“What are those guys doing?” I asked.
Roger was thrown. “What?”
“On your jacket. Is that what you got a letter for? What sport is that?”
Bill and the kid behind the counter started to laugh.
“What?” Roger said. “It’s for wrestling.”
“You mean rolling around on the floor with another boy.”
Roger’s brown skin turned purple and he took a step toward me. His friend caught him and said, “Let’s just get out of here, Roger.”
Bill and I watched them leave. Bill then flashed me an awkward smile, then seemed to fold up. But I was pumped up, wanting to talk, jump around. “Did you see his face?” I asked.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, I’m not mad at you, Monk.”
“Then what is it?”
“Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like—” I stopped and looked at the fish. “This is a good one. Father will like this one.”
I drove back to D.C., back to what had been my mother’s home, what had been my parents’ home. The inside of the house was stale and hot. I switched on the large air-conditioning unit in the dining room and sat at the table. I sat where I had always sat during meals and regarded the other chairs. Mother and Father had sat at the prominent ends and I was placed on a side alone, facing my brother and sister, an empty chair beside me. The occasional guest would occupy that seat, but otherwise it was always there, empty, never removed to be against the wall like the other auxiliary chairs. I listened to the house, recalling my parents’ voices and footfalls, but I couldn’t hear them. I heard the hum and periodic rattle of the air conditioner, the switching on of the refrigerator in the adjacent kitchen, the ringing of the phone.
It was Bill. “I’ll be there in a bit.”
“Where are you?”
“National. I’m about to walk over to the Metro.”
“Would you like me to pick you up?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I’ll pick you up at Metro Center.”
“I’ll take the Blue to the Red and I’ll meet you at Dupont Circle at,” I could hear him looking at his watch, “four o’clock.”
“See you there.”
My brother’s hair was blond. I recognized his face as he sat on a bench near some conga players, but I thought only That guy looks just like my brother. My brother had blond hair. It was my brother and his hair was yellow. His skin was still light brown. He called to me.
“Bill?”
“It’s me.” He hugged me, an event in itself, and I appreciated the gesture, but it was as stiff as if he hadn’t touched me at all.
“Hey, your hair is blond,” I informed him.
“Like it?”
“I guess. It’s different.” I felt like an old fuddy-duddy, as my mother would say of herself. “I found a parking space up on Connecticut.” I reached down and picked up his soft leather bag. “It’s good to see you,” I said as we started to walk.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
“A little out of shape. But not you.”
“I’m in the gym every night.”
I made a kind of congratulatory sound that I hoped didn’t come off as patronizing. “I should try a little of that.”
“How’s Mother?”
“In and out.” As I said it I wondered which was the bad way: in or out? Was she lost when she was in her mind or out of it? And I wondered if the symptoms I had been observing were in fact not those of her disease, but of her coping with deterioration, a retreat to a safer place.
“Does she know who you are?”
“She did today,” I told him. “How are the kids?”
“Fine, I think.” He watched me for my reaction and when I gave it to him, he said, “We’ll make it through. It’s hard to hear your daddy’s a fag.”
“Would you like to go the house first or to see Mother?”
“The house. I need a shower. I was up early to catch the plane.”
I drove us home. Bill fiddled with the radio.
“How’s work?”
“Good.”
“How’s—” I searched for his friend’s name.
“Gone.”
I have often stared into the mirror and considered the difference between the following statements:
(1) He looks guilty.
(2) He seems guilty.
(3) He appears guilty.
(4) He is guilty.
“Are you all right?” Bill asked. He was out of the shower and had returned downstairs to join me in the den. I was lighting a cigar. “You shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Yes, I know.” I watched the tip glow orange and shook out the match. “Are you about ready to go?”
“It’s sort of late now, don’t you think?”
It was in fact nearly six. “It’s a little late,” I said, “but it is her first day there. I’d like to check up on the old lady.”
Bill nodded.
Mother had not eaten, we were told. She did not recognize Bill, pulled away from him when he took her hand and tried to look at her eyes. She did not recognize me. She might have if we had stayed another sixty minutes, another fifteen, another five. But we didn’t.
“About the money,” Bill said.
“I’ve got it covered,” I told him.
It had become my practice (at least I wanted it to be) to let such conversations wither and die of their own accord, to not offer any appropriate or inappropriate comment, but to simply shut up and let the words become vapor.
Only appearances signify in visual art. At least this is what I am told, that the painter’s work is an invention in the boundless space that begins at the edges of his picture. The surface, the paper or the canvas, is not the work of art, but where the work lives, a place to keep the picture, the paint, the idea. But a chair, a chair is its space, is its own canvas, occupies space properly. The canvas occupies spaces and the picture occupies the canvas, while the chair, as a work, fills the space itself. This was what occurred to me regarding My Pafology. The novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting, my having designed it not as a work of art, but as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly. It was by this reasoning that I was able to look at my face in the mirror and to accept the deal my agent presented to me on the phone that evening.
“His name is Wiley Morgenstein and he wants to pay you three million dollars for the movie rights,” Yul said. “Monk? Monk?”
“I’m here.”
“How’s that sound?”
“It sounds great. Are you crazy? It sounds terrific. It makes me sick.”
“He insists on meeting you.”
“Tell him I’ll call him.”
“He wants to meet you. He wants to pay you three mil, the least you can do is have lunch with the guy. I haven’t told him that there’s no Stagg Leigh yet.”
“Don’t. Stagg Leigh will have lunch with him.”
Yul laughed. “You’ve lost your mind. What are you going to do? Dress up like a pimp or something?”
“No, I’ll just put on some dark glasses and be real quiet. How’s that?”
“Three million for you means three hundred thousand for me. Don’t screw this up.”
“Yeah, right. Gotta go.”
“Wait a second. Random House says there’s so much excitement about the book that they’re going to try to bring it out before Christmas.”