There she is. He walks toward her. His wife slams a door, she senses another woman. His wife breaks a dish, his boy says something silly-all these are calls to leave, eviction notices, and he will heed them halfheartedly, an always irritable paterfamilias. Walking hand in hand with her on a pristine Caribbean beach. A seagull looks at him, and says, “Dad?” That’s his son. There is his son again by proxy, using the seagull as his mouthpiece, in the way that children play with hand puppets, dropping shit on his shoulder. “Dad? Dad?” There was no denying the bleed-through. Another name for bleed-through is sanity. Heeding the call of this world is a duty, too, after all. He would leave the world of his head and return to the actual. But he had laid a good foundation time and time again. This world of his was also real and was not going anywhere. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t live in it, but he could be there anytime because it was his. He would be alone in one world so he would not be alone in another. It is his and hers. It is his.
38.
The Sox sucked and the Yanks soared, but not in Brooklyn; in Brooklyn the Sox remained ascendant. Ted took to taking his morning coffee and buzz in the prelight dawn on the steps of the house. He was there when the paper came flying in. He would throw it away, or stash it under his bed, and fall back to sleep for a couple of hours, the up of the coffee and the down of the weed battling it out in his tired brain.
A few hours later, Ted would “wake up” with Marty. He’d help Marty get dressed in his Red Sox fan attire. “Don’t you feel a little stupid, a grown man wearing the clothes of a sports team, like a little kid?”
“No,” Marty said. “I like it. It identifies me. Like a bird’s plumage.”
Then they’d go down to Benny’s kiosk. Today, after the fake Boston win, no wheelchair and no cane. Marty had pep in his step. The Sox skid was over and so was Marty’s.
The gray panthers might have been a tad overzealous preparing the charade. But then again, they had nothing else to do, absolutely nothing. Ted’s first clue of this was the appearance of the Times delivery boy speeding toward them on his bike, screaming, “Fuck fuck fuck cocksucker mothersuckerfucker dickass French kiss big tits nipple whore Yankees!”
“I like this kid,” Marty said, and then to the kid, “What’s wrong, squirt?”
“Sox won?” Ted asked hesitantly, by way of cueing the boy. The kid had obviously been given carte blanche by the panthers to do some experimental cursing in his role. He was quite a natural. Sounded good, real.
“Sox won! Fuuuuuuuuuckkk…” and he was off, the “fuck” trailing behind him like sonic exhaust.
Ted saw Schtikker about twenty yards away, gesticulating to the kid to bring it down a notch. The kid certainly was over the top, but enjoyable, a little like a little blue Don Knotts.
Here came another suspicious dude in a suit making way too much of a bee line for Ted and Marty.
“Goddamn Red Stockings of Boston!” he declaimed in nineteenth-century diction as he passed by. Gotta give that guy some notes, Ted thought, and update his fucking playbook. As they approached the kiosk and the gathered men, Betty leaned out her window on cue, and for the first time in her life, sounded wooden, insincere, and just plain weird. “Sixty years of waiting is over, Marty.” She looked down at something; was she looking at a piece of paper, a script? Jesus Christ.
Marty called up to her, “I’d wait another sixty for you, sweet Betty.” Betty looked at the panthers and put her hands up, like what now? Clearly she was not prepared to improvise. She seemed to panic, screamed, “Go Sox! Curse of the Babe! Damn Yankees! Bambino! Yazzz-ce-ze-stremski!” like a greatest-hits run of baseball clichés, and then slammed the window down. The panthers were laughing as they came forward to see Marty. Every moment Marty had his back turned to one of them, Ted would receive an exaggerated wink or the okay sign.
“Ivan, come here and let me check your age.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” said Ivan.
Benny, or rather a hand, reached up over the kiosk counter with Benny’s voice. “Here is your paper, Marty. Your special paper. Special for you.”
“What is this, the Yiddische theater?” Ted said for the benefit of the panthers only.
“Got it, Benny. Thank you.” Ted took the paper, stopping Benny from incriminating himself with further bad acting.
Tango Sam took Marty in hand like he wanted to dance, and Marty looked like he was going to take him up on the offer.
“Marty,” Tango Sam said, “successful advertising executive and long-suffering Sox fan, you look tremendous, loan me fifty.” It was gonna be a good day.
39.
Something was shifting in Ted. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt it was good. That was a strange feeling for him, because usually he didn’t know what it was, but felt it was bad. He’d read somewhere that every six years or so, the body’s cells have completely died and been reborn or something like that, turned over like a car speedometer. Meaning that every six years or so, you were literally a new man. Every scrap of you, for better or worse, head to toe, was not as it was. Ted wondered if the soul molted, too, like a snake angel. Because that’s what it felt like, like his soul was shedding its skin.
One morning, about a week later, Ted overslept, and jumped out of bed. It was after nine. Shit. He ran outside to get rid of the paper. He picked it up and had it over his head to toss it, when he heard, “Ted, what are you doing?”
Marty was at the window, looking down on him. Ted was busted.
“Getting to the bottom of who’s stealing your paper.”
“Who is it?”
“Well, I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it yet.”
“But you got it today?” Ted looked at the paper in his hand.
“Yeah, I got it today.” And just then the overacting, overcursing Don Knotts kid came flying by on his bike: “Nipple-titty-pubes-fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkk…”
Which could mean only one thing to Marty: the Sox had won again. Sufficiently and happily distracted, Marty pumped his fist in celebration and disappeared from the window.
Ted hustled down to the kiosk to brief the boys. The Yankees were back in town, so Ted had to go to work and couldn’t manipulate the outcome with the VCR. So he had decided to try a rainout. He had the panthers ready with hoses to go up on Marty’s roof and try to create a realistic-enough downpour to convince Marty that the game would get canceled. Then Ted would call from the stadium, corroborate the rainout, say he had to go to a work meeting, then rush home in the Corolla immediately after the game was over. If the Sox won, then he’d say there’d been a long rain delay, but they got the game in after all, and the Sox had pulled it out. It was worth a try anyway, and the panthers were into it. Satisfied that they had some kind of plan, Ted hustled back up the block to home.
“Where the fuck were you?”
“And a good, good morning to you, too, sir.”
Once inside, it was harder to keep Marty away from the paper. Ted held on to it and pretended to read as he fixed breakfast. Marty watched him impatiently. “Can I see it now?”
“See what?”
“For god’s sakes, Ted, the newspaper, can I see it?”
“Oh, the newspaper. Here, can you see it?” He held up the paper for Marty to see. “You see with your eyes, not with your hands.”