Domestic Violets, page 7
In the silence that follows—a silence even longer than the one before, long enough for the lamps to turn off and the room to go dark and quiet—I think of all the arguments we’ve had and all of the regrettable things we’ve said to each other since our first silly fights over stupid shit when we were dating. They all seem to have culminated into that.
“It’s done, by the way,” I say. “I finished it.”
I wonder if she’s even heard me, if she’s simply fallen asleep beside me. “Really?” she asks, finally. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s been a long time since you asked.”
I’ve been working on this thing for so long, and now it’s done, but it feels stupid now. Years ago, when I’d just started writing it, I used to print pages for her as I went and she’d read them in front of me. I used to imagine bringing it to her, finished, in a box, surprising her with it.
“I’ll read it on the train when I go to Boston,” she says, and then she says nothing else. Katie read my novel in two days. This girl who shouldn’t even give a shit took my book to bed with her and snuck away from work to finish it, and my wife wants to save it for her upcoming work trip.
Anna is absolutely right. I’m not my father. By the time he was my age, he’d published four novels, won two major literary prizes, and left his first wife.
I wake up sometime later, in the middle of the night. My head is throbbing steadily, my stomach hurts, and I’m sweating. I’m thinking of Katie, because, I realize, I was dreaming of Katie. It was as vivid a dream as I’ve had since I was a kid, so vivid that it takes me minutes to fully accept that it didn’t happen, that she didn’t come into my office, close the door, and start kissing me.
Beneath our sheets, my cock is so hard that I actually gasp in the dark. My normal, average-as-can-be penis has been replaced with something cartoonish and chemically altered, like a penis from the future. I close my eyes and try to do the impossible, to allow that strange dream thread to continue on again. Katie is there, and she smells like shampoo and her corduroy jacket is the only thing she’s wearing. As I kiss the dream version of this lovely girl, my mind wanders.
I’ve pretended to suffer for my art, telling my wife and even myself that I’ve suspended my life and stayed at my ridiculous job out of dedication to my book. But that book is done, and I’m lying in bed looking forward to tomorrow because I will walk into that dreadful office and the first person I see will be Katie.
I don’t want this dream to be over. I want to stay here where I am, but Anna rolls over, sighing in her sleep, and I’m fully awake. Dream Katie is gone. Anna kicks me, and in the perpetual half dark of our room, sighs again, and one sleepy arm drifts back and rests over her head on the pillow. The other arm soon follows and she kicks the blankets down until they rest on her hips. Her nightshirt is pulled against her breast, crooked and tight on her body, and a shadow falls across her stomach. She sighs again, which becomes a soft moan from somewhere deep in her chest. I sit up, and she’s whispering something, but I can’t understand her, more sighs and half words. When she moans again, I recognize it and her breath becomes short and fast.
“God,” she says, barely a whisper, and she arches her back.
She bites her lower lip and her face is beautiful but from this angle, in the low, shadowy light, it’s like the face of a stranger.
“Fuck me,” she says, but it’s so soft that maybe she hasn’t said anything at all.
I am next to her, listening to her. I want to touch her but I can’t, because she’ll wake up and I’ll have to explain this. I want to touch her, but I can’t, because I’m angry at her and she’s angry with me, and even though I love her, I don’t like her as much as I should.
She’s right next to me. I’m alone and she’s alone. We have never been farther apart.
Part II
Chapter 10
I watched Letterman all the time when I was a kid, and then in college, but I can’t remember the last time I saw more than his monologue. He’s gotten more political as he’s gotten older, and he and Paul Shaffer are talking about the election and the economy. John McCain was supposed to be on the show a few days ago, but he canceled at the last minute to deal with the financial crisis, whatever that even means, and Letterman is obviously still pissed.
“Is Grandpa gonna read from one of his books?” Allie asks. She’s excited to be up at this hour, even if she doesn’t completely understand why. She’s wearing pajamas with dolphins on them and she smells like a bowl of mixed candy.
“No, honey,” I say. “He’s gonna read jokes.”
“He doesn’t write jokes. He writes books.”
“You’re right. Someone else wrote these jokes, and now he’s reading them on TV.”
“That’s not fair,” she says. “The people who wrote the jokes should be able to read them.”
I consider trying to break this concept down for my daughter, but I don’t even know where I’d begin. But then Anna is hushing us. “This is it. He always does the Top Ten List after the first commercial.”
We’re in our pajamas, sitting on the couch, and I’m nervous for my dad. Letterman isn’t even live—it was taped hours ago—but I haven’t heard from him and I have no idea how it went. He could have fallen on his face or been drunk or accidentally said the F-word on the air. God only knows. Letterman looks up at the audience and raises a blue card over his head. “It’s time now, ladies and gentlemen, for tonight’s Top Ten List.”
Cartoon numbers count down from ten, and Anna and I smile at each other. It’s been a week since our fight. That’s what one of our fights generally looks like, two people saying hurtful things to each other without raising their voices. Sometimes I think I might prefer movie fighting, where everyone yells and then has sex in the next scene. She technically apologized yesterday, but it was one of those married-people apologies, more of a tactical move than anything else, a way of moving on with things.
“The category tonight, from the home office, Top Ten Perks to Winning the Pulitzer Prize. Have you ever won the Pulitzer, Paul?”
“No, but I’m working on some things.” Paul says. He’s wearing purple sunglasses.
“Not a lot of people know this about me,” says Letterman. “But I actually never learned to read.”
“Well, you’ve done well for yourself, sir. It’s an inspiring story.”
I’ve forgotten how much time they waste on this show, just bantering back and forth about nothing. I think of my father standing backstage behind that curtain, waiting. And then I find myself thinking about my mom. This happens a lot, particularly when I’m a little in awe of something my dad is accomplishing—some surreal, famous-person thing. She’ll inevitably show up in my head in voice-over format. She’s like the Morgan Freeman of my conscience.
He gets to be on TV, Thomas, she says. And I know that’s very exciting. But remember who was there for you when you fell off your bike the first time, or when that horrible little girl made you eat that worm and you cried in the passenger seat of my car when I picked you up from school.
“Oh come on already!” says Anna.
Letterman is making jokes now about some guy in the audience from Canada, and it’s going on and on. He keeps asking him if people in Canada are generally able to read. But then he finally clears his throat and gets back on task. There must be a producer off camera somewhere, frantically pointing to an imaginary watch. “Presenting tonight’s list is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction and one of the world’s greatest living writers, Curtis Violet. Come on out, Curtis!”
My dad steps out onto the stage in a blue blazer and an open-collared shirt. Anna and Allie clap along with the audience and Allie says, “Grandpa” as if this six-inch version of him can hear her. He waves and smiles.
“Top Ten Perks to Winning the Pulitzer Prize. Take it away, Curtis. Number ten.”
The drummer starts a faint drumroll and my dad eyes a spot just above the camera. “I get an exclusive ten percent discount on my next purchase at participating New York area Barnes & Noble booksellers.”
“That sounds like a pretty good deal,” says Letterman. “Number nine.”
“Now maybe I’ll be famous enough that people will stop asking me if I wrote those sexy vampire books.”
“Number eight.”
“I’ve just been hired as head writer on MTV’s The Hills.”
“Number seven.”
“I get to make up my own creepy religion for movie stars and weirdos. It will be called Violetology.”
The crowd likes this one, and Letterman laughs. “Number six.”
“I no longer have to pretend that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow.”
And just like that, the audience turns and goes completely silent. Curtis looks over at Letterman and shrugs.
“Well, I guess we really shouldn’t have expected much more than that, huh?” says the host. “Number five, Curtis.”
“I’ve finally earned enough street cred to have that fruitcake Tom Wolfe whacked.”
“Number four.”
“From now on, the patches on the elbows of my tweed blazers will be made from one hundred percent real endangered species skin.”
“That doesn’t really seem like something to celebrate. Number three.”
“Screw the financial crisis. I have enough money in my wallet right now to buy everyone in the audience a used Dodge Neon.”
Television has filled him out somehow, and he looks like a younger, happier man. It’s like he’s at Politics & Prose bookstore in D.C. for the hundredth time giving a reading and not the Ed Sullivan Theater on national television. One hand is poised in his pocket, the other gesticulates casually as he talks. He is my idol.
“Number two.”
“John Grisham and Stephen King have to mow my lawn for a whole year.”
“And the number one perk to winning the Pulitzer Prize,” says Letterman. The drumroll heightens and my dad smiles at the camera.
“Fabio has finally agreed to do my next book cover.”
The band breaks into music, and then, with another quick, professorial wave, Curtis is gone.
“Is that it?” Allie asks. I guess she’s unimpressed.
“My God,” says Anna. She reaches for my hand and I take it without even thinking—a reflex of love. “He didn’t even look nervous. Can you imagine going on TV and being so . . . cool?”
“I wonder if he was stoned,” I say, but she’s right. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve imagined what it’d be like to be my father.
Half an hour later, after a series of surprisingly complex questions about how television works, I manage to wrangle Allie into bed. Her eyes are big and she’s jittery from all the excitement, like she’s been sneaking handfuls of coffee beans since dinner, and I wish it was legal to fasten children to their beds. We’ve agreed to skip reading a story tonight, since it’s after midnight, but she’s demanding two stories tomorrow. Parenting is often about negotiating.
“Is Grandpa Curtis coming back to stay here? With us?”
I tell her that I don’t know and that he might be staying in New York for a while, and she just frowns at me.
Dear HR:
I ask my daddy lots and lots of questions. But he hardly ever knows the answers to them. I’m beginning to think that maybe the other daddies are smarter than he is. Seriously, you should have heard him try to explain to me where thunder comes from. It was pretty embarrassing.
When the phone rings, I tell Allie good night and rush out of the room. I can hear Anna drawing a bath on the other side of the house. I already know who it’s going to be.
“Did you see it?” he asks.
I settle onto the bed with the phone. “No. Jimmy Kimmel had Carrot Top on, so we decided to watch that instead. I love that guy.”
“Did I look old to you? I thought I looked kind of old. They put so much makeup on me. I felt like I was in drag.”
“Well, you are pretty old, Dad. But you didn’t look bad old. You looked cool old. Sort of like Mick Jagger.”
“You think anyone got that Gravity’s Rainbow joke?” He sounds quiet and tired. His voice has a cavernous sound when he’s calling me from his loft, like he’s at the bottom of a well in the Midwest somewhere.
“Hell no, of course they didn’t. But I think that was kind of the point, right? I don’t think people even pretend they’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow anymore. They pretend to have read much smaller books now.”
“You ever read it?” he asks.
“Of course. Like twice.”
“Yeah, I haven’t, either. I don’t think anyone reads anything anymore—unless it’s about cutting carbs or fooling the perfect man into marrying you. At my reading today in Rockefeller, it was the same crowd of old people, like always. It’s the publishing industry’s dirty little secret. Readers are dying off.”
Like Allie, I’m restless, and so I get up and pace the room, stopping at the window to look at my dad’s car in our driveway. He took the train up to New York, so his keys are hanging from a nail in one of our kitchen cabinets. I could hop in it now and tear off across the Key Bridge like a video game. But, of course, I don’t. I hear ice cubes dropping into a glass as he pours himself a drink.
“I think you’re being a little dramatic,” I say. “Remember your deal last year at the PEN/Faulkner? It was like a Justin Timberlake concert. I saw kids shotgunning beers outside the building.”
“Those were just my students. They show up for all those things. It gives them an excuse to not be working on their own writing.” He goes on like this for a while, sipping his drink and sighing in my ear. “Do you think they’ll read me when I’m gone?”
“Who, your students?”
“I don’t know . . . anyone? The way they read the greats? Like Zuckerman. They’ll read Nicholas forever. He’s really something, the lonely old prick. Maybe he should have been on Letterman tonight.”
I think before speaking, arranging my dad’s books across a shelf in my mind. “They won’t read all of your books. A lot of them though. It might help if you gave them a few more. It’s been five years. Zuckerman’s published four since Stairwell came out.”
The moment this leaves my mouth, I regret it. Stairwell, Curtis’s last novel, is the only book my dad has published that one could reasonably call a failure, and he rarely ever mentions its existence. The New York Times wrote a highbrow, long-winded review that essentially boiled it down to one word: boring.
“I really thought people were going to like that one,” he says. “Believe it or not, I’ve never tried harder on a book. It was like giving birth to a cactus every day.”
“Well, maybe that was the problem,” I say. “You never seemed to be trying before.” This makes me think of my own problem, and how things seem to come easier when no one is thinking so hard.
Curtis is quiet for a while, and I know exactly what he’s about to say. “Have you spoken with your mother lately?” he asks, his default question again. If for these few minutes a window has been open, that window is now closed.
“No,” I say. “I was thinking of her tonight actually, when I was watching you. I need to call her. She’s been trying to get ahold of me. I’m having lunch with Gary this week though.”
“Well, that should certainly be intellectually stimulating,” he says, like some elitist asshole. This is his typical stance regarding my stepfather, a man whose only crime is that he’s never harmed anyone in his life.
“Nice, Dad.”
“I’m just saying, does the man have any interests besides cars? It’s like trying to have a conversation with a copy of Kelley Blue Book.”
“Why are you so depressed, anyway? Jesus, you were on TV tonight. This might come as a shock to you, but not everyone gets to go on Letterman.”
“I’m not depressed. I’m just . . . contemplative.”
And drunk, I think.
“Sonya wants me to do the Today show this week. Do you think I should?”
“Yeah, why not? But make sure Matt Lauer does the interview. Everyone else over there is bush league.”
Curtis turns away from the phone and whispers something, and then I hear a faint voice—a woman’s voice, of course. “Dad, are you with someone?”
“What?”
I feel silly for this, for indulging my father while he sits in his multimillion-dollar loft with whatever silly girl he’s managed to turn things upside for this time. It’s such a strange role that I play in this man’s life. He can’t walk down the street without someone telling him how brilliant he is, but still he calls me to mope.
“I’ve gotta go, Tommy. I’ll talk to you soon, OK?”
I can only sigh. “Good night, Dad.”
Chapter 11
Hank and I are walking through Georgetown.
It’s early evening and the sun is setting, and we encounter dozens of our neighbors and their dogs. Whenever Hank and I venture out into the neighborhood, it strikes me how clearly neither of us belongs. Everyone in Georgetown, at least everyone outside of campus, is wealthy, and they dress the part. In expensive suits and sweaters from places like Ralph Lauren or Burberry, they walk their pure-bred, well-groomed dogs, often making wide circles around Hank the mongrel and his incessant butt sniffing. My neighbors have all probably lost half their net worth in the last month, but they still exude wealth effortlessly.
With my plastic CVS bag in hand, I bend over to pick up one of Hank’s shriveled little turds. I’ve done this a thousand times, but I still find it humiliating. It’s like I should stand on a parked Volvo station wagon and scream, “Yes everyone, I just picked up shit! And now I’m going to carry it around with me in this little baggie!”
I call Sonya’s son, Brandon Ross. It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. For most of my dad’s career, Curtis has gone back and forth between his loft in Manhattan and his condo here in D.C. near American University where he’s the figurehead of the school’s MFA program. During my childhood visits to New York, Brandon and I were inseparable. These sorts of friendships are hard to bridge into adulthood, though, especially when one is married and the other couldn’t be further from married.
