“Much thanks.” After a minute of small talk, I make my proposaclass="underline" “Ultimately, it will be easier to place the collection if a few have been published first. There is one which is ready to go out, but I’m wondering, under what name?”
“What do you mean?” she says rather aggressively, like she thinks I mean perhaps under my name.
“Richard Nixon? R. M. Nixon? R. Nixon? It depends on how ‘out there’ you want to be, how obvious or not.”
“Interesting,” she says. “Let me discuss that with my family and let you know. Can you send me the story?”
“Of course; do you want just the clean copy or all the revisions?”
“Both, if you don’t mind,” she says.
“I’ve read the story,” Mrs. Eisenhower says in a measured tone the following Monday. “The original version was eleven hundred seventy words, and yours is less than eight hundred.”
“Yes,” I say. “I worked on that one pretty hard, took it down to a short-short, what folks call flash fiction.”
“You cut a lot,” she says.
“It shouldn’t be so much about word count but about impact. This particular story had a limited vocabulary, and I wasn’t sure how long readers would stick with it until they got to the punch line.”
“‘Cocksucker,’” she says.
“Yes, that’s the punch line.”
She pauses. “My father wasn’t given to spontaneous humor, but when he’d let himself go, it was quite something. He liked to bang out songs on the piano and it would drive my mother crazy. We would go to pieces, laughing. I still have the letters he wrote me as a kid — very formal, full of good counsel. He wanted things to go well, but often felt so isolated. Whatever it was he was after, he had to find his own path to it. A life like that takes its toll, more on my mother than on him,” she says, ruminating aloud. And then, abruptly, she stops. “All right, then,” she says, “send it out, let’s go with Richard M. Nixon.”
“Thank you,” I say, and hang up.
I draft a cover letter:
Dear Ms. Treisman,
Enclosed, please find a short piece of fiction of great historical significance. In recent months I have had the pleasure and responsibility of bringing into the light the collected fiction of the notable R. M. Nixon. And while Nixon was long known to have made copious notes about all manner of things, it was only during a recent transfer of materials that a particular series of boxes was fully explored. You are the first to be reading this story, because I can’t imagine a better place for it than in the pages of The New Yorker. I will hold my breath awaiting your response.
Thanks in advance,
Harold Silver
My phone rings again. “I’m not ready to go public,” she says. “I want you to continue with your work, and we’ll talk again when the collection is complete.”
“Of course,” I say; my balloon’s been popped.
Ricardo comes for a week. I drive him to school; the bus brings him home. The house rules: no television during the week, no video games, no sugar.
“And what am I supposed to like about this?” he asks.
“That I care about you.”
In the late afternoons we play, do homework, and walk the dog. I check his spelling, his math, make sure he bathes, takes his medication. I make his lunch and pack a snack for the bus trip home. By the end of the week, I would swear that Ricardo is doing better. I’m not sure if it’s true, or if I’ve gotten used to him.
I call the Department of Social Services to see where we are regarding the foster-parent approval. “Your paperwork is in the system; that’s all we can say,” the woman tells me. “Have you got your references, your clearances, your letter from the bank, and the psychiatric evaluation?”
“I was waiting to hear from you about the next step.”
“Never wait for us, just keep moving, and eventually we’ll catch up.”
“All right, then; is there a psychiatrist you recommend? Someone ‘in the system’?”
“No idea. I’m new — I usually work in the Motor Vehicle Administration. Hold on, let me ask.”
I am on hold for what seems like forever.
“I couldn’t find anyone who knew, so I looked in some files of approved families; here are some names of who they used.”
I write them down, Google each, and call the one whose office is closest.
Cousin Jason phones to say he’s gotten an e-mail from George. “Does that seem weird? I thought he was in jail?”
I don’t say that I got him an iPad for his birthday.
“He ‘friended’ me on Facebook and sent a message: ‘I always knew you were gay, sorry if I embarrassed you at the family dinner.’ I wondered if maybe he was in a twelve-step program and making amends. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously, but he was so specific. I said thank you. Yesterday he wrote to say all my Facebook friends were so masculine and good-looking and he bet I was getting ‘it’ a lot. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t answer. Today I got another one, asking if I knew anyone in the ‘holy land’ with a bank account.”
“What was the e-mail address?”
“Woodsman224@aol. com,” Jason says.
I write it down.
“I wonder if maybe he’s involved in a cult or some weird activity, or maybe his e-mail was hijacked. I had that happen, and all my friends got an e-mail saying I’d been robbed in London and they should wire me money — cost my buddies a couple of thousand bucks.”
“I’ll look into it,” I say. “And you, are you doing well?”
“I’m fine.”
“And your mother?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Jason, would you want to have dinner sometime?”
“In the city?”
“Yes,” I say, “that would be nice.”
“It doesn’t have to be, like, a big long thing,” he says.
“Of course not,” I say.
“A quick bite somewhere,” he says.
“A quick bite,” I echo.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but is it something specific?” Jason asks. “I mean, is there an agenda or some specific something that you want to talk about?”
“No, really nothing at all,” I say.
“Fine,” he says, “we could do that sometime; not right now, but sometime.”
“Okay,” I say, “let me know what works.”
I hang up, wondering, do I e-mail George, do I somehow contact AOL and find out if this is really George’s account? I’m not sure I want to be “in touch,” so easily reachable. I continue to draw circles around the address until it looks like a Spirograph project. I pin it to the wall by the fridge just in case. …
Sara Singer, the head of Ashley’s school, calls again. “I won’t beat around the bush,” she says. “It is my feeling that it is no longer in Ashley’s best interests to remain here.”
“You’re kicking her out?”
“We are protecting her.”
“From what, your staff?”
“And the other students. It’s getting ugly. Ashley deserves a more accepting environment.”
“Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Are you pathologizing a child struggling with the death of her mother, the collapse of her family, who was preyed upon by a teacher — a figure of authority, who should have been a comfort, a moral compass?”
“She’s been taken over by the gays and the bois.”
“I didn’t realize that there were gangs at the school.”
“Not gangs — but preferences. She’s been taken in by the gay students and the gender-confused. Frankly, I don’t think it’s the place for her. And it’s become a bit of a stir — sort of ‘who can feel sorrier for her,’ like that experiment where kids carry around an egg for a week and have to take care of it like they would a baby. … In this case, the various factions are warring over who should take care of Ashley, and as you can imagine, the faculty has had to adopt a hands-off policy.”