“I think so?”
“You workin’ it?”
“No, they’re still away.”
Back to staring at the TV. A full minute crawled by. Marty began to whistle an indistinct tune, then said, “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, we’ve done fine the past few years without it.”
“Has it been a year?”
“More.”
“But oh, how I’ve missed this, this father-son rapport. Can’t beat it.”
“No, you can’t,” said Ted.
Another interminable minute passed.
“Do you wanna talk?” asked Ted.
“Sure.”
But then nothing else. Ted imagined he heard the tick of that very loud stopwatch they always play on the TV program 60 Minutes.
Marty spoke up. “Do you not wanna talk?”
“Do you?”
“I’m asking.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Well, it seems we are talking.”
“Are we?”
“My lips and tongue are moving and I am forcing air through my teeth.”
“That is talking. You’re right.”
“Or talking about talking. Feels good, don’t it?”
“Sure do.”
“Why did we stop talking?”
“You wanna know how we could give this up?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I sent you a book. You called me a name.”
“I called you a name?”
“I sent you a book, you called me a homo.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Oh.” Marty laughed at the memory. “Is that bad, Dr. Brothers? Should I say ‘homosexual,’ not ‘homo’? I can’t keep up with the fucking word police.”
“I don’t care what you say.”
“Apparently you do. Very much.”
“It didn’t bother me. It’s neither here nor there. You bothered me. I sent you a novel for your opinion and you called me a name.”
“I didn’t call you a ‘homo.’ I said you write like you might be a homo.”
“Oh, well, that clears it up.”
“Come on, I was just trying to say you need to live a little.”
“What does that have to do with being homosexual? Homosexuals don’t live?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Bullshit. It’s like any sexism or racism or whatever. It’s not important.”
“It’s something like a figure of speech, Joe College. You’ll never be a writer if you worry about the word police. Your mind can’t be Singapore, your mind has to be Times Square.”
“Fine.”
“Would you have preferred if I quoted your beloved Berryman and said your life is a fucking ‘handkerchief sandwich’? More palatable? Same fucking thing.”
Ted exhaled hard and audibly, his breath and lips almost forming a word, but not quite, and that seemed to be the end of that, but then he just could not let it be.
“Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that your last three girlfriends were younger than me. And that made me a tad…”
“Jealous?”
“Disgusted. Totally fucking skeeved out.”
“Bonnie!”
“Was that her name? I knew her only as ‘the infanta.’”
“Bonnie. Bonnie, and before her, Amber.”
“Stripper name.”
“She was a stripper.”
“Thank you.”
“And a PhD candidate in African dance, FYI.”
“You can’t get a PhD in that.”
“Says you.”
“Twenty-five?”
“Who cares? Twenty-three. Her smell, Ted, her smell gave me health.”
“Jesus.”
“Monica. I should call her.”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“Asshole.”
“Can we not?”
“Oh, oh, yes, we can not. We can not all day.”
Ted couldn’t take this, he felt the anxiety rise in his chest. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a joint. Marty looked disapprovingly at him, but then reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out vials of pain pills-an escalation in the drug war. He shot Ted a sideways glance: My shit is better than your shit, I win.
“What is that, Valium?”
“Maybe. I don’t know if I’m feeling Valium or feeling Quaalude. You know, sometimes I feel like daffodils and sometimes like daisies.”
“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Quaalude’s a good Scrabble word, gets rid of an overabundance of low-scoring vowels.”
“I hate Scrabble. ’Lude it shall be.”
Ted shrugged and fired up a laughing bone. Marty popped the Rorer 714 along with some horse-pill-sized vitamin Cs and said, “Don’t worry about the smoke, I just have lung cancer.”
“Shit,” Ted said, and blew the smoke in the other direction, waving it away. He snuffed out the joint carefully and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”
They sat in silence again for a while.
“Hey, Dad?”
Marty checked to see if Ted was being wholly ironic with the Dad thing. Maybe he wasn’t.
“Yes, son?”
“Wanna go for a walk?”
“No, not really.”
Ted flowed back into himself a little, like a wave receding. He felt he had just extended himself a mile, though he knew it wasn’t that far. More like an inch, but it felt like more than it was. Marty sensed this recoil, and bridged a little of the psychic distance.
“I’m not a great walker anymore. I’ll go for a shuffle, though. You wanna take me for a shuffle?”
15.
Ted had put on his Yankee jacket for the morning chill, and Marty, in retaliatory response, had put his competing Boston Red Sox jacket on over his robe, as well as a Sox baseball cap for overkill. Marty used a cane these days, sometimes even a wheelchair, and he had to lean on Ted for support. There was a green magazine kiosk down at the end of Marty’s block where he went to get the paper-the Post. The Times he had delivered, but Marty didn’t really want to admit to reading the Post. Nobody did. Except for the sports. He went down there to talk to some other old men who had nothing to do but suck on the butt ends of the unlit, last thirds of cigars, complain, bullshit sports, and tell one another lies all morning long. These men had been in the neighborhood for as long as Ted could remember. While working as an advertising man his whole life, Marty had rarely hung out with them. But since retiring a couple of years ago, Marty had been spending more and more time on the corner, and this group of elders, this Polish Russian Black Italian Irish Greek chorus, had become his social life.
On the way to the magazine kiosk, apropos of nothing, Marty said, “Mariana.”
“What?”
“The nurse’s name is Mariana.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Huh.”
Marty seemed to know half the folks who walked by or perched at their windowsills. It seemed his persona as a crusty old fuck wasn’t just for Ted, but people in the neighborhood were more amused than irritated by him. As a young couple passed them pushing a toddler in a stroller, Marty whispered to the child, “Five and a half games, you little motherfucker.” The husband laughed and said, “Morning, Mr. Fullilove.” An old woman leaned out the window of her third-story perch and yelled, “Fullilove, you front-running son of a bitch!” Marty lifted his middle finger for her. She laughed. “I made some banana bread, Marty, is that Ted?” She asked like she’d seen him yesterday, and not fifteen years ago.
“Yes, hi, Mrs. Hager, it’s me.”
“Good Lord, Ted, it’s been ages. My, my, the years go by so fast.”
Marty yelled up at her, “Yes, sweet Betty, the years do go by so fast, but the days are so fucking long.” Betty seemed genuinely moved to see Ted, shaking her head at the confounding, slow-fast passage of time.
“I have banana bread for the both of you. Stop by on your way home.”
It took a surprisingly long while to navigate the one block to the kiosk at the corner. But this was Marty time. Ted would have to acclimate. The gray panthers were all loitering with absolutely no intent but to kill snail-paced time. Benny, the owner of the kiosk, was a dead ringer for Cheswick in Cuckoo’s Nest. Schtikker was a fat Austrian Jew, always jingling handfuls of quarters in his front pocket, like he was happily suffering from some form of numismatic elephantiasis. Ivan, a very light-skinned black man who constantly rolled cigarette butts from the street into the gutter with the tip of his cane, like a highly specialized, obsessive-compulsive sanitation worker. And a very dapper Tango Sam, who reminded you of Burt Lancaster grown old and who seemed to dance everywhere rather than walk. When they got to within shouting distance of the kiosk, Tango Sam spoke up: “Marty-you big macha you, the retired one of twelve vice presidents of the seventh-largest advertising firm on the East Coast, you look tremendous-loan me fifty.”