The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  “Your father wasn’t by any chance an inventor?” she asked when she heard my name.

  Though I resisted saying so, she was the daughter of Peter Treves, the man principally responsible for my father’s never making a nickel from his Nomoscope.

  MY MOTHER WAS INSTINCT AND EMOTION, MY FATHER logic and intellect. If they ever shared a bed I never saw it. They fought terribly, Papa with reason on his side, my mother with passion and projectiles. One time she scrawled on the living room walls with a black grease pencil. She’d just finished painting the walls herself, dark purple, like the inside of a giant grape. The fight had been over that color. My mother asked my father what color she should paint the living room. “Why don’t you paint it purple?” he’d said. He’d been joking, of course. But she didn’t know it and went ahead and painted the room.

  We used to beg our parents to divorce, that’s how bad their fights were. Though Mom threw things, she and my father never laid hands on each other. The blows were strictly verbal. Words were weapons. I can still hear my father’s sneered “viles” and “loathsomes,” his face burning red, saliva spraying from his lips. He fought in English; she Italian. Cretino. Maledetto. Vile. Loathsome. The words launched like mortars.

  Reason and passion at war, twin children caught in the crossfire, ducking for cover.

  It was my wish, my longing, to be loved by these very different people who barely understood each other, who – if they spoke at all to each other – used words as ordnance. Words were murderous, made to wound or be misunderstood. Is it any wonder I put my trust in pictures? In Mrs. Decker’s kindergarten class, I drew fire engines, ocean liners, the Empire State Building lit up at night. Papa put the drawings into a file folder we called the “museum.” With pictures, there was no question of being misunderstood.

  In my worst dreams I’d try to make my parents understand me with words. One recurrent nightmare took place in the kitchen. I’d be trying to explain something to my mother and father, something important. My mother stirred something in a pot on her big black Chamber’s stove; my father sat in the breakfast nook with his paper. They nodded their heads, or ignored me, but neither of them seemed to actually understand whatever it was that I was trying to explain to them. And so I raised my voice. I shouted. I screamed. Still, they either didn’t seem to understand, or they ignored me. That’s when I started breaking dishes. I opened the kitchen cupboard and threw one plate after another, hurling them onto the floor. All the while my mother stirred her Bolognese sauce and Papa read the paper as if I weren’t there screaming and smashing plates.

  I was in high school when I first had this dream.

  The ability to understand each other through words is the thing that civilizes people, that keeps them from tearing each other apart. The war between my parents resulted directly from their failure to speak the same language. Though they both spoke Italian, my father spoke the language of reason and logic, while my mother spoke one of irony and innuendo. A picture may be worth a thousand words; a gesture may embody reams of psychology and philosophy. But the subtlest and most complex emotions demand nuances only spoken language can afford, and only if the language is shared.

  My inventor Papa, working in his rat-hole laboratory at the base of our driveway, in turning a brass or aluminum shaft would adjust the bit of his lathe within a tolerance of one in ten thousand. I marveled at the precision of the adjustments by those hands darkened with metal grunge. I thought if I could calibrate my words with the same level of precision, within the same tolerance, then I might build something out of them that would assure me the understanding that I never achieved in that terrible dream; I could make myself heard without having to scream or smash plates. At long last, I’d be understood.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER’S BEAUTY. THE DRY, DUSTY LIBYAN CLIMATE. The winds of the Sirocco blowing their dust over the Mediterranean, Malta, Italy, Croatia, Tunisia. The winds blow at a maximum speed of 100 kilometers an hour and are most prevalent during the autumn and the spring. The little girl in the yard of her villa, straddling a wall in the shade of a fig tree or her brother’s Lambretta, spluttering down a palm tree-lined boulevard. Frozen in her eternal adolescence, in an endless flirtation with a world that ended, for her, on or around June 28, 1940, the day Italian anti-aircraft guns accidentally shot down Italo Balbo’s Savoia-Marchetti in the skies over Tobruk. She was twelve years old and hasn’t trusted anyone since. I want to write about her beauty, which has challenged, impressed, and annoyed me, the sudden vision of her naked at the top of the stairs from which, still a child, I was forced to shield my eyes. How she kept things hidden from me in secret drawers, and other things kept secret – the disparity between what she knew and what she was willing to disclose. For most of the time growing up I could not trust her. Words were articles of concealment. To utter a truth was to negate it; to speak (for her) was to lie. Sincerity existed in a realm beyond words, sacred and private, not to be shared, or anyway not to be confounded with language.

  At eighty-seven my mother is still strikingly beautiful. From her I inherited my powers of charm and seduction.

  “MULTIPLE DEFLECTION CATHODE RAY TUBE.” Patent No. 2,489,331

  XXVII.

  Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx, New York, 2002

  TWO YEARS AFTER YOUR FATHER DIED – TWENTY-THREE years after the teacher and you had last seen or spoken with each other – the teacher phoned you.

  By then you and your wife were living in Spuyten Duyvil. In the early hours after midnight, in your studio during one of your frequent insomnia bouts, you googled the teacher’s name. You’d never done so before, in part because you weren’t sure what you would find or that you’d be ready to find it, but also because you wanted to (as you put it to yourself) “let sleeping dogs lie.” Now, though, your curiosity exceeded your reluctance, and so you typed the teacher’s name into the search field and hit “return” to find that the teacher was a full professor at a university in Oregon. More searching turned up a faculty directory with the teacher’s name listed along with his office phone number.

  Later that same day you tried the number to find it non-working. By then you were too curious to let it go at that. You phoned the university switchboard and asked for assistance. While waiting for the operator to direct your call you heard a call-waiting signal and switched to the other line. A gentle voice that you recognized instantly asked:

  What are you doing?

  I was calling directory assistance, you answered, laughing.

  Well, you got direct assistance, said the teacher.

  For the next hour you and the teacher spoke. You spoke of the things each of you had been up to since you last saw each other, you of earning a livelihood through painting and illustration, he of obtaining his doctoral degree and teaching classes at several programs at different universities before going on to co-found and head the Indigenous Studies Department at his present institution, working with Native Americans and refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. He’d been to Vietnam many times, the teacher told you, and had even set up an exchange program with a university there, the first ever of its kind in that country. Like you, the teacher was married now, he explained, to a Vietnamese woman twelve years older than he. He spent about half his time with her in Vietnam, at her home in Da Lat.

  She speaks no English, he explained. And she refuses to come to America.

  Why is that?

  She’s afraid of airplanes.

  You spoke of your own marriage, of your wife’s and your struggles to make ends meet as artists, of minor victories and defeats. Though it was nearly noon, you were still wearing your bathrobe. Paulette was in some other part of the house, in her study or in the kitchen, reading or writing or cooking (she’d studied at the French Culinary Institute and become a proficient chef). She was at most a dozen yards away, yet she may as well have been on another planet in another galaxy, so unaware was she of the history being revisited in another room.

  All this time while you
spoke with the teacher you couldn’t stop smiling, nor could you ignore the fact that the teacher and you were talking around something, namely that summer back in Corvallis twenty-three years ago. What had happened back then? What had gone wrong? Had there really been two hundred dollars in that box on the shelf behind your bed? Had Curtis really accused you of stealing it? Had the teacher and Curtis been lovers? Why had they treated you so coldly? The truth, that’s all you wanted. You wanted to know the truth.

  I’ve never stopped thinking of you, you said. All these years.

  Same here, said the teacher.

  I’ve missed you, you said. It was true. You’d missed him, or rather you missed the good parts of the past that you and he once shared together.

  At last, during a lull in the conversation, you said:

  What happened back then, that summer in Oregon?

  What do you mean?

  Curtis, the money I supposedly stole, how things ended between us.

  Who says they ended?

  You know what I mean.

  It was a long time ago, Peter. I doubt I could remember many details if I tried. All I know is it wasn’t a good time for us to be together. Our relationship had come to a turning point. It happens; things change. As transitions go, it wasn’t very smooth. I wished it had come about more gently. I was sorry about that. I know you were very hurt. I know that you were bitter. I don’t blame you. I was bitter myself, but for different reasons.

  Why were you bitter?

  I wasn’t bitter toward you. I felt bitter toward myself.

  Why?

  For not having handled things differently, for not having handled them better. The fact is I didn’t want to be your teacher anymore.

  Who said I wanted you to go on being my teacher?

  It wasn’t a matter of what you wanted so much as of what you obviously needed. I just couldn’t fill that role anymore.

  You could have said so.

  You’re right, Peter, I could have. It might have spared you some suffering. It might have spared us both some pain. But I didn’t. Maybe because I was angry at you for putting me a position where I had to choose between a friendship with you that came with the obligation to go on being someone I no longer was or wanted to be or sacrificing our friendship. I guess I made the latter choice. And who knows, maybe the suffering was necessary; maybe that’s what it took.

  What it took to what?

  For us both to move on.

  After a long pause you blurted: Are you gay?

  Sounds of Henry Hudson Bridge traffic filled the ensuing silence.

  I just told you I’ve been married for six years.

  Yeah, I know, but –

  Listen to me, Peter. When you and I first became friends thirty-three years ago, I told you people wouldn’t be able to understand our friendship, what you and I had together. Remember? I tried to warn you back then that it was too special for most people to understand, that it wouldn’t fit well into any of their recognizable categories, but that they were still bound to try and label it, the way you’re trying to label it right now.

  I’m sorry, you said. I don’t want to label anything. I just had to ask.

  Why? To know what? To put our friendship in a box? Is that really what you want, Peter, after all these years?

  The teacher spoke gently, almost a whisper. Still you heard traces of anger and disappointment in his voice.

  That’s not what I wanted, you said.

  Then why ask whether or not I’m gay?

  I’m sorry. Your felt your cheeks flush with a thirteen-year-old’s embarrassed disappointment in himself.

  No need to be. For the millionth time there’s not a box for what you and I had, Peter. If there were it wouldn’t come with a convenient label.

  The conversation went on for another half hour or so and ended politely, with you telling the teacher if he should ever find himself on the East Coast he should look you up, that Paulette and you would love to have him over. I know she’d like to meet you, you said. God knows I’ve talked enough about you to her! And she’s a fabulous cook. She’ll put out an amazing spread!

  The teacher reciprocated, saying if you should ever come to Oregon you should do likewise. He didn’t mean it, of course. Neither did you.

  After you’d hung up, it occurred to you: you still had no idea who the teacher really was. You felt as if your world had just been painted some hopelessly ambiguous combination of drab shades, like camouflage.

  You wished you hadn’t spoken with him, that you’d let sleeping dogs lie.

  A MONTH LATER you got another unexpected phone call, this one from Vivian. Since graduating from Bethel High you hadn’t seen or heard from her, though you’d heard rumors that she moved to Boston, where she’d taken up with a professional ice hockey player.

  Vivian tells you she’s living in New York, where she’s been involved in the theater, writing books and lyrics for musicals, including one about Hamlet’s doomed sweetheart Ophelia (“You know not what you’ve done / You should become a nun”).

  You meet at the Metropolitan – the museum, not the opera house. Having arrived early, you check your shoulder bag. You wear a pair of fresh black corduroy pants with a white turtleneck. You want to look your very best, to demonstrate that you have, so far, persevered if not prevailed in the battle against time and decay. Only after you’ve boarded the Metro North local to Grand Central does it occur to you that white turtlenecks had been one of the teacher’s trademarks.

  It’s raining. You stand at the top of the stairs leading up to the museum entrance, holding an umbrella, watching people come and go, trying to imagine what Vivian will look like after so many years, picturing gray hair and the frowsy wardrobe of a woman past caring what strangers – men especially – think of her looks. All this time a slender woman with dark brown henna-colored hair stands holding her own umbrella at the bottom of the stairs, gazing at a mansion on the far side of Fifth Avenue. She wears a black dress with a bright Hermes scarf. Her left arm is perched on the brass railing.

  Could it be?

  You approach slowly and speak her name.

  Vivian?

  She turns, smiles. You hug, then you stand back to inspect each other. She hasn’t changed, yet she has. Except for the artificially dark hair she looks like her younger self, but a synthetically preserved version of her younger self. Her face is thinner, her cheeks flatter. The little Chickarina meatball is still there, still clinging to the tip of her straight nose. When she smiles you notice that her teeth aren’t in great shape (but, come to think of it, they never were). For a moment, that part of you that remains thirteen years old relishes her having made these small yet inevitable concessions toward decay and decrepitude, until it occurs to you that she’s having similar thoughts about you.

  Should we go to the café? you suggest.

  YOU FIND A table by the enormous window. Low murmur of sophisticated voices, view of Central Park, rain sliding down huge panes. No cell phones permitted.

  You make small talk. Careers, health, interests, relationships past and present. The musical Vivian mentioned on the phone is the only one she had any success with. Since then she hasn’t been able to get so much as a reading of one of her plays at a decent theater. She walks dogs for a living.

  Dogs shit a lot, Vivian informs you. But at least they don’t make me feel like shit.

  You share some of your own career woes, making them sound worse than they are.

  When you’ve exhausted all other topics, Vivian says:

  Would you like to talk about ——? She invokes the teacher’s name.

  Sure, you say. Why not? (It’s all you’ve been wanting to do, really.)

  She tells you she last saw him when she was eighteen, a little over a year after she graduated from high school, when “suddenly, out of the blue,” in the mail she received from him what she describes as a “very intense letter; a passionate letter.”

  Very passionate, she repeats.

&nb
sp; Had he written to you before that?

  Vivian shakes her head. Not that it mattered. His letter made it clear that he hadn’t forgotten about me, that I’d been on his mind ever since he left Bethel.

  You give Vivian a puzzled look.

  Let’s just say it was a very romantic letter, she says.

  Romantic? you say.

  It was a love letter, she admits finally with a sigh. He confessed his love to me. He was living in Boston at the time. You know he lived in Boston?

  Yeah. He wrote me from there, you say. A couple times.

  Did he? (This doesn’t seem to please her.)

  By then I’d been accepted by the Boston Conservatory, Vivian goes on. A coincidence? Fate? Who knows. Back then I used to think everything was fate … Anyway, I went to visit him there. In Boston. I rode the bus. He had an apartment by the Fenway. I think he may have been living with some guy, I’m not sure. Anyway, I had his letter to me tucked in my purse. I must have read it fifty times on the damn Greyhound bus. He met me at the terminal. We went out to dinner, a steakhouse. He seemed – nervous. All through the meal he kept fidgeting, looking at his watch. I asked if anything was wrong. The third time I asked him, he snapped at me. Why do you keep asking that? I said since you keep fidgeting and looking at your damn watch. He said that lately he’d been under a lot of pressure. I forget the reason or reasons he gave. To be honest, I don’t remember all that much about that evening, except that he was obviously very nervous and things didn’t go very well. They didn’t go well at all.

  Doesn’t sound like you had a good time, you remark.

  He treated me like I was still his student – like I was still in eighth grade, like five years hadn’t happened. He didn’t seem able to deal with the fact that in the meantime I’d become a full-grown woman. He seemed to want to ignore that little fact, or deny it, as if the grown-up me wasn’t sitting right there in front of him, as if he was having dinner with some fourteen-year-old girl, someone he didn’t have to take quite so seriously, at least not romantically, anyway. It was one of the worst nights of my life. No, scratch that. It was the worst night of my life.