“I’m not proud of the way I’ve been behaving,” I said. I was still staring at the yellow lamp. My body seemed to be shifting. Or perhaps it was the house that was shifting under me. “It’s not like I’m selfish. I know things haven’t been easy for you either, Dad. What with Mom pregnant and all, and me just sitting in my room feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t been helping much around the house. I haven’t been keeping up the yard.” My first and only substantial memory of Dad was much like this. We had been divided from one another by the thin fabric of Mom’s stomach. He had said things to me in his deep voice. The words had reverberated in my warm, amniotic placenta like chimes in an iron bell. “I’m going to try and make it up to you,” I said. Now my words reverberated, now my words filled things. The Formica table, the plastic chairs, the dishes in the cupboard, the bills on the microwave. “I think it might make things better for all of us.”
With a flourish, Dad shook the leaves of his newspaper back into conformity and refolded them. Dad’s face was flushed and slightly sunburnt. I was beginning to suspect a sunlamp in Dad’s office. He was smiling. He, too, thought things would soon get better for all of us. He suggested a movie that afternoon; he would take off early from work. Or a baseball game. The Los Angeles Dodgers, as I understood, were our home team.
Yes, handsome. Very youthful.
I told him I’d think about it–I had many errands to run that day. Maybe tomorrow–or better yet, next week. Sometime that afternoon there were a few things I needed to pick up at the hardware store. Dad loaned me his Visa Gold card.
We were both still smiling very energetically at one another when Dad left for work.
THE BODY, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is firm and intact. It’s the only promise we can count on, and we can’t really count on it much.
“We’ll need this,” Pedro said. We were touring the hard aisles of Ace Hardware and Plumbing Supplies. I was pushing the Ace Hardware shopping cart, on which one eccentric wheel wobbled and spun contradictorily. “We’ll need this, and this, and this and this. We’ll need one of these. And we’ll need one of these.” Finally we decided on a large steel toolbox with trays that extruded when you opened the toolbox lid. I was very impressed with Pedro’s knowledge of tools. He knew which ones had the sharpest blades and points. He knew which ones were built to last.
“My, my,” the checkout lady said. The checkout lady had very gray hair. She wore an official red Ace Hardware apron and nametag. The nametag said her name was Dora. “You look like you’re going to start your own little business.” She held herself with such ardent restraint I knew she could barely prevent herself from patting my “tousled” head. She took Dad’s Visa Gold card.
“Did your father tell you you could use this?” Dora asked, still beaming her flawed white dentures.
I offered to show her my ID.
“No, no. That’s fine.” Doris ran the card through the gutter of an electric scanner. “You’re a very industrious young boy,” she said. “How old are you, dear?”
“I was eight years old last November,” I said. Then I carried the toolbox back up the street to my house.
The tools fitted snugly into their appropriate compartments. The lid of the toolbox closed securely. It was like a body with its tidy organs hidden inside by warm, glistening envelopes of tissue.
“Where’d you go, Pedro?” I asked.
“You didn’t need me around. You had your dad’s credit cards. You had all you needed. You didn’t need me.”
Only after I urged him repeatedly did Pedro show me how to fit the gleaming hacksaw blade into the firm steel handle. Outside it was hot and sunny. The sun-dazed birds in the trees didn’t make a sound. Later I stored the pregnant toolbox in my closet under a heap of new clothes Dad had been buying me over recent months. When I closed the door I could still detect the gravity of it there. It seemed charged with its own imminence. It cooked there, like the dashboard lighter in the days of Mom’s luminous motion.
“IF DAD’S BODY was a house, Mom, what kind of house would it be?”
“It would be a very big, safe, well-built house with stone walls and turreted balconies. It would be made from the best materials. It would be perfectly designed to benefit the needs of its specific occupants.”
“Would it have heavy doors?”
“The heaviest.”
“Would there be alarms? What sort of alarms, Mom? Sonic or wire? Would they be hooked up to some private agency, or to one of those shrill fire bells? Would there be dogs, Mom? Would private guards check the place out whenever people were away?”
“Sonic,” Mom said. “Everything in this house will be clean and compact. There won’t be any wires or cords to tangle or confuse you. Everything will be in its proper place.”
“Will I have my own room?”
“We’ll all have our own rooms. Our own bathrooms and baths. We’ll have private brick fireplaces and balconies. We’ll have well-equipped bars and portable color televisions in every room hooked up to satellite-dish reception antennas.”
“Will there be a yard?”
“A vast green expanse of it. You won’t even be able to see let alone comprehend its gate. There’ll just be a distant green vanishing point. You’ll think you’re losing your sight. You’ll feel like you’re living on your own little planet, a planet with abrupt horizons and green earth. Your eyes will strain and water if you try to take in too much of it at once.”
“Is it in the country?”
“It’s in the city and the country. That’s how big it is.”
“At night can you see the stars?”
“You can see the white buzzing band of the Milky Way. Every star in the sky shining at once. It won’t seem like light, but matter. It will weigh against you like mass. It will shine like gold. You’ll be lying on the green grass at night and try to reach out for it. You’ll try to touch it. Your hand will ache, just thinking about it.”
“I can enter Dad’s house any time I want.”
“Of course you can. It’ll be your house too. You’ll have your own key.”
“I’ll have keys to all the rooms.”
“Except the secret ones.”
“But even then, I can peer in the windows. I’ll be allowed in the secret rooms when I’m older.”
“When the time comes, you can discuss that with your father.”
“I only want to go into rooms Dad’s already been in himself.”
“You’ll have to be careful.”
“I’ll find thick complex networks of lymph and artery and tissue there. Fatty deposits, moist and cellular, like the eggs of fish or amphibians. The hard moist marrow filled with yellow matter. Renal ducts and spongy scoops of liver. The hard muscled heart. The body’s stringy muscles knitting ribs and shoulders and stomach. Bones articulated with other bones.”
“That’s all none of my business,” Mom said. She was staring at the television screen. Neon cash amounts flashed on an enormous multicolored board. The faces of celebrities beamed and flushed. One hugely happy and obese female contestant began to cry, surrounded by gigantic photographs of all the wonderful, exotic places she would soon be visiting. “That’s all something you’ll have to discuss with your father.”
I FELT THE cold strobing black atoms humming around me in the darkness as I swayed back into my room through the swirling hallway. It was just Mom and me again. Mom in her room with the baby growing inside her like a secret, like the secret promise of bodies, and me in my room across the hall with Pedro, spinning our thin schemes of savagery and mutilation, trying to push Dad into the future again where he belonged, into the future’s deep dark earth where the black atoms hummed and spun like elementary planets. Mom and I had grown so far apart we could understand one another again. Ours was
a cellular complicity. Even when we lived in different countries and spoke untranslatable languages we still knew each other. Mom knew what I had to do and approved with a covert dense resignation. It was an approval that made Mom’s body hard and perfect and safe.
“That’s a Conready steel file,” Pedro said, showing me how to hold it. “Feel that weight. There’s a lifetime guarantee on that sucker. You want to know how many steel tool manufacturers offer a lifetime guarantee on their merchandise? I’ll tell you. Not too damn many, that’s how many. Not too damn many at all.”
I was suffering giddy delusions of grandeur. I considered writing the local newspapers and confessing all my plans. Then later I would send them photographs of what I had done to Dad while they stood helplessly by, pretending authority over world events. I felt like an astronaut who had just returned from deep space and the exploration of rich worlds inhabited by aboriginal cultures and convoluted blue cities into which random asteroids regularly crashed. My mind and knowledge were astrally privileged; I had returned to live in a world of tiny, ineffectual ants. Just as the baby was assembling itself in Mom, I now felt Mom assembling herself in me. Everywhere I went I went with Mom’s implicit consent. Everything I did I did at Mom’s unspoken command. I felt incalculably brave. I felt invulnerably correct. I felt like science or politics. I had broken the cipher of eternal language; I was learning new words about the real universe, and with this eternal language I would live forever. Words were what mattered, not bodies, not things breathing, vulnerable and vile. Life was a hard word, or a sentence filled with hard words. The process of living was not a problem of biology but of grammar. One simply needed to know how to arrange oneself within the proper sentence. One simply needed to comprehend not one’s substance or actuality, but rather one’s relationship with the world’s other hard objects. One night I was filled with such weightless soaring arrogance I even called Beatrice and confessed everything.
“You can’t fool me, Phillip. Don’t call me up at home just to hand me this line of nonsense.” I heard the pronounced puff of Beatrice’s lips against her filtered cigarette. She exhaled the smoke with a long theatrical sigh. “You love your dad. You’d never do anything to hurt him.”
“I hate him.” I was finishing the last of Dad’s Wild Turkey, garnished with a splash of crushed ice. “It’s all going to work out perfect. I know exactly what I’m doing because I’ve done it all before.”
“You can’t hate him, Phillip. He’s your dad.”
“I’ve worked it all out. I know exactly what I’m going to do.”
“You’re going to kill him,” Pedro whispered, somewhere in the dark.
“Isn’t that just like a man,” Beatrice said. “To say he knows what he’s going to do when he hasn’t got any idea what he wants or who he is to begin with. Who the hell are you, Phillip? That’s the question I’d like answered. Not what stupid things you’re going to do.”
“Kill him,” Pedro said. “Kill him, kill him, kill him.”
“I hate him,” I said.
“You hate him, Phillip? That’s just what I mean, isn’t it? Man’s myth of intentionality. I do things to you. Predication. Subject and object. The dream of a perfect cosmic grammar. Well, dream on, kid. Dream on till you’re old and gray. Because you’re old already, Phillip. You’re already older than your own dad. If you want to know the truth, I think I like your dad better. At least he tried to make things work without bullying everyone all the time, like you or Rodney. In fact, Phillip, I think I like your dad a whole lot more than I’m beginning to like you.”
The black atoms swarmed and rushed around me. They were my private atmosphere. They would take me back into the darkness with them very soon. “Fine,” I said. “I don’t really care what you think, anyhow.”
“Let me put it to you this way, Phillip. You don’t matter. Neither does your dad. We’re all nothing but heat, motion, gravity, sound, history, light–that’s all that matters, Phillip. Just force and stress, time and matter. Start thinking about those things. Get outside your feeble, crowded little brain for once in your life and try looking at the big picture, will you? You guys all like to think you’re such hotshots, you’re in such control of everything. Well, you’re not. You’re nothing but a bunch of dicks, that’s all you are. Us women, on the other hand, we’re what you call heterogeneous. That means we’re everywhere, everybody at once. We’re both good and bad, right and wrong. We’re the great resolvers of conflict, Phillip. We’re like octopuses–because we’ll swallow anything. Even men. Even battling and forlorn men like you and your dad. You guys try so hard to be subjects, characters, things, you forget us women are the whole story. We embrace you all. What you really want to destroy is women, that story of yourself you can’t control. Women are what you really hate, Phillip, not that poor dumb jerk of a dad you’ve got. I’ve been reading a lot lately, Phillip, since we broke up. French feminists, existential Marxists. I’m teaching myself French so I can read Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason–much of which has been improperly translated, from what I understand. You should learn to speak French too, Phillip. Then we could talk French to each other over the phone.”
“I’m sorry I called,” I said. I could hear something clacking wetly in Beatrice’s always lugubrious mouth. I could even hear its faint reverberation against Beatrice’s crooked teeth. Hard candy, I thought. Perhaps a Tootsie Pop.
“Do you miss me?” Beatrice asked after a while. “Have you missed me since I haven’t been around?”
There was more to the universe than light, gravity, mass, history, motion and sound. That’s where she was wrong. I was in the universe too. Me and Pedro.
“Sometimes, I guess,” I said. “I guess sometimes I miss you a little bit.”
PEDRO AND I agreed on one thing–we would have to move quickly. Dad had begun talking about returning Mom and me to our true home.
“As you know,” Dad said to me one night over dinner, I haven’t wanted to rush things up to now. I didn’t see any hurry. But now I don’t see any need to waste any more time around here, either.” Dad indicated the thin dismal living room, made even more sad and depleted by the bright new furniture and drapes Dad had installed since his arrival. “I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself here, but let’s face it. It’s pretty depressing, wouldn’t you say? It seems to be getting on everybody’s nerves.”
“It’s just a house,” Mom said. “It was just the first thing I could find when I needed one.”
Mom was seated across the table from Dad. She was wearing a broad-waisted cotton summer dress. She gazed emptily at the curtained window behind Dad as she chewed her Chinese noodles. Mom had only lately, at Dad’s polite insistence, begun taking meals with us.
“Our real home’s still waiting for us,” Dad said. “There’ll be a nursery for the baby. There’ll be a room for a live-in nurse to help your mom. And you, sport. You.”
Dad offered me the rest of the cashew chicken, which I perfunctorily declined. I had suddenly lost my appetite.
Dad forked the remainder onto his own plate. “You’ll be going back to school. You’ll have a nice room, and a proper library to study in. You know I bought the Britannica School Edition for you since you left? I put it up in your room already, along with a few other things. A word processor, your own video machine, some classic movies on cassette. I think you should start filling in some of the gaps in your education–I’m talking popular culture, here. The entertainment industry. That’s the business I’ve always expected might attract you someday. Film, television. Cable’s opening up a lot of new ideas in marketing. The production end, that’s what you’d be good at. Technical equipment, where the real money is.” Dad poured himself the rest of the lapsang souchong. He gazed into the tepid brown water, as if he were reading the arrangement of leaves at the bottom of his cup. I wondered if they said anything interesting. “I think it’s time we got on with our lives,” he concluded. “I think it’s high time we all stopped messing aro
und.”
20
“HI, ETHEL. HOW you doing?”
“Phillip. Phillip. Oh, isn’t this nice. Isn’t this nice to see you. Phillip.”
Ethel’s voice sounded and recoiled at the same time, stepping her lightly backward into her immaculate living room. Even as she called my name she seemed to evade me. I stood on the sunny porch and she in the shadowy doorway. The contrast made her appear at once firm and unfocused, as if every particle of her was being diffused by some foggy outdoor film screen. She resembled an apparition, like one of my recent dreams of Ethel.
“Is Rodney home?” I said. “Do you think I could see him?”
As she was letting me into the hall Rodney’s voice abrupted warily from the top of the stairs. “Who is it? Ethel? Is it someone for me or what?”
“I think it’s good you’ve come over to make up,” Ethel whispered. Quickly she began handing me whatever was available on the dining room table. A plate of crescent-sliced, crustless sandwiches. A bag of Cheetos. A couple of cold Buds. “It doesn’t matter who starts an argument, does it?” she said, winking. “It just matters who’s man enough to make up. If you’re friends with somebody, then sometimes you’ve got to swallow a little of your pride, don’t you, Phillip? It’s good to have you back, dear. I think he’s missed you. I think maybe we’ve both missed you.”
I really wasn’t up for Ethel right now. Every gesture she made suggested she and I shared some secret agreement that either excluded or diminished Rodney. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t matter. That the friendship Rodney and I shared not only superseded her, but was actually none of her business.
I carried all the stuff up to Rodney’s room, balancing it against my stomach. I knocked lightly with my knee.
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