“Oh,” I said, “just a harmless old drunk, really. You don’t need to leave.”
“Do you have any idea the shit I had to go through? Just to have a life? And you put your hand on me?” She grabbed the bottle by its neck, the handle over her knuckles like the—hell, what’s it called?—on, you know, a buccaneer’s sword.
“Whoa,” I said. “Easy. What say we just wind this back?” I stood up and reached to take the bottle away from her.
She stepped back and swung it against a porch post. It rang off the wood, but she swung it again, smashed it, splashing gin on her jeans and shirt, and held up the jagged, dripping glass that was left. “You don’t even know what the shit you’re dealing with,” she said. She looked at it, then flung it onto the lawn and ran to her car.
I watched her out of sight around the corner and went inside to look in the freezer, though I knew damn well that had been the last of the gin. The whole night still ahead, with the state store closing in an hour.
I took back roads as far as I could, then went through the speed-trap towns with the cruise control locked in at twenty-five. I bought three handles of Tanqueray, as if I were a party giver, opened one in the parking lot and poured a used Styrofoam coffee cup full. I kept it between my thighs the whole way back. But I had the secret of invisibility that night: I could have steered head-on into a van full of children and no one would have seen there was a problem to be addressed.
I pulled in the dooryard, banged into something, walked zigzag to the house and stood swaying in the living room, calling out to Mort till the strings of the piano rang. You see now how funny that is, right, yelling, “Mort! Mort!” to a dead man? I cried out for the little dead girl to come be my little dead girl, I went to my knees and asked Jesus Christ into my heart, I went out onto the porch and hollered across the road at Royall Brown, the Great Disapprover. In the silence—watch out for the false ending now—I heard an apple fall.
—
Have I been showing you a good enough time? Why don’t you come on out, bring your drink, and we’ll get old what’s-his-face down here to do his little buck-and-wing to the tune of “Dear Christian Friend”—would that amuse?—and favor us with his views on how flesh is dust and so on. Or how about a private performance, first time anywhere, of my latest. Oh, I finished it—you didn’t take all that poor-me shit too seriously, I hope—and sent it off to young what’s-his-face. It’s scored for string quartet, but I can approximate it on the piano, if you don’t mind how half-assed it sounds, and at this point in the festivities, what’s the difference? Ted Williams never did sing to me anymore, so I had to patch it together out of this and that—plagiarize it really. You’ll hear a smidgen of Eight Songs for a Mad King in there, a smidgen of Stockhausen’s Momente, a smidgen of “Time in a Bottle” (who says I lack the common touch?). And Feldman, of course—can’t get away from him. That pair of four-note phrases, the second seeming to question the first, at the beginning of Palais de mari: didn’t I work the variations on that sucker. Well, I say you’ll hear this stuff, but it’s all been through the grinder, so you’d have to know what you were listening for.
So here we go: five movements, five sets of variations on five lines of text, word for word from Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero.
1. The plan is to live on the big boat.
2. I made a mistake. I need a lawyer.
3. You know who did this to me? Jesus Christ did this to me!
4. You’re the abortion I wanted—how do you say that to your son?
5. At the damn gate of the park, where we always meet.
Don’t you like the little story it tells? I had to chuck out the stuff that inspired me in the first place—Cocksucking fucken syphilitic Jesus and whatnot. Let Roberto Loomis be the Rebel Angel and take up a flaming sword against the Disapprovers. According to the biography, some nurse said that Williams, on his deathbed, finally came to know Jesus was his savior. I thought the third movement was the place for the Wagnerian Jesus drama, then the death-metal family angst in four and finally, in five, the Meeting at the Gate—or the Parting at the Gate, however you want to read it—in pastoral quietude.
So I await my judgment: was I father enough to Roberto Loomis at least? As for you, whom I’ve been trying to sweet-talk this whole time, I get the feeling there’s nobody here anymore. I will have done my important work: you have to picture the hand coming out from under the lid. I drank too much—that is, I drank—though Deborah (as I said) had developed a little problem herself. And I got lost in listening, for which one has to be grateful. Clearly I’ve worked up this farewell aria with some care, but—and here comes the final cadence—I’m going to let you have the last word. Wasn’t I the shit back then?
Desecrators
While Fran was in the bathroom, Cal told Cammy one more time that he’d have his cell with him and that if anything at all—Okay, Daddy, okay. Fran came out with fresh lipstick. Cal slung his bag over his shoulder, kissed the lips lightly and he was out of there. In the lobby, Hector asked if he wanted a cab; he said no thanks and stepped out into sunshine. Hot for October. So at the Hertz place on Seventy-Seventh, he chose the convertible over the SUV—shit, let’s go for piggy and slinky—and it arrived still dripping, long, low-slung, midnight blue.
He double-parked at the corner of Forty-Ninth and Tenth Avenue and got out his cell; better not to wait in front of Margaret’s building, even though the boyfriend was off reporting a story. Or that was the boyfriend’s story. Cal’s story was a Milton conference in Princeton, which he would tell Fran was so tedious he couldn’t even write the piece of mockery he’d had in mind. Margaret must’ve had a story too. They’d fucked the first time on Tuesday afternoon, her place, the boyfriend ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain not to come home early. So a weekend had been a must. This weekend had been a must.
She came around the corner wearing sunglasses and a Dodgers cap, bag over her shoulder, cigarette pack rolled into the sleeve of her white T-shirt. Cal got out and said, “Welcome to my midlife Chrysler.”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
“With the car?” he said. “Or the jeu d’esprit?”
“The car,” she said. “I told you I was a simple girl.”
He put her bag in, slammed the trunk, then looked her over good. “We like the nips,” he said.
“What, these?” She looked down, grabbed a handful of T-shirt on each side and pulled it tighter. “Externals,” she said. “Can we have the top down?”
“I won’t say the obvious,” he said. She reached for her door handle, but he thumbed the button on the key ring, the headlights flashed and the locks snapped shut. “You haven’t greeted me properly.”
She looked behind her, said, “Yeah, fuck it,” stepped to him, took hold of his ass and pulled him into her. Her tongue on the roof of his mouth, right back to the soft palate. Fingernails in his neck.
“Jesus,” he said. “Who taught you the password?”
“Come on, you’re easy to read.” But she was breathing hard too. “Like Nancy Drew.” She stepped back. “Okay, so Nancy gets accepted to art school, goes into class with her pencil and stuff, and there’s Ned Nickerson sitting there on the podium with all his clothes off and his dick standing straight up. So what did she do?”