The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  “Thank you, Phillip,” she said, as obliquely as she might acknowledge some porter in a hotel. “Thank you very much.”

  “I’m in my room, Mom, if you need me.” I felt the pulse of alcohol in my blood as if the entire house were contracting gently around me. Then I heard the unmistakable gurgle of liquor being poured into Mom’s smudged glass.

  “You’re a very good boy, Phillip. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, I’ll be all right. Just make certain you’re going to be all right too.” There was a rustle of newspapers. I could feel the darkness assembling in Mom’s room, like clouds and gulls around some alien shoreline. For months I thought I was the one who had eliminated the buzzing opposition of Mom’s men, but now I knew it was that gathering darkness. It was descending in the elevator from its high luxury office building. It was accepting the keys to its Triumph from the black attendant. It was flying off across freeways and cities. It loved us. It loved Mom and it loved me. It loved both of us very much.

  I DIDN’T THINK of Ethel as a surrogate so much as a compensation. She could never take my mom’s place, but she could make that place seem less cold and drafty. Some days I arrived deliberately early at Rodney’s house, when I knew he was still in school, and drank generous Manhattans with Ethel while melodramas played at us from her blurry black and white television (the good color television, of course, was in Rodney’s room). Eagerly she told me all the lost, distracted secrets of her prodigal son. “Rodney is actually a very affectionate young boy. Like you, Phillip, he is patient and attentive. He’s a good listener. He’s considerate and well-mannered–when he wants to be, that is. He always helps with the housework if my legs are sore. Sometimes he saves money from his allowance and buys me little presents. If he’s rude, it’s because he likes to show off in front of his friends. Young men, as you know, are embarrassed to show affection to their mothers, particularly when their friends are around.”

  I wanted to ask her why, but was afraid such an awkward question might give me away. I might accidentally divulge the secret life I lived in strange houses, the secret life my mom had begun living behind the bolted door of her minimally furnished room.

  “Would you like another Manhattan?” Ethel asked.

  She showed me her empty glass and I took it.

  “I’ll get these,” I said, and returned to the kitchen for the Jack Daniel’s. Ethel had taught me how to mix a number of competent drinks, a feat in which I admit I took some pride. I returned and sat on the sofa beside the morning’s smeary newspaper and watched the fabulous television. Ethel was absently handling her embroidery frame and gazing out the window at the harsh, smoggy sunlight, the palm trees faded and unraveled like some overexposed snapshot, the uniform houses and pavements and flashing cars. “People don’t always intend to make other people feel bad, Ethel,” I told her, though I was never sure she was listening. “Sometimes people just forget other people are even around. I know it sounds strange, but people operate that way, I swear. Sometimes they don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes they don’t even know you’re there at all.” I was grasping at straws. Whenever I found myself trying to excuse Rodney’s disgraceful behavior I became tangled and caught in my own inflexible words. Ethel, meanwhile, gazed out the window. “Maybe people just don’t know where they are sometimes,” I said, afraid to stop talking because then the judgment would come. In the long pause my talk would have to mean something. “Maybe people just talk without remembering who it is they’re actually talking to. Maybe you just shouldn’t think about it, Ethel. Maybe you should join a health spa, or develop an interesting hobby. Do you hear me, Ethel? Would you like another drink? Ethel? Are you listening?”

  BEFORE LONG I was taking lunch with Ethel every afternoon around one o’clock. The casual scheme of my domesticity was growing more fulfilled and content. My paper route, breakfast, morning study sessions (I was currently investigating Plato, biophysics and Freud), afternoons with Rodney burgling strange homes, television, evening meals and bed. And every afternoon before I left the house I would leave Mom’s lunch wrapped in plastic and deposited outside her bedroom door. Ethel was instructing me in the art of fine sandwich building. Tuna and chicken salad, avocado and sprouts, bacon, lettuce and tomato, roast beef, pastrami and turkey with cottage cheese, peanut butter and bananas. Whenever Ethel sliced the sandwiches in their rich brown bread the divided segments always looked impossibly tidy and controlled on their clean white plates. “Sometimes at night,” Ethel said, humming and staring out the back window while she washed her hands at the sink, “Rodney’s father calls me from a long way away. He says he wants to move back. He says he misses my cooking.” Ethel’s voice trailed off aimlessly, like late night drivers descending off-ramps in search of a quick, inexpensive meal. “I tell him I wouldn’t mind, if it was just up to me.” Drying her hands on a thin patterned towel, Ethel gazed over my shoulder. Her eyes looked so intent, I often turned to see what she was seeing. I suspected a grown man had suddenly appeared behind me, perhaps a taller and more mature version of myself, Ethel’s more substantial companion that my thin body merely represented. “‘But it’s not up to me, Harold,’ I tell him.” Ethel was sculpting soft white flower petals from the bodies of scoured radishes with a small sharp paring knife. “‘We have to do what’s best for Rodney. We have to do what’s best for our son, who’s been raised under very trying and unfortunate circumstances, as I think you well know. It’s easy, being a father, to think you can just show up when you feel like it. Children need someone they can count on, Harold. And as much as I may want you back, I don’t think Rodney could ever count on you again. You’d only disappoint him.’”

  Ethel never disturbed or embarrassed me. I knew she had her own secret life to live, just as all mothers live fair portions of their lives down there in dark secure rooms and hidden gardens filled with strange plants and trees. I was simply grateful for the time Ethel spent with me here on the outside while I learned to prepare bases for soups and gravy, toss Caesar and fruit salads, cook purées and stews. I fricasseed, baked, boiled and roasted. I cleaned chicken and fish, basted lamb and pork, pressed my hungry hands into the thick dough of breads and cakes and cookies and pastry. I loved Ethel’s warm kitchen and the heady smell of bread baking while I waited for Rodney to return home and transgress with me those other, colder kitchens where I was picking up handy appliances, kitchen pots, pans and utensils and reassembling them in the hard irrefutable kitchen of Mom’s silent and discriminating house. I wanted to build Mom a strong home that would always be there for her and provide anything she might ever need. I was beginning to realize that I would have to leave someday. I still loved Mom more than ever, but I was learning that life carries us places, like rivers and winds carry things, often against our will.

  RODNEY MAY HAVE been only twelve years old, but he had big ambitions. “I need real estate,” Rodney often said after his second or third drink. With our merchandise gathered around us in the living room like a family at Christmas, we were lingering overlong in a commodious four-bedroom Spanish-style home in the foothills of Sherman Oaks. Outside the streets were filled with dry, amber lawns and stark, shedding palm trees. Every once in a while a bright bluebird flashed. “I need tax incentives, money market liquid asset accounts, diversified stock portfolios, treasury bills, low-interest tax deductible loans, property, houses, income property, cars, trucks, buses, planes. I don’t need this. I don’t need this crap,” he said, making his customary gesture at the huddling portable televisions, radios, jewelry and microwave and, still in its original Sears packing case, an adjustable three-temperature electric blanket which I intended to leave that night, like a meal or some religious devotion, outside my mom’s bedroom door. “I don’t need a bunch of crap just weighing me down. I need negotiable capital. I need security and a firm financial investment base. I need money, property and women. I’m talking gash, now. I’m talking poontang. I’m talking scuzz. I’m talking countless good-looking, insatiable young women with re
ally big tits.” Aimlessly Rodney’s left hand began stroking the inner thigh of his Levi’s. Then, abruptly, he leaned forward and reached for the margarita mix in the blender’s thick Pyrex bowl. “I need money and sex and more sex. I been thinking about it every day lately, Phil. I gotta get laid, man. I really gotta get laid.”

  Then, contemplating his refreshed glass for a moment, Rodney slumped back against the sofa while I tried to appear as calm and unaffected as a prayer. I was practicing with a cigarette, sucking the thick smoke into my mouth every few seconds and expelling it, pushing it out with my tongue and cheeks. Phooh, I said, as quietly as I could, because it wasn’t a sound Rodney or Mom made when they smoked. Phooh. An ugly miniature terrier lay asleep dribbling in my lap. Gently I lifted it onto the sofa’s side. “Don’t talk about it,” I told him. “Don’t talk about what you want too much. You’ll lose the edge.”

  “I need to fuck women.” Rodney’s voice was growing subdued, distant, ritual and dark. “I need to fuck fuck fuck until I can’t fuck anymore.”

  “It’s all a dream, Rodney. If you talk about it too much, you wake up. Then there’s just the bright sun. Then there’s just the cold bed.”

  Suddenly Rodney sat up straight and placed his margarita on the table. He cautioned me with his left hand and gazed off intently at the far wall, as if listening with his eyes, poised like a diver.

  I heard the footsteps too. Keys being shaken. Then a sack of something banging against the porch while keys rattled more distinctly. Implicitly feminine sounds.

  “If you keep dreaming, you can have it all, Rodney. If you keep dreaming you can even be a grown-up. You can even fall in love.”

  “Fuck love,” Rodney said.

  We were grabbing the most compact and obvious loot, then slipping down the back stairs and out the rear garage door, through the yard and backyard gate while upstairs that stupid terrier was yelping and throwing itself up and down in the air as its master incautiously opened the front door.

  “Fuck love, man,” Rodney said later at Burrito King. “Fuck family. Fuck people and things. I want the real stuff, man. I want currency, I want sex. Give me the stuff and save all the bullshit. I’ve had it up to here with all the bullshit, Phillip. I’m tired of rotting away in Ethel’s lousy household. It’s time I started living my own life. I’m telling you, guy. Life is something you do. Bullshit is just something you’ve got.”

  CURRENCY AND SEX were forces in our lives now, like smoky, violet surges of electricity and light. Sex and currency, currency and sex. The hum and the pop, chirring and turning, beating like electricity. We could drive cars with that force radiating deep inside us. We could activate industrial machinery. We could generate enough massive interior energy to drive cities, planets and suns.

  I didn’t feel the same sudden push inside my flesh that Rodney felt, but rather a sort of anxious intellectual charge. The energy whirled aimlessly inside my head, where I nightly replayed that strange film I had watched with Mom only a few months before on a hotel-room closed-circuit television, Sexually Altered States. Sexually altered, sexually altered altered states, states of sexually altered states, altered states of sexually altered states. Sometimes the images sped and raced in my mind, and I imagined myself taking a seat in my own subjective cinema. I imagined the curtains sweeping open and the light dimming, I imagined the credits, and then the first exuberant breathless cinematic fuck. I tried to contain all the events within the frame of a plot. I tried to imagine the interstitial scenes, the dinners and champagne, the slow dances and undress, often growing so involved in them that I never got around to thinking through to the serious action again, the way the karate master is supposed to think through boards and blocks of concrete. I thought it was the anticipation that made sex real, but now I know it was merely my explicit faith in that imagination which unreeled around my childhood like the spokes of a milky galaxy. I was beginning to learn that the imaginative act was more important to my life than action itself. Action merely articulated you with an exterior and superficial network of facts, data and information that superimposed itself across the realer world of my imagination like a restraint, or a clinging, oily film. I wanted the dream of sex, the energy and heat of it. Had I been able to articulate the problem for Rodney, I’m certain he would have preferred the dreams too.

  11

  “I’VE NEVER CONSIDERED myself beautiful,” Beatrice said, listlessly running her hands through her tangled blond hair. Beatrice was twelve years old and attended Rodney’s sixth-grade class at Junípero Serra Grammar School. “But I don’t think beauty’s the only thing men are looking for, if you know what I mean.” Her look let us know she didn’t expect there was any chance we would ever know what she meant. She tugged at her slightly soiled dress and crossed her legs. After a second of demure hesitation, she accepted Rodney’s cigarette. Then Beatrice lit it with a Ronco from her purse, which she snapped shut with a practiced flourish. “Beauty’s just what a woman seems. Plenty of women can be made beautiful. Look at Vogue, for instance. Look at Cosmo. That’s not all men are looking for, you know. I know that’s what they say men are supposed to be looking for, but that’s just a male myth. That’s just capitalism. That’s just the psychological domination manifest in all competitive class struggle. Basically, you see, I think men are a lot more capable and intelligent than that. I think men want a woman they’re attracted to, sure–I’m no spiritual idealist or anything. I don’t subscribe to bogus Christian dualism–all that repressive male ideology we’ve inherited from the Greeks. But there’s a natural woman men are looking for underneath all the Clairol and Maybelline. There’s a raw–oh, I don’t know, call it sexuality, or passion, or molecular urgency–that marks a real woman out from the pack. It’s in her eyes, in her smell, in the way she combs her hair.” Delicately, Beatrice jiggled in her seat, tugging her skirt straight underneath her.

  We were sitting at a Formica booth in Winchell’s, feeling that warm arousal of steam from our fresh coffees. I held my Styrofoam cup between my hands. I was trying to keep my eyes expressionlessly focused on Beatrice. I was certain any expression on my part would be a sort of self-betrayal. Better to give her nothing about me she could analyze or remember, nothing she could keep for years and years, like nail clippings or stray buttons with which she could cast intricate social spells. I just wanted to watch Beatrice, her lips so hastily smudged with the chocolate rainbow donut, her pink skin and knotty, unwashed hair. Beatrice lived in a trailer park with her father. The trailer park, located in Encino, was called Trailer Town, and Beatrice’s one-bedroom trailer was a 1959 Spartan Luxuryliner with polished wood interior and fully operable stove and central heating.

  “I think that’s what I’ll always have to offer my men,” Beatrice said, and took the first brave sip of our scalding coffee. Rodney and I had ordered it black because Beatrice had. She put it down with a little emphasis.

  “It’s like television, movies, books, even record albums. This is what beauty is. This is how you’re supposed to look. This is a girl’s normal height, how much makeup to wear, how big your tits should be”–I felt Rodney give a little jump beside me–“and all that long morose unforgiving catalog of what women are supposed to be, how women are supposed to feel. Beauty is the culture industry’s attempt to make each of us a commodity. The culture industry, guys, is vast and incredibly articulate. It knows exactly what it wants to say all the time. It wants to make each of us the same on the outside, while letting us pretend we’re somehow marvelously special on the inside. The culture industry hasn’t invented ‘beauty’ in order to control how we look, but how we are, and that’s the scary part. How we think. How we be. I guess you guys should know right away I’m a Marxist. I support the Sandinistas, and the leftist guerrilla forces in Chad. I’m not a vulgar Marxist or anything–I mean, I don’t pick my nose in public (that’s supposed to be a little joke)–no, I guess you’d have to call me a post-structural Marxist. I give credit to Althusser, but I’m not an acoly
te of anybody’s. Anyway”–with another little flourish of her black purse–” if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to find a ladies’ room.” Beatrice glanced over her shoulder, then pointed. One tiny cuticle of her index finger was perceptibly tagged with chocolate. “That’s it there, I think.”

  When she was gone, Rodney and I took long, contemplative sips of our hot, black coffee. Around us the scrubbed linoleum still smelled strongly of ammonia and disinfectant, and every once in a while the matronly woman behind the counter, wearing a black hairnet and plastic gloves, gave us a dirty look, as if she expected us at any moment to run off with something. Coolness drifted through me. I was very high in the air, drifting among birds and planes. It was incredibly quiet in the high air. There were no words in sight, not even fragments of words. Eventually, without looking up, I leaned towards Rodney.

  “What’s she talking about?” I asked.

  Rodney didn’t say anything right away. I heard the flash of a match that he dropped into the black ashtray. “I don’t know,” he said after a while, watching the bright match extinguish with a tiny puff. “But I think it may be a load of crap.”

  WE WOULD TAKE Beatrice to my house in the afternoons when we weren’t scavenging other houses, but she never put out. She always said she was going to put out but she never did. Though my interest in the outcome was philosophical rather than immediate, I would watch the slow struggles Rodney waged with Beatrice on the poor, makeshift couch in my living room with perfect equanimity. They would kiss for hours, penetrating into the roots of one another’s mouths, breathing deep into one another’s lungs and hearts, shifting and turning very slowly, Rodney’s leg between Beatrice’s, his arm around her waist. Sometimes I would watch them for a while, but then I would watch the television instead. “The Rockford Files,” perhaps, which I adored, or “Barnaby Jones,” which I could at least endure. “Mmmm,” Rodney might say, though Beatrice remained chastely, even demurely, silent. “Mmm, baby.” It didn’t sound quite right to me, but perhaps, I thought, Rodney was still practicing. Perhaps love wasn’t something you felt, but rather something you learned. Then, abruptly, Rodney’s hand would stray too far and, before either of us knew it, “it” would be abruptly over.