By the time I was paying attention again—and surely no more than a few moments could have passed—Luke was telling Grandpa that he would arrange for a private ambulance and Grandpa was saying that he would get the paperwork started so we could get Esther out of Leyden as soon as possible. Irv turned to leave and suddenly my father and I were, for all practical purposes, alone.
Luke made sure the door was firmly shut and then he threw his arms behind him and locked his hands, and then rapidly raised and lowered them, up and down, like the handle of a jack. A moment later, his spine made a series of alarming cracks and pops. “Oh, man,” he said, with evident satisfaction, closing his eyes. His eyelids were dark, thick as alligator skin; you could barely make out the bulge of the eyeballs beneath. Once, he’d been the kind of man who needed to shave but two or three times weekly, he was once so fresh-faced, almost pink, but now he was weathered as a stump. Over the years, his face had grown and shed at least a dozen beards: a pirate’s unruly fringe, a Russian mystic’s long black tusk, a stylish Vandyke that lasted not nearly as long as the double chin it had been grown to conceal. Now, shaved clean, he looked worn, almost ravaged. Gravity tugged insistently at the corners of his once arrogantly curled lips, giving him the look of a man who when asked “How’s business?” sourly replies “Don’t ask.” If you’d taken the crucifix and the round collar away, he would have looked Jewish from across the street; people would have been able to spot his Semitism the way Grandpa smelled the sea. His ears had grown, and so had his nose. In a caricature drawn on the CD cover of one of his bootlegged concert performances (Geneva, Switzerland, 1980), the artist had drawn Luke’s schnoz as long as a baguette, bent at the end, making him look like an illustration of the Jew Without Scruples from some Nazi pamphlet.
Mom used to say (though never to me) that Luke was an innocent, a child, beneath it all. Well, that innocence was long gone, swallowed by the muck of ego, entitlement, and drugs, revelation, conversion, and tantrum, blow jobs, anal sex, private showings, his pick of the litter, and a thousand and one rarefied pleasures and perversions I could barely imagine. He was paying the price for his life, organ by organ. And somewhere within him was the terrible sad panic of a once holy man starting to realize that, despite everything, his body might outlive his soul.
“Do you remember when I came to see you at that spa?” I asked.
“Which spa was this?” he said.
“The one around Lenox, Massachusetts. Last summer, for Christ’s sake.”
“Last summer?”
“It doesn’t matter. Do you remember when I saw you on Martha’s Vineyard?”
“Is this a test? What do I get if I answer correctly?”
“I can’t believe you don’t remember,” I said.
And with that, my time alone with my father was completely squandered. Grandpa came back into the room, his face registering frustration. I ignored him for the moment.
“I came to see you in Lenox, Massachusetts,” I said to Luke, in the overenunciated, syllable-obsessed way of the petulant son to the absent father, a voice I had never before had an opportunity to use, but which came to me full-blown, like your first sneeze. “You were at the Wellspring Lodge. You insisted we play tennis together. That was a lot of fun. That was a real first-class treat. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed chasing the ball around in the sun and—”
“You know he has a bad heart,” said Grandpa. “He had rheumatic fever when he was a child.”
“Grandpa. Please.”
“Bad heart’s better than a bad conscience,” said Luke. “Better than bad breath, too.”
Silence, except for the beep of Mother’s monitor, marking time like the digital clock in a bomb.
“She was still protecting you, did you know that?” I asked.
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Luke was getting angry. He wasn’t used to being pressed; for all his perfected spontaneity, his man-of-the-people poses, he was used to huge helpings of deference, he was used to that old devotion being slathered on with a snow shovel, he was used to the sibilant chorus of Yes surrounding his life like a swarm of locusts.
“I’m talking about the woman you supposedly loved.”
“What are you trying to do, Billy? You want to fight with me? I’m just a couple buckets of blood, and bones for the dogs. This ‘me’ you want to fight is really something in your own head. Why don’t you try fighting with yourself?”
Luke’s voice was startlingly low, a honeyed croon, so unlike his usual nasal, wise-ass, reedy kazoo of a voice that it caused me to wonder if he had just become a different person, or if his soul was like one of those flashlights that can shine red, white, green, yellow, or blue, mediated by a simple plastic dial over the face of it. But then I realized: this was his Nashville timbre, the almost comically resonant style he affected after he had repudiated the paisleyed psychedelia of the sixties, and began to boyishly idolize the cowboy singers, beer-bellied, eagle- eyed middle-aged men in string ties, the Nashville old guard, terse, tough guys with barroom scars on their knuckles, or a bitten-off ear, a shattered knee, guys who spent more money on drugs than the Grateful Dead and Blue Cheer and the Stones put together.
“How are you planning to get her to New York?” Grandpa asked Luke.
“We’re just talking about money here, is all,” Luke said.
“What else is new?” said Grandpa.
“Well, we don’t want Esther waiting around all day,” Luke said.
“Of course not,” said Grandpa. “But they seemed to think there would be no problem in removing her by seven this evening, at the latest.”
“And if they fuck that up we’re here for another night.” Luke tepeed his fingers and …
And I remembered that one of the last things Esther said before the crash was that was a gesture Luke and I shared, a bit of chromosomal legacy more mysteriously transmitted but no less distinct than brown hair or soft teeth. I watched his fingertips tap two by two and I felt for a moment almost overwhelmed by an emotion for which I had no name. It was like being nailed to the wall and soaring like a bird at the same time.
“If Esther sat up in bed right now,” I said, in a voice that I was certain sounded serene, “do you know what she’d say? She’d say, ‘Luke, I want you to meet your son. Billy, say hi to your father.’”
“Not now, Billy,” said Grandpa. “First things first.”
But of course he would feel that way; he was Esther’s father. His first allegiance was to her, her well-being, her happiness; it was only natural. He was her father.
“Let me ask you something, kid,” Luke said. “Why would I ever be so wicked or so blind? If the flesh of my flesh stands before me, who am I not to embrace the child?”
“Is that from the Bible or something?” I said. “And anyway, how can I know why you’re wicked or blind? How can I know anything about you? You never came to see me. And when I track you down, you never seem to remember who I am, or when you last saw me, or what I want.”
“What you want? You know how many people walk in and out of my life, wanting something? Wisdom, old rags, reasons to believe? I don’t have what you want, and you probably don’t even know what you want. You just want what you don’t have.”
“I know what I want,” I said. All the decks had been cleared, every competing reality had been set aside, everything, and now all there was was this, this moment, this room, this man standing before me, this man whom I had chased and dreamed of all my life, this shadow of a shadow, this dream of a dream. “I want the same thing I wanted when I came to see you at Wellspring. I want the same thing I’ve wanted my whole wasted goddamned life. I want you to say you’re my father.”
Grandpa put his hand on my shoulder. Was there something in my voice that alarmed him? Was he worried? Repelled? I could not bring myself to exactly care.
Luke, too, seemed unnerved. And I thought to myself, with an almost paranoid singularity of focus: Aha! He’s afraid to answer! But even then, in
the freezing, hollow, echoing madness of the moment, I was obscurely aware that Luke’s face did not register fear so much as pity. I thought, Well, that is just not going to work. But his suddenly soulful eyes slowed me down, nevertheless. And this moment’s hesitation proved fatal—my heart began to clatter and bang like a tin man falling down a steep flight of stairs. My hands and feet were turning icy. The world was a Lichtenstein painting, a transparent world of bubbles and dots.
“What’s wrong with him, Irv?” I heard Luke say, in a voice that sounded like the distant ocean when you are in a hotel room, half-asleep in your bed.
“You’re giving him a heart attack, is what’s wrong with him,” Grandpa said. And then: “Billy? Can you hear me? Billy?”
I looked at him. How old he seemed, how frail. I forgot to speak; I thought I had said something, but I hadn—t.
Luke dragged a metal folding chair to the middle of the room and Grandpa, loosening my belt, guided me down into it. My tongue felt huge in my mouth. My hands, made of lead, dropped into my lap.
10
“ARE YOU SURE you feel all right driving?” Luke said, as we pulled out of the hospital parking lot. I had been thoroughly checked over, pronounced in sound albeit neurotic health, and released. Now Luke and I were on our way to Kingston, on the other side of the Hudson, where he had somehow secured not only an ambulance but an attendant who would accompany us as we transported Esther to New York. Luke was vague when I asked him how all this had been arranged; I suspect he himself was not sure. He had a number of people on his beck-and-call brigade, people who tended to his menagerie of needs and whims. Needless to say, he did very little of the labor of his own life. It had been at least thirty years since he’d changed the sheets on a bed, or changed a lightbulb, or stood impatiently in line for popcorn, worried the movie would start without him. Yet despite his twenty-four-hour coddling, he still maintained his angry, alienated sneer, he still wrote as if he were somehow an outlaw. He wrote, I suppose, from some proletarianized spirit, a disenfranchisement of the soul. Or perhaps his memories of being beneath the heel of society were still so vivid that they seemed more real than the Malibu-Monaco axis upon which his current world so luxuriously turned.
We drove over the bridge spanning the Hudson. The river trembled blue and white as the wind raked at its surface. Luke seemed uncomfortable; my rented Probe was probably the shittiest car he had ridden in in at least a quarter-century. He stretched his right leg out and massaged it above the knee. Years after shattering it in a spin-out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (at nearly the exact spot where the jazz trumpet legend Clifford Brown fatally crashed) Luke’s leg often ached. (It was the leg that led to his addiction to painkillers, and then to heroin.)
“Still playing a lot of tennis?” I asked him.
He simply shook his head no. So much for tennis.
He remained silent, coiled deep within himself. His snubs, of course, were notorious, and I had heard of them from several women who were involved with him. Annabelle Stevenson told me that Luke once didn’t utter a single word to her in eleven days. Even Esther, who was slow to speak against Luke, at least to me, said that once Luke had come to her bed near dawn, his drugged-up eyes no more expressive than olives. He perched on the bed like an incubus and stared at her until she awakened. Once she was up, he continued to gape at her, as if she were some bizarre creature beyond his comprehension, a sport of nature who not only bewildered him but who had done him direct harm. When Esther finally cracked and cried out—she was not wholly unaccustomed to these staredowns, but she had her limits—Luke threw up his hands and stalked out, as if she had just proved his nutty, nocturnal point. As for me, I was thus far unfazed by Luke’s legendary silence. I preferred it to his also legendary tongue-lashings, bullying sarcasm, and general shittiness.
His silence in the Probe had been broken only by his musing out loud about the possibility of dropping in on Eliot Shore, who was living near Kingston. Eliot had once been so many things to Luke—jester, yes man, messenger, general factotum, occasional confidant, and Luke’s partner in that horrible parlor game they called “Blake,” which amounted to nothing more than mercilessly teasing some hapless victim until he or she blushed, trembled, or burst into tears. They called the game “Blake” after the William Blake line: “Opposition is true friendship.” By which Luke meant he was looking for someone who could stand up to him.
The game would go something like this: Some awestruck person, reduced by the nearness of Luke to abject adoration, would be drawn into a mock argument between Eliot and Luke. The argument would be about something absurd—should a purse snatcher be given the electric chair, does aspirin make the penis larger, that sort of thing. Finally, the bystander would be pressed into expressing an opinion; with some regularity, the victim would take Luke’s side, at which point Eliot would say, “You’re on his side because he’s Luke Fairchild,” and with that the trap snapped shut and the person would be caught in a verbal maze, with Eliot and Luke willy-nilly exchanging positions, back and forth, with trick passes like the Harlem Globetrotters, until the victim didn’t know what she believed, or if she even had beliefs, and then—if it was the penis-enlarged-by-aspirin riff—Luke and Eliot would whip out their cocks and ask her to guess which of them had regularly been taking Anacin. It was the sort of nasty joke for which people are rightfully accused of sexual harassment these days. Even then you needed more than insensitivity to get away with it: you needed power, and you needed to despise the isolating force of that power.
“So,” I said, “I meant to ask you.” I paused for a moment, to let him wonder. Then: “How are your kids? How are the twins? Felix and Tess.”
“Don’t see them much as I’d like to.”
I felt an icy twist of humiliation at the pit of my stomach, in that dark and tender place where we store our aloneness and terror. I had expected him to deny that the twins were his, yet somehow he had not.
“But they are yours. Right?”
“Do we have to do this now?”
“We may not have another opportunity.”
“Opportunity? You call this a fucking opportunity?” He shook his head and looked away.
We were nearing the Van Fleet Lodge, once a turreted mansion of some social distinction, a place of formal picnics on the east lawn, evenings of chamber music, and long dinner parties that included the Roosevelts, John Dos Passos, and Arturo Toscanini, and which was now a private hospital for substance abusers. (Esther had once considered checking in for a week or two: I saw now I ought to have done more to encourage her.) Our route took us past a few used-car lots; a boarded-up mini-mall; a trailer park whose muddy entrance was flanked by two monumental plaster lions; a drive-in called Kountry Kone; a batting cage, driving range, and go-cart complex called Eddie and Bo’s Fun City; and an automobile graveyard, where thousands of compacted cars were piled on top of each other like slabs of dried and salted meat. (“I see the people cut out of the deal / The wind blown trailers, the twisted steel”—“Standard of Living,” recorded 1988.) I knew the sights well; I had been on this road a few months earlier, when I came to interview Eliot Shore on the raw, gray day after Thanksgiving.
“Eliot lives down that road,” I said, pointing to a sign that read Block Factory Road. Green metal, rusted, riddled with bullet holes.
Luke was taking off his crucifix, his beads. He unfastened his priest’s collar—it sprang to life as soon as it was off of him. Then he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his once pious but now suddenly stylish black shirt. His wrinkled, sun-spotted hands. His sad eyes. The faint wheeze of his long, slow breaths. Father.
“Eliot Shore?” he said. “That’s weird. I was just thinking about him.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
I was about to say: You said his name, you wondered out loud if he was still around. But some strange and unexpected sense of tact prevented me. I thought it would embarrass him, and I did not want to. All my life, I had wa
nted a father who was pledged to protect me, and now that man was next to me and I needed to conceal from him the secrets of his own aging, just as I never mentioned to Irv the little crib sheet of forgettable names I found in the breast pocket of his shirt.
We passed the rotted carcass of road kill on the side of the highway, a raccoon, perhaps, or a large cat. A trio of gigantic crows, their oily feathers bright in the sun, pecked hurriedly at the matted fur, looking for the morsels that remained.
“How’s he doing, poor crazy Eliot? Still hungry?” Luke said.
Hungry? The question unsettled me. What did that mean? I had spent hours with Eliot Shore. I had taped him, answered his phone when he suspected it was creditors on the line, listened to his poetry, taken his supposedly pregnant cat to the vet and then had to come back with the bad news that Octavia was not pregnant but had cancer. I could have thought of many words to describe Eliot—“elusive,” “paranoid,” even “perverted”—but “hungry” would not have occurred to me.
“Maybe we should stop in and say how—dya-do,” Luke said, turning in the seat and looking back toward Block Factory Road.
The back of Luke’s neck was red, deeply wrinkled. It was in these passing glances of him, in these stolen looks, that I found myself loving him just as I had over the years, when I heard his voice on a record and sensed within it something brave and unprotected. It was in those odd moments, when I very least expected it, that, as the Sufis say, my heart had wings, and it flew from the cage of bone and self, away from the prison of the actual and into the ether of the possible.
“Do you want to?” I said, slowing down.
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