Across town, toward the ship channel and the faint promise of sun, T.R. and my grandchildren were sleeping—in my mind’s eye their sleep was Edenic, shadowed with good dreams; soon they would be awakening to the first day of their new life with me.
At the thought that I would meet the three of them soon, I suddenly felt flooded with energy—a thing once common but now rare. I never supposed I had a first-rate mind or a first-rate talent, but I had, for some years, been in possession of first-rate energies; no one who lacks them will go as far as I went in episodic TV, where you need both the speed of the sprinter and the endurance of the marathoner if you’re to live and function through the forty-two weeks that comprise a season.
Once I had trusted my energies completely; they were as natural as sunlight and seemed sufficient to carry me through any task; but then, for no reason medical science could determine, they began to leave me, and their departure was as swift as a winter sunset.
Success, which had once energized me, began to enervate me instead. For months at a stretch I awoke lethargic, paralyzed by the knowledge that there was no longer any need to rise. There was no likelihood that I would be doing anything very interesting or very useful if I did rise, so often I just didn’t bother. Gladys could usually be badgered into bringing me orange juice or hot chocolate; often I just slipped another policier flick into the VCR and watched Franco Nero or his equivalent chase sleazy Mediterranean dope dealers around Genoa, Naples, or Palermo.
Godwin and Gladys hated it when I stayed in bed all morning watching policier movies. They took it as a sign of moral collapse, a point I didn’t argue.
“The only difference between you and King Farouk is that he was fatter,” Godwin would announce, standing nervously in my bedroom door.
“Well, I may get just as fat before I’m through,” I said. I always replied cheerfully to accusations of moral collapse.
“Your whole problem is that you never had to do no regular work,” Gladys informed me. “It’s important to move around and get the blood circulating.”
“I believe it circulates whether one moves or not,” I said, with scientific dispassion.
“Pecking on a typewriter gets it moving in your fingers, I guess,” Gladys said, intent on the theme of moving blood, “but I wouldn’t call pecking on a typewriter regular work. You got five fireplaces in this house, why don’t you pop out of bed in the morning and chop a few pieces of wood? That might do the trick.”
“It might do the trick of me cutting my foot off. Is that what you want?” I asked her. I had never chopped wood in my life.
“It’d be better than wasting your whole life watching movies,” Gladys replied stubbornly. She didn’t easily give up her visions, and she returned to the theme of woodchopping many times in the next few months, inspired, no doubt, by President Reagan’s example; Gladys was deeply devoted to President Reagan, though cool to the First Lady.
“Them movies you watch ain’t even in English,” she said. “I wouldn’t see no point in watching a movie in one of them old languages.”
This morning, though, my energy seemed to have returned from its long absence. I felt like doing something, and, considering the hour, walking seemed my best option. As the sun colored the thinning mists, I dressed and walked along South Main to Rice, among whose dreaming groves I had spent so many absorbed hours as a graduate student in my mid- and late twenties. Then, I wanted to learn all there was to know about literature, and I felt sure I could: I meant to read everything in English literature, from the first runic fragments to Iris Murdoch, before going on, like a grazing ruminant, to digest the literatures of the continent, the steppes, South America, Asia. I would read it all, and meanwhile I would write.
Standing once again amid the great trees of Rice, I felt the kind of bittersweet feelings that seemed to me entirely appropriate for a man of my age and station; I had traveled a long road, circling the decades and the continents not of literature but of emotion, to reach those groves once again; I had written a poor first novel (I burned every copy of it I could find), married and lost one woman, loved and lost many others, while keeping the affection, I hoped, of a few women of brilliance. I had produced one hundred and ninety-eight episodes of a sitcom, a life’s work squeezed into nine years, though it had taken nearly forty years to get to it.
Though no life could have been much less like Rilke’s than mine, I thought of him as I walked through the Moorish colonnades of the old Administration Building. He had taken all his life to get ready to write those Elegies, had written them in two great bursts, and, not too long after, died.
Well aware that a sitcom producer should not be comparing himself to a great European poet, nonetheless I was conscious of certain parallels in our careers—Rilke dealt with women largely through letters, but no doubt he would have used message machines had they been available in his day; that was one parallel. Women who were rarely actually with him nonetheless sustained him; that was two. And I had stewed and fidgeted forty years before spewing out “Al and Sal,” after which, if I could have managed it, I would have serenely died. For at least three of its nine years “Al and Sal” was really good, too—the sitcom equivalent of the Duino Elegies, the only thing I ever did or would ever do that got close to being art.
Some insects die when they mate; I’ve always admired those artists who did their art-mating and got gone—it seemed better than sticking around to become an old drone, as Wordsworth had.
During the years when I had been unable to find, much less see, my daughter, I told myself that an artist was better off merely being a parent to his art; but I never believed that. For one thing, I had no real conviction that I was an artist—calling oneself one didn’t cut it; you had to make art to have a right to the name, and I hadn’t made any. But when I finally did make a little, inventing lively, true-to-life children for Al and Sal, it never made up for the fact that I wasn’t being a parent to the child I had actually fathered. The burdens and blessings of parenthood were a constant theme in Al and Sal’s debates, fights, marital wrestlings. Sal was pro-baby; in her late thirties she saw no reason why she couldn’t have just one more, and she was pissed off at Al for three whole seasons because he suggested she have her tubes tied after she had their last child. Al was anti-baby; he would rather work on his lawn, and would cheerfully have taken Sal to get her tubes tied, though he knew better than to suggest it again—the mere suggestion had made Sal angrier than he had ever seen her, before or since. “I have to live with you, can’t I at least be fertile?” Sal had screamed, at the apex of that memorable fight, a fight which left millions of Americans shuddering—after all, it could happen to most of them.
But Sal’s dreams of another baby came to naught—so completely to naught that she developed the fantasy that Al had had a secret vasectomy, just to thwart her. Her references to his vasectomy became so constant and so bitter that Al was driven to drink; the debate did nothing for his potency, which, as Sal bluntly informed all America, had been known to flag. Fear that it would flag yet more tortured Al during the two black seasons before the series closed. He spent more and more time on his lawn mower, avoiding Sal’s bed; Sal, for her part, became increasingly blatant about her deprivation. She did the dishes in a negligee and lolled around in bed watching soft-core pornography on the Z channel. She held many anguished soliloquies with her mirror on the theme of why her husband didn’t find her attractive anymore. Al, in self-defense, bought his own TV and installed it on the screened-in porch, where, more and more frequently, he retired to watch hockey matches and drink himself to sleep on his beloved couch. Sal pursued him even there. Once, fearing her approach, a drunken Al floundered out the door and took off down the street on his lawn mower, only to lose control of it before he got to the end of the block; to everyone’s horror the mower veered through the impeccably tended flower beds of June, a sad little neighborhood spinster who lived only for her award-winning flowers. June forgave Al, but Sal didn’t. “I hope you’re s
atisfied,” Sal said icily. “You’ve ruined June’s life, and all because you had to go get that stupid vasectomy. I only wanted one more baby.”
Al never recovered from that tragic night. In losing control of his lawn mower he had in effect lost control of his life. He even came to believe that he had got a vasectomy. Sal became so vicious to him that even Nema, who played Sal, got worried and started trying to get me to tone down her anger a little, but I couldn’t. As Al and Sal’s marriage self-destructed, so did the show, plunging on toward a Götterdämmerung of marital resentment, frustration, confusion, weakness, dishonesty. I was on the very verge of having Sal seduce her next-door neighbor’s beautiful teen-age son—a plot turn Nema was all for; she had long since gagged at having to appear to retain sexual interest in the pudgy Al, which is to say, her costar, Morgan Underwood—when the network, horrified at what America would think of that, finally pulled the plug.
Personally I considered that the nine years’ debate on the qualities of parenthood, all conceived by a man who had never been an active parent, was the true secret of the show’s success. It was soon clear to me, from the mail the show got, that millions of Americans, not to mention citizens of the wide world, were, like Al, of a somewhat divided mind on the subject of children. Were they worth it? the show asked. Not sure, the world replied.
As I plodded through the silent Rice campus, I wondered again about Rilke. Did he dream the great phrases of the Elegies after he had finished them, as I still dreamed scenes in “Al and Sal”?; or, once his work was done, did his sleep become a peaceful blank, peopled, if at all, by the elegant rich women who supported him? In other words, did art bring peace? Did the Elegies pay off, for their creator, the decades of brooding, fidgeting neurosis that preceded them?
I would never know; I just knew that “Al and Sal” hadn’t helped my sleep one bit. I was happy to have the hundreds of millions, but I had no sense of resolution at all; nothing that had been unsettled in my future had been settled by that show.
Across Main Street from Rice was the great twenty-hospital Medical Center. I slipped across the still-empty street and probed among the hospitals until I came to the oldest among them, the hospital where T.R. had been born. I stood on the small lawn in front of it for several minutes, trying to call back the emotions of that hard night, twenty-two years before.
But my memories of those emotions, once as vivid as a burn, had faded and blurred, the skin grown back over them. It had been raining, I remembered, and I had been very tired, having driven all the way from San Francisco with only brief stops. My timing in those years was frequently disastrous, but never more so than that night, because I arrived at the hospital just as Sally’s parents were coming out. Her terrible father, Mr. Bynum, hit me several times, knocking me into the squishy grass; Mrs. Bynum, her equally terrible mother, had cheered him on, telling me all the many reasons why I wasn’t fit to be married to their daughter, or to raise their grandchild. Confused from the blows, very tired and very wet, I had finally put the Bynums to flight by chanting obscene words, or words that I knew they would consider obscene: fuck, prick, clitoris, nipple, etc. Then, torn with pain, I had accepted what I supposed was only temporary defeat; I left the hospital, visited my wonderful friend Emma Horton—long since dead of cancer—and drove south to the Rio Grande, where I drowned my feeble, brain-damaged second novel.
The defeat—that is to say, the delay in commencing my life as an active parent—had lasted longer than I could ever have supposed it would, that night at the hospital. It had lasted a surprising, and obviously an inexcusable, twenty-two years.
But now, finally, I was back, and what I hoped was that the old saying about better late than never was true. Somewhere in the Lawndale area, across the purring freeways, beyond the shacks and unpainted houses of the Third Ward, T.R. and her babies slept. When they awakened, my life as a parent would at last begin.
TWO
1
Back at the Warwick I immediately had an anxiety attack brought on by my obsession with first sentences, or beginnings of any sort. I was about to meet T.R. What first sentence ought I to say to her, my long-lost child? Wasn’t that question ten times more important, and thus ten times more anxiety-producing, than the choice of a first sentence for my novel?
In the case of T.R., the consequences of the choices were so immense as to be paralyzing. In a sense we had already spoken our first sentences, but those were spoken over the phone and wouldn’t have quite the same force as sentences spoken face to face. What if I began by ticking her off, as in fact I had already done several times? She had the impatience of youth, or, perhaps, just the impatience of herself. She might be more demanding than the most demanding reader; she might expect too much—for instance, that I somehow make up for twenty-two years of absence with a few choice words.
After a few minutes of dithering anxiety, during which I discovered that I had forgotten to bring any clothes except what I had on—I had packed a suitcase and left it sitting in my study—I decided to seek advice, and began by calling Jeanie. But Jeanie Vertus wasn’t in; I got a guarded message, in neutral tones, giving the phone number I had just reached; nothing else.
“Listen, since I have you, I think you ought to get out of that bird-woman movie,” I said. “There’s something I found out as a result of having a crazed bird woman in ‘Al and Sal’ and that’s that very few bird lovers ever neglect their families. Ninety-nine percent of them are excellent nest builders; they do absolutely everything they’re supposed to do, just like birds themselves. Didn’t I tell you how the Audubon Society and all those other bird organizations got all up in arms over that character? My advice to you is: Don’t take a role in which you neglect your family!—unless you neglect them for a grand passion with Marcello Mastroianni or somebody, and even then it could be risky. Your millions of fans like to see you behave well, and you just better remember that.
“I’m very, very nervous about meeting my daughter, that’s why I’m so emphatic,” I said. “Now that it’s probably too late, I’m more than ever aware of the importance of good family behavior.
“I miss you,” I added forlornly. “I love you. Bye.”
Then I called Nema, who was in her trailer having less-than-magnificent fantasies as she dawdled her way through the second season of a not very energetic series called “Ms,” in which she played the most powerful female executive in America, a kind of cross between Katharine Graham and Sherry Lansing, a coldly efficient woman whose after-hours behavior was anything but cold. Unfortunately, the men producing the series were not coldly efficient; they muddled through episode after episode, making costly production mistakes and wasting everyone’s time, including their own.
“Porcupines move faster than these producers,” Nema said.
“You sound pretty bored,” I said.
“Beyond bored, stupefied,” she said. “Right now I’d probably fuck anything that walked through the door. It’d be something to do for a few seconds, at least.”
“I’ve been wondering what I should say to my daughter when we first meet,” I said. “First impressions can be pretty important. I wouldn’t want to make the wrong kind of first impression.”
“You haven’t even met her yet?” Nema said. “She called yesterday. What’s taking so long?”
“It hasn’t been that long,” I protested. “I had to drive to Houston, and when I got here, she was out dancing. I’m going to see her in a few minutes but I’m worried about what to say.”
“How about, ‘Hi, I’m your dad,’” Nema said, a little caustically. “Get in the car and go see your child. Don’t sit there brooding about what to say for three hours.”
“You’re right, I’ll go right now,” I said.
“I’m gettin’ worried that I might be losing my capacity for fantasies,” Nema said. “What do you think I could do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could take a course or something.”
“A cours
e in how to have fantasies?” she said, startled. “I’ve never heard of a course in how to have fantasies. A college course or what?”
“There could be a college course,” I said vaguely. Actually the remark had just popped out; Nema without fantasies was like Laurel without Hardy. I had no idea if any college had yet sunk so low as to offer credits for a course in fantasies, but it was certainly possible; not Harvard or Yale, maybe, but a lot of colleges were not Harvard or Yale.
“Be more specific,” Nema said. “This is important to me. Working on this stupid show is so boring it’s causing my fantasy life to atrophy. It’s getting where it’s hard to imagine fucking somebody in an unusual way—I mainly just fantasize the missionary position now, and sometimes not even that.”
“I’ll try to check and see if there’s anyone who gives a course in it,” I promised, just as Nema got summoned to the set.
“Call me back when you find out something,” she said. “A woman as experienced as I am ought to be able to imagine something a little more baroque than the missionary position.”
When she hung up I sat on my bed feeling lonely. Nema had told me exactly what to do, of course: Hurry on over to Dismuke Street, find T.R., and say, “Hi, I’m your dad.” Nema had seven children and handled them expertly; I had no reason to doubt that her command of basic parental procedure was sound. She liked kids, she had given birth to kids, she raised kids, and those she raised were all healthy, lively, and appealing. She had both broad expertise and abundant common sense; her recommendation was the obvious one. I needed to get moving, display some willingness, even if the willingness involved some crude phrasing at first.
I couldn’t help wishing, though, that the two calls had been reversed; that I’d got Nema’s message machine and Jeanie in person. Jeanie had no children and wouldn’t have given me any advice; but she would have seconded me in my indecision, my squirming over the right approach; she might have no idea what I should say to T.R., but she would have felt, as I did, the necessity for rehearsal.
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