70.
They found themselves in a town called Sturbridge. They got a quick meal at a Friendly’s. Even though Ted loved himself some Fribble, it paled in comparison with Mariana’s offering. Ted helped his father bathe and get ready for sleep. They shared a room with twin beds. They watched some local broadcasts discussing the upcoming one-game-winner-take-all playoff. It was all anyone was talking about up here. The Curse of the Babe and 1918. Ted tucked Marty into bed, turned out the light, and got into bed himself.
“That was a fun day, Teddy, thank you.”
“Sure thing, Dad. Walking around that town today, I remembered this recurring fantasy I had when I was a kid.”
“Yeah?”
“Remember we used to take the LIRR out to the island in the summer sometimes and we’d head back on those hot summer Sundays and the AC was always shit and I’d stand between the cars and watch the sleepy little Long Island towns slide by.”
“I remember those days.”
“Mostly Indian names—Islip, Wantagh, Massapequa. And of course the always mysterious and alluring Babylon. Sometimes the train would be moving so slowly, like three miles per hour, I felt like I could just step off unharmed and keep walking. And I’d think about you and Mom back there in your seats oblivious, and I could just step off and walk into a new town and become a new person. Walk up to some nice-looking suburban home and say, Hi, I’m Ted, can I be your son? You don’t have to call me Ted, either, you can call me whatever you want. And I’d become new. They’d give me new clothes and I’d have a new mom and dad, and you guys wouldn’t know I was gone till you hit the city and by then it’d be too late, you’d never find me.”
“That’s not a very nice bedtime story, telling me how you wanted new parents.”
“That’s not it, Dad. I never stepped off. Did I? I never got off the train. I always stayed with you.”
“That’s true.”
They lay in silence, readying for sleep.
“And you know what, Ted, that’s gonna be enough for me. That you never left. That’s more than a man could ask of his son.”
“And you never left me, Dad.”
“No, I guess I didn’t.”
“That’s enough too.”
Marty flicked on the light. “I don’t wanna sleep, Ted.”
“I get it. What do you wanna do?”
“I wanna look for trouble.”
71.
They made their way back out to the car. Ted and Marty just drove around aimlessly. Ted asked, “Should we look for trouble on the map, ’cause I don’t know where I’m going?” There were short bursts of conversation followed by long, easy silences. Around sunset, they went looking for another motel. They weren’t far outside Boston now, but it was still rural and bucolic. They stopped at a nice vantage point to watch the sun go down. Marty said, “You don’t know how beautiful it all is till you’re about to leave. It’s actually not true that if you’ve seen one sunset, you’ve seen ’em all; more like if you see one sunset, you wanna see them all.”
Ted nodded at the still vital truth of that cliché and its corollary.
“What happened with Mariana?” Marty asked.
“Nothing. I think she just sleeps with a lot of people.”
“Good for her. Sex is great. It’s the best. I’m gonna miss it when I’m dead.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You want my advice?”
“Not particularly.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Noted.”
“Who cares what she does? You like her?”
“Yes.”
“Who cares what she does? I’m dying, buddy, you think I care if your mother fucked your uncle Tim?”
“Mom fucked Uncle Tiny Tim?”
“You’re missing the point. All that personal shit just falls away like meat off a bone, and all you’re left with is love. All I remember is I loved your mom and I miss her. And I love Maria, too. Trust me, when you’re dying, you’re not gonna give a fuck who Mariana fucked. You’re just gonna be thankful that she fucked you, you moron.”
They checked into the Paul Revere Motor Lodge, and got ready for bed. Ted lit up a joint; so much for quitting. Marty partook. “I really feel like I’m compromising my future,” he said.
In the dark, only the ember on the tip of the joint was visible as it passed from bed to bed. Ted took an overly ambitious toke, and coughed. Marty exploded in anger, out of nowhere. “That fucking cough! I hate that fucking cough!”
Ted nearly jumped out of bed. “Jesus, Dad, where did that come from?”
Marty regained his breath and his composure. For a moment, and then he began to cry, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
“What’s the matter?”
“I think I figured something out.”
“What?”
“Cough.”
“What?”
“Cough.”
Ted coughed.
“Yes, goddammit, the sound of your cough makes me so angry.”
“You’re angry at me ’cause of my cough? Not ’cause I throw like a girl and I’m better-looking than you?”
“When you were nine months old, you got sick, your first cold—and you’re not better-looking than me, by the way—your mother and I waited to take you to the hospital. We didn’t know. What did we know? We took you and the doctor looked at us like we were fools to wait. We didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know this.”
“No, you wouldn’t remember. You weren’t even a year. They gave you a spinal tap. Stuck a big needle in your tiny back, and I wanted to kill that doctor for hurting you, then kill myself. They didn’t know what it was. Three days you got worse.”
Ted lay in the dark so pitch he could imagine seeing what his father was saying on the blackness before his eyes like a movie.
“The doctors couldn’t figure it out. We stayed in the hospital with you, your mother and I. On the third night, your mother fell asleep and I leaned into you, right up to your beautiful little face, and I spoke to whatever disease or virus or demon that was attacking your lungs, double pneumonia or RSV or the devil himself, whatever, I spoke to it, and ordered it to come out of you and fight like a man, to come out of you and into me. It was all I could think to do. And I knew it was not enough. I knew I was powerless and you would die. And I had a vision.”
“Of what?”
“I had a vision of what the world would be when you died. That there would never be joy again, just an infinite well of sadness and pain, and I started descending into that well, deeper and deeper, and it had no bottom. I began to drown.”
“But I lived, Dad, it’s okay, I lived.”
“Yes, you lived, but today when you were coughing, I just got transported right back to that time and place, and I realized that I got scared. I got scared of that bottomless darkness and pain. And I could never face it again, you dying, and loving you meant facing it again, facing the possibility of that pain again. I was so scared to lose you that I never took you back. I don’t think I ever took you back all the way in again. I got scared to love you.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
Ted didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. And so, undeterred, Marty kept at it, kept on connecting the dark dots in his mind, on his lungs, in the sky. Ted remembered those old connect-the-dots puzzles they used to give him in grade school, where a bunch of seemingly random points, joined in the right sequence, would reveal a clear picture of something, usually something majestic like a constellation. Ted had the sense his father was close to finishing his puzzle, the dark majesty of his own sky of stars.
“I spent my whole life trying to figure people out, tricking them by appealing to their unconscious, and I never, I never figured out my own fucking self.”
Ted had an instinct to make it all better, to put it in context, to put words on it, to forgive, to help Marty forgive himself, but he remained quiet. Right behind the impulse to smooth things over was the
wisdom to let it be and let time, even though they were fast running out of time, work its natural pace of injury and healing. Ted thought, We are all of this earth and subject to time and its laws—physical and psychic—and there are no shortcuts. All time was geologic. A Polaroid that took fifty years to develop in your hand.
Everything had been leading to this moment, everything, why move past it before it took shape, before it was colored in, before it settled? Words would only diminish things, like cages for wild animals.
After minutes of silence, of Ted listening to his father sob in the dark, Marty began to breathe more regularly, to quiet and comfort himself. Ted had been crying too, his cries mingling with his father’s; yet he was crying not for himself, but for his father, and that pure instinctive generosity laced a sweetness beneath the anguish of both men.
Finally, Marty spoke: “That’s why me and Mariana clicked.”
Ted swallowed and took a deep breath. He wanted his voice to sound unstrained by all this big feeling.
“You mean Maria.”
“No, Mariana. She lost a little daughter. To cancer. That’s the tattoo on her ankle. Christina. Her little girl’s name was Christina.”
“Not Christ, Christina.”
“Yeah, Christina. She understood my fear of you ’cause she had seen the darkness of a child’s death too, only she still lived in that darkness, every day she has to walk out of it into the light where the living are and then, every night, she walks back into the darkness where her daughter is. It was her idea for me to write again.”
Ted watched the images of his mind project out onto the blackness. He saw his young father and his infant self; he saw a young and terrified Mariana and a dying girl. He saw the bottomless well, but couldn’t draw near it, couldn’t look down into it; he did not have a child, he couldn’t know. His father spoke and sounded spent:
“Ted, please tell me you don’t hate me.”
“Oh God, no. I don’t hate you, Dad.”
“I’m so tired.”
“Go to sleep.”
“I’m afraid I won’t wake up.”
“You’re not done yet. I’m not afraid.”
Ted got up and went to his father’s bed and got in. He put his arm underneath his dad’s neck and held him, Marty’s head on his chest. Ted kissed the top of Marty’s head. Marty whispered, “You’re my secret weapon.” Ted had vague memories of his boyhood, indistinguishable from wishes, of his father putting him to sleep like this on difficult nights. His head buried in Marty’s chest, Marty stroking his hair. In the pitch dark, his sense of touch was heightened, and he could feel the beat of his own heart moving Marty’s head ever so slightly on his chest, rocking and consoling him. In less than a minute, Ted could tell by Marty’s deep breathing that he was asleep.
Ted waited in the dark like that for an hour, watching the images in his mind, like Plato in his cave. But he couldn’t sleep. He got up, careful not to wake his father, to go out and smoke another joint in the motel parking lot. He swallowed the roach, went to the pay phone out there, and took out Mariana’s card. He dialed the number. He didn’t know what to say, but he wanted to say something. He hoped it would come to him as it rang, but it didn’t, and no one picked up.
He went back inside where his father was sleeping. He walked over to Marty’s bed and kneeled down. He couldn’t make out the old man’s face in the dark, though he was less than an inch away. He whispered in the sleeping man’s ear:
“You tried to kill me a long time ago, but you couldn’t because my father took you out of me and into him. But you’re still a coward. You attacked a child and now you attack an old man. I’m not scared of you anymore. I’m a man. I’m ready to fight.”
He listened to his father’s breathing, for any kind of change. He couldn’t tell.
“My dad called you out of my lungs and into his, but now I want you back. You came for me. It’s me you want. And I want that fight. Come out of him and into me. Come back where you belong…”
Ted inched down even closer so he could feel his father’s breath on his own mouth. He inhaled deeply, and again and again and again, hoping to catch his demon out and defeat it once and for all. The three of them crouched in the darkness—Ted, Marty, and the demon, undecided and malevolent, hovering between them.
72.
Ted parked the Corolla at a nice spot by the Charles River. Sixty-eight degrees and sunny. Panthers or no panthers, there would be no rainout today. Father and son shared a doobie in peace and quiet. They ate some food, watched the rowers on the water. One of those perfect fall days where you just lose track of time. The radio was off to save the enigmatic battery. Ted looked up at the blue and chanted, “‘The mules that angels ride come slowly down the blazing passes, from beyond the sun.’”
“If you say so, Cheech,” said Marty.
“Wally Stevens says so,” Ted footnoted, as he coughed through a deep lungful of cannabis. “Sorry.”
Marty waved it off and smiled as if to say he was no longer bothered by Ted’s cough. He said, “I like watching the rowers from up here, ’cause you know they’re killing themselves, that they’re cramping and their lungs are burning, but from this far away, you can’t hear or see their pain. All I see is this miraculous smooth flight across the surface of the water. From this Olympian remove, all I see is beauty.”
“Sounds like art. Concealing the hard part.”
“No, baby, it’s death. That’s what looking at things from death is like. No sweat, all beauty. I wish I could’ve been dying my whole life.”
Ted looked at the smoking joint in his hand and said, “You’re outheavying me, Dad. Too deep while I’m eating a ‘sub.’ The burning bush. I think I’m gonna quit.”
“Not me,” said Marty. “I’m a pothead.”
“You walked through the gate, huh?”
“Yes, I walked through the gate and forgot to close it.”
“Well, ’cause you’re high. You forgot to close the gate ’cause you’re high.”
“Ah so.”
“You crazy kids with your hash oil and your wacky weed.”
“Hash oil? What is this hash oil of which you speak? Tell me about this hash oil.”
“Slow down there, William Burroughs.”
“Wish we had some Frusen Glädjé.”
“There is no emperor like the motherfucking emperor of ice cream.”
They both looked into their minds to see if they remembered passing a convenience store in the past hour or so that might sell ice cream. Neither could come up with an image, and they both quit looking in mild disappointment. They watched in stoned awe as the rowers cut like knives through sparkling liquid glass.
“Ted?”
“Yeah?”
“What time is it?”
Ted said, “Oh shit,” and jumped at the car radio to turn it on. The game was already well under way.
“Shit! It’s three! Game’s at two thirty!” Ted said. “The game started.”
He threw the car in gear and backed up. The unmistakable, unwelcome sound of metal rim on pavement.
“That’s a flat,” Marty said. “That’s a flat tire.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Of course, Ted had no spare and had to go running to flag down a cab, get to an auto parts store, buy a tire, and cab it back. Ted left Marty in the car to listen to the game and enjoy the river. The streets were more or less empty, so he made good time, considering. Most of Boston was either at the game or home watching, all of New England probably. They lost a lot of time, but eventually they were rolling again on four good wheels. Marty was nervous with the game on the radio, listening intently for sounds behind sounds, with the focus of a stalking predator, for telltale signs of the action even before the announcers could relay it, wiping his sweaty palms on his pant legs.
Boston is one of the oldest cities in the country and was designed for the foot and the hoof, not the tire. If it’s not quite a maze, it is mazelike. Ted knew he was close to Fe
nway, but he couldn’t find it. One-way streets led him astray, and he couldn’t find anybody to ask directions because the game had rendered the city a ghost town. Knowing they were in danger of missing the game, Ted began to panic. “Shit, shit, shit—where are we?”
“No idea. Boston? Why don’t you have a map?”
“I don’t have a map ’cause I thought you were from Boston!”
On the radio, Carl Yastrzemski hit a home run to put the Sox up.
“YAZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! Goddammit! Yazzz! We’re up! One-Zip! One-Zip! We’re up!”
Ted spied a cop up a block and jumped out of the car to ask him directions. Marty watched as the cop gesticulated, and they spoke for what seemed like five minutes. Ted came running back to the car and stepped on the gas.
“What is with those fucking ridiculous accents?” he said.
“What’d he say?”
“I have no fucking clue! ‘Kenmahsquah’? He said we need ‘Kenmahsquah.’ What the fuck is ‘Kenmahsquah’?”
“Do not ahsk what you cahn do for yahr country, ahsk rahther … Wait, that’s wrong.”
Ted made a sharp and probably illegal left.
“We’ve been here before,” Marty said.
“No, we haven’t.”
Marty pointed. “Yes, we have, I recognize that thingy over there right next to that thing.”
“No! You’ve never been here before, Mr. Boston, that’s the whole problem!”
“I think you should pahk yahr cahr in Hahvahd Yahd.”
“Shut up. You’re fucking high.”
“Jerry Garcia is God, man.”
“I agree. Please be quiet.”
“I just saw a sign.”
“What’d it say?”
“Said you’re an asshole.”
“Dad.”
“No, it said ‘Kenmore Square—Fenway.’ Make a U-turn.”
“Kenmah! I can’t make a U-turn.”
“Grow some cojones and make a U-ie.”
Ted threw the car into a movie-stunt-worthy skid and locked into a nice U-turn, surprising himself. They fishtailed back the other way, laughing their heads off.
“Do it again, Daddy!” Marty yelled. “Do it again!”
Bucky F*cking Dent Page 20