Jernigan, page 6
“Petals on a wet black bough,” I said. The faces didn’t look any more or any less blank. “Listen, Danny?” I said. “I’ve got to get back to the hyacenda.” Now, where hyacenda came from was one of Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, where Pat is writing a western movie and gets hacienda wrong. Ext. Long Shot of the Plains. Buck and Mexicans approaching the hyacenda. One more of my obscure things that Danny had no way of understanding. He probably thought it was really hyacenda. “I’ll see you back there, what, before eleven, huh? And if you want to come home for dinner we’ll call Domino’s or something, okay?” Don’t be fooled by how casual this all sounds: I was issuing a command.
“Okay,” he said, looking down and away. I was sorry for him, being ordered around by his father, however collegially, in front of his girlfriend. Or perhaps he was embarrassed by a belated sense of having gone too far with his cheeky little thumbs-up this morning.
Back downstairs, Martha stuck a cassette in my shirt pocket. A long kiss at the door—each bending a knee to insinuate a thigh between the other’s thighs, a voucher for unfinished sexual business—and I was out of there.
The house looked, as I pulled into the driveway, the way a house looks if you’ve been away for a month: that is, the angles and proportions had gone all funny. Or something. Maybe just more distant than I’d expected, as if through the wrong end of binoculars. But there was the lawn, all freshly cut. By me. Yesterday.
I got a beer out of the refrigerator, took it into the bathroom, and finished it while taking off my clothes. The tape in my shirt pocket was labeled WEBB PIERCE in awkward handwriting. I stayed in the shower a good long time, soaping and rinsing everything twice. Then to the bedroom, where the Yahrzeit lamp was still going, pale in the late-afternoon sunlight. I gave the plastic rod a twist to close the blinds, then shut the door, and the candle threw a shaky shadow of me on the wall. I thought how amazingly sick it would be to jerk myself off, after this day, in this candlelight. Then I thought, You’d better stop scaring yourself. So I put on clean clothes, got another beer out of the refrigerator, went into the living room and turned on the tv. Another ballgame, with two thirds of the outfield in shadow.
I was still sitting there when Danny rolled in, during the Independent News. In fact, just as they were rerunning the highlights of the same ballgame, how about that. He sat down on the sofa, crosslegged, with his God damn running shoes still on. Though I don’t suppose I really gave a shit. He sank at once into the tv trance, as if that were his real life in there and the rest was shadows. Well, like father like son. Some commercials came on, then the weather, then the commercial where the pretty woman eats Frusen Glädjé and you wonder whether or not you’re supposed to think she really feels shame. Then the muffler strongman came on and Danny said, “So you going to see her again?”
What he was really asking, I imagined, was the following: A, was his father the kind of man who wouldn’t see a woman again after spending the night with her? B, was that the kind of man to be? C, how would this complicate his life? And perhaps D, was he going to get a new mother? Hey, I could have used the answers too.
“Well,” I said, “we certainly liked each other a lot—I mean, obviously.” Idea: Why not put it on the kid? “But how would you feel about it?” I said. “You and Clarissa? I mean, it’s sort of a strange situation for you to be in, right? All of a sudden your father and her mother.…”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, at least unusual, okay? You’ll grant me unusual?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We kind of knew it would happen and everything. When we finally got you guys together.”
I stared at him. This was sitcom stuff. Well, of course. These were kids who’d spent their lives watching shit like this, widower with houseful of girls meets divorcee with houseful of boys, and some William Frawley type around too, in an oh-so-improbable apron.
“She’s real nice,” he said. “And you two have a lot of stuff in common, right?”
What, like being old?
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “I mean, it was a nice thought, but didn’t you think through the consequences? You know, suppose it really got serious with the two of us and then you and Clarissa broke up. Or vice versa.” I was a great one to talk about thinking through the consequences.
Now he stared. “But Dad,” he said. “If you thought that way about everything, you wouldn’t ever do anything.”
Hey, welcome to Heritage Circle.
He got up off the couch. “I’m gonna go practice.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just use the things, okay? The earphones? And don’t stay up all night.” The shit you’re obliged to say.
After the news they had some paid program on about being an entrepreneur, with people like Famous Amos. I zapped the sound down almost to inaudible and picked up P. G. Wodehouse. If I ever needed Blandings Castle, boy, tonight was the night. The lawns and gardens that you could practically see before you as your eyes moved along through the words, and Psmith winning the hand of Eve Halliday entirely on charm and eccentricity. Without so much as a kiss.
6
Although I’d had enough of it by Sunday afternoon, on Monday morning I called her from work. Partly because it was the call you had to make if you didn’t want to seem heartless, partly because I wanted her again that night. Hey, partly because it would put off for another few minutes having to start calling more prospects about this dogshit office space I’d just listed in the too-far-West 30s, next door to an SRO. I mean, I was saying I’d just listed it. And in fact it was my most recent listing.
Nobody answered the phone, and I hurt like a three-year-old at the thought that she had a life of her own.
Danny wasn’t home when I got back from work. Called over to the Peretskys’, got Clarissa. Yes, Danny was there, but her mother wouldn’t be home until eight. Did I want to talk to Danny? Did I want her mother to call me when she got back? No, no, not important.
I called again at nine-thirty. Not back yet. Tell her … tell her I’ll try to reach her later in the week. Nothing important, tell her. Catch up with her eventually.
Went to work the next day, came home. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door; son of a bitch stopped just as I got to it. Danny, of course, wasn’t home. Phone rang again ten minutes later. Her. “Clarissa is such a space case,” she said. “She didn’t tell me you’d called until this afternoon. I could’ve killed her. So”—deep sigh—“how are you?”
III
1
Eight days before my father died, I had driven up to Woodstock to see him. Oh, no premonitions; just the routine visit I’d been making every couple of months. Better quickly say Woodstock, Connecticut. He bought there in 1970, convinced it was going to be discovered, like the Woodstocks of New York and Vermont. Certainly it became unaffordable, like everyplace else, but as far as I could see it hadn’t been discovered in the sense he meant. Just another pretty New England town with no reason for anybody to be there.
“So how do things march down there in America?” he said, pouring a glass of George Dickel for me and a smaller amount for himself. America, in his code, meant New Jersey. The whiskey glugged, as it will out of a new bottle. His face seemed redder than ever, and his belly forced gaps between the pearloid buttons of his denim shirt.
“A lot you care, you old beatnik,” I said. “I bet you don’t even watch Wheel of Fortune up here. What do you do with yourself, anyway? Read Emerson all day?”
“Emerson?” he said. “What do you think, I’m going native? Emerson tv, maybe. Actually, I was thinking about trying to get my Latin working again so I could read the Eclogues. Or maybe it’s the Georgics—what the hell am I trying to think of? There’s one about shepherds and one about farming. One I want is the one about farming.”
“Then you want the Georgics,” I said. “I think.”
“Let me write this down,” he said. “So you still remember all this business.”
“You can take the boy out of the academy …,” I said. “So what have you been up to?”
“Here you see it,” he said, raising his glass, which was almost empty already. “Nah, I do this and that. Work a little bit. You want to see a couple things? Don’t say yes just to humor an old man. On the other hand, don’t say no.”
“What can I say?” I said.
“And mind you praise ’em up,” he said, getting to his feet and setting down his empty glass. “No matter how much they secretly depress you.”
“This must be hot shit,” I said. “Assuming I’m uncrumpling your ironies correctly.”
“Well,” he said, obviously pleased with himself, “you’ll see what you think.”
I got up and followed him. “Leave it,” he said, pointing to my glass. “House rule. No bringing sauce into the workplace. Unless,” he said, patting his stomach, “it’s already on board.”
The studio had been a henhouse. He’d paid some contractor too much money to move it from up behind the house and attach it to the north wall of the kitchen on a new foundation. Now it had a wall of glass where chicken wire used to be and skylights let into the roof. A potbelly stove sat on a podium of salvaged bricks.
“Looks neater than usual in here,” I said. “I thought the creative impulse was supposed to thrive on disorder.”
Instead of answering—or by way of answering—he laid a hand on my shoulder and turned me around. It was a giant painting of my mother’s face, as it was when I was a child, on a yellow field squirming with brushstrokes. Big: the top of the head was level with the top of my head, the chin down around my navel. And absolutely photorealistic, except for the eyes: like most of his recent people, she had two pairs. And a dagger-shaped piece of paper, a foot or so long, that was glued or lacquered over her mouth. You had to look closely, but you could see it had been ripped out of a blown-up print of the Mona Lisa: you could make out the smile, the chin, an ear, and some of that crumbling landscape. The way it was slapped across the bottom of her face, it looked as if she were being gagged. It looked like a smirk too. Or a scream.
Then I stepped closer: at two feet away I could see that the whole thing was painted. At the instant I caught on, he laughed his little two-note laugh. “Trump your oil, did I?”
“You old goat,” I said. “So you can still get it up.”
“Try to,” he said. “Couple more here someplace.” From behind the sort of stand-up screen artists’ models used when they undressed, he carried out five more canvases, all in the same series.
“Jeez,” I said. “Should I try to strike the Greenbergian note here, or just tell you they’re wonderful?”
He shook his head. “Detail,” he said. “Go into a lot of detail about why they work so well. Then I want to hear about how Trina is going to sell ’em for a hundred grand a pop and how that little shit Julian Schnabel is going to get his ass kicked.”
“Well,” I said, gearing up.
“And then maybe throw in a word on your own behalf, and tell me what the hell you’re doing as an assistant vice shoeshine boy at some outfit that’s doing its bit to help squeeze the working man out of New York City. Not to mention the painting man.”
“Ho boy,” I said. “Do we have to do this again?”
“I worry,” he said.
“About what, for Christ’s sake? The money is fine, as long as you don’t try to live in Manhattan on it. I mean, it beats junior-professor money. And it’s, I don’t know, soothing. It’s all this business that has to get done, you know?”
“It depresses the hell out of me,” he said. “Underneath all those layers of bullshit, what you’ve basically got is a bunch of self-pity. And what you’ve got underneath that, presumably, is rage at me for whatever it was you think I did to you.”
Don’t worry, he wasn’t going to catch me that easily.
“Aha!” I thundered, levelling an accusing finger. “All the father’s fault!” I blew on my finger and holstered it. “I mean, come on. Being Francis Jernigan’s son isn’t like you have Down syndrome, for Christ’s sake.” This much was true, no matter how I felt. “If you want to blame somebody, then blame what’s-his-name, Hofmann.”
“What Hofmann? What are you talking about?”
“The LSD guy,” I said. “Somebody Hofmann. Hans Hofmann.”
“Not Hans,” he said.
“Little joke,” I said.
He shook his head. “How anybody could take that stuff twice,” he said. “That God damn little pill of yours cost me six months of work.”
“So that was your atonement, okay?” I nodded at the paintings. “So. What did you work from on these?”
“Ah,” he said. “Sheer inspiration. See, she appears whenever I rub the bottle. Those George Dickel ones seem to work best these days. You rub it and …” He suddenly got tired of his jeu d’esprit. “Old picture I had around,” he said. “You ever see this one?”
He went over to his work table, opened an Edgeworth tobacco tin and handed me an old black-and-white snapshot the size of a playing card. “I had this blown up so I could see it better, you know? And just took her head off it.”
It was the three of us, in bathing suits, with a lifeguard’s tower in the background. Me standing between my mother and father, holding their hands. I looked to be about three or four, short enough so that to reach their hands my arms were raised like a strongman’s. My mother’s face was the face in the painting, all right. I avoided looking at the breasts. Across the years, her eyes met yours.
“Where was this?” I said.
“Florida.”
“I vaguely remember,” I said. “There was a big cockroach or something where we were staying.” I looked again: all three of us. “So who took this picture?” I said.
“Ah, that’s what makes it so special,” he said. “Jack Solomon.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “He was there with the three of us?”
“Sure. Him and Margaret. Poor old Margaret. You think I look like shit. You ought to see her these days. As I remember, we only dug out these bathing suits for the picture so we wouldn’t scandalize ’em back at the drugstore. Most of the time we were running around buck naked. You remember he used to walk out into the water with you on his shoulders?”
I shook my head. “I hope I shit all over his hairy back,” I said.
“Nah, you and he were big buddies,” he said. “Hell, he and I were big buddies.”
“This was before anything was going on? Or don’t you know?”
“During,” he said. “In the middle of. As nearly as I can tell. Six months, a year into it. I suppose I didn’t figure it out because it was so obvious. The Purloined Letter. I can remember just like that”— he made an artist’s half-frame with a right angle of thumb and forefinger—“when this picture was taken. Him standing there naked pointing that big old box camera and his dick hanging down.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Taken me all these years to see that I could just go ahead and use the image and not worry about, oh, narrative or anything. I guess I decided nobody gave a shit anymore. Including me.”
“Well,” I said, “it made you a hell of a picture. Hell of a series.”
“And only a part of my long legacy of joy and light.” He opened the door. “What do you say we go in and get pissed? I already gave myself the day off tomorrow to watch the playoffs. That’s what kind of Emerson we got up here. Emerson tv.” He seemed to have forgotten he’d made this joke before.
“Suits me,” I said. “Judith took Danny with her up to her mother’s, so I’m not expected. I can go back down in the morning, if you’ve got a bed for me to pass out on.”
“Couple of ’em,” he said. “So how come that old cow gets to see her grandson and I don’t?” He filled his glass, then topped off mine.
“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I said. (He’s lying. Joe Isuzu.) “He likes going up there because they’ve got this big music store around the corner from her house. What do you have around the corner that can compete with that?”
“Cows,” he said. “Four-footed ones. And a damn sight better to look at. And a lot more useful to the human race. And not a whole lot stupider.”
“What can I say,” I said. “Next time.”
Which turned out to be his funeral. Not the heart attack for which I’d been preparing myself, but a fire that burned the whole place to the foundation. First the studio, then the rest of the house. The oil and the turpentine and the woodstove and him probably in there drunk. At any rate they found a bottle, shattered by the heat apparently.
2
Whatever money Trina could have gotten him for the new work probably wouldn’t have helped much.
The day after his memorial she invited me for a drink. It turned out there wasn’t much business to wrap up. She had a few small pieces she hadn’t been able to get rid of; he’d owed her a few thousand dollars for a few years. My father had distrusted Trina on principle, though she’d been his dealer since his first show, in 1949. I’d always assumed she’d done what she could. It wasn’t her fault the stuff from the early ’50s kept going up every time it got sold again, and she genuinely seemed to admire the post-’65 stuff: she gave a muted wail when I described the paintings destroyed in the fire. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. Her eyes darted around the tabletop: finally she tapped her cigarette ash into her empty glass. “Ah well,” she said. “At some point they simply weren’t tracking him anymore, and of course what can one say?”
“He never should’ve stopped with the squiggles,” I said.
“That couldn’t have lasted forever, either, darling. What you’ve told me—I can’t even think about it. And that stunning old house. Though at least you’ll have the insurance. Is that crass of me to say?” She lit another cigarette and raised her hand; when the waiter looked over, she scribbled on a phantom credit card slip with a phantom pen.
