Jernigan, page 23
I put the radio on, but it was just an AM one and damned if I could find any Christmas music on the whole thing. News Radio 88, Latin music, a bunch of call-in shows. “Big night for the lonely souls,” I said, and snapped the thing back off.
Martha started weeping.
“Fuck,” I said. At least this shut everybody up the rest of the way. After a few miles Martha’s shoulders even stopped heaving.
I pulled up in front of the house and turned the car off. They all just sat there. Without the engine going, it was as silent as it got in New Jersey. Snow hitting the windshield and melting. Finally Danny said, “We’re going to go in, okay?”
I just gave a good big shrug, meaning What the fuck difference did it make what anybody did. This was called not helping matters any.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Peretsky?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said. “You guys run ahead in.”
That left the two of us.
Martha said, “He was Rusty’s best friend.”
So apparently we were now going to get the story of Tim.
“Like before high school,” she said. “And they both ended up back here after the army. I mean they weren’t like in Vietnam or anything. Tim actually was in the Air Force, and Rusty was in Morocco most of his time. Anyhow, they were sharing this house, and Rusty and I started going out. I was done college and I had my first real job, you know, that wasn’t like waiting tables, and now I had this cool boyfriend. And so eventually I moved in. I was the only one that had a job or anything. Once in a while Rusty would get like a package from Morocco, or he and Tim would go in on a key together and sell enough lids out of it to get their money back, but that was about as far as it went. The whole rent was like a hundred dollars. So Rusty and Tim would just kind of go around scrounging things, like I remember a lot of the wood we used to burn in the wintertime they got following these guys around from a tree service. I think Tim’s dad got him into raising rabbits. At any rate, that stuff gave him the idea to start the magazine, which Rusty thought was crazy. Like Rusty used to call him the PM? Because he was going to be the Publishing Mogul. But I used to do typing for him sometimes after I got done work and kind of generally help out. And I used to do like little drawings to go at the bottom of the pages and stuff.”
I suppose that was my cue to say Oh really, I’d love to see some. Didn’t know she ever did drawings. At this late date it was kind of a so-what.
Snow was starting to stick to the windshield.
“So then when I got pregnant with Clarissa,” she said, “Rusty and I were going to get married and everything, but we were going to all just keep living in the house like before. And then like a month before she was born Rusty sold some weed to an undercover cop and he got sent away for a year. This was, you know, ’72. So anyhow, Tim just stayed and looked after me and Clarissa for that whole year. ’Cause I’d quit my job and everything. For a while he was even pumping gas at night at this service area on the Garden State so there’d be money coming in. And the whole time nothing ever happened, and you can believe that or not.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Rusty sure didn’t. After he got out and everything, the three of us just kept living there, but he wouldn’t talk to Tim very much. Or me much, either. It like really changed him. I always wondered if guys maybe did something to him there. Though the really weird stuff didn’t start till we moved here and Tim got his own place.”
“The really weird stuff,” I said.
“Well he sort of hit me and stuff,” she said.
Figured.
“At any rate,” she said. “So after Rusty and I split up I started seeing Tim again. I mean, not seeing him seeing him, but we’d get together and talk and stuff, have dinner. So I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly got so weird tonight. I think I’m premenstrual.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down.”
“Is that putting myself down?” she said.
The whole windshield was white by this time. You couldn’t see out.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just talking.” Truest thing I’d said in weeks. “It’s cold,” I said. “You want to go in?”
“It’s cold in there too,” she said.
“Unless the kids started the stove,” I said. “Little joke.”
We sat there with my little joke echoing.
“Well, look,” I said. “I’m going in.”
“Would you do me a big favor?” she said. “Could you just leave me the key and go in and start the stove and let me run the heater until it warms up in there? Just this one time? I really don’t think I can stand it tonight going in there and having it be cold.”
“What do you mean can you have the key?” I said. “It’s your car, right?”
“I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not going to make a habit of this.”
“Hey,” I said, and opened the door. “Christmas comes but once a year.” Mr. Gracious.
Snow was really coming down. The walkway was completely white, and just a few blades of grass were sticking up out of the white lawn. It was a little warmer inside than out, but the stove had cooled enough to put your hand on. You could hear the tv going in the kids’ room.
I got the stove started and sat there in my coat. First the heat hit my shins. Then I felt it on my face. Then I went out to fetch Martha. The car was throbbing away with the windows fogged up, and one of those impossible things crossed my mind: that she’d got a vacuum cleaner hose from somewhere and hooked it to the tailpipe. So did that mean that I wished her dead, or was it just one more thought?
I helped her up the steps so she wouldn’t slip. She went in and sat down on the floor by the stove, hugging her knees like the woman in that Edward Hopper painting. My father used to have a print of it hanging in the living room, back when I was a kid. Woman sitting on her bed, window open, face full of sun. He’d done such a convincing job of painting harlequin sunglasses on her that I’d grown up thinking that was what the thing looked like. I tried to give myself a gratuitous feeling of awe by thinking about the comparative pinprick of fire in the stove versus the unimaginably vast fire of the sun. But of course your mind can’t really leap magnitudes that way.
“So I guess the presents can wait until tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot to take the presents. He’s going to think I’m terrible.”
“Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,” I said, “He’ll always say, ‘I forgive.’ You want anything to drink?”
She shook her head.
“Well that makes one of us,” I said, and went into the kitchen. “How about to eat?” I called, pouring out a good big glassful of gin. No answer. I’d finished up that bottle of Absolut—waste not, want not—but it didn’t touch the heart the way the old gin-ereeno did.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She’d worn her denim skirt tonight, probably as a message to Tim that in her heart the 1970s would never be over. She had the buttons undone to mid-thigh. The front of the skirt covered her knees as she hugged them; the back fell away, revealing white thigh down to the underpants. So I had finally gotten there: no desire at all.
She looked up and saw me looking. “You have my permission to get as fucked up as you want,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What, me worry?” I said. I considered following this up with a hugh-hugh-hugh goofy moron laugh. But that would have taken things to too crazy a place.
You could hear stuff snapping in the woodstove.
“In case you’re feeling guilty, Peter,” she said, “this actually is not the worst Christmas I ever had. Or in case you’re flattering yourself.” She got to her feet and started for the bedroom.
“I thought you wanted to get warm,” I said.
“I won’t say the obvious,” she said. I got her drift, but how, exactly, would she have phrased it?
I heard the bedroom door close. Just close, not slam. Which made me think about how everything went in circles, just like the Beatles used to say. You started out closing the door, then things got so bad you were slamming the door, and then things got really really bad and all you did was just close the fucking door. Why the Beatles, though? Probably thinking of that song. The one that goes Of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.
IX
1
Me waking up, Martha gone, same old beginning again. What was different was, I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to bed. I mean, it was obvious how I’d gotten to bed: leaning on Danny’s strong young shoulder, right? (Little joke.) But I couldn’t remember actually stumbling to the bedroom. Yet here I was. The old res ipsa loquitur. Odd that loquor should be a passive verb. Though in Latin, stuff like active/passive or masculine/feminine didn’t really mean anything. Bully for Latin. Take agricola, famous example. According to Danny—who wasn’t one of them—a few kids in his school wanted to take Latin, probably because they thought it would help them get into better colleges, but there wasn’t anybody left in the school system who could teach it. One more way you could have made yourself useful if back years ago you’d done everything differently. Funny shit to end up thinking about first thing on Christmas morning. If it was in fact morning. Though what the appropriate thoughts might have been I still can’t imagine. What, you’re supposed to lie there wondering why the Word had to be made flesh?
Clearly nobody in the house, whatever time it was. You could tell by the feel of things, not that I really believe in the feel of things. (And if things did have a feel, who less apt to feel that feel than Jernigan?) I mean, for all I know the kids were up in their room lying spent after the noisy fuck that I hadn’t realized was what had awakened me. Cold as hell in here, maybe that’s what I meant by the feel of things. Rick’s card still unopened on the night table. What could he possibly have written that I’d want to read? (How about a ream of typed pages—some in prose paragraphs, some in verse, like Jack Nicholson’s opus magnum in The Shining—saying over and over again I forgive you I forgive you I forgive you?) Most likely all it said was what last year’s said: Thinking of you. Fuck a bunch of being thought of. I took it with me down to the kitchen and threw it in the garbage, still unopened. Let the good wishes go biodegrade themselves.
On the kitchen table I found a note, on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, with ragged perforations along one side.
Peter and kids,
I went over to Tim’s to pick up our presents. If you wake up, there’s o. j. all made in the fridge and some English muffins and REAL BUTTER!!! Merry Xmas.
—M
The clock said like twenty-five of one. Wasn’t she afraid of interrupting Tim and the girlfriend as they lolled? Though I was forgetting the girlfriend had a child to get back to, there’s something I remembered, so no lolling probably for old Tim this Christmas morning. Wasn’t there a pitcher named Tim Lollar?
I polished off the last little bit of gin in the old quart—must’ve been a hell of a rest of the night, boy—and opened a new one. More economical to buy half gallons, I know, but that was too alcoholic. (It was also alcoholic to worry about whether things were too alcoholic.) So I’d kept buying quarts, but two at a time so as not to have to go back so often. And another day began. I reminded myself to look out the window. Out of touch with nature: hell, that was probably, what, a good two percent of the problem right there. Bright outside. Sun seemed to have melted most of the snow—now there was another thing I remembered, snowstorm last night—except for what lay in the shadows of the tree trunks. I thought Hey, white shadows, how about that.
Well, so now we knew where Martha was, but what about the kids? What the hell kind of kids, more to the point, would absent themselves on Christmas morning? True, they couldn’t have had high hopes, but. Maybe everybody’d simply gotten tired of waiting for old Dad to roll out, and decided to go ahead and have their Christmas just the three of them. I went into the living room and looked: all the shit was still under the tree. So. Big mystery. And of course so very interesting to think about.
I seemed to have burned up everything in the woodbox last night, so the first thing to do was put on shoes and a coat and go out and get some logs in. Et cetera. Upstairs I heard the tv go on. Maybe they’d just been waiting to hear me moving around so they wouldn’t disturb my sleep. (Little joke.) It was probably more like, We know you’re up now so this is just to let you know we’re in here and you can go fuck yourself. Maybe old Martha had the right idea, sit in the car and run the heater—one more thing I remembered from last night. (Shit, it was all going to come back if I just relaxed and didn’t think about it. The old Zen archery.) So I went and got dressed, put on overcoat and gloves, jammed the big new gin bottle into the big side pocket and went out to the car. Took another good belt and slipped the bottle under the seat, figuring fuck all this soda-can bullshit: if you can’t even tell whether there’s a cop car around or not, you’re not in any shape to be driving anyway.
So I cruised around town for a while with the heater blowing, that and the gin warming me up nicely. The sky was already starting to cloud over again. And I just didn’t want to go back to that God damn house. So I ended up driving all the way up to Paterson, and then east to the GW and down into Manhattan. Got off the West Side Highway at 96th Street and drove up to 102nd. I double-parked and looked up at Uncle Fred’s windows. Nothing to see. Then down to 72nd and Broadway, to Gray’s Papaya. It was illogical—fuck, it was hypocritical—to find it depressing that Gray’s Papaya was open on Christmas. Had a hot dog and a piña colada, which I fucked up by dumping a bunch of gin in it. Cleaned out the car while I was parked there, got rid of all the Diet Coke cans and McDonald’s bags and shit in a trash basket. That fucking cowboy jacket too. Laying it on top where some shivering derelict might see it. So that was about all she wrote for the world’s greatest city.
By then the sky had darkened except for a fissure in the west where the sun was going down. Couple flakes of snow. On the GW again, pretty adequately fuzzed by this time, driving into that sunset, the golden glare ahead inviting me just to close my eyes and be absorbed. Thinking about Judith again. There must have been a nanosecond there when she went Oh my God and then Oh all right, fuck it. I had another headache. Or more of the same headache. From squinting. From that God damn hand hurting. From worrying about how bad I was being, disappearing for hours on Christmas Day, drunk, the presents still unopened.
Parked in front of the house was a red Suzuki Samurai. Shiny. Probably some snot-nosed little friend of Danny and Clarissa’s. Well, fuck ’em, maybe they’d all go off drunk driving, or whatever kind of driving, and leave me in peace. This was, in effect, wishing your son dead.
In the kitchen, a black leather shoulderbag hung from one of the chairs. It stunk: that new-leather stink. I looked through the doorway into the living room. Danny and Clarissa were on the couch, at least a foot of cushion between them. Clarissa staring, as usual, at her black Reeboks. Danny smoking. Nobody talking. The visitor was in the Morris chair. From the doorway you could see an acute angle of leg: a cowboy boot, heel worn down, sticking up into acid-washed denim. Danny looked up at me and gave his head a little side-to-side shake. I gave him back a jaunty salute, meaning Fuck you too, and went to the dish drainer for a jelly glass. You don’t just put the bottle to your mouth in front of company.
When I turned around, a man in the kitchen was saying, “You Jernigan?”
Taller than me by the worn boot heel. Thick hair like some politician trying to look Kennedyesque. One of those mask faces, skin way too tight. The face might have passed for younger than mine if not for those breastlike bags under the eyes. Smiling, or at least showing teeth. Black cable-knit sweater. Jeans tight on him. Daylight between his thighs.
“Rusty Ronson,” he said.
Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that.
“Ronson?” I said.
“Hey, change my luck,” he said, “you know what I’m saying? Let her have Peretsky, she’s such a victim anyway. Fuck a lot of good it did me. Pah-RET-sky.” He began to sing his name to the tune of “The Bowery”:
Pah-ret-sky, Pah-RET-sky
He says such things and he does such things oh Pah
RET-sky, Pah-RET-sky
I’ll never be him anymore.
I held up the bottle and the jelly glass level with his eyes. “Drink?” I said, figuring it would either smooth him out or not.
“I think we need to get to know each other first,” he said. He worked his wallet out of his hip pocket and handed me a business card: on it, a Rolls Royce radiator with the RR emblem, and beneath it, in gothic typeface, RUSTY RONSON ENTERPRISES.
“You in the car business now?” I said, being oh so casual. Not scared.
“Car business?” he said. “That’s what she told you? Shit.” He shook his head. “Promotion business,” he said. “Independent promoter. So tell me one thing. What kind of freak show you got going in my house here? We know you’re fucking my wife. That’s been established. You touch my daughter?”
Behind him, in the doorway, I saw Danny.
“Hey Dan?” I said. “Why don’t you take Clarissa out for a walk, okay?”
“I asked you something.”
“What is this about?” I said. Pulling sweatshirt over head. “Of course I didn’t touch your daughter.” White breasts.
“She says different.”
I looked at Clarissa. She looked at me.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Mr. Jernigan, honest. Daddy’s playing one of his weird-shit games.”
“Kayokayokay,” he said, waving his hand back and forth as if erasing a blackboard. “I’m allowed to test you, right? My responsibility, right? As a parent. As a motherfucking parent, man. I am now fully satisfied that Danny Boy here and Danny Boy alone is putting the boots to my daughter. And I believe I will have that drink.”
“I think we’re out of tonic,” I said. “Water do you okay?”
Martha started weeping.
“Fuck,” I said. At least this shut everybody up the rest of the way. After a few miles Martha’s shoulders even stopped heaving.
I pulled up in front of the house and turned the car off. They all just sat there. Without the engine going, it was as silent as it got in New Jersey. Snow hitting the windshield and melting. Finally Danny said, “We’re going to go in, okay?”
I just gave a good big shrug, meaning What the fuck difference did it make what anybody did. This was called not helping matters any.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Peretsky?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said. “You guys run ahead in.”
That left the two of us.
Martha said, “He was Rusty’s best friend.”
So apparently we were now going to get the story of Tim.
“Like before high school,” she said. “And they both ended up back here after the army. I mean they weren’t like in Vietnam or anything. Tim actually was in the Air Force, and Rusty was in Morocco most of his time. Anyhow, they were sharing this house, and Rusty and I started going out. I was done college and I had my first real job, you know, that wasn’t like waiting tables, and now I had this cool boyfriend. And so eventually I moved in. I was the only one that had a job or anything. Once in a while Rusty would get like a package from Morocco, or he and Tim would go in on a key together and sell enough lids out of it to get their money back, but that was about as far as it went. The whole rent was like a hundred dollars. So Rusty and Tim would just kind of go around scrounging things, like I remember a lot of the wood we used to burn in the wintertime they got following these guys around from a tree service. I think Tim’s dad got him into raising rabbits. At any rate, that stuff gave him the idea to start the magazine, which Rusty thought was crazy. Like Rusty used to call him the PM? Because he was going to be the Publishing Mogul. But I used to do typing for him sometimes after I got done work and kind of generally help out. And I used to do like little drawings to go at the bottom of the pages and stuff.”
I suppose that was my cue to say Oh really, I’d love to see some. Didn’t know she ever did drawings. At this late date it was kind of a so-what.
Snow was starting to stick to the windshield.
“So then when I got pregnant with Clarissa,” she said, “Rusty and I were going to get married and everything, but we were going to all just keep living in the house like before. And then like a month before she was born Rusty sold some weed to an undercover cop and he got sent away for a year. This was, you know, ’72. So anyhow, Tim just stayed and looked after me and Clarissa for that whole year. ’Cause I’d quit my job and everything. For a while he was even pumping gas at night at this service area on the Garden State so there’d be money coming in. And the whole time nothing ever happened, and you can believe that or not.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Rusty sure didn’t. After he got out and everything, the three of us just kept living there, but he wouldn’t talk to Tim very much. Or me much, either. It like really changed him. I always wondered if guys maybe did something to him there. Though the really weird stuff didn’t start till we moved here and Tim got his own place.”
“The really weird stuff,” I said.
“Well he sort of hit me and stuff,” she said.
Figured.
“At any rate,” she said. “So after Rusty and I split up I started seeing Tim again. I mean, not seeing him seeing him, but we’d get together and talk and stuff, have dinner. So I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly got so weird tonight. I think I’m premenstrual.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down.”
“Is that putting myself down?” she said.
The whole windshield was white by this time. You couldn’t see out.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just talking.” Truest thing I’d said in weeks. “It’s cold,” I said. “You want to go in?”
“It’s cold in there too,” she said.
“Unless the kids started the stove,” I said. “Little joke.”
We sat there with my little joke echoing.
“Well, look,” I said. “I’m going in.”
“Would you do me a big favor?” she said. “Could you just leave me the key and go in and start the stove and let me run the heater until it warms up in there? Just this one time? I really don’t think I can stand it tonight going in there and having it be cold.”
“What do you mean can you have the key?” I said. “It’s your car, right?”
“I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not going to make a habit of this.”
“Hey,” I said, and opened the door. “Christmas comes but once a year.” Mr. Gracious.
Snow was really coming down. The walkway was completely white, and just a few blades of grass were sticking up out of the white lawn. It was a little warmer inside than out, but the stove had cooled enough to put your hand on. You could hear the tv going in the kids’ room.
I got the stove started and sat there in my coat. First the heat hit my shins. Then I felt it on my face. Then I went out to fetch Martha. The car was throbbing away with the windows fogged up, and one of those impossible things crossed my mind: that she’d got a vacuum cleaner hose from somewhere and hooked it to the tailpipe. So did that mean that I wished her dead, or was it just one more thought?
I helped her up the steps so she wouldn’t slip. She went in and sat down on the floor by the stove, hugging her knees like the woman in that Edward Hopper painting. My father used to have a print of it hanging in the living room, back when I was a kid. Woman sitting on her bed, window open, face full of sun. He’d done such a convincing job of painting harlequin sunglasses on her that I’d grown up thinking that was what the thing looked like. I tried to give myself a gratuitous feeling of awe by thinking about the comparative pinprick of fire in the stove versus the unimaginably vast fire of the sun. But of course your mind can’t really leap magnitudes that way.
“So I guess the presents can wait until tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot to take the presents. He’s going to think I’m terrible.”
“Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,” I said, “He’ll always say, ‘I forgive.’ You want anything to drink?”
She shook her head.
“Well that makes one of us,” I said, and went into the kitchen. “How about to eat?” I called, pouring out a good big glassful of gin. No answer. I’d finished up that bottle of Absolut—waste not, want not—but it didn’t touch the heart the way the old gin-ereeno did.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She’d worn her denim skirt tonight, probably as a message to Tim that in her heart the 1970s would never be over. She had the buttons undone to mid-thigh. The front of the skirt covered her knees as she hugged them; the back fell away, revealing white thigh down to the underpants. So I had finally gotten there: no desire at all.
She looked up and saw me looking. “You have my permission to get as fucked up as you want,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What, me worry?” I said. I considered following this up with a hugh-hugh-hugh goofy moron laugh. But that would have taken things to too crazy a place.
You could hear stuff snapping in the woodstove.
“In case you’re feeling guilty, Peter,” she said, “this actually is not the worst Christmas I ever had. Or in case you’re flattering yourself.” She got to her feet and started for the bedroom.
“I thought you wanted to get warm,” I said.
“I won’t say the obvious,” she said. I got her drift, but how, exactly, would she have phrased it?
I heard the bedroom door close. Just close, not slam. Which made me think about how everything went in circles, just like the Beatles used to say. You started out closing the door, then things got so bad you were slamming the door, and then things got really really bad and all you did was just close the fucking door. Why the Beatles, though? Probably thinking of that song. The one that goes Of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.
IX
1
Me waking up, Martha gone, same old beginning again. What was different was, I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to bed. I mean, it was obvious how I’d gotten to bed: leaning on Danny’s strong young shoulder, right? (Little joke.) But I couldn’t remember actually stumbling to the bedroom. Yet here I was. The old res ipsa loquitur. Odd that loquor should be a passive verb. Though in Latin, stuff like active/passive or masculine/feminine didn’t really mean anything. Bully for Latin. Take agricola, famous example. According to Danny—who wasn’t one of them—a few kids in his school wanted to take Latin, probably because they thought it would help them get into better colleges, but there wasn’t anybody left in the school system who could teach it. One more way you could have made yourself useful if back years ago you’d done everything differently. Funny shit to end up thinking about first thing on Christmas morning. If it was in fact morning. Though what the appropriate thoughts might have been I still can’t imagine. What, you’re supposed to lie there wondering why the Word had to be made flesh?
Clearly nobody in the house, whatever time it was. You could tell by the feel of things, not that I really believe in the feel of things. (And if things did have a feel, who less apt to feel that feel than Jernigan?) I mean, for all I know the kids were up in their room lying spent after the noisy fuck that I hadn’t realized was what had awakened me. Cold as hell in here, maybe that’s what I meant by the feel of things. Rick’s card still unopened on the night table. What could he possibly have written that I’d want to read? (How about a ream of typed pages—some in prose paragraphs, some in verse, like Jack Nicholson’s opus magnum in The Shining—saying over and over again I forgive you I forgive you I forgive you?) Most likely all it said was what last year’s said: Thinking of you. Fuck a bunch of being thought of. I took it with me down to the kitchen and threw it in the garbage, still unopened. Let the good wishes go biodegrade themselves.
On the kitchen table I found a note, on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, with ragged perforations along one side.
Peter and kids,
I went over to Tim’s to pick up our presents. If you wake up, there’s o. j. all made in the fridge and some English muffins and REAL BUTTER!!! Merry Xmas.
—M
The clock said like twenty-five of one. Wasn’t she afraid of interrupting Tim and the girlfriend as they lolled? Though I was forgetting the girlfriend had a child to get back to, there’s something I remembered, so no lolling probably for old Tim this Christmas morning. Wasn’t there a pitcher named Tim Lollar?
I polished off the last little bit of gin in the old quart—must’ve been a hell of a rest of the night, boy—and opened a new one. More economical to buy half gallons, I know, but that was too alcoholic. (It was also alcoholic to worry about whether things were too alcoholic.) So I’d kept buying quarts, but two at a time so as not to have to go back so often. And another day began. I reminded myself to look out the window. Out of touch with nature: hell, that was probably, what, a good two percent of the problem right there. Bright outside. Sun seemed to have melted most of the snow—now there was another thing I remembered, snowstorm last night—except for what lay in the shadows of the tree trunks. I thought Hey, white shadows, how about that.
Well, so now we knew where Martha was, but what about the kids? What the hell kind of kids, more to the point, would absent themselves on Christmas morning? True, they couldn’t have had high hopes, but. Maybe everybody’d simply gotten tired of waiting for old Dad to roll out, and decided to go ahead and have their Christmas just the three of them. I went into the living room and looked: all the shit was still under the tree. So. Big mystery. And of course so very interesting to think about.
I seemed to have burned up everything in the woodbox last night, so the first thing to do was put on shoes and a coat and go out and get some logs in. Et cetera. Upstairs I heard the tv go on. Maybe they’d just been waiting to hear me moving around so they wouldn’t disturb my sleep. (Little joke.) It was probably more like, We know you’re up now so this is just to let you know we’re in here and you can go fuck yourself. Maybe old Martha had the right idea, sit in the car and run the heater—one more thing I remembered from last night. (Shit, it was all going to come back if I just relaxed and didn’t think about it. The old Zen archery.) So I went and got dressed, put on overcoat and gloves, jammed the big new gin bottle into the big side pocket and went out to the car. Took another good belt and slipped the bottle under the seat, figuring fuck all this soda-can bullshit: if you can’t even tell whether there’s a cop car around or not, you’re not in any shape to be driving anyway.
So I cruised around town for a while with the heater blowing, that and the gin warming me up nicely. The sky was already starting to cloud over again. And I just didn’t want to go back to that God damn house. So I ended up driving all the way up to Paterson, and then east to the GW and down into Manhattan. Got off the West Side Highway at 96th Street and drove up to 102nd. I double-parked and looked up at Uncle Fred’s windows. Nothing to see. Then down to 72nd and Broadway, to Gray’s Papaya. It was illogical—fuck, it was hypocritical—to find it depressing that Gray’s Papaya was open on Christmas. Had a hot dog and a piña colada, which I fucked up by dumping a bunch of gin in it. Cleaned out the car while I was parked there, got rid of all the Diet Coke cans and McDonald’s bags and shit in a trash basket. That fucking cowboy jacket too. Laying it on top where some shivering derelict might see it. So that was about all she wrote for the world’s greatest city.
By then the sky had darkened except for a fissure in the west where the sun was going down. Couple flakes of snow. On the GW again, pretty adequately fuzzed by this time, driving into that sunset, the golden glare ahead inviting me just to close my eyes and be absorbed. Thinking about Judith again. There must have been a nanosecond there when she went Oh my God and then Oh all right, fuck it. I had another headache. Or more of the same headache. From squinting. From that God damn hand hurting. From worrying about how bad I was being, disappearing for hours on Christmas Day, drunk, the presents still unopened.
Parked in front of the house was a red Suzuki Samurai. Shiny. Probably some snot-nosed little friend of Danny and Clarissa’s. Well, fuck ’em, maybe they’d all go off drunk driving, or whatever kind of driving, and leave me in peace. This was, in effect, wishing your son dead.
In the kitchen, a black leather shoulderbag hung from one of the chairs. It stunk: that new-leather stink. I looked through the doorway into the living room. Danny and Clarissa were on the couch, at least a foot of cushion between them. Clarissa staring, as usual, at her black Reeboks. Danny smoking. Nobody talking. The visitor was in the Morris chair. From the doorway you could see an acute angle of leg: a cowboy boot, heel worn down, sticking up into acid-washed denim. Danny looked up at me and gave his head a little side-to-side shake. I gave him back a jaunty salute, meaning Fuck you too, and went to the dish drainer for a jelly glass. You don’t just put the bottle to your mouth in front of company.
When I turned around, a man in the kitchen was saying, “You Jernigan?”
Taller than me by the worn boot heel. Thick hair like some politician trying to look Kennedyesque. One of those mask faces, skin way too tight. The face might have passed for younger than mine if not for those breastlike bags under the eyes. Smiling, or at least showing teeth. Black cable-knit sweater. Jeans tight on him. Daylight between his thighs.
“Rusty Ronson,” he said.
Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that.
“Ronson?” I said.
“Hey, change my luck,” he said, “you know what I’m saying? Let her have Peretsky, she’s such a victim anyway. Fuck a lot of good it did me. Pah-RET-sky.” He began to sing his name to the tune of “The Bowery”:
Pah-ret-sky, Pah-RET-sky
He says such things and he does such things oh Pah
RET-sky, Pah-RET-sky
I’ll never be him anymore.
I held up the bottle and the jelly glass level with his eyes. “Drink?” I said, figuring it would either smooth him out or not.
“I think we need to get to know each other first,” he said. He worked his wallet out of his hip pocket and handed me a business card: on it, a Rolls Royce radiator with the RR emblem, and beneath it, in gothic typeface, RUSTY RONSON ENTERPRISES.
“You in the car business now?” I said, being oh so casual. Not scared.
“Car business?” he said. “That’s what she told you? Shit.” He shook his head. “Promotion business,” he said. “Independent promoter. So tell me one thing. What kind of freak show you got going in my house here? We know you’re fucking my wife. That’s been established. You touch my daughter?”
Behind him, in the doorway, I saw Danny.
“Hey Dan?” I said. “Why don’t you take Clarissa out for a walk, okay?”
“I asked you something.”
“What is this about?” I said. Pulling sweatshirt over head. “Of course I didn’t touch your daughter.” White breasts.
“She says different.”
I looked at Clarissa. She looked at me.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Mr. Jernigan, honest. Daddy’s playing one of his weird-shit games.”
“Kayokayokay,” he said, waving his hand back and forth as if erasing a blackboard. “I’m allowed to test you, right? My responsibility, right? As a parent. As a motherfucking parent, man. I am now fully satisfied that Danny Boy here and Danny Boy alone is putting the boots to my daughter. And I believe I will have that drink.”
“I think we’re out of tonic,” I said. “Water do you okay?”
