Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  * * *

  GEORGE’S ASSISTANT, KATRINE: she had gotten the green slacks—key lime—and found herself matching flip-flops. She was wearing the dress flip-flops today. Little glass beads on them.

  We’re wearing flip-flops to the office now? George said.

  You’re not, Katrine said. Just me. And they’re not flip-flops.

  I’m glad, George said.

  These are one-hundred-and-eighty-dollar sandals, you should know.

  I’m tempted to say we’re paying you too much but I know we’re not.

  No, you’re not, she said. But occasionally one buys oneself something.

  One does, George said.

  Spring 2004, the cat, the Fat One, was sick and at the vet. Anna’s cat, two and a half years after. El Gordo. George’s heart rate was accelerated, he was feeling beside himself, he was surprised the degree—desperately, enormously—to which he did not want this cat to die. He was on the verge of a full-fledged anxiety attack. Perhaps this was a full-fledged anxiety attack: the thought made him more anxious. But the cat. Poor thing had a lump in his throat. They were going to operate to remove it. George had called three times already for reports; they kept telling him the vet would call after the operation. At three thirty or so he couldn’t take it anymore and left the office and took a cab to the vet’s. The vet was in another operation and would be out soon. He paced. They asked him to sit (he was agitating the other pets in the waiting room, it was thought); he said, I’ll wait outside, please come get me. Cars went by, it was 79th Street just off West End Avenue, a big crosstown street with entrances to the West Side Highway, which in none of its parts was officially called the West Side Highway. Here it was the Henry Hudson Parkway. South of 59th, it was West Street. North of Van Cortlandt Park, the Saw Mill River Parkway. This was an exit and entrance point. Four lanes of traffic. Suburban SUVs. Cabs. Immigrants in Corollas. He tried to slow his heart rate: breathe. Breathe. How could this cat do this to him? He could see it all again, the rubble, the smoke, the white lights. The flyers posted everywhere with pictures and short biographies of the missing. He’d never put one up for her, he’d known it was useless but now he regretted that, it seemed callous, lazy, selfish, like not providing a headstone. She had been officially declared dead in a legislative gesture in late 2003, no remains ever identified. So no grave. He was thinking of buying one; getting her a stone. He would. He would. Let this cat be okay and I’ll buy you a fucking stone okay? Like the diamond you never got.

  The cat was, in fact, okay. No cancer, it appeared, and so the labs proved days later. Soon he was eating again with gusto, putting back on weight he’d lost, showing his usual contempt, peppered with moments of affection, usually first thing in the morning when he wanted fresh water and new food. So George bought Anna a headstone and a plot, up above Tarrytown in Sleepy Hollow, she’d be buried where Ichabod Crane had last been seen, until she’d spotted him that night in John Jay Hall almost thirty years ago. He told her parents, then took them to the site—what ritual? Who knew what ritual; the cemetery had a chaplain for a fee, they used her.

  * * *

  THOUGH HE’D SWORN that he’d avoid the neighborhood he couldn’t really, not while Nate had friends down there. Battery Park City. A little town of ten thousand souls, all in the top ten percent of United States earners and most far better, constructed in the 1980s across busy West Street from the Trade Center site. Battery Park City was not of itself interesting but a strange sight now that other place was, across the road, the former WTC, twenty-foot-high cyclone fencing tarped on the inside, and lights of white fire glowing above it night and day. People with apartments nearby were known to buy blackout curtains for the nights. Two years and not much visible progress had been made. George had come down to pick the boy up and prior to making himself known he stood watching his son play basketball with his friends; there was a park along the river and he watched from a kind of parapet separating the upper portion of the park from the lower, where the basketball court lay. Beyond that, westward, some trees and the Hudson River. He had a car service driver waiting on the roadway, a flight of stone steps above where he stood. He was content to let the driver wait and watch the game. There was Nate, with his luxurious hair, at the center of the scene. Tied back into a stubby ponytail, like a samurai’s. Sweaty gray tee hanging off his chest. George looked out toward the water, the trees affording him just fragments of a Hudson view, and reenvisioned that night in 1976—he tried to place himself in memory on the dirt, the landfill, beneath all this construction… with that gorgeous young woman; he felt it in the gut, again. How he’d envisioned growing old with her, traveling… She hadn’t wanted to give up her apartment, her sanctuary, so they had decided to buy a house in the country and furnish it together. His little ice chest, durable plastic, likely still somewhere below them: the Igloo. The IglooTM. That was the difference between then and now, or one of them: in those days one felt no need to call a thing by its corporate name. It was the mid-’80s or later before he even knew they were called IglooTM. Hell, Brown & Co. had introduced more corporate marketing jargon into the lexicon than most and the company still trained the assistants to correct those not using the proper text. Soy half-caff latte baby, tall, grande or venti. Back then, for the ice chest, he’d used ice chest. Now there would be no other way to refer to it except by its corporate name. George watched Nate with the ball. Nate was only five feet eight and broad of chest and back, his mother’s son, her family’s brand of peasant genes in him. George had been late in his growth, Nate might grow an inch or two still; George knew the matter pained him. He was a good ball handler. Back to the basket, a man on his shoulder a good three inches on him. He cut to his left, his shoulder in the defender’s chest, and angled for the baseline. Watch the hook! one of the other defenders yelled from the far side of the lane but too late, Nate went up, his entire width separating the taller boy from the ball, his right leg lifted high, and he lofted a classic hook shot. That’s right, George thought—you can only watch the hook. Nate could have been Bob Cousy in 1958, thicker and heavier but formally flawless with this ancient shot. He didn’t wait to see it swish but turned as soon as he landed and trotted back to a defensive position beyond midcourt. One of his teammates went by with hand out at waist level—they briefly touched fingers; a gesture suggesting another gesture.

  What was this, when you saw your son do something so practiced, fluid, known: when you saw his personality in his work, as it were. The retrograde quality of the shot—very Nate. He had asked George lately about waistcoats, fobs, and spats. What was this feeling? Commonly called pride, but the word did not suffice. Like a sentimental television commercial with beautiful smiling third-world children and a time-lapse film of a flower blooming while cloud formations whizzed by overhead, except the child was his child and the flower was… what? His own self, his identity, his life, his love for his son, his existence on the planet, unfolding like the long uncertain legs of a newborn calf just rising—what was this feeling of completion, of fulfillment, you underwent when watching your child succeed, thrive, exist on terms utterly his own, out in the world, against the world or with the world, what was it? Undercut by grief, still surrounded by the ache of terrible loss. This was why the mayfly died after mating, after the dropping of the silted eggs. Completion. Human children had no pupae in which to lie and grow beneath the stones. One had to stick around for a good long while to protect them. Parents became accustomed to this role and weren’t programmed to understand that at a certain point, a very early point, it was over. But then one day you knew. All the future years were uncertain but you had no more say over them than you would for whether the trains ran on time. All the years, what to make of them?

  Yes. There was a question. What to make of them. Here is where he had the full taste of his solitude.

  * * *

  GEORGE HAD BECOME fascinated with the Golden Ratio. He asked Nate endless and, Nate repeatedly pointed out, profoundly unmathematical a
nd pointless questions about it.

  Okay, you have a line, AC call it. On that full line a point, called B, is situated such that the full line, AC, over the partial AB line is the same ratio as the AB line over the shorter BC line.

  Right, Nate said. There are many other ways to express this. Like with rectangles. Or as one plus the square root of five, divided by two.

  Yeah, that’s a complete mystery to me. Anyway, that ratio in both cases is represented by phi, or roughly one point six one.

  No, Nate said. One point six one eight zero three three nine eight. I mean you have to keep at least the eight. One point six one eight.

  So you know the Fibonacci sequence?

  Yeah, Nate said. One plus one is two, two plus one is three, three plus two is five, five plus three is eight, next thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, yeah. Each number plus the one before it yields the next number.

  So this is insane, George said.

  I know what you’re going to say, Nate said.

  We didn’t do math at this level in high school.

  That’s not what you were going to say, Nate said. What you’re going to say is once you get up to fifty-five and eighty-nine and one forty-four, the larger number divided by the number before it basically equals one point six one eight.

  How can this be? George said.

  It is, Nate said.

  Yeah, right, that’s how God answers—I am who am.

  No, but it’s a mathematical fact, that’s all.

  No no no, George said. It touches infinity. The Fibonacci sequence goes on to infinity and the principles go on—around and around and around—like the tigers in Little Black Sambo.

  Yes, Nate said, all keeping the same proportion ad infinitum—

  Nate pronounced the phrase in school Latin—ahd eenfeeneetoom—providing George a sense of pride and annoyance, a paradoxical mix he’d found common in parenthood.

  What’s Little Black Sambo? Nate said.

  Never mind, George said. Forget I mentioned it. A boomer slip of the tongue.

  Of course Nate googled it.

  I can’t believe you were told this story, he said.

  That’s only the beginning of the injuries, George said.

  * * *

  NATE WAS DOWN in DC with Marina, for a long weekend. She called George.

  How are you, she said. More like a declarative than an interrogatory.

  I’m fine, he said.

  No you’re not, she said. Nate says you’re a ghost.

  Thank him for me when you see him, George said.

  How do you know he’s not here now?

  I can feel it through the wires, the lack of a certain vibration. The Nate effect. Where is he?

  At a friend’s.

  He has friends down there?

  He does now, she said. A girl. Daughter of some people we went out to dinner with last night. I brought son, they brought daughter. The twain met.

  What time will the twain get to the wailwoad station? George said.

  Funny, said Marina. Meanwhile, forget Nate. What are you going to do?

  What is there to do? George said.

  I don’t know, she said. I’m sorry to be so useless. Do you want to get together?

  By this she meant go to a hotel and enjoy their bodies for a while.

  No, George said. Thank you. I want to find a way…

  What, she said.

  To come to terms. To accept. To stop hurting. To go on. To love well. The rest… I don’t know. The rest is up to God.

  You believe in God? Marina said. That’s new.

  I believe in… creation? The workings of the universe? Mathematics? Fate? The constant phi? Something. Call it God.

  Um, okay, Marina said.

  Call It God: A Memoir, he said.

  Call It Cod: The Life of a Massachusetts Fisherman, she said.

  Call It Odd: The History of ESP, he said.

  Call It Bod: The Art of Looking Hot in Tight Clothes, she said.

  Call It Sod: The Laying Down of Patches of Grassy Earth.

  They could do this all day.

  Enough, she said.

  I’ll stop if you will.

  Deal, she said. Although we still had mod, nod, pod, plod, wad, clod.

  That’s not stopping, he said. I was working on Christopher Dodd but I’m holding back. I expect the same.

  Oh no, you have to tell me the Christopher Dodd, she said.

  Call Me Dodd: The Man from Willimantic.

  Willimantic?

  Willimantic, Connecticut, is the home of Senator Christopher Dodd, yes. About forty miles north of Old Saybrook. Up Route 32 there.

  George gestured with his hand to the unseeing phone, despite the absurdity of doing so, a dismissive gesture upward. Up 32 there. Likely she could see this in her mind’s eye: hear the gesture in the tone of his voice.

  * * *

  ON BREAK FROM his junior year at Berkeley, Nate for Christmas gave George The Last Waltz. The new DVD. Or, George discovered, the reissue of what had been the new DVD a couple of years before. It was enhanced. It had more songs. There were the special features. There were the weird studio pieces at beginning and end.

  Let’s just get to the concert part, George said. They watched together.

  Interviews, etc. Nate manipulated the DVD remote. All George could think of was a collection of warm summer nights in 1978—a more merciful summer than the one before—and of seeing the movie on one of them with a pale, highly cultured girl, a classical singer in training, a Canadian, from Toronto, easily bruised—literally—by his light stubble which burned across her white skin, by his mustached lip which chapped hers so thoroughly that she looked as if she’d gotten drunk and smeared her lipstick across her mouth. He hadn’t known for certain if he should kiss her, some fear or doubt he felt, he didn’t know her signals, which was just waiting, talking, laughing, past one, past two. No physical movement toward him, no gestures, hints. Except they’d held hands in the film—why hadn’t he known she wanted him, she asked him later. What did he think she was sitting there for at that hour? Finally they kissed—it must have been two in the morning by then, in his apartment. She wore a dress and heels, and stockings in the heat; the movie had opened at the Ziegfeld, where all the big movies opened, and the place had just installed its first Dolby sound system, which rattled their bones. The Ziegfeld was on 54th near Sixth Avenue; soon after the film started, once the actual concert portion started, he was so happy he reached for her hand and then paused as he was almost to it; she sensed it there; the millimeter-by-millimeter coming together of two young hands at a New York City movie theater in 1978. It stirred him now, to think about it. Such tentativeness. The erotic power of it at that granular level. The communication between them, without speaking or even—especially—looking. They inched toward each other, and touched, and fingers found fingers; they never looked at each other or acknowledged what was happening, the fingers’ slow movements each like a miniature caress. Then she moved, or he moved, one of them coughed perhaps, smokers as they were, and it ended, and after that he didn’t touch her, there beside him, and wondered later why he hadn’t. She told him she wondered too. After the film they walked east to the newly opened Citicorp building, which had a nice restaurant that had impressed her. They both ordered scotch—Johnnie Walker maybe? She had hers neat, adding a touch of water on her own, he had his on the rocks and she chastised him for the ice, which she thought was criminal. So did he, now. Lex and Third Avenue above 42nd Street was still a kind of no-man’s-land in which stood this shining new aluminum-clad tower and various side buildings; other than that, this stretch was hookers and sandwich and hot dog places with sales windows open onto the street, no interior but the kitchen, and steam table bars and, directly across Third Avenue, an old strip bar with a couple of men standing around outside looking mobbed-up and unwelcoming. It was a barren neighborhood with a silver tower standing in its midst, utterly medieval; outside its walls lingered various h
ighwaymen, heretics and harlots. The banking complex included, anomalously, a church built partially underground and partially exposed by a glass pyramid on the corner. He hailed a cab on Third and took her away from there, to the living room of the apartment on 110th Street that he’d sublet for the summer. His roommate was away. They played records and she’d waited and waited and finally kissed him—while he stood at the record player she rose from the chair she’d sat in and put her arms around his neck. It was two in the morning, where else was she going to go? She had the most amazing and elaborate underwear. Stockings with garter and bloomers over panties and a lace brassiere with four hooks. He would forever, thinking of this, attribute it to her being Canadian, which made no sense. Her breasts were white globes. Nipples of the palest pink.