“Well, sure, okay, good night. I love you, Son.”
“Love you, too, Dad.” And I did.
When my father came home from the war, he was jubilant about all the violence he’d seen. Happy to have survived, I suppose. Or perhaps he saw it as a game, a contest in which his platoon had triumphed. He worked furiously to build a business, but there was something peculiar about his hard work. He seemed to have no specific goal.
When I was fourteen, my mother said, “Do you know why your father works so hard?”
I thought I was about to get a virtue speech. I said, “No.”
She said, “He works so hard because he’s crazy.” She never elaborated on this but left it in play, and it has remained with me for more than a quarter of a century.
The only time my father ever hit me was when I was fifteen and he asked if I was aware of all the things he and my mother had done for me. I said, “Do you have a chart I could point to?” and he popped me square on the nose, which bled copiously while he ran for a box of Kleenex. His worst condemnation of me was when he’d mutter, “If you’d been in my platoon …” a sentence he always left unfinished.
My mother was a scientist; she worked in an infectious-disease lab until my father’s financial success made her income unnecessary. Even then, she went on buying things on time, making down payments, anxiety from their poorer days leading her to believe that she wouldn’t live long enough to pay off her debts, even with her Coca-Cola money. Once they were comfortable with affluence, they became party people, went to the tropics, brought back mounted fish, and listened to Spanish tapes in the car. But they were never truly comfortable away from the smoke and rust of their hometown.
The last year I lived with them, my father came to the bizarre conclusion that he lacked self-esteem, and he bought a self-help program that he was meant to listen to through headphones as he slept. From my bedroom, I could hear odd murmurings from this device attached to his sleeping head: “You are the greatest, you are the greatest. Look around you—it’s a beautiful day.” You can’t make this shit up.
We were nearly done with the plastic surgeon’s vacation home. I had a big crew there, and everyone was nervous about whether we’d have someplace to go next. We had remodels coming up, and a good shot at condominiumizing the old Fairweather Hotel in town, but nothing for sure. I met with Dr. Hadley to lay out the basement media room. He was a small man in a blazer and bow tie, bald on top but with long hair to his collar. I asked him, “Are you sure you want this? You have beautiful views.” Indeed, he had a whole cordillera stretched across his living-room window. He was gazing around the space we were inspecting, at the bottom of some temporary wooden stairs. Push brooms stood in a pile of drywall scraps in the corner. There was a smell of plaster. He lifted his eyes to engage mine, and said, “Sometimes it rains.” One of the carpenters, a skinny cowboy type with a perpetual cigarette at the center of his mouth, overheard this and crinkled his forehead.
No checkers tonight. Dad was laying out his platoon diagram, a kind of spreadsheet, with all his guys, as he called them, listed. “When I can’t fill this out, I’ll know I have dementia,” he said. It was remarkable, a big thing on butcher paper, maybe twenty-five names, with their specialties and rankings designated—riflemen, machine gunners, radiomen, grenadiers, fire-team leaders, and so on. There was, characteristically, a star beside my father’s name, the CO. Some names were crossed out with Vietnam dates; some were annotated as natural-cause eliminations. It was all so orderly—even the deaths seemed orderly, once you saw them on this spreadsheet. I think this was how Dad dealt with mortality: when a former sergeant died of cirrhosis in his sixties, Dad crossed out his square on the spreadsheet with the same grim aplomb he’d used for the twenty-somethings in firefights; it was all war to him, from, as he said, “the erection to the Resurrection.”
Although he complained all the time, Dad lost weight on my regimen. When he got below the magic number, Mom didn’t believe my scale or my word, and we had to have him weighed at the fire station, with a fireman reading the number to her over the phone while Dad rounded up a couple of guys to show him the hook-and-ladder. He’d made it by a little over a pound.
When I came home from the plastic surgeon’s house that night, Dad was packing up. He had a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, and his little tape player was belting out a nostalgic playlist: Mott the Hoople, Dusty Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Quicksilver Messenger Service—his courting songs. My God, he was heading home to Mom again!
“Got it worked out?” I said, flipping through one of the girlie magazines he’d picked up in Helena, a special on “barely legals.”
“We’ll see.”
“Anything new?”
“Not at all. She’s the only one who understands me.”
“No one understands you.”
“Really? I think it’s you that nobody understands. Anyway, there are some preliminaries in this case that I can live with.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t go to the house. I have to stay at a hotel.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? A lot of surprising stuff happens at a hotel. For all intents and purposes, I’ll be home.”
And now I have to figure out how to work around Dee and Helen Folsom, who are on the job site continuously and kind of in the way. One night, they camped out on the subflooring of what will be their bedroom, when we barely had the sheathing on the roof. The crew had to shoo them away in the morning. I think the Folsoms were embarrassed, dragging the blow-up mattress out to their old sedan.
I have no real complaints about my upbringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was, which meant that I was free, and I made good use of that freedom. I’ve been asked if I was damaged by my family life, and the answer is a qualified no; I know I’ll never marry, and, halfway through my life, I’m unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in my house for more than a night—and preferably not a whole night. Rolling over in the morning and finding … let’s not go there. I build houses for other people, and it works for me.
I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.
When Monika and I were first married we rented a house on Sand Creek, sight unseen, because Monika wanted to live in the country, and nothing else was available within reach of town. Everything we had been told was true: the house was a furnished ranch house with two bedrooms, two baths, near a quiet grove of aspens. It had been repossessed from a cowboy and his wife, who had gone on to Nevada or Oregon—somewhere in the Great Basin. The man at the bank said that he was an old-time rambling buckaroo, who’d stopped making his mortgage payments because “he was looking for a quit.” Monika turned to me for an explanation, but I just wanted to get the deal done and move in. “It might not be exactly to your taste,” the banker said, “but nothing says you can’t tweak it.”
It was an absolute horror. Skinned coyote carcasses were piled on the front step, and a dead horse hung from its halter where it had been tied to the porch. Inside was a shambles, and there was one detail we couldn’t understand without the help of the neighbors: shotgun blasts through the bathroom door. Apparently Mrs. Old-Time Buckaroo used to chase Mr. Old-Time Buckaroo around the house until he ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and hid in the bath. The sides of the tub were pocked with lead.
Monika, who had seen the dead horse, said that it was a shame the wife had failed and that the two of them were now in the Great Basin, living out their lives. This is a bit of an
understatement—at the time Monika broke into sobs and begged to be taken away. “Is this how you treat your wife?” she turned on me. “Stop calling me your princess, you bastard.” I never quite got used to these flare-ups or to Monika’s sometimes-misleading passion for fresh starts.
Monika was not only not a westerner; she was not even an American. She had been stranded in architecture school by the uproar in the former Yugoslavia, and by the time it was safe for her to go home, we had met and planned to marry. Which we did. And now we were in that house. Monika was commuting to architecture school, and I was running an underemployed law office that five years earlier had done thirty real-estate closings a month and now did at most two and often none. Booms in real estate came and went, like weather, except that there always seemed to be plenty of weather.
I am aware that my ability to wittily point out things like this, and to describe the house the way I am describing it, has a lot to do with the fact that Monika left soon after we’d moved in. She abandoned what she contemptuously described as “the western lifestyle” to return to her parents in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, she found herself a nice house with no dead horses or coyotes, and a nice man and a nice baby—a twofer in the fresh-start business. Ours had been a poor excuse for a marriage, borne on an ill wind from the start.
I was still in the house, which we had painted in such a hurry that we’d rolled right over the outlets and floor moldings in uneven lines, giving one the feeling that the interior had somehow been draped in paint. For a long time, the sight of the walls kept Monika in my mind, even when womenfolk came for a visit, always short. Something—either me or the house—seemed to give them the willies.
I first met Bob when he came to congratulate me on “getting rid of that Croat.” Like many other men in the area, Bob wore cowboy boots and a big hat and described himself as a former cowboy. This phenomenon interested me, and I began to put the stories together a bit. For example, Bob, a retired electrician, had not been a cowboy for at least forty-five of his sixty-two years. Further investigation suggested that his cowboy years had occurred somewhere between the sixth and seventh grades and may have lasted just under a month. I had always imagined cowboys, former and otherwise, to be laconic men, who, if they overcame their reluctance to speak at all, did so without much expression. Not Bob. Bob never shut up and his facial movements had more in common with those of Soupy Sales than John Wayne. A surprising number of his anecdotes culminated in his telling people off, especially members of his own family. “My mother’s in her eighties and she keeps talking about when I was in her belly. Ever hear anything more disgusting? I finally had to tell her to shut her trap.” Or “I got fed up with my son. I told him to go fuck himself. He said he’d give it his best shot. Never at a loss for words, that boy.” Or “They’re all driving me crazy: my wife, my mother, my son, all his noisy friends. All the guys I worked with. Too much time on their hands. They need to get a life and quit cluttering up mine.”
Mail addressed to Bob was once mistakenly delivered to my box, so I took it up to his place. It was clear that he was living alone. In time, I learned that he had been living alone for years and that all his stories of telling people off were just wishful thinking. Bob’s relatives had put plenty of distance between themselves and him long ago. The only car that was ever in his driveway was his, an obsolete six-cylinder Bel Air with plenty of gravel cracks in the windshield. But at least Bob had integrity: he was mad at the world, if not yet at me. If I didn’t wind sprint to my car or work on weekends, I was in for long visits. Still, something about him touched me.
Bob and I had really started to settle in—with Bob tracking my movements to make sure that I was home from work for at least ten minutes before he showed up—when Monika called me from Belgrade. She had written occasionally since leaving, but this was the first time I had spoken to her in a couple of years. I found it painful in the extreme and didn’t quite keep track of the conversation, uncertain why I should care that she had money from the sale of her house or that little Karel already slept through the night and was such a happy boy. Monika must have detected my confusion because she suddenly asked, “Are you following this?” and I had to admit that I was a bit lost. She filled me in: she wanted to come back. What had happened to her new man? I asked her. “Out the window!” she said.
Monika spoke nearly perfect English, but she always managed to alter our colloquialisms slightly. My favorite was her description of a problem as “a real kink in the ointment.” I tried to correct this to “fly in the ointment,” but with a blank look on her beautiful face she asked me what a fly would be doing in ointment. I let it go. I had been raised to think that loving your spouse was a requirement. “Love is a job,” my mother had snarled at our wedding as she gazed at Monika, who was wearing some sort of shocking Eastern European headdress. Thus, I loved Monika even after she left me and until the day she announced her return, a baby under her arm by someone I had never met.
On the first day of the Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival, Monika got off the plane and handed me little Karel. “For you. Have I aged? I don’t seem to turn heads the way I used to.” She wore some sort of gown that fit her like a giant lampshade, a grand cone that went from her neck to the ground. “Is that a dirndl?” I asked.
“No, it’s a dashiki. Oh, God, you haven’t changed.”
I was in shock. As for little Karel, now in my arms, he was clearly black. I had an unworthy thought: Wait until Bob gets a load of this. Turned out I was wrong to worry about it because when Bob met Karel he thought he had a skin condition of some kind and expressed his sympathy.
In the parking lot, Monika said, “What are you doing with this tiny car?”
“I’ve been single, Monika. It was all I needed.”
“Well, I’m back.” She worked her way into the passenger seat while I held little Karel, who was gazing into my eyes confidently. “And this put-put will prove inadequate.”
The feeling came back to me, from the days of our marriage, that I was doomed in life to take a lot of shit and make weak jokes in response.
We made love as soon as we got to the house. Monika bounced me around and remarked that I seemed out of it. Across her lower back was a mysterious architectural tattoo, which turned out to be Le Corbusier’s plan for the High Court of Chandigarh, India. As I drifted off into postcoital tristesse, Monika raided the icebox. She was perfectly candid about her enthusiasm for food, explaining that her ex was a glutton. “Often when people come from lands of scarce resources their response to abundance is gluttony.”
“A big fellow, is he?” I asked weakly.
“In every way,” she said with a laugh. “You know what a Mandingo is?”
“Is it something to eat?”
“No, idiot! A Mandingo is an African warrior. You’re thinking of a mango!”
“Oh. Is he an African warrior?”
“Hardly. He’s a Nigerian neurosurgeon. But Olatunde has the sort of Mandingo traits that I hope Karel inherits. He’s actually Yoruba.”
I looked over at Karel. He didn’t seem to possess any Mandingo traits. He was just a little baby waving his arms around. When Monika collapsed with jet lag, I took him out to the sofa and let him play on my chest until he fell asleep. And then I fell asleep. The last thing I saw was a bird trying to get in the window. Monika’s luggage was still sitting in the living room, unopened.
Bob must have figured out that Karel did not have a skin condition because there was certainly a theme to the gifts he brought over. “He already had a baby shower in Belgrade,” Monika said, but that didn’t stop Bob. A children’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown’s Greatest Hits, and a pretend leg of fried chicken made out of some rubberlike material. “He can actually teethe on it!” Bob said.
When he was gone, Monika said, “My dream was of a new life here, but this may be impossible.”
“I think Bob meant well,” I said.
“Ah, make no mistake: that was not Bob speakin
g and bringing his symbolic gifts. That was America speaking through Bob.”
Meanwhile, Karel teethed contentedly on his rubber drumstick, his little chin glistening as he hummed.
As part of Monika’s first assignment on her return to architecture school she began to design some alterations for our house, a wing here, a wing there: I was terrified that she would actually want me to have these things built.
“Why do we need a loggia?”
“Why do I even talk to you?”
Bob continued to visit some mornings for coffee. If he arrived before Monika left for school, she fled to her car. “Always in a hurry, that gal,” Bob said. “Someday she’ll be designing skyscrapers, and we’ll brag we knew her back when.” Whenever Bob drove Monika from the house, it fell to me to care for Karel until the babysitter arrived in her white tennis shoes and loose shorts that made the vanishing of her thighs into them a matter of urgent mystery. I loved to start the day by playing with Karel in bed. He’d sit on my stomach, and we’d play hand games that always ended with this merry little boy tipping over onto the pillows only to arise and crawl on top of me again to resume the battle with a shout. If Bob was still there, we did this on the living-room rug, scurrying around until I had rug burns on my knees. When Bob wasn’t launching into some complaint about his overindulgent mother, he was wonderful with Karel. I could leave the two of them together while I dressed for work, and whatever Bob did always had Karel squealing with delight. The arrival of the babysitter, nubile Lydia, would put an end to all this: I went to work; Bob went home.
I have lived in this town for a long time, but I was raised in Bakersfield, California, a town I was longing to flee by the age of ten. I coughed up out-of-state tuition, went to law school, then settled here, at first alone and then with Monika. I mention all this because my colleague, Jay Matthews, who has lived here all his life, told me that Bob’s mother could hardly be driving him crazy: she died when he was a boy. “Got to be fifty years ago.”
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