Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

by Juliann Garey

“Red.”

  He turns around and, without actually focusing his eyes, gives me a dirty look.

  “Philistine.” He stares at one of the doors, tilting his head from side to side as if he were looking at one of those blinking Jesus holograms. Fuck, I am never getting home tonight.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “What would you call it?”

  “Burgundy maybe? No, more of a Chianti or—I know, claret.”

  “So really any shade of red with an alcohol content of fourteen percent.”

  “Claret, definitely.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I was fuckin’ terrified we weren’t gonna solve that one. Can we move on, please?”

  Lucky for me, the numbered floors start at street level. One more and we’d be camping out on the landing overnight. When we reach three—approximately twenty minutes after completing the thirty-minute mail retrieval mission—he stops in front of the apartment at the top of the stairs. He keeps his back to me while he fumbles with his keys.

  “I don’t put out on the first date,” he says over his shoulder.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I like ’em a little higher up the actuarial table. I just wanted to make sure you could get in.”

  “Bullshit. You want to smoke.”

  “What? No!”

  The plan is to protest, but not so much that he can’t actually see right through me.

  “I mean I might. You know, once in a while. But I’m not going to smoke yours. You probably need it for your … and don’t they ration you?

  “My what?”

  “Your—well, don’t you have …”

  “Cancer? Do I look like I have cancer?”

  Old guy, thinning hair, getting high regularly? Pardon me for jumping to conclusions. I shrug.

  “No, I do not have cancer. Shit, I look a helluva lot better than you. I work out, you know. Weights.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “Sure I do. I bet you can bench-press your own weight.”

  “Asshole.”

  The old guy picks up the stroller parked outside the apartment next door and hoists it over his head. A shower of Goldfish crumbs, petrified Cheerios, and animal cracker amputees rains down on him. He stumbles backward a few steps, loses his grip on the stroller, and it goes bouncing down the stairs. Most of it comes to a stop on the landing, but one wheel continues down to the first floor.

  The old guy stares over the railing at it. I stare at the apartment that belonged to the stroller.

  “Depressed single mother?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Leave her a note. I’ll take care of it.”

  He’s still staring into the abyss when I notice that his Planned Parenthood bag, deflated and empty, is hanging limply from his wrist, one strap dragging on the floor. The contents—more than just a bunch of soggy tabloids—have spilled out and there must be a dozen little plastic containers of weed, all neatly labeled, scattered across the hallway floor.

  I bend over to start picking them up and suddenly the old guy whips around, knocks me out of the way, and snatches up every one. He readjusts his bag onto his shoulder and looks at me bashfully.

  “I just had lunch with my dealer.”

  “You do lunch with your dealer.”

  “We’re very tight.”

  “You know,” I say, “I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced. I’m Greyson Todd.”

  “Walt Fischer,” he says, shaking my hand. “Wanna get wasted?”

  I know exactly what to expect when I enter Walt’s apartment. Cabbage boiling on the stove, plastic runners to protect the high-traffic areas of his beige wall-to-wall carpeting, econo-size tube of Preparation H on the bathroom counter.

  But I am wrong. Very. True, the peeling paint and ceiling cracks are just where I thought they’d be, and the wood is stained on the floorboards around the radiators. But repairing those obvious signs of wear and tear would be a mistake. Apparently, our landlord agrees.

  Wear and tear is the foundation upon which Walt has built his castle. Through the doorways of the railroad apartment, I can see that room after room is filled with what are either family heirlooms or, more likely, carefully sought-out treasures picked up for nothing over years of dedicated flea-marketing.

  I do not expect to be invited into someone’s home. It has been a long time and I am unprepared. I am searching for feelings I cannot name. Like trying to identify the spices in a new version of an old recipe.

  Walt peels my coat off without asking me and hangs it carefully on a brass coatrack. He tosses his keys and mail on an old silver tray monogrammed with someone else’s initials and then bends to squint at an invisible spot on the narrow oak table it sits on. I smile for the first time today when he licks his thumb, rubs the spot, and then polishes it with the hem of his sweater.

  I wander around Walt’s living room: grandfather clock, well-worn kilim rugs, antique mirrors, rolltop desk, velvet armchair, faded leather sofa. The combined alchemy of these objects gives off the warmth and peace of mind Beverly Hills decorators have struggled for centuries to replicate.

  Beyond the living room, a streetlight shines into Walt’s bedroom, illuminating a collection of little colored glass bottles on the window-sill. Those bottles. Something about them makes me want to put my arms around Walt and hold on very tight. Because old guys don’t have little glass bottle collections. Teenage girls do. Willa does. Probably.

  I am in Walt’s house, looking into Willa’s room. I am in Walt’s house, standing in my house, looking into Willa’s room from my living room with the grandfather clock for which we overpaid because Ellen fell in love with it at the Santa Monica Antique Show. I fell in love with the deep reverberating sounds it filled the house with every fifteen minutes. The chiming that eventually made Ellen regret we’d ever bought it in the first place.

  I taste home. And for that, I love Walt.

  But I think I will save the hug for another time.

  “Pretty swingin’ bachelor pad, huh?”

  “You’ve got quite an eye, Walt.”

  He walks over to an antique wooden icebox—the kind that used actual ice to keep the food cold. “Had one just like this when I was a kid.”

  The advent of Freon has freed up Walt’s icebox to accommodate his large and varied selection of booze. He pulls out an excellent bottle of Hennessy and two old-fashioned-looking snifters.

  “Are you sure you’re not a gay man from West Hollywood?”

  “This,” he says with a sweeping gesture, “was a hobby born of necessity.”

  “Fire or divorce?”

  “My ex-wife got every fucking stick of furniture,” he says, handing me my drink.

  “If I didn’t hate her so much, I’d thank her. I didn’t realize how ugly that shit was. It was kind of a toss-up which one of ’em I was happier to get rid of.”

  Walt unlatches the old pipe rack that’s sitting on the coffee table, and as soon as he cracks the lid, the thick aroma of fresh, sticky pot leaks out.

  “Give yourself a tour while I roll us a joint.”

  The kitchen is narrow with doorways at both ends and the appliances are ancient—the downside of living in a rent-controlled apartment. Walt’s refrigerator door is covered with photos: a boy around seven and a girl of nine or ten. In one, the children are younger. They sit together on Walt’s lap eating ice cream cones, dripping chocolate and strawberry all over Walt, whose head is thrown back midlaugh. I lift the corner to look at the photo underneath it. A much younger Walt—probably in his forties—stands with his arm around a young man in a cap and gown. A pretty, young woman stands on the other side of him smiling.

  I am halfway out of the kitchen before Walt’s art collection catches my eye. Layer upon layer of crayon drawings, macaroni collages, and construction paper snowmen are taped to the side of the fridge facing the wall. Secreted away like treasure. These I remember. These I know. Our Sub-Zero was Willa’s private ga
llery. The exhibits changed, but Ellen kept them all. All of the fall leaves pressed in wax paper, all of the cotton-ball bunnies, all of the four-fingered, pickle-nosed self-portraits.

  I feel tiny beads of sweat form on my forehead. My heart is racing.

  Why didn’t I take one with me? How stupid. Just one to tape on the side of my refrigerator. I am convinced that everything would be different if I had slid a crayon landscape with a rainbow out from under the Pepsi bottle magnet. Or taken one of her early works from the giant plastic storage box Ellen kept them in under her bed.

  I can’t stop it. I press both hands over my mouth to muffle the unplanned sob that escapes. Just one. I wipe the tears away with a dishtowel. I’m fine.

  “I didn’t realize my kitchen was so interesting,” Walt yells from the living room.

  My first impulse is to run. I’ve been caught standing in Walt’s kitchen staring at his grandchildren’s artwork like it’s porn.

  I remind myself that it’s possible I’m being paranoid. That most likely Walt has no idea what I’ve been doing in here. I stick my head out the door so I can see Walt.

  “Those your grandkids?”

  “No, I just like to hang out near playgrounds with a telephoto lens.”

  I can see the little glass bottles. Just over Walt’s shoulder. In Willa’s room. I’m sure there is a plastic storage box under the bed filled with her artwork. I look at the art on the fridge again. I’m sure it’s just like what’s in the box under her bed in her room.

  So I take one. A macaroni-and-lentil collage in the shape of a heart.

  “And your daughter and son?”

  I roll it up very carefully and walk to the other side of the kitchen, which opens onto the entry hall.

  “Uh-huh. She’s an astrophysicist at Cal Tech. He’s … a Republican.”

  I gently slide my heart into the sleeve of my jacket.

  “Makes me sick. But Richard, my son, lives in Westport, so the upside is I get to see my grandkids. I read to them from The Communist Manifesto when they come to visit.”

  I sneak back into the kitchen and walk out through the other side into the living room, where Walt is carefully licking the edge of the paper on a perfectly rolled joint.

  “Soup’s on,” Walt says, handing me the joint and a sterling silver cigarette lighter circa 1940.

  I am still stoned when I leave Walt’s and walk down the street to the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the corner. I am cradling my jacket as gently as I can. When I get back upstairs to my apartment, I spread the jacket out on the kitchen counter and gently work the collage out of my sleeve.

  Then I take out the Elmer’s I bought at the drugstore and carefully reglue the macaroni pieces that broke off.

  New York, 1994. I wake up feeling lost, empty, as if I have given too much blood. Or all of it. But Glenda is there to cheer me up. To make me forget what I can’t remember.

  The day after Glenda’s cinematic come-on, I more or less invited her to watch me jerk off—an invitation some girls might actually balk at. Dragging my blanket behind me, I came into the dayroom, lay down on one of the couches, and, making sure she could see, put my hand down my pants. While the other patients watched Jaws, Glenda pulled up a chair and watched me. We went on like that for days, eventually getting each other off under the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Still, we’re adults. We want to fuck. But the logistics of psych-ward fucking are tricky, to say the least. For one thing, it is difficult to find a loophole in our unit’s no-touching policy that allows for penile-vaginal penetration. So we, Glenda and I, have chosen to disregard this draconian rule entirely. True, there are no locks—anywhere, at anytime. But we have found that the unlocked showers of our unlocked rooms afford us the most privacy. For at least a few minutes at a time. Then again, it’s not as if Glenda worries about things like consequences or getting caught or even being watched while we’re going at it. Sometimes I think she hopes we’ll be seen. I never know from one minute to the next what her desires will run to. It is like fucking a different woman every day. A different paranoid, psychotic woman who mumbles under her breath about government conspiracies. But beggars can’t be choosers and my potential dating pool is limited.

  Besides, Glenda would kill me if I cheated on her.

  TWELFTH

  This is it. The last one. The one that will put Humpty together again. So they say. But how will I know whether or not I am whole now that I have lost so much? It seems an endless cycle—losing and gaining parts of myself. Gaining my sanity; losing the ability to hold on to five minutes ago. It can drive a person crazy. This endless loop. This crazy loop. Endless. Maybe I am just keeping them in business.

  If that’s the case, I could almost respect the marketing strategy.

  New York, 1993. I knew it would happen eventually. It was inevitable. There are only so many people in the world.

  I am in the Jazz section of the Sixty-Sixth Street Tower Records when I first catch sight of her standing at one of the listening stations across the store.

  The ambient sounds of riffing and scatting muffled through abandoned headphones, of shopping bags rustling, and the tail ends of passing conversations all erupt, blossom, and wither like some great acoustic time-lapse photograph. In the microsecond it takes me to recognize her.

  She looks different than I imagined. I guess I thought my leaving would have done more damage—something that I could see just by looking. Tattoos, a nose ring, some ugly form of rebellion. But she doesn’t really look any different. Older, but not different. Her hair is still long, shiny, and blonde, like the little girl who hugs her mother in the hair color commercial.

  My first impulse is to run and hide. I’m not sure why. Maybe fear. Fear of what I want.

  She smiles as she talks to the sales guy. He has a tattoo—it looks like barbed wire circling his bicep—and an artificial body, constructed by machine at a gym. She tosses her hair. Is she flirting? Jesus, he must be ten years older than she is.

  “Can I help you?” A pale boy with unnaturally blue-black hair and lipstick to match has come up behind me.

  “No, I’m just …”

  The boy walks away.

  I look down. My feet are moving—following her. I walk up one aisle and down another, pretending to browse. She joins some friends. They all stand with one hip cocked, wearing more or less the same thing—low-cut jeans and too-small hooded sweatshirt jackets. They all wear flip-flops on their feet, presumably to show off the hideously colored polish they wear on their toes. One girl is too chubby to pull off this uniform. Baby fat hangs out over the top of her jeans, which cling too tightly to her thighs. But she seems oblivious. They are giggling. My daughter and her friends shuffle down the aisles—talking, laughing, shopping, laughing; stepping on the backs of their too-long jeans, which are frayed and dirty on the bottom. Why are girls that age always laughing?

  If I were still her father, I could ask. I would know her friends’ names. I would take them out for pizza. Do sixteen-year-old girls eat pizza or just salads?

  I look up. I am standing in Rap/Hip-Hop. A middle-aged white man with thinning hair, wearing Timberlands, browsing in the Rap section. Not the least bit conspicuous.

  One of the girls looks over and catches me staring. I panic, look away, study the fine print on the parental advisory sticker on the CD I am holding. She whispers to the others and they all look over. I can feel them. I know I shouldn’t look up, but I can’t help it. I need to see if there is anything at all in Willa’s face. Anything. I am older, I have grown a beard, but she would have to know me. I look up for an instant, lock eyes with her, and see nothing. She laughs and puts her hand over her mouth the way young girls do and turns away. She whispers to her friends and they turn to face me.

  “Pervert!” The chubby one yells at me, and they all laugh and run down the aisle. My face burns. My stomach lurches. I walk quickly and calmly to the back of the store, hoping to find an employee restroom. Nothing. And
no one around to direct me. I panic and run to the stack of boxes I’d seen one of the sales kids unpacking earlier and, bending over it, I vomit onto Garth Brooks’s latest release.

  Willa and her friends are still there when I collect myself and return to the front of the store. I feel somehow stronger now, purified, ready to face her head-on. I stride over to the Employee Picks station where they are sharing earphones. At the final moment, though, I freeze, and instead of closing the last few feet between us, I stop at the end of the rack and pick up a CD.

  “Look, guys,” says Chubby, “the Perv’s back.”

  I look up at her. Cunt. Bitch. Cow. I know exactly what she is going to be in twenty years.

  “Now listen here, young lady,” I say in an entirely unconvincing parental tone of rebuke that none of us believes. “I don’t know where you learned your manners, but—”

  “Why are you following us? Why are you, like, staring at her?” one of them asks, pointing to Willa.

  “I’m not … I … I … I’m … because I’m her …”

  Willa looks at me, her eyes searching. “My what?”

  “Your father.”

  There is no sound. At least I don’t hear any. Willa looks confused. Her friends are stunned; their mouths hang open.

  “My father,” she says. It isn’t a question.

  I nod. “I know this must be … I mean, after such a long time, this isn’t … Do you think we could go talk somewhere?”

  “Um … I don’t think …,” she begins.

  “You are fuckin’ nuts, mister,” says Chubby. “You better get the hell away from her.”

  “Pardon me, but what goddamn business is it of yours?”

  “I’m her SISTER! And you’re not our fuckin’ father. So fuck off.”

  So. Fuck off. Not our father. Fuck. Off. My Sister. Not. Her Father.

  It’s like they are all very far away. Like I am looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And silence. Someone has pressed the universal mute button. I don’t know for how long.

  I am looking at Willa—staring, squinting. Until my eyes sting.