The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

  Carla got under the covers and lay down next to me in her sleeping bag.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  I searched my mind for adjectives. I wanted to please her, choose the right ones by being descriptive. “Kissable. Dreamy. Exquisite.”

  “H-H-How do I look?” I asked. I stuttered less when I was alone with Carla than I did with anyone else, but it still cropped up occasionally.

  Carla laughed and avoided the question. Whenever she asked me how she looked, she knew that whatever I answered, she was irresistible. She wanted me to be handsome, but I wasn’t. My pimples wouldn’t go away; I wouldn’t go away. I was who I was. I wasn’t handsome. Carla knew that. She could see. She wasn’t blind. She loved me, nevertheless. She loved me for the complexity of my soul—something like that. Anyone can have clear skin (as my father does), blue eyes (ditto), wavy hair (till middle age), a mellifluous voice (still).

  We touched fingertips, interlocked fingers, pressed palms together like flat stomachs, squeezed tight. I spread her middle fingers, moved my index finger up and back between her fingers. I held the back of her neck, closed my eyes, kissed her. Surprisingly, she sat up, kissed me, and then we bumped foreheads while I was undoing the zipper of my sleeping bag and sliding closer to her. She laughed at what she took to be my clumsiness. I kissed her pug nose. We joined lips and twisted our heads until I said, “We’re destined to make love tonight.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m ready. It’s cold. I really need to use the bathroom first.”

  She got out of her sleeping bag, gathered up a few things from her backpack, tried the door.

  “It’s locked,” I said.

  She turned the doorknob, pushed the door open.

  “Liar,” she said.

  “I honestly thought I’d locked the door,” I said.

  She closed the door softly behind her while I lay down on the sleeping bag. Outside, tree limbs swayed like broken arms and thick sheets of cutting rain erased the sky. I waited for Carla, who could easily be another few hours. She got lost in bathrooms. She felt safe in them, at home, locked in. She had a toilet kit like a suitcase. She liked to be clean. She talked about towels and soaps and different kinds of tissues—their warmth, their softness. She liked to play with faucets. Transfixed on beauty, she stared into mirrors for hours, scared away blemishes.

  I was, in a sense and for the moment, one of those blemishes: I wasn’t Carla’s dream boy. I didn’t have a deep, husky voice. I wasn’t the lioness’s dark brunette.

  My father, reminiscing to me recently about his first girlfriend, said, “For about five years, from the time I was twenty-three until twenty-eight, I dated one of your Aunt Fay’s friends, Pearl Feinberg, a tall and very attractive young woman whose statuesque figure evoked appreciative whistles and oohs and aahs from onlookers. (Don’t think we called it ‘dating’ back then, but you know what I mean.) Pearl was employed as a secretary and part-time model for one of New York’s big apparel firms. I had a good job (working for the Journal-American), a lovely girlfriend, a knock-your-eyes-out tan Ford convertible (which looked like today’s VW Cabriolet), some money. I felt like I had the whole world in my twenty-five-year-old hands.

  “Pearl and I were always busy when we saw each other on the weekends: the movies, the theater, picnics, parties, lectures, and tennis in nearby Highland Park. Although we dated steadily for five years—all our friends expected us to be together forever—we never talked marriage. The fault was mostly mine. We were both well past the age of consent, but I was too immature, afraid to the point of being phobic about taking on responsibility. I was the least sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old in the Western Hemisphere.

  “The Journal-American, like all the other daily newspapers in New York, was suffering huge losses in advertising as a result of the still-lingering Depression and made big cuts in staff. In 1938 I, too, became unemployed. I managed to land a job with the New York Post, but six months later that was wiped out. That summer, after three months of unemployment, I decided to take a job at Chester’s Zunbarg, the Catskills summer resort, maintaining the tennis courts and occasionally trying to teach tennis to overweight fur salesmen and Bronx schoolteachers. It was there and it was that summer that I met Helen [his first wife], who had just been divorced from a New York Times business page writer and was planning to spend most of her summer at Chester’s.

  “Helen was a very sophisticated woman—by my lights, anyway. I learned all about sex and politics from her. She was, even then, deeply involved in Communist Party politics. In fact, one year after we met, she left her Wall Street job—she was a librarian—to work as a volunteer for the Party.

  “That torrid summer—emotionally, not the Catskills’ fifty-degree climate—I forgot all about Pearl. At the end of the summer, I came back to Brooklyn and lived with Helen for several months before we got married. Never saw Pearl again.

  “Forty years later, after coming to Providence for your commencement, I stayed for a week with Fay, now living in a posh condominium in Queens. One morning, she went shopping, and when she returned, the first thing she said was, ‘Milt, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the mall. You’ll never guess in a million years.’ I tossed out the names of some of my boyhood friends with whom I’d lost contact.

  “‘Believe it or not,’ Fay told me, ‘I ran into your old flame, Pearl. Her name’s not Feinberg now. She married one of the boys from our old neighborhood who used to play tennis with us. Her name is Richman, the name of her late husband. She still looks beautiful; her hair is gray, she has two daughters and several grandchildren and lives in Queens. She gave me her phone number. I told her you were visiting from California and filled her in a little on what you were doing. She said she’d like to hear from you.’

  “Well, 1978 was one year after your mother’s death. I was still working my way out of my depression. And the day before, I had seen the new Neil Simon play Act Two, which dealt with the anguish and torment faced by the leading character, a writer, who meets a young woman shortly after his wife’s death. He wrestles with the thorny problem of whether he should keep seeing this new woman in his life. He tells his brother, who encourages the relationship—‘life must go on’—that he has strong guilt feelings about the new relationship because of his still passionate feelings about his late wife. The writer winds up continuing the relationship and—as the curtain falls!—marrying her. I totally rejected Neil Simon’s cozy and glib ending. ‘How could he marry her so soon after his wife died?’ I said to myself while seated in the theater. ‘What were all those professions of undying love of his deceased spouse that he made in the opening act? Just foreign propaganda? And what about those Valentine gifts he sent every year like clockwork? Phony as a three-dollar bill.’ Those were the reasons I gave Fay for why I didn’t feel up to calling Pearl, let alone visiting her. But the biggest reason was my shame about the shabby way I had treated her, the god-awful way I ended it. Never calling or writing. Nothing. Shameful. Unforgivable.”

  Superheroes

  My cat, Zoomer, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling onto their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while Laurie, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second favorite activity is to lie between the three of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Natalie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably reacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. Zoomer loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie across the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room—a lion surveying the savannah, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that, thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer.

  From room to roo
m he drags “his” teddy bear—what Natalie calls his girlfriend—and, despite his supposedly having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window at his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles, pseudo-disappointedly, for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really, Zoomy’s a pussy.

  In the movie Spider-Man, when Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re changing, and that’s normal. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. To Peter, his sexual maturation is the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world. One of the amazing things about my father is that he still believed in this transfiguration deep into his 80s.

  The first time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was “incredible.” “What do you mean ‘incredible’?” he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling up his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes painfully clear that Peter’s newfound prowess is procreation or, more precisely, onanism: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” All three times Spider-Man rescues M.J., they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex: Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy emotional cleanup afterward.

  Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Even the “squirrelly faced” burglar who steals the New York Wrestling Foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a car-jacking, whispers “Thanks,” then flashes a sweet smile when Peter steps aside so he can get on an elevator. Ferocity and humility are in constant conversation and confusion. (Natalie: “This movie is about how everyone has a covered-up side. People don’t always show you the way that they are.”)

  On a Saturday afternoon a few years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake pool, while I swam laps, my father swam a little, then lifted a few weights, took a sauna, and dozed, which he adamantly denied, as he always does. In the locker room, a 10-year-old kid started humming to himself, at first quite quietly, the Batman theme, which my father didn’t recognize at first, but when I told him, he nodded. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling, though not to my father, who finds nearly all manifestations of mass entertainment—with the important exception of sports—appalling. “Popular culture,” as he explained to me in the car on the way home, “is not real community. It’s substitute community.”

  At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.

  “I want to know if you’re coming or going.”

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out, continues to lie very still.

  “Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake: you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

  He takes her hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

  Superman.

  My father lives in Woodlake, a Bay Area condo/sports complex for senior citizens. This is a place where tough old birds come to die, but they think it’s an Olympic training camp: mineral water and Frisbees. Jacuzzi, sauna, tennis courts, weight room, bingo parlor, dance hall, jet-black parking lot, jet-propelled automobiles, white stucco apartments, ice plant growing everywhere. Ducks quack across an artificial pond. Well-preserved, sun-baked septuagenarians stroll the putting green. Grandmas in string bikinis stride from the swimming pool. Dad’s cohorts scamper around the courts, wearing tennis whites and floppy hats and state-of-the-art shoes and C sunglasses, wielding their oversized rackets like canes and butterfly nets. My father’s studio apartment is remarkable only for the sheer number of rackets, racket presses, tins of balls, shirts, shorts, sweatbands, warm-up suits, sweat socks, shoes, jocks tossed about. It isn’t an apartment filled with my father. It’s a pro shop filled with the sport of tennis.

  In almost every piece he writes on his antique Remington for his Woodlake-sponsored writing class—a dozen women, a retired dentist, and my father meet with the teacher every other Wednesday—he projects himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He’s held more than fifty jobs in journalism and public relations and social welfare, been fired from many of them, been plagued by manic depression for fifty years, been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy countless times, is a genius at loss. Lily Tomlin was thinking of my father when she said, “Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.” He’s always thrown a stone at every dog that bites, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” My father, who is the only person in the world who may have a worse sense of direction than I do, writes about another friend, “Lou can go astray in a carport. He has the worst sense of direction of any male driver in the state of California.” Time after time he lets himself off way too easily. I used to want to urge him out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.

  Story after story is built on self-flattering lies: his children from his first marriage, from whom he’s estranged, didn’t attend his 95th birthday party, but now they do, bearing gifts. He’s been bald since he was 40, but now his “hair is” only “nearly gone.” My mother dies at 60 (instead of 51). Writing, for him, is a chance to gild the lily. My dad still reads voraciously and he dislikes easy sentiment in life and literature (he recently declared J. M. Coetzee’s brutal, astringent Disgrace the best novel he’s read in ten years), which is why his upbeat tone fascinates and baffles.

  His voice in these stories is that of a macher, when in reality he’s obsessed with his failures and as tough as nail polish; I want him to write about weakness, about his weaknesses, but instead he quotes, approvingly, a friend, who says about women, “Remember the four F’s: find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.” My dad, Sam Spade.

  He grew up poor with four brothers and two sisters (his mother died when he was 12 and one of his sisters died when he was 16), but nostalgia reigns: “Ah, them were the days, the good old days:
the age of innocence, the summers of my vast content.” “I’ve never felt that ‘at home’ feeling about any other apartment I’ve lived in as I did about 489 New Jersey.” “Mrs. Mason was very supportive, hugging me to her bosom at times or drying my tears.”

  My father and mother divorced shortly before her death 30 years ago, and they had, by common consent, an extremely bad relationship. But it’s now a “solid-as-Gibraltar marriage.” My father, asking for time off from his boss, tells him, “I was faced with a palace revolution and the three revolutionaries at home were getting ready to depose the king.” The king he wasn’t. I want him to write about forever having to polish the queen’s crown according to her ever-changing and exacting specifications. I want to ask him: What did that feel like? I want to know: What is it like inside his skin? What is it like inside that bald, ill dome? Please, Dad, I want to say: only ground-level. No aerial views or airy glibness.

  Hoop Dreams (iv and v)

  The junior varsity played immediately after the varsity. At the end of the third quarter of the varsity game, all of us on the JV, wearing our good sweaters, good shoes, and only ties, would leave the gym to go change for our game. I loved leaving right when the varsity game was getting interesting; I loved everyone seeing us as a group, me belonging to that group, and everyone wishing us luck; I loved being part of the crowd and breaking away from the crowd to go play. And then when I was playing, I knew the crowd was there, but they slid into the distance like the overhead lights.

  As a freshman I was the JV’s designated shooter, our gunner whenever we faced a zone. I’d make three or four in a row, force the other team out of its zone and then sit down. I wasn’t a creator. I couldn’t beat anyone off the dribble, but I could shoot. Give me a step, some space, and a screen—a lot to ask for—and I was money in the bank.