Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  Never, in any comradely way, have we been close, but at the time when such things still mattered, I did all I could to displease and disappoint him. We overlapped, then, as adversaries, like ink stains on an office blotter. His dictates and my flaunted heresies notched together, achieving an intimacy that we never could.

  When Carla and I were still quite small, he began to organize us in dispute games, assigning pro and con roles on a current events topic or courtroom recreation. The winner was rewarded with a blue ribbon strip pinned on by the loser. Another learning experience was trying to mediate between him and our mother—in short, learning not to. Their harsh, spiraling set-tos were precious to them, the cream in their coffee, oddly but consistently comforting, and not to be intruded on. Later, having the eligible skills, Carla and I were allowed to come in and widen the war, sniping away at targets of opportunity until we, and usually mother too, were routed by Gordo. His triumphant rages would immobilize the house. He’d bellow and stamp like some parodic Lear while we hid out in our rooms.

  Carla pretends that he has softened in recent years, paled like his pearl-gray eyes. But I say once a bully, always a bully. She wrote me to describe his long afternoon walks, his enthusiasm for azaleas, the swaying of his liver-spotted hands over reference books as he composed another crossword puzzle.

  “He’s not as ashamed of retirement as I thought he’d be. True, they’ve kept him on some sort of oracular retainer….”

  No doubt. This is the man who finessed the Hotel Armonk case and quashed a governorship. Carla, gently wishful, veils the record of the past with her azaleas. But I remember the cruel mimic, the arm-twister, the scary drunk who grew more silent and impermeable as the level in the bottle fell, the unending smallness of this man who had his monogram faced in brick above the fireplace and once threw a close friend’s toupee over a yacht railing in order to resolve a cribbage argument.

  “I’m certain he’s ready to reconcile,” Carla went on. “If only you’ll make the first move.”

  Dear, dimly available sister, it’s already done. We are as reconciled as two sums in an accounting ledger.

  I was living in L.A. the last time we spoke. Violet and I were separated but not yet divorced, and I was brimming over with aimless nostalgia. It was Easter Sunday and the Long Lines were overloaded with ritual calling.

  “What’s up, Dad? Are you dyeing eggs?”

  “No.”

  “It’s eighty degrees here and I can see palm trees from my window.”

  “Eggs, trees. I suppose you’ve got a couple of canaries with you.”

  The gaseous hush of vodka was in his voice.

  “Just me, Dad. Me, myself, and I.”

  “Fine, fine. And what are you doing for money?”

  “That’s not why I called.”

  “All right then, surprise me.”

  I could see him looking at his watch, at his dull reflection in the black surface of the hall table.

  “Actually, I was trying to remember which cheek your ski-pole scar is on. It’s been that long.”

  “The Alps, my God. Now there’s one sight I go right on seeing. Nothing on your horizon, is there? Movieland. All that stucco. Marquees and fruit juice stands instead of peaks.”

  “And not a crumb of snow.”

  “So then. You’re still with that whatsername of yours?”

  “Not right now.”

  He filled the space for judgmental militance with a slow question. “Shall I send a check?”

  “That’s not why I—”

  “Yes, fair enough. You don’t have to shout.”

  No, I really didn’t have to. Finally.

  “Your sister has invited me for holiday dinner,” he went on blandly. “The wine will be corrosive and the lamb will be underdone. Some little barefoot friend of hers will ask me to dance.”

  “Give Carla my love.”

  We exchanged bad jokes, promised to send postcards, and that was it.

  26

  DEFINITIVE TECHNIQUE. PRECISE SCRUTINY. A conviction that nothing is missed. Certain group vanities are encouraged among the staff here, keeping foremost in mind that we register only as units in a system. A system, elementary in its perfection, to surround and contain a precise whole. And each movement within the system a refinement, a distillation. They want us comfortable in such beliefs, like mice in a warm winter burrow.

  Do I contradict? I typify. Another nibbling mouse, a 2T five-year man sent down to this edit room dismal as a Bulgarian subway, on an errand that demonstrates the system’s reach, the ability of its agents in the field to surround and contain. Their booty is now before me, racks and racks: the random tape inventory of a small independent station in west Texas, now, along with its owner, defunct. It had offered the sort of programming favored in trailer parks and residential hotels, old reruns and cut-rate movies, a world of black-and-white. It had offered a removal in time, an undoing of age and failure, something to still the guts. Cramped, retching feed clerks, the manicurists and windmill mechanics, muttering, smoking, sniffling, conjuring dust shapes from out of the furniture, were soothed by Petticoat Junction and Mr. Ed. In sepia Mexican melodramas, they found a past more favorable than their own. And now, under my hands, all would enter into the system, a minute flicker of refinement.

  The tepid denouement of Bachelor Father unspools before me, a commercial extolling the spreadability of a peanut butter named for J. M. Barrie’s androgyne. I reach for cold coffee and a fresh log sheet, am riven by a voice.

  “Rich in emulsifiers,” my mother says.

  The last television appearance of her paltry career, a cosmetics spot. Immaculate, she moves dreamily at the edge of a formal garden.

  “Treat yourself like royalty,” my mother says.

  On her pilgrimages into Manhattan, she usually had lunch with Sonia Brooks. They had both sung in the choir at Temple University, had both seen their young ambitions wither in the perpetual shade of a city too tall. Sonia would never get a seat on the stock exchange and my mother wasn’t going to star in a prize-winning revival of Anna Lucasta, so they foraged for ethnic restaurants and obscure museums, drank in hotel bars and flirted hazardlessly with waiters.

  Soma’s husband, a Scottish homosexual, ran an advertising agency named after himself. His client list included a hotel in the Poconos, a commuter airline, textile mills and medical supply houses, the tourist bureau of a blighted Caribbean island, and a brand-new product called Dewbeads.

  “Made from goat placentas or something.” Sonia tied a knot in her cocktail straw. “And this TV ad they’re planning—I’ve seen the storyboard and all—it’s perfect for you. Mature but handsome, a vision from the tennis court, like—”

  “Too bad I don’t work anymore,” my mother said.

  “Damn you.” Sonia hissed like a sub-code steam line with drunken belligerence, her tipped Punt E Mes bleeding into the tablecloth. “Damn your reticence. Ian has an awful case of amoebic dysentery and he’ll do anything I say. Do you want the thing or don’t you?”

  Rising at 4 a.m., breakfasting on vodka and grape juice, my mother was limousined to the location, an estate in Lyme, Connecticut, that had recently come under the aegis of the National Historic Trust.

  The company man was distressed. “It’s a fucking castle. It’s intimidating,” he said. “Okay, the look is nice, but we’ve got to move product.”

  “Exteriors only,” said the director, a graduate of the Austrian State Film School. “No castle.”

  In the garden, union men in green jumpsuits sprayed blossoms with glycerin water while my mother circled a marble fountain and tried to remember her lines.

  “You must be calm but underneath in flames,” the director told her. “You await your lover here. You are wet between the legs in anticipation. In every movement of your body, we must read this sad history.”

  On the first take, she trembled so badly that the company man asked if she was on drugs. She took it too fast, too slow, missed marks. A li
ght stand fell, a plane passed overhead. On the sixteenth take, she tripped on a flagstone and soiled her white dress.

  “Better pull yourself together,” the wardrobe lady cautioned. “They’re really frantic out there.”

  My mother sobbed on a cot inside the little airless trailer. She considered making a break, heading off into the trees, but imagined them tracking her with dogs.

  “Just pretend everyone else is like out on bail,” said the wardrobe lady. “That’s how I do it.”

  Outside, the sun was high, seemed to pulse. Unhappy with lighting conditions, the director worked himself into a tantrum, struck at a mike boom and ripped open his hand. The company man fled to phone New York.

  “There was something about the sight of blood,” she later told us. “It filled me with a sense of peace.”

  They wrapped on the twenty-first take and my mother passed out on the limo ride home, dreamed of Sonia selling shares in a Viennese blood bank.

  The Dewbeads commercial aired for the first time on a network telecast of Charade with Audrey Hepburn, and we all circled the set to applaud.

  “I’ve never seen you look so beautiful,” Carla breathed, plucking her lip, smelling of bath talc.

  “Convincing,” judged Gordo, and filled his mouth with cashews.

  I said: “Mom, this is what you need to get restarted.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She looked wistfully at the screen, where George Kennedy was swinging the shiny metal hook he had in place of a hand. “I even have new pictures to send out.”

  I no longer believe, as I did then, that she allowed herself any real expectations. And, in fact, nothing ever came of it, beyond a personal appearance at a shopping plaza in Valley Stream. Dewbeads, widely reported to cause skin rash, was eventually removed from the market by the Food and Drug Administration. Sonia Brooks went to live on a Moravian farm near Wilmington. The glossy eight-by-tens remained in a bedroom drawer, unsent.

  I watch it over and over again. The tidy rows of zinnias and marigolds, boxwood and hemlock in topiary geometries, sun glinting on the fountain’s distant spray. In white, lovely as a stranger…

  I am bound to her by chemical strands impossible to sever, by an overwhelming, overriding instinct: avoidance of pain. Damn our reticence. I’ve thought of her countless times in the long years since her dive into the tube and never once missed her, never once wanted to pull her back out. She is where she belongs, and so am I. On opposite sides, each one, blinking reflexively.

  “Dewbeads,” my mother says. “Because we deserve it.”

  27

  OVERTRIMMED WHITE HOUSES WITH circular driveways. Lawns clipped and edged, alike as burial plots. Two girls in pleated skirts and kneesocks who rush excitedly toward an open convertible where lettermen slouch in wait.

  The marine amoebae Formanifera exist inside calcite shells and send out branched filaments in search of food. One million fibers make up the human optic nerve and mine are hard at work, assembling this picture of an unlisted street, an invented town.

  That kind of day at the facility: imagining relationships that aren’t there, looking over my shoulder. Too much time underground and I suspect myself. Now here’s Eduardo with the mail cart and a smile that slides all over his face.

  “Something personal.”

  He dangles the envelope and I see a jaggedly halved lipstick heart on the flap. Violet, only Violet. A collector of the gestures of romance.

  “Going to read it out loud?”

  “Not to you.”

  He tugs at his left ear, mangled by a highway patrol bullet. “You shouldn’t be so stingy with Eduardo. Don’t you know he’s culturally deprived?”

  The envelope is thick, addressed in the angular, pressured handwriting.

  Darling—

  This took courage to send, but I had some saved up, there being little call for it out here. The Virginia position I phoned about has evaporated…funding cuts as well as “personality differences.” A juicy tale here, which you can only have in person. It’s a round-trip ticket, as you can see. No traps. Last night I cried just from looking at a cake pan. I remember small things with you, and the smaller, the more trivial, the sharper the twinge. Please say you’ll come. I’ll bake unforgettable cakes.

  Vee

  Sharply pointed Vee, expert scene designer, quick-change artist, greatest fuck of my life. I never could keep up with your generous provocations, or the empty difficulties that came up just as fast. But when you had a grip on yourself, which, as I discovered, was just barely most of the time…

  No traps, you say? Don’t feed me that angel food. I can match you recall for recall: winding, with a tight focus anticipating the classroom, your German alarm clock sans numerals; that pertinent walk when you weren’t really going anywhere, arms swinging close as if you were polishing yourself; exuberant eyes as your machine emerged from the car wash slick and glistening like a newborn; a low, two-syllable hum while I excavated by suction those rich salt deposits below the rim of your instep.

  So on and on. Uninterrupted, uninterpreted. Letting images spill is the easy part, no distinctions made. But to look away, to say no when temptation is hard and sharp against your stomach like a spear, is connivance at its best. Anyway, something close to it.

  There is no more call for courage where I am than where you are, but the air is light and easily penetrated. I see things: my narrowness, blundering capacity for harm, suspended appetite for the activities that make up a “life.” Dear angular, deeply clefted Vee, I am useless to you, a hard, rebuking vacancy like the silence after a thousand cake pans clatter.

  Skirts and letter sweaters swirl in the flimsy-looking malt shoppe, below the sign that says NO DANCING. Youthful high spirits, Mr. Mayor. They’re celebrating the big win over South Central State. Lindyhopping fringe bit actors whose animating thoughts are of doing Bus Stop in an amphitheater, or an unannounced, show-stopping Cohan medley at a benefit for crippled children; who celebrate raw delusion with every swirl.

  So I look away, into the sure alignments of this airline ticket. Depart. Arrive. Carrier assumes no responsibility for…

  For ex-wives who, to be sure of anything, require regular distress. And not enough the subterfuges of students or some incident on the freeway. Violet needs the intimate, twisting jabs of someone close. But her mother is too old and soft to peck as she once did, her twist-expert sisters gone with their ambitious husbands to Bahrain and Fort Worth, her usual friends too feckless or too repressed. Why can’t I comfort her? Make the awful quiet go away? Because the speed and the stamina are all gone. As James Brown used to croon, I’m tired but I’m clean.

  Here. I’m here, Violet, and that’s all. I’m all packaged up here, in my viewing booth, in my car, in an air-conditioned unit that Heidi keeps straight for me. Yes, Violet, and it’s so easy to be with her in that cool, dark room. She’s tense and bony as a child. She’s fitful and clammy and disorganized. And when the mucus pours from between her legs, mouth around her own frantic fingers, Heidi doesn’t know who I am—or care. Nothing asked or surrendered. Two creatures following the dictates of their chromosomes.

  That’s right, sure. Smoke is just particulate matter in suspension. And the television picture is only a description of light—light hitting a surface.

  28

  MRS. O. MUST BE feeling stronger. For the second Saturday in a row she’s in among the flowerbeds with clippers and weeding claw. The sun is high and she wears a maroon-and-white baseball cap advertising electrolyte salts for livestock. Strap-on rubber pads protect her knees.

  I’m here with my feet propped on the air conditioner, watching her through the window. A slow news day. My pet scorpion slumbers under pine bark, water drips from the showerhead, and all I see when I close my eyes is a plate of shredded lettuce floating in space. The old lady shames me. Come on, slick, get those corpuscles moving.

  Into the heat, across the empty parking lot. I squat down slowly and dabble my fingers in the dirt, ask Mrs. O. if
she could use some help.

  “My biorhythms are very favorable today.” She grins, a display of shoepeg teeth. “I like to get nice and dirty when I can.”

  “I could do the edging along here. I’m good at that.”

  “Sometimes, when I have to stay lying down, it’s like forgetting who you are…. The size of him! Those worms mean good aeration, you know!”

  The sun is like something prying at me, a sharp tool.

  “Do you want your package now?”

  “Now?”

  “With the prettiest stamps all over. You’ll see.”

  The stamps, from the American Reptile series, are avocado green. Another book from Violet: Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone. A bold black box on the flyleaf in which the publisher promotes his whole line: “These spirited tales are impressed upon the memory and their reading is productive only of good.”

  Without explicit warning, Violet went to Mexico for a divorce. She took me out to dinner the next week, and, in the middle of a monologue on Toltec burial practices, handed over a teller’s check for two thousand dollars.

  “Your settlement,” she said. “It would be more, but they rolled back my cost-of-living adjustment.”

  Eyes fixed on my mulligatawny soup, I said, “I’m a chiseler, Violet. I held out on you from the start.”

  “Relax, you earned it. Hazard pay.”

  I wasn’t talking about money, and she knew that. But she was so prepared, so clipped in her attitude. I wanted to explain where the fault lines were, why I’d dodged away, what to avoid next time.

  Violet pressed cool fingers over my mouth. “Send me a letter.”