Finally, poor Esther could bear it no longer. “Don’t you have anything to say?” she wailed.
“I’m trying to be a gentleman here,” said Luke. “Any other man would be giving you the third degree, but I figure when you want to tell me who the father is, then you will, and in the meantime pass the shrimp, little darling, can you do that for me?”
“Tell you who the father is? What are you talking about? You’re the father.”
“Oh man, it would be so fucking cool if I could only believe that.”
Over the next few months, as Esther Rothschild became more and more pregnant, larger, more easily tired, and certainly less interested than ever in being a part of Luke’s increasingly high-profile life, Luke tried to convince her to abort the child and go back to the relationship they had enjoyed in the past. “I miss you, Essie,” he’d say, shaking his head, staring at the bulge in her stomach, and sometimes even falling to his knees and weeping with loneliness—though Esther suspected these crying fits were an excuse for Luke to put his head against her stomach and listen for signs of the child within.
I never intended to quibble with Neil Schwartz or the Neil Schwartzes of this world, of which there are legion—the half- truth brigade. Isolating some favorite, fetishized facts in favor of other, less lovely or less exciting, ones is really a kind of intellectual pornography. Neil could only go so far in portraying Luke’s selfish panic at the news of my inception; Neil, who despite his many, many kindnesses toward me (guitar lessons, skates, Yankees games, Pelé autograph) was just another Lukologist. The so-called exposés of my father were done in the spirit of a farmer harvesting a field: even as the cotton is picked, new bullshit must be spread for next year’s crop. The unwritten law of professional Lukology is never to go so far in exposing the truth that people will stop wanting to read about the great man, thus ending the whole industry.
What Neil failed to include in The Gospel was that my father mounted a wild and constant campaign to convince my mother to have an abortion. The son of a bitch wanted me scraped out. The thought of Luke, with all his powers of persuasion, using everything from his hipness to my mother’s adoring attachmerit to him to convince her to terminate me, and the bravery of her resistance to him, has made me, over the years, practically swoon with an endlessly reenacted sense of danger and rescue, danger and rescue, danger and rescue—the great drama of my life, played out before I was born.
Birth control. As Rosa and I staggered and stumbled toward my mother’s room, though I was wearing my mother’s clothes and about to make love to a friend of my mother’s, in my mother’s bed, I was primarily worrying about birth control. Rosa threw herself onto the bed, fun-loving thing that she suddenly was, and landed flat on her back. I knew the unwritten choreography of these moments well enough to know that now I was supposed to fling myself upon her, break my fall with my hands so that my body hovered just over hers, and then kiss her deeply, while I gradually lowered myself onto her, the journey of a push-up but not round-trip. But I just stood there, grinning inanely—though with a humiliatingly hard erection.
“Are you on the pill or something?” I said.
She had already begun unbuttoning her blouse. Her breasts, as if anticipating their impending freedom, seemed to grow larger. “No way,” she said. “Are you?”
“I don’t believe they’ve perfected the male contraceptive pill yet,” I said.
“Well, they haven’t perfected the woman’s pill either, but that doesn’t stop doctors from handing them out.”
“Point taken,” I said.
Her fingers stopped unbuttoning her blouse, but she was still smiling. “Anyhow,” she said, “you have to wear a condom. Safe sex and … well, you know.”
“I don’t travel with condoms,” I said.
“Darn.”
“Darn?”
“I’m disappointed.”
“I was sort of hoping you—d have one.”
“I’m old-fashioned. A man invites me for dinner, I bring a couple bottles of wine, but that’s about it.”
“Well. What should we do?”
“There’s always a cold shower.”
I must have looked more disappointed than I realized. She got one of those “Aw, whatsamatter?” looks and reached up toward me.
“I can give you a hand job, if you like,” she said, but softly, with a kind of purr in her voice, so it didn’t sound that bad.
“I don’t really want a hand job,” I replied, hastily, without weighing my options.
“I don’t mind. I’ve even given them to my dog.”
“Now that’s an enticement. Which hand did you use?”
She looked at both of her hands, laughed. I spooned next to her, stroked her hair, following the curve of her skull, and then massaged her neck.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I whispered.
Her body tensed. She raised herself on her elbows, glanced (guiltily?) at me.
“Why’d you ask that?”
“I’m just kidding. It’s … It’s a non sequitur. It’s something I do.”
She dropped flat onto the bed again. Silence. Inactivity.
“Well, now you’ve made me curious,” I said.
“Luke,” she said, resigned.
“You’re kidding.” But, really, I ought to have been grateful it was just her dog and not her son.
Rosa looked away. I followed her eyes; she seemed to be looking at the framed photo of Esther, Grandpa, and me on my mother’s night table. She was trying to figure a way out of what had suddenly become an uncomfortable situation. She felt she had hurt my feelings, and also she had exposed a certain rather grotesque groupiness in herself. But what to do now? She decided to sweep it all under a carpet made of sex. She turned over to face me, so close her features were a womanly blur. She ran her fingers through my Lukish curls. She nibbled at my long Lukish earlobe. I forgave her. The temptation of celebrity was too strong. And Luke was more than a star—he was a prophet, a god. I was probably as close as Rosa would ever come to touching immortality. Why did I think she was better than that? I was no better than that.
“If you promise to be careful, we can make love anyhow,” she whispered directly into my ear.
“I can sing Luke songs while we do it.” I think I must have been trying to queer the deal. I think I wanted to talk, to befriend her, to start building my list of names of people I could call and who would call me, rather than just add another woman to my list of ludicrous conquests.
“Shhh.” She gave me a shut-up kiss.
What happened to her child, her child’s father, her mother, her past, her boots, her privacy and dreams? The particularity of her was being blown to bits like a little Hiroshima of the soul, irradiated, cooked by the ten thousand suns of Luke’s fame.
“What if you get pregnant?” I said.
“I won—t.”
“Famous last words.”
“Well then, what?” She pressed her pelvic bone into my hip.
“Hand job?” I said, more or less joking.
She was silent for a moment and then she said, “Do you want to go first? Or can I?”
She took my hand and guided it to her crotch. She rolled onto her back. She spread her arms, her legs. She looked like an X on my mother’s bed. She held me in place and moved herself against my palm. Et cetera, et cetera. Fade to black.
8
ROSA was still with me when I got a call from the hospital, informing me that my grandfather had arrived and was insisting upon seeing Esther, which was of course impossible, and he wouldn’t budge, which was of course typical of him, and would I please come right over and collect him.
Grandpa Irv was sitting in the reception area when I arrived. He was erect, taut as barbed wire, with a little plaid suitcase, such as a child would carry, at his feet, and his cane leaning against the wall. His eyes were closed. There he was, the man who had always symbolized for me logic, unflappability, and tireless hard work. Irving Z. Rothschild—the Z stood f
or nothing, it was just a letter his mother stuck in there to distinguish him from another Irving Rothschild who lived in their building on Hester Street. Grandpa seemed to be asleep. “Grandpa!” I called out. I had left Mother’s house somewhat irritated by his sudden arrival and the trouble he was causing at the hospital, but now that he was before me I was so deeply grateful to see him.
He snapped to. Years on call had left him with a well-oiled nervous system. He sprang to his feet, unconsciously reached for something—perhaps his doctor’s bag, that old brown leather satchel that used to be at his bedside, holding a stethoscope, tongue depressors, syringes, pills, and little pamphlets about socialized medicine he gave to certain of his patients, the ones he felt needed political education.
“Billy!” he said, opening his arms to me.
We embraced. He had shrunk, but there were still five feet and eight inches left to him. Yet he was hollowed out now; his bones were like soda-shop straws. He patted my back, clasped my hand. Looking at me overcame him for a moment, and to keep himself from crying he impulsively pulled my hand to his mouth and kissed it, a weird, courtly, yet somehow hysterical gesture.
Blessed as I felt by my grandfather’s kiss, so rescued, so loved, the moment he touched his lips to the back of my hand I remembered I had left the house without washing, and my fingers might still be cunty. Grandpa had a sense of smell like a bloodhound, and as the other senses faded, his olfactory genius only increased. He could smell the ocean when we were miles away from it, burned coffee across the river in New Jersey, shoe polish on a passer-by, sesame noodles when we were still six blocks from Chinatown. I gently dislodged my hand and then pretended to scratch my nose—sure enough, they were redolent of getting Rosa off.
“How’d you get here?” I asked.
“A friend. What difference does it make? Who’s the attending physician? I have to talk to him.”
“You can’t do that now.”
“Does he know he’s dealing with the daughter of a physician?”
Actually he, or they, did not. It struck me: Esther, to the people in this hospital, was the woman who used to go out with Luke Fairchild. That her father was a doctor was as unknown to them as the sachets of dried lavender in her dresser drawers, or the way she moved her hand in front of her face to obscure her slightly gummy smile, and it hadn’t occurred to me to mention it.
An elderly woman in a pink quilted robe came up to us, supported on an aluminum walker. She wheeled an IV tower along with her; her left hand was purple from the bruises of needles going in and out. She was freshly lipsticked, with a strangely young, wild look to her—like a country girl on a boozy Saturday night.
“I want to thank you for all your good advice,” she said.
“That’s perfectly all right, my dear,” Grandpa said, the strain in his voice suddenly submerged beneath the savory baritone of his professional voice, that mixture of kindness and condescension he used for forty-four years in his ministrations to the Brooklyn left and the Brooklyn poor. “Just remember the folks in this hospital have bought a lot of very, very expensive equipment and they want to use it at every opportunity. You follow me, dear? They order up test after test, cause you a great deal of discomfort—but remember: they tack it onto the bill. You have the right to say no. So you make sure they explain every procedure.”
“Oh, I will, I can promise you that,” she said. It looked for a moment as if she wanted to touch Grandpa, but she was as unstable on her walker as an uncooked egg and she didn’t dare.
As the woman clumped away, Grandpa gave me a brief but unmistakable “So there!” look, as if it had been my idea to close up his practice, put him out to pasture in Seizure World.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Why? You don’t like it here?” He smiled; his teeth were large, unevenly placed, Druidical stones. “You were always so squeamish.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I’m fine. Soon, I’ll be asleep for eternity. Now I like to keep my eyes open. Are you at Mommy—s?”
It had only been since Grandma’s death that Irv had taken to calling his daughter Mommy.
I picked up his suitcase. Together we walked toward the door; as we approached the front desk, the night nurse quickly busied herself with something on her computer. Grandpa must have given her hell before I got there and she clearly wanted to avoid even looking at him.
Outside, in the hospital parking lot, the night air was chilly, but nonetheless fragrant with the shy, hesitant spring. Honeysuckle, wet earth. Above, the sky was so full of stars it seemed as if some of them might spill to earth. Grandpa stopped to look up, holding on to my arm for balance.
“Now there’s a sight,” he said, softly. “Look at all our relatives out there.” It had been one of his consolations during my fatherless childhood, how we were all originally descended from matter, the same matter that made the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and every other star in the sky.
“She’s going to make it,” I said, inanely, but meaning it, too. I was now one of those people who believed in the sympathetic magic of the well-meaning sentiment. And why not? What else do we have? The clenched fist eventually becomes crossed fingers.
“Which one’s yours?” he asked me, gesturing with his cane to the little knot of cheap sedans gathered in an otherwise empty parking lot.
“That one,” I said, pointing to a dark green Ford Probe.
“That’s your car?” I didn’t know if he meant it was too good for me, or not good enough.
“It’s rented.”
“So you’ve got a credit card,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ve totally sold out to the corporate machine. Moloch’s my main man, now.”
Grandpa nodded, waited for me to open the door for him. I stood there helplessly, watching him negotiate the series of bends, twists, and slides necessary for him to get into the car. He looked like someone trying to walk down a narrow flight of stairs with a wide-open umbrella. Everything was such a hassle for him—his bones, his bowels, his eyes, his ears, gravity, history, memory. The last time I visited him at Shoreview, I found in his shirt pocket little slips of paper upon which he had carefully printed some of the names he had been forgetting of people at the home—the doctors, the physical therapists, the attendants. He hadn’t bothered with the other inmates.
As soon as I drove out of the hospital parking lot, Grandpa closed his eyes, and a moment later he was asleep. There was comfort there, being beside him. He had been as close to a father as I had in this world. When I was very young, and consumed with shame over my fatherlessness, I sometimes pointed Irv out to others and claimed that dapper, elderly man as my dad. For the three months I was a Cub Scout, it was Irv who brought me to meetings—Esther tried, but my conformist urges were like fingernails on the blackboard of her emotional radicalism, whereas Irv, crafty old Leninist, believed in boring from within—and it was Irv who came limping along for the father-and-son camping trip to Bear Mountain. It was Irv who gave me my first glass of beer when I was fifteen, skunky Canadian brew which he poured as lovingly as if it were expensive Champagne: “Better than seltzer for after a meal.” And it was Irv whom Esther assigned to give me a talk about sex—which he did in his office, complete with detailed medical illustrations—after which I was fairly well equipped to deliver a baby.
I pulled in front of my mother’s house and gently shook Grandpa’s shoulder to awaken him. He woke instantly, but the paleness of him, the caved-in quality of his mouth, the stunned emptiness of his eyes gave the impression of someone waking from death.
“We’re here,” I said, not much above a whisper. “Esther’s house.” I realized he was scrambling for an idea of where he was.
I walked around the car to open the door for him. The night, despite the avalanche of stars, felt like an abandoned house. I heard the shrill, unearthly cries of coyote cubs coming from somewhere in the invisible woods, manic, eerily melodic yips and howls—how Esther loved them!
&nbs
p; “You need some help?” I asked, holding out my hand to him. He didn’t answer, but he gripped me—his hand was cool, smooth, like a statue suddenly capable of movement. I gently tugged, and he allowed me to pull him to his feet, out of the car.
Grandpa secured his balance and then looked toward the house. The lights in the bedroom windows blazed like fires in the darkness. He looked at his stricken daughter’s cottage in the middle of nowhere, far from Brooklyn, somehow even farther from Manhattan, far from theaters and galleries and meetings, far from the UN, far from Federal Plaza, and Grand Army Plaza, and One Centre Street, and all the other places where father and daughter demonstrated to end the arms race, or free Angela Davis, far from any life that Irv himself would consider worth living, her hideaway, her early retirement home, this slate-and-shingle crypt of keepsakes and diaries, with its cupboards full of esoteric teas, and the beams of its attic groaning from the weight of her boxes of photographs, and its basement the burying ground of all her empty liquor bottles—for though she drank in secret, she created a kind of sorrowing archaeology of every slip. It was a place away, an obscurity, an irrelevance that always irked Irv; but tonight, as it floated before us in a sea of darkness, he was unaccountably moved by the sight of it.
“What a pretty house,” he said, and gazed at it as if it were a kind of paradise. “It’s really pretty, isn’t it?” His voice was quaking. Irv was an emotional man, but his feelings were often unpredictable to him—they ambushed him, or blew through him like sudden storms. His attitudes toward daily life were shaped by the rigors of medical science—measured, clean, methodical, dogged and pessimistic—and his sense of fate was entirely circumscribed by scientific socialism, a Marxist view of history as an implacable engine driving humanity to its destination: that paradise of freedom from money and property where everyone was a Messiah. But now he stood before his daughter’s humble house, a house that in her absence had become her in his imagination, and I knew it was taking everything of his waning strength to keep him from sobbing out loud.
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