“That’s never true,” Rhea says. “You just haven’t found the reason yet.”
The whole time, Rhea knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.
“I got lost,” I say.
It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she’ll say, “Forget the Spanish,” and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we’ll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.
The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Lou watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. “Haven’t been. Outside. In weeks,” he says, coughing a little. “Haven’t wanted to.”
Rhea pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital bed could cause an explosion. I’m afraid the real Lou will be outside by the pool where he lived with a red phone on a long cord and a bowl of green apples, and the real Lou and this old Lou will have a fight. How dare you? I’ve never had an old person in my house and I’m not going to start now. Age, ugliness—they had no place. They would never get in from outside.
“There,” he says, meaning by the pool, like always.
There’s still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a fruit shake next to it. The nurse-butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.
Or Rolph? Could Rolph still be here, taking care of his dad? Rolph in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if he’d walked in a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Lou yelling for me, “Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn!” Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I’d done by then.
In the mirror, Rolph’s chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.
And when it happened, in Rolph’s tiny bedroom, sun sneaking through the shades in stripes, I pretended it was new. He looked inside my eyes, and I felt how normal I could still be. We were smooth, both of us.
“Where’s that. Thing,” Lou asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to, in his red bathing suit, tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didn’t hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?
The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. “I got old,” he says.
The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.
“What about Rolph?” I ask, my first words since “Hi.”
“Rolph,” Lou says, and blinks.
“Your son? Rolph?”
Rhea shakes her head at me—my voice is too loud. I feel a kind of anger that fills up my head sometimes and rubs out my thoughts like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this pool—his son’s, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.
Lou is trying to speak. We lean close, listening. Habit, I guess.
“Rolph didn’t make it,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.
“What’s the point, Jocelyn?” Rhea asks me, and in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realize that I already knew about Rolph. And Rhea knew—everyone knew. An old tragedy.
“He was. Twenty-eight,” Lou says.
I shut my eyes.
“Long time ago,” he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest. “But.”
Yes, it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.
“Losing a child,” Rhea murmurs. “I can’t imagine it.”
The anger squeezes, it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Lou’s hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. I’m that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Rhea shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and we’re just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When he’s absolutely still, I let him float to the top.
I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Rhea is touching his chest.
It’s a bad day. The sun hurts my head.
“I should kill you,” I say, looking at him straight. “You deserve to die.”
“Enough,” Rhea says, with her sharp mother’s voice.
Suddenly, Lou looks in my eyes. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, that man who said, You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and We’ll see the whole goddamn world, and How come I need you so much? And Looking for a ride, kiddo? Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it on his bright red car. Just tell me where.
He looks scared, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. “Too late,” he says.
Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on a party Lou was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. “Like a baby,” Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.
Every night, my mother ticks off another day I’ve been clean. It’s more than a year, my longest yet. “Jocelyn, you’ve got so much life in front of you,” she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there’s a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.
Lou is speaking again. Trying to speak. “Stand on each side. Of me. Would you, girls?”
Rhea holds his hand, and I take the other one. It’s not the same hand as before, it is bulbous and dry and heavy. Rhea and I look at each other across him. We’re there, the three of us, like before. We’re back to the beginning.
He’s stopped crying. He’s looking at his world. The pool, the tiles. We never did get to Africa, or anywhere. We barely left this house.
“Nice to be. With you girls,” he says, fighting to breathe.
Clutching our hands, as if we might flee. But we don’t. We look at the pool and we listen to the birds.
“Another minute,” he says. “Thank you, girls. One more. Like this.”
6
X’s and O’s
Here’s how it started: I was sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park reading a copy of Spin I’d swiped from Hudson News, observing East Village females crossing the park on their way home from work and wondering (as I often did) how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind, when I made a discovery: my old friend Bennie Salazar was a record producer! It was right in Spin magazine, a whole article about Bennie and how he’d made his name on a group called the Conduits that went multiplatinum three or four years ago. There was a picture of Bennie receiving some kind of award, looking out of breath and a little cross-eyed—one of those frozen, hectic instants you just know has a whole happy life attached. I looked at the picture for less than a second; then I closed the magazine. I decided not to think about Bennie. There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about som
ebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours—days, if I have to.
After one week of not thinking about Bennie—thinking so much about not thinking about Bennie that there was barely room left in my brain for thoughts of any other kind—I decided to write him a letter. I addressed it to his record label, which turned out to be inside a green glass building on Park Avenue and Fifty-second Street. I took the subway up there and stood outside the building with my head back, looking up, up, wondering how high Bennie’s office might possibly be. I kept my eyes on the building as I dropped the letter into the mailbox directly in front of it. Hey Benjo, I’d written (that was what I used to call him). Long time no see. I hear you’re the man, now. Congrats. Couldn’t have happened to a luckier guy. Best wishes, Scotty Hausmann.
He wrote back! His letter arrived in my dented East Sixth Street mailbox about five days later, typed, which I guess meant a secretary had done it, but I could tell it was Bennie all right:
Scotty baby—Hey thanks for the note. Where have you been hiding yourself? I still think of the Dildo days sometimes. Hope you’re playing that slide guitar. Yours, Bennie, with his little wiggly signature above the typed name.
Bennie’s letter had quite an effect on me. Things had gotten—what’s the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.
I happened to have the next day off—the day after Bennie’s letter came—so I went to the East River early that morning and fished. I did this all the time, and I ate the fish, too. Pollution was present, yes, but the beauty of it was that you knew all about that pollution, unlike the many poisons you consumed each day in ignorance. I fished, and God must’ve been on my side, or maybe it was Bennie’s good luck rubbing off on me, because I pulled from the river my best catch of all time: an enormous striped bass! My fishing pals, Sammy and Dave, were shocked to see me catch this superb fish. I stunned it, wrapped it in newspaper, bagged it, and carried it home under my arm. I put on the closest thing I had to a suit: khaki pants and a jacket that I dry-cleaned a lot. The week before, I’d taken it to the cleaners still in its dry-cleaning bag, which caused a breakdown in the gal behind the counter—“Why you clean? You already clean, bag not open, you waste your money.” I know I’m getting off the subject here, but let me just say that I whipped my jacket out of its plastic bag with such force that she went quiet, and I laid it carefully on the dry-cleaning counter. “Merci por vous consideración, madame,” I said, and she accepted the garment without another word. Suffice it to say that the jacket I put on that morning to visit Bennie Salazar was one clean jacket.
Bennie’s building looked like a place where they could implement tough security checks if they needed to, but that day I guess they didn’t need to. More of Bennie’s good luck flowing down on me like honey. Not that my luck was generally so bad—I would have called it neutral, occasionally edging toward bad. For example, I caught fewer fish than Sammy, though I fished more often and had the better rod. But if it was Bennie’s good luck I was getting that day, did that mean my good luck was also his good luck? That my visiting him unexpectedly was good luck for him? Or had I somehow managed to divert his luck and siphon it away for a time, leaving him without any luck that day? And, if I had managed to do the latter, how had I done it, and (most important) how could I do it forever?
I checked the directory, saw that Sow’s Ear Records was on forty-five, took the elevator up there, and breezed through a pair of beige glass doors into a waiting room, which was very swank. The decor reminded me of a seventies bachelor pad: black leather couches, thick shag rug, heavy glass-and-chrome tables covered with Vibe and Rolling Stone and the like. Carefully dim lighting. This last was a must, I knew, so musicians could wait there without putting their bloodshot eyes and track marks on display.
I slapped my fish on the marble reception desk. It made a good hard wet thwack—I swear to God, it sounded like nothing so much as a fish. She (reddish hair, green eyes, flower petal mouth, the sort of chick who makes you want to lean over and say to her oh so sweetly, You must be really intelligent; how else would you have gotten this job?) looked up and said, “Hi there.”
“I’m here to see Bennie,” I said. “Bennie Salazar.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Not at this moment.”
“Your name?”
“Scotty.”
She wore a headset that I realized, when she spoke into a tiny extension over her mouth, was actually a telephone. After she said my name, I caught a curl to her lips, like she was hiding a smile. “He’s in a meeting,” she told me. “But I can take a mess—”
“I’ll wait.”
I deposited my fish on the glass coffee table next to the magazines and settled into a black leather couch. Its cushions sighed out the most delicious smell of leather. A deep comfort seeped through me. I began to feel sleepy. I wanted to stay there forever, abandon my East Sixth Street apartment and live out the remainder of my life in Bennie’s waiting room.
True: it had been a while since I’d spent much time in public. But was such a fact even relevant in our “information age,” when you could scour planet Earth and the universe without ever leaving the green velvet couch you’d pulled from a garbage dump and made the focal point of your East Sixth Street apartment? I began each night by ordering Hunan string beans and washing them down with Jägermeister. It was amazing how many string beans I could eat: four orders, five orders, more sometimes. I could tell by the number of plastic packets of soy sauce and chopsticks included with my delivery that Fong Yu believed I was serving string beans to a party of eight or nine vegetarians. Does the chemical composition of Jägermeister cause a craving for string beans? Is there some property of string beans that becomes addictive on those rare occasions when they’re consumed with Jägermeister? I asked myself these questions as I shoveled string beans into my mouth, huge crunchy forkfuls, and watched TV—weird cable shows, most of which I couldn’t identify and didn’t watch much of. You might say I created my own show out of all those other shows, which I suspected was actually better than the shows themselves. In fact, I was sure of it.
Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are information processing machines, reading X’s and O’s and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call “experience,” and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson News for four-and five-hour stretches on my free days (my record was eight hours, including the half hour I spent manning the register during the lunch break of one of the younger employees, who thought I worked there)—if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didn’t want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?
I tested my theory by standing outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street during a gala benefit for heart disease. I made this choice randomly: at closing time, as I was leaving the Periodicals Room, I noticed well-dressed individuals tossing white cloths over tables and carrying large orchid bouquets into the library’s grand entrance hall, and when I asked a blond gal with a notepad what was going on, she told me about the gala benefit for heart disease. I went home and ate my string beans, but instead of turning on the TV that night, I took the subway back to the library, where the heart diseas
e gala was now in full swing. I heard “Satin Doll” playing inside, I heard giggles and yelps and big scoops of laughter, I saw approximately one hundred long black limousines and shorter black town cars idling alongside the curb, and I considered the fact that nothing more than a series of atoms and molecules combined in a particular way to form something known as a stone wall stood between me and those people inside the public library, dancing to a horn section that was awfully weak in the tenor sax department. But a strange thing happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.
I went to the russet-haired receptionist’s desk, balancing my fish on two hands. Juice was starting to leak through the paper. “This is a fish,” I told her.
She cocked her head, a look on her face like all of a sudden she’d recognized me. “Ah,” she said.
“Tell Bennie pretty soon it’s gonna stink.”
I sat back down. My “neighbors” in the waiting room were a male and a female, both of the corporate persuasion. I sensed them edging away from me. “I’m a musician,” I said, by way of introduction. “Slide guitar.”