving a person one cannot bring oneself to marry, she did something surprising and beautiful. She bought a plane ticket for San Juan. She did not tell anyone her intentions. She appears to have had no specific intentions. Alone in Puerto Rico, she visited the places she remembered from her time there with Rafael, who had died a year or two earlier.

  Eliza’s life, it seems to me, turned out quite differently from whatever she might have hoped for when she was a woman in her twenties, taking flight, however incompletely or abortively, from her father’s house. It is my understanding that after she returned home from New York she lived for a time in a sort of domestic captivity, like a Virginian Elizabeth Barrett Browning, until it was arranged that she would marry a distant cousin, Robert Antrim, a man older than she, a man she likely did not love passionately. Robert Antrim was in those years the manager of the Blandy Experimental Farm, now the Virginia State Arboretum, a University of Virginia teaching farm near Winchester. He was taciturn and hardworking, and he and Eliza had two sons. Then one day Robert Antrim took it into his head that it was his destiny to raise gladioli in Florida. He and his brother, Frank, had for some time been going on annual car trips together — speechless two-week-long excursions to central Florida and back. They had an old Ford, and were known for driving slowly.

  I can remember, from my childhood, my father’s father’s slow driving. Many years after Robert and his brother took their first trips down the Atlantic seaboard, and long after Robert Antrim had settled his family in Sarasota, near the end of his life, when my sister and I were young, he used to drive us, in his blue Mercedes diesel sedan, to the Ringling Museum of the Circus, part of the grandiose folly of an estate left by the great John Ringling after he fell into debt and, in 1936, the same year my father was born, died of pneumonia. The Ringling complex is located on Sarasota Bay, and includes John and Mable Ringling’s enormous and weirdly decorated winter residence, Cà d’Zan; and the Ringling Art Museum filled with minor Old Masters and Baroque paintings and tapestries; and a theater in the Italian Baroque style, the Asolo; and the Museum of the Circus, all originally constructed using buildings and parts of buildings painstakingly disassembled, crated up, and shipped from northern Italy to Florida in the 1920s and early thirti
es. Attached to the painting galleries is a library in which my father, in his free time as a young museum guide working afternoons after school and over summer vacations, read art history. It was here, according to my mother, that Sir Anthony Blunt, the infamous spy and historian of Renaissance and Baroque art, upon finishing a tour of the museum’s collections, invited my father, who had conducted the tour, to attend the Courtauld Institute in London. This took place before Blunt was exposed as a Russian agent and stripped of his knighthood. I sometimes wonder how things might have gone in our family had my father accepted Sir Anthony’s offer. In the event, things were as they were, which meant that my sister and I, when children in Sarasota, were unfailingly greeted, at the entrance to the Museum of the Circus, by Cookie, a midget wearing an ornate red coat. Cookie was famous as the Munchkin who, in the Munchkinland sequence in The Wizard of Oz, presents Dorothy with a bouquet.

  Anyway, I remember from those trips that my grandfather never drove his Mercedes at a speed greater than twenty-five or thirty miles an hour — in contrast to my other grandfather, Don Self, who kept in his carport Oldsmobiles and Buicks of the massive sort that easily handled ninety miles per hour on the interstate — and I remember, in some way that is as much emotional as pictorial, the scenery that characterized that part of Florida in the years before the Gulf Coast became the densely populated, semiurban landscape it is now.