The Divined Comedy

by Barry Rachin

When she got home later that night, Ava was too wound up from the crazy weather to sleep. She fixed herself a burrito in the microwave and settled in with the Danish philosopher.

  Humans cannot think our choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the mix through pure subjectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses the point...

  Ava understood that she was doing a relatively poor job ‘living her choices’. She had put her education on hold so she could pump gas in a driving rainstorm while ‘normal’ people hunkered down at home doing sensible things and structuring their lives in a manner that, like a well-managed stock option, provided the maximum return on investment.

  Eight o’clock the next morning, Ava Frick’s father shuffled into his daughter’s bedroom, eased down on the comforter and whispered, “The wallpaper hanger is steaming the vinyl paper from the sheet rock in the living room, so don’t go wandering about in your underwear.”

  There was no immediate reply. Ava was resting prone under the covers, a pillow propped over her head. Though she couldn’t physically see her father, the girl could smell his tart, Old Spice cologne. Mr. Frick, whose salt-and-pepper hair was thinning away to nothing on the top, would be wearing an ivory, brushed cotton, Van-Heusen dress shirt with khaki, polyester slacks. The pants were a bit out-dated, but with eighteen months to retirement, there was nobody in the business community the man needed to impress. Mr. Frick rested a hand on the small of his daughter’s back. “You got in late last night.”

  “Trucker pulled in at quarter to twelve. After he topped off with diesel fuel I still had to cash out and close up.”

  Her father lifted the pillow. Leaning forward, he kissed Ava on the nape of the neck then placed the pillow back again. “See you later.” He disappeared out the door.

  From the early sixties, Ava’s father sold washing machines for Sears Roebuck. He won salesman-of-the-year awards back-to-back more than a dozen times. The man was honest to a fault, never exhibiting the slightest compulsion to lie, exaggerate or misrepresent the product line in order to to close a shaky sale. During the Vietnam War, he wrote letters to the presidents – first to Lyndon Johnston then later Richard Nixon, demanding that they bring American troops home from Southeast Asia. Ava vividly remembered ferrying envelopes with the sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. address down to the mailbox. “You really think that fascist jerk is gonna read your stupid letter?” The fascist jerk Nathan’s teenage daughter was referring to was Richard Milhous Nixon. Ava was going through a difficult adolescence. Everyone over the age of thirty was a bona fide jerk; thirty-somethings weren’t much better.

  Mr. Frick’s anti-war, protest letters were quite verbose, sometimes running three pages single-spaced and typewritten on an old-fashioned Smith-Corona electric model. Ava read through several in which her father argued passionately against the domino theory, suggesting all of Southeast Asia would fall to Communism once the puppet regime in South Vietnam collapsed. The war was unwinnable. American soldiers were dying, cannon fodder for a lost cause.

  Mr. Frick churned out, on average, two protest letters a week. And that didn’t include the endless barrage of postcards mailed to congressmen, senators, and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The soft-spoken reformed Jew with the chicken neck and graying sideburns protested the war while raising a family, selling Kenmore-Maytag appliances and teaching aerobic exercise Thursday evenings at the Brandenberg Community Center. Following the freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Mr. Frick petitioned his records from the federal government and discovered that his subversive activities during the Vietnam War had been closely monitored as ‘a potential domestic threat’ by both the FBI and CIA.

  Subversive activities. Potential domestic threat. Did the government imagine that, when he wasn’t selling top-loading washers at the department store, Nathan Frick was hurling Molotov cocktails and inciting civil unrest? “If J. Edgar Hoover comes for supper,” Ava quipped one night when her mother was still alive, “do we put out the good China or go with the everyday dishes?”

  After her father went off to work, Ava never budged. She could hear a radio tuned to a country and western station purring softly in the living room. In a creaky falsetto, the wallpaper hanger was crooning along to a Kenney Chesney ballad. Ava drifted back off to sleep. An hour and a half later she finally threw the covers aside. Pulling a sweatshirt over her head, she wriggled into a pair of jeans but couldn’t negotiate the button on the waist. No matter - the baggy sweatshirt would hide her late-night escapades with pasta and breadsticks. Truth be told, a nineteen year-old women with a little extra flesh on her bones was more voluptuous than slovenly. Her olive skin was still flawless, the breasts and hips in perfect working order. Ava dabbed Origins Winterbloom number-two eye shadow on her upper lids, applied a fine dusting of hypoallergenic powder over her throat to merge the real chin with its significant other and shuffled into the living room. “Good morning.”

  The wallpaper hanger, who had his back to her, was pressing the flat surface of a steamer up against the far wall. Lowering his arm, he pulled the tray away from the paper and a burst of scalding steam puffed up toward the ceiling. The man was tall and wiry with a droopy moustache and wire-rimmed glasses. The slender nose arched with an aristocratic flair. Like a rust-pocked car where the odometer has seen the hundred-thousand mile mark come and go, the face was pleasant enough but well-traveled. “I’m Rufus,” he smiled, turning back to the work at hand.

  “Can I get you anything?” Ava offered.

  He reached up with a putty knife separating a swatch of soggy paper from the wall. The sheet lifted away in a jagged heap. “Cup of coffee would be nice. Milk no sugar.”

  Ava headed toward the kitchen but pulled up short. “You remind me of someone, a writer from the psychedelic sixties by the name of Richard Brautigan. You’re his spitting image.” In high school Ava had read Brautigan’s A Confederate General from Big Sur. With the droopy moustache, lanky, angular body and bittersweet smile, Rufus, the wallpaper hanger, was a dead ringer for the minimalist author who was all the rage when Ava’s father was still a relatively young man. “Unfortunately,” Ava added as an afterthought, “Brautigan was a hardcore alcoholic who drank himself to death.”

  The man repositioned the steamer at the highest point where the wall and ceiling converged and leaned slightly forward, trapping the steam against the paper. “I got plenty of vices,” Rufus drawled cryptically, “but liquor ain’t one of them.”

  Ava retreated to the kitchen. She fixed herself an asiago bagel with chive cream cheese. When the coffee was ready, she poured two cups and went back out to the living room. “Your timing’s perfect.” Rufus pulled the plug from the wall outlet and removed the cast iron venting plug from the top of the steamer. “The water’s pretty much run out so I have to break anyway.” He sipped at the coffee.

  “What branch of the service were you in?” Ava was staring at a tattoo on his right arm.

  “Grunts. US Army infantry.” He eased his rump down on a step ladder and nestled the coffee between his wide, calloused hands.

  Ava nibbled at the bagel. The pungent aroma of the asiago cheese titillated her senses. “Where were you stationed?”

  “Afghanistan. A godforsaken dump called Helmand Province in the southwest of the country. It’s the world's largest poppy-producing region, responsible for forty-two per cent of the world's total heroin production. We actually pay the local war lords not to grow the stuff.”

  “It’s always nice to know how the government manages out tax dollars.”

  Rufus grinned darkly but had nothing more to say on the matter. Putting the coffee aside, he went and filled a bucket with cool water from the kitchen tap. Funneling
the liquid into the steamer, he put the bucket aside when the water gauge read full. The wallpaper hanger plugged the electric chord back into the outlet and, while the metal plate was heating, moved about the perimeter of the room stuffing trash in a plastic garbage bag. “Got discharged from the army a couple years back but developed some problems associated with the war so I had to go for counseling.”

  “What sort of problems?”

  Rufus grabbed a pile of sticky paper and wedged it at the bottom of the bag. “Anger management.”

  She nodded her head up and down digesting the information. The stoop-shouldered man who resembled Richard Brautigan seemed utterly harmless, like an overgrown teddy bear. “But you’re okay now?”

  “Oh sure! Once I got to the root of the problem, it was just a matter of making a few minor adjustments,... tweaking my psyche, so to speak.”

  “Such as?”

  The steamer was beginning to sputter fitfully now, alternately dribbling then spitting small streams of tepid water from the vent holes. Rufus ran a palm over the orange rubber tubing feeling for the steaming as it crawled blindly through the coiled hose in the direction of the perforated metal tray. “With the help of Dr. Jacoby over at the Veterans Administration Hospital, I learned about my problem and how to cope.” Rufus reached into a leather tool bag and pulled out a foot-long brush with stiff black bristles. “What’s this?”

  “A tool for smoothing wallpaper.”

  “Animate or inanimate?”

  “Definitely inanimate,” Ava replied.

  “Ten months of therapy taught me that I am basically an incorrigible misanthrope who relates much better to things than people.” He said this in an affable, low-keyed drawl. “So I subsist off my veteran’s disability check, do odd jobs under the table, and pretty much sidestep the rest of humanity.”

  Ava kept to her room for the rest of the morning. Around one in the afternoon, Rufus tapped lightly on the open door. “I’m finished stripping the paper. Going to grab lunch.”

  Ava nodded. “Okay.”

  “When I get back, I’ll size the walls and spackle any cracks or holes. Get everything ready for tomorrow.” Ava gazed down the hallway. All the old wallpaper had been stripped away and neatly bundled in trash bags. “You live here with your father?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Grew up in this house. I work second shift over at the Gas Mart on County Street.”

  “The one with the blue and white sign?”

  “That’s right. I was planning to go to college last September, but then my mother died and I decided to take some time off.” The gangly man smiled and scratched his earlobe. He would have been modestly handsome ten years earlier, Ava mused. Rufus still wasn’t bad looking for a working stiff in his late twenties.

  “What were you planning to major in at college?”

  “Philosophy.... existentialism mostly.”

  “That’s out of my league.” Rufus yanked his car keys out of his pocket and headed for the door.

  After lunch, the paperhanger ran a bead of dark blue masking tape around the baseboard and with a fine-nap roller began coating the walls with sizing. An hour later, Ava came back into the living room dragging a Hoover carpet cleaner behind her. “I was trying to steam the runner in the entryway, but the machine doesn’t work right.”

  Rufus put the paint roller aside, dropped down on his haunches and inspected the undercarriage. “There’s your problem,” he said, indicating a flat piece of plastic which extended across the front of the vacuum. “Someone must have whacked the front carriage and loosened the screws holding the squeegee plate in place.”

  “Can it be fix?”

  The man ran a thumb and index finger over his droopy moustache. “Just tighten the screws or drill pilot holes on either side,” he tapped the plastic unit where the new holes needed to be positioned, “and that should do the trick.” He rose to his feet. “If you got an electric drill and small bit I can save you the bother and take care of it right now.”

  Ava got down on her hands and knees. Now she could see the problem along with the potential solution. Without the plate wedged firmly against the floor there was no suction to pull the sudsy grime out of the rug. Her brother, Gary, had borrowed the machine a month earlier to clean his rugs. Did Gary know the machine was broken yesterday when he returned it? Probably. He had a disconcerting habit of borrowing things without asking and returning them damaged, empty or otherwise nonfunctional. “No, I’d rather do it myself.”

  Rufus’ face melted in a broad smile. “Like I said earlier, I’m real good with machinery and dead things. It’s just people I can’t manage.”

  With a Phillips head screw driver Ava fixed the carpet cleaner. She didn’t need to drill pilot holes as Rufus suggested. Locating a container of stubby, sheet metal screws under her father’s work bench, she simply replaced the rusty old screws, firming them hand tight. The new fasteners pulled the faceplate into proper alignment and, when she brought the machine back upstairs from the basement, it worked like new, sucking the wet sludge into the waste tray. Ava washed the front hallway runner and entryway rugs before heading out to work.

  The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ...

  Ava didn’t know if fixing the carpet steamer qualified as a sublime truth that she could structure her life around, but it certainly made her feel just a little bit more in control of things. Later that night around two in the morning, Mr. Frick got up to use the bathroom. Seeing the light on in his daughter’s room, he stuck his head in the doorway. “How was work?”

  Ava put the Kierkegaard reader aside. “A lot drier than yesterday.”

  “Your brother stopped by.”

  “Yeah, I know. He dropped off the rug steamer.”

  Mr. Frick shook his head. “Gary came back again earlier this afternoon.” He pawed at the oak floor with a leather slipper. Ava noticed that, since her mother’s death, her father had begun to look frailer, withered and parched as an autumn leaf. “Apparently, your brother, the investment counselor, made some bad decisions in the bear market and needs to borrow money.”

  Ava cringed. “How much?”

  “Quite a bit,” Mr. Frick remarked opaquely. “Problem is, I love your brother dearly. I just don’t trust him. Never did. I told Gary no. He would have to look elsewhere.”

  “And what was his response?”

  Mr. Frick’s features contorted in a melancholy grimace. “Not to be denied, he wanted me to take out a home equity loan... sort of a cash advance on his share of the inheritance.”

  Ava felt a tightening in her chest. Her breath was coming in shallow, choppy gasps, and the young girl had to pause while the rage subsided before she could respond. “The man has no shame.”

  “In my will,” Mr. Frick spoke with brutal authority, “you’re the trust, the sole beneficiary. I’m leaving you everything - the house, furnishings, whatever remains from investments and retirement savings.”

  Ava stared at him in disbelief. “Is that fair?” She wasn’t thinking so much of Gary, the scheming schmoe, but rather her sister-in-law and two nieces, the oldest of which was just entering middle school.

  Hoisting his flannel pajama bottoms up higher on his skinny waist, Mr. Frick gazed at his daughter somberly. “Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas.”

  The boiler clicked on in the basement and Ava could hear the water pump pushing the heat through the house. “Unlike your brother,” the older man translated, “you don’t know from any funny stuff”. “Gary, the high-roller, drives a Cadillac Seville, vacations in Acapulco twice a year and wears custom-tailored suits,” he added coldly. “Let him reevaluate his present circumstances and learn to live within his means.” The widower trudged back to bed. When he was gone, Ava breathed in deeply and let the air stream out of her lungs in a barely audible groan.

  How much did her father know?

  Not terribly much apparently, and Ava wasn’t about to spill the beans
. The other day when her troublesome brother returned the rug cleaner, Ava was fixing herself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. He looked distraught, utterly exhausted. “When the hell are you going to get a real job and move out on your own?”

  “Nice way to open a conversation.” Ava smeared mayonnaise on the bread then arranged the cheddar cheese and tomato slices. Since the late fall, native-grown tomatoes were hard to come by and prices had skyrocketed ridiculously. Ava paid seventy-nine cents for the plump, vine-ripened beauty she was positioning on the sandwich. She only needed half. Her father could chop what remained in a salad with his supper.

  “Well it’s true, you know,” he shot back petulantly. “You’re almost twenty years old and act like some shiftless eccentric.”

  “Being shiftless doesn’t imply dishonesty,” Ava replied. “Shiftless people may be lazy freeloaders and hopelessly ineffectual. It doesn’t automatically make them disreputable.”

  Gary squirmed uncomfortably and gazed out the window at the bare trees. A blue jay was picking through the empty seed husks on the metal feeding station in search of the last few bits of edible protein. Ava kept a stash of sunflower seeds and cracked corn in the basement, replenishing the feeder on a weekly basis from late November through March. “A person can be shiftless,” she continued, “and still maintain his personal dignity. Of course that presupposes the individual in question does nothing flagrantly dishonest.” Ava watched as a pad of butter melted on medium heat. She lowered the sandwich into the Teflon pan and pressed down with a spatula. “Exactly how much of Mrs. Sardelli’s retirement savings did you squander?”

  Earlier in the week, an article had appeared in the Community Section of the Brandenberg Gazette: Local investment advisor indicted for misappropriation of client’s funds. Gary had covertly moved an elderly woman’s entire life savings from government-backed securities to a high-risk hedge fund that relied aggressively on selling short, leverage, swaps, derivatives and arbitrage. Three weeks into the transfer, the fund tanked and investors lost everything. Now the district attorney was indicting Ava’s brother for fraudulent misappropriation of funds.

  “Does dad know?” He brushed her original question aside.

  “Not yet.” She flipped the sandwich over and pressed down with the spatula again. Gary sat down and massaged the back of his neck distractedly. “You could sell your house,” Ava suggested, “and try to negotiate with the authorities for a reduced sentence.”

  “And where the hell are my wife and kids gonna live?” He whined with unfocussed rage.

  Ava wasn’t about to suggest that he move back home. The disgrace would kill her father. And anyway, adding Gary, the flimflam artist, and his nuclear family to the mix would turn their idyllic existence upside down. Try as she might, Ava couldn’t muster a grain of sympathy for her brother. “I’m the job Gypsy,” she muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  She removed the sandwich from the pan and sliced it at a diagonal. Placing a dill pickle on the side of the plate, she brought the meal to the kitchen table. “When I finished high school last year and couldn’t find steady work, you used to ridicule me. ‘Ava’s a brain-dead, job gypsy - can’t settle down, score a husband and make a normal life.’” “I’d rather be a shiftless job gypsy living at home with my widowed father,” she observed, raising the pickle to her mouth, “than a two-bit crook.”