The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  I nodded, but I think I might have had a sour expression. My mother’s eyes filled with tears, but I wasn’t able to care about that, just then.

  “Is he mad at me, too?”

  “Oh no, Billy. Of course not.”

  “So how come he doesn’t come over and see me? He doesn’t even buy me anything or go anywhere with me.”

  “I know. I really hate him for that, Billy.”

  “Well, maybe if you stopped hating him he’d come over.”

  “I have stopped hating him, honey.”

  “But you just said—”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Just then, I remembered something. I went into the living room, with its gated windows that looked out onto the fire escape, and the high, peeling plaster ceiling. One entire wall was covered with shelves, where Mother kept her hundreds of books and framed pictures of me, and of her, and of her family—old sepia photos of Grandma and Grandpa’s wedding in a huge Flatbush synagogue, and of Esther’s graduation from Hunter College, and of four-year-old, spindly-legged, fringe- shirted, chaps-wearing me on a Shetland pony whose expression was filled with abjectness, catatonia, and disgust, taken at a petting zoo in Pennsylvania, and pictures of aunts and uncles and great-grandparents and third cousins, ranging from devout Eastern European Jews, gloomy, dressed in black, with beards and babushkas and humorless eyes, who reminded me of the Amish we saw not far from the petting zoo, to a child- psychologist cousin in Miami, and a real-estate-swindler second cousin in San Diego. A hundred times over, perhaps a thousand, Esther had looked at these pictures with me, identifying each of them, trying, I suppose, to stanch the bleeding of my wounded heart with a tourniquet of relatives.

  The bottom two shelves of the case were filled with Esther’s records, and I crouched before them, knowing exactly what I wished to find. She had nine of Luke’s records, all neatly shelved together. I pulled out the one called Village Idiot. The cover showed my sudden father, a substantial man to my young eyes, but really just an arrogant, possessed, rowdy, aging boy, twenty-two years old, with sunken cheeks, zonked blue eyes, and a wild meringue of auburn curls, with his arm around a bony woman a half-inch taller than he, a woman with black hair, luxuriant eyebrows, photographed with her head tilted down and to the side, so that her face was mostly obscure, but who I was now realizing was my mother. Luke and Esther were hurrying along Bleecker Street, with the wind at their back, lifting the collars of their matching buckskin jackets, whipping their hair around. They seemed entirely happy and in love. They wore boots, jeans; their bodies exuded confidence and satisfaction. Luke had a guitar case slung over his left shoulder; Esther carried a string bag filled with oranges and a skinny loaf of Italian bread from Zito’s, a bit of product placement that Luke engineered in exchange for five hundred dollars’ worth of credit at the bakery.

  My mother had followed me into the living room, and I held the album up for her to see. She had poured herself a very large glass of red wine and she walked carefully so as not to spill it.

  “Is this you?” I asked.

  She drank her wine and then patted her lips with the back of her hand.

  “This is exactly what I was afraid of,” she said.

  1

  I HAVE been trying to tell this story for more than twenty years. Often, I thought of stopping everything and doing a kind of Huck Finn and taking off for the territory of my father. There was always something to stop me. The hurdle jump of my daily life. Exhaustion. Fear. Lack of money. An illusion that it was no longer necessary and that I could do very well without a father, especially a father who had abandoned my mother. I did not have a particularly good life and I was not a particularly good man, but, as we say in our ambivalent culture, on the other hand, I wasn’t leading a bad life and I wasn’t a bad man, so there were always reasons—persistent if not persuasive—to leave well enough alone.

  I don’t know that there was a vivid, defining moment that launched me in pursuit of Luke. I had always kept an eye on him. I read the adoring biographies, bought the albums, followed the gossip, and made it my business to attend whatever concerts I could—staring now at his spotlit figure on the stage and now at the enraptured faces of the fans in the rows around me. Over the years, I was not exactly secret about Luke being my father. I mentioned it whenever it suited my purposes—it was obviously a great sexual aid, a kind of celebrity-mad Spanish fly. And then, about three years ago, using my job as a substitute teacher to finance my research, I began to devote myself to the study of my father in earnest, thinking and dreaming of little else, writing letters, having long phone conversations, and crisscrossing the country to gather the testimony of anyone who knew him.

  There were things I wanted to know: how did a shapeless Jewish kid from the Midwest become so famous, so beloved, so despised, so lonely, so pious, so drug-addicted, so vicious, so misunderstood, so overanalyzed? How did he break so many hearts, crash so many cars, how did all that money rush in and out like water through the gills of a fish? The history of my father, It’s been said, is the history of the second half of twentieth-century America. I mention this not only to impress (you), but to excuse (me)—for pursuing him, even though I am past the age when it can be considered in any way seemly.

  I think I look like him (high forehead; less-than-granite chin; graceful, girlish hands). And my mother, upon repeated questionings, made it clear there is no possibility, logical or biological, that any other man could have planted the seed in her in the winter of 1964. Nevertheless, Luke has never admitted I was his son. By the time she told me that Luke was my father, my mother had given up trying to get him to accept his responsibility. She had made her peace with the situation and with him—though there was a slightly nauseating implication of payoff when he gave her shared composing credit in three songs off his fifth album. But that wasn’t much of a bribe, it was just uncharacteristically decent behavior on Luke’s part, since my mother in fact did help write “Early to Bed,” “Sweet Freedom,” and “Lorca in New York,” the publishing rights to which largely financed my private-school education and which, even as they sputtered into antiquity—they were not exactly Luke’s Greatest Hits—still shed enough capital for Mother to buy an antique little house near the Hudson River in Leyden, New York.

  It was there that I saw her on what turned out to be my last field trip in search of new bits of Lukology. I’d taken a couple of days off from work; there were some people I couldn’t get to on weekends. It was the last week in May, and I was primarily concentrating on the priest who had been so central to Dad’s Christian conversion, Father Richard Parker, who had been oddly neglected in all of the many, many books about Luke. I spent all day Monday and the beginning of Tuesday with my Aiwa, filling those dollhouse tapes with testimony.

  On my way back to New York from Father Parker in Albany, and a couple of other upstate stops while I was at it (Gig Kurowsky, Luke’s old bassist, and Terrence St. James, Dad’s driver and drug courier in the early seventies), I stopped to see my mother. I came to her isolated cabin (steep snow- resistant roof, red shutters) on Snake Mountain Road in Leyden, which is exactly one hundred miles, to the last click of the odometer, from my apartment on West 105th Street.

  As I drove toward her house, the spring sky was streaked with sunset colors—light charcoal clouds strewn like rubble in a field of flame red—but around her house the night had already settled in. I smelled the flowering trees—the crab apples, the peach—but I couldn’t see them.

  There wasn’t another house within a mile of Mother’s. The sound of my car’s engine brought her onto the porch, and as my headlights turned this way and that on her winding driveway, illuminating here a flowering mountain laurel, and there a copper-eyed cat perched on a capped well, Esther shielded her eyes against the glare of my brights. She wore a long flowered dress, a crocheted shawl, Chinese slippers. Her long dark hair was well past her shoulders and showed a fair amount of gray.

  I parked next to her maroon van and stre
tched the monotonous thruway miles out of my aching back—these bottom-of- the-line rental cars are murder on the spine. As glad as she was to see me, Esther stayed on the porch, waiting for me to approach her. The most beautiful girl in Greenwich Village doesn’t run toward anyone, not even her own son. She waited for me, the golden light of the windows behind her, giant moths orbiting frantically around her yellow porch light.

  “Billy,” she said, holding her hands out to me.

  We embraced, kissed, embraced again. She smelled faintly of camphor; she was forever storing and unpacking her clothes. She had of late become careful about material things, even a little compulsive. She wanted to extend the life of every possession. Her house was paid for, but she worried about the property taxes. That sort of thing. Her share of the royalties from the songs she wrote with Luke couldn’t keep up with inflation. To stretch her funds, Mother had gotten into the stock market and was, in fact, weirdly successful with her investments, which she chose on wild but somehow useful hunches, bringing in astrology and her own personal assessment of the company’s products.

  “You look tired,” she said, breaking our embrace, stepping back to look at me more closely.

  “Can I spend the night? I can’t drive another inch.”

  “Since when do you have to ask?” She narrowed her eyes. “Your color’s not good.”

  “I have to be at school by eight-fifteen. That means getting up by five.”

  “Fine by me. I’m up before dawn anyhow. I’ll go out and get fresh bagels.”

  It was code, her way of telling me she wasn’t drinking. When there was alcohol in her life, she woke at noon, sometimes slept straight through until dinner, with the curtains drawn, the phone unplugged.

  She linked her arm through mine, pulled me indoors.

  Her house was neat, but it showed evidence of someone living alone with her own thoughts. There were tidy little piles of things in the corners and on the tables, books to be read, books to be loaned or returned, clothes she planned to repair or restyle. There were flats of geraniums in the windows and a half-completed jigsaw puzzle (nuns, balloons) on the threadbare Persian rug. The fireplace was swept clean of its long winter of silvery ash and was filled now with dried flowers—pale purple, rust orange, and white. Mother had no TV, nor did she own a radio. Like a one-woman jury in a trial without end, she lived sequestered from the media.

  I stood with her in the kitchen while she took our dinner out of the oven—lasagna. I found a couple of clean plates and she served it up.

  “So what’s going on with you and Joan?” she asked me. “I was hoping you’d have her with you.”

  Joan Odiack. My girlfriend. A well-packaged bundle of nerves. Raised in Detroit by elderly Slav immigrants, she’d been on her own since running away from their not terribly tender mercies at the age of fifteen. Self-taught and self- justifying, she had chopped fish in canneries, slept in parks, stolen. I’d met her at a bookstore reading by Grace Paley, bit deeply into the hook of her pathologically passionate nature, and had been either with her or waiting for her to come back to me for nearly two years. Now, just past her quarter-century mark, she was finally getting tired of being poor; and the fact that I was Luke’s son, which had impressed her far less than most of my girlfriends, had now begun to gall her. Where was the money?

  “Get a more luxurious house and she’ll visit. Maybe something with an indoor swimming pool. She could do laps while we talked.”

  “You are with her, aren’t you?”

  “She moved back in with me. I guess her great romantic adventure fell flat. She expected me to take her back.” I shrugged. I thought that was going to sound rather more jaunty than it had.

  “You took her back because you missed her.”

  “She was with someone from Louisiana. A businessman, fat as a pig. And she’s brought his little habits home with her. She’s got me drinking all this New Orleans coffee and eating Cajun food and listening to Professor Longhair.”

  “You shouldn’t be drinking coffee. And I’m not so sure about that Cajun food, either. Anyhow, you must be glad to have her back.”

  “If I was well, I probably wouldn’t even know her. We went to bed three hours after we met. Things like that never work out.”

  “You said she loved you. You were sitting in this very room and you said that.”

  “I was deluded. She wasn’t into Luke—I mistook that for love. I don’t seem to know the difference.”

  “She’s very beautiful, in that wild way. A runaway horse.”

  “She sees ghosts and she’s in a bad mood at least forty hours a week. She’s got a mood that ought to be paying her a salary.”

  We ate in the kitchen; the night and its tiny flying things ticked against the windows, hungry for the pale orange candlelight. Esther’s sink was full of pots and pans, but in the candlelight it wasn’t very noticeable. We talked about the job Esther had taken, a two-day-a-week gig reading Thackeray to a rich old woman who lived in a spooky old Leyden estate on a bluff overlooking the Hudson.

  “She wants me to read as slowly as possible,” my mother said. “She’s convinced she’ll die when It’s over.”

  “Maybe she’ll leave you all her money,” I say.

  “Yes. I’m sure she will. Like in a fairy tale.”

  She breathed deeply and exhaled slowly. I had a sudden, frightening sense of her, a body running down, slowly but surely. Time was catching up with her, its bony hands plucking at her skirt as she tried to outdistance it. And there was something else, a more specific heaviness on her spirit: she could not abide my continuing to look for clues about my father. Each time she thought I’d finally come to the end of it, I disappointed her by beginning the search again. I was not and could not be cured of it, and she watched at the bedside of my life as the fever took me again and again.

  “Why don’t you just say it,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever’s bothering you. I know what it is anyhow.”

  “Do you now.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Then there’s no real reason to converse, is there?”

  “Just say it, Mom. You don’t like it when I rummage through the past, talking to people who knew Dad.”

  “Dad,” she says, shaking her head. “Dad. Daddy. Da-da.”

  “Well, he is my father. Whatever else he may or may not be.”

  “Do you really think you’re going to get the goods on him?” she said, resting her fork a little too carefully against the edge of her plate. She folded her hands, moved her face closer to mine. “And then what? Write a book about it? Do you think you’re going to blow him out of the water with a torpedo made of words?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “But is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know. It might be. I won’t know until… until I know.”

  I closed my eyes but I felt the room move a little and I quickly opened them again.

  “Then what, Billy? Are you trying to settle a score?”

  “That can never be done. Not after what he’s done to us.”

  “Us? Speak for yourself, Billy. Please don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re doing this for me. I don’t want it. And all you’re going to succeed in doing is racking up a ton of bad karma.”

  “Spare me. Bad karma. There’s too many goddamned Buddhist retreats up here. Where’s your anger?”

  “Gone. What do I need with it? I have my son, my house, my friends, my plants.”

  “Your plants?”

  “Stop it, Billy. I don’t appreciate that kind of rough kidding. What I’m trying to tell you is, I feel no anger toward him. Luke and I had a relationship and then we broke up. That’s not exactly a capital offense. I should be grateful.”

  “Grateful?”

  “Yes. For the time I had with him. The places he goes, in his mind, with his music, the things he understands, the things he feels—a normal person can hang on for just so long.”

&nbs
p; “You can’t believe this. You’re just trying to—”

  “Even when he was wrong, or mean, or too stoned to make sense, there was always something there. Even when he blew out his voice, or couldn’t hold a tune—he’s a genius, Billy. A real live genius. And he was mine, for a while. He loved me, deeply. Why shouldn’t I be grateful?”

  “He wrote songs about you. He invaded your privacy. He wrote songs about your vagina, for Christ’s sake.”

  “We have no idea whose vagina that song was about. And why do you dwell on that one, anyhow? He wrote so many songs. His songs got people out of jail—”

  “Yeah, and some of them were murderers, like Sergei Karpanov.”

  She drew back a little. We did not speak lightly of Sergei; we barely spoke of him at all. Was what Luke did for Sergei worse than what he didn’t do for us? Perhaps; perhaps not. But since Esther seemed willing now to forget, or at least minimize, the wrongs Luke committed against her and her son, Sergei seemed to stand in for everything that might be rotted at the core of her old lover.

  “Luke made people brave,” said Esther, recovered, and even stronger than she was the moment before. “When some of us thought we could change the world, it was partly because of him. He wrote our songs. Genius is its own defense, Billy. I don’t need to protect him. But I certainly don’t need to take pot shots at him, and neither do you.”

  “He betrayed you. He left you with a child.”

  “I loved being your mother. I was fine.”

  “But what about me?”

  “I hate that phrase.”

  “I know you do. But I wanted a father. Even now, when I see kids, little kids with their father, it makes me ache. I see them holding hands. I see them kissing. Little boys and their fathers in the sunshine, kissing on the lips. Not handshakes, or hugs, or little pecks on the cheek. Lips! The whole world is like one big Father’s Day picnic.” I tepeed my fingers and tapped the tips together.

  “That’s new. You wouldn’t have had that, anyhow. Look at you. My goodness.”