“Are you doing what I said?” the Bat asked.
“Maybe we should climb out the window,” I suggested. I could tell my voice was, like, shaking? “Out onto the lawn.”
“Fuck that,” Oscar informed me. “Come on.” He took my hand and walked me to the door. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded. “Let’s have the introductions.”
Oscar put his hand on the doorknob and whipped the door open. There in front of us was the Bat, his dad, standing in the hallway, his grimy hands made into fists. His mouth was open, and you could see in there, most of the way down into his stomach. You wouldn’t want to send postcards with this guy on the picture side. I had expected somebody older. And bigger. The Bat was shorter than Oscar, more kind of pint-sized, very ratty and low-rent, with long Brylcreem greaseball hair swept back in hoodlum waves, and this brown mole just to the right of his nose. He looked like one of those smelly little cigaretted guys who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl at a seedy backwoods carnival, just waiting for someone to barf. That’d give him a tickle. They had shaved the warm-and-fuzzy off this guy a long time ago. From the odors in the air you could tell also that he was, heads-up, a full-time drunk. He’d gone way past the hobby stage. He had stare-at-the-jury eyes and funny pointed bat ears to pick up screams. Also: the deadest expression I had ever seen on a human being was equipped into this man’s face, like he was a failed rapist or something, and couldn’t get over it. The small wiry guys are the meanest. He’d kill you for a nickel. Under the hall light, he looked at me and panted. He would be the first customer for the video we were going to make, I just had a feeling.
“Hello Missy,” he said, lookin’ at me, proportionating me.
“The name’s Chloé,” I said. “Pleased to meetcha.” I was keeping up the civilities, because maybe someday this ghoul would be my father-in-law. Didn’t hold out my hand, though. Give me some credit. Anyway Oscar had my other hand.
But what Oscar did, was, being brave, he just had my fingers in his and took me, like we were the cool kids, down the hall and out the front door, Oscar saying nothing. I guess he didn’t want to start a fight exactly at that moment.
“Don’t you come into this house again unless I invite you,” the Bat said. “I don’t want that stuff going on here. There’ll be trouble I can’t be responsible for. Real bad trouble.” I heard his ineffectual voice fading, a mean-streak voice floating in the air, rising up to the atmosphere, and because nothing in the universe is ever lost, heading out to the galaxies, and I thought: Jeez, what a bad ambassador for Earth that guy is!
Short fathers can be so weird. There must be something about short-fathering that makes men so crazy. If you’re middle-sized or tall you’re usually okay as a father. Otherwise, it’s mysteriously unreal for everybody and inexplicable, in addition.
We got into Oscar’s junk car, this old AMC Matador, with doors that sang when you opened them. I loved that sound and feel I should mention it.
“That son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said. “I’m gonna kill him.”
“You could try to never see him again,” I said.
Oscar put his head down on the steering wheel. This old car, I loved it, and I wanted to cheer Oscar up but couldn’t think of how.
“It’s ’cause of him,” Oscar said, “I was sort of a junkie for a while. How I got my start.”
“Wow,” I said. “I can see that.”
“I don’t want to talk about it though.” He started the ignition and the engine magically turned over. “Chloé,” he said, “we gotta make some money. We just gotta set ourselves up. I’m gonna kill him otherwise. Who’s this Janey person, this video woman?”
So I explained to him about it, one more time. When I finished explaining, he nodded. I figured that was the go-ahead.
Charlie, now you know. Now you know how we got ourselves into show business.
NINE
SOMETIMES I FEEL as if my life is a murder mystery, only I haven’t been murdered yet, and I don’t plan on being murdered at all, of course. But it’s puzzling — my life, I mean — the way a murder mystery is puzzling, with something missing or dead out there where everyone can see it — what happened to Bradley W. Smith — only I don’t know what it is, just this intimation of violence. I need a detective who could snoop around in my life and then tell me the solution to the mystery that I have yet to define, and the crime that created it.
For example: every morning, driving Turbo, my car, on the fifteen-minute commute to Jitters, I go around three curves. On two of these curves someone has planted little white wooden crosses to memorialize sudden vehicular deaths, and next to each cross, a display of artificial flowers. Artificial flowers! Petunias, these are, and violets, probably. Weeks pass, and they don’t fade. I wait for them to droop as in a natural cycle. But they are stubbornly unalive and therefore unwilting, so they must be plastic, with machine-made blues and yellows and whites. Imagine that: plastic-flower sorrow. It’s not ennobling. The quality of the grief has a discount aura, like a relic tossed haphazardly into a bin. I just mark it down and store it away every morning. I notice these things for my own protection.
It’s a short drive that I have to do, each dawn of the working week, and there are few signs of violence on it except for these crosses. I watch for minute changes in the landscape. I steer a straight line past the reddish-yellow-brick high school, ease my way around one of the fatal curves, and there’s the Tiny Tot Drop-in Day Care Center, its sign decorated with pseudofestive balloons and a teddy bear waving an American flag, followed by a few acres of scrubby farmland with two FOR LEASE signs planted near the highway.
The last cash crop on this acreage happened to be pumpkins. Just before Halloween two years ago, the pumpkins covered the lawn fronting the highway, and the farmer sat behind a card table, wearing his feedstore hat and collecting his money. From the farmhouse chimney, smoke rose day and night, from autumn till spring. Woodsmoke spread across the highway like a porous blue curtain and enveloped the passing cars in a domestic living room odor, also blue. The farmer, too, smelled of woodsmoke, and his skin looked like treated lumber. He dropped his meager earnings into a little steel box. He seldom smiled. Then we never saw him again. Another section of his land was bought up, and condominiums stand there now, a complex called The Polo Fields. No more fires, not now.
A drive-in bank is located near the second curve (you’d think the manager of the bank would try to remove the white cross and the plastic flowers from the edge of the bank’s manicured lawn, but no), and then you see a strip mall where the office of my dog’s veterinarian, Dr. Hasselbacher, is located. After the mall you would see, on this route, three separate apartment and condominium developments, one called Appleton Estates and the other One Pine Lane. At One Pine Lane, the eponymous white pine, a token tree five feet high, stands planted near the entrance. It’s amazing that the kids haven’t killed it by kicking it to death. What I mean is, day after day, freshly scrubbed schoolchildren wearing backpacks are lined up for the bus, jostling one another, early morning kids, dressed in bright-colored kid-clothes, yellows mostly, and nautical blues. The boys bravely kick the tree, ripping off the bark. The girls watch, some avidly.
I like seeing these kids, though I wish they’d leave the tree alone. I recall being a kid myself. I was a successful child. I count these multicolored schoolchildren each morning and try to remember how many are wearing backpacks and how many are carrying lunch boxes. Sometimes their parents come along and stand with them, smiling proudly and distractedly. This thought keeps me occupied and momentarily removes the image of those drive-by crosses and plastic flowers.
I drive with one hand on the wheel, holding my cup containing coffee mixed with vanilla and chocolate-chip ice cream in my other hand.
I pass by the health club. The manager is often outside, enjoying a cigarette.
SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, on one of our Sunday morning phone calls, when I asked my dad whether he had ever had trouble rising and shining at daybreak or getting motivated f
or his job at the agency, he became exasperated with me. He said, “Son, Monday morning is Monday morning. Everybody’s got to do it. There are no solutions, there’s only the work.” My father, a gentle man, becomes somewhat abrasive on long distance. “Brad, you want food on the table, you have to go to the job like everyone else,” he said, as if this thought had not occurred to me.
“I was just asking,” I said.
My poor old dad: liver spots, seven years from retirement, quadruple bypass, still overweight, a weekly participant at AA meetings. He’s got little scabs on his scalp, I don’t know from what. I imagined him standing there by the phone, a graying, pudgy Vietnam War survivor trying to offer sage-sounding advice to his son.
“Nobody likes a whiner,” he wheezed. “What brought this up?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A man’s gotta show up at the place where they expect you to show up.” He coughed and hawked phlegm into the mouthpiece, or so it sounded. “You have a good job. But since you want advice, I’ll tell you something to keep your spirits elevated. I just recalled this. Something your grandfather once told me. This was his cure for low spirits. When you pour your first cup of coffee of the day, if you’re feeling crummy, put a dab of ice cream into it. It’s festive. Then you gotta trudge off like everybody else, like I said, but you got the ice cream with you. Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”
Booze once, ice cream now, I thought. Jesus, the poor guy, I should be the one giving him consolation and reassurance.
“No,” I said. “Dad, it’s just . . . you know, with my marriage breaking up . . .”
“Listen, Brad,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I just can’t . . . I don’t know. You’re way past the age when you tell your parents much of anything. It’s just what?” My father worries about long-distance costs almost as much as he worries about me and sometimes is short in these conversations. Really, he means well. I’m not presenting his best side here. “You don’t like your job, managing that coffee store, then get another position.” He waited, and his voice grew a bit quieter. “Son, believe me, I blow some of my brains out at work every day. My head’s full of bullet holes. It’s what work does to you. Life is suffering, as the major religions say. Face up to facts.”
“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re on this subject of advice and everything, how have you managed to stay married to Mom for so long? What is it, thirty —”
“ — Thirty-eight years.”
“Thirty-eight years,” I said. “How’d you manage that?”
“That’s no sort of question. You can’t ask me that. But since you’ve asked, I’ll answer it. It’s simple. You want to know the secret? I’ll tell you what the secret is. Here’s the secret. I kept my mouth shut.” He waited, a wintry pause. “That’s the secret.”
There was another long cessation of talk, during which I smelled rubbing alcohol from somewhere in my house (had Bradley the dog found a bottle in the bathroom and knocked it over? I would have to look), and then I wished my father well and hung up. Months and months ago, after he had first met my wife-to-be, he had somberly told me that my marriage to Kathryn would not work out. So far he hadn’t reminded me that he had said so. He wasn’t that kind of parent, not so far.
I ARRIVE AT THE MALL and park my car and check the sky for rain or snow. On this particular morning, the sky has a weird pinkish cellophane-like tint to it. The air smells like factory exhaust. I walk in through one of the service entrances. I am a service person.
When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and the antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light.
Above us in the mall’s atrium, close to our entrance, is a skylight in a mystical geometrical shape like one of those Masonic emblems. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in business and profit. Only . . . anyway, across from us is a clothes store, Snooker, specializing in clothes that have a slick polyester thug appeal, and next to it on one side is Video Village, and on the other side is All Outdoors, where they sell what they call wilderness products — though there’s no wilderness within a thousand miles of here — hiking clothes and such, along with alpha-wave sound-effect tapes of breakers crashing on the beach and nearly extinct birds singing their farewell songs. The place smells of cedar and burlap. Nearer to us, down a sort of mall alleyway heading out to the north entrance, there’s a cinnamon roll concession and a one-hour photo lab, and a Fun Factory and a maternity store called Motherhood, next to a nutrition store for bodybuilders. They sell megavitamins, protein powders, and motivation magazines and tapes in there. The last store in that alley is eXcess-ories (“Everything eXtreme you want”).
Out on the courtyard is a salad-and-snack store, The Marquis de Salade. Next to our business is Heppelworth’s, which sells weekly, monthly, and yearly planners, and motivation posters and motivation books. They sell motivation in there, preachers of aggression, hard-sell cures for Monday morning blues. Motivation! Almost everyone at our end of the mall sells motivation except us. Everything around here is a cure for Monday morning. Well, I guess we do that, too, with our coffee. The biggest-selling items in Heppelworth’s are the framed posters with pictures of seagulls flying over misty Pacific coastlines thick with lyric beauty and printed wisdom underneath. There is an enormous markup for these items. Here’s a sample of what they print on the posters.
SUCCESS: Every effort no matter how large or small contains the kernel of its own reward. In every inventory your greatest asset is you.
Then there’s another one of a raging river cutting through a swath of pine woods. Underneath that you would read the following thought.
THE FUTURE: I can go no higher than my hopes can take me. Therefore I must be defined by my hopes and the awe-inspiring practicality of my dreams.
Sometimes I go into Heppelworth’s on my break. I speak to the manager, Windtunnel — not his real name, I don’t want him to sue me — about customer traffic and about business. Windtunnel occasionally visits us when he comes into Jitters on his break, though he always drinks the cheapest coffee we have. He has the murderous blank open-eyed look of a screech owl, and his breath smells of floor cleanser. Anyway, in Heppelworth’s, I look at these posters Windtunnel has put on display, and of course I feel the onset of mall hallucination. I am so far beyond being motivated that I want to punch the nearest clerk. But I don’t! That’s discipline. I start to think up my own motivation posters. I’d put them just below photographs of automobile junkyards and clear-cut forests and gray skies sick with cloudy indifference. The Gospel According to Bradley. The Book of Job, pronounced “job.”
DISCIPLINE: I am a peaceful man. Peace is my mission: I will not smite any customers today. That is sound business practice and a sure path to profits.
Then I go back to Jitters.
Following Kathryn’s departure from my life, I’d go to work after giving Bradley the dog his early morning walk. I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history. I’d look out through the steel-mesh security curtain at the dim interior spaces of the Briardale Mall. You know, stores have a peculiar bitter vacancy when there’s nobody in them, nobody wanting anything. They succumb to pointlessness.
I’d sit down and inspect our books and spreadsheets, then make sure the cups and saucers and equipment were all in place. I’d make the brews for the day and load the dispenser-the
rmoses with them. I’d open the cash register and do a count. I’d page through Specialty Coffee Retailer. I’d look out through those cell bars at the empty mall. Shiny surfaces. Every surface washed and polished. After an hour or so, the bakery would deliver our breads and pastries for the day. I’d chat with the delivery guy, Hans.
Jitters is meant to be inviting. We have wood floors and semiwood ceilings. We have tables and chairs, and large sofas and furniture — Pottery Barn knockoffs — scattered every which way. Soft surfaces. We have — well, we have my paintings on the wall. The Feast of Love is up there, in the back. A portrait of Bradley, my dog, is also up near the entryway, but it’s very abstract. You can’t tell whether it’s a dog or a contraption or what, though it looks friendly in its abstract way, like Nude Descending a Staircase except with a dog. You can see Bradley in there if you know where to look. He’s eating dog chow, the food suggested by drips and dribbles. It was cubism plus charm.
If I had everything ready for the day and a few moments free, I’d start to draw. I’d draw the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, the dragon that Harry Ginsberg had told me about. I got started with this art thing by being a cartoonist. I’d draw this dragon on little sheets of motivation paper I’d filched from Heppelworth’s, the dragon rubbing out all the wording in Heppelworth’s, all that motivation. Then I’d draw little pictures of him browsing and shopping and setting fire to JCPenney’s and Nordstrom’s and eating all of the cinnamon buns just down the mall from us and then eating the Mortal Kombat machine at Fun Factory. And then, resting. My dragon: like God, on the seventh day. Some of these drawings were technically quite difficult.
When the exterior doors of the mall open, the senior citizens arrive and start their mall walking. Smelling of antique cologne, they hold their elbows up and appear to be quite complacent as they grind by.
The Feast of Love Page 11