The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  When you returned, the beaded curtain was in tatters, its bright beads scattered everywhere. Don lay sprawled across his bed, bleeding and weeping.

  My rainbow! He tore down my rainbow! That bastard! That son of a bitch!

  A few days later, on a blend of tip money and donations from fellow waiters, you flew home, the French Quarter a postage stamp in the DC-9’s window.

  * * *

  BACK IN THE NORTHEAST, YOU TRANSFERRED TO A SMALL private liberal arts college on the bank of the Hudson River an hour’s drive north of New York City. You studied writing and literature. Having confronted bums, heroin addicts, and drunken homosexuals, you felt qualified to render human experience through words.

  You had paid your dues; you had struggled. That most of your struggles were self-generated and therefore didn’t count, or counted only so much, you failed to recognize or appreciate.

  Thus you applied yourself to the writer’s vocation, the latest in a long line of artistic flirtations. This time, however, you felt that your resolve would hold.

  You weren’t much of a student. When it came to your own initiatives, you applied yourself with ardor, working deep into the night. But for assigned labors you showed little initiative, preferring to do push-ups and sit-ups on the campus quad.

  You were prone to distractions, chief among these being a coed with a French first name. She wore flowing white dresses and spoke in a permanent whisper – owing, perhaps, to the amount of time she spent in the library, bent over in her carrel in ardent pursuit of Paradise Lost.

  How you loved Marie-Claude, and how she loved Albert, the Polish poet, who was fucking Cecilia, who had a crush on you. You knew that Cecilia was fucking Albert because he lived in the dorm room above yours, where you heard them fucking. That Marie-Claude’s affection for Albert wasn’t returned in kind didn’t by the slightest degree extinguish her flame for him. Nor did it boost your prospects any.

  In your bitter frustration you played Debussy (very loud) and shaved your hair off. You stopped eating and ran barefoot through snow and ice. You quit doing your school assignments and abandoned your latest novel-in-progress. On sunny days you sunned yourself in the same quad where you’d done push-ups and sit-ups, eyes closed, watching the patterns that the sun made under your eyelids as you once did with the teacher on the island with the decorative stone lighthouse. Ages ago, so it seemed.

  One miserably cold winter afternoon as you were hitchhiking back to campus from the nearest town, you saw a car approaching, a car of Japanese make with rusted fender wells that you recognized as Marie-Claude’s. You stood there smiling with your thumb out, waiting for her to see you and stop. Instead Marie-Claude drove right past you, her eyes fixed dead ahead – glued, no doubt, to the specter of the Polish poet.

  A WEEK LATER you quit college and returned to New York City. You’d decided to be an actor again. You got the tip about the casting director from your personal manager, who warned you that he was a “slimebucket,” but also said he was one of the biggest in town. If he liked you it would be a boon to your career.

  Punctually at four p.m. you arrived at the casting agent’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment. The casting agent’s assistant – a skinny boy probably not younger than you, but whose effeteness made him look younger – took your headshot and resumé and had you sit in the foyer. Minutes later the casting agent appeared – a plump, round-shouldered man in his seventies, wearing a gold satin bathrobe. You stood and introduced yourself.

  The casting agent had a thick eastern European accent. Sze James Dean dipe, he remarked having looked you over, but viz un Idalien tvist. Randy, holt my galls vuh ze nexd hef owr.

  The casting agent escorted you to his living room, the walls of which were papered with flocked red velveteen fleurs-de-lis. The heavy curtains were drawn, the lights were dimmed. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder played on the stereo. In the center of the room was an overstuffed white sofa on which the casting agent sat. From there in his thick accent he guided you through an exercise known as The Boy on the Mountaintop.

  Ze berbus uf ze eggserzise, the casting agent explained, iss do bring oud ze innozent liddle boy in yooh, ze vulnrable, innozent, helblezz liddle boy.

  The casting agent told you to picture yourself on a mountaintop. It is nighttime, he explained in his thick accent. You are all alone on the mountain under a blazing canopy of stars. Among all the stars is one star brighter than all the others.

  I vunt yooh do reej voh zat briedest uv ztahs, the casting agent instructed.

  You closed your eyes and reached. Zat’s ryed, you heard the casting agent say, reej voh it, reej voh zhe bruydest ztah! Yooh ken do id! Yooh ken! Yooh ken! With your eyes still closed you reached as far as you could, so far you thought you would dislocate your arm. Meanwhile the casting agent sat there on his white sofa, a fat-kneed god on an upholstered cloud, saying, Yooh ken do it, yooh ken do it, yooh ken, yooh ken …

  While reaching for the star you heard a shuffling sound followed by the scratch of a needle being torn cruelly from a record.

  Yooh kent, the casting agent’s voice intruded. Yooh kent duch ze stah. Yoohr ahms ah doo shzought. Yooh ah doo veek, doo szmall. Hits hobelezz. Yooh hef failed. Yooh ah a bed boy, a vey bed boy. Yooh neet do be bunished. Yooh neet do be shbanged …

  Dear Past Self, how I wish that I did not have to report what occurred next. How I wish I could say either that you were wise to the casting agent’s subterfuge, but decided to go along with it for the hell of it, or that you didn’t give a damn, or that, being such a fine actor, you were carried away by the exercise. The truth is less flattering. The truth is that you were too naïve, too cowed, too desperate for any form of success to do anything but obey.

  So – with the needle replaced on the record, to the haunting strains of der Kindertotenlieder, beneath a dome of imaginary stars, you made your way to the casting agent, whose frowning knees poked out from under his gold satin robe, and draped yourself over his thighs. As his palm found you, you looked at the wallpaper, reading into its intricate forms the source of the pain that shot up to the level of your eyes before shivering down to the tips of your toes, imagining that it lay in the flocked red fleurs-de-lis and not in the casting agent’s blows.

  When you exited the casting agent’s apartment building the sun was setting in lurid colors on the far side of the Hudson River. A harsh midwinter gust blew east across Fifty-forth Street. Your cheeks burned from more than the cold. As you walked toward the subway you wondered if other actors had gotten their start this way, Brando, Dean, Cagney – if they too had endured The Boy on the Mountaintop or something like it. The thought made your cheeks burn hotter. You considered going back to the casting agent’s apartment, punching his femmy assistant in the face, and choking the casting agent to death.

  Instead you walked on to the subway station, slid a quarter under the token booth’s Plexiglas partition, and sat with your head in your hands at the dark end of the platform, waiting for the downtown local.

  The next morning you phoned your parents to say you were coming home.

  BEFORE MEETING THE MOTHER OF MY CHILD I’D BEEN married to another woman for seventeen years.

  Paulette lives in Nashville now. We’re still friends; in fact, not long ago I stayed in her new home. I was passing through Tennessee on my way to Carbondale, Illinois, (Audrey’s mother was attending graduate school there) to see my newborn, a journey of nine hours, and thought: why not? Her new beau, a guy named Duane she went to high school with, greeted me with her at the door. Nice guy. I liked him immediately. We ate dinner at a Greek restaurant, then I spent the night on the sofa in the living room of their condo that had so many of the trappings of our past marriage, from furniture to color schemes, I felt like an amnesiac who, after a protracted interval of lost wandering, had stumbled fortuitously back into his own forgotten life. Yes, it felt a bit weird. But like my father before me, I subjugated my raw emotions to reason. Why not feel just as (if not more) perfectly at home in
the dwelling of my ex-wife and the man she loves as in a Motel 6?

  In civilizing our feelings we sometimes do them and ourselves an injustice. It’s better sometimes to not be rational, to put our trust in more primitive feelings. This is something my father generally could not do and that I myself have a hard time doing. Among other things it makes falling in love hard.

  “DEVICE FOR COLOR MEASUREMENT OF LIQUID IN CONTINUOUS FLOW.” United States Patent Number 3,773,424. Filed August 2, 1972

  XV.

  Old Bill

  Bethel, Connecticut, 1979 – 1980

  LIVING WITH YOUR PARENTS AT TWENTY-THREE HAS advantages and disadvantages.

  Advantages: material comfort and security, home-cooked meals, and the companionship, warmth, and understanding of those responsible for your birth and upbringing and who love – or, anyway, tolerate – you more than anyone else in the world.

  Disadvantage: wanting to kill yourself.

  You viewed your return home as a defeat, a humiliation, a failure. You had failed. The prodigal child home with tail between legs. Like many a prodigal child you resented your parents for this, as if they were to blame. You had yet to realize the scarcity of having these two people both together in your life, how brief their tenure would appear to you to have been when all was said and done in the big picture of your life.

  Meanwhile you couldn’t bear your mother’s perpetual synthesis of distrust and solicitude, her legion mispronunciations and malapropisms, her hoarding economy-sized jars of mayonnaise in bulk, bouillon cubes, and Saran Wrap. Above all, you resented her for being stronger, grittier, and more self-possessed than you, her son.

  Then there were your mother’s migraines. They kept her bedridden for days, dry-retching into a Tupperware bowl. The migraines usually occurred on the heels of her arguments with your father, fights that often ended (as the ones between you and your brother often did) with a projectile of some kind being hurled, the hurler being your mother, the projectile an ashtray, the target a mirror that, the following day, your father would replace.

  As for your father, the charming, sad, eccentric old man who wrote you all those letters, few things in life upset you more than the sight of him eating his morning toast. He would sit there, in the breakfast nook with his two three-minute eggs (one in its cup, the other on the plate next to it by his spoon) and his cup of tea (Lipton) steeping and two slices of bread (Thomas’s Protein) in the toaster (burned, burning, or about to burn, as suggested by the conical umber stain on the white cabinet above the toaster), with a jar of Chivers Coarse-Cut Olde English marmalade close at hand.

  Before you even entered the kitchen you’d be assailed by the acrid odor of burned toast and hear the butter knife scraping against the charred bread, followed by crunching, gurgling, and swallowing noises as your father spread more marmalade over more toast between more sips of tea, the tea-soaked but still brittle toast crashing against his dental bridgework, with crumbs of toast (not including those you would encounter later in the plumb-colored sink and clinging to the mirror of the medicine cabinet in your father’s – the downstairs – bathroom) flying every which way.

  Why your father’s breakfast habits aggravated you so much you couldn’t, and I still can’t, say, but they did. They annoyed you in the extreme, to where you could no longer stomach the smell of burned toast.

  Perhaps they stood for something greater than toast and tea. Maybe they were your own failings and inadequacies magnified and projected. Maybe the scorched crumbs on your father’s breakfast table stood for the charred cinders of your gutted life.

  YOU WERE ONLY twenty-three, yet you felt both ancient and unborn. In the mirror of your father’s medicine cabinet (flecked with bits of food matter from him flossing his teeth) you studied the lines in your face – there were one or two now – as if studying the lines on one of the service station roadmaps your papa kept in the glove compartment of his Simca (and that he rarely consulted), searching for signs, shortcuts, directions.

  When not sketching or writing in your basement room or floating around Bethel like a microbe, you tried to make yourself useful. One day, while your mother was in bed recovering from one of her migraines, you decided to put the house in order. You spent the morning trimming shrubs and cleaning gutters and the afternoon vacuuming, mopping, and doing laundry. With those things accomplished, you turned your attention to your mother’s stove – the black antique Chamber’s stove with chrome knobs that was your mother’s pride and joy. You decided to clean it for her. For this task you solicited your father’s help. You put him in charge of the top burners while you cleaned the oven. You handed him the can of Easy Off and went to work.

  A half hour later your father called to you. You turned to see him holding two of the stove irons. They dangled from his rubber-gloved hands, dripping brownish goo on the floor and into the dog’s dish as he stood there with a lost helpless look on his face.

  I’m sorry, he said, but I can’t seem to put this bloody thing back together. It’s simply not possible!

  You turned to the sink where he’d been washing the irons. It looked as if someone had struck oil. The counter, the curtains, the dish rack, the sponges, the potted plants – all were laced, flecked, or splattered with black grunge.

  As your father continued to stand there holding the dripping irons the dog leaped up and started lapping at them.

  YOU HAD JUST dropped your mother off at the hospital to have some testing done for her migraines when you saw the man in the wheelchair, the same man you had seen at the teacher’s carriage house in eighth grade. You recognized the pink-orange complexion that covered half his face and the dead crow of a toupee on his head.

  He was being pushed in his wheelchair to a van parked in the hospital parking lot. Though like the other it said ETTELUBMA POT-PIT across its back doors, this van was white, not red.

  The attendant was a different person, too, not a black man this time but a white man with stiff white hair. Having loaded his human cargo into the back of the van he climbed into the front.

  From the driver’s seat of your mother’s Rambler American you watched, your MG having bitten the dust.

  Under gray skies you followed the van out of the hospital parking lot and through an industrial park to the interstate entrance where it climbed up the northbound ramp toward Newtown. You felt like a TV detective following it.

  After a dozen miles the van exited onto a road that wound past the brick buildings of the Southbury Training School, a facility for mentally disadvantaged children.

  It started raining. The van’s signal lights winked as it turned onto the road to Lake Lillinonah. The lake was a fabled make-out destination for teenagers, who would park along its shore and, under cover of smooth alder and spiceberry bushes, engage in wanton acts. Along this iniquitous stretch of road the van splashed through deep puddles to a straightaway squirming with frogs, hundreds of them, their squashed bodies turning the roadway into a slimy bubbling stew.

  As they rolled over the amphibious carpet, the Rambler’s tires made horrible squishing sounds. An occasional torn frog specimen, tossed up by the ambulette’s rear wheels, hurled itself into the Rambler’s by then opaque windshield, where the dimwitted windshield wipers beat them into a relish-like consistency. You squirted blue wiper fluid, turning the mixture a muddy shade of turquoise.

  Unable to see, you pulled over and, with the sleeve of your denim jacket, wiped the gooey mess away as best you could. By then your head pounded with the headache that had budded as you rose that morning and that now burst into full bloom.

  On your way back to the car, your sneakers crushed more frogs, their peeps so loud you couldn’t have heard yourself over them had you screamed, as you were tempted to. By the time you put the car in gear, the ambulette had vanished into the rainy night.

  Still you kept driving.

  Then you saw the van parked in the driveway of one of those houses they move on trucks, a double-wide, with a wooden ramp stretching f
rom the driveway over a weedy overgrown yard to the front door.

  You crept past, watching as the attendant slid the van’s side door open. Holding a large tutti-frutti-colored umbrella over both their heads, he lowered his passenger to the ground, then rolled him up the ramp to the front door. The scene held you so enthralled you nearly drove into a telephone pole.

  At the next driveway you turned and doubled back. That’s when you saw the mailbox on the side of the road across the street from the house, with the teacher’s last name spelled out in reflective stickers. You passed one more driveway before pulling over.

  By then your headache throbbed. You opened the mailbox and took out all the letters inside. Mixed in with bills, circulars, and junk mail was a letter from the teacher. Postmarked Corvallis, Oregon.

  You reminded yourself that stealing letters out of people’s mailboxes was a federal offense. You’d be a criminal, a felon. You could go to jail.

  You slid the letter into the pocket of your jean jacket, replaced the rest of the mail in the mailbox, got in the Rambler, and drove off.

  * * *

  THE DAY BEFORE YOU SET OFF ON YOUR WESTWARD journey, as you and your father were leaving the bank where you’d gone to purchase traveler’s checks, apropos some remark you made, some grandiose ambition you’d given voice to, he said to you, Do you know what I think, Peter, my boy? I think that you’re overdrawn. Overdrawn – do you know what I mean by that? It was one of the very few pieces of advice that your father had ever given to you, along with Don’t spend your life among machines; Never give gasoline to a slow engine; and Always rinse your mouth out with water before you go to bed.

  That same evening, you were sitting in a bar called the Mad Hatter’s Lounge, scribbling away in your notebook when an old guy in a baseball cap stepped up to you.

  Man, will you look at that hand go, he remarked with his hand on your back. Hell, I can’t even think that fast. And a southpaw to boot!