Gargoyles

by Bill Gaston

  He wonders what the men outside will think of the radio. Or the project glued onto his bedroom wall — the pocket watch, one of his early dissemblies. Every piece, almost sixty, some so small he can’t see them in this light, stuck to the wall in a pattern that was his best effort at patternlessness. Now he sees fractals. To the two friends who had occasion to see this paste-up he offered the word “installation.” The friends just nodded, and he suffered a dip of dismay that they didn’t know he was joking. As if at seventy-seven he had the arrogance to change careers and say he’s now a visual artist. As if he’d call a childish paste-up “art.” It’s tragic you can get this old and people you call friends don’t know when you’re joking. He wonders what the three men below will see when his dissembled watch falls under their flashlight beams — a starscape? golden snow? — or if it will register in their eyes at all.

  He checks for them out the window. They are behind the rhododendrons, looking up. He doubts they can see him. They look afraid. As they should.

  The dissembling itself was no joke. Taking the watch apart was only serious. He’d chosen such a small object as a challenge to age, had gone out and purchased jeweller’s tools and an eyeglass. He remembers tweezing that first piece, trying not to shake, pulling it gently away from its neighbour piece and away from the whole. Making it bigger by making space. It’s a new architecture, a purest architecture he’s learning, one that widens the spirit. In the stomach a palpable emptiness and glow. Each piece taken from a whole is another door lifted off hinges.

  He falls back onto his pillow. He’s breathing hard for no reason except age. He wonders if he shouldn’t put on some clothes for this.

  Richard interrupts the silence to give the taxi driver a second address. He really should see the house. How long has it been since he came out for Christmas? Three years? Four?

  His accent heavy, the driver is squat and feline and could come from any number of hot countries. He appears irritated by the detour, as if he’s being asked something that threatens his wallet, though the meter ticks steadily up. When Richard spots the house and asks the driver to slow down, the driver swings to him with apparent dismay and asks, “You want?”

  It doesn’t help that the house the driver has been asked to stop at is doorless, with dark gaps like empty eye sockets. Through the front door, furniture can be seen in the hall shadows. Even the double garage door is gone. The perimeter of the house is barred with two strips of yellow police tape and Richard doesn’t bother to explain when the driver turns again to stare at him. He takes in this house he hardly knows, the helpless little curve of its drive, meant to suggest an estate. The faux shutters. He wonders why, ten or twelve years ago, his parents ended up here, in suburbs. They had lived in Barcelona. New York. New Mexico. Up a fjord ten miles from the Alaskan border. Likely they were here for the same reason as everybody else — convenience. Proximity to a hospital.

  Richard wonders if the police were calling the home invasion a home invitation because of the absence of doors. Well, why wouldn’t they joke? Isn’t his father’s eccentricity funny? Or, if we just cut to it and call it dementia, what’s dementia except nature’s ugliest joke? To put the wrinkling people back in diapers and also make them crazy.

  He wonders if he has the legal right to go in and look around. Though why bother. He’s been in a thousand houses like it, sold dozens with a similar floor plan.

  Richard remembers the trips, which were always in service to his father’s career, where he first learned about the qualities of the desirable home. All those times as a child hanging around odd buildings, learning concepts like “natural light” and “onsite-energy source.” He remembers that long drive to New Mexico when, leaving a gas station, him in the back seat with a new old-fashioned pop bottle in hand, his father explained “neo” to him. And when he arrived at their new home he understood that “Neo Vernacular” meant a huge old weathered country shack that was actually brand new and had heated floors, disguised solar panels, and a cool hidden electric dumbwaiter that delivered stuff up to his bedroom.

  This house, his father’s last, had no architectural label.

  Richard wonders at the house’s worth, and the size of his commission. Because of course he’ll be getting the listing. Why wouldn’t he? He isn’t up on the market here but it’s in a nice neighbourhood and might be in the half-million range.

  But how perverse is this? To hear about his father’s attack, to fly out and pass the house on his way to his distraught mother — and then to pause and calculate commission? He feels some guilt, but wishes he felt more.

  When told to continue downtown, the driver groans as if put upon.

  He can’t find his robe in the dark of the closet so he feels for candles in his drawer and locates two. They are the Gaudi tower replicas a colleague sent from Barcelona as a kitschy joke; from the look of it Gaudi wanted to build a vertical city for hobbits. Space hobbits. Catholic space hobbits.

  He now must go back to his bedside table for the matches. He’s still getting used to the non-electric life. Nearing the window, absurdly, he covers his bare groin with cupped hands, though everything he covers is grey as a ghost. In any case, the men are no longer where they were.

  He goes to the closet again and, forgetting, flips the dead light switch. Then, cursing, returns to the bedside table, grabs the matches he’s forgotten, and finally lights the candles. How is it possible to keep forgetting the same thing?

  He does remember the breast that made him quit electricity. Not being a football fan he hadn’t actually seen it, not live, but in the after-hubbub he saw replay after replay. He found it interesting that Canadian replays showed the breast, while American replays masked it with blur, like the face of an alleged felon. Actually it was the Canadian version he hated most. To see a breast treated like that. First, that it was encased in ugly armour, then revealed with sham violence. With that gesture, society got a sick self-portrait. And in their outrage that children had glimpsed a breast, the howling Bible-thumpers were just as sick. How has a breast become a dirty thing? How is it possible? Eleanor’s breasts, he remembers encountering them that first time and feeling them in his soul as the heart of their difference — and to think that beauty itself could make him breathe quickly! Then the same breasts feeding Richard, this odd connection between mother and son, the taut nipple a kind of weaning umbilicus, granting a child its independence slowly. That a breast was sheathed in crust then ripped free and exposed as everyman’s soft-brown-shit-of-desire, well, it made him want to quit humanity. He pictures himself up a forested slope roping together a functional hut, no power pole in sight, leading his young Eleanor through the door, under the hanging blanket, both of them barefoot on the cool swept clay. Eleanor’s breasts will have at times seen the sun, but only when it was her whim, nothing to do with the mass neurosis-of-theday. The TV breast wasn’t even all that well shaped. It looked like a listless football. It occurs to him that maybe that’s all he’s complaining about here. He hopes he didn’t go to the basement and kill the main switch and quit electricity because some celebrity’s breast wasn’t what he wanted it to be.

  But that’s that, no more electricity. He will learn what this life is like, and try to feel it as another opening. Hard, at first. For instance, he thinks he remembers his decision at night, and, after descending to the basement and locating the panel, the second he pulled the switch he found himself in the reality of a pitch-black cellar, against the cement wall most distant from the stairs, with no flashlight. But a promise was a promise and the switch stayed down, though he tripped once finding the stairs. The next day he got a taxi to deliver, along with a few groceries, a gross of candles. Then he had to phone a friend to bring over some matches.

  The entrance to his mother’s building sports an ostentatious royal blue awning that lacks only a smarmy doorman. Otherwise the building looks solid. How fancy does waterfront have to be? Richard finds her name on the panel and buzzes. Answering, her stilted voice bet
rays someone new to the system. She tells Richard her suite number is 631, then instructs him that it’s on the sixth floor. Richard is reminded that his mother is eighty, then remembers she is capable of that kind of humour.

  She greets him at the door and they hug. It’s been at least three years, and again Richard is shocked by a body impossibly dwindled, a bony baby bird, with a fledgling’s baldness too. Her eyes have gained an odd creaminess and colour, the slight blue of milk. He’s been suffering this shock-of-age since she was fifty, ever since he’d stopped living in their city, but how can it surprise him so deeply every time?

  His mother makes her way back across the living room to sit in a chair angled toward the picture window. Richard steps up beside her, takes in the million-dollar view of the harbour. In the near distance a sea plane takes off, though one can hear nothing. Sailboats creep along under power, some coming in from the wind, others going out to find it. He sees waterfront signs for a wax museum, an undersea world, some hotels.

  “I’ve always wanted this,” his mother says.

  “I can see why,” Richard responds neatly, pretending not to hear the weight in her voice.

  Adding even more weight, she lifts a beer bottle off the windowsill and sips from it. His mother, who never drank. Never, in all the years with his father, who enjoyed it almost to the point of abuse, who tried to get her to join him. Richard finds this beer of hers spectacularly perverse but he says nothing.

  “And how’s Melanie?” his mother asks.

  “She’s fine. She’s good.” How is Melanie? She’s fine.

  “Give her my love when you phone her to report on things.”

  “I will.” The nose of a huge ship has come into view. White, a cruise ship. “How long have you been here again?”

  “Right after the doors came off.”

  “And how long has —”

  “I put up with the blankets for about a week.”

  “Right.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. The first week a storm came right in our front hall, blew over the coat rack, and stained the antique hutch.”

  “I know. We talked on the phone, Mom. About those blankets.”

  She meets his eye in a way that says, If that is so, why didn’t you fly out and make things right? He wants to tell her that, at the time, he didn’t — he really didn’t — think it was that serious. During another, ritual phone call, his father had laughed explaining the blankets. His mother was in the background and she wasn’t screaming or crying. Richard knew she was scared, but he chalked that up to being less adventurous with age. He knew his father was being conceptual again, but he didn’t know how dangerously conceptual.

  “I checked in here three months ago this week.”

  “This is a condo, right, Mom?”

  “Yes. And the furniture was all here. And dishes for eight. Though I haven’t entertained. Well, just Dorothy that one time. New Year’s Eve we shared a bottle of wine she brought over. The cork almost took her head off!”

  “You didn’t spend New Year’s Eve with Dad?”

  “He didn’t spend New Year’s Eve with me.” His mother turns almost completely away to continue her watch over the small harbour.

  Richard reaches down to take her elbow and squeeze it. She doesn’t respond.

  “So, Mom, did you buy this place? Or are you renting?”

  “I’m —” She stiffens, momentarily confused. A little spasm seems to help and, finding the word, she turns to him, angry with him for asking.

  “It’s a lease.”

  Richard nods, not knowing what to say, except, “It’s nice.”

  “It has a door.”

  “Right.”

  “When your father had our doors removed? And they were just awful empty holes? He called them his gargoyles.”

  “Gargoyles?”

  “That was it for me.”

  Richard easily recalls the summer at the lake when his father taught him about gargoyles. Gargoyles became a large part of that summer and several beyond. He remembers coming upon his father late one night, sketching under the coal-oil lamp. Even then his father embraced the old-fashioned. There at the lake, neighbours found his oil lamps more quaint than strange.

  His father was chuckling while sketching. Richard braved an interruption — he was in his pyjamas, he was supposed to be in bed — to see what was so funny. In lamplight his father’s round, tanned face shone deep orange, and his cheeks and chin where he hadn’t shaved fell almost to black and made him a little frightening. He was sketching with two of Richard’s pencil crayons, a brown and a grey. What looked to be a series of hunched dragons was, his father explained, a creature called a gargoyle.

  “I like that one with his eyes closed,” Richard said, pointing, not quite touching the paper. You weren’t to touch Dad’s drawing, though these didn’t look like his work-drawing.

  “He’s supposed to be squinting.”

  “I like that fat one too. How his tongue curls like that.”

  “Do you think it’s too long for a tongue?”

  “Make it even longer,” Richard said, only happy to be asked. “But how come they’re all sitting like that?”

  “They’re squatting. On the ledge of a building. In this case a cottage. I’m designing a summer cottage, next lake over, and the client wants,” his father snorted and shook his head, “four gargoyles. One for each corner eave. Actually you’d call this cottage a country estate. But I don’t think the project will happen.”

  His father explained that no two gargoyles were alike. They were creatures of the imagination. If you travelled Europe you could see them on the oldest buildings. Yes, they often had their tongues out, or their claws, and in some cultures, their penises. They were trying to look ugly on purpose, because they were actually protectors, protectors of your home. Their job was to scare away evil spirits.

  “What did the evil spirits look like?”

  “You mean what do they look like?” And here his father put his round, orange face close to Richard’s and looked scary-on-purpose, like a devil.

  That summer Richard began making gargoyles himself. What began as a joke around the dinner table became a real project for him, and a dizzying leap for his artwork, which up till now had graced merely the refrigerator. His father was not only letting him carve gargoyles for the eaves of their cottage, but encouraging him to. His mother protested that gargoyles would ruin the look of a cottage. To her more subtle hints that a ten-year-old might not be capable of turning out art worthy of adorning “not just a playhouse, but a place someone lives,” his father said, “What do we care?” This gave even young Richard pause, for wasn’t caring about that exactly what an architect did?

  His father bought carving tools and showed how every single cut had to be away from your body. He chainsawed the roughest of shapes for him, based on Richard’s preliminary sketch. Cedar was one of the easiest woods to carve, he explained, and had natural preservative in its sap, which was why it lasted so long, years and years, even unpainted, and which was why it was used for totem poles, and why it would be perfect for his gargoyle. This was Richard’s proudest moment of the summer, hearing that his father wanted his gargoyle to last. His first, which did indeed end up on a corner eave of their cottage, had a single bent horn on his forehead. He was fat, and smiling. His impossible tongue was too big and fat to be a tongue at all and looked like a second head. Gouged eyebrows formed a V above his nose to show any evil spirits how mean he would be if they got close.

  Even now, decades later, Richard can see every homely, botched detail of his first gargoyle. Whenever he smells cedar, he sees that face emerging, smiling and mean, from the tortured wood. What was frustrating, but then not, was how different it was from what he’d drawn. At first he hated that he couldn’t carve very well. Then he learned to see that the gargoyle had always had its own idea of its face and it wasn’t going to behave. Because that’s what gargoyles were like. They might sit up on your house for you, but there’s
no way they would ever behave.

  He hears faint footsteps and, he thinks, whispering. His thumb is bleeding pretty badly. He had momentarily sat himself down at his radio dissembly, inspired to pry the metal collar from a glass tube, and the glass gave way in his grip, imploding with a chuck, cutting his thumb. He has been sitting watching his blood, its beading up to form a drip, which grows heavy enough for gravity to take across his wrist, leaving a black trail, and plick, onto the tabletop. Five drips so far. It is slowing, clotting. He smiles at the final bead. Will it or won’t it? Such a tentative dissembling. He wouldn’t have the patience for it.

  So, the men are inside. They’re in the house, he’s in danger, and Eleanor was right. She is always right. The outside did come in. His guess had been that no one would dare.

  He hears them down there whispering. Which means they are afraid. So he’s still right. He’s still right.

  As is Eleanor. As are the men downstairs. Everyone’s right. Everyone’s always right. Isn’t that funny? He does believe exactly this impossibility: one may be deluded or mistaken but at one’s inmost core everyone’s always right. He thinks he truly understands this to be the human condition. He also understands his version to be far more tragic than the other one, that of original sin, which is nothing more than the church’s cheap bait. The tragedy is that, though we are all completely right, it’s hard to know what to do.