The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  Do you need help? the nurse said, holding out an oversized wafer of green paper. The druggie left with the gurney.

  I do not, Albert said, snapping the gown from her hands. Whether due to his brief and harsh childhood or unbalanced neurological chemistry or a simple unwillingness to part with the warm comfort of selfishness, his reaction to offers of help had always been the same: a petulant outburst, a denial of his own human needs, a refusal to admit that he found comfort comforting, or that he experienced helplessness, or that vulnerability of any stripe could survive in the arctic environment of his heart. Such had been the state of his existence. Offers of union to which he responded with rocket fire. Kind words torched as they floated, delicate as butterflies, from the lips of admiring young associates. Gestures of friendship splashed with acid.

  He couldn’t keep up with his thoughts anymore. He was flailing, drowning in a sea of his own worst impulses. He’d nearly lost his ability to strategize.

  Nearly. It hadn’t disappeared entirely. He stopped his hands, yet again working at the buttons on his shirt, as it had occurred to him to make an ordeal of the task. He plucked weakly at one mother-of-pearl disk until the nurse moved to help. Again the hands, oh, the hands. A flash from a memory that had not yet rotted away: He was eight and his cousin Sadie was absently scratching the back of his head while they sat out by the edge of the field watching dust devils, his scalp buzzing beneath her fingernails. That she meant nothing by it transformed the act into an exquisite experience, and he understood even then that her disinterest lent her touch all its power.

  The shirt’s cuffs had three buttons each, thin nacreous disks that required the nurse to cup his hand against her wrists while she manipulated the closures. Getting all six securely closed was among Albert’s daily triumphs. The cuffs required a wife, or else ambidexterity on the order of a card sharp. Her hands lingered as she struggled with them. Her bottom lip disappeared between her teeth. Well, I don’t know about this, she said, shaking her head. Albert was in ecstasy. Then she caught on to the method, a crumpling of the fabric that opened the eyelet enough to push the button through, and the cuffs were open.

  There we go. Up now.

  He rose slowly from the bed, venturing to rest his hand on her shoulder as she helped him off with his pants. He was wearing white cotton boxers with blue pinstripes, and when he inserted his thumb between the elastic and his bony hip and began to pull them down, she said, It’s not that kind of party, Mr. Caldwell.

  The elastic snapped as he jerked his hand away. No doubt she’ll return to the nurses’ station and they’ll all have a good laugh at the sack of bones who tried to get a tug, he thought. Just as well. Dismiss me. Think nothing of me. He got into the gown and turned so she could tie the neck and back, and when she finished, he turned again and settled his buttocks onto the mattress and reclined into the bed. She took his wrist and pressed, eye on her watch. Satisfied, she leaned over him—a wave of flowery deodorant and beneath it a close, familiar female acridity—and pressed a button on the wall above his head. The overheads went out and he saw through the window the Hudson and, across the ice-clotted river, the lights of Union City. Heaving gusts of snow ticked against the window, and lying quietly in his Arco adjustable, Albert breathed normally as the nurse pulled up his covers, hovered with her hands on her hips, attempting to assess what category this one fell into, exactly: trigger-happy with the call button, a flop-and-roller, a halluciné.

  You’re not going to give us any trouble, Mr. Caldwell?

  I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear.

  She had a keen sense about her patients, something akin to a Secret Service agent’s eye for the pearl of sweat that gives up the assassin in a jubilant throng. For someone who showed up wearing Turnbull & Asser and cashmere socks, this old man wasn’t copping nearly enough attitude with the help.

  Albert closed his eyes and concentrated on the hallway layout, and when he concentrated, his face screwed up like someone twisting water out of a towel. He unscrewed it. Concentrate. Wait. He opened his eyes a sliver, detected the outline of the nurse, still there; still there when he checked again, and after a time he adjusted his breathing to signal that he had been overtaken by slumber, and he waited for her to go. He was in a hospital. There was water to the south.

  4.

  The Blizzard Party. Published 1981 to critical acclaim, a laurel collector, bestseller, kingmaker, an unforgettable, an unputdownable. A cathedral of the mind, a masterstroke, a high-wire act, a virtuoso performance, a breakthrough, a brave and compelling intermingling of autobiography and fiction, a capstone, a new standard, a blah, a staggering blow to those sounding the novel’s death knell, a blah, a bright star in the blah firmament, a singular blah, an act of blah, a blah pointing the way to a new blah, a blah blah, a blah, a blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

  My father shipped my story to the far corners of the world. He turned that night in 1978 into art, a thing to be passed around by strangers, dismantled and reconstructed, used as an intellectual bludgeon, argued over. A thing that determined the weight of my worth. He’d done some remodeling in the name of fiction, and insisted on calling it a novel, but, as usual, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to complicate things. His heart had been pierced by the gleaming needle of veracity, and thusly afflicted, he chose not to change anyone’s name, so that suddenly I—the flesh-and-blood I who ate oatmeal from a pink plastic bowl at the scarred kitchen table, who struggled to align the seam of her tights with the tips of her toes and demanded obedience of her stuffed animals—collided with the inky I my father had conjured on the page. I became a photo negative, a child-shaped hole into which anyone who’d read the book tried to fit the Hazel they’d met in those pages. The real Hazel. Here’s how it would go: On introduction, adults would repeat my name slowly, eyes narrowed, and I’d get the feeling that I was naked before them, even if I didn’t know why. They had knowledge about me I didn’t have about myself.

  This went on for years, until I was old enough to read the book myself and learn what they knew. Surprise: My father’s version of the night didn’t match mine. Some memories generate their own language, their own peculiar logic and associations, coded so that only the bearer of the memory can understand them. I’d developed a juvenile idioglossia to describe that night, a mix of sound and dream and flashes of vision, a language with no English analogue, and here I discovered that my father had published a terrible translation. Not just terrible—he’d translated my story without even consulting the original. It was an invention. Who cared what he remembered? Who cared about his record of events? Who asked him? He’d gotten everything wrong.

  Yet, wrong as it was, I was seduced by his perfect description of the Vornados’ apartment and the people in it, the blizzard, the heaviness of Albert Caldwell’s heart. He’d treated me with love, if not with accuracy. To read his novel was to be dropped into an exact reproduction of that night, yet one in which the actors had gone off script and were playing out a completely different story than the one I knew to be true. Reading it was an oddly dreamlike experience, not unlike being caught in an unending state of déjà vu.

  He claimed that the things he’d changed, he’d changed so that I could preserve my own past. He’d done it, he said, to protect me, but the disjunction had turned out to be anything but protective. I was fifteen when I first read The Blizzard Party, as unsure of myself as any fifteen-year-old, and I quickly seized on the book as the root of all my problems. Thanks to my father’s novel, no one I’d met since its publication could have experienced the true me. All they’d met was a puzzle, a twin, a chance to speculate. It explained everything, from alienation to acne.

  Oh, the pleasures of unfettered indignation. I unleashed my rage on him. I denounced his parentage, made threats to “go public” with my own version, and, finally, treated him to long bouts of silence (silence I’m sure he was only too happy to suffer). It was during one of these inter
stices, which could last a week or more, that I realized my memory of the night in question had begun to erode. The act of reading his story was destroying my own. Not only destroying it, but rebuilding a new city atop it. My father always said that the more you repeat a lie, the more it sounds like the truth. I would amend thus: writing down a lie makes it the truth. What chance did a teenager have against the foremost narrative wizard of his generation?

  I’d read and reread, underlined and crossed out, censored entire pages with thick black Sharpie, crammed notes into the margins and gutters, tagged lies and half-truths, fury driving me back again and again to certain passages until I knew them by heart. I’d flooded notebooks with outraged responses without noticing that his rhythms and inflections were trampling my own. I was horrified to discover later that his linguistic tics had seeped into my English essays; in class discussions, I’d insisted on Salinger’s intentions using terms I’d picked up from critical essays about my father’s work, arguments sagging with prolepsis and discursion, my father’s favorite diversionary tactics. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t forget, that I would keep the two versions separate, and all the while I was reading and rereading until my own story was buried deep beneath his. I’d shoveled so much dirt onto my memories that I’d never be able to perform a successful exhumation. It’s hard to believe I hadn’t done it all on purpose.

  * * *

  So my memory is water-warped and faded. I’ve executed my best vanishing act on my father’s defective translation. I have rewritten and rewritten so that I—not the hole in the world—might appear in the cracks between his paragraphs, in the gap between a comma and an I. So that I might appear in fiery letters blazing against the sky. I appear here. If I embellish, if I fail to account for certain facts, if I speak through the mouths of the dead, you’ll remember that my father spoke for me without so much as a knock on my bedroom door. Many of you read what he wrote, and you believed. Do me the service of reconsidering.

  5.

  The night of the party, I’d fallen and hit my head, and because of the blizzard my mother couldn’t track down my pediatrician, so she’d taken me upstairs to see her friend Dr. Jane Vornado. She hadn’t intended to stay any longer than it took to have Jane look me over, but there she was, putting away her third rum and Coke. My mother and Jane had been friends for decades, yet my mother arrived wearing the apologetic smile she put on anytime she had to involve a third party in my care and comfort, the smile meant to give the impression she was a reasonable and pliant woman, not one given to hysterics or undue demands. She hoped that the smile would, in turn, transform her so this attitude of agreeability would become her genuine state of being. Jane was the one who put the first drink in her hand.

  Her reflexes are fine, Jane had said. Coordination’s fine. It’s a little cut. I’m going to put some Loctite on it.

  Do I need to ask? my mother said.

  Something I picked up from an OB at City. He picked it up from a midwife.

  Isn’t that remarkable, my mother said, sucking down half the drink.

  For tearing. Better than stitches. Right, Hazel?

  Tearing what? I said.

  In a percentage of births, the perineum sustains tearing during delivery, Jane said. Do you know what your perineum is?

  I shook my head.

  It’s the area between the bottom of your vaginal opening and your anus, Jane said. Sarah, you’ve got to get in there on this stuff. These days there’s no telling where they’ll pick up things if you don’t get in there first.

  Can you stop saying I have to get in there? my mother said.

  That would hurt, I said.

  What would? my mother said.

  Tearing your vagina, I said.

  Yep, Jane said, dabbing my wound with gauze. And then you have to get stitches. But for first-degree lacerations like this one, sometimes you can use glue. That’s better, right?

  Right, I said.

  Okay, hold still. She pinched the wound and dropped a dot of the clear cement onto the skin. Toothpick, she said to my mother, who handed it over, and Jane smoothed the adhesive around. Done, she said.

  My mother knocked back the rest of her rum and Coke.

  Hey, Jane said to me. You get dizzy or you feel like you’re going to throw up, you tell your mom right away, understand?

  I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. I got brained! I said.

  That had been hours ago. Days, years ago. I had happily ensconced myself in a guest bedroom to watch TV. My mother felt the party stretching out, becoming leaner as it settled into accumbency for the long night ahead. Though still early in the life cycle—people were standing around in clusters, and only a couple of guests—a man and woman, both white-haired, who looked like they’d just gotten off the Concorde from de Gaulle—were dancing to the Stooges album pounding through the speakers. They were both wearing silk scarves and platform shoes. Once the party got a little older, the sofas would fill up, someone would dim the lights, the crowd’s id would emerge. These parties, if they were any good, went backward in time, the guests urging the river back upstream, toward their coolest years, always bygone, and they’d land on “I Can’t Explain” or Cavern-era Beatles and they’d abandon conversation for dancing when that frenzy of physical memory shot through their spines, everyone young again for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That would come later. They were still on punk, music for corporate cools, according to my mother’s students, all of whom listened to reggae. Donna Summer would put in an appearance before a sustained bout of Bowie, depending on when Bo relinquished control of the stereo. No time soon, judging by the gunslinger’s slouch he’d assumed against the wall next to the cabinet. As long as he was manning the controls, it would be mood music for the cubes.

  A young party, then, and it would pass through the stages with inevitable predictability, the same as every other party. What a sad thing, always striving to be unique, a party unlike all those that had gone before, a vanguard moment in communal relations, a night that charted, a memory. My mother had always thought of parties as events designed to foster collective amnesia, so that what you wanted in the end was a memorable place for forgetting. Cute.

  She was in a clutch of five, the right number, the configuration at which two-by-two intimacy (always man-woman, man-woman, wasn’t it?) broke apart into the impersonal, performative stage-and-audience situation, a five-way conversation being a mythical Loch Ness sort of thing, because in reality, wasn’t it always just one guy speechifying while the other four stood there and swizzled, which was exactly what she was doing, swizzling, absently observing the varieties of digital combinations employed to cradle a wineglass, almost as individual as the faces above them, each one a signal, her mind wandering, fingernail polish color, prominence of hair between knuckles or lack thereof, presence and make of watch, style of bracelet, wedding ring.

  Thank god we look at the nose when we’re talking, she thought. Thank god we don’t actually have to look into people’s eyes.

  In her little flight of five (three women, two men), one woman and one man were married, one of each sex was not, and my mother was, but absent her spouse. They were all about the same age, steered toward one another by Jane, who’d then veered off in search of other lost souls, and they’d talked for a while about how consummate Jane was, and one of the men was funny, the married one, and the other one less so, thus playing catch-up, hard to watch, and both of the other women were perfectly nice, though one, wearing a huge white hat made out of an arctic fox, was overselling her boredom, making no effort to conceal her scans for a better option, a naked disregard for the feelings of the other guests that my mother admired, possibly because she herself was lashed to politic behavior like a sailor to the mast. I suppose it was that same appreciation for brutalist behavior that attracted her to my father. And, naturally, everyone was doing it, checking over the shoulder of whoever was standing opposite, just in case. Three knew each other (the couple and the fox hat), all
had Jane and Bo in common, and they had talked out the blizzard and the married man was explaining the Coriolis effect—inaccurately, my mother thought, but what did it matter? She crunched an ice cube and heard the echo of her own mother’s voice, You’ll crack a tooth, and at the same time a more ventrally located dialogue, the morbid drone of Henry Kissinger lecturing her on Viennese-era sexual frustrations.

  Low-pressure systems. Low pressure, the man was saying.

  I’ve never understood any of it, his wife said. Nothing but a bunch of wavy lines to me, she said, smiling with her whole face, beaming, shooting rays of sunlight out of her mouth.

  Lows bring precipitation. And now here’s the interesting part. The Coriolis effect makes wind blow counterclockwise around a low.

  Good god, Terry, his wife said, are you trying to get us thrown out of here with all this subversive talk?

  Everyone laughed.

  Come on, this is interesting, isn’t it? It’s—it’s—it’s human history, it’s ancient seafaring knowledge. Someday it might come in handy. Like when we get tossed out into the blizzard because of your big mouth. He swatted his wife on the ass. She made a Kewpie doll face and said, Did you say counter cock wise?

  Good grief, Marg, said that fox hat.

  If you stand with your back to the wind, the low-pressure system will be on your left—left for low—and the high-pressure system will be on your right, so when you’re rounding, say, the Cape of Good Hope, making for Madagascar, you’ll know how to avoid those nasty low-pressure hurricanes I’m sure you’ve all heard so much about.

  Fascinating, the other man said.

  See? the first man said to his wife. See? Fascinating! Buys-Ballot’s law.

  God, take me now, she said.

  Say their names again? the second man said.

  Buys-Ballot. One guy. Buys like Bosch Tools. Danish.