“So,” she said, replacing the glasses. “How are things with Wurster?”
“Weird,” I said. I told her about the frigid house, the pages of telephones and furniture. She nodded, knowingly.
“Uh-huh. Heard about it before. He knows what he’s doing.”
“So how does he know my father?”
“You don’t know that?” she asked. Her eyes widened, as if to take in the fullness of my ignorance.
“No.”
“He inked the TV special. The main characters and all that, the animated parts. Your father wouldn’t accept the usual team of animators, so Wurster said he’d do it alone. It came in way late but under budget. You’ve never heard this?”
“Never.”
She nodded. “He took your dad, uh, seriously.” Another blush. “Sorry. Not that he shouldn’t be…”
“No, no,” I said. “I know it’s fluff.”
“But he thinks your dad was some kind of genius. The drawings, I suppose.” She watched a waiter hurry from the kitchen balancing huge platters of steaming food. It made me hungry. With a demure throat-clearing that portended a white lie, she said, “I can see that, I think. Maybe.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “So.”
“So.”
“So tell me about Wurster,” I said. “What’s his story? Why doesn’t he have his own strip?”
She shrugged. “He can’t get one together. God knows he’s tried. My boss has a file full of his, uh, efforts. Panel after panel of these wonderful drawings, but there’s no story at all. He has a narrative dysfunction.”
“I see.”
She gave me a look. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s an example. The last strip he sent us was called ‘Elliot Dunfee.’ It’s just about this guy hanging around in his apartment. There’s no setup, no punchline. Elliot fries some eggs, he gets the phone, something new in each panel. The drawings are usually in chronological order, or maybe there’ll be some extended task Elliot has to do, like wash his car. And maybe the last panel will be Elliot dropping the hose and getting himself all wet.”
“But is it funny?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s really funny. But in a wry way. There isn’t that laugh you get when you’re surprised by a joke. You just slowly break into a grin.” She demonstrated, mugging puzzlement, then spreading a wide smile across her face, like honey across a piece of Wonder bread. I laughed. “I think he’s published in the indie comics,” she said. “Comic books, I mean, where you can do the postmodern kind of thing. His stuff doesn’t really fit there either, though. I suppose he could do a one-panel gag strip or something, but I think he thinks it’s below him.”
Our food came, and we ate it. Neither of us spoke, recognizing as we did the superfluity of conversation. In my family, to talk during dinner was an oddness my father would not tolerate; we had to eat together, but we did it silently. Amanda could never deal with this habit. Several times per meal, she opened her mouth, then snapped it shut in frustration. Eventually we bought a small television at a junk store and set it up on the dish drainer during meals, so that there was something to distract us from each other.
Every once in a while I stole a glance at Susan. She was neither loud nor piggish, but she ate efficiently and with great speed, her chopsticks scissoring in the air before her like conductor’s batons. My food was nearly gone before I realized how much I was enjoying myself: meals at home had been marathons of discomfort, and with Amanda they were tinged with a long-standing guilt that she did nothing to discourage. I was actually eating, in relative repose, with another person.
Susan finished first and waited with her hands folded while I put away the last pieces of rice. I set the chopsticks down in an “X” on the plate before me and raised my head.
“Wow,” I said. “This place is great.”
“Oh, good. We should conduct all our business meetings here.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be more, but I supposed that if I was going to be a cartoonist there must be. I began to get excited.
“So,” I said. “You said something about news from corporate.”
“Oh. Actually, not really. I mean, I thought I might.” She reddened. “All I know is that they’re eager to meet you and see your drawings, and all that.”
“No news is good news,” I said.
“I should tell you, though.” She lifted her eyes from her empty plate and pursed her lips. “They’ll probably have another guy lined up.”
“What? For the strip?”
She nodded. “Just in case you, you know, don’t work out. But they want to go with you, being as you’re in the family, and it was what your father wanted.”
“Oh.”
“Do you think it’s going all right?” she said. “Your drawing?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I may not be good enough. It’s harder than I thought.”
Now she frowned openly. “Well, you have the home court advantage. If you’ll pardon that metaphor. My dad is a rabid Knicks fan.”
“Sure.”
“I know you can do it, Tim. Really. Just keep drawing, that’s all.” She smiled a little, a quick thing that vanished immediately. “You didn’t bring anything, did you?”
“Drawings? God, no.”
She picked up the check and gave it a surreptitious look. “Well, bring some next week. If you want, that is.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
* * *
When I got home, Pierce was crying. I could hear him from down the hall. I wasn’t ready to hit the studio yet, though, so I found myself staying in the house, the kitchen specifically, kneading methodically at the floor with a dishrag. The dirt came up in strata, like latex paint from an apartment cabinet. I rubbed along with the jerking rhythm of Pierce’s sobbing until I could no longer take it. Then I got up and went to him.
I didn’t knock, just walked right in. He was lying in a ball on the floor by his dresser, shaking like a junkie. If he was embarrassed by my entrance, he didn’t show it. I knelt on the ground next to him and said, “Pierce, what’s the matter?”
He gulped air, coughed, finally blurted, “You know.”
I thought for a moment that he was dipping into one of his paranoid troughs again, that he meant he thought I could read his thoughts. Then it struck me that I should know, I was his brother.
“Is it Dad?” I said.
“It’s like g-getting out of jail,” he gasped, and he wheeled off into sobs again, one after the other, like squalls of rain.
I let myself sink to the floor and sat there, my legs crossed. The last time I’d sat on his bedroom floor, Pierce and I were kids, and we were playing with our Lego space station, and he was crashing his spaceships into everything. He assembled all the buildings loosely, so they would shatter spectacularly when he wanted them to. And then, like that, I was crying too, as if some forgotten part of me, a part that had chugged along invisibly without any problems for my entire thirty years, had suddenly wrenched itself horribly out of whack, had cracked in half and let out this stupid, impossible flood. And it was not the kind of cry I’d had, with great catharsis and eventual relief, a thousand times before; it was more like a torrential bloodletting in which some vital humor was gushing forth and could not be recovered. With dawning horror I understood that this was my confidence draining away: not only the kind that let me do my pathetic art, or believe, however faintly, that I could become a cartoonist, but the kind that let me stumble daily out into the world. I held my head in my hands and let snot dribble through them. Was this what it was like to be Pierce, all the time?