The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “I hear you have a new house,” he said. “Will you let me see your house?”

  I don’t remember how I answered I don’t remember now and the clock by my bed reads 3:15. The minute hand keeps moving. I wish it would stop, Diary!

  I have taken another couple from the vial by the bed and there are six. I wrote the number that I started with down and it was eight. You see it written here I always write it I started with eight so I want to be sure. They say that I am special and I’m wondering if the moment is coming when I will close my eyes and the things that seem real bleed into what can’t be. That’s the second you know you are slipping which is what I feel now a slow slipping. I can’t finish the conversation I want to write it out, what I remember, but am falling asleep leap a leap and so I won’t forget:

  8.

  The flashlight bobbed on those last scrawled lines, but I turned its dying circle to the door when I heard the noise. There were sirens in the distance and rain in the jacarandas, but what I really heard was inside. A tumbler click? A key turning in a lock? I stood, the beam fading. The flashlight was cheap. I’ve said that already. I switched it off and walked to the door that led into the hall.

  I looked out.

  A noise: something in the living room, the low sweep of light.

  A silhouette stepped into the hall, raising his own flashlight toward me as I jumped back inside Marilyn’s room and pressed myself against the wall behind the door, eyeing the broken window and listening as the men—there were two now—entered the Telephone Room:

  “—red,” the voice said.

  “So much shit.” Another voice. “Who knew she had it?”

  “Nothing here.”

  “You what?”

  “I said there’s nothing. I said there’s . . . I don’t see it.”

  “Let’s look in the other room. Maybe they got it wrong.”

  “The captain said—”

  “Come on.”

  “He would have to—”

  “It’s not in here. Nothing’s in here.”

  “Except a bunch of shit. Let’s try the other room.”

  I pressed myself against the wall behind the door, hands flat on both sides, my face all eyes.

  The beam swept the room.

  I held my breath.

  The beam steadied on the bed, landing on the diary.

  “There it is!”

  I ran and grabbed the diary from the bed and darted to the broken window, cutting myself on the glass left in the frame, and dropped to the lawn.

  “Grab his jacket!”

  I heard crickets and barking dogs in the air out on Sixth. I thought of Mrs. Murray’s testimony, Miss Monroe in the soldier’s position, no refractile crystals, the missing yellow, the entry in the diary—

  I jumped over the fence and ran to the cul-de-sac.

  A van marked B. F. FOX ELECTRIC was parked down the street from my car. It hadn’t been there before.

  I got inside the Rambler. The engine wouldn’t turn. I sat turning the key, lights and radio flashing, then dying as the cheap bastard sparked out.

  I pushed the diary onto the floor, kicked it under the seats as the engine clicked and I drove straight into the man. I couldn’t see his face. He fell to the street, picking himself up just as I turned and sped down Sixth.

  In the rearview mirror, I saw them coming.

  It was 8:01. And I was late.

  9.

  You’re late,” Rose said as she took a blackened casserole from the oven and put it on the counter to the right of the sink. She wore an apron and mitts. She opened the lid, waving away smoke with those Mickey Mouse hands. “Burned,” she said, and turned to me. “You were supposed to pick him up an hour ago.”

  “I got delayed at work.”

  “Sure, it’s always work. Don’t tell me.”

  “It’s something this time.”

  “Like . . . what? The tissue samples?”

  “Hey.”

  “I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean it.”

  We were in El Segundo, not far from the airport. The name means “the second” in Spanish, since it’s only the second location in the U.S. to host a Standard Oil plant.

  That tells you almost everything you need to know.

  The house was where I’d lived until just after the trial, the place where we had tried to make a home. Rose sighed, deflated, and shrugged with a slap of both mitts against her summer dress. She had long brown hair that she was always brushing behind her ears and skin that looked like a soap commercial. She smelled of soap, too.

  Someone once asked, “What is there to say about love that someone else hasn’t already made money off of?” I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t have anything to say about love. I certainly never made money off it. Rose once cut my black hair with clippers in the kitchen and, picking it up from the floor, said, “Too bad I can’t sell this.”

  She had fallen in love, she said, with my hair and the way it curled around my ears and the way one ear stuck out more than the other and the way my eyebrows looked, she said. That and, she said, my hands. For me it was the same. It’s the details that you notice—the slight damp on the back of her neck, the way she clips her fingernails.

  Now I held The Book of Secrets up to her. “The diary,” I said. “Of Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Well, that’s just great, but how does that put food on the table?”

  “There’s food on the table.”

  “The damn cookbook doesn’t work. It’s like that sweater you gave me.”

  “Which?”

  “The one that never kept me warm. We’ll have to get dinner out.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mean you,” she said. “Someone’s coming over.”

  “What kind of someone?”

  “We’ve discussed this before: It’s a trial separation.”

  “When do we reach a verdict?”

  “We already did. You can only make so many withdrawals from an emotional bank account before it’s empty.”

  “Are you seeing that therapist again?”

  “I need to stand up for myself.”

  “You’re seeing that therapist again.”

  “I need to take care of Max.”

  “You do take care of him.”

  “You know what he asked me last night?”

  “No.”

  “He wanted to know what a whore was. Some kid told Max that his father was caught with a whore and there are pictures to prove it. So Max—”

  “I wasn’t caught with a whore.”

  “That’s not what the Mirror said. I want to show you something.” She walked from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room where Max sat playing Monopoly on the carpet.

  I followed.

  “Max?”

  My son looked up, and I don’t know how to tell you what I felt about him, Doc. He was nine. He was four feet and four inches. He was the most beautiful kid in the world. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful.

  And there he sat. I see him now: playing with the game he didn’t know how to play, using the silver pieces as toys.

  His favorite was the thimble.

  “Show Ben what’s on your leg.”

  It was “Ben”: not “Dad” or “Daddy.”

  “Do I haf to?”

  “Yes,” she said as the boy stood and shambled over to where I stood. He sheepishly slipped from the beige corduroys he wore with the gray T-shirt. He wore Batman underwear. Rose pointed to the tiny marks in a small, symmetrical cluster near his ankle.

  “Look at this, Ben,” she said. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Bites.”

  “Bedbugs. From your fleabag hotel.”

  “It’s not a hotel.”

  “The hotel where he spends every other week. God only knows what else he’s getting from that place. VD from the toilet seats—”

  I cupped my hands over Max’s ears. They were small and warm. “Little pitche
rs. My apartment is fine, Rose.”

  “Your hotel—”

  “Please,” I said. “Let’s go into the bedroom.”

  • • •

  The bedroom was in disarray: clothes on the floor, the bed unmade, the picture of Rose, Max, and me that had sat by the alarm clock on the bedside table turned to the wall. Moving boxes sat around the bed, filled with my stuff: books, the old model train I had bought for Max’s last birthday and assembled in the basement, my typewriter, a stack of jazz albums Rose had never liked, a few 8mm W. C. Fields movies, and a baseball bat.

  “We need to make this fast,” she said. “I want custody of Max.”

  Like a punch in the gut. “You’re kidding me?”

  “—lieved,” she said over the plane flying low into the airport.

  “You what?”

  “I said I thought you’d be relieved.”

  “To lose my son?”

  “To have more time. To kiss Daddy Curphey’s ass.”

  “I don’t kiss ass.”

  “You perjured yourself.”

  “I got a promotion.”

  “Step Three? That’s what you got in return for your soul? Faust at least got Gretchen. You got a bottle of bourbon in a Wilshire hotel.”

  “It’s not a hotel. It’s the Savoy.”

  “On Wilshire.”

  “I think I should remind you that you kicked me out.”

  “You want me to remind you why?”

  “The Mirror lied,” I said.

  “Oh, and you chopped down the cherry tree.”

  The doorbell rang. “Jesus,” she said.

  10.

  I suppose that I can trace the death of my marriage to the afternoon we won the lawsuit, Doc, after which we all repaired to a place called Verona Gardens. It had once been a tony nightclub—it was now a hotel—on Hollywood Boulevard.

  We started with some fancy drinks that seemingly shielded us from excess through egg whites and umbrellas, but it wasn’t long before we achieved a kind of liftoff on the harder stuff, and the next thing I knew we were drinking shots straight from someone’s bottle.

  Everyone was toasting me. My testimony had made me a hero, the new deputy coroner, Step Three, and with every shot I felt that I was taking yet another step away from my own past. I was a big man, important, and had proved it in the courthouse. I wasn’t going to end up lost, a failure out in San Berdoo, hulling beans.

  This is what I kept telling the woman who had, like everything else, lurched out of nowhere. She liked my hair, she said. She kept touching it, telling me that it was black and not only black but glossy and beautiful and how my lips were red against the white of the skin and the bluish stubble of beard. “You Irish?” she asked.

  “Black Irish.”

  “Black,” she said, “is sexy, freaky.”

  The next thing I knew I woke on a bed that was smeared with blood. An ashtray filled with butts sat in the sun that streamed through open blinds. There were bowls of half-eaten Chinese food. Some of it was dripping on the walls.

  The phone was ringing.

  “Jesus.”

  I stood, still in my clothes, and stumbled to the phone, trying to piece together the story of the night from the evidence of things around me.

  Lipstick on the mirror read, “So long, sucker.”

  She had emptied out my wallet.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “This Ben Fitzgerald?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Who’s—”

  “Duane Mikkelson. From the Mirror. You heard of it?”

  • • •

  Is this my boy?” Rose’s New Friend said as he entered the house, taking his hat off and smiling down at Max, who was playing in his underwear. “This must be my boy.”

  Max looked up.

  The New Friend bent to tickle my son’s face with his forefinger. “Or is this a monkey?”

  The New Friend was older—forty-eight at least—with a thick gray mustache slightly twirled at the edges and gray hair so precisely parted and pomaded it looked plastic. He was Santa Claus with a shave and a haircut.

  He looked like money.

  He also looked like a flit.

  “Rose,” I said. “Let’s put Max’s pants on.”

  The New Friend looked up at me.

  “Mr. Charles,” my wife said, “this is Ben. Ben, this is—”

  “Reginald Charles.” He extended his hand. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  I shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m afraid dinner is ruined. The cookbook didn’t work.”

  “Oh, a shame.”

  “Neither did the sweater,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Ben was just leaving,” Rose said.

  I brought Max’s pants to the boy and held them out for him to step in. “Come on, buddy. We’re going to the park.”

  “You’re not taking him to Pacific Ocean, are you?” Rose asked.

  “Sure am.”

  “Yay!” Max said.

  “That place is a death trap,” said Rose.

  “At least there are no bedbugs.”

  11.

  A drinker loses time. I knew this from my dad. A drinker’s life disappears, like magic, from 5 P.M. to 3 A.M. To recapture the hours, he must be a daily detective of his own ashtrays and bar food, his napkins and the lipstick on unfiltered Pall Malls, his stained sheets and the smell of hops under the streetlight in the back of the bar where the fans kick out exhaust. He must be a detective of his own soggy evenings, as I had been the morning after the trial—or as I was when, that night, I found myself in a part of town I didn’t know.

  “This is Titusville Air,” the friendly voice said on the radio.

  The reception started going out when the lights from the only other car on the road rose in the rearview.

  It was a Ford Fairlane. Dice dangled from the rearview mirror. It tailed me for maybe five miles but disappeared when I finally found the PCH and, soon afterward, Pacific Ocean Park.

  “Dad?” Max asked in the shotgun seat.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros?”

  “I give up, Max. What?”

  “Hell-if-I-know.”

  “That’s a good one, sport. That’s really a good one.”

  • • •

  The park stretched across a three-block swath of Venice, like a T with its stem jutting into the ocean. At the tip was an island overlooking the Pacific; you reached it only on the Ocean Skyway bubble carts. I parked in the Ocean lot in a part of town you know is run-down. Venice. You’ve been there. Rose thought it was a “death trap” and “dangerous and unsanitary,” just like the Savoy.

  It wasn’t. But a man whose wife is divorcing him has only a few options, one of which involves giving the son those things that she denies. These “things,” she now claims, included Wild Turkey and pills, which is a lie. You know that, Doctor.

  “I don’t,” you say.

  I grabbed the diary and held my son’s hand as we left the car and walked past the lights around the fountains with the dolphins and the swirling Neptune and the starfish at the top of the rotating pole to the ticket window under yellow arches. Behind the Plexiglas, in the green fluorescent light, sat a woman whose head barely cleared the low shelf.

  “Two, please.”

  “One ninety-eight.”

  We walked into the park that stretched down to the island at the end with the sound of laughing and the ca-ching of clown heads ejecting at the pop of water rifles and the lights of the city in the sky over the Santa Monicas. Yellow and green neon lit the balls above the hot dog and the cotton candy stands.

  “Where to, sport?”

  “Around the World in Eighty Turns.”

  “You always get sick on that one.”

  “Mom gets sick on that one.”

  “Okay.” I wondered how far I should go. “How is she, sport?”

  “She’s oka
y. She’s seeing people.”

  “People.”

  “Like the man. She put an ad in.”

  “Where?”

  “Newspaper. For testing boyfriends.”

  “What kind?”

  “Other daddies, I guess. She’s mad at you,” he said. “But I can help.”

  “How?”

  “Here.” He took the Get Out of Jail Free card from his pocket. “It’s the only one I have.”

  I bent down, hands on his small shoulders, and looked straight into his face. “You know something?” I said. “I’m gonna keep this forever.”

  And I will.

  Later, he threw up in the toilet of the Savoy because his belly hurt, he said, thanks to Around the World in 80 Turns, a trip we’d taken twice, and while I sat on the edge of the bed, hand on his damp forehead, I heard the rattling in his chest. He was clutching his silver thimble.

  He was having an asthma attack, Doctor. He has asthma. So, at 2:15, I took him for a drive. It’s pretty much the only cure. You roll the windows down. You try to clear his lungs.

  We drove for hours.

  At 2:15, we returned to the hotel and I carried my sleeping son up the stairs to the room on the seventh floor. I sat watching his chest rise and fall behind his T-shirt as the lights elongated on the ceiling from the cars on Wilshire. Some dwindled into nothing as they passed.

  Some didn’t.

  When he finally slept, I reached for the Wild Turkey in the kitchen cupboard, took the Kent pack from my pocket, and carried The Book of Secrets to the sofa that faced the window over Wilshire.

  I opened it and read.

  • • •

  The tape moves slowly. You stare at me, eyes wide, the cigarette burning all the way down to your fingers.

  “So,” you finally ask. “What did you read?”

  “Tell me where Max is first.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “Talk about a double standard.”