The Business of Naming Things

by Michael Coffey

  “It’s good, then?” Michael said, unusually offhand for him.

  “It’s gorgeous,” said Everett. “I hope we get a tour.” Everett checked himself; his neck twitched, a signal that he was backtracking. He made things slightly worse, though. “Oh, but first, about us!”

  Everyone waited out the awkward moment and let the goodwill return to the surface in the lovely room.

  Everett reached for his third cookie. Michael commenced their overview.

  “I graduated from Oreville,” he said.

  “He escaped Oreville,” amended Everett, unable to resist.

  “I studied at Cornell and took a degree in mathematics. Everett here and I met right in this town. I was in the grad school, applying theoretical models to biological processes. That’s still my field. Everett was doing an M.F.A. Everett’s in theater, at the Public Theater. Director of communications. We spent the eighties in New Haven. I’ve been at NYU, in the city, now for about twenty years, doing research mostly. Everett’s gig with the Public is great. We travel. No children, two cats. We married last year. What else is there? Is that our life?”

  “And Everett?” asked Janet. She’d just returned from the kitchen, again, and seemed restless. “Where are you from?”

  “Oh, nowhere,” he said, laughing his nervous laugh. Everett didn’t like to talk about his military upbringing. He preferred to talk about decor or other people’s families.

  PHILLIP LED MICHAEL UP THE STAIRS to visit with Mr. Newman. Everett moved onto the front porch with Janet. Going up the stairs, Michael was reminded of the stairs in the Dashnaw house, and how it was down those stairs that first Phillip had come and then Tommy, when he first met them. Now it was in reverse, another mystery to be found. At the top was the big mastiff, swinging a light drool and eager for company. Barley led the party across the hall to a large, sunny room. There in the bed, a big four-poster, was Mr. Newman, wearing blue pajamas, his right sleeve pinned.

  He smiled broadly, his teeth gone gray, the skin on his face tight and shiny, cleanly shaven.

  “Can this be Michael?”

  Michael shook Mr. Newman’s left hand, his one hand, like he had years ago, a loose gnarl of bones now. He shook it delicately, but Gerald Newman returned his grip with a sharp, strong squeeze.

  “I remember you. You were good to our Tom,” said the old gentleman. He smiled and sniffed a little, and brought a floral handkerchief to his nose.

  “Thank you, Mr. Newman.”

  “You can call me Gerry now. No formalities. And frankly, you’re older than I ever dreamed I would be. And here I am now, eighty-four. Five,” he said, correcting himself, and Phillip, who stood some distance away, giving space, laughed.

  “What are numbers anyway,” Michael said. “Take it from me, Mr. Newman. Gerry. I’m a mathematician.”

  “Take it from me,” said Mr. Newman with a topping grin. “I’m a shrink, retired. So little can be quantified, you know, when all is said and done. Sit down,” he said. “Let’s visit.”

  Phillip set a chair for Michael next to the bed, on Gerald Newman’s good side, his arm side, and he extended his hand to Michael once again and Michael grabbed it. Phillip took a chair near the wall, and Barley positioned himself so he could see everyone.

  Two hours later, Mr. Newman was asleep, Barley and Phillip had long since left, and Michael felt unburdened, sitting in the darkened bedroom. Something had brought them together, Mr. Newman had told him. Something had worked its magic to orchestrate their meeting again—he said that something was, no, not Ellington, but Michael. He said that Michael had a question. But Michael just shook his head and tried a smile.

  “It was unacceptable,” Mr. Newman then said. And they talked.

  What was unacceptable was the scene in the barn—the mooley. Mr. Newman said Michael’s father had tricked Hilda into letting Tom go to the barns—to pet cows, she’d been told. Afterward, Tommy was dropped off at home. He looked stricken; he was feverish and agitated, said Mr. Newman. He and Mrs. Newman got it out of Tommy what had happened. Mr. Newman called Patrick Touhey on the phone and they agreed to meet on the road between their houses, like some kind of showdown. Michael’s father declared that being around a sick and doomed child wasn’t so great for his only son, who was growing away from him, “his only father,” Mr. Newman told Michael, quoting.

  Mr. Newman said he made the decision, right then, as he walked back to his house, that it was time to move the family.

  Mr. Newman was right that Michael had a question—but he didn’t know it till he had the answer. The reason Michael never asked it was that Everett had always asked it for him. What did Michael’s father do? What damage? What good? What was Michael, what was the father?

  Michael then spoke—at Mr. Newman’s request—about his math and biology work, his use of a model to investigate some of the data on the genetic diversity of small creatures, like plankton. “To our surprise, the idea of ‘species’ may not really be applicable in all cases,” Michael told him. This was the subject of the paper he’d just finished for the Math Society. “Even among some very large populations, it’s the individuals that matter.”

  “Plankton,” Mr. Newman said softly before drifting off.

  When Michael arrived at the foot of the stairs, he could see Phillip napping on the couch, a small tent of newsprint on his chest. He could hear laughter—Everett’s—out on the porch, where he found Everett and Janet sprawled in Adirondack chairs, cocktails in hand. At Everett’s feet the yellow Lab was recommending himself for something, anything. Janet looked up. “Everett’s telling me about Fort Bragg,” she said cheerily.

  “Janet’s an army brat, too,” said Everett. He checked Michael’s face for mood. “And we’re going to play some piano four hands. Then order a couple of pizza’s from Sally’s—we remember Sally’s—”

  “Dad loves the white pizza,” said Janet.

  “—and then we’re spending the night. And that’s that.”

  From the shade of the porch, the sunlit lawn glowed like a host, its steady pulse a comfort, life itself, evenly trimmed. Images running the gamut of senses flipped through Michael’s mind like cards in a trickster’s hands—hay smell, summer light, his mother’s chalky cheek, an empty shirtsleeve crisply folded, Ben Webster’s breathy tenor, what love was, is, around him in repose on this porch. Molasses. This thought came to him: In an infinite field, the center is anywhere.

  SONS

  I

  HE SHOULD GOOGLE IT—roses of the unborn—the random phrase flashes through. Meanwhile, he’ll just mince around his midden of sneakers and loafers and those leather ankle boots she bought him that he hates and take another sip—the glass sits in a little sock cubby. It’s dark in here. The liquid burns like distilled fire, which, in a sense, it is. Slow sips, coal smoke, Macallan in a California closet. Yessir. Not shit at all. Where was he? Joyce, perhaps. A little too romantic. Auden, maybe . . . Loved roses. The unborn . . . If he had his BlackBerry he could check it right now. He thinks he hears something. The She. He knew it. Good thing he’s in the closet. And the She’s out there—her shadow through the louvred door. Quiet now. He laughs—damn! But fuck it, it is funny. I’m a closet drinker is the thought he has just had, and it is funny, funny when the figurative becomes literal; that’s comedy, isn’t it? Make a note of it. The door opens and his heart does a gallop. Her face and hair and gray suit right there.

  “I thought I heard something,” she says. “Imagine my surprise.” He can smell the acid of gone love in her breath, like ashes.

  “I got lost,” he says to wife number three, who just stands there, adjusting an earring with both hands as if tightening a bolt in a mask.

  Several beats. “And now you’re found again,” she says in a mock-childlike voice, pivoting. “We’ll be late for the theater.”

  It’s Kerouac, he remembers, and throws back the rest of his scotch. “The roses of the unborn in my closed eyelids.” Big Sur.

  BORKMAN, BORKMAN,
BORKMAN and the shit does not hit the fan. That’s the problem with wife number three: She’s got her own problems that she prefers a blind eye to be cast upon, her Tiresias, and he doesn’t mind, and so she does not call her man on his scotch-in-the-closet trick. The quid, the pro, the quo. A classic codependency. She smokes and fasts and has her injections of Juvederm and Perlane; he has his five or six drinks a day, the patch, and an online gambling account. She has the indoor gym; he has the little writing studio. Little is done of late in either. But why mention it.

  John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen’s next-to-last play. It’s from the Abbey Theatre, Frank McGuinness directing. They are schlepping to Brooklyn to see it and they are late. Or at least they hustle down Church Street for the subway as if they are late. She welcomes the exercise, and he inwardly brightens at the prospect of an early arrival and time for a cold one in the lobby. It’ll work out just like that.

  Must we narrate the No. 2 train to Atlantic Avenue? It can be cut, in life’s edit, if nothing happens or too much else of greater interest happens elsewhere. But give it a chance: they crush through the turnstile one after the other and actually touch, a bit of comedy, Keystone Kop–style, when he hastily steps into the same leg gap as the She and they jam to a halt, his front touching her backside, till he extricates himself with a backward hop. She actually smiles.

  “Jesus, keen for Ibsen?” Lost.

  The train is crowded—it is about 7:20, a Friday night. He checks his messages. She finds a seat, though, down the car, while he hangs on to his spot near the door. He can watch her. But not for long, for she is no one, looking at nothing, somehow. If there were a fire before her, she would not see it. She’s moved to another world. She is looking at a child eating an ice-cream cone, one knee skinned and her Mary Janes dangling from a wicker seat while her father in suit and vest fans himself with a straw hat and checks his watch. It’s 1960 and her eyes are closed. Her husband looks at the ad for Dr. Zizmor, dermatologist.

  No message from the Guggenheim.

  THE WALK FROM THE ATLANTIC AVENUE subway exit to the Academy is always depressing. On Broadway, or Broadway so-called, the theater you arrive at seems destined, as if, all along, that is where you were destined to be, like good drama—the Schubert! BAM still feels found by accident, an unfortunate one, and every time he goes there—or the She goes there (this was her notion)—you consider bagging the show, but there’s no place else to go—no bars, no restaurants, just a few too many African import shops—and here you are. Up the steps, then, c’mon.

  Pina Bausch that way. And Richard III. Beckett.

  The place is charred and abraded and gray; warehouse chic, like most of hip Brooklyn today. But the concessions area is well manned and lively. The She repairs to the ladies’; he considers his fate through the rising vapors of a Sam Adams, said fate, he concludes for the millionth time, long ago sealed.

  After a human cattle walk up a side stairway, there is the stage, below. As promised (Ben Brantley), it’s a snowscape. Ibsen, after all. Norwegian. The lights are still up; they settle into their seats, which are fair—but at seventy dollars each? What price culture, he thinks. For the moment, it is a New York moment—his fellow citizens, most of them white, like him, most of them in their fifties, like him, have worked their lives by some commodius vicus of recirculation, he thinks, to arrive here. So what. He gives the She the inside seat, more toward the center: always the gentleman. He must suppress a belch, while the She clicks to her minimal grateful look—a slight, momentary pinch of the outer rim of the nostrils, the mere suggestion of what sincerely tearful thanks would do to a face. Just a taste. Thank you. When she turns back to inspect the empty stage, he sees the dusting of powder on the down of her near cheek. Life is sad, Dad.

  He stands to take off his overcoat—he loves this coat, John Varvatos, cashmere, a gift to himself for having finished his grant proposal on time—and now he will, yes, attend his electronics, as prompted by an announcement from the stage. He surveys the house. Ho: Below he sees his current in-laws, near the front, nice seats—why didn’t he know the great ones were attending? They are old now. No reason, really, to hear from them. So he had not.

  He could see the old man—the She’s father—sinking into his own fine coat, hiding from the eyes of the public, hiding in plain sight, as it were, but drawing all the more attention to himself for disdaining it—just as he did when he read in public, quietly, rapidly, as if embarrassed to be the center of attention, but rather making the audience strain all the more to hear each brilliant sentence which, son-in-law must admit, each was. A genius fellow, agreed, who might be able to say more about Ibsen—who would be able to say more that is new about Ibsen, you can be sure—than anyone else alive, if he set his mind to it. Being in attendance, it is sure that he has put his mind to it. There’ll be an essay in The New Yorker soon, no doubt. And a check, a certain slender portion of which, by virtue of the application of general principles and a provision of the tax code, will fall to his own account, or his wife’s, Deo volente.

  He’d seen the ghost of his own dear father once, in a public place, and wrote one of his better poems about it—at Shea Stadium, in attendance there with his own son (first marriage) at the time, and his son’s girlfriend (she who had rescued him from drink—temporarily). His son was waiting out a court process in another state—wheels of justice grinding in Indiana. The boy with a substance problem; an anger problem; a problem with his own dad’s abandonment of him when he was child, and yet sitting there together, the three of them, watching Mets-Phillies. Not bad. Not drinking, either, in support of said son. And then, there, before him, the baldish pate of his own late father, the boy’s grandfather, dead by then for a good four or five years, a career corrections officer, and an Elk, a Knight, a Legionnaire. Dead ringer for the man, from behind: same soft hunch of the shoulders, too broad for the light cotton jacket that stretched across them; the slight tilt forward of the forehead, as if looking over glasses; the three strands of hair combed from right to left across the top, which his only son, as a toddler, used to pretend to barber with his fingers, sitting atop those shoulders; the rim and wattle of those ears unmistakable. He sits two rows down from them. The son—we better introduce by name here—Liam with his own son, Johnny, and girlfriend Leah; Liam’s father, Frank (adoptive, ghost of?)—lies in wait, as the game progresses (against Curt Schilling, little progress by the hometowners), for the old man to stand up. He seems rooted to the seat; Dad had a different bladder than that, thinks Liam to himself. Surely, when the game ends or when the man with the baldish pate and the big ears decides to leave or take a leak, Liam will catch a glimpse. Frank, the ghost of Frank, will rise and turn and come up the steps, right by them. But he does not. The hometowners miraculously rally, knock out Schilling, and in the end pull the game out; Carlos Baerga, big night. The game ends on a home run—pandemonium, as they say. When Liam looks, the man is gone. A ghost. “Love is a distant whisper/and a listening in,” he wrote in his poem.

  The curtain—or rather, a scrim—rises. There’s Fiona Shaw.

  He’d seen her twice before—once at a party at the Irish consulate and then as Winnie in Happy Days, right here at BAM in a Deborah Warner production. At the party, a good ten years ago, Fiona was bright and vivid in look and talk, apple-cheeked, if not a bit windburned, her speech quite fast and a total delight, a sharp sweetness like, say, mint chocolate, her brogue. She sipped a whiskey, neat, and beamed at various men as if they were fascinating. In the Beckett play, she was too young for Winnie, Liam thought, her arms too gym-taut for a woman buried to her waist in a mound of dirt; and again tonight, she is too young for Gunhild Borkman, the shrewish wife of the disgraced John Gabriel. Sadly for Liam, Fiona Shaw is too young for him, as well.

  She gives vivid speech once again as the play begins. Standing erect at center stage in blocky nineteenth-century shoes, she knifes the air with powerful strokes, cuts and shreds the space around her: Gunhild Borkman, disgraced wife of a dis
graced banker, cannot be budged or fucked with; she’ll gut you with flashing hands. She is emphatic and shrill. Her husband has cast the entire family into eternal shame by screwing investors, it would seem, and she’s living with it, and he’s living with it, in his eighth year of house arrest, or something like that, upstairs. Alan Rickman, as Borkman, once he arrives, drips scorn on everything with slow delight, ladling out bile. It’s as if he’s lost everything, including the chance to die. Everyone in the audience must be reminded of Bernie Madoff, thinks Liam. But Liam is reminded of himself.

  THE NIGHT AIR SMELLS. Intermission. Liam stands outdoors on the top of the steps, where he’d be having a smoke if he still smoked. He is surprised that Borkman had gotten to him. He’s never liked Rickman since his snotty embodiment of Eamon De Valera once. Unfair, yeah. But this one burned. Lost in thought, Liam is thinking about how lost in thought he is, which centers him a bit, and catches him up with time. He won’t even sneak a drink in. A couple of typical BAMers ever so politely jostle him out of his way, assuming he is smoking out there in his big overcoat, but, rather, he is just then hunched slightly, trying to work the keys on his BlackBerry. A Google search:

  BORKMAN is of middle height, a well-knit, powerfully built man, well on in the sixties. His appearance is distinguished, his profile finely cut, his eyes piercing, his hair and beard curly and grayish white. He is dressed in a slightly old-fashioned black coat, and wears a white necktie.

  Liam looks down at his shoes. The mica or schist or whatever it is twinkles like starlight in the cement—distant worlds beneath his Mephisto loafers. He has forgotten which tie he is wearing—flips it out and peers: the pearl grey Bax Agley. Almost like Borkman’s. But he’s not, what is it—“well-knit and powerfully built,” but he’s got a decent profile. He thinks. He shakes this thinking off—and Googles Fiona Shaw. . . . For crissakes, she’s a lesbian, and they are flashing the lobby lights and he’s got those stairs to climb and then the wedging in of bony ass to the unforgiving seat next to his wife of five years. As he makes his way slowly up the long cattle ramp, many of his fellow bovines slower moving than he, he gets in a few last glimpses at said BlackBerry: his e-mail. The Guggenheim, any day now, any day now. C’mon. Make me a Fellow or shoot me already. He has alerts set up—anyone who blogs with the words Guggenheim Fellow 2011 will be a signal—to let him know who’s won. No such alert. But here’s one, from the “Brogan” alert. Something about his son from his son. What am I in, thinks Liam Brogan, a Paul Auster novel? The second act is gonna feature me?