by Grant Ginder
Randal is yelling: “What the fuck were you thinking?”
And I’m saying, “I don’t know. I mean—I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking.” I’ve got Ernie Banks’s five hundredth homer palmed in my right hand and I anxiously pass it to the left. Playing catch with myself. “It was that eye, man. It was that fucking glass eye.”
Randal sits on a curb. He puts his head between his knees, balancing his brow on the ends of his thumbs. But he’s too nervous: He stands as quickly as he sits, fidgets in both his pockets for a cigarette, and kicks an aluminum trashcan when he can’t find one. The sound bangs off the steel beams of the “L” that encase us.
He says, very suddenly, “I’m going back.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m going back there. I’m going to save her.”
“You’re fucking nuts.”
He takes a knee on the sidewalk. Tightens the shoelaces on both his sneakers. “We don’t have any idea what they’ve got planned for her.”
“It’s a cat! What could possibly happen to her?”
He looks up at me from where he’s crouched, and in the city’s neon twilight his cheeks glow red, blue, green, orange.
I change my tone: “What I mean is that woman’s probably just lonely. You know, like how cat people are lonely.” I don’t believe myself. “She probably just needs, like, a friend.”
He stands and flexes his calves against the curb; he pulls each foot to his ass, separately, stretching his hamstrings.
“They’re going to kill her.” Then: “Follow up with Lucy. Park her along the curb one hundred feet west of the restaurant, and keep the engine running.”
“This is crazy,” I tell him. “You’re fucking crazy.”
He trots west toward the Gangster’s, emerging out from under the “L” and into a triangle of light sliced out of the road by a streetlamp.
“There’s blood on your hands, McPhee,” he calls.
I get in the car, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattle in their frames. I stab the keys into the ignition, but I don’t turn them. I pull at the ends of my greasy hair until there’s a sharp pinch and four strands come loose. I thud my palm’s heel against the steering wheel.
“He’s lost it,” I say to no one, to Lucy. I’m silent, then, half waiting for her to respond, for her radio to blink alive and dictate some sage wisdom.
A car passes us and the pavement crackles.
“Fine,” I say, throttling the engine. Kicking her into gear. “Just fine.”
It’s nearing eleven o’clock, and all the spots along the curb are taken, so I double-park next to a Honda a stone’s throw west of the restaurant, as I’d been instructed. White-knuckling the wheel, I count how many seconds I can stand between glances in the rearview mirror. The neighborhood surrounding The Gangster’s has undergone some intense gentrification since the 1970s, so instead of catering to a circus of oddball crooks, its streets are now checkered with gay men and young couples who’ll wait hours to get into restaurants that have outside seating.
I say, “Christ, Randal. Hurry up.”
I watch the couples as they hold hands, lifting their looped arms over chained bikes, fire hydrants, children. To distract myself, I edit them into different pairs—place this woman with this man; make these two guys slip their fingers into each other’s pockets; have this girl plant an unexpected kiss on her friend’s cheek—things that I’ll no longer be paid to do, but that would make their lives infinitely more interesting.
Then, finally, I see him.
Randal’s sprinting, but awkwardly, his arms wrapped around his midsection. When he gets closer to the car, I see that his kneecaps are covered in flour and bits of mashed-up cheese. A brushstroke of marinara shadows his left eye. Dalloway’s head peeks out from the collar of his shirt. Her chewed-up ears brush his jawline as she peers over his shoulder at Doug, who trails them by about twenty-five yards, hurling obscenities.
“Get her in gear!” Randal shouts over Doug’s fucks and sons-of-bitches and faggots. He says again, as he swings around Lucy’s rear, “Get her going!”
We’re rolling by the time he slides into the front seat. Doug launches a pizza saw at the car, but it bounces off the back bumper with a harmless clink, powerless. In the side mirrors, I see the gay men and the amorous couples take to the fringes of the sidewalk.
“We got those motherfuckers good.”
He lifts his shirt and Mrs. Dalloway slithers out into the open air. He pulls a trapezoidal chunk of pineapple from her front paw and then, very theatrically, she shakes the experience from her, sending barely noticeable tears against our cheeks. Quickly, she bounds between us toward the car’s rear. She presses her nose against the back windshield and watches Doug, who is currently shrinking into a fat, thrashing speck.
• • •
We’ve passed the border into Iowa and the night is beyond black: it’s a vacuum that eats the stars. We are driving through the night.
The mobile phone rings once.
“Dad?”
“Finn?”
“It’s me.”
“You need to come home.”
I tell him, “I’m halfway there.”
There are no other cars in sight, and so the road exists for only as long as Lucy’s headlights allow. A silence persists in which my father realizes what I’ve done. In which his breath shortens and then draws itself out again. In which I think we both realize that if it weren’t for each other we’d be totally alone.
This time he says, “Please hurry.”
WHAT I REMEMBER
1987: Finn
By Colin A. McPhee
There were two earthquakes.
The first one happened on October 1 and coincided with the exact moment of his birth.
“Well,” the delivering doctor said, “that was interesting.”
His surgeon’s mask had gone askew and the stool he’d been sitting on had been knocked to the ground. Nurses buzzed around us—checking, measuring, snipping, stitching. One of them wiped clean Finn’s tiny body. She swaddled him in a blanket and handed him to Clare, who was propped up on her elbows, the bed’s pillows having been thrown to the corners of the room.
The maternity ward was on the first floor. Above us, I heard the frantic clack of feet running. Nervous, overcooked voices.
“Should we leave?” I asked. “I mean, should we evacuate?”
The doctor pulled the gloves from his hands. “What, because of a little tremor?” He rinsed his fingers in a sink and then reached down to pick up a roll of paper towels that’d fallen beneath a cabinet. He looked at Clare, at Finn. “Son,” he said, “you’re in for a lot more than that.”
I watched from the hospital’s window as Los Angeles tried to pull and patch itself back together. A car had run head-on into a fire hydrant, causing a steady stream of water to geyser twenty feet into the sky; the driver had turned on her windshield wipers. Newspaper stands turned over and spilled their printed contents out onto the sidewalks. People kicked through the separated pages, pulling them from their shins, their knees. They toed the curb wearily, with hesitation, verifying that the world had stopped its rollicking before they took their first steps. The next day, I’d read how the earthquake—it would come to be known as the Whittier Narrows—clocked in at a magnitude of 6.0. I’d read how, a few miles south in the city of Cypress, a ten-ton replica of Michelangelo’s David now lay supine in the grass. I’d read how a falling slab of concrete killed Lupe Elias-Exposito as she crossed the parking lot with her sister at the state university in Los Angeles.
Finn was crying. I knelt down beside Clare’s bed and looked into his puckered face as he gulped his first mouthfuls of air. Later, we’d speculate as to whether he was born because of the earthquake, if the ground’s trembling and splitting gave him the final push he needed, or if it was actually vice versa, that Finn’s eagerness to climb from his mother’s belly made the whole world shake.
Clare whispered shh, shh wh
ile she brushed thin wet strands of hair from his forehead. He reached his arms out, up, his tiny fingers grasping at nothing, at everything.
“Isn’t he so beautiful?” she asked.
I said, “Is he supposed to be that blue?”
• • •
For that first year, Finn was Clare’s purview. I had just begun to encounter the writer’s block that would come to characterize most of my adult life; just started to recognize its stern corners, its sharp edges, the perpetual shadows it threw. At that point, though, I was still convinced I could move it. I was still convinced that if I locked myself away for long enough, or if I let my eyes cross enough times while staring at the screen, I’d manage to burrow through the block’s center, eventually hitting light on the other side. And so, during those long, futile hours, Clare was always the one who fed Finn, who bathed him, who went to him when he’d cry at night. We’d hear his piercing scream, and I’d make a show of lifting myself from the sheet, but she’d press a hand against my chest, say, “No, I’ve got him.” I’d follow her sometimes. I’d creep down the hall behind her, past the office where I wrote, the shell-shaped nightlights along the wall throwing yellow against my toes. I’d watch through a crack in the nursery’s door as she held him, as she rocked him.
It wasn’t her, though, and we both knew it. Finn was growing too quickly, he was changing; the last thing a child provides is certainty, and certainty was the one thing she craved. So Clare—she was Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment, or Lana Turner in Cass Timberlane. She only took to mothering so much as those roles would allow her, and so I suppose I wasn’t surprised—not honestly, at least—when she told me on our son’s first birthday that she was planning on returning to acting. That she needed new sources of inspiration, new examples of life.
We were sitting in our kitchen with Finn, who was struggling to remove a paper party hat we’d fixed to his head.
“What do you mean you’re going back?” I said. “And to what career?”
She was cutting squares of white-frosted cake, and I watched as her grip tightened on the knife’s handle.
“What about staying here? What about raising your son?”
“Don’t be such a chauvinist.” She used the broad surface of the knife to scoop the slices onto red plastic plates. “I’m talking about some commercial work. A few auditions a week. And besides—he’s your son, too.”
“I’m sure Ron has found someone else to cast.”
“Oh, ha ha. A clever one, aren’t you.”
“But what will we do?”
“Jesus, Colin, it’s not like you’re dealing with E.T. here. He’s your son. You’ll feed him. Change his diaper when he craps. Maybe take him on a walk if you both get bored.”
She passed Finn a piece of cake and he promptly speared it with his thumb.
“No,” she told him. “Don’t do that.”
The first few days we did little more than stare at each other. I’d moved my computer to the living room so I could work in sight of Finn’s playpen—a subtly unnerving cage decorated with primary colors and eerie insects with Cheshire-cat grins. Two months earlier he’d taken his first step, and so his mornings were now spent standing, stepping, blinking, falling. Occasionally, he’d kick a discarded rattle, which would cause him to break into a gurgled liquid laugh. Whenever I left, it was only for a moment—to use the toilet, to fill a bowl of cereal—still, though, he’d cry instantly; I’d disappear behind the living room door, and right away the screams would start. Rushing back, I’d find him propped up against one of the playpen’s mesh walls, his chubby fingers pinching the nylon frame. Sometimes he’d silence immediately, and sometimes his wails would continue. He’d gaze at me for one quiet moment and then hurl his head back farther, stretching his mouth to an even wider, more anguished angle. He’d say, Oh, you. You’re not who I was asking for. Sometimes: I was expecting someone else. Specifically—her.
It was during one of these fits on the fourth day that I took him from the playpen. While his cries reverberated off the walls of the room, I brought him to my desk, to my computer, and bounced him lightly on my knee. My left arm was wrapped tightly around his fleshy midsection and I could feel his lungs fill with tiny bubbles of air. With my right hand I typed:
Shh.
Shhhhhhhhhhh.
I’m your father.
You’re my son.
There’s not a lot I can do to change that.
As I typed and as he bounced, his crying slowly began to stop: his wails decreased in volume till they dissolved into soft, wet vowels. He reached out to me and touched my face.
Those are my cheeks.
Those are my lips.
That is my heart.
Pick your own nose.
• • •
“How’d it go today?” Clare would ask when she returned home in the evening. I would have just bathed Finn and we would be sitting in the kitchen with the windows flung open, the salty Pacific air clinging to our tongues, our eyelashes.
“Fine,” I’d tell her. “Better.”
She’d be trying to get him to eat, but he was becoming more and more difficult with her. From his high chair he’d pitch handfuls of mushed-up peas and overcooked carrots. Shredded pieces of noodles would hang from Clare’s hair.
“Let me try,” I’d tell her, slipping an arm around her waist.
“No. No, I’ve got it.”
Finn would turn over a plate of sliced hot dogs, and the pink pieces would tumble down Clare’s loose shirt. She’d stand, frustrated.
“He’s being impossible.”
Again I’d say, “Let me try,” and he’d eat.
• • •
She started going on calls that were earlier in the morning and later in the evening; she’d leave us alone for vast stretches of the day and would rarely check in. When she did return home, I’d often be in bed, the blinds in our room drawn to keep out L.A.’s perpetual purple glow. In the dark I’d hear her undress—the dull thud of her shoes being kicked against the wall, the swoosh of a silk skirt floating down to her ankles. When she crawled into bed, she’d fold herself against my chest and I’d smell the smoke in her hair. I’d try to remember what I wrote in the fan letters I’d sent her, back when I was convincing her to love me, back when we weren’t competing for attention from ourselves.
“Traffic on the 10 was nuts,” she’d say.
“This late?” I’d keep my eyes closed.
“There was an accident at Pico.”
“You’re awful with directions.”
Most times, she’d already be asleep.
The next morning, I’d type to Finn:
What do you think it is today?
I’d guide his doughy hand to the keyboard and I’d let him pluck at random letters.
Rqndavt
You think? My bet’s a walk-on on some soap.
Xq436dn
You think she got it?
1ngr
Me neither.
When spring was tilting toward summer, we’d abandon the computer, our joint writing, and go on long, aimless walks along the Santa Monica boardwalk and pier. We’d watch surfers vanish into collapsing aqueous tunnels; we’d hold our breath until they’d reemerge from the wave’s foamy backwash. We’d feed potato chips to the gulls, laughing and cringing as they wrestled for the crumbs, as they beat their filthy wings into one another’s chests. If the sun wasn’t too strong, and the temperature not too hot, I’d let him bury his feet in the sand.
“That’s what you’ll build castles with,” I’d tell him.
He’d point out at the ocean, to the swimmers and the boats with their white stretched sails.
“That’s what you’ll swim across.”
A girl would trot by, her heels kicking up small explosions of sand, her legs smooth bronzy pillars.
“That’s what’ll break your heart.”
• • •
“You love him more than you love me.”
It was Sept
ember 28, 1989—almost two years after the earthquake. Finn, who now spoke (but too quickly, much too quickly, and with an inability to pronounce rs) had just been put to bed, and Clare and I had opened a bottle of wine in the kitchen. Her back was pressed into the white tile counter; her face was too heavily made-up from a panty-hose commercial she’d shot that afternoon—her first job since returning to acting. Milky foundation an inch thick. Pink cheeks. Lips the color of overripe apples.
“That’s ridiculous.” And then, “I can’t take you seriously when you’re wearing all that stuff on your face.”
“I like it. I feel like myself in it.” I handed her a glass of wine, and when she drank from it she tattooed the rim with her painted mouth. “And it’s not ridiculous.”
“It is.”
She said, “But it’s still the truth.”
And it was, which I think is what made it so terrible. It was something that both she and I had come to realize, separately, over the past year: that without Clare I’d still exist as some version of myself, but that without Finn, without the opportunity to shape his world, an integral part of me would be lost. I’d sense her resentment of me, of him—the way her voice tightened whenever the three of us were in a room and the attention slipped away from her, the way she became frustrated with his speech problems, the way she’d tell him she didn’t understand him. And I understood it. I understood the frustration over watching something that had once been hers—ours—gradually become mine. Still, though, I didn’t know how to reverse it. Or, what’s more: I wasn’t willing to try.
“What would you have me do?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Love me a little more. Love him a little less.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Wash that shit off your face first. It’ll stain the pillows.”
She finished the wine in two large swallows.
• • •
When she left, it was with a letter that wasn’t even her own. She copied the note that actress-writer Jacqueline Susann wrote to her husband Irving Mansfield when he was drafted into World War II. She taped all four sides of the paper on which she wrote it to the surface of the kitchen table, as if she were afraid the thing would blow away and that she wanted to ensure, against all possible odds, that I’d find it. Which I did. After returning from a walk with Finn. I told him to empty the sand from his shoes while I read and then reread the note. She didn’t even edit the sentences to make them relevant.