The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  What’s funny? my mother said, shouldering him. His weight on the cushion had tipped her into his hip and he felt her thigh there against his and he felt the yawning within his body, an opening hunger for sex.

  Nothing. Just listening.

  She stay asleep when you put her down?

  Out like Liston.

  Didn’t Liston take a dive?

  I don’t know what I’m talking about. Out like a sack of bricks. Down like a light.

  Poet.

  Watch your mouth.

  There’s a storm, Bo said, coming up the coast, but the fish can’t feel it yet. They’re nice and settled.

  The music was good. My father was cataloguing the living room, dim, the lambent cone of orange from the fire, the dull reflection off brass handles and glazed picture frames. The saltbox couldn’t have been laid out this way originally. They’d demolished walls, exposed beams, vaulted the ceiling, installed extra rooms to accommodate their modern appetite for space. But there was something more to it—an anachronistic solidity for a house of this age. The floors did not creak. The doors swung soundlessly on nickel-plated hinges. Their latches aligned precisely. Faucets delivered neat little columns of water and the cocks rotated with a whisper. The corners were perfectly squared. Even the kitchen knives were so sharp they fell through vegetables as though attracted to the cutting board by a magnetic force.

  The music seemed louder now. Maybe just a loud passage. It was good but wrong for this full-scale diorama. Everything was just so. Did anything here have sentimental value to the Vornados? No family pictures, only black-and-white photos of trees, framed paintings of pastoral scenes. A set. Wasn’t it a set? Even the cracked paint on the bookshelf, which held musty unread volumes in cloth bindings splashed with mildew, was the painstaking work of an artisan, one of the local eccentrics about whom the Vornados had a million stories. Were the books even real? Should he stick his hand into the fire and extract a glowing log to test the quality of the illusion?

  This is a cognac ad, he said.

  My mother studied his face. She knew this declarative tone. Salty, she said.

  Fireside ambience, he said. Wool sweaters, loafers, amber liquid in heavy crystal. Hearty laughter and musings on contemporary life. The photographer would set up outside the windows over there.

  Cut it out, she whispered. Feeney had been talking but now my father had everyone’s attention. Bo and Jane’s faces were open expressions of bemusement—they were waiting for him to turn the joke. Feeney was frowning as though he’d been distracted from some Clausewitz he’d been laboring to parse.

  What’s that, Saltwater? Feeney said.

  My father ignored him and spoke to the air over their heads: The host’s personality exudes a Caravaggiesque glow that illuminates the gathered friends’ faces as they share intimacies and rest easy. What’s that? The market’s doing a swan dive? Babies freezing to death in China? They’re rioting in the Bronx? Never mind all that! We’re safe here behind the bulletproof fortifications of wealth and class.

  He held up his fingers to frame the shot.

  Jane tipped back her wineglass and took a sip, watching him over the foot.

  I don’t exclude myself, he said. I’m in the shot. I’m fully present. I’m enjoying the spoils of your labors. This place puts neurotics like me right at ease, like a warm glass of milk. It’s a mind-control experiment. So much care put into the removal of uncertainty! Everything as predictable as a clock. We’re the only thing left to chance. We’re the only variables! Isn’t that something? It’s utterly precious and a perfect narcotic, to wit. Bo, I have to ask you, though. There’s something about all this perfection that’s a little emasculating, don’t you think? Those perfectly flawed needlepoints in the bathroom? To have lavished such care on anything that doesn’t require gun oil or have a gearbox? Either you’re under your wife’s thumb or you’re a willing participant in this façade. Wait. Don’t tell me it was all your idea.

  Bo was relaxed, a tumbler balanced on his crossed knee. What a gas, he said to my mother.

  Oh, he’s just getting warmed up, she said.

  Bo hadn’t yet decided how he would react. Perhaps with the tolerant jocularity of a movie star pried from his dinner conversation by an ardent fan. Or perhaps he’d get up and smash the bastard’s jaw.

  Surely you must have realized that other men would ask these questions, my father said. I’m asking on behalf of these theoretical men, you understand? Because it’s a lovely house. It’s cozy as could be. It’s just, I don’t know, hard to identify the masculine presence.

  Bo took a slug from his glass.

  No offense, Jane, my father said.

  She smirked at him and waved her hand. And there—it was all right. Bo had his answer. They’d take it as a badly delivered joke, this assassination. They’d blame it on his drinking.

  But there is another possibility, my father said.

  Erwin, honestly, my mother said.

  Oh come on. What’s the unexamined life? Here’s the answer, in the form of a question. What if they’ve created this all explicitly to force these kinds of questions? What if they’ve done it all intentionally, just to attract the mockery of superior old bastards like myself? What if the façade isn’t a mask to cover their insecurities but a medium for self-expression?

  That’s three, Bo said.

  What?

  That’s three questions, Bo said.

  So it is. Here’s a fourth: What if you’re a couple of Warhols? House as kitsch—your commitment to reproduction, it’s a riff on the absurdity of the historical American house, the central lie of which is that there can be any history in a house that’s only a hundred years old. America doesn’t have a fucking history. Christ, go to Prague and they’ve got rats in the basement with more extensive family trees than the Kennedys. Here’s what I want to know. How did you get them to do it? How’d you get the carpenters to overwork the floors just so? And all the handles? They’re so carefully mean. Patinated, but with that shellacked permanence, like they’re in amber. It’s one thing to find an artisan who can age a piece of furniture, but to find one who can age it and then add the final step, so that the work itself is apparent in the final product, so that it displays its own artifice—that’s real craftsmanship. That’s what Jencks is talking about. True postmodernism. Am I taking this too far?

  Oh, absolutely not, Bo said.

  Good, because I’m quite serious. We’re sitting in a piece of art here. This, all this, it’s a commentary on those batty old Wasps who let their mansions come down around their ears because god forbid they should act like they care about stuff. Only new money cares about stuff. You had everything custom-made for this place, isn’t that right? All the Chippendale stuff upstairs, that dining table? Made to order, distressed and faux-finished? You’re the vanguard of an age of intentional inauthenticity! You’re giving the finger to every white-shoe Princeton pseud who got it all from Mommy and Daddy. Fuck them! Fuck ’em well and right!

  Christ, you’re a piece of work, aren’t you? Feeney said.

  My father blinked. He realized everything he’d said had been directed at Feeney, trying to impress and destroy at the same time. He feared his friends’ money and their confidence and their success and it was small, infinitesimally small, of him to malign them, even if by some miracle of inebriation it sounded to them like nothing more than a tone-deaf pseudo-academic roast. Small because he felt calm around them, yes, and that was a gift they gave him. He basked in the warm glow of the control they exerted over their lives, the opportunities that their money afforded them. He found comfort in their presence. But he was only here because he was added patina, and that was humiliating. He was here as author Erwin Saltwater, and he knew it because they tolerated him. Because Bo didn’t slug him. Because Jane didn’t tell him to shut the fuck up. He’d concocted the diatribe to thank them for their hospitality, to sing for his supper, to provide them a story they could tell their friends. Mission accomplished.


  They’d moved on like it hadn’t happened. Feeney was talking about the markets again. He talked like a flood sweeping through a village, in a chaotic rush of words that tore trees out by the roots and plucked houses off their foundations.

  My mother turned to my father. Age of intentional inauthenticity? Been sitting on that one for a while, have you?

  I suppose, he said. What is wrong with me?

  Where would I even start? she said.

  “Blue in Green” ended and Jane turned the record over. My father’s eyes were closed. The needle popped, dropped into the groove, played a few bars of dust before the piano and the drums came sliding in like something out of a heist movie and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley came in behind them, saxes crackling with spittle, and then Davis, restrained, creeping over the shoulders of his bandmates. “All Blues.” My father let himself back into that old apartment on 77th. The landlord had installed his own mother in a top-floor unit one winter. Because he ran the boiler only enough to keep the pipes from freezing, she’d contracted pneumonia and died. That’s how my father had heard it. He had trouble remembering her face. She was a black sweater and gray skirt, a column of dust planted in orthopedic shoes. She wheeled her supplies around in a squeaky folding grocery cart scrounged from a dumpster. She scrubbed the lobby floor on hands and knees, her phlebitic legs sticking out hideously like marshland maps cut and crossed by violet creeks and streams, the central rivers in cerulean. More than once he’d had to step over them to get to the stairs. Always mumbling to herself in Polish. My father could have spoken to her, but he hadn’t. On weekdays she cleaned her son’s other buildings. On Sundays, she cleaned the one where my father lived. Saturdays she went to synagogue. When her neighbor on the eighth floor had fallen ill, she’d made a pot of krupnik, wasn’t that what someone had said? Things he’d heard after she was dead. She hadn’t been old. Another thing he’d heard was that she’d been in the camps, but that she’d managed first to get her son on a train to Spain, then a boat to the U.S., and he’d grown up with his aunt and uncle on Long Island.

  My father had lived on the second floor, in a studio with a mattress, his books, the Olivetti, and a portable record player. Some days he listened to “Blue in Green” three hundred times, at the tune’s end his hand automatically reaching for the arm, fingers casually dropping the needle back at the beginning while their twins waited patiently atop the keys. This fine synchronization of body with machine rendered him calm enough to write, the repetition silencing the demon voices and tics that sabotaged his concentration.

  That song was the score to his first book, a companion and an ally, and the Vornados had boiled it down to tar to patch holes in their conversations. The old woman was ingrained in the music, down in the grooves of his memory, her scrub brush, the swish of the brushes on the drum kit, her voice whining with the horn, with the sirens, the slamming of doors above and below, the concrete footfalls of his upstairs neighbors, the bass, the hissing of the radiators, the street, the snapping of the Lettera’s typebars. How romantic it could be in retrospect. Why not also pretend that she might have been a beautiful woman before the war, a woman of culture? Of course she hadn’t been.

  Feeney was arguing that increased sales of nude pantyhose correlated with the increased availability of pornographic films. He was trying to get a rise out of the women, employing the genial lechery men used to compete with the detrimental effects of women’s lib, the main of which, as any male of the species could tell you, was a complete loss of humor in the fairer sex. My father wanted to hear “Blue in Green” again, this time loud enough to drown out Feeney, but it wouldn’t do to get up and flip the record over. Earlier, he might have had the right, but now he had to make an effort not to be such a grade-A prick. Instead he went and got another drink, waving the bottle, a peace offering, at everyone, who shook their heads no, and when he came back he sat on the other side of my mother, closer to Feeney and the Vornados, and when there was an opportunity, he apologized, bumblingly, with a convincing degree of sincerity that he felt at the time was genuine. Bo patted him on the leg and Jane waved him off again, just as she waved off everything, it seemed, that might impede the progress of her personal narrative.

  My mother stitched the patterns in the bathrooms, Bo said. She loved Frost.

  Jesus Christ, my father thought. She loved Frost. Frost! What a riot she must have been. I bet she threw herself down the staircase every Easter morning.

  My father nodded. One of the greats, he said.

  * * *

  On Saturday, at an hour so early the darkness was heavy as a slab of stone, the alarm clock by my parents’ bed, conveniently set by Bo the day before, went off clangingly, prompting my father to thrash wildly in the direction of the noise, taking out an ashtray and a glass of water before he found the clock. My mother muttered something indecipherably profane and he dragged himself from the bed and into the black bathroom, where he and Doppler tried to hit the bowl. He picked his way downstairs. Bo and Feeney were already at the espresso machine, a chrome-piped contraption covered in pressure gauges, its chassis enameled in Ferrari rosso corsa. It was so early there was not even a pale line at the horizon.

  The transistor radio on the windowsill was tuned to the local AM, which at that hour broadcast the time, temp, and NOAA forecast on a five-minute loop. In Bo’s estimation, a good morning to be on the boat. Temperature in the teens. Nothing serious, atmospherically speaking. The storm was still making its way up the coast from the Carolinas but nothing to worry about today. None of them had slept more than three hours, and Bo’s eyes felt like someone had attacked them with a melon baller.

  Bo was a pioneer in the nascent world of leveraged buyouts, the spread in Montauk a minor facet in his crown. There was a castle in Ireland he had his eye on. A storage facility in Mahwah for his collection of buffalo hides. A separate facility on East 72nd Street for his paintings. Mountains of money: a phrase never far from his consciousness. He’d never felt a need to apologize for or curb his desires. If his confidence grated, that wasn’t his fault any more than it was a tree’s fault it provided shade.

  He’d been chewing on my father’s drunken rant from the night before. As another sign of my father’s jealousy, it pleased him—it pleased him far more than all the obscene praise piled on him by men who wanted to fawn their way into his good graces. Bo understood that all men wanted what he had. His stuff, his power, his ability to ignore the problems that plagued their minds and forced them to tell themselves lies about their worth in the world. To Bo, my father was no different from the rest, except in the way he expressed his jealousy, which was honest, even soulful. Maybe this was how kings felt about their jesters: a fool was one whose disdain for the king’s power was so pure that he could be trusted to tell the truth from time to time.

  Doppio for you, Bo said, pushing a cup of espresso toward my father, who was still wobbly, unsure whether he’d slept or only rolled around the bed for a few hours searching for sleep, and he threw it back in one shot.

  Vile, Feeney said. Americano for me.

  We don’t serve your kind, Bo said.

  The hell, Feeney said.

  Macchina italiana, speak no Americano, Bo said.

  Goddamnit, Vornado. Just give me something with a set of balls on it.

  This fine fellow passed out on the couch last night, Bo said to my father. Now I have to burn the thing. Bo slid an espresso cup across the counter. Doppio.

  May you have only daughters, you son of a bitch, Feeney said.

  Beware your half-wit sons, Bo said.

  The way they talked, they could have been a pair of former college roommates, ever bound together by the barbed wire of competitive urges, surrogate brothers still capable of squabbling for hours over baseball stats. They spoke to each other in the tones of fraternal derision common to trading floors and golf clubhouses, fangs dulled just enough to allow them to sink their teeth into the other’s hide without drawing any blood. But they
’d known each other only a few years, since Bo and Jane had bought the house.

  Still, my father wasn’t convinced that the two weren’t merely exceptionally skilled at wallpapering their contempt for each other. Feeney was the antipode to Vornado’s swaggering gentleman, even now pounding the table like a piston as he made some point about how the cocksucking communist rebels in South America were driving up the price of coffee. My father doubted that the man had passed out on the sofa at all. Seemed more likely that he’d lain there, vampirical, his brain churning out conspiracy theories between fantasies of hand-to-hand combat with the Japs.

  What my father hadn’t yet hit on was Feeney and Bo’s shared hunger, a Nietzschean impulse toward mastery. He would understand later. He was an observer on the edge of their kinship, though they didn’t treat him as an outsider as much as a foreigner they’d come across in a bar, a sad sop who couldn’t keep up with the slang and lifted his glass like a fruit, who for fun they kept pulling with them from one dive to the next. A mascot.

  My father’s only redeeming factor, by his own estimation, was that he could fish. He might be able to acquit himself on the boat. Maybe. He had fished muddy, sprawling waters as a boy, learning to thread jigs between the branches of the half-submerged trees where the bass hid on boiling summer days. Those slow chocolate rivers produced catfish as big as newborn calves, and they liked to flatten out and suction down into the sludge by the dam spillways. Towing them off the bottom was like hauling out a potbellied stove. He hadn’t fished more than twice in the thirty years since he’d left home for college, yet he considered himself a fisherman, and when Bo suggested the outing, he’d agreed immediately, to my mother’s vocal surprise.

  He’s talking about fishing on the open water, Erwin, she’d said. The ocean.

  Where else would it be?

  All right, Ahab. Just stay in the boat, okay?