‘Billie!’ he called.
She drifted into the living room, wiping her hands on her jeans. She owned several aprons given to her by his mother, but thought them very unflattering.
‘What is it honey?’
‘Where are the kids?’
‘In their rooms. Homework. You told them, remember? No TV.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right. Good.’
‘Uh-huh. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just wondered.’
‘Okay. Dinner in half an hour.’
Something about the way they interacted these days made passion difficult to initiate. Were they too familiar to each other? Too self-conscious? Had they become like competitive siblings? Goddammit. He nursed his martini, felt the lust fade in a sweetly melancholy way.
Ah, Life!
In some ways, he felt he was still at the beginning, still making his plans, but here he was already: almost forty. The life expectancy for a man was seventy, which left him thirty more years – assuming the final decade was not spent as a dithering idiot. He felt panicky.
He’d begun painting last year because his latest great novel was stalled in chapter three as usual, and it depressed him. He’d never got beyond a third chapter. Sailing had become a bore too. All that preparation, and later all the putting away of sails and hosing down the decks. Plus Elisabeth and Billie whined whenever it got windy. No one talked to him when he was painting, and a painting could be finished in a day. He’d fallen in love with the smell of linseed oil, and the image of himself as an artist. At first he’d copied the masters: Leonardo, Van Gogh, Picasso. Then he tried painting from life, from photographs. His own house, the children, the beach, sailboats under the Golden Gate. But it was abstract expressionism that really caught his imagination. The challenge of expressing emotion about a thing, without painting the thing itself. To strip all effort at contrivance away, and rely on shapes and colours alone. Surely this was the epitome of art. Pollack, Motherwell, de Kooning had become his idols.
He sat in front of the television, and while the presenter interviewed a local politician, Jack imagined the challenge of putting his whole life into one painting. Taking his nebulous mass of memories and somehow summing them up with oil on a single canvas. How satisfying it would be, to frame it, hang it on the wall, step back and look at it and say, Well, there it all is! It might make some sense then.
‘Jack?’
‘Yes honey?’
‘Where are the peppercorns?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Okay.’
Seemed like he just filled that pepper grinder! Which perfectly illustrated his point. So – the painting of his life:
Birth. Dot.
Childhood. The twelve years of his mostly unremembered childhood would become a three-inch line of cobalt and chrome yellow. Hot dusty days of boredom. He remembered years of feeling shy, not at home but at school. Lonely. Add some dabs of transparent viridian for each trout he caught while fishing alone on the Sacramento River. Riding his bike home with the fish in a bag hanging from the handlebars. Pretending to go to church with his sister, then sneaking off to the park instead – that would deserve a dollop of chartreuse. Meeting their parents later in front of the church, and making up lies about the service. Being bad with Ivy had been great. Listening to his parents bicker had not been great. They bickered continually, with real venom. Mostly about money. Blue and yellow to make irritating green strokes.
High school. A horizontal line less than an inch, like a dash. Squiggles of burnt sienna and cadmium red would burst from it like a fountain, with patches of deep French ultramarine. Blissful days of swimming and sunbathing and walking for hundreds of hours with Ernie, back and forth to see movies at the Sebastiani Theatre. Talking about nothing and everything. Laughing their heads off. Girls, well, they’d been okay to date, sure, but he’d enjoyed those long walks with Ernie more. And Ivy taking off with that young husband of hers. Oh! That would be deepest darkest indigo, and moist from all those tears he did not cry. Then his dad died, aged forty-eight, and six months later Glen Miller died too. Black smudges, grey at the edges.
Army. Fewer splotches of paint than high school. Some zinc white in there, which would be grey where it mixed with black, in between an inch or two of horizontal blue. That nameless girl in Japan. He could honour her now, with a shape that was both sensual and dignified. Perhaps tones of pure ivory. And though he remembered laughing a lot with all those other soldiers, it hadn’t been real laughter. Not the kind he had with Ernie. He’d not kept in touch with a single army friend.
College. An oddly shaped ellipse of time, with no horizontal lines at all. It would be an alizarin crimson explosion, running vertically right off the canvas. Yards and yards of Lizbeth’s breasts! Hemingway! Harry James! So many discoveries, so many firsts, it was as if those times had been too large somehow to fit into their allotted minutes and hours. Had leaked into another, more eternal, dimension. That must be what timelessness meant. Literally unattached to time in the normal sense. Defying the laws of physics. Most of all, he remembered consciously refining his own personality. By the time he graduated, Jacko MacAlister was solid, both inside and out. Witty, assured, sexy. Or at least he was under the impression he was, he now realised.
Billie. First week knowing her had lasted about three years – probably an excitable orange, with the oil so thick it would dry in spikes. But that romance had disappeared in a whirlwind gust, and since marriage, the years had gone by without leaving a week’s worth of trace, really. More like the transparency of watercolours – mostly green and pale blue. Sure, the babies came, and that had been exciting in a way, little wriggly splodges each of them, but in memorable terms, overall it had been blurry. Losing Charlie would be magenta jabbing into deepest blue. Jab jab jab. But then that too had been absorbed into smoother, more forgettable days. And forgettable days didn’t count. Their shape was nowhere near the size it ought to be.
Every change stretched time, but only initially. Like walking the same route every day through the field to the beach, thought Jack. Initially it felt like a long walk, but eventually a path was created. And soon the path was walked in a daydream, feet carving deep ruts. Probably the same as everybody’s life, he thought with a sigh. Not so special after all, damn it.
Four years ago they’d stopped moving house. Perhaps that would explain his building restlessness. The sense that something would have to give soon. Like a fault that was due for a quake. If there were to be no more adrenalin-charged house moves, or new jobs, or more babies, or more wives – then what else could change? He told himself that tomorrow he’d attack his great novel again, or start that great painting depicting his life. Quit his job and find a way to start his own publishing house. Make a stance against time passing. Against death itself.
He closed his eyes and let his daily routine run through him. Get up, do a few push-ups, grab some coffee, read the paper, drive down San Pedro, passing the same old man jogging at 4th & Heatherton. And the lady with the three babies in the giant stroller. And the tattooed teenage boy hitching. It always seemed like just five minutes since he last saw them.
He focused on the television again. The hippies were still marching. Was this live news? It seemed so. Life was happening elsewhere, to other people. And it seemed to have happened overnight, all these social changes. He and Billie had been holding steady at young, young, youngish, then suddenly wham! Not young. Ponytailed boys and long-haired girls were having sex all the time and laughing at guys like himself. Uptight dudes in suits. Squares. The world was full of undulating copulating bodies, humping away right in plain view.
Free love.
Jealous? Oh yes, he admitted it. Jack was bitterly, passionately jealous. It was so unfair. When he’d been their age, he’d been in Japan wearing an army uniform. And then studying, then working to support a family. Not having an entirely unpleasant time (who said army food was terrible? Jack had loved K-rations), but still. Rewards were supposed to
come from hard work and discipline; hippies were cheating. They didn’t pay their dues to sing the blues; they didn’t even want to sing the blues. Dreadful racket, their music. Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. But what really annoyed him was the way hippies called themselves freaks and rebels. They were spoiled babies; nothing radical about them at all. Even his own kids pissed him off. Sam, who was nearly fifteen, was about to join the peaceandloveman club, he could tell.
‘Stop being such a drag, man.’
‘Don’t you call me man,’ Jack had scolded his son.
‘Okay, Jack.’
‘And don’t call me Jack either. Dad. You call me Dad.’
Fledgling flower child, with his tie-dye shirts and KMPX blaring on the radio.
1967 was laughing at Jack, all right. And San Francisco was a party he had not been invited to. He was forty years old during the summer of love and pissed as hell. He could hear his wife whistling in the kitchen, as she clattered pots and pans.
‘Billie!’
‘What is it now, honey?’
Wiping her hands on her jeans again. Her roots were showing. This was made more obvious because she’d pulled her shoulder length blond hair into a tight ponytail high on her head, fifties-style. Her bangs were about an inch above her eyebrows. Those sexy caterpillars. Looking at her, even while irritated at absolutely everything, he still couldn’t help thinking: Damn fine figure of a woman, my wife.
‘Any more nuts?’ He offered up the empty nut dish.
‘I’ll have a look.’
She took the dish, and he took a Viceroy from the bronze turtle cigarette holder. Lit it for something to put in his mouth, watched Billie return to the kitchen. He could do this from his living room chair. Did other men still check out their wives, after sixteen years? It felt a bit furtive, watching her lean over to find the bag of nuts in the bottom cupboard.
She brought the nuts and sat on the arm of his chair, trying to sense his thoughts. He was in a bad mood, she knew that for certain, and whenever he was tense, he did seem to get more…affectionate.
‘Oh, look, Jack, isn’t that Union Square?’
To Billie, it seemed innocent – a whole generation of kids had cottoned on to the war-is-bad idea, as if they’d just discovered the wheel. Bless! Just look at them flash each other the peace sign, like a tribal code. They all seemed adorable. Like Sam and Elisabeth. Silly, soft kids, doing silly semi-dangerous things. Half the time she wanted to walk right up to them, scold them for their own good. Give the girls baggy shirts to cover up their nipples. Pass out bus tickets to the boys hitching on the on-ramps. Overall, she preferred hippies to the beatniks. The Beat movement had never really interested her; black was unflattering, unless you were fat. Loners and show offs and pretentious queer poets were beatniks. Oh, well. She guessed everyone had to belong to some group when they were young. But wait, had she ever belonged to a group? She’d been a cheerleader once.
She thought of her mother’s world, and her grandmother’s. All those silent movies, the Buster Keatons and Laurel & Hardys. The rattling little black cars that needed to be crank started, the stiff corsets and eternal gloves, the way every man and woman had worn a hat. How those things must, in their own day, have seemed so exciting, so modern compared to what had come before. And now look at them. People just laughed at their old-fashioned ways. As for the clothes – well, it had recently occurred to her that the outfits her mom wore, were simply the clothes she’d always worn. And her grandmother hadn’t suddenly started wearing flowery dresses when she’d turned seventy; she’d always favoured floral. No doubt, the Levi jeans and L.L. Bean polo shirt that felt youthful to her right now, would one day be perceived as old lady clothes too. She thought it strange and amusing, that every generation felt superior to the previous one. Not only superior, but less innocent. She’d often wondered when it would apply to her own generation, and here it was. Happening right before her still-young eyes.
Billie was secretly enchanted by hippies. They reminded her of the travelling show that used to come to the county fairground every spring. The rides, the costumes, the exoticness, the way all her friends and family would become slightly exotic that weekend too. Stuffing pink cotton candy into their mouths, addicted to the sensation of melting-to-sweet-nothingness on their tongues. Drinking too much beer, laughing hard, shooting plastic rifles for lurid stuffed pandas. The late sixties, so far, had that same glorious anarchy. So shamelessly raunchy! She’d never forget her sister, Louise, screaming from the top of the Ferris wheel, that she loved Johnny Tib, who was, of course, still married to that tramp he got pregnant in sophomore year. Betsy Snodgrass, with her pointy bra and kohl eyeliner.
Johnny, on the ground, shouting up to Louise: ‘Run away with me then!’
And Louise screaming back: ‘Yes! Yes!’
By Monday he’d finished with Louise, and she’d consoled herself with bespectacled sweet Chuck, who’d always been too shy to ask her out, and now, in her humiliation, saw his chance at last. Billie remembered her sister clinging to him as if he’d rescued her from a burning building, but for years now, Louise had done nothing but complain that Chuck was boring. His hair was still a crew cut, he liked his jeans ironed and his mealtimes regular, while she’d let her hair grow long, wore headbands, and begun meditation classes. Come to think of it, she’d stopped shaving her legs too. God only knew what was going on with her armpits.
The sixties was a travelling show her sister might be joining, but Billie didn’t have an admission ticket for it. There it was, just the other side of the chain-link fence. Visible, audible, smellable. Once, alone in the bathroom, she’d made the peace sign to herself in the mirror. Smiled the way she’d seen some of the long-haired bare-faced girls smile: sleepily, carelessly, sexily. Eyes half shut. Did being Mrs Jack MacAlister, mother of two, driver of a station wagon, mean she was forever banned from summers of love? And how had this happened so quickly? She’d thought they were the hip ones. Even the word hip was not hip any more.
She was still on the arm of his chair, and they were both still watching the news. Weather now. Tomorrow would be in the nineties again. Crazy-making headachy heat.
‘Jack, the kids are on vacation.’
‘So?’
‘So how can they do homework?’
‘Jesus, Billie. I don’t know. I just meant…go to your rooms! The homework bit just came out automatically. They were both rude.’
‘Can I tell them they can come out now?’
Pause. Jack looked up at Billie, a silly smile creeping out. He loved it when she kowtowed to him like this. So what if it was just her ploy.
‘Nah,’ he said, and slid an arm around her waist. ‘Not yet.’
She knew he loved her. These quiet moments were the best. The news program cut to a commercial. Rice-A-Roni! The San Francisco treat! Rice-A-Roni! Everybody’s got the beat! She made a mental note to buy some, then yawned, raised her arms up high, let her breasts rise too, till Jack had to stop pretending he was watching television. He pulled her onto his lap, and she giggled her little-girl giggle. In this moment of forgetfulness, they slipped into their old selves, and every single thing in the world – even the children – disappeared.
Then the phone rang.
Jack tried to hold on to her, but Billie sprang up to answer it. It was sufficient that he’d pulled her onto his lap. Anticipation, for her, was the best part. But Jack’s spirits dipped immediately. She never wanted sex.
‘Jack, it’s the boy about the Volkswagen you saw in the paper.’
He took the phone, and Billie danced a little and sang softly. Sugar! Honey, honey! You are my candy girl, and you got me wanting you. One thing about Billie, she’d always been light on her feet. Jack could hike, play tennis, sail a boat, ride a ten speed, but could he dance? Billie danced around him now like a nymphet, as he talked on the phone about mileage and air-cooled engines.
After the boy had been paid and the VW Beetle parked in his gar
age, Jack did a territorial inventory. Emptied out the glove compartment, peeked inside the trunk, under the seats. The boy had been just another spoiled brat driving a car his dad bought him, and there was lots of junk left behind. Hershey wrappers, beer cans, butts. Jack threw all these out onto the floor of the garage, with disgust. Then, in the little pocket on the back of the driver’s seat, he found a sandwich baggie full of green…what the hell?
A week later, Sam was rummaging in his dad’s sock drawer for a pair to wear to school, as usual. Why were his dad’s socks so much nicer? They just were. And there it was, nearly an ounce of marijuana in his father’s sock drawer. Jiminyfuckencricket! He’d only just begun smoking joints himself, and felt both proud and sinful about it. Now he frowned. Was there no way to rebel against this man?
They decided to go for a walk in the woods, not too far from home. The neighbour’s dog followed them, a red setter. It was a delicious day, and the sun filtered down through the eucalyptus trees. The air was a warm fug of tree menthol and dust raised from their hiking boots. After a while they stopped, sat on a log, and Sam rolled a joint. Jack loved to smoke, and he sucked the joint down like the first cigarette of the day. The dog wandered off. There she went, her tail thwacking the underbrush.
‘Lady!’ called Jack. ‘Lady, come here!’
‘Just leave it, Dad. Not our dog.’
‘We didn’t stop her following us.’
Jack kept calling, and the dog kept walking. Then his voice dissolved. He couldn’t even finish saying her name without giggling so hard he fell off the log.
‘La…deeee!’
‘La…! Dee…!’
‘La…la….la…! Dee…deee…dee!’
‘You okay, Dad? Guess you’re feeling it now, eh?’
‘Where’s she gone? The damn dog’s gone!’ This was the funniest sentence Jack had ever uttered or heard, and he was speechless for a good five minutes. Tears were rolling down his cheeks, and his son laughed too. In a surprised, conspiratorial way. Then Jack stood up slowly, smiled goofily and meandered off. This way, that way, an aimless gait till he was out of sight.
Wait For Me Jack Page 20