“Saturday,” I said.
It was Christmas break of my freshman year in college. Father was excited to have me home and telling him about my classes and my professors. Ever since I began reading serious literature, he had forced the rest of the family to endure our discussions at the table. When I was eleven, he would prod me with simple questions, get me tied up and laugh a bit at me. When I was fourteen, he would bait me, twist me up, confuse me, then laugh a bit at me. At eighteen, he honestly seemed to believe I could add something to his understanding of novels and stories. I told him that I had read Joyce in a class. Bill moaned. One would have thought that his second year in medical school would have proved a more normal common ground between physician and son. Lisa was about to graduate from Vassar and had adopted a kind of death-girl attitude in spite of her being off to medical school the next year.
“We read Portrait and Wake,” I said.
“I see they’ve refrained from using complete titles in university these days.”
I laughed and Father laughed, but the rest of the family, I’m sure, read his comment as contentious and condescending.
“What did you think of Finnegan’s Wake?“ Father asked. He turned to Bill. “Have you read it?”
Bill shook his head.
Father took a quick bite of potatoes and returned his attention to me. “So?”
“I think it’s overrated,” I said.
He stopped chewing.
“Or not rated correctly, anyway.”
“That’s youth talking,” Father said. “The word play alone makes it a remarkable book.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And it’s multilingual and all that, but still.”
“I’d think that you’d never consider fiction the same again after reading that book.”
“Well, you don’t actually read it,” I said. “You look at it for a long time, but you don’t really read it.”
“My point exactly.” He laughed and drank some wine. He offered a nudge of his elbow toward Lisa as if to include her.
“Okay,” I said. “This is what I wrote in my paper.” I looked at Mother and my siblings and felt sick, like I had been seduced into slitting their throats. I looked at my father’s excited eyes. “In spite of the obvious exploitation of alphabetic and lexical space in the Wake and in spite of whatever typographical or structural gestures one might focus on, the most important feature of the book is the way it actually conforms to conventional narrative. The way it layers, using such devices as metaphor and symbol. What’s different is that each sentence, each word calls attention to the devices. So, the work really reaffirms what it seems to expose. It is the thing it is, perhaps twice, and depends on the currency of conventional narrative for its experimental validity.”
Father looked at me for a long time. He then looked at his other two children and put his fork down. “I hope before you go to bed this evening, you kiss your brother.” Then he stood and left the table.
Of course I felt bad for my brother and sister, but I felt worse for myself. I didn’t enjoy being so set apart and I was well aware, painfully aware, of the inappropriateness and incorrectness of Father’s assessment of me. At eighteen, I realized I was eighteen and not so smart or special, and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my own ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact, my brother, second-year medical school student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, “Geek.”
“It’s not my fault,” I said.
Lisa hit the top of the stairs as I said this, gave me an almost sympathetic look, shrugged and stepped into her room. The closing of her door was just ever so slightly louder than a normal closing of a door and so she too managed to slap me about some.
But how bad Lisa and Bill must have felt. They were far more accomplished than I at the time (and later). I had done nothing yet. I viewed my father’s favoritism as irrational and saw myself as being saddled with a kind of illness, albeit his.
Numbers 23, 24
Wilde: I’m afraid for the voice.Joyce: What do you mean?Wilde: The way writing is moving. All voice will soon be lost and what will we be left with?Joyce: Pages.Wilde: And story?Joyce: What is story anyway? Just a way to announce the last page.Wilde: Have you ever walked through a thunderstorm carrying a long metal pipe?Joyce: No, I haven’t.Wilde: You should try it. Joyce: Are you upset?Wilde: No, just announcing the last page.
Marilyn had never looked more beautiful to me. We were sitting in her kitchen and, from all appearances, Clevon was not present. Marilyn poured the coffee.
“I looked at a place for Mother yesterday.”
“How was it?”
“Fine. Clean. Neat. Cheery. What do you say about a place where people go to expire.”
“I’m sorry about not calling yesterday.”
“I figured you were busy,” I said.
“Clevon and I are now officially broken up.”
The news pleased me but I was unsure how I was supposed to take it.
After a brief pause, Marilyn said, “I have to tell you, though, that we slept together that night.”
Why did she have to tell me that? I didn’t need to know it and I could have done quite well without knowing it. Had I not known, I would not have cared, but now all I could do was care. I cared about what he meant to her, about what I meant to her, about whether she was on top or he, about whether she had had an orgasm, more than one? about the size of his penis, about the size of mine, about why she had told me. I studied the aged wood table, warped white pine slats with a mitered border of what I thought might be maple, an odd combination. I ran my fingers along the rounded edge in front of me. “Well, those things happen, I guess,” I said.
“I realized he doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I nodded. “A good thing to realize.” However late.
She got up from her chair and came to me, bent at her waist and kissed me on the lips. She pulled me to my feet and led me by the hands into her bedroom, where again she kissed me. We rolled around a bit, gyrating and rubbing body parts with a level of arousal that was both refreshing and, sadly, stale, my understanding that the excitement was partly, at least, simply a function of newness. While kissing her neck, which was slightly salty, I glanced at her night table and saw a copy of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins. I stopped moving.
“What’s wrong, baby,” she said. I liked the way her voice sounded, especially as she called me baby, but the sight of that book had called back the troops.
“Have you read that book?” I asked.
She looked back over her head to see. “Oh, that? Yeah, I just finished. It was pretty good.”
“What was good about it?” I rolled off to lie beside her.
It was clear she was confused that we were having this conversation. “Is something wrong? You can just come out with it. I shouldn’t have told you about Clevon.”
“What did you like about the book?”
“I don’t know. It was a good story, I guess. Lightweight stuff, but it was fun.”
“It didn’t offend you in any way?”