They made their bed and they lay in it.
I wanted a man who couldn’t boss me and tell me what to do and he wanted a woman who would tell him what to do, not that he likes to listen.
He said to me, I thought she was real smart, I like brains in a woman, no one ever excited me like that. It was all worth it for a while but in the end, nothing’s worth it, that’s the trouble, nothing in the whole goddamn world is worth it including you my goddamned fine feathered friend.
Then he grabbed me and whispered, I love you, Wileykins.
He said, I like the devil better than the other one: the devil’s a gentleman and gives you a contract. When you’re a kid, you’re sweet, but I don’t think kids are happy, they don’t know anything about anything that counts, you have to have money and you have to have your balls before you can know what’s good and what’s bad. With good balls and a pocketful of money, the world is yours if you want it, if you can stand the ashes and the discontent. Wiley, I won’t lie to you: everything turns to ashes. You put an apple in your mouth and you start to chew and it turns to ashes. There’s no such thing as a lucky man, there’s no point envying any man, they’re all lying, everyone’s sad.
Samuel Lewis Silenowicz—self-willed, powerful, a male loose in the universe: he told me when I was older that I wanted to be near women, I wanted a little happiness, is that so bad? It must be, it must be, because you sure do get yourself punished if that’s what you enjoy in this world. There’s not a woman alive who can be nice to you if she likes you. They have to despise you or you can’t get the time of day from them. They like to pretend they worship you. I don’t understand it. I do understand it. I hate it. I hate them. You’re the one for me.
After he and Lila were dead, I was told something that she never had told me: He was much too broken and unstable a man to be able to manage anything, he was a sweet man but he’d been in the war, and Lila and her mother knew it, someone always had to take care of him.
The adoption people said he was too unstable to be allowed to adopt a child; a lot of people felt very guilty toward you for keeping their mouths shut about this.
That was an opinion. It was true after the fact. It was partly true before—Lila never admitted to that but others had spoken of it to me, his doctors chiefly: We aren’t sure, they said. We weren’t sure.
You have your real mother’s mind and you don’t have S.L. ‘s craziness in you.
But I do.
Other people said he was a good-natured but bad-tempered man … a climber and a little wild … a man who liked to make trouble.
Sometimes at home in the bedroom, in Portsmouth, the biggest room in the house—it had a sleeping porch and a dressing room and a really big bathroom—he would walk around, naked or dressed in a towel, when he was young. His vanity—and his style—changed somewhat when he was thirty-six or so, and he got heavier, and his face bulked out and he got a small-town face, not pretty anymore, but people still looked at him plenty on the street sometimes. He still had a look of voluptuous vanity then, and a kind of openness and snobbery, I think, and sensual presence, sexual power that was arresting and strange. He would walk around singing, I can live without my wife, I get a lot of news of my wife—isn’t it a stupid life?
He would say, I never wanted to be a rich man, I just wanted to be a good man for a party.
On the downtown street in Portsmouth, in the bright light, Daddy and the bandaged child could be registered as pain. Certainly, they are not happy men. Daddy pushes open a swing door, and we enter an automobile showroom. Maybe eight, maybe ten polished and bulky Buicks and Oldsmobiles are in it. My bandages show white in the mirror at the back of the showroom. The patch of white in the mirror that runs along the whole back wall marks where I am in that Italianate mural, a prince’s mural.
The cars have a great novelty of outline—they wear a distress of mirrorings, thin flowers of reflection, parti-colored. Some are as gray and as pale as water. The floor is highly polished and has reflections as well.
Daddy calls out, “We’re here, live customers, live bait, where are the sharks?”
Three salesmen are materializing among the reflections: I doubt they are happy men, but I don’t know.
“Hi, there.”
“Hello, hello.”
“Hi, hi, y’all.”
In the eerie indoor light, their reflections hover and drift in the back mirror and on the waxed and shiny floor and on the waxed metal skins of the cars.
They are male presences attending to us.
Contradictory beams of light from the front windows and the overhead fixtures and small streaks of reflected light make us all as if airborne but solid, too. Thin hints of reality persist and make it grander that the men and Daddy are marvels, men who are flowering bushes of images and reflections—it is a near miracle.
At the same time, I know better. They are men: they smell; their smells are foreign smells, foreign to my life. The fabric of their clothes and the soap they use—the food they eat—makes their smells distant and strange to me. One of them is wearing a vest—and one is in shirtsleeves—and one is in a morning coat—and spats.
Daddy, silver-framed with shadows flying everywhere around him when he moves his head, says more or less in my ear (he is carrying me), “I’m a regular P. T. Barnum, did you know that? You like it here?”
This stuff, the room, gripped the child’s heart at once through the walls and veils of illness and unhappiness—through the pain—faintly at first but unyieldingly; and although he resisted, still his squeezed heart, his little boy self slowly bent inwardly as if he were hugged by what is here and his presence in it.
“This place is jolly like a jelly,” Daddy said.
His hand is on my shoulder. Without entire conviction, I shrugged it off; and then, in further childhood politics, the child closed his eyes against this awesome, joyous, earnest place.
“Go ahead, pick out a car,” S.L. said. He said, “That’s what we’re here for. I’m gonna let you buy a car for your mother.” I stared at him and then alongside him, alongside his face in the white light. “Won’t she like that? I bet you she will, you’ll like it—” I didn’t understand; I didn’t believe what he was really saying—that I was to choose the car, the colossus, and I couldn’t understand him, if you follow me. He whispered—his harsh breath flowing over me—‘A Jew, Raskob, he runs General Motors for those bastard DuPonts—he’s the brains—go ahead and buy and don’t worry about the politics, the politics are good enough, O.K.?” He smiled past me at the salesmen. In a kind of nervous exuberance, he said, “I have to hand it to G.M., their engineers are on their G.D. toes; they know their goddamn chrome from a hole in the ground. Ignore the two Oldses over there, Olds is a pile of tin. The Buicks are good solid cars. They stand up to punishment, and people are impressed when you drive up in one of them. It’s time a fine, bright boy like you started to learn how to spend money, and no nickel-and-dime stuff, man-sized money, the little shaver’s got man-sized money to spend, now pay attention, you nice men hear me? Howdy … howdy,” S.L. said to them in Ruralese. He has a grand overarching look in his face in this moment of shopping.
He likes shopping. It interests Daddy a whole hell of a lot: it is part of what has led him from his father’s way of doing things. Still, he’s an outsider at it, still.
The men’s breath and voices—"Well, yessir, yessirree, yessirree bob,” and “Who-ho-ha-ho—” and “Hot ain’t it? Whew.” “Hot enough—hot ain’t no word for it, I don’t think even boiling will cover it, what do you think of that?"—one of the salesmen, a skinny man, did a riff like that.
Daddy said at some point, “S. L. Silenowicz here—and son, Wiley—”
Everyone’s being friendly-but—i.e., watchful, coy, dignified, sly—breath and voices honk with life and foreignness—foreign to us—an obvious foreignness of manias, habits, maybe even principles—and laws. Certainly, incomes.
One salesman has a face made of dishes and cups of
flesh like pink sand. One is silly with pomaded hair with very tight waves in it very neatly combed and an insanely pleasant half-smile and eyes with no focus.
And one is thin as if made of wires and blue veins and white skin. He is inspired by some kind of male spirit that is entirely new to me. It is not like Daddy’s in any conceivable way. This man is big-mouthed and taut—even a little jumpy; he has big eyes set in narrow sockets: he is really present.
The fat one has a fat man’s specialized buried-a-private-treasure vanity and one guy there who thought he was a snappy dresser but he was a very simple guy, and there was one live wire; Mclntyre always keeps one live wire on the payroll but he doesn’t keep them long; Mclntyre only uses fools.
The thin one is the live wire—that means like the tungsten filament in a lightbulb: he’s turned on, he’s a bulb, i.e., shrewd and clever—adventurous, bribable, not worn down, maybe tireless. His physical vanity is pungent. He’s got a smile that knocks you right over, you got to grab your wallet and hang on to it. It’s funny, too, he’s a funny-looking man.
Daddy was fascinated by other men sometimes—some other men.
The salesman has a restless smile—S.L. has no real smile: S.L. is darkly humorous; he’s a humorous guy. The thin man is so tightly expressive and self-promising and restless that he makes the room ache, it’s a kind of danger he radiates, there’s a steady butting at you, a sense of precipice.
I stare at them head-on. Part of me is private and dark and oblique here.
Dad said, “Well, now, we all love children, they got such good hearts, and this little fella’s real nice. And I’m the king of the hill, I’m the cock of the walk, and I’m gonna teach him how to spend money, I’m gonna see to it that this fella’s a big spender, he’s going to buy a car for his mom, she didn’t take care of the oil level, and she tore hell out of the engine block, and the car acted up, and she ran it into a bridge girder—now how about that? But she didn’t end up in the Mississippi, we ended up here, ain’t that nice, and everybody loves kids and everybody loves a mother, and he certainly does love his mother, ’cause he’s a scholar and gentleman, he’s an officer of the palace guard, he’s going to buy a car for his mom—ain’t that nice? Let’s make it nice for him, what do you say? You wouldn’t insult motherhood, would you? You wouldn’t insult a little kid with big money to spend, would you? Say hello to him, his name is Wiley. He wants the best that money can buy for his lady-mom.”
Their day’s labor is to be placed at my disposal.
Dad’s eyes are humid, sentimental, innocent, partly withdrawn, gentle … Dishonest. His meanness showed. His nobility, too. He sweeps the feet right out from under you. Two of the salesmen looked blank—the thin one caught on and looked ironic at Dad’s wish to be peaceably, sacredly important in this way. Not that he, either, knew what game this was. But he was in the world in a way different from the way S.L. was—the thin guy was poised watchfully, tautly, but he tried not to show that: he was sort of very cold-tempered, sort of hot-bodied like a hair-trigger—a hick, a redneck: that’s S.L. describing him.
Daddy sighed patiently because people were dumb and didn’t understand what he said, didn’t understand his projects, his enterprises, didn’t understand the king’s metaphysics or concern for his subjects’ happiness. Daddy said, “Now lookee here—” and he reached into his pants pocket sadly. The sadness is his politeness, his rural etiquette; he has a rural mournfulness at men’s being difficult and making life difficult; it’s not ghetto lament, it’s the real thing but a crazy version—the thin man’s eyes are really sane; they’re like carpenters’ levels with green liquid in them; but his intensity is kind of nuts the way the filament in a lightbulb that buzzes and burns white can seem nuts. Blond Daddy, with false naïveté on his face, and some of the real, and them with their versions of male false naïveté mixed with the real thing, we were all hicks, that much cash money turns people into hicks, believe me, Daddy slowly, in great luscious hammy pantomime, took a wad of bills from his pocket: “I won’t say this is big enough to choke a horse, less’n you gotta horse nearby we can try it on and see if he chokes. Now I’m telling you fellas, this kiddy here wants a car, and he has cash, he has this cash, fifteen hundred dollars, gentlemen—gentlemen, I believe we have here fifteen hundred dollars—that can buy any car in this place, right?”
“Right,” the thin one said, shaking very faintly and grinning as if Daddy was bait for a shark—it was kind of an invitation, and very knowing, I didn’t understand it at the time.
The other salesmen said little things, like “Aw” and “Ahhhh” and “Uh.”
Dad said later, They looked greedy as sin. They work on commission. If they split it, that’s maybe fifty dollars each, enough to buy a used car, a Model-A or to have a real good time in Chicago, a binge for a couple of weeks, whores, whiskey, the works, or to buy a couch and a washing machine and other little things for the little woman.
Dad counted the corners of the bills, new bills, fifteen of them: they were stiff.
He put them folded, they crackled, into my shirt pocket.
“Now, I know you guys are ace number one crackerjack salesmen, I want you to give the kid real good service—” To me he said, “Now, here you go; now you have a little money to spend. You go buy the car you want, you go pick a machine to give your mother.”
I am to be like a full-grown man, it seems, and command the attention of these men.
I can remember my eyes getting funny, hard and round like fists. My despair is wobbling like a ball between my legs in water when I try to sit on that ball. It’s going to escape me. Dad is inhibited and respectful and interested and he is liberal-hearted and an exhibitionist. “We’re holding little services, services for feeling good. O.K., sweetheart, now I want a little cooperation from you, I want to see you feeling better.”
The presence of that much cash is like the gleam of naked skin. I bite my lip with surprise and suspicion. I feel sick—the moment is profound for me, vertiginous.
Daddy said, “This little king here, our Valentino, be nice to him. My brother-in-law the mayor, my friend and brother-in-law the fire chief, we all want you to be nice to our friend, extend him every courtesy ‘cause you know he’s got the cash and he can do what he wants with it; we want one and all to be happy in this town; you can trust us.”
Two of the salesmen are smiling uncertainly as if they are willing to be happy at his say-so. I am powerful in a way, I have real power for the moment at Daddy’s say-so.
The fat salesman and the empty one are eager: they somewhat laboriously assume an atmosphere of jolly truce, a broad pleasure dealing idealistically with a kid in this grown-up place, hot weather, the Great Depression, and all. I am numb and brutal with rank and secretive delight. I’m a little the way Nonie was when she hit me, in the few, cold minutes in which she hurt me. I thought harm was near now and real in them, too, and that Daddy should be careful and guard us. Him and me.
Daddy said, standing straight and noble, “I’ll tell you nice fellas something, money doesn’t matter but kindness surely does—” His voice buzzed, beelike but big, summery and large. My chest hollowed out behind the money in my pocket.
I felt the rancorous envy of the skinny man, his pride and dislike and contempt for Daddy and the rigmarole.
It’s not just judgment, though—it’s a kind of wrestling for eminence.
I felt S.L.’s strength-in-the-world, his mind as power; its stupidity—his intelligence had a bend in it, a dud quality: he was no better than a child sometimes. A potent child, however.
Fathers are singular men behind the name Father.
I felt I had money for a face. I saw myself in the slightly darkened chamber inside the mirror; I saw an altered face.
Things stir in me and suffocate me internally. I am truly equal now to a good dog or horse, that agile, that strong, that marvelous, I have the rippling silver-and-green paper at my disposal—even if only as a joke.
I loved mone
y so. I looked up at Daddy and he squatted to be nearer me; I leaned toward him but I kept my face turned away.
With his lecher’s sensitivity, he knew what I was feeling, sort of. He reached his large fingers into my shirt pocket, he pulled the money out. I sighed abruptly. He said, “See that.” He took one bill, “It says, one hundred, it’s a hunderd dollars—” I leaned against him and I sighed really deeply; he said, “This isn’t just ordinary money, Wiley, ordinary money’s mean, this is money that’s got heart’s blood in it, this is for you to be happy. When you’re king, you can put your face on it and make the whole world happy.” He took his cigar out of his mouth. “Or when I’m king, I’ll do that for you. Hows about you giving me onesy-twosy little kisses?” I shook my head no. “Be mean, it’s all right. Here, crinkle it up.” The hundred-dollar bill. He closed my fist around the wad. The peculiar paper felt more like cloth to me than paper. “It’s all yours, honey—”
I stared at him. Slowly he straightened the bill, put it with the others, folded them, put them in my hand, he guides my hand so that the money is in my pocket, over my heart. He aimed my hand, he had to loosen my fingers one by one, the money is my pocket.
We look at each other, he and I. I turned away from him—slowly—I put one foot in front of the other. The crazed and intense and unfocused affection I felt for money, for automobiles, displaces the unslaked disgust I still feel at a world of wounds and pain, Nonie’s too, and Daddy’s, and strangers who smell of food unlike the food I eat and know and of different kinds of clothes from those I know now.
I feel real happiness (of a kind).
Daddy: “We’re just a pair of no goods, we’re putting on the Ritz, we’re putting on the dog—”
The World Is the Home of Love and Death Page 14