“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“You read it?”
He nodded again.
“Barbara’s read it,” I said. “Marcy’s read it. And now you’ve read it. Has the old man read it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is that it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being one of your characters.”
“You’re not a ‘character,’ Jerry. You’re you. You’re Jerry.”
“You know what I mean. I’m not crazy about being in it. It depicts a time and a place I’d rather forget. You might remember, Jake, not much was going my way back then. I’m not eager for a reminder—certainly not a permanent reminder. You’re not going to publish that thing, are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s unfinished. But there’s not much I can do about the past, Jerry, and how things were for you then. It’s a factual account.”
“Can’t you take me out?”
“No, I can’t take you out. For Christ’s sake, Jerry, you’re his firstborn son.”
“But it’s his story. Who cares about a firstborn?”
“It’s not a novel,” I said. “It’s a factual account of the day of his diagnosis. I can’t just make shit up in a factual account, Jerry. I’m obliged to mention the firstborn. And if that first-born happened to tell him he was in Belgium on the day of his diagnosis when in fact he was living on Western Avenue, I think that’s pretty pertinent information. You were there that day, you played an important part.”
He wasn’t happy about that. “That was a terrible time for me, Jake. I was stuck in a rut, depressed, angry. I’m no longer that guy. Anyway, I’m a dynamic human being. There are many different sides to my personality. I play the guitar, I fly airplanes, I can code with the best. I was gainfully employed for many years running, Jake. Did you forget about that? And I don’t know if you know this, but my spiritual insights are real. My Buddhism is real. Those aren’t poses. But you hardly touch on any of that because you’re so fixated on my goddamn Dumpster diving, which I did for like two years at most, and my goddamn denim cutoffs! I’m not a pair of cutoffs, Jake. There’s a lot more to me than smoking pot and reading Krishnamurti. But in this book of yours—”
“Half book,” I said. “It’s unfinished.”
“—Charlie Barnes isn’t the only man living out a farce. I’m a fat joke, too! One-dimensional, unchangeable, grotesque, dishonest. I wear the same clothes day after day after day. I never do laundry. I never shower. I never put on a suit and tie. I never eat a fancy meal or make love to a woman. I’m hardly the human being I know exists out here in real life. I don’t want to cast aspersions on your execution here, Jake, but I’m never more than a caricature in this so-called true account of yours. And I get it, I get it: at that particular time, I was a caricature! I was little more than a ranting troll—for the left, of course, but still. Don’t take me back to that time, Jake, please. Don’t stick me in that time forever, the same static, strident, unhealthy motherfucker from here to eternity, ranting and raving against all of society’s ills and his poor disappointing father. Leave me out. Otherwise, you do me an injustice. I need a longer time frame and a bigger stage for my soul. Cut me out, or—or—how about this, Jake? Make me the hero.”
“The hero?”
“Sure, why not? You like me, don’t you?”
“I love you,” I said.
“And you know how dynamic I am. You even say it yourself somewhere: I’m like a myth. Jake, forget about Charlie. Write about me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“But this book is about Charlie, Jerry. It’s a testament to Charlie and my love for him.”
“Then do me the favor of leaving me out of it, Jake. Make me the hero or cut me loose, one or the other.”
It suddenly occurred to me just how nice Jerry smelled. The bland rental had filled with the fleurs of a lush masculine springtime on account of his French cologne. He smelled expensive. He was out of those dumb denims we both hated and in a pair of tapering white chinos and leather loafers, which he wore au courant without socks. He’d slimmed down, too. I was duly impressed. And they say people can’t change! On me at that moment, he tried a different tack.
“If you can’t make shit up, Jake, and everything is true, then why are there so many inaccuracies?”
“I suppose you’re about to tell me that he doesn’t wear dentures,” I said.
“Of course he wears dentures,” he said. “There’s no sense in denying that. I’m talking about that part where my mother and I go around Danville looking for him during the time of those cicadas. Do you remember that?”
“Sure, I remember it. I wrote it.”
“Well, you have us driving east.”
“Driving east?”
“On Vermilion Street. But Vermilion doesn’t go east-west, Jake. Vermilion goes north-south. It’s a north-south street, Vermilion. So why do you have us going east-west?”
“That’s your objection?”
“Then you have us passing the Palmer Bank. The Palmer Bank wasn’t on Vermilion. The Palmer was downtown, Jake. It was downtown! The Palmer Bank was downtown!”
There was a long pause.
“You might as well have us driving through Hoopeston!”
“Hoopeston,” I said.
“That’s right, Hoopeston. Or Brisco, or Flat Iron … Danville could be any one of those small towns for how cavalier you are with Vermilion Street.”
“You want out of a true account because I get my directions wrong?”
“Jake, this is north, south, east, and west we’re talking about here. You can’t just have your way with north south east and west! Take me out. Or at the very least, obscure my identity. Isn’t that something you writers usually do?”
“Would you like me to obscure your identity?”
“You use my real name, for crying out loud. I can’t even plausibly deny knowing you people. What if we go public someday, Jake? Or everything goes into the shitter again and I’m out there looking for another job? HR learns I’m the guy in your book, I’m fucked. Let’s say I’m out to dinner and my date discovers that I’m the dickhead in that famous book who lied to his dad about going to Belgium. Am I going on a second date? I don’t think so. I’m never getting laid again. My name is plastered on practically every page!”
“What would you like to be called?” I asked him.
There was another long pause.
“I’ve always been partial to the name Jerry,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Jerry it is.”
And I made him Jerry, just like I said I would.
“I’m sorry, Jake. That’s still not good enough. I don’t want to be in your book, period. Take me out. If you can’t get the little things right, like which way Vermilion runs, how can anyone trust you with the big stuff?”
“So you can effectively hate the man for years, hold all these grudges against him, lie about living in Belgium, move back in with him when you go broke and get evicted … you get all these second chances, but I’m not allowed to make a little mistake about which direction the streets run?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m his son.”
He stepped out, but before shutting the door and heading inside, he bent down for a final word.
“Just out of curiosity, Jake … what did you hope to do, redeem him?”
There was a long pause.
“Now that would be a work of fiction,” he said.
He shut the door and walked up the drive in his leather loafers, with his pretty flowers.
62
I stepped out of my rental and resumed pacing. I tried my dad’s cell again. Still no answer. A large discontinued Cadillac pulled alongside me. It was rusted along the edges and packed to the gills with old people. The driver, a hundred if he was a day, was spry enough to lean over the laps of his ancient polyester-clad passengers to holler out, “Are you the valet?” I pointed behind me. The man put the car in Reverse
. As they retreated, I heard the voice of an old lady say, “So there is a valet.” A second later, that same party was involved in a little fender bender with the actual valet, who was trying to parallel-park a Nissan in a neighborhood now crowded with cars.
Coming up the sidewalk a minute later was my uncle, Rudy, the vitamin peddler and life-extension fanatic. Rudy had made his fortune on the internet, and unfortunately the culture did not require that breed of man to dress well, if at all. Rudy had a habit of wearing high-on-the-thigh runner’s shorts everywhere he went, showcasing the entirety of his long, ropy legs no less than if he were toweling off after a shower, while pairing that garment with a traditional white oxford shirt that hung below the skimpy shorts. Altogether this provocatively suggested that he might be wearing nothing at all below the waist. This sort of thing made his nieces and nephews unaccountably depressed whenever we appeared in public with him. As I was not related to him by blood, I didn’t mind it as much as, say, Marcy did, although it’s true that Rudy was my least favorite Barnes. It was his opinion that my books were unreadable. According to Rudy, they were full of unlikable characters. Every one was either a dick, a cynic, a moral bankrupt, or a scumbag who gave the human race a bad name. Well, here you are, Rudy, a minor player in one of those books. How do you like the characters now?
He did not come solo. He was pushing down the paved mellow path Delwina Barnes in her ninety-fifth year, a cane crossed over the arms of her wheelchair and the old lady’s arms crossed over the cane. Tall, white, and listing, she resembled a wheeled Tower of Pisa. I, like you, had assumed that Delwina was dead. She was not dead. Diabetic and demented, but not yet immobile, by God there she was, a monument to gerontology ready to party. I was attempting to slip inside my rental unseen when Rudy spotted me. He knocked hard on my passenger-side window, then a second time, which forced me to lower it.
“I don’t sell dog pills,” he said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“You have me selling dog pills in that book of yours. I don’t sell dog pills.”
Narcissism, justly lamented for doing so much damage, especially within the family unit, could also work miracles, as when a fundamentally apathetic collection of illiterates gets wind that they appear as characters in a book and transforms overnight into a bunch of rabbinical scholars. First Barbara, then Marcy, then Jerry, and now Rudy. Animals in the wild were more likely to read something I’d written prior to my turn toward the biographical, but now it appeared I’d never lack for readership.
“Is there anyone in this family who hasn’t read my book?”
“I run a respectable online distribution center of high-end dietary supplements and herbal remedies. Everything I sell gets my personal seal of approval. I sure as shit don’t peddle dog hormones, or whatever the hell.”
“It’s unfinished, by the way.”
“What do I care if it’s unfinished? A slander’s a slander, son.”
“I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding, Uncle Rudy, rather than an intentional slander.”
“Do not call me your uncle,” he said. “You know, from the moment Charlie told me that you might tell the story of how our parents met, I thought to myself we’ve got the wrong guy. My mother is a likable person. We are all likable people. This is a wonderful family. Ask anyone. But then you come along and give us your take on things, and there’s only one word for it: unlikable. You don’t really do likable, do you, Jake? You do quirky sometimes, you do dysfunctional, you do weird, diseased, mentally ill. You do ugly and unpleasant. You do varieties of the damned. We didn’t stand a chance from the beginning. And now look. Sure enough, the decency is gone. The charm is gone. We are completely unlikable. It’s a crying shame. But I’ll tell you what, son. Change that shit about dog pills, or I’ll see you in court.”
As we were talking, the natural grade of the sidewalk set Grandma Del gently in motion. Rudy hurried over to the old lady, caught her before she really took off, and hauled her up the drive.
63
After that, I thought, fuck it. I’ll go inside and find Charlie myself. For one of the accommodations he had made to his compromised life was to guarantee to his children that wherever he might find himself, the door would be open to them—and I was his child. Wasn’t I his child?
I might have barged right in, too, and demanded an answer to that question, had it not been for a new surge of arrivals. Among them was that decorated veteran and member of an elite force, Barbara’s son and my stepbrother, Troy Ledeux. Crisply buff, blindingly white, a buzz cut with military cap in hand, he seemed to want to mind his own business. But as he turned at the sidewalk to take the drive, his starched gleam, so bright and martial against the backdrop of a slumbering suburb, drew stares, and patriarchs broke off from their humble family units for the honor of shaking his hand. I stayed put. At six years old, after screaming “Saddam Hussein!” Troy whaled me in the nuts, and now they tingled at the sight of him.
Talking to his fans in the circular drive, he spotted me at the curb. He excused himself and walked over to have a word.
“Interesting book you’ve written,” he said.
“You’ve read it, too?”
“But it made me curious,” he said. “What about his time in the service?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“His two tours. You don’t even mention them.”
“His two tours?”
“From ’63 to ’65,” he said. “He served two tours. Or so he’s always told me.”
There was a long pause. Steady Boy in Vietnam?
“He said this to you?”
“More than once.”
“And he wasn’t joking?”
“These were man-to-man talks,” he said. “He was dead serious, every time. So it has to be one or the other. Is he a veteran, or a bald-faced liar and fraud?”
I didn’t really know how to answer that. I did my best.
“He was present at the launch of Apollo 11,” I said. “I know that much.”
“Do you?” he asked. “Or is that just another story he likes to tell?”
With that, he turned and walked up the drive.
64
After watching from the curb as Troy entered the house, I had a simple epiphany that reframed my reality and aligned it more closely with the consensus view: in the stephouse on Harmony Drive, steppeople like Dr. Barbara Barnes and her Blue Star son were the real and substantial people, and I was the stepperson. I was even something grubbier: the foster kid with the stunted arm, related by blood to no one, a hanger-on from a nowhere town. I deserved to be kicked to the curb.
I think I loved Charlie because I, too, could feel terrible self-pity. If no one respected that about him, least of all Charlie himself, it gave me the secret feeling that he and I really were father and son, with more in common than he had with either Jerry or Marcy, both of whom could be so hard on him. Charlie spoke so little of his own father, and he was the more neglected and damaged of his mother’s two sons. I think he could feel like an abandoned child himself, closer in spirit to the stray mutt than his well-nourished little brother. He saw himself in me. We had similarly squalid starts. And we had physical defects: my arm, his teeth. I loved him and he loved me.
Had I done something impertinent, then, by heeding his directive that should I ever write about him, I should write the truth? Real life makes for good novels because it’s lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for. That didn’t mean that a man of great pride and ambition cared to be reduced to his carnal acts, misallocated resources, and impotent rage. He was a clown, in my retelling. And something worse than the real thing: the metaphorical clown that men become in the eyes of other men when their dreams flop and some dickhead with a bullhorn is there to broadcast it, disclosing all his insecurities and failures to the world. He must be furious with me, I thought. I’d betrayed him. What sort of surrogate son repays the man who made all the difference with publ
ic humiliation?
I tried him again, no answer.
What happened next was a lifesaver, even a kind of miracle after the passage of so much time. Sunk down in the discoloring gloom of my unbelonging, feeling as faint as the light flickering from those Japanese lanterns, I was sitting in the car when I noticed a man and his wife making a steady advance in my side mirror. They were proof of former times: it was my father’s old friend Happy Necker, given name Julius, the bald, bounding, good-humored, unwitting inventor of (and early investor in) the Original Doolander. Beside him was his wife, the woman I had called Aunt Wyla as far back as I could recall. Trotting alongside them was a shaggy, black-matted mutt that had to be so old by then that it was its own sort of miracle. So much more real, more elemental was this Danville couple than those extras and specters arriving with them that I immediately hopped out of the car as if to cure myself completely of steppersonhood with the mutual warmth that would pass between us at first sight, such as:
“Uncle Happy?”
“Why—Jake Barnes!”
“So good to see you.”
“And do you remember—”
“Of course—you were my Aunt Wyla.”
“Indeed I was—and still am! Come over here, kid, and give me a hug.”
And like that, enfolded in her arms again, reminded of picnics on warm blankets, wool hats in winter, and animal tracks in the snow—and of Lee Ann, their only child, my first crush. All the loot stolen from the galleon ship of my childhood when Charlie and Charley divorced might have been buried within these two old treasure chests whose sudden reappearance restored at once all that had been lost. I had missed them without knowing it, the way a middle-aged man observing a child at play will suddenly apprehend how much paradise has crumbled away since he was that age, and as we approached one another on the sidewalk, I put my hand out with only a smile to speak my thoughts. But the man said nothing, just frowned and shook his head in confusion as he slid past. The woman fell in line behind him. The dog marched on. Neighborhood strangers out for a stroll, they gawked up at the lively party in progress, turned at the corner, and disappeared.
A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 26