Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  I hear another beloved body start to wean itself off a control substance known as oxygen.

  My father’s body now forgets to do what healthy bodies always do: Always take the next breath, then gulp the next.

  Instead, one faltering inhale. “To breathe or not to breathe?” I hear his inhalation wait, pivot. “I know I left it around here somewhere.” Leisure seems abounding. Breath turns there for one moment, on its axis, for seconds, some particle of a whole minute, it spirals, an autocrat and nonteam-player, it twists as if considering itself, its crosses its arms, it rests its chin in the palm of one braced palm. I shift to see if I must lurch to standing, pound this fellow’s chest? Then, a glottal gulp, and Dad’s life moves forward one more notch. Breathe—at least—the next breath does.

  But, something in this usual impaired intake seems new to me, and strange: it’s this: I have never before heard these signs of coming death befall a person over forty-five.

  To receive such signs from someone nearly eighty, even someone I obliquely if cantankerously love, softens, even sweetens the horror.

  To hear dying set its sites on a guy who’s had nearly a century, who’s engendered one junior and the other sons, who’s given a fortune to the church, who has made about a million bucks, it half relaxes my dread of the process, somewhat lightening these facts. I look over at this man who sired me. I don’t think the usual enraged “No!” I’d feel toward some expiring friend, age thirty-four. Instead, observing signs of dying from a man whose age predicted it, his son’s sigh comes just…. “So.”

  So this, at last, is Natural Causes. Well, well, death on time. Hello at last.

  —Practice. Practice.

  Dad, as if feeling my eyes on him, now clutches the black remote so tight he changes the news to the Disney channel. The living prairie suddenly achieves its unlikely time-lapse bloom, cacti pop forth petals and on my father sleeps. Robert pronounced after their first meeting, “An attractive if somewhat remote man?”

  Mom makes dinner a room away. Her usual practiced stirrings. Dad groans. How gigantic he once seemed.

  Looking over, I study this gentled-looking pale-haired gent, his face blotched from skin cancers removed, his clothes so tidy and simple, his hands clawing the remote, crablike jerkings, even asleep—anxious about ending, trying to grab hold, and stay put.

  I smell dinner. Blackeyed peas for an early New Year’s—the borrowed African-American custom—assuring our prosperity. For every bean at least one dollar. Dad—though sound asleep—now reaches up to scratch his nose. Such comic finicky precision, then the arm flops down. I laugh. For him, I feel a sudden wash of fellow-feeling.

  His abrupt helplessness makes me want to scoop Dad nearer, touch his forehead, pat his upper back and say, as I have to Robbie, “There, there. I’m here. It’s okay. Go on down wherever it’s easiest. Love you, do. If need be, go, go now.”

  But Mom walks in. Oblivious to my father’s usual open-mouthed and unattractive sleeping, she says at her normal volume, “See what the weather is for your flight tomorrow.”

  She stands holding one carrot, a peeler. She scans around, then nods down at the remote in Pop’s pink fist.

  Instead of grabbing it from my recliner (the one usually hers), I rise. Passing her, I stop beside his larger chair. I move to gingerly lift controls from Dad’s close grip.

  She watches the transaction with a strange, tired disinterest. (She is ready for me to leave.) Even asleep, my father resists me. Comes one stubborn grunt. I explain to our sleeper in a half-whisper, “Just want it one sec, so we can see the …”

  Daddy jerks me hard around my neck. With a wrestler’s “Ha!”, he’s pulled me down on top of him. Wheezing, he pins me so damn well. Surprised, I yell, “All right all ready!”

  Mother, watching from above, afar, calls down, disgusted, “Well, for Pete’s … you two. Will you boys ever grow up? There are other ways to solve things.”

  Fact is, the old coot’s got me in a fairly solid headlock. And—even while fighting him some—I admire him for it. Call that male of me. Did I startle him? Is he even really awake?

  “Daddy, pul-lease, only wanted the remote.”

  Mom calls, “Dick, we just need the weather channel, to see, Dick, about tomorrow, Dick. His flight, Dick.”

  “Ask!” my father screams direct upright at us both.

  His stringy biceps winch around my head. Now he’s giving me what we kids once called “the Dutch rub.” (With as little hair as I now have, it truly hurts. This is insane.) I jerk toward the remote, but he holds that in a fist bobbing far aside.

  My cheek presses his chin’s stubble, then bumps down against his breastbone. He’s forcing me toward belt buckle. Where will this end? Not a pretty sight for Mom! From his passing chest, I hear the rage and the disease, a single force snaffling up and out at me.

  I’m lying half across my dwindled father. This is so weird. My big feet are now completely out from under me, the lamp’s kicked somewhat cockeyed. Upset at first, I soon find I don’t half mind. This is the longest physical contact I’ve had with the guy since my infancy, if then. Have I not been touching him now for around forty seconds? Let’s try for two minutes, go for the gold. Contact otherwise? Decades of handshakes.

  “Don’t tell. Suggest! Ask. Ever hear of it?”

  And I, scalp burning, nose close to bleeding on him, discover this grotes-querie can be fun. I burrow in, take full kid-advantage. Nuzzle Dad to Death. Great game. When else will I ever relearn my father’s lap, and chest, and sweet slack neck?

  Under us, the springs of his stressed chair ominously ping. Factory dust releases toward lamplight. “This can’t be good for either one of you!” Mother’s veggie peeler clicks behind me. I laugh. Do I just imagine, or is he enjoying this horseplay too? Wasn’t that a power-chuckle? But Dad only tightens his grip around my head, literally tries to twist it off. “Don’t! That hurts, you motherf … you mother!” I groan like a bride faking first orgasm, I just wriggle in even deeper. Mom’s peeler tap tap taps along my spine, sandhill crane. “You, two, roughhousing. You’ll break something. Warned you. Something always gets broken!”

  How do I know how not to put too much weight on Dad, how not to hurt the guy? Why, from my long amorous career with all those boys below me, taking it, of course. Me, learning how to make the most or least of my bulk as need requires, their egress permits. This flash makes me laugh. I just stay put. Story of my life. Get happy in your headlock, pussy boy. I hate myself I love myself.

  At least the channel button yields to his pressure. Still face to face with him, I hear scraps of forty shows reel past—wok cookery tips, cartoons involving whistling cliff falls, Bewitched laughtrack, panda birth news—all amid the smell of orange blossoms from nowhere, and Mom’s jealous squeals. “This minute. Will call the Albertsons, I swear.” I cling to him through a question from actual Jeopardy.

  Host Alex: “Former President of Princeton whose idealistic League …”

  Me: “Woodrow Wilson!”

  And under, my sire growls, “‘Who is Woodrow Wilson?’ Must be put in question form.”

  “Says who?” I call. Dad pounds hard on my back until, outstretched, obedient, not meaning to, I burp. I laugh, she laughs and finally even he does, but …

  He’s finally shouting, quite clear, “Somebody get the geek off me.” Even that doesn’t hurt at first.

  My one mistake was letting him suspect I half enjoyed this. Always a tactical error—sign of any overt joy derived from him.

  “In future”—He takes a breath, my mother gaping down at me with disgust, some horror—“future … Don’t take. Ask!”

  I struggle hard to disengage. It’s tougher than you might expect, learning to climb down a last time off your dad. His big chair threatens to jackknife, slicing both of us, sandwiching layers, genital identical genital identical—a ply of two men playing at killing.

  Dad, now confused, finally fully awake, so embarrassed at my present size, tries wor
king the joystick of his lounger, eager to spill me.

  But I only holler into his tense smell rising, aftershave and fear of losing your car at inhospitable mall America, I yell childlike straight down at him, “You win, Daddy Daddy Dad. No contest. ‘Ask!’ Junior’s asking.”

  “Okay then. More like it,” and, kingly, Dad yells, “Done!”

  As I stand, disheveled and chagrined as someone rising from a semi-coerced sexual encounter, shamed but only seeming so, he hands over the control. Declared Winner, Dad can now.

  The remote is passed. Awkward, I feel winded. Standing, I bat around the dial for the weather. It pleases him, rebuttoning his collar, to say the weather’s exact channel, loud. I am pretending I’m not shaken; I’m shaken. Standing just past his view, I look over and down at him, still allowing him to decently collect himself. I find a weather woman saying, “Sailing conditions, fair and hot.”

  I can still feel all the places where his big hands grabbed my upper back, a slight oil left burning even through my shirt.

  “Dinner, Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis,” Mom soon calls. And, after the grappling, after several quick drinks, we three regroup. Three, an underrated number. Tonight, released by all this physicality over absolutely nothing, we enjoy a joshing, boisterous, early New Year’s feast, exactly drunk enough. We again speak only of old times. Mom and I try remembering names of all our former neighbors’ dogs. Dad’s gone silent, as she rattles, “Ginger, Pinto, and Sweetheart, the cat.

  “A calico,” Mother, pedantic, adds “spayed,” then laughs at her virtuosity. But now, as usual, with one hand’s speckled back, she stifles her own pretty sound before it even half unfurls.

  It’s only as I’m preparing for bed later, standing in the salmon tile bathroom, shirtless, making muscles toward the mirror, the way I did at age fourteen, only then do I hear her swerve bumping along the hall as she, without knocking, throws open the door, looks shocked—to find me posing shirtless. “Come quick. It was too much for him. You don’t know what you weigh now. You two were always too much for each other.”

  “But he pulled me down … You saw …”

  Since dinner, he seems to have lost thirty pounds. He’s half on the bed, shirt off, still a beautiful man—but face up, arms out, he’s like some North German crucifix. I see he’s just a mouth gasping and, spying me, also shirtless, he tries pulling one corner of the white chenille spread over himself. He tries saying something, keeps pointing pointing up at me. “What’s he yelling?” I ask her above the tortured red face snapping open/shut between us.

  “He”—she hands me the portable phone to dial the rescue squad—“he’s saying, ‘Him! Him!’ It could mean anything. Maybe one of those times he doesn’t know who people are. I mean, you haven’t let him see you in a year. You have to keep him used to you these days!—Please, Hartley, not to get your feelings hurt again now! Call!”

  It’s 911, then finding the closet’s oxygen tank. (I need glasses to read fine print; she sets hers on my nose.) It’s the messy exit and the neighbors all in robes under red circling light outside. Somehow, dizzy, I imagine the crane, the floating gator, what will they make of this odd show? Nothing.

  This means extending my visit (Gideon will try to take over, I’ll miss Alabam’s departure for Berlin), it’s the guarantee that Dad’s much better, a simple matter of thinning the blood, avoiding further exertions; it’s my living on the phone with those in charge of Robert, who is worse. His parents are arriving even though Angie’s gone; they cannot change tickets. Everything’s unrefundable.

  Mom herself Buicks me to the airport, a beautiful smooth driver she is—she who never gets to. “Thank you for spending your holidays with us,” she says. And only in saying something so formal and flat and partial does she finally give way an inch, she cries, hanging onto the wheel, she lets me—still fastened to the passenger’s seat—hug her wherever on her I can reach.

  Three days later at two a.m., Mom’s voice by phone: “Honey? So sorry to wake you. You need your sleep what with everyone up there depending on you so. —You’ve guessed. Your father’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead. What’d you think I meant? Lost with the Buick?” and she laughs a toxic little laugh that is, uncannily, his.

  “I found him in his big chair. It was after the late news. Since about eight, I’d been just letting him sleep there. If I’d known, maybe I could’ve helped him more …”

  “Mom, nobody ever got better help than Daddy did. Next plane, I’m there. Don’t meet me, please, I’ll rent a car. Hang in, honey. Who’s with you? The Albertsons? Good. Let me speak to Ray, please. What? All right then, ‘Dave’—whatever. Whichever of them is there, let me speak to the male one of them, please? Sorry, Mom. You think the La-Z-Boy wrestling, or my falling on him, set him back, whatever…. Dave? This Dave? Well, Dave. Yeah, well, thank you, Dave. He thought the world, too, of you and … your wife. How is she? I mean Mom. How’s my mother taking it?”

  A Remoter Control

  ell, he died two years ago, or no, come to think of it, it’ll soon be three.

  I do see my Mother more often now. She’s freer to travel, excellent company when here, somehow much clearer these days. Times, she flirts with the plan of moving back to North Carolina. She has grandkids, friends there. My folks only picked Florida for his golf.

  But, while our connection feels warm and we do tease each other more, she’s still holding something major back. It’s not quite what I’d hoped for, our tie. Either she’s saying, “You have such good taste. Not just safe like ours was,” or she keeps trying to enlist me as my dad’s belated P.R. firm. “He tried so hard, didn’t he? Finest looking fellow, Dick, and such a good provider …” I look at her and wonder whom she’s fighting to convince.

  It’s like she’s scared he’ll walk in on the two of us. He might find her having a wee bit too much fun, he might find her laughing and without him. I’ve tried, but I just can’t help her with this part. There’s a way a son who loves his Mom as much as I love mine can never quite forgive her choosing him, her choosing that. Which means, in the end, her having me. Go figure.

  Last week, on impulse, enjoying a sense of her I trust more now and act on faster (no speaker phone insuring mass psychology), I phoned Mom in the middle of a weekday, “So, what’s up? Something is new, because I feel it. What’re you most looking forward to, kiddo?”

  “Wellll,” she said, and I knew there was something. I knew she said this through a smile and I could picture her face and mouth so vividly, it almost hurt me. My newfound kind of joy in her. These days, it is a pleasure I can sometimes show.

  “Wellll, young sir? Since you asked. Your ole motherhubbard seems about to possibly be, how you say … ‘dating’?” And she laughed, laughed her beautiful, her most sexy, laugh. I felt shocked. The sound was old yet new. It really was the laugh of some unimpeded, privileged young girl. Her whole life yet before her. The laugh failed to intercept and police itself, no hand clamped over mouth. It was, I knew, her laugh before the marriage. She was returning to some state of carelessness pre-Him and, of course, alas, prior to me. I caught such a sweep of joy from clear back then, I even felt a second’s jealousy.

  What a lucky man my dad had been! And yet, with him dead, she’s laughed more yards of playful laugh than I can ever recall drawing out of her at once. By phone, laughter came toward me, golden and at shimmer. A great luxury, her permitting me to hear this young pure spilling silliness of hers.

  The widowers down there on Golf-Vue Cay are lining up to squire her now. I do believe those widowers have been waiting. I think those widowers are very smart.

  Do I miss my father? Well, my father was a decent man. There were moments of real sweetness: “New York, watch out!” Like so many guys that age—with the Depression and the War each landing a different kind of sucker punch—Dad was also a very very conventional man and a hard one. Remote. He grew up poor, wanting to make a million dollars. And he did! He made his cool mill
ion, if the hard way. He went to work on a Monday when I was about one year old and—in many ways—he never really came back home.

  Hard to explain how much of him ended up Missing in Action. Did he choose which parts to sacrifice, and why?

  I mean, he got to live in a beautiful house with a beautiful woman who loved him and with healthy sons who loved him or, at worst, really wanted to. Then he was a retired millionaire, and all of it was just as he had planned, just as any kid wearing an apron ever wished. Still, it all had to be stated in question form. (No simple joyful assertions: “I have always been lucky in my friends.”) He seemed some hard-earned capital, proud never to have ever been “touched.” Severe penalties for early withdrawal.

  Fact is, Dad didn’t really want other people to have any fun, you know?

  The truth is—(and you are asking for the truth, right?)—most days, I don’t actually miss my father all that much.

  And yet, even now, evenings especially—I feel it. Some chronic low-grade longing, still.

  So, yeah, around office-closing-time:

  I do at least miss missing him.

  On Whether to Purge

  the Dead from One’s Address Book

  “It R US”

  f my life began as an essay, it was ending as an opera. Alabama and I, assigned anonymous numbers, presumed a couple, had chosen to retrieve our test results in tandem. Somewhere inside a New Jersey lab, salaried preoccupied people (parents, stamp collectors, cat owners) had spent weeks doing things to samples of our blood. A state law kept everyone (even your spouse) outside the room while your news, good or bad, got passed.

  Only three days before our long-arranged appointment did we mention actually planning to keep it. Hard now to recount how much felt at stake.