“Yeah.”
“You gotta get undressed first.”
“The Splinter is aware of that.”
Marty turned fully to face Ted now, a towel around his waist.
“You uptight naked in front of me?”
“What? No. I’m thinking.”
“Are you kidding? I changed your diapers. I’ve seen that thing.”
“I don’t recall.”
“Okay, I watched your mother change your diapers. Jesus, you’re serious.”
“I can’t. Just look away.”
Marty dropped his towel to the floor, standing facing Ted now and naked.
“Can’t be any worse than me. I look like an old woman with a dead sparrow where my cock should be. Ecce homo…” Marty made a magnanimous gesture toward his crotch, reminiscent of Carol Merrill on Let’s Make a Deal.
“I prefer not to.”
“Check it out, Bartleby. Get naked with me, you fucker.”
“No.”
“Take ’em off or I’ll take ’em off.” Marty made a grab at Ted’s Speedo. Ted leaned back as he brushed his hands away, losing his balance and slipping hard and flat on his back on the wet floor.
Marty laughed. “That was fantastic. Positively Chaplinesque. Keatonesque. Ten from the Russian judge.”
Now Ted was just pissed.
“All right,” he said, and stood back up, ripping the bathing suit down to his ankles in one violent motion. And there they stood, father and son naked, man to man, a couple of feet apart.
Marty’s eyes went down to Ted’s manhood and stayed there. He scrutinized the area inscrutably, tilting his head this way and that, appraising, as one would a precious stone.
“Happy?” Ted asked angrily. “And just for the record, and this goes without saying, but I was swimming, you know.”
Ted grabbed for his towel, but Marty stopped him.
“Look at me, Teddy, look at this shit.” Marty spread his arms out to be inspected like a man about to be patted down for weapons.
“It’s okay, Dad, I don’t need to…”
“Look, Ted, look. Please. I need you to see.”
Ted did as his father said. He took him in. He beheld the damage done by time and cancer. His eyes found the new angry scar from a recent surgery on his father’s chest, glistening wet and red. It looked raw, like it still hurt, and Ted flinched, instinctively feeling the hurt in his own chest. He beheld the dying animal in front of him that was his father, and he felt his eyes fill with tears.
“Fucking chlorine,” he said.
Marty shifted his open arms toward Ted now and stepped forward to hug him. Ted received him and hugged back. There they were, father and son, naked and wet, embracing in the bowels of a YM-YWHA in Brooklyn, late summer 1978.
Marty was crying too. He whispered in Ted’s ear, “That’s a perfectly respectable prick you got there, son.” That particular phrase felt better to Ted than he would have ever imagined, and he didn’t care to unpack why just then. As Marty was speaking, another old man entered the locker room from the pool to change, and saw the two men holding each other.
“Faygelehs…” the intruder muttered under his breath as he walked away. Marty and Ted held on.
32.
The Doublemint Man is shiny with sweat and slumming it up in Spanish Harlem. He is not alone. Maria lies next to him. Maria. He just met a girl named Maria. And suddenly it’s summer. The curtains flutter. He strokes the fine forest of dark hairs on her arms and above her knee. He can’t get enough of her. Her smell, her feel, her her. He’s a goner. He takes a swig off a can of Budweiser and puts it to Maria’s lips. She sips. Even the way she sips turns him on and leaves him on. Maria takes an ice cube from the cooler by the bed and puts it on his forehead, where it melts as quickly as if on a stove.
“I love you, Maria,” he says. “Your flesh feels like home to me. Su casa es mi casa.”
“That doesn’t sound so good as you think, Gringo.” But she smiles. They kiss. Their tongues move over each other so fast and deep, as if having given up on words to express the intensity of their feeling. Thank God for a language barrier. There is too much to tell and nothing to say. Their mouths will show from now on and not tell. Cerveza never tasted better. Woman never tasted better. Life never tasted better. He whispers in her ear as he eases easily inside her. They begin to sway, side by side, and make love for the third or fourth time today.
“Nothing exists outside this room. No wrld [sic] no people no sun no moon no time.”
“Tell me that story again, Grigo [sic].”
“Just you and me. The Russians dropped the bomb. Everyone is dead and everything is gone. Only this room survived. It’s only us left.”
“Just you and me?”
“Just me and you, baby.”
33.
A whimpering woke Ted up. At first, he thought it was him doing the whimpering. He sat up and wondered what he might be whimpering at, slowly becoming aware that the noise was coming from another room. He got up to investigate. Marty was asleep on the couch, lying on his side, dreaming like a dog, huffing and sleep running. He did not look happy. Ted sat down next to him and shook him gently. “Dad? Dad? Wake up. Dad?” Marty stopped twitching and opened his eyes, childlike and blurry from another world. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“It was horrible, Teddy, horrible.”
“What was?”
“I dreamt we had to give it all back. What we had in August, we had to give back in September.”
“What was that?”
“Everything. Oh, everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Sox. Gave away our lead to the Yankees. They gave it all away and I had to die. Billy Martin came to collect my soul like in Damn Yankees.”
“Just a dream, Dad. Sox got a, what, like a six-game lead?”
“Six and a half.”
“You’re safe. You got a cushion.”
“Don’t let it happen to me, Teddy. Don’t let them take it all away.”
“I won’t.” Ted reached out to a table, grabbed the bottle of prescription pills, and put one in Marty’s mouth.
“Go back to sleep, Dad.”
Marty was still drowsy and spent; now drugged, he started to drift off again.
“Perchance to dream, there’s the fuckin’ rub. Promise me you won’t let me die.”
How could Ted promise that? What was the best thing to do, the kindest? Ted honestly didn’t know. He wished Mariana were there; she would have an opinion, she would know, she would take responsibility. The Dead counted off to begin “Sugar Magnolia” again, making it hard for Ted to concentrate.
“Ted?”
“I promise, Dad, I promise.”
34.
As his dreaming dog of a dad slept in, Ted walked alone down to the gray panthers at Benny’s kiosk. He had an idea. He had a vague shadow of a plan. He would try to keep his promise. As he left home, he picked up the delivered New York Times and turned to the sports pages to see if the Sox had lost. They had. He carried the paper with him, and when he got near the old men, he tossed it in the trash. Here came the first of the gray wave, Tango Sam. “Ted, you look tremendous, so handsome, do you feel handsome? You must feel handsome. Loan me fifty.”
Ted saw the top of Benny’s head move just above the stacked papers. “Where’s Marty?”
“Sox lost,” Ivan said.
“QED.”
“Ipse hoc propter hoc.”
“Sine qua non.”
“Not really. That’s inaccurate.”
“You’re inaccurate.”
“Guys! Guys, listen, guys, I was thinking about the whole Sox thing, how a loss takes it out of him.”
“This is what we’re debating.”
“There is no debate.”
“Right, right,” Ted cut off this next riff. “So I was thinking, why do the Sox ever have to lose?”
“’Cause they suck and they’re from Boston, that’s why.”
�
��’Cause they call a hero a submarine, and a liquor store a Packy.”
“Boston is not a hub.”
“’Cause it’s the way of the world.”
“It is the Way, the Tao.”
“What Papa Hemingway calls a ‘good thing.’”
“What the gods want.”
“What God wants.”
“Fuckin’ monotheist.”
“Fuckin’ polytheist.”
“No, I’m a Hindjew.”
“Gentlemen, please let me explain.” Ted finally saw a rare spot of dead air in which to jump. “Benny, you got any back issues?”
“Some, sure.”
“He’s half a hoarder, Benny is.”
“It’s a sickness.”
“A psychological malady.”
“Something happened in Benny’s toilet training.”
“What didn’t happen in Benny’s toilet training?”
Ted jumped in again. “If you can find box scores from when the Sox won or the Yankees lost and pull those pages, the double pages, on days when the Sox actually do lose, we can replace those reports with the bogus, old wins that we stash away now.”
The old men fell silent. A first. Tango Sam broke the silence. “You mean you want us to lie?”
“Well, not lie exactly. Well, yes, lie. Lie for the better good.”
“We did it once as an experiment, but to make it a way of life, a modus operandi, is another matter.”
“What would Immanuel Kant do?”
“Probably tell you to suck his German schmeckel.”
“I couldn’t. ‘I Kant, Immanuel,’ I would say.”
“Rollo May, though.”
“What about the television?”
“The boob tube.”
“The television caveat.”
Ted was prepared for the television caveat. “Have you seen those VCRs?” The old men murmured words like video and Casio and RCA, getting anything technological after 1950 about 80 percent wrong. Ted continued, “They use them to tape games, then go over games with players, to see if they can see anything, a tendency, or whatever. They have, like, five VCRs at the stadium and I took one, I doubt they’ll notice, along with a bunch of tapes that I can slip in when Boston is losing or the Yankees are winning. I have, like, ten tapes of Sox wins from this year. A couple of them beating the Yankees.”
They fell unnaturally silent, the hive mind buzzing.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it breaks my heart to see him every time the Sox lose.”
Ivan spoke first: “I’m appalled at your mendacity, but moved by your empathy.”
“It seems doomed to failure.”
“Like Carter’s whole administration.”
“Naysayer.”
“Republican.”
“Pansy.”
“Ted is in the lead. Ted has the reins.”
The hive went quiet again. A silent vote was being held among them. Tango Sam did a two-step. Schtikker spoke for the hive: “It seems, young Theodore, that we are in like the proverbial Flynn.”
35.
Each morning after that, Ted rose at dawn to intercept the Times delivery. He tried to cancel the subscription, but, perversely, the fucking thing kept hitting his doorstep every morning even more punctually than before, like a spurned lover on his best behavior. As soon as it landed, Ted took it inside and hid it under his bed. When Marty woke up looking for the news, Ted would tell him it hadn’t come and curse the Sulzbergers, and the delivery boy, and the international Jewish conspiracy if he felt up to it. He told Marty that he called the Times every day to complain. “That’s my boy,” Marty said. “Give ’em hell.”
It was a good thing, too, because the Sox had hit a skid, and the Yankees were gaining on them. Not that Marty knew. Ted and the panthers kept Marty in a little bubble of Boston victory. Benny quickly became adept at switching out the sports pages, and Marty’s eyes were not so great anymore anyway. It worked. Ted went so far as to mope about when he wanted Marty to think the Yankees had lost. They were gods controlling Marty’s weather.
He had the ruse under control, and Marty was bouncing around the house some days. True to his story, the Sox were keeping him full of life when they “won.” But Ted was afraid that Mariana might inadvertently carry news like a contagion from the outside world into the news quarantine, so he decided to visit her at the hospital. Hadn’t seen her since the yoga debacle.
At the front desk, he was told that Mariana was on lunch in the cafeteria. When he entered the dining area, he spotted her across the way, a handsome man about Ted’s age in her arms while an elderly man looked on. There was a sense of mourning about them. It was almost too intimate. It was nice to see Mariana at work, see her comforting the young man, letting him get it out. Whatever it was. She had the power of empathy without sentimentality, he decided right there. And this was a considerable power. Ted wondered at the pain that had brought her to such a place where she could receive the grief of strangers day after day after day. What grief of her own might she be effacing with the grief of others? He could not imagine. But there was something hidden there, hidden deeply, that both terrified and intrigued him like no other woman ever had.
Ted continued to watch Mariana from afar as the two men left her. She rolled her neck and shook her hands like she was flicking off water, as if she were jettisoning negative energy, as if cleansing her grief palate for the next customer. She got on the food line, Ted sidled up behind her.
“Can I offer you a cup of Jell-O?” Mariana spun around a bit quickly, as if taken out of a daydream. Ted continued, “Or in Spanish, I suppose that would be a cup of Hell-O.” Nope. Just keep moving.
“Red or green?” Ted held up a cup of red Jell-O and a cup of green. Mariana pointed to the red. Ted became an aspic sommelier: “Excellent choice. I think you’ll find the red flexible, but not spineless; firm, but not unyielding; sweet, but not cloying, with subtle notes of red dye number two.”
They moved down the line. Ted grabbed a couple of sandwiches and little milk cartons, told the cashier, “For both. Like a date.”
Mariana moved off with her tray to find a seat. “I’m cheap,” she said, “but I’m not that cheap.”
They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches. “What’s on your mind, the Splinter?”
“Don’t.”
“What’s on your mind, Lord?”
“Please.”
“Ted.”
“You have a hard job.”
“I love my job.”
“Love? Is that the right word?”
“Did you come here to tell me I don’t speak correctly about my job?”
“Okay, no, sorry. So you know the Sox have been losing and the Yanks have been winning?”
“If you say so.” She seemed tired, longtime tired.
“So I hated to see how weak it was making Dad. So I’ve kinda been faking the outcomes pro-Sox, and you’re really the only other person he talks to, and I didn’t want you to blow me by mistake.”
Mariana’s eyes widened. “What?” She looked behind herself, then turned back to Ted. “You don’t want me to blow you?”
Now Ted’s eyes widened. He looked behind himself and turned back to Mariana.
“What?”
“By mistake? How could I blow you by mistake?” She asked this like she was really trying to find an answer to the puzzle.
“I said ‘it.’ I don’t want you to blow ‘it.’ By mistake.” Mariana had the slightest of smiles crease her lips.
“You don’t want me to blow it?”
Ted became aware that he was blushing. Damn his milky Scottish roots on his mother’s side. “No. I don’t want you to blow it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Not at all. And once again I assert—Freud schmoid.”
“Dios mio, you’re such a prude, Ted. We’re just body parts, that’s all we are, body parts and souls.”
Ted felt naked, felt like his body parts weren’t quite fitting together smoothly
at the moment. He added milk to his Jell-O like a four-year-old, and said, “I. I. You. Shit. You make me … I’m afraid to speak.”
“Did you just call me a spic?”
“Speak! I said, ‘speak.’” Ted looked up and Mariana was laughing, at him or with him, he didn’t know and he didn’t really care. He had made her laugh. She was laughing and that was a pure good.
“Listen, Ted,” she said, “death is not a story; it can’t be faked out. Death is real. You can’t really keep your father safe.”
“I know, but can’t you just play along for a bit? If it makes his last few days happy, you know, how bad can it be? I thought the nurse of death would love the idea; it’s like we’re seizing control of the narrative and all.”
Mariana nodded and stood up to go.
“He’s your father, you don’t need my permission. I gotta run, break’s over.” Ted watched her leave to go do more death counseling. He exhaled deeply, then inhaled his Jell-O and reached across the table to finish hers, wondering if it was bad to mix red and green.
36.
Unfortunately, Marty was dead set on watching the Sox–Yankees game on TV today. Ted worried about controlling a live situation. About an hour before the game, he took Marty for a walk, hoping to get him distracted enough that they’d miss the ball game entirely, but Marty kept checking his watch. He did manage to dump him on the gray panthers for a while, which gave him time to set up the VCR, which he told Marty was a newfangled antenna, and to get his game tapes in order if need be. There were about ten tapes, and all were labeled with helpful specificity—“Carlton Fisk homers vs Yankees,” “George Scott game winning hit vs Yankees,” “Eckersley strikes out side vs Yankees.”
By the time Tango Sam and Schtikker walked Marty home, Ted was about as ready as he was gonna be. The game was more than half over, and the Yankees were ahead. Ted had time to find the clips that might possibly work and pinch hit for reality. The Sox were at home, so should be in their white-based home uniforms, but Ted had both home and away (red-based “uni”) snippets. This was important for continuity if a switch was needed, but he’d just have to wing it and hope Marty didn’t notice. Just in case, Ted fiddled with the color controls on the TV and brought the whole spectrum down to a kind of green. Delaying Marty had also given Ted time to talk to some key folks in the neighborhood—the newspaper delivery boy with the erratic rocket arm, a few choice neighbors—and tell them what he and the old boys were up to and why. These folks might be called upon at any time to provide background to the ruse. It was a little like staging a neighborhood play, only there was no script, and the performance might begin at any time on any day.
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 12