The tap-bell on the glass counter out in front of the station dinged several times. It was Mrs. Hanleys son, Marshall, come to pick up the Ford. As Walter approached him, the young man removed his headphones and kept them around his neck without turning them off. Walter could hear a tiny band playing heavy metal as Marshall fished out his credit card.
Walter swiped the card and waited while the winged horse on the blue LCD screen over the cash register reared, flapped its wings once, twice, and lifted off, over and over again, looking for all the world as if it was trying and failing to escape from a box. Finally, the printer spit out the ticket, Walter tore and offered it, and Marshall, having determined no interaction was required, placed the headphones back on his ears and signed it.
“The keys in it,” Walter said to his back as he walked away.
Time for the VW. The phone rang. Donny again. “Walter? Walter, its Donny D., I mean, you know, Donny.”
“Hi Donny.”
“From AA.”
“Donny, I’m busy. What can I do for you?”
“I’m in trouble, Walter. I’m in big, big trouble.” Walter refused to pump the information from him. He watched the Ford leave the station, fishtailing and peeling rubber.
“Walter?”
“I’m right here, Donny.”
“I got served. She fuckin’ served me! Gave me a bunch of sweet talk just this week about don’t worry, we just need a rest from each other to sort things out and then she fuckin’ serves me! Divorce, man. Why am I working so hard to do the right thing, man? Whats the point? Who gives a shit?”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Give a shit?”
“I just want her back, man.”
“Donny, look. This is about your drinking. This is not about her or what she said or what you thought she said. This isn’t about what she did. It’s about what you did. Now you’re up against the truth, okay? I hate to sound like a hard-ass, but the main thing is to ride this out and not drink over it.”
Silence.
“Donny?”
“Been there. Done that.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“You’re drinking now?”
“I can’t just let her walk away like that!” Walter heard a sob.
“Why not? Why can’t you?” It was coming clear to Walter, it was what empty men, what men with missing pieces did. He could see it like a diagram of a power train. Woman as missing part: ignition, clutch, voltage regulator, brake. He couldn’t put it into words. Sobs on the other end of the line.
“Donny.”
“You’re pissed at me, aren’t you?”
“That’s not the question either, Donny. What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Can you get to a meeting?” There was a crash on the other end, Donny saying “Oh, fuck!” away from the receiver, then it sounded like he dropped the phone.
“Donny?” Walter gave it a minute and hung up.
It wasn’t until he’d cut away most of the old gasket around the damaged windshield of the VW and started to remove it that Walter became suspicious. He ran his fingers over the glass at the point of impact, the center of the web of brokenness. There was no way, not with the plastic laminate pressed outward like this, that the impact had come from outside the car. He slipped into the drivers seat, extended his right arm toward the windshield. Made a fist. Exactly. He did a little experiment, punched the windshield elsewhere, new cracks radiating outward. The thin skin of plastic casing stretched the same way. He got out of the car, heart pounding, slammed the door hard, and punched the windshield from the outside. He ran his hand over the spot. “Jesus, a baseball,” he said out loud, “not a chance, no way.”
He worked like a demon, dislodging the windshield with blows from the heel of his hand, ripping out the old rubber gasket, throwing them both in the dumpster. He cleaned and siliconed the metal around the opening and tucked the new gasket in all around. He rigged the wire so that after he’d maneuvered the new windshield into position he could use it to pull the inside lip of the gasket over the metal flange. When he was done, he called Nancy at work.
Out sick. He called her at home.
“Hello?”
“Hello yourself. I called your work and they said you were sick so I called to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh, hi Daddy. No. I’m fine. I just needed a day to catch up. A mental health day.”
“Nancy?”
“What?”
“You’d tell me if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you?”
Later on he’d realize that this was the point where, if she didn’t know what he was getting at, she would have asked what he was getting at.
“Of course I would.”
“Well then. If you talk to Cal, tell him the Bug’s done. I’ll leave a message at his office. Tell him I’ll wait for him here. I want to talk with him.”
Next was a Chrysler that needed a new water pump, a Dodge that needed a new ignition and solenoid, new brake pads for a Honda, two drive-in tire repairs, and a muffler and tail pipe assembly for a rusty old Cadillac. All afternoon, as he worked, Walter thought of what he wanted to say to his son-in-law. Clarity came and went, interrupted by waves of anger and sadness and old guilt he thought he’d done with. At five thirty a car dropped Cal off. He wore his briefcase on a strap across his chest. He walked right over to the VW and ran his hand over the new windshield. He flashed Walter a grin and a double thumbs up.
“Looks great!” he said. “Good as new! Thanks, man.”
Walter realized the sit-down, the heart-to-heart he’d been imagining all afternoon, was not going to happen. It couldn’t. He had been thinking of the young air salesman, of Donny, of himself those many years ago, and he’d wanted to take this boy—oh, that’s what he was all right, a boy—take him by the shoulders and somehow make him feel the strength and concern and warning of his scarred hands that understood so much. Then the words might come. Then he would tell him that he understood what it was like to feel adrift, unchallenged, used as badly as this rotten world has always used young men, how it twists and distorts every decent impulse, shames and maims them, shrinks and breaks them. Instead he said, gruffly, walking toward him, “What’s my name?”
“What?”
“I have a name. What’s my name?” He held the driver’s side door of the VW open for him.
“What do you mean?”
“Am I Walter? Dad? Pops? Mr. Crosby? Get in, get in.”
Cal’s face colored red as he slid into the driver’s seat. “I. I don’t know. I guess it depends on what you want me to call you.”
“No, I would say it depends on how well we understand each other, don’t you think?”
Cal nodded and grinned nervously. “I guess.”
“I would like to think that I could be a kind of older friend or advisor.” Walter squatted next to the VW and through the small open window placed his hand on Cal’s shoulder. He was surprised to find his hand shaking, and he thought Cal must surely feel his thumb trembling where it rested at the hollow of his throat. Good, he decided. “I’m good at fixing other things besides windshields is what I’m trying to say.”
“I know that.”
Walter reached in with his left hand and stroked the inside of the windshield as if to remove a streak or smudge. “But it’s easier when people tell me the truth, when I know how things stand.” He gave Cal’s collarbone a single pat as if in amity or reassurance but let his thumb graze, lightly, the young man’s Adams apple.
Cal squirmed. The paper-tagged key was in the ignition but when he tried to lean forward, Walter tensed his arm and kept him pinned to the back of the seat.
“I was a young man once, a young husband, but not by any stretch a good one. I imagine you’ve heard that story.”
“Yes, yes I have.”
“All right. So here is what you need to know—you do with it what you want—you need to know that I remember w
hat it’s like to have your rage twist up your way of seeing things, confuse you, twist you so you can’t tell friends from enemies. Do you know what I’m trying to say to you?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Because I never, ever, want a reason to feel that kind of rage again. We understand each other?” Walter felt Cal swallow.
“Yes, sir.”
“Walter. Call me Walter, son.” He squeezed Cal’s shoulder and withdrew. His stiff knees cracked as he straightened himself up. “I’ll go call Nancy, tell her you’re on your way.”
HARVEY’S BIRTHDAY
Harvey had the habit of running his hand over the bald top of his head when he was nervous. He knew that only drew attention to his baldness, and sometimes he would catch himself doing it and stop. He once thought he might buy a hairpiece, but he’d never seen one that looked real; even when they were the right color, they didn’t fit right. He knew a record producer who wore one, and the way it sat there on his head, Harvey half expected him to press a secret button in his pocket and make it whirl around like a slapstick comic’s.
Harvey was ashamed of his belly too. Although he hadn’t gained a pound in years, his weight had shifted. Some mornings, before he’d eaten, his stomach flat, he’d stand in front of the mirror, running his hand over his crown again and again, thinking that he still looked pretty good when he pulled his shoulders back. But soon after breakfast he became bloated; most days he stayed that way all day, and he took to wearing loose clothing. Awful sounds, like cloth tearing or a chain run through a ring, came from his distended middle; or thunder, as if there were a storm inside the great inflated hollow of himself.
Rick and Linda had invited him upstate from the city to celebrate his fortieth birthday, and walking through the woods to the river with them, Harvey thought how little they had changed in all the years he’d known them. He’d been best man at their wedding in, what was it, 1972? That hadn’t been his title, they hadn’t given him one, but he had been the one in charge of the rings. It had been an eccentric affair: Rick and Linda, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old, both in white robes, the minister in a paisley dashiki cut in a V down the front to show his clerical collar, dancers in tights attempting to demonstrate the idea of union without being lewd, and here and there a joint being passed around. Who were they then? Just barely adults, all of them, yet Rick and Linda seemed substantial even then, secure, a younger version of this couple he was walking with. Later they moved to L.A., then Vancouver, then Colorado, and now back east to upstate New York.
Rick walked with a folded blanket under one arm, one hand on the bowl of his ever-present, ever-burning pipe, the other holding a book with his forefinger stuck in the pages for a bookmark. Rick was a psychotherapist, but it always seemed to Harvey that the rest of his life was an interruption of his reading.
Linda carried a canvas bag that Harvey figured probably contained her voodoo stuff. He had always called it her voodoo stuff though he meant no disrespect. Although she made her living as a nurse, she had published articles on astrology, tantric yoga, alchemy, and herbal medicine. From time to time she’d send him one, torn from a magazine, with a short note; sometimes all it said was FYI with Xs and Os for a signature.
Harvey had his towel under his arm, rolled as always when he went swimming, but this time there was nothing in it. They were going to a nude beach. Harvey ran his hand repeatedly over the top of his head as they walked.
“Harvey, remember that song you wrote for Sylvia?” said Linda. “The one about, well not about, but the one where you said, ‘The woods and water whisper: Eden’s here, O Eden’s here.’”
“That was the refrain,” said Harvey. So they were going to bring up Sylvia. Just like the time he’d visited them out West. Poor Harvey. Marries his perfect partner, singer of his songs, his inspiration, and she up and dies on him. They never knew her. What did they know? Pity. Screw pity.
“Didn’t Bonnie Raitt record that?” asked Rick.
“It was never released. Her producer sent me a tape. It’s somewhere. Packed away. So you remember it?”
“Just that part,” said Linda. “I was thinking how this place reminds me of it. Wait till you see it, Harvey, it’s perfect!”
Harvey was remembering. He tried not to. He tried as hard as he tried to hold in his belly. He could feel his insides rumbling. Except for a few memories of their wedding, which were in fact memories of pictures of their wedding—cutting the cake, sitting in the back of the limo together, Sylvia throwing her garter and trying to hit her older sister’s upraised hands—he managed not to remember almost all their times together. The trouble was that his hands remembered; his nose and his chest and his belly and his arms remembered. What came back to him was the smell of her hair and skin, the light down on her forearms, the small pink birthmark on her neck, the feel of her earlobe between his lips. He remembered Sylvia, but he could not, or would not, remember places they had been and things they’d done together.
Off to the left, in bright sunlight, children were sliding down the smooth rocks of the fast water where the streambed dropped suddenly, and there were twelve or fifteen people on the pebbled beach, sitting or lying on towels and blankets, reading or talking in twos and threes. The water poured over the rocks where the children played, then widened and became shallower as it passed the beach until it curved out of sight. The stream had cut though a tall hill so that across the water was a wall of clay and rock on top of which the trees, some with roots exposed, leaned out over the edge. It was as if the whole scene were a trench dug with a spade.
Harvey didn’t notice any of this. While Linda and Rick spread out their blanket, holding down the corners with their sneakers, Harvey took off his clothes. Would people look at him? Would they note that he was mushroom-white, potbellied, with pimples on his ass? He ran his hand up over his head again and again.
In the hollow dark of Harveys swollen self there was thunder, and he feared the storm it augured. Sometimes he would shake and lose control of his body, of his ability to concentrate or follow a conversation. At least this time he knew what he was so nervous about, and a part of him even thought that it was silly for him to be so agitated. Though his insides churned and mumbled, he could almost smile at himself. But only almost: he should have taken better care; he should have gotten more exercise; he should have worn a hat when he was young. He would jog; he would get more sunshine; he would write songs again. Harvey thought these things wordlessly and all at once.
Intent on not looking at anyone else, Harvey headed straight for the water and waded in up to his neck. The water was warm and soothing. He paddled around for a short while, then found a place where some underwater rocks made a kind of seat, and he wedged himself in and leaned back with his eyes closed. He did not look back at the beach.
Linda got her tarot deck from her canvas bag. “Read your cards for you, babe?” The smoke from Rick’s pipe was a blue the color of spruce.
“Maybe later“
“Does Harvey seem all right to you? I mean I wish he were writing songs again. He says he doesn’t think in words anymore. He was good, babe. His songs used to say things, better than most songs I mean.”
“I wish he’d gone to see Andrew or Fitz when I referred him.”
“But it’s been years. What is it now? Ten? Twelve?”
“PTSD,” said Rick without looking up from his book.
“Oh come off it babe, he’s a friend, not a case.”
“It’s up to him. It has to be that way.”
“It makes you wonder,” said Linda. She dealt the cards out on the blanket, for herself.
Harvey lowered himself a little so that only his eyes and nose were out of the water. Like a frog, he thought, I’m like a frog. With my big white belly. Hiding in the water. The part of him that used to be able to laugh at himself smiled just a little. He looked out over the surface of the water. The small swells were different silvers, chrome in the sunlight, a duller nickel color in the shade. T
he shrieking and laughing of the children was refreshing. In the city, kids ran up and down his block playing, but they yelled “Fuck you!” and “Suck my dick!” at one another. He used to hear them from his studio, before he stopped going there. Besides, it wasn’t what everyone thought; the songs had stopped even before Sylvia died. He imagined a short biography, “… in his youth he wrote several hit tunes.” People still spoke of the songs he would write; they would be sad songs, they said, but people love sad songs. But Harvey had written his songs from a place deeper than mere sadness. What was down there where the songs came from was too dark and complicated and tangled. It made noise, not music; it murmured and groaned but did not speak.
Harvey allowed himself a glance at the beach. Linda was playing solitaire; no, probably reading the tarot. Rick was lying on his belly, reading. Harvey looked away, then back. People were keeping pretty much to themselves, to the people assembled in their own small group. One man was sketching. A voyeur in nudist’s clothing? Harvey felt the beginning of a laugh, but it was small and only inside himself. A couple were playing chess. He could tell who the regulars were because a few had tanned bottoms, and some of the women’s breasts were tanned. He was careful not to gawk. He began to paddle around in the water, ducking his head, taking quick looks.
A tall thin man with white hair walked along the beach; he was wearing a wristwatch. Harvey thought that nothing, not Rick’s pipe nor one couple’s chessboard, nor the crisp notes of a little radio from somewhere was as hopelessly absurd as this naked old man wearing a watch. He was very tan, all over, with brilliant white hair on his chest. His skin sagged a little, as if it were too big for him, and wrinkled just above the knees and elbows. Harvey ducked under the water, arms along his sides, paddling only with his hands and feet. Like a platypus, he thought. When he surfaced again, he peeked back at the beach. A short, dark-haired woman, her breasts and rump untanned, was asking the old man for the time.
Interference & Other Stories Page 3