“He dies?” Michael asked, disbelieving, sitting up in bed.
I nodded. Tears threatened to appear on my son’s face.
“He can’t die!” Michael told me.
“Well,” I said, “he does. I’m sorry, but that’s what happened.” I kissed him good night and, after waiting for him to calm down a bit, went back downstairs.
The next night I told another story about Heroic Henry. In this story, he persuades a dragon to eat the lava that is dribbling down from the volcano and threatening the village with incendiary ruin. Then, together, he and the dragon conquer an army of zombie puppets coming in from the West Country. Overcome with thankfulness, the village rewards both the dragon and Heroic Henry with a salary and comfortable shoes. The dragon is put on a retainer. At the end of the story, Heroic Henry dies again.
“This is like last night,” Michael told me.
“Sorry. Can’t help it. That’s how the story ends.”
On subsequent nights, Heroic Henry fought off the vollzards—lizard-like vultures—and then he organized picnics and freed various slaves and went to King Alarcord’s Mine to retrieve the Biggest Diamond in the World, and he wrote operas and he invented the water-powered automobile engine, and somehow found himself as a relief pitcher in the seventh game of the World Series (he saved the game, of course, for the Toonerville Titans, who had at last made it, after much struggle, into the major leagues), and he rescued the elephants from the evil capitalist poachers who had flown in from Frankfurt, Germany—he is, indeed, a super-hero, but he must meet up with Death at the end. Death, impeccably groomed, is usually wearing a business suit and takes him through the nearest doorway.
After about two months of this, on those nights when Michael was half asleep, he would sometimes tell me to shorten the story. “Make him die,” he would mutter.
In January, Michael invited a friend to stay for a sleep-over, and when the boys were ready for bed, he asked me to tell both of them a Heroic Henry story. The friend had a sweet bewildered look underneath a mop of tangled blond hair; his name was Abraham (we were getting into the era of Old Testament names). I didn’t think Michael’s friend could handle the usual narrative conventions. So I went up there to Michael’s bedroom and had Heroic Henry cure King Scotty of the wound in his side, and then Heroic Henry fought off the Yankees, a flock of vampire birds wearing baseball caps, and finally the rains came and saved the village from starvation, and the wheat was harvested, and everyone lived happily ever after.
From his sleeping bag on the floor, little Abraham seemed quite contented. He appeared to be drifting off to sleep.
But Michael was outraged. “He has to die!” he said. “He always dies! He’s not Heroic Henry if he doesn’t die!” I shook my head and turned out the light. Behind me, I heard Michael protesting, “That’s not a real Heroic Henry story. That’s a fraud!”
“Sorry,” I said, behind the closed door. “Tonight he lives.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Michael replied.
He once told me that he knew he had been conceived on the Moon by Moon People, transported as a Moon Baby on a rocket ship back to Earth, and we, his parents, were trying to foist him off as a normal American boy, whereas in fact he was totally interplanetary.
I agreed with him. Yes, that was exactly what had happened. He expressed dismay with my agreement—he shuffled away angrily. But he’s a sweet little lunatic who actually has pretty good sense, and anyway, the sight of him always lifts my heart.
25
AFTER DINNER, the boys disappeared—Jeremy into his room to do his homework, write out his college applications, and call his current girlfriend, Celeste (pronounced “Sellest”). Like other American teenagers, Jeremy has his own cell phone, and sometimes the two of them simply stay on the phone all evening as they do their homework. I don’t see how this is physically possible, but I know that it happens. Jeremy’s ear has reddened from having a phone always pressed up against it. He has had one girlfriend or another for as long as I can remember. They adore him—his kindness, his good looks, his gentlemanly manners, and his attentiveness. Even when he breaks up with one of them, he manages to be so gracious that they stick around. It will not be like that once Michael’s romantic feelings are stirred up. There will be an air of sickness and apocalypse. Michael will make them crazy.
After Jeremy excused himself from the table, Michael, lacking his best audience, also excused himself—for a wolf cub, he is polite—and, after waving and saying “Tschüss,” made a beeline into his own room, the better to read up on his latest enthusiasm, Gay Pride. After half an hour, he would probably get bored with that. A page would turn. Coca-Cola syrup concentrate is often available behind the counter at drug-stores, for certain gastrointestinal ailments—and few people would know this sly little fact. Michael would be suddenly interested. Coca-Cola syrup! What uses…might it be put to?
My wife stood, swept a strand of hair aside from her forehead, and with a laugh said, “Well, it seems we have a gay son.” With the back of her hand, she wiped her cheek, a gesture I have always found endearing.
“Could be. But I doubt it.”
“Me, too. Well, we’re completely unsatisfactory parents for him anyway. In this household, if you came out of the closet to your parents, all you’d get is a bored yawn.”
I nodded. “That’s it. No closets here. With us, everybody says everything.” As she cleared the table, I settled in to add up some receipts, part of our months-long preparations for our income taxes.
Once, about a year ago, in the car as we drove along the back roads to one of Jeremy’s swim meets in the next town over, I said to Laura that she and I were like a couple of oxen hitched together, yoked, and that when we had first come out of the stable, no one had known how much work we were good for. As it had turned out, we had accomplished plenty; we were a good team. (We had met when I was still working for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, and she and I had endured periods of tight budgets and some of the terrible economies that can break a marriage.) She was of course offended by my remarks. Oxen? Yoked together? Not a kind analogy. Not very romantic. Her womanly honor was offended.
I’m not stupid. I know that no wife wants to be compared to an ox.
Laura, by the way, is now a collector and dealer in contemporary and classic quilts. I hadn’t known about quilting and the system of sales and trading in women’s quilts until I met her, but she knows all the networks, African American and white, and she knows all the collectors and the great artists of quilting. She has spent a lifetime learning this trade and learning this art. She loves the work and as an agent takes very little for herself.
In any case, I don’t see what is particularly romantic about a married couple raising their children and getting from day to day, and I said so in the car that afternoon. I made my case. The ordinary business of diapers and fevers and broken bones and drafty rooms and lost socks and schedules on the refrigerator door takes the shine off everything for a while. Women understand this better than men do. Why should any marriage with kids be starry-eyed? Romantic heat may start the process off, but dutifulness and pure stubbornness keep it going. Romance—this is my personal view—is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen. Most people give it up, and they should. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a great poet, but he had an aversion to raising the children he sired, and he avoided them, and they suffered; you can look it up.
Girls swoon over Jeremy. They can see that he’s a practical boy and will be a pragmatic man. Once he’s married, he’ll be steady. He’s a great prospect. Reliability is sexy. Of course, having good looks like his sweetens the whole deal. They attend the swim meets to see him in his Speedo, these girls, avid. They smile to themselves. Their eyes are wide and glistening.
But on that day, Laura was angered by what I had said. She went into a sulk, and even though Jeremy won his event with a personal-best time, she wouldn’t speak to me on the trip back home. It was the ox simile, I’m sure.
&nb
sp; On the particular evening when Michael had enrolled himself into the Queer Nation, and my wife and I were having one of our ordinary after-dinner clean-ups—me doing the taxes, and Laura, my wife of almost two decades, rinsing the dishes in our suburban home in New Jersey—Laura jerked her head up with a sudden recollection and said, “Oh, by the way. Someone called.”
“Who?”
“Someone I never heard of. Said his name was Jerome Coolberg. Who’s that, Natie?”
Someone should have complimented me. Only five seconds passed before I said, “Nobody. Well, somebody, from…grad school days. Did he leave a number?”
Yes, he did.
26
LAURA AND I have had our own share of shadows. We’ve been lucky but not that lucky. For years we were poor. I’ve already mentioned this. When the quilting business was flat, Laura worked as an administrative assistant. I took a second job teaching a night class for immigrants, English as a Second Language. Then there was the accident.
When Jeremy was six years old and Laura was driving him home from day care, she hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street downtown. She had been adjusting the radio to get a better station, and Jeremy had been yelling, and she was distracted. Baby Michael was home with me. This guy was where he shouldn’t have been (no intersection and no crosswalk), but Laura didn’t see him, and the impact of the car threw him several feet into the air. He went unconscious for an hour or two, had a concussion and multiple fractures, and was in the hospital for over a month. He turned out to be one of those litigious Americans, a real bastard, a pain profiteer. Also an electrician and a drunk, but his alcoholism didn’t get into the trial. He sued, of course. It’s true that Laura hadn’t had her eyes on the road, and it’s also true that our Chevy needed brake work. Our insurance was paid up, thank God, but the whole process went on for a couple of years. We were destroyed in some of the ordinary ways, and when it was over, you couldn’t find either of us for a while; we had become vague and insulated. I could feel internally the parts of myself that had dried up and withered. Laura said I looked like a tree hit by lightning. I never said to her what she looked like. When lawyers stay calm but keep on talking to you and won’t stop, it’s as if they’re screaming and screaming.
But we’re lucky. We got over it. Our next-door neighbors have had the whole menu. Their daughter ran away a couple of times, mismanaged a major cocaine addiction, and was turning tricks in Atlantic City by the age of sixteen. She even had her own pimp. The parents were nice middle-class Americans, churchgoers. They didn’t know what was happening to them, or how it had started. Poor American parents: so easily confused. This same daughter got herself enrolled in a recovery program, emerged from it, began cutting herself for fun, then ran away again, this time to San Francisco, where she resumed her career in prostitution. This time she refused help. She accompanied her pimp/ boyfriend on a drugstore holdup, was caught and jailed. Her brother, inspired by her behavior, developed a liking for Vicodin. He started stealing prescription pads. He earned his own jail time. Etc. Two kids in the slammer. The father commenced drinking, and why wouldn’t he? Catastrophe is contagious. Everyone knows stories like this.
My point is that middle-class life in this country seems to be operating on a contingency basis. It can change on you at any moment. They can pull the rug out from under you. You can be thrown into the street without appeal. Your furniture is carted away; your clothes are tossed on the front lawn; your children are ground up by a crazy commercial culture. Catastrophe lurks; ruination prospers. As the guy in that movie said, Ask people for help, watch them fly.
I went into the den and gazed down at Coolberg’s phone number. The numbers in that particular combination had a terrible frightening appearance to me. My hands were shaking, and of course I didn’t want to go back there, into that world.
27
ULTIMATELY I WAS REMOVED from Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed. My memories of those events were adulterated by the nightly visitations from those people and occasions after the major scenes were over. A sorcerer ruled my imaginings. The music of Mahler served as the background audio sound track. My visitors walked through walls toward me the way Marley’s Ghost seeped past the door on his errand to Ebenezer Scrooge. My dreamcallers carried their deadness around with them. Chains clanked. I can’t sort out what actually happened from what didn’t, and I can’t get the dreamstuff out of the narrative. Even though I don’t think about that time period often anymore, it accompanies me. My soul was mortgaged. I paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work, until it was mine again. My history is what it is. Anyway, my crisis occurred decades ago, and I have a life to get on with. So I apologize now for this reconstruction, which is only an outline, a foggy sketchy thing, and for its necessary unreality. Also for its fragmentation. I don’t perceive the beauty in brokenness these days, though I once did. But I can acknowledge its truth.
28
I WAS LYING on the floor of my bedroom, praying to God to save Jamie, whom I adored, from all harm. When I came to, someone seemed to have taken away most of my furniture. I was in a blank space unbounded by dimension or time. The apartment had been almost entirely emptied. A mattress remained on the floor, and one book remained, the Brownstone Eclogues. No: over there, a book of translations of a German poet, whose name disappears on me every time I read it, sits on the windowsill. The rest of my books had performed a vanishing act. I went to the mirror. Coolberg’s face looked back at me. As in a Cocteau film, I fell into the mirror and swam in the glass.
29
SOMEONE IN THE CULINARY ALLIANCE called me, and I drove my VW down to Allentown where the People’s Kitchen was burning to the ground. I was surrounded by my friends from the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance. The firemen went about their work with deliberation. Joyous flames shot out from the windows the way they do whenever a particularly effective job of arson has been ordered and set into motion. I was weeping, first, and then violent sobs overtook me. This fire signaled the end of collective generosity in this our country, America. Bent over with sorrow, I was grieving for all our broken promises, for the loss of charity and loving-kindness. Someone reached down for me and ordered me to stand up, someone who looked like Jesus. In the early 1970s, many men in their twenties looked like that. Jesus had broken out on their faces. There was an epidemic of Jesus. What was Jesus doing here? I despised him; I had said so. He spoke to me. To this day, I remember that among other instructions, he told me to be a man. Then he vanished into the crowd. Most of his words disappeared from my head almost as soon as he uttered them because Jesus lives solely in the world of dreams. But not the part about being a man. Why did he care about that?
30
THERESA HAS CALLED ME a devil again and apparently I have hit her. Or tried to. She blocked my fist. I might have hurt her. Probably not: she seems pleased by my gestural violence. How is this possible? It cannot be possible. She’s a feminist. She has been giving me more of her typical knowing smiles. She recognizes that I have been two-timing her and that I do not love her or her irony or her great body. Nevertheless, she continues to ask me for sex, to demand that I fuck her. When I am tender with her, she becomes impatient and angry—that’s pretend-love, she says, and from you, it’s sickening. We start to get rough with each other in bed. We begin to cross the borders that you shouldn’t cross. With her, love is complicated by its opposite, contempt. On the other side of the border is pain and the promise of clarity, but in our case there is no clarity, just more pain.
31
THIS PASSAGE IS a palindrome.
My adored, my beloved. My life. Why did I love her? No explanation is ever satisfactory. How could it be? Jamie had finished her night’s rounds, had returned the cab to the central dispatcher, clocked out, and was waiting for the bus in a shelter downtown when she was set upon by a gang. What were they doing out on the streets at that time, five
thirty a.m., before dawn? Were they under orders? Why had Coolberg predicted something like this, in Shadow? A coincidence, of course, that was all it was, a mere coincidence, a narrative necessity, a required episode of violence against a woman to keep readers awake and alert.
I sat beside her bed in Buffalo General day and night. She would live, they said. A kind nurse named Mary kept us company for several hours, I remember that. Sometimes Jamie would come back to consciousness and look over at me. She whispered from underneath her bandages. Where was her family? Where were her girlfriends? Wherever they were, they didn’t visit us, though a few of them called, and when I answered the hospital phone, they asked questions, their voices full of concern. But people don’t like to visit hospitals, I know, and even an assault can be regarded as infectious. The police questioned her, of course, but her assailants, by striking her, had blurred themselves into nothingness, and she could not detail them. What I finally said was that I was her family, and when I did, Jamie whispered to me to take any of the pieces that I wanted, the birds and the dirigibles, from her apartment; she had never made out a will, she confessed. Am I still alive? she kept demanding of me, in whispers, as if both the question and the answer were secrets. It feels like I’m dying. And I told her she wasn’t, and she couldn’t; I wouldn’t permit it. I saw her pursing her lips, so I kissed her, and she winced.
In the rape, she’d been hollowed out and emptied and smashed up, her broken pieces carelessly glued together in the aftermath, and when she was released, she couldn’t bear to be touched or even looked at. She would scream upon being observed. She came to regard her little metallic birds and blimps and tetrahedrons with utter contempt. Junk, trash, leavings, waste. If I wanted them, I could have them all. She hated herself, she hated her work, she especially hated art: sentimental frivolities, all of them, part of a gone world. Life was not like that anymore. Her hatred poured out in a flood, and of course her hatred included me. Because she could not identify her assailants, who had been wearing ski masks, the case remained unsolved, and no suspects were ever arraigned. It took on the phantom existence of something so terrible as to be almost imaginary.
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