by Jack Livings
Honey, my mother said to me, do you feel like you’re going to throw up? I shook my head. Dizzy? I shook my head again. No, no, neither. Yes, bleeding. Probably. Yes, probably. She looked in my direction. My head was on my father’s shoulder, and I smiled weakly at her, resigned. That’s the problem, she said, I can’t get Foreman or anyone else and I wondered if we might stop by your place— Of course. Oh no, Jane, we’ll just go to Roosevelt, then. That’s no good. No, no, no. Are you sure? Really sure? Oh well, that might be fun. She raised her eyebrows at me. And if we need to go on to Roosevelt— Sure. Sure. Of course. I’ll see if he’s up for it. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. We’ll be up in a minute. Bye.
Vornados are having a party, my mother said after she’d hung up.
Tonight? my father said.
Right now. She said she was just about to call us.
I’m sure, my father said.
She said she’d look Hazel over and that we should all stay for the party. Erwin, they’re having a costume party, my mother said and burst out laughing.
She actually said she was just about to call us? he said.
Spur-of-the-moment. They were just about to call.
My father shook his head and laughed, and then I started laughing, looking to him, then to my mother, for some clue why.
Now you’re going to insist on coming with us, aren’t you? my mother said.
Let me get my tux, my father said.
Daddy, you’re coming, too? I said.
No, honey, said my mother. How to explain to me why it was funny? How much better it was to let me laugh alongside them, unencumbered by understanding, sounding my single note in their major key.
She actually invited me? my father said.
She did.
By name?
That asshole, I believe she said?
That’s me.
I’ll call if, you know. Anything, my mother said.
Anything at all, he said. He kissed my mother, kissed me, and slipped something into my hand. I knew what it was without looking, and he said, For good luck. It was the only time I can remember him parting with the hex nut he carried in his pocket, his talisman, a mechanical fixture whose intended use is to bind together, to stave off entropy and chaos, two forces he detected everywhere.
Part II
8.
In 1978, the tongue of land at the far eastern end of Long Island was home to the 773rd Radar Squadron of the United States Air Force, the Ronjo and Memory Motels, a trailer park out at Ditch Plains, a decent point break on the south side, and a voracious white-tailed deer population. Clusters of gray clapboard houses, battered by snow and ice in the winter, scoured by sand and sun in the summer. The red-roofed Coast Guard outpost just up the road from the Montauk Yacht Club, a ruin that played host to a few families on Sunday afternoons for lunch. The waters hadn’t been fished to death, and a person with a boat could make a living.
There was speculation at the time that the Air Force had been taking advantage of the base’s secluded location to conduct experiments on the population of Montauk (2,800). Unconventional psychological warfare, time travel, electromagnetism, invisibility. In 1978, it wouldn’t have been impossible to fill most of the seats in the ballroom at the Montauk Yacht Club with members of the populace who claimed to have been abducted and forced to participate in those experiments.
On the Friday before the party at the Vornados’ penthouse, I’d taken a train to Montauk with my parents. They’d kept me home from school and we’d caught a cab to Penn Station for the long ride out. For hours I’d been in stasis, suppressed to a near-narcoleptic state by the blurred rhythm that train windows impart on the world, but as we approached the station, the train slowed and the trees thinned to offer flashbulb views of Napeague Bay. Then the woods fell away entirely and there was the insinuation of a body of water to the south, Fort Pond, its presence marked by a void brighter than the snow. Even if you couldn’t see it, you could feel the immense presence of the sea surrounding the place, but it was the infinite white ceiling of the sky, its sovereignty unbroken by office towers or billboards, that was unsettling to a child accustomed to the gray canyons of the city.
My father stepped down from the train first and reached up for me, and I fell forward into his outstretched arms for the short flight to the platform. My mother came down. My skin tightened in the cold. At the other end of the car, a lone passenger climbed aboard. A conductor’s blue-capped head popped out, dipped back inside. The doors clicked shut and the train pulled out the way it had come in, terminus turned origin.
We stood on the platform setting down and picking up luggage, adjusting our coats and scarves. My father had his Olivetti case and a beaten leather valise, an artifact from his youth that I had stuffed with paper and colored pencils, assorted jewels, a plastic cup bearing the faded logo of the New York Yankees, and because the bag was also the permanent residence of a rock collection, two yo-yos, a Slinky, plastic plates, teacups, dollhouse furniture, hair bands, pennies, and a battered Etch A Sketch, it weighed almost as much as I did. I had made it as far as the apartment door before surrendering it to my father. He had a small gym bag, as well, containing his personal effects. My mother, in addition to her own bag, carried two more, one primarily stuffed with winter clothing for me, the other with board and card games. I was their only child; they were older parents; one might say they intended to treat me with great care, if not indulgence.
When my father looked at the sky, the gray, muscular shadowing of the clouds stretching toward the horizon, only the constant stitch of the power lines kept his sense of complete insignificance in check. It was nearly silent after the train had gone. A halyard tinged against the mast of a flagpole, the standard’s fabric popping in the wind. Sound was swallowed up into the mass of the sky, and when he turned to say to my mother, There they are, his voice was carried away. She slipped her hand around his neck and pulled him to her ear and he repeated it, though she’d already seen.
Out in the lot, Jane Vornado was waving at us from behind the wheel of her Land Cruiser, its mint-green chassis spattered with mud and road salt. My mother and I climbed into the front and my father accordioned into the back, among fishing tackle, a flare kit, our luggage, and situated himself on a bench, atop a coil of marine rope. The vehicle smelled like gasoline and bilgewater. Jane took it easy out of the parking lot and ambled along at thirty-five, but even at that speed my father couldn’t hear what was happening up front. The dash blowers didn’t do much, and what little heat they did produce leaked out of the cab before making it to him. The whole thing rattled like a box of tools.
My father knew Sid Feeney would be there. The Feeneys owned the house next door, a white saltbox with a flagpole in the front yard. In the summer a ring of whitewashed rocks surrounded a bed of red, white, and blue flowers at the base. He supposed Feeney was out there at the first melt, touching up the rocks with a bucket and paintbrush, shimmying up the pole to polish the finial. Feeney wrote military histories, broadly researched hagiographies of Allied commanders that never failed to make the bestseller lists. He appeared never to have been troubled by a moral decision, which is to say that he knew inherently right from wrong and felt that it would be treasonous to question his self-assurance, installed as it had been by God Almighty himself. Feeney depressed the hell out of my father.
The tire treads sang on the pavement. Every pothole rattled his teeth, and when they plummeted from the pavement onto the dirt road that led to the house, he bashed his head against the steel roof.
Full of bile on most subjects, my father was especially sour about this setup. Supported by the pylon of their immense wealth, the Vornados rusticated on the weekends inside a full-scale reproduction of bygone days, playing out a fantasy of Life on the End, where they dried fish from the shed rafters and wore waxed canvas jackets, chopped wood, made venison stew, attacked the house’s curling cedar shakes with antique shingling hatchets, at night slept under mounds of Hudson Bay blankets, refus
ing heat unless it came from a hot brick. They spoke of the land and sea as though they had bartered for their homestead with the Montaukett. It must have all come from a sense of guilt over their success, he supposed, a desire to do honor by the memory of their parents’ struggles, or those of their grandparents, or whoever had come over in steerage and broken their backs on the Lower East Side for a dollar a week. Who, my mother asked, was he to judge? Just because they want to have a little fun on the weekends, their morality is out of whack? It’s out of whack, he replied, because the Mercedes parked in the garage beneath the canoes is their morality. So that allows you to label them inauthentic? she said. This is what people do, isn’t it, Erwin? They hang up one costume and put on another one.
Through the murky window of the Land Cruiser he saw, well, scenery: wilderness, snow, the wind-bent trees, a slice of the striated sky. The woods were thick on either side of the road, the spaces between pines stuffed with brush, spindly hardwoods struggling in the shade of towering hickories, an impassable landscape packed with eastern red cedars spouting billowing rolls of evergreen, one trunk spawning another, which split for another, and on and on. Even in the dead of winter the woods were as dense as a wall.
Once you had arrived on set, there was no way out. My father was to play the writer, the husband, the crank, the one with a fresh lump atop his skull to symbolize his spiritual injury.
A final spine-obliterating thud, and Jane ratcheted the brake. From the garage Bo Vornado approached the Land Cruiser, arms out, as if to embrace the vehicle itself. He moved through the world with an ease that my father imagined to be primarily the result of a healthy childhood, ruddy-cheeked, rough-and-tumble, football with brothers in the fall leaves, a hearty impertinence charming to teachers and girls alike, taking what he wanted when he wanted it, wanting for nothing. What he knew of Bo he arranged in a daisy chain that reduced the man to a manageable shape: varsity quarterback, student body president, matriculation at Harvard, Porcellian, elevation to toastmaster, reward of a desk at an investment firm. Taken under the wing of a managing director, he’d bidden his time, risen through the ranks, and, as prophesied, at the appointed hour slayed his mentor and appropriated his office and title. Then, bored by conquest, he’d struck out on his own. On principle, my father was opposed to Bo’s existence, so anodyne, so well oiled, his entire life an unobstructed downhill run through fresh powder, yet he couldn’t help liking him. Bo’s masculinity had been so perfectly forged that it shielded him from any self-analysis of whatever failings lurked within his personality. He had, indeed, been raised to be a gentleman, charming, mindful of the needs of others, deferential to his elders, a steady arm on which a woman could lean. He’d never been in danger of displaying the syrupy, overly respectful attitude perfected by those boys who kept a sharp part in their hair, learned their catechism, and masturbated compulsively; he had, instead, a musky, mysterious air, that of a ram perched atop a mountain peak surveying his territory, and when he greeted my father with a hail-fellow-well-met embrace, my father’s heart rose a little, as though they were old boarding school chums reunited after decades. There was no question in my father’s mind that it was an embrace as practiced as a well-wrought wrestling hold, one designed to transmit authority and strength. Dominion. You are within my fold now, old boy, no harm shall befall you. It worked like magic.
Bo gathered up the bags—all of them, my father noticed, plus a couple of the boxes that had been knocking around the back of the vehicle, enough to crush an ox—and led the way inside, my mother and I trailing behind. My father had held on to his Olivetti case. Somewhere, Feeney’s voice. An indistinguishable hum of words, then, Son of a bitch! rang out like a call to arms, and Bo’s tattered laughter, and my mother’s laughter—the betrayal!—and my father sensed that he, too, would have to enter the house now, the player called to stage, and so in he went, carrying the Olivetti case at his chest, braced for whatever might lie within.
Maestro! Feeney called, his mouth open wide enough to swallow my father whole, and came at him, right hand extended, palm as big as a broadaxe, a cigar smoldering in the left.
Hello, Sid, my father said.
You look like you need a scotch and a hooker, Feeney said.
Depends. You buying? my father said.
There he is, everyone! Ha ha ha! That’s the spirit! Feeney roared.
God, look at him, my father thought. Like something out of Darwin’s notebooks. That honker, the gaping mouth, those eyes bulging out like the view ports of the Nautilus—it was as though he had been conceived to consume as much of the world as possible. Extraneous elements like hair had been boiled away. His ears were pinned like shutters against the sides of his skull. He was nothing but sinew, the result of an inner engine that always ran at full capacity, burning more fuel than he had in reserve.
Feeney’s wife, Carla, was a hummingbird at his elbow. Though my father had met her plenty of times, she never failed to surprise him. He was sure he’d never seen a smaller adult woman in his life who wasn’t affected by dwarfism, an effect intensified by her apparent desire to vanish entirely behind her husband. What could explain the unfortunate combination of stature and timidity? It was too cruel a fate for the universe to have bestowed upon one person. Maybe, my father thought, silence is her weapon. Maybe the only one that works against a nuclear warhead of a man like Feeney.
Name, rank, and serial number, soldier! Feeney said. He always tried to get my father to cough up details about his time in the service, but my father never complied. Silent Death, Feeney called him. Surely, my father thought, Feeney had spent World War Two in some out-of-the-way post—Hawaii or a listening station in Greenland. No one who’d seen the front could be so pathologically gung-ho.
I’m going to try to get a little work done before we get wrecked, my father said.
A writer, Feeney said, is an addict whose drug gives him no joy but wastes his body and crushes his spirit. I can’t recall who said that.
You, my father thought. You’re the one who said that. He tugged some of the luggage away from Bo and headed upstairs. He knew his way to the bedroom, where he set up the Olivetti and pulled out his papers.
He had no intention of working. Once the desk was properly arranged, he positioned himself diagonally across the bed to signal that he’d been felled by an irresistible force. The silence and the light unweighted the air here; in the city, the air was fractious, stuffed with matter, and it insisted that he listen and record. It was a nuisance, he realized, as he always did when he was away from it, the city’s false urgency. He closed his eyes and spiraled down quickly and dreamed he was in a swamp, chest-deep in water, pulling a boat by its bowline.
* * *
My mother called him from downstairs. It was dark, time for drinks, and he went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, a performance intended to reimmerse him into the world of real things, but that was, in truth, only a means of delaying his entry into the audience downstairs. He told himself that wasn’t the case, that the water was a baptism, a declaration of his intention to interact with his loved ones and his friends, and began the usual argument with himself over his own cowardice and inflexibility. A baptism? It was a dodge, but the problem was, which did he believe it to be? Both, but if a man can’t decide what it means to put water on his face, what chance does he have in a room with Bo Vornado and Sid Feeney?
He went downstairs and took the drink waiting for him and touched me on the head and fielded the polite questions on the quality of his nap and the ribbing from Bo about sleeping on the job and Feeney’s clunky barb about making a buck on his back, and my father laughed and shook his head at the tragedy of his own slothful disposition, saying with disbelief, I know, I know, and then, L’chaim! and dropped the first depth charge of the night, the first one always the most potent, the scotch sliding down his throat like a boy’s fist stripping green leaves from a twig, and he was relieved, overjoyed, even, to feel the searing wash of the alcohol that would m
ake him a tolerable dinner companion, one with no honor to defend, malleable opinions, a man who felt nothing but goodwill toward his fellow travelers.
The night tracked along the usual parabola, no acrobatics. They went through politics, money, art, real estate, things loosening up at the fourth bottle of wine, my father realizing by the fifth that even Feeney had softened when the man said he admired his own father for never, not even on his deathbed, asking god to ease his pain, and appeared to be choking back tears. Carla went home not long after dinner, leaving through the kitchen door with her wrist to her forehead. Around midnight my father made a slow, drunken ascent of the stairs to deposit an already-sleeping me into bed. He got me into my nightgown, put me under the cold covers, tucked the blanket around my body, smoothed my hair. In moments like those he felt that he was a father. The rest of the time he felt as though he’d been sent onto the ice without a stick or pads and told to take control of the puck.
Back downstairs he slumped onto the end of one of the sofas and put his feet up on the hearth. Bo dropped the needle on a record, dim but audible, and my father recognized it from years ago, Davis’s trumpet retracing the lines scored in his memory, the apartment on West 77th, before he’d met my mother, before he’d published anything, when all he did was smoke and throw away what he wrote. Like paying an old friend a visit, recalling himself that way, and though there was conversation around him, he preferred the company of the past.
He, Bo, and Feeney were going fishing in the morning and Bo was outlining his strategy with a nonchalance meant to highlight his lack of obsession about the event, though to my father it seemed fairly obvious he’d been poring over depth charts and buying advice off the locals. Why else would he have said, Well, it’s not like I’ve been poring over depth charts and buying advice off the locals? My father smiled at the ceiling.