by Carson, Tom
Demanding he wasn’t, and since he was Gerson, I took it for granted this was his preference and had no complaints of my own. What a relief for us both that he was so civilized! And he was, so stalwartly and helplessly it drove him to despair.
At least to Pam, though, he only voiced that despair once. What he told Stella Negroponte’s photo is none of my concern, but I’m sure he’d stayed courteous, good-humored, paradoxically self-assured, and the rest of the bland bit when Stella was around in the flesh. Otherwise, her picture wouldn’t have been on open display in the den: not if Gerson was Gerson, as he couldn’t help being.
The once followed a celebratory Musso & Frank’s dinner. Gerson had given the pashas notice he was switching to their Antichrist—television—as the new head of production at Rik-Kuk. One natural way to cap off the night would have been to triumphantly turn on our set, tiny regatta flags that spelled out “screw metro” fluttering on its antennae. At a time when prissier households—especially movieland’s—preferred keeping theirs hidden behind cabinet doors (it fooled nobody, Panama, wasn’t meant to; simply acknowledged the sight was a rude one), our big fifteen-inch RCA Gleason was on bombastic display in the living room.
In those days, however, TV stations went off the air at the witching hour. My mind boggles at the mobs of Fifties-born children conceived to either “The Star-Spangled Banner” (newlyweds) or a test pattern’s monotone foghorn (younger sibling, perhaps calmer, perhaps not). In our marriage, spawning any such diapered thingummy wasn’t on the table: Pam’s one stipulation before I’d said yes, agreed to by Gerson with not only alacrity but something like gratitude. But from our usual preliminaries—him jangling the car keys, me instantly shoeless with an “Ah!” in the foyer—neither Mr. nor Mrs. was in any doubt we were going to screw Metro by screwing.
Once the bus cleared the hill, though, he felt distracted. (I mean literally felt: to me, from collarbones to knees. My feet were less sure, rubbed the sheet like a hunchback for luck.) At least by his considerate standards, the post-coital Pompeii was brief. Then he turned on the lamp.
“Gerson, what is it? Aren’t you”—as always when light fringed his fine hair that way, I was reluctant to say “sleepy”—“tired?”
He was glaring so fixedly at the opposite wall that I thought he was going to suggest putting a TV set in the bedroom, one thing we’d agreed we’d never do. I’ll spare daisysdaughter.com readers the multiple rounds of “Well, whats?” and “Oh, nothings”—married life’s version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”—it took to get something out of him.
He still wouldn’t look at me, though. “Nothing, I guess. I just thought it would maybe be different.”
“Different? We ran out of different on our first anniversary. Good riddance too! I just looked damn silly in that Frederick’s stuff. You must know what you’re in for by now.”
“That’s just it. No, it’s not! But it’s part of it.”
Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily and so forth.
“Well, don’t we know what we’re like? That’s what makes it nice,” I said. “I know what you’re like. You know what I’m like.”
“Do I?”
“What kind of question is that?”
Life is but a dream! Row, row, row.
“Pammie!” he finally said. “What’s the one thing everyone knows about you?”
“Nothing, so far as I know.”
God, it was awful for him. “The whole world. Knows you put your finger. Up Murphy’s ass!”
“Thank you, dear, for reminding me. So?”
“So! Don’t you ever once consider. Putting your finger! Up—” he’d run short on breath; it came out as a squeak—“mine?”
I was baffled, since I’d done that and worse to him. He’d done much, much worse to me as I lay there and quailed, though I have to admit those bits usually ended up striking me as funny, not vile. But only, of course, in my Pamagination. I kept its unwelcome glimpses of ransacked disgust as sequestered from him in bed as I did my Dachau flashbacks out of it. Never really sank in that Gerson horizontal and Gerson vertical might both be gripped by dread he’d missed the important part.
“Why, I never thought you’d want me to. That’s all,” I said, knowing it wasn’t.
“I don’t even know if I do! Fun it doesn’t sound like. That’s not the point.”
“What is?”
“I don’t know! But it’s here somewhere.” He smacked the bed. “Here.”
If you ever find yourself in a like situation, Panama, listen to me. Do it, don’t do it, try something else next time and if it’s a bust, laugh! And skip off in the nude like a wood sprite, bikini girl. But don’t offer.
“Why, Gerson,” Pam offered, both hands waving helplessly. “I mean, I suppose I could or whatever, if you—”
“No!” he literally shouted. “I can’t explain, but never. Not once I had to ask. Don’t you see—” and here my Gerson spoke the dignified words that inadvertently restored our marriage to its old easy terms, at the cost of a distant ship scooting away—“now it would only be painful.”
I couldn’t have quashed that chuckle if our lives had depended on it. In a way, Gerson’s did: a life where, without needing to ask, he could be someone other than Gerson, Gerson, Gerson every cursed minute. Because he was Gerson, he gaped at Pam’s chuckle and then understood it. And because he was Gerson, he sheepishly smiled and then laughed.
I’ve never sent a man to prison before or since. In my defense, he went willingly, and they say jailbirds get rattled easily when they’re on the outside. I can’t imagine and wouldn’t want a marriage or even friendship without laughter, but beware when it’s the only language of endearment you share.
Once we’d gotten done laughing, he looked at me tenderly. “Ah, Pammie. Not me! Not us, I know. Let’s both try to get some sleep, what do you say? I’ve got my first day of school with Gene Rickey tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s right!” I said. We managed a few rounds of married life’s happy version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” before he switched the lamp off again.
Whether Gerson’s omission of Not you from the litany was deliberate, I can’t say. Yet I sometimes marvel he didn’t stick a TV set in the bedroom, which I’ve still never done in my life. Kelquen used to sleep atop the one I’ve just glanced at in such puzzlement, since it can’t be ringing.
My God! That’s the t
Posted by: Gramela
Elephone, yes. It was the elephone. But all clear, daisydaughter.com readers! Pink Thing and Gray Thing are in their proper casings. Cadwaller’s gun is relapped and unused. I still know Potus’s voice only from TV.
It was Panama, daisysdaughter.com readers. (Meet the legend at last.) Panama, her dad, granddad, mom, dog, and kid brother, all clustered on speakerphone. “Hallooo, Grammie! Happy birthday. Oh, Scarf, just stop it. Scarf, now!”
I fumblingly lowered my pistol. Great-grandfather’s gun, meet great-granddaughter’s squeal. I could’ve fired midway through and she’d never have known.
“Oh this is so sweet of all of you perfect dears,” I squawked back. At my advanced age, you can pull that crap out of your hat without blinking. Do you think we don’t know how we sound? “It’s so nice to be remembered.”
“We don’t need to remember you, Gramela! We know you! We all love you! Scarf too. Scarf, say happy birthday in dog!”
“Pan, don’t be silly.” That was her dad. “Oh, Christ, what am I saying? Go right ahead.”
“Is Scarf new?” I asked to ask something.
Tim groaned. “To Scarf first and foremost. Three months, says the pound.”
“You’ve got to meet him, Gramela!” Panama squealed. “He is adorable.”
“If I don’t shoot him first,” said her mom. “Pam, you remember my favorite couch?”
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“Dozed on it often as CNN played.”
“No more. Siempre los desastres. But how are you really? The truth.”
“Still right here with you! Knock wood.”
“Ouch! Hey, Pan, quit.”
Chris cut in. “Pan! I’m not saying it’s wrong for you to hit your little brother. He’ll never learn otherwise about girls. But that’s the oldest dumb joke on the planet.”
“Shit, Grandpa Chris. That was just my excuse, not my reason.”
“Oh, all right then. Hi, Pam.”
“Hi, Chris,” I grinned. (Grinned? Oh, yes. I’ve had this gun in my lap since 6:20 a.m. Right then it too just felt like part of the family.)
“I guess you know my dad would be thinking of you,” he said without false pomp or unctuousness. “We’re not him, but we do what we can.”
“Well, I’m certainly thinking of Cadwaller. But I don’t need a birthday for that.”
“Neither do I,” Chris bragged affectionately. “I wish he could’ve met Pan, though. She’s turning into such a cutie, one of these days this old man may ask her to pose in the nude.”
“Grandpa!”
“I only wanted to prove I can scandalize you, my young miss…”
“Oh, BFD. Guess what, Gramela? At my school? At my school, we call scandals flipflops! They’re all just what we have on our feet.”
“Oh.” Love of language comes first and then you grow discriminating. “Is your father still there, dear? How’s the next book coming, Tim?”
“Oh fi—”
“Liar! Black liar. He hasn’t been working on it at all. Dad just got back from France, Grammie! I’m soooooooooooooooo jealous. He worships Marie Antoinette.”
“News to me, Tim. And I damn near wrote a book about her once,” I said, chortling but flipflopped. “What would your grandfather say?”
“No, no. Marie Antoinette, ital, a movie,” Tim laughed. “It’s not coming out here ’til October, but I saw it at Cannes. It’s pro-Marie, too. The Europeans were booing, but I swear I think it’s wonderful.”
“October? Yes, that sounds interesting,” said I pleasantly, toying with Cadwaller’s gun. “Yes, hello, Scarf! Hello. But my God, Tim: who plays her? Who could possibly get me to sympathize with that—”
Posted by: Kirsten Dunst’s Oldest Admirer
Son, as they say, of a bitch. Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Son of a bitch, bitch, bitch!
It was Ned Finn who realized that was the lyric to Beethoven’s Fifth. You’d hear him singing it under his breath in our tiny embassy in Nagon when a file went missing or the Department asked for something absurd. Nan told me the Finns used to bellow it on car trips, only their youngest barred from joining in by infancy and then delicacy. Ned died before she got permission, and then of course Stacy Finn ended up with the best reasons of all to sing “Son of a bitch” to the Fifth Symphony.
Until mine. Damn this country! When all’s said and done, damn this country. It can push and gnaw away at you until there’s no bloody give left. It can drive a dotty old bag who’s read too many obits and too many news reports of a senseless killing to hike up the Paris footlocker’s lid, ignore her mother’s chaotic pages of The Gold-Hatted Lover, and wait for a White House phone call or an Omaha-indigo sundown to do herself in. And then this country, this country!, springs its favorite trap. Flipping through “Coming Attractions” as if it’s no matter at all, this country, this country!, casually asks, “Don’t you know Kirsten Dunst is Marie Antoinette?”
October. Could I phone the White House myself and gently explain dear Bob got my birthday’s date wrong? Then sit here for four addled months with Cadwaller’s gun, ordering buckets of tuna salad from Sutton’s as Siempre los desastres splatters cable and each morning’s WashPost makes my woozy head orbit with obits just so I can close mimsy borogoves that have seen Kirsten, my Kirsten, as a queen—as a queen! And Tim, curse him too, had to tell me it’s wonderful. Why couldn’t it at least be one of her lesser efforts, not that there are many of those?
For personal reasons I’ve often wished she’d star in a gals’ romp set in New York in the early Forties: The Refrigerated Lovers, say. But Versailles will do in a pinch. Oh, Ard, oh, Ard! The world goes all to mud in your head and then silver sparkles at a theater near you.
Gerson’s shade groaned at the way tag-team genius would’ve Metroized my new dilemma: batty Peg in a trance as she sets down the elephone (“A bit more unsteady, Miss Harrington”) and her liquefied thoughts about the gal she’ll leave behind rivulet down her face’s cracked map. Stuff and nonsense. I had all those Cadwallers and a very annoyingly voluble dog on the line. Barely had time to coo “Oh, I do like her” when Panama rebolted from the blue.
“Grammie! For once in your whole stupid life, will you say yes to Provincetown? We’re all getting fed up, it’s disgusting. Stop being such an old bag, you old bag.”
“Pan!” That was her mother.
“That’s all right. Panama, good for you,” I told them: them, since she already knew. “I can’t, dear. I really can’t travel and I’d be the most awful fuss if I did.”
“Not this year!” Chris boomed. “Sorry, Pam, but we’re putting a gun to your head. We’ve hired someone to help out just for your sake. She deals with geezers like us [he wasn’t a diplomat’s son for nothing] all the time.”
“What’s her name?”
“Moesha, oh—Moesha. Hang on, it’s right here. Moesha Kendricks. Wow! That’s a very odd question to ask off the bat.”
True, but I couldn’t have asked them to send me a picture and its caption was my only substitute. “What of it? I’m elderly,” I said. “One foot in the grave and one in my mouth. I’m fucked if I know which is which anymore.”
“But you do know we all wish you didn’t say things like that.”
“Why on earth not? Tick-tick-tick. No fountain of youth I can see in the neighborhood. Can you?”
“The reason we don’t like it is it’s your excuse for everything and you aren’t dead yet,” Tim put in. “Grammie, Dad’s hired her. That’s settled. Come on, will you think about coming?”
“Pleeeeeeeeaase, Gramela?”
“All together,” Chris commanded. Muddled elephonic roar of group Cadwaller “Please,” frantic barking.
“All right! I’ll think about it. Just to shut Scarf up,” I said.
“Yay!”
Duty done, the Cadwaller carnival was shifting its focus: I was audibly one item in a big family’s day. I say so with no resentment, since if calling a pretzel like me was the highlight, I’d flee such bores by speedboat. Then Panama burbled again:
“Gramela, I nearly forgot! Did you listen to the iTune? Did you like it?”
“Dear, I’m sorry. The I-Tune?”
“The song?”
“Oh, yes! Yes, I did like it. Believe it or not, I was humming it first thing this morning. Well, trying to. Can’t say I got very—”
“Oh, good! I’m so glad. Okay, chen-chen!”
“Chen-chen!” I called.
“She’s gone, Pam. You know her. Faster than a speeding bullet.”
Posted by: Pink’s Newest One
Panama’s faith that my frail life is enriched by exposure to the Panamanic beeps her generation decoys its hips with is one of those pumpings of teenage enthusiasm even a faux relative as gamy as me knows better than to trample on. I can recall Pam’s failures to get Daisy interested in anything at all that interested me. Guessing my methods were inept, I never grasped that for my mother the source was what invalidated it.
I’m also not blameless, since at Panama’s age you can’t tell the difference between an occasion and a newly announced hobby. Unconvinced by Andy Pond’s and Nan Finn’s praise, I’d n
ever been to the FDR Memorial until Tim brought her along to see it for You Must Remember This. Hadn’t quite understood how it tumbled on, with varied rushes of water that grew magnificently still at the final pool marking death.
That was two warm springs ago. Past cherry-blossom time, but before District air’s summer mimicry of car exhaust. Though I was still grumpy about my new wheelchair, I was relieved we’d brought it.
I got re-grumpy when I saw a shrunken (he was lifesize) Roosevelt seated in my chair’s less gadgety prototype at the entrance. Not part of the original design, as I tri-grumpily knew from the WashPost. The tapdancing-challenged, or whatever the handicapped bloody call themselves these days, had lobbied for a representation of their fellow cripple sans illusions.
Nicophobes had lobbied equally successfully against any depiction of him with cigarette holder. If you asked my generation, which clearly no one had, that was denying Toscanini his baton. Bunny lovers had wrangled over letting Eleanor Roosevelt Rigby’s statue show her in her fur stole. Ridiculous, just ridiculous.
“Oh, he wouldn’t have liked that at all,” my dentition and I grumped at the spring air, meaning the chairbound FDR. “He really did keep it hidden from us.”
“Yes, Gram. I think I’ve read that once or twice,” said Tim fondly. “I haven’t been making up this damned thing off the top of my head, you know.”
As Tim rolled me on, however, I grew touched. The sculpted and, to my eyes, inevitably Dorothy Day-ified breadline was the turning point. Strange to think it was now my generation—Pam’s “us”—for it hadn’t been at the time. To a Purcey’s girl, all this had been primarily an adult business, and like all adolescents we’d concluded they’d fashioned the world as it was then by choice.