“Nicest thing you ever said to me.”
“You being ironic?”
“I don’t think so…?”
It was the question mark that struck them both as hysterical. They were in a groove. It felt good.
“Go to bed, Ted. Don’t go to bed angry.”
“Okay.”
“Wake up angry.”
“Good advice, Dad.”
They were both wheezing now, unable to stop the laughing fit.
“Come here and give your old man a kiss good night.”
Ted didn’t move. He was aware of not wanting to touch his father, as if the two men ran on separate currents, and contact would create shock, like they were magnets pointing the same repulsive poles at one another. Marty sensed this primitive revulsion and said, “Nobody touches the old and the sick.”
Ted softened and came forward, and put his lips on his dad’s forehead. His skin was cold and damp, inert. They could barely see each other. It was safe to love each other in the dark, Ted thought. They couldn’t see how badly they loved each other, how they always botched it, didn’t have to own that chasm of need. Ted felt his father’s soul open up to the kiss like one of those plants that grow only at night, he thought, without any irony. A nightshade. My father the nightshade.
22.
Ted’s old single bed had weird dreams in it. As he fell asleep, he was wondering if certain beds had their own routes into the unconscious and you’d dream certain times and places and people, depending on the vehicle you slept in, the bed. Sure seemed that way. If that were the case, then there was a route etched in this bed many times over to a raven-haired girl in a beige raincoat in Playboy’s August issue of 1960. She wasn’t the centerfold. Ted never went for the front-runner. She was one of those pictorial side stories; a supporting player, a curvy Rosencrantz or topless Guildenstern. Apparently, from what young Ted could deduce, poor unlucky got caught in the rain, ducked into a phone booth, and-can you believe it?-there’s a handsome guy in a tux already in the phone booth. What? Not really much room to move in there. And even though she’s wearing the raincoat, seems she has to take it off because it’s wet, and-what… she has nothing on underneath for some reason. What are the odds? She must’ve been distracted when she got dressed this morning, late for her job at the school. Young Ted always liked to think she was a seventh-grade teacher, or, a year later, an eighth-grade teacher, and so on, until, by the time Ted went off to Columbia, she had gotten her PhD and was teaching college at a small Midwestern institution. Her generous black hair was everywhere. That she had nothing on underneath the raincoat didn’t surprise the handsome young man at all. In sympathy perhaps, he removed his tux. That’s how adolescent Ted had learned what a gentleman does when confronted by a naked woman in a phone booth, how a real man behaves.
Something about that Playboy girl, her shape and coloring, had imprinted itself on Ted’s libido like Lorenz on one of his ducks. He would follow her, and her prototype, anywhere. She became his once and future wheelhouse. Teddy had found a way to her in his daydreams and dreams on this bed so many times. It felt like-no, it was a relationship. His first love. She’d be in her forties now, easy, married with kids, a mom. Maybe dead. Ted had the urge to find her and thank her. She didn’t know how she’d helped him. That dark-eyed, Mediterranean woman in a slicker in a phone booth in the rain. She didn’t know how she’d been loved. She should, Ted thought, because he liked to give credit where credit was due. She should know she was treasured. She will live frozen in time, young and beautiful and beloved, as long as Ted shall live.
He was awakened by a burning smell. It was a bad smell. Was his idiot father trying to cook breakfast? That was a fiasco even when he’d been in the best of health. He checked to see if he had fallen asleep with a lit doobie. No, it wasn’t his ass that was on fire. And no, that wasn’t bacon.
Ted raced down to the kitchen, but it was empty. He then realized the smell and smoke were coming from upstairs. He doubled back. All the way up to the top floor, where Marty had a pretty decent, presently contained blaze going in the old fireplace. He was kneeling amid a pile of strewn magazines, tapes, drawings, and writings. Ripping photos and advertisements out of magazines, looking over each one before he tossed it on the flames. In between tosses, he was having fun squirting lighter fluid on the barely controlled and toxically smoky flame.
“Dad, what are you doing? The smoke.”
Marty spoke as he doused the mess in butane. “You know, during my infrequent spasms of self-reflection, I have looked back on my life and felt that what I’ve done hasn’t amounted to much. But now that I see it all laid out before me like this, all the ignoble effort, all the years of making stupid people want stupid shit, well, it just makes me wanna put a gun to my fucking head.” Marty could be histrionic and operatically self-loathing, and operatically loathing of others for that matter, but Ted could see this was sincere, or as sincere as he’d seen his father. This was sincerity, dying Marty style: “Burn it. Burn it all,” he said. “The bonfire of the inanities.”
Marty had been a New York ad man in the ’50s and ’60s. He was like Catfish Hunter, a coveted free agent in that world who moved from team to team for the highest bidder. He started at Young & Rubicam. He moved over to Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather shortly after the war. He worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach for a while, and many boutique agencies in between. He never stayed at any one place too long. Those were good times to do what he’d done. He’d been a disciple of the thinking of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, the father of what came to be known as subliminal advertising. Bernays intentionally used his uncle’s “discovery” of the “Unconscious” to manipulate social behavior and consumerism. Ted had been turned on to Bernays, an unsung villain in American history, during a sociology course at Columbia in his sophomore year. Bernays, starting off as Enrico Caruso’s press agent, coined the term “public relations,” which became the big business of “engineering consent” that begat the big business of advertising. Nobody these days would believe it was Sigmund Freud’s nephew that basically created a business founded on the principle of making people want what they don’t need, but some shit you just can’t make up.
When tobacco companies found they couldn’t get women to smoke for fear of appearing masculine, that smoking was the domain of man, Eddie Bernays put together a parade of attractive, party-girl debutantes down Broadway, enjoying not cigarettes but “torches of freedom,” thereby successfully linking, in the public mind, smoking with youth, beauty, independence, and empowerment. He made sure it got extensive press coverage, and, almost overnight, millions of women took up smoking. Fast Eddie did this over and over again with products to market, selling not the virtues of the thing, but the feeling the thing would supposedly give you. Lifestyle trumping life. Perhaps Freud really was the disease for which he purported to be a cure, and his nephew was the metastasis of his uncle.
Ted liked to think of Freud as one of the greatest literary critics of all time, nothing more. Ted had even conceived of a novel he never finished, called Uncle Siggy, that cast Eddie as a sort of American Faust. And Marty was right there in the next generation, coming up with snappy, subliminal copy, figuring ways that beer made men irresistible to women and chewing a certain gum made beautiful blond twins want to bed you. When Ted had the sinking realization that the 800-plus rambling pages of Uncle Siggy might be nothing more than an Oedipal attack on his father by way of Bernays, he felt embarrassed and exposed to himself, and even though he loved the chapter where Freud (in reality, it was Ernest Dichter) suggested that asparagus sales would spike if they were marketed as phallic symbols, he put the book down, never to pick it up again.