Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  But he said, “Everything’s perfect, we have a little heaven right here: just stop and think about it.”

  Then, a minute later, his breath is not convinced; he sort of blames me, or fate—I mean, he feels it really could be perfect and it isn’t.…

  He’s in his thoughts and far off and then his attention comes rolling and roaring back like a train backing up in a switchyard, a monstrosity thing, a giant engine suddenly switched from track to track, then to a track aimed toward me. He smiles distantly: his attention, although it is fixed on me, is changeably receding: “A freckle-faced kid but you don’t have freckles—well, you could be well and sweet and make me happy.”

  Then he turns into a new version of a sentry-nurse, half a beaming lighthouse, public, publicly friendly-faced, fatherly in the damp air. A wind has started up, and the clear spaces are larger, but we are still closed in. “But we’ll do what we can, can, can, to keep the wolves at bay.… And it’s all a can of worms, but so what? That’s what I say to you.” This is a variant of saintly-but-sneaky—he’s in motion; he’s all thunder and big stuff—dangerous amusements: he displays a high-keyed grimace, a locally sophisticated smile at the foggy air: he’s an O.K. fella, shy, distracted—handsome: that’s what he looks like right now, in the mist-walled moment: Root for me. He is not meanly vain, not now, only sometimes, in the way he dismisses everyone and the way he expects indulgence for what he does (because when all is said and done, I’ve done my work, I’m a real man, goddamn it); as a practical matter, real men are forgiven, they have absolution, sort of, as they go along, unless things go really wrong. With me here, he’s being patient—up to a point; he’s a good man, not a bastard—but he’s a man.

  He’s sort of on fire physically with restlessness, so that his softness and crooningness have a comic beauty.

  He knows that. He has a depth of comic knowingness about himself and people—it’s noticeable.

  I would say he has a public anxiety to feel deeply, this is part of his persona, to be someone who is real and strongly true—not a thief, not an embezzler, a man of great emotions, the best emotions, the greatest version of the emotions that there is.

  He needs to feel he feels deeply as he needs to take a full breath from time to time. In his business life and with Lila, he is more ironic and sarcastic and good-hearted and shrewd and careful than he is a man of deep feeling. He’s experimenting now with deep feelings.

  It’s as if he had dark shafts and mines in him in which fires rage in veins of coal—long-term fires.

  He is filled by his appetite to feel. I can imagine stuff earlier that day, business meetings, and getting the car taken care of; he maybe carried on with a woman he doesn’t much like, a secretary—women encouraged him; he encouraged them to. Once, in a corner of a fire stairs, after a business meeting in which he was set apart from the money boys and felt hurt (I overheard him telling this to some men in a bar where I sat quietly), the consolatory sex—“They have the gelt, I have the prick-a-prick”—was lousy, or so he said, and now he’s like a child—innocent and infinite in passion. He’s like a child but one who’s infinitely powerful.

  I feel his attention as a refined space that I am in.

  He says, “If everyone would listen to me, the world would be a finer place to live in.”

  He is deep-humored, with ogling eyes; his eyes do that as a joke. They’re deep-lidded and nursey, nursery kind and sweet, still a lecher’s eyes: he is a man of local wit.

  Daddy lives physically, altering his surfaces and his tones as he goes along: “I don’t like books, they’re too mean, but I would like to write one book, I’d call it The Book of Pleasures. I am a perfect gentleman now that I am here with you. It’s a dogfight to see who takes care of you, Pretty One. Everyone in the house fights to be your nurse.” Nurse to the silent child. “I can see why. I’ll tell you something: a little sweet pity feels good on a wet day. It’s good to be near a warm heart on a sad day.”

  The thickness and foreignness of his voice are mystery and clouded-ness—his has the nature of a voice from the cloud. The sound spreads out and does not focus: it is as if a steeple spoke. And Max’s voice is this man’s voice—Max is my real father: this voice used to play other games, used to speak differently.

  The bluff of claiming equality with a man is not possible in the matter of voices. In the transposition of my fathers was a great booming that affected my pulse. The way one has two parents—or one—or three—is like being in the soberly silver and dark air, with what was nearly a rainlight in it, walling us into the mist and occasional drips and spits of water and even a second or two of rain—this commits you to metamorphosis with good reason. I was a changeable realist. I don’t know if that is the same as disloyal or not. S.L.’s masculine intentions included having grains or particles in his voice of knowledgeable rhetorical music as such things go around here, and spreading and temporary shadings—masculine and cultivated—meanings that I cannot hope to match. The thoughts do not seem to come from his mouth and throat but from his will, a cloud; and they fill the entire field of unity of vanity that is suspended from his presence and that surrounds him and keeps him separate, as a matter of spirit, from the earth, from the rain.

  The voice emerges from around the wells and barricades and roofs and arches of his body—nicely ripe flesh, on this fella. The voice was skylike for me—a sky over the real landscape and over an implied one in him and a ghostly version, a predicted one in me. The puffed and scaly and whistled and whittled and chiseled syllables pass above the ground of the world and over the listener’s half-conscious consciousness of speech. The lip shapings S.L. does seem more like pantomimes of meaning than aspects of taming and guiding the noise of his voice. His throat-hurled noises and the palatal echoes and nasal shadings are special to him—that stuff can’t be notated. He applies a male, pale lacquer of breath outside a syllable so that are you smiling has in the final breath of each syllable, in the paling and dwindling r and in the fluted u and the vertically falling and rising narrow i and in the pursed and then flung-open ling, an untoned wind of poetic intention: “Ahrrr—uhhhhh—ahhh YuHuuUuuuu uhhhhh ahhh SMIIIIII ieh, eh, ehhh, LiNGggg—ahhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh.” Two nasal notes, at the end, are a shift downward: all his tones, even those meant to cheer you, have a subcurrent of male lament. Male grief.

  All his tones are new for me, are a different philosophy of speech from my other father’s, and from the women—different emotions, different sorts of attempts at meaning, different meanings, secrets: secrets from women—everything he says refers to everything differently. Think of the chambers of reference for me. I can’t listen hard and see clearly at the same time. I can hear and see at the same time in a nervous blur without thought, in action—if I can say that. Mostly, if I hear him well, the fog-chambered street vanishes, the silver and brown spaces, some of which are bright silver off and on as the clouds and the sky shift in meaning and in luminescence. Instead, I see what he says, blinkingly, a squinched, knotted, vertiginously knotted picture, knotted on itself and yet clear, too, a sort of active picture, mysterious and lucid, as a dream is, but with his direct authority.

  His mood, his moods, his ultimately gentle but also jaggedly tough, bigly harsh speech, his breath—his real breath is geological (and geographical) noise, and in it are veinings and plates, are words somehow. I guessed at them as at doorknobs, coat hangers, coffeepots. I guessed at them; I leaped at them; I caught them in the teeth of my mind. Then they were like toys in the light in my room at a given hour. The speeches were like boxes with toys and shadows in them, or like a shelf with toys on it, or a window with toys on the windowsill: the lines or shapes of words are in a jumble of glare, they are fields of attention that I find myself in or am whisked past. This campaign, this hobby cheered me.

  In the brown-as-if-muddied and swathing and damp air, he is a serious and committed aesthete of flesh as well as of masculine style in consolations and in male bravuras of speech, his voice in its vocal
careenings and its strutting. By the time we had walked along the street a little way, he had a memory of moments when he had felt strenuous charity toward the cleaned up (and pretty) kid.

  At moments, as we walk, as he breathes in and out, as his moods alter, I feel his strength blending in with the beat of my heart behind my ribs—it is a vast sensation; almost infinite is how it feels. I widened out and had new reaches of myself and larger bones, a larger voice. I had his large heartbeat as echo and shadow or prop of my own much smaller and neater one: cello and perhaps tin drum. The mystique of male company is in this area of sharing strength, this addition to the self which has armylike aspects to it, a sense of multiplication. S.L.’s hospitality was hopelessly arbitrary, and sexual, unrooted in real customs—his sexual actuality constrained him—he could not be other than a man of lechery, he could not be friendly without being an immediate intimate: all his social grace and formality consisted of his holding back, of his being ironic about what he felt and largely knew, rightly perhaps, to be the sexual nature of the world.

  His real hospitality was in sexual matters.

  S.L. was thirty-three years old. A large percentage of his fucks were mercy fucks (and another large percentage was with whores, a pro playing a pro). It is very strange, the charity of a sensual man, the movements of the heart in someone profoundly sensual, and the qualifications and reality in it. Ultimately, such charity accuses you: If you can’t fuck and be attractive, you’re a Poor Thing. Part of any real sense of strength is the sense of charity it has, the way part of being womanly is built around showing a kind of illegal mercy. With people with money, like us—a lot of this is corrupted by dealing and tricks. Bribes matter. That charity is now devoted to the good-looking mute kid—but it has an odd proviso because of my real father’s brute strength and temper (and his ignorance: He is scum, I will overhear when I am older) and because of the child’s prettiness and charm of posture and of expression: S.L. did an inventory: “You carry yourself good, you got a charm there in what you do with your face, you have real nice coloring, Prettikins.”

  He is a father: I am proposing an unideal father, one for whom fatherhood can’t be a closed topic. He is an unideal example but he may be typical anyway. I am an example of an unreal but ideal son to him but not ideal because damaged and mute—that’s how it works. He is merely who he is, I am a narrator, and not just a narrator but a son who will “appreciate me, give a little nice history, for a change—”

  I am also merely who I was, a kid. And so what? So far as I know, I am maybe also a timeless fragment of truth—but it is mounted at an odd angle to the ecliptic of the earth in this rainy light.

  A white house rises in front of me above its own gray and black reflection in a puddle, a sheet of dark water. It makes me tremble, the phenomenon, the dreamlike screen, the flattened and foreshortened mimicry and then the true and shadowed, to me somewhat tilted, wood loomer. I tremble in my ignorance. Everything is eccentric in plane and everything is albino to some extent. A gold rectangle on S.L.’s belt is pale, is palely white-seeming, with only a faint cast of possibly being also yellow in the glary and wet and drifting and changeable light. I cannot tell you how much I loved the actual house and how much I feared and even loathed its reflection. I kicked at the puddle, or stepped on it, to break it, or squash it. The reflection in its ideal nature shows a house in which I cannot live—one I cannot enter. I can’t live in the reflection; and at moments it seems to have stolen the real house and the realities of entry and halls of the wood loomer. I see in its smoothness, in its slick, enshrined prettiness, a rebuke to my grossness of dimension, and the related fleshly flaws of my existence. This bursts, in a kind of emotional budding, into my yearning to have things be different for me—such things as that.

  Then my mood changes.

  I doubt that I am as changeable as S.L.

  I am as changeable as S.L.

  I stamp on the puddle and disorder it in real (and childish) earnest. Rescued, set free, the real house sails unheedingly blunt-walled in the gray and brown air—it goes on looming tiltedly, dimensionally: I look up to check on it across its piece of wet lawn and in its brackets of wet white mist. It ignores me.

  I move on hurriedly, I come to the next puddle. In it I see another reflection, leaves of a tree and me looking down—a pale, curly-haired, blond child, very pale—and I see the gables and the chimney of another house. It is easier to see the house and its windows and chimneys and part of a tree and its branches and its leaves in the puddle where they are flattened and stilled and close to one another than in the trembling air in which, when I look up, all the mysterious separations into distances and directions and densities and differences dismay my shy, and maybe fragile, mind. I squat and touch the screen with a finger: everything is oddly angled, with ladders of succession, and no space; but only a kind of flattened clarity of organized presentation that is interesting and seems useful although no use is given, except that one’s eyes feel placated and fed.

  The house has wooden siding and twisted and partially gleaming windows in the dulled light of the puddle. Shadowy fans of wind ruffle the surface and raise gliding and blinding ridges, but in such fine ways that the house and its border of near leaves—near to me peering in the puddle—do not entirely disappear. Insofar as I can read what I see (much of the world is a disorderly scribble to me, green and brown and silver chaos), the windows are framed, silled, corniced—there are a lot of them, of windows. Here is the tilted head of the doubled and peering child. The reflection is a reflection but it seems to be leaves and me and part of a house. It is not habitable but it is true. It is legible. It seems to be good training in seeing. It has the breath of Spirit in it. I held my fingers above it and slowly did not touch it and then I did. Then I withdrew them.

  I like the usefulness but I do not like the hint of the ideal, the presence of ideal meaning—seemingly. It has a threat to it, a weird quality—it has the menace later to be noticed by the child in ideas and principles proposed to him for him to be ruled by. The reflection has no real odor. I begin to wonder where is the sound of a train, where are the fields. Then I do hear a train far away, but the house is not trembling at all. The house wall near me does not echo and boom. We are here—we are high in the air, it seems from the silence and from the quality of the air: it is true: this is high ground. The noise of the train so far away and of the drip of water, of the stilled rain, like the noises S.L. makes, that Daddy makes, this much transformed man, are not examples of anything, but I can make them examples of the truth of the other house being one of these houses, of there being only one house so long as I use the reflection as the feeling and name of house. I do this, and the element of error in me turns out to be truth—in a way—as in my childhood dreams (and still, I would suppose).

  “Look at you,” Daddy says. “You’re a looker—ha-ha.”

  Nowhere here, nowhere, is there a single one of the odors of the other house.

  Daddy and I, each, quiver with the lines of our moods—our lives: this is an example of being father and son in a way.

  I echo with the man’s presence—it almost but doesn’t drown out the lines of my moods. Does he echo with himself?

  Transactions and illogicality and rending fatedness in a moment.

  Who will suffer most—who will have the better time today—him or me?

  Imagine a man who was chiefly intelligence, whose entire life was spent as thought even when he took a child for a walk or when he fucked—even when he was in midfuck, or perhaps he chooses to be quick, so that he is not ever in midfuck but goes zip, zip; or he likes only danger, doing it in public hallways, so that the decor of the occasion is what matters, and midfuck is a silence in the hall—and was not himself in his own flesh, in an act, in the treacherous realities, the expanses of real time but was always thought, was intelligence-in-general, an example, and perhaps not quite a real mind but it is a real mind and he is a person as much as he ought to be for the sake of his li
fe, even then, I would think.

  I look up from the puddle at S.L., and I see the nature of presence in his wind-rouged (or salmoned) blondness, his ticking eyelids and his glasses, his fluttering necktie—he’s an example of unideal presence—well, I mean, he’s there, and if he’s there, he’s not the ideal thing, just in the nature of things, in the nature of what the ideal is: it is only me alone in my head but there with him in bodies and voice—I don’t speak—me alone in my head and the meanings I want. The true thing in the rush of feeling is that I get only him, not my idea of a father, but confusion, yet it’s a stability, a still place in the wind. Only him and not my idea of a father, you can’t tell how much the feeling means; this is why if you’re in the present, it’s like being inside folly, pure folly, pure simplicity, the poor simplicity of real immediacy, not pure, not simple at all.

  I think there is a transference of consciousness from him to me along these lines. It has to do with a kind of male sense of what’s going on, which is unlike a female sense of it. Real safety for a woman, a locked door, is ideal in a way it isn’t for a man, at least so far in history, in which it is simply a kind of madness or breakdown in the man, a step or degree in a hopeless defense and part of a history of defeats and victories, with now one being ahead and now the other.

  I mean, he shares with me the contingent or time-riddled or on-consignment nature of our being together and our emotions—and our varied beauties and our varied vanities—and nightmares and hopes. He doesn’t know what is going to happen. He doesn’t know what is in his mind. This is familiar and male. I recognize the way he feels (sort of). Will I listen to him always, every minute? Will I be true among dangers? A wind has started up—it runs like a naked child after a bath, whirling here and there, and then it subsides. And then it’s a crowd and tumble of such children in their transparent rush and acrobatics—this widens the area cleared of mist. My wind-teased eyes begin to squint—to limit and edit my field of vision, the fields of my confusions. My will in squinting means, in part, that paying no attention is now an act of logic.