“What about here?” she said to my father.
“Not yet, not here,” my father said.
Now we were on the river road. We spotted mast tips over the river hills. The plaid bag was on the floor. I was the keeper of it now. I put my hand in to feel the sandwich wax. I heard my father talking to her under the brother-and-sister songs.
He said, “One fucking opinion.”
He said, “Don’t think that way.”
He said, “A specialist in New Paltz.”
He said, “Don’t think you’re getting away from me yet.”
He said, “We have to tell them. That’s the whole point. Who cares about the boats?”
I was beginning to care about the boats.
I was beginning to be someone who wanted to see what kind of boats the world had sent to sail here. I wanted that to be the point.
I started to ask a lot of questions about the boats. I didn’t think it was wrong to ask.
Our father said the boats would be big and from every sea-going land. He said sea-going as though he meant some harm. He said the boats were one thing, and there was also another thing we would all have to talk about when we got to the boats.
I said I had some things I wanted to talk about, too. I said I wanted to know why they boiled piss at the gas station, what purpose did it serve. I said I wanted to know why he didn’t just fix the porch screen while the bees were sleeping. I said I wanted to know if there was an Old Paltz, too.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” she said. “We’ll tell you everything.”
I asked why the wrong arm was so wrong, whether what we were going to talk about was an even wronger wrongness.
“Look,” she said, “the boats.”
My father pulled the car onto a high plain, a meadow. The plaid bag slid when we braked.
We got out of the car and stood in the grass. We stood in our places from the car. People sat on blankets and bed sheets, pointed at the boats.
“Look,” said my father, and we were looking.
“Does this answer any of your questions?” he said to me.
“Some,” I said.
The wrong arm was backways in front of me like it was still in our secret slot. There were scars, blisters, sun peels, stains. There were birthmarks and marks from after being born. It could be anybody’s arm, I thought. We were making it wrong by saying it was wrong. We should be holding it and rubbing it and taking her by it to lead her somewhere. To lead her by it to the boats. We didn’t need a lantern man’s one fucking opinion in New Paltz to make my mother’s wrong arm right again. We didn’t need all the bees to go to sleep to keep the wrongness in my mother from getting wronger. We just needed to waste all our wishes.
“Let’s go closer,” I said.
And then I did the wrong thing.
My Life, for Promotional Use Only
The building where I work used to be a bank. Now it’s lots of little start-ups, private suites, outlaw architects, renegade CPA’s, club kids with three-picture deals. It’s very artsy in the elevators. Everybody’s shaved and pierced in dainty places. They are lords of tiny telephones, keepers of dogs on battery-operated ropes.
I work here for my ex-girlfriend, some sort of handy-man, or some kind of clerk. I can’t run an accounting program, or collate, or even reload a stapler right, but there’s usually something for me to do, even if it’s only to loiter, to stand around in a way that reminds Rosalie she’s my boss.
This is not hard.
Rosalie is some kind of rock star now. She’s the founder of a web site for serotonin-depleted teenage girls. They log on and rant about their home life to other oppressed teens as far away as Laos, or at least Larchmont. Rosalie’s paper-rich since a big tech outfit bought the company. There’s a line of clothing, a perfume, maybe a sitcom in the works.
Rosalie and I are still chummy. Maybe she feels sorry for me. Maybe she also resents the way I ditched her back when I was a rock star in actual minor fact. She pays me piss wages and sometimes buys me lunch.
“Let’s recap,” she’ll say, the two of us out for Indian. The condition is I tell her all about my latest girlfriend.
“Her name is Glenda,” I say. “She’s a painter.”
“Painting’s very in right now,” says Rosalie. “Or it was a few months ago. I don’t have time to keep up.”
After me, Rosalie fell in love with a boy billionaire who saw her picture in a fashion spread, one of those bulimia gazettes dedicated to time and the body’s dwindle. They had what amounted to an amorous montage, young industrialist and glamorous new media mogulette — Zürich, Paris, Crete. Then one night the kid had a coke seizure, drove his Jeep off a bridge into a lake. For me, there are only two words that count in this story: Electric windows. My father always warned me about them.
“You’re in the drink,” he said, “and the power shorts out. A dumb way to go.”
Maybe they make them differently now. I don’t drive much. Maybe the kid hit his head.
These days Rosalie wrestles her Saint Bernard through doors, calls her lawyer from the curb. Whenever she pinches a napkin in half for the big dog’s leavings, bends over for a civic-minded scoop, her jeans make this lovely spout of denim at the back. You can see a piece of the prayer wheel she has tattooed on her tailbone. Look hard and maybe you can see me there, too, shackled to the spokes, spinning, dying.
“With Glenda, is it as good as it was with us?” Rosalie says at one of our tandoori lunches. Her mouth is a cavern of cumin.
“It’s different,” I say.
“Good answer. We just did an issue on why the best ex-boyfriends lie.”
“I know,” I say, “I was there when you thought it up.”
There really is a Glenda the Painter, but she must be in her nineties by now, if she’s not dead. She was old when my mother took me to her studio on Saturdays to learn how to draw. I could never get past foreshortening feet, which I took, correctly, I think, to be symptomatic of a deep character flaw. I was some side-on maestro, though. I’d have been hot shit in ancient Egypt.
The first time someone at the office asked me about my skill-set, I thought it was some kind of mail-order frying pan. Everyone seems to have one but me. The people I work with are human résumés. They are fluent in every computer language, boast degrees in marketing and medieval song. They snowboard on everything but snow. They study esoteric forms of South American combat and go on all-deer diets. Sometimes I’m not even sure what they are up to, but I know I will read about it in one of our city’s vibrant lifestyle journals. It’s easy to detest these people, but they have such energy, such will.
I used to think I had integrity but I came to realize it was just sloth. For a few years I was the lead singer in a band of punk manqués. I couldn’t sing, but who could? Talent was not the point. The hard dick of knowingness was pushing the least of us into the light. I referred to myself as the frontman. I liked the word. I was never at the front of anything before.
Our music was in dire need of notes but we had the charm of the improperly medicated. Between songs I used to stab out cigarettes on my tongue, weep, proclaim my love for my father in all its sordid, socially-determined complexity. Everyone said they couldn’t make out the words once the music started, but I preferred it that way. God knows what people will think if they ever really hear you.
I met Rosalie when she came to our show at a converted storefront grocery at the edge of the city. Everything was a converted something down there. Every club was the Bakery, the Barber Shop, Shoe Repair. My band was already up on stage, coaxing screeches from defective Peaveys, giving in to the joy of a random cymbal splash. This was our much-theorized intro. My entrance wasn’t due for a while, not until all possible frequencies of aural inanity had cancelled themselves out. Soon enough I would crawl into the lights with a microphone in my ass, bleat what I took to be holy.