by Lou Cove
I hope Glovey Butler is watching.
Amanda and I swallow a long list of follow-up questions as Howie picks Mama off her feet and spins her until the flowers of his drawstring pants dissolve in a blur and our mother—our soft-spoken, impassive mother—begins to laugh. Uncontrollable, head-back laughter, long straight brown hair set loose in rolling crests, looking straight at the gray autumn sky that hangs skeptically over Chestnut Street.
I’ve never seen her so helplessly happy. Carly grabs my hand, and we begin to spin, all of us a tightening gyre on the front lawn.
“Now,” Howie pulls away, returning my mother gently to earth, and looking at me, “where the hell’s your old man?”
*
Pa’s in the kitchen. It’s a tiny L-shaped room, cramped compared to the rest of this dilapidated mansion. Originally a staging area for meals, this little space off the massive dining room was designed to receive meals via the dumbwaiter from the real kitchen in the basement. But for my father, cooking is performance art. He’s not going to do it in the basement.
“El Jefe!” Howie calls, squeezing his way into the kitchen to hug his old friend and take in the view: every open surface covered with spices, knives, bottles of wine and oils, a bronze mortar and pestle, mustard seeds, fresh horseradish, oranges, figs, and a whole fish, head and scales still on. “All hail the chief!”
“Boobie! You made it. And in record time, too.” Papa wraps his arms around his friend, hugging him firmly but keeping his hands at a slight angle to avoid getting whatever’s dripping from them on Howie’s dashiki. “Jesus, where the hell did you get those pants?”
“That’s my lovely bride’s handiwork,” Howie says happily. Papa grabs a long wooden spoon in one hand, the handle of a small saucepan in the other, and stirs whatever has started to boil over. “Well, you look like a fucking geisha girl.”
“Feel even better than that. There’s freedom in the flow. You’ll see.”
“Well, you look good otherwise. Working out?”
“Breaking concrete with a sledgehammer.”
“Make an honest hippie out of you.”
“So what’s for dinner?” Howie reaches for the saucepan, turns it his way, and dips a finger.
“Little Polish thing from the Old Country. Ryba with galarecie. Cold fish in aspic, carrot rings, hardboiled eggs, and lemon slices … Watch the handle,” he adds, turning the saucepan around so the handle faces the back of the stove. “Kids.”
“You’re living the life, Jefe.” Howie pats my father on the back. “I always knew you’d make good.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, boychik.”
Howie’s admiration of Papa sparks an unfamiliar feeling: pride. Something I’ve never really felt about my father. But there it is. His open respect for my father is something I can’t remember other men expressing. Uncle Ricky? Always quick with the comeback. Gramps? He seems to regard his son with a mixture of amusement and a where did you come from? confusion. And Papa’s friends seem more likely to compete with him than to compliment him. And he with them. It’s the one-upsmanship of men. I thought they all did it.
But not this man.
“Are you the same age as Papa?” I ask.
“Not quite, hermanito. He’s like my big brother. Ten years older and a hundred years wiser.”
Later, after our dinner—fish heads and eggs for the adults, jelly omelets, thank God, for us—Howie hangs a sheet on the family room wall and breaks out a box of Kodachrome slides. Mama wraps David in her arms. Amanda sits by her. Papa and Carly talk politics.
“Jerry Brown—” Carly implores.
“Fuck Jerry Brown! He lost last time. What’s the point of trying again? Besides, we have a Democrat in the White House. Everybody needs to stick with Carter. Come on. Jerry Brown … Shit,” Papa says.
“What do you think, Louis?” Carly asks, raven’s-wing hair draping over her shoulder.
“Dunno,” I shrug.
“No? Iran’s gonna be an albatross for old Jimmy. I bet you have an opinion on this politics thing,” Howie says, locking the carousel into place. “I remember you at that party when your folks lived in Georgetown.”
“I was two,” I say softly.
“Yeah, but you knew your stuff. You kept running around the party saying ‘Nixon is a doodie! Nixon is a doodie!’ And you were right, little man. You were SO right.”
“You were there for that?”
Howie nods. “I’ve had my eye on you since you were a wee tumbleweed, Little Big Man.”
“I like your minibus,” I say, eager to keep up the conversation.
“I do, too,” Howie says, transitioning smoothly along with me. “Want to drive it?”
“One day. One day,” Papa says, cupping my face in his hand like I’m two instead of twelve. I pull away, and grimace.
Howie kneels down to Carly, kisses her the way people kiss in movies, not at home. I avert my eyes. She is beautiful, and he may be the most striking man I have ever met. Overwhelmed, I stare absentmindedly at the paperback spines on the shelf so no one will notice me blush. Kazantzakis. Nabokov. Roth. The Joy of Sex. David is asleep now, on the floor beside me.
“We should move to San Francisco,” Papa muses.
“Please don’t make us move again,” I groan.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Mama assures us.
“But the freedom. Think about it,” my father presses.
“Don’t idealize, Jefe,” Howie cautions. “I came to San Francisco the spring after the Summer of Love. Six months is all it took for that dream to curdle. The real hippies literally carried a coffin down the center of the streets of Haight-Ashbury, crying ‘It’s dead! It’s over!’ Now it’s just people spare-changing on the streets and selling hippie shit, making money off it.”
“Who died?” Amanda sits up, alarmed.
“The innocence,” Howie says, standing.
Carly elbows him playfully. “Oh, Howie. It’s still totally alive. You just went down a dark rabbit hole for no good reason.”
“You’re right. Back to business. It’s showtime!” he shouts, flipping off the light switch by the door, futzing with the projector so that the image fills the wrinkled bedsheet.
“Where’s that?” Mama asks as the first photo—a picture of Howie in a bathrobe, laughing with a small group of people—comes into focus.
“Our backyard. Just before the wedding. I’m laughing because if I don’t laugh I’ll probably cry my fucking eyes out and go running.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mama chides. “You look happy. Really happy.”
“It’s a world of illusion!” Howie says with a Doug Henning bucktooth flourish. Finally, a reference I recognize.
The slides continue, tracking the moments leading up to a wedding that resembles none I’ve ever seen before.
“When do you put on your tuxedo and dress?” Amanda asks, sucking as usual at her ring and middle fingers.
Howie chuckles warmly. “It’s not that kind of wedding, Sweet Tush.” Carly snuggles against him, squeezing his arm and smiling as if to say: we know something you don’t, but if you’re very lucky, we might tell you.
“What do you mean?” Amanda asks, incredulous. “Everybody wears a tuxeee … doh?”
The image on the sheet switches from a slide of Howie and Carly facing each other in bathrobes to a slide with the robes lying at their feet, the bride and groom smiling those we-know-something-wonderful smiles. They are very, very naked.
The moment is immense. I have never seen breasts like that. Not in the ladies’ locker room at the Y when I was still young enough to go with Mama. Not in Gramps’s bathroom Playboys. Howie’s penis is small and difficult to find in all that hair. Carly’s boobs, though, are right there. And the two of them, naked on the screen, are sitting right beside us.
Amanda and I say nothing.
“You didn’t!” Mama finally squeals. “You didn’t! Did you?”
“Come on!” Papa says, leaning f
orward.
“Like the day we were born,” Howie murmurs, as if recalling the greatest moment of his life. And maybe he is.
Gretchen isn’t wrong about my parents being different. They keep The Joy of Sex and Delta of Venus alongside Ulysses and the big American Heritage Dictionary with the blue leather cover and silver embossed lettering on the bookshelf behind us. They went to Woodstock and saw Dylan turn electric at Newport. They smoke pot sometimes, occasionally in front of us.
But they aren’t this different.
The slides continue. Howie and Carly, standing naked. Looking up. Raising arms. Shouting something as a rope attached to a giant wooden bucket above them is tugged by some kind of groomsman, showering them with steaming water. They reach forward, embracing so tightly it’s hard to tell them apart, just a mass of skin and dripping hair. Everyone around them claps, laughs, smiles, shouts. Silent, but so noisy in my head.
“I don’t…” Mama says.
“Far out…” Papa says.
“It was the best way we could think of to come together,” Carly whispers, still clutching Howie’s arm and looking at the photo of herself pressed into her new husband, naked, with nothing between them.
“Was that real?” Amanda asks.
“Oh, honey,” Carly slides back over to my sister and wraps her in her arms, “that was as real as it gets.”
I look at my father, then at Howie. Any man who gets girls to marry him naked deserves to be projected on a screen.
The heat on the side of my head pulls me out of my sudden fixation. It is coming from the glare of Papa’s gaze. Turning to face him, I know that he has sensed, with uncanny accuracy and speed, the germ of a betrayal.
We all have friends, his eyes telegraph in radioactive Morse code, but there’s only one man you should be taking your cues from here.
Message received. No decoder ring necessary.
Howie clicks ahead a few slides. People eating party food. Guests departing. Carly brushing her teeth. Howie in bed. A picture maybe taken by Howie of his knees, his hairy legs, white tube socks with yellow stripes at the top, and Carly sitting at the end of the bed. And then one of Carly, eyes closed, face down. Eating something?
“What’s that in your mouth?” Amanda asks the question I am wondering.
“It’s Howie’s penis,” Carly says matter-of-factly.
“OH-KAY,” Mama chirps loudly. She jumps up and flips on the lights. “Time for bed!”
High Over Salem
“My parents don’t know I climb the slate roof above my room all the way to the top,” I tell Howie through bites of an Elvis sandwich: bacon, banana, and peanut butter. “It’s four stories. Probably the highest spot in the neighborhood.”
“Well it’s there. Isn’t that the point, Mallory?” he asks.
I nod, feeling trusting enough after eight days with him to reveal my Secure Position—the roof ledge four stories over Chestnut Street that only I know how to get to.
We finish lunch and head up to my room and slip out the south-facing window to the flat roof where Gretchen and I kissed. But I plan to take Howie higher: just to our right, sitting in the open air, a segment of the upper roof hangs precariously, begging to be summited. You just have to jump to get to it. And if you can make it, you can climb to the Secure Position, balance on its forty-foot peak atop a single line of copper, and see the entire city.
“You have to jump,” I explain, pointing to the edge of roof just out of reach.
“Jump? You’re more rebel than I gave you credit for, son of Jefe. That’s a fucking fall.”
“Do you want to try it?”
“Hell, yeah,” he says, slipping off his sneakers, leaping nimbly on bare feet to the slanted section and starting the crawl up to the peak.
I keep my Pumas on and follow. We position ourselves unsteadily at the center of the copper casing where the back and front roofs join. Turning to the north, we look down at the quiet expanse of Chestnut Street. Falling back the way we had come would probably be survivable—we’d just tumble over the edge and drop to the pebble roof outside my window. But one wrong move forward and there’s nothing between us, the bricks of the walkway below, and the emerald moss growing thick between them, but not thick enough to cushion our crash.
“Look over there.” I point to the harbor. Howie shifts on the edge, drawing a rectangular Sucrets tin from his pocket, snapping open the lid, and slipping a half-smoked joint and a book of matches from within.
“That is fucking beautiful. Look at that. The Atlantic.”
We stare silently at the whitecap ripples of Salem Harbor. Sailboats bob and pitch between the power plant and the rocky split lip of Marblehead.
“Maybe this is the view that made Melville conjure his great white whale. His unattainable demon dream. You know, while he was shacking up with old Hawthorne here? Hard to believe that this beautiful scene inspired Melville to write the most boring book I ever read in my life. But I’ll never forget how they made oil from blubber now, will I? Poor old sperm whale.”
“Sperm whale.” I look away, hiding a twelve-year-old’s grin.
“I never understood that myself. First of all, it’s in the head of the whale, not the dick. Second, it’s supposed to have the consistency of wax, so it’s more like smegma than jizz.”
“Smegma?”
“A bummer for the goyim. You and I are exempt, son of Israel. One painful snip, one get-out-of-smegma-free-for-life card.”
“Then what’s jizz?”
“Nectar of the gods. Fruit of my loins. Pancake syrup for the pussy.”
“I…”
“It’s sperm, little Jefe. Just a fancy handle.”
“I never had any,” I confess.
“Oh! Yeah, well, it’s coming, just hold on. There’s plenty in your future.” He takes a hit and speaks while holding his breath, eyes starting to water. “I promise.”
We could just as easily be talking about movies or comic books. It doesn’t seem any different when Howie brings sex up. Papa tries every once in a while, just to see if I “Have any questions?” but I always answer “No.” One rainy Sunday afternoon my father came down from a short “nap” and joined me on the front steps. We sat together, not speaking for a few minutes. And then he said, “You know, you’re too young to have sex right now, but when you can, you’re going to love it.” Gah!
Howie loses his balance for a moment and laughs, grabbing my shoulder and steadying himself. “I’m catching up on my Hawthorne. Salem tourist and all. You know what he said about this place? He said all sinners that weren’t worthy of hanging should be sent on a pilgrimage to Salem and forced to spend time here.”
“Guess I’m a sinner, then.”
“Ha! I’m no literary genius. I just read that last night in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Hysterical. I think Hawthorne was all about the seduction of life. He didn’t like it here because everyone was so goddamned puritanical. Very 1950s. Very McCarthyesque. So he did what any great artist should do: flipped the townies the bird. You know what that book is about, right?”
I shake my head.
“A minister diddles a hot local lady, and then they try to keep it a secret. She’s married to a geezer who she thinks is lost at sea. She’s all alone and she ends up having the minister’s baby and no one knows who the father is but they know it can’t be the old man, so they make her wear a red letter A on her chest. A for adulteress. And Hawthorne understood how fucked up this prude shit is. Plus, he had some personal history with prejudice—his ancestors, two sisters, had to sit in the town meetinghouse and wear forehead bands because they were lesbians.”
“The sisters?” I can barely keep up.
“Yup. With each other. Those headbands were supposed to let everyone know that they had had incestuous relations. You can’t make this shit up,” he snorts. “Hawthorne would have been so free love if he were alive today. As soon as he got rich, he was out of here.”
“I don’t blame him. I mean
, I’m kind of getting used to it. It’s better with you guys here.” Howie smiles warmly at this. “What was your high school like?” I ask him.
“Two years of hell. Then two years of happiness, mostly because of Mary Beth Scanlon.”
“Who?”
“Shiksa goddess. Magical mystery tour of fantabulousness and first vagina I was ever permitted to touch.”
“Was she mad?”
“With lust. Such a bad girl! I mean, not bad, but she was willing to do things the other girls weren’t. And she was good at it.” Like Gretchen. “I didn’t play well with the good girls back then. I was a tubby sperm whale, you know. Big enough to have boobs. It’s not a good thing. Especially in high school. So stay trim, young fellow. Stay trim.”
“You’re skinny now.”
Howie lies back against the slate, exhales deeply, looks out at the big sky. His flat, barely hairy belly rises and falls. Exposed. Rugged. Ridged by muscle. He rubs it lovingly. “This? This didn’t just happen. I worked my ass off. And took two months off of school to do it.”
“Your parents let you leave school for two months?”
“It was that, or buy a bra. I didn’t give them a choice.”
Fat Howie. It’s like saying Fat Fonzie. And this other part. I didn’t give them a choice. How does that work? I get a choice between muesli and Grape-Nuts and that’s about it.
I roll to him and stare.
“You have to kick the shit out of your demons,” he says. “This one I beat into submission. That one…” he points to the swelling Atlantic, “that one still needs work.”
“What do you mean?”
“I love to look at that ocean, you know? But I still can’t go out on it. Not since my first trip at sea.”
“Were you a sailor?”
“Well, first I was a crewman for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. You believe that? Me! I got a girl pregnant, she needed an abortion, so I got a job at the Pittsburgh public television station working on a kids show. They call that irony, amigo.”
How many questions can I ask, just about that sentence? “How old were you?”