Will There Ever Be Another You, page 10
Into my dress for the dance, and standing on my father’s shoes. How do you know those things? I wanted to ask, but I had told her, I had told everyone. She had my own girlish haircut. Her name was the one we were using for the mother in the show: Mary. The father must be Gary, then, for Heidi had believed as a child that the names of married people had to rhyme. But the name Betty, for me, was harder to apply. “You … I mean, Betty,” Heidi would correct herself, every time. It helped to have an actor in mind as you were writing. It freed you. The one we imagined was a pure ponytail, an endless font of reaction: She would give you a different take every time, whereas in my brief foray into the art I thought it was the peak of professionalism to deliver the line the exact same way every night, so none of the other actors got surprised. It was always clear, reading a script, which role they would assign to me; I got the sluts and I got the little glass animal collectors, I thought, fingering my systematized stones; they saw something about me I couldn’t see about myself. But perhaps I could be free now, in the figure of the blonde.
What if she wasn’t a writer, I had said to Heidi once, desperate to be released from the tarot pack of my own past, which could only be laid out in so many ways. What if she does what you do: transmutes experience into performance? A sort of Spalding Gray, wading out to sea with stones while monologuing. An empty stage with a glass of water on it, on something like a bedside table. Nearly every night now I had an actor’s dreams—backstage, realizing I didn’t know the part, that I was never given the script or received the wrong sides. Or worse, that I knew the lines but had no ideas. The ideas in acting were so different from what the woman and I did: The whole key might be that you wore a pair of glasses, or used crutches, or chewed gum, and the idea would descend like radiance and warm the cool clay of the character to life. You never knew what was going to release you into the body that was ready: to trust the other actors, to trust the self to truly respond. Check out my dwarf pouch baby, Heidi had written, and I felt a little of the old levitation: for the first time, something I would actually say. We had written the scene with the father lounging on the leather couch, idly strumming an electric guitar. We had written the old student—not reappearing, but her fear rising every time she saw a white car. We wrote, “I think my mother was a little in love with him,” but how could that be true? Well, I could ask the woman, who seemed to want to be something more, who was telling me she wished that things had gone differently, that she had seen me one daisy-faced morning in class.
Upstairs something terrible was happening to the blonde. I slipped the Scar back inside the pouch and took out the Wheatfield, which seemed to have real wind in it, rippling ripe heads. Deep inside was the Mother, and the Fingerprint, which stood for the child, but there was no Father anywhere—that was back with the long-lost fluorite, that claimed to open the third eye. And I did see it, me standing with my father for once alone, and him shy and baffled, not knowing quite what to do, relying on me to provide the proper sense of occasion. Which waited, as I trusted in meaning to wait. In England, I would learn much later, outside the stones of any school, there was a great standing vein of it called Blue John, which was dug out, cured in the air for a year, and then given to a daughter on her graduation day.
Schutzenfest
That was one way of telling I was still myself: I always saw a priest in the airport. Sometimes two. Often a young one and an old one, appearing to hold hands—though that couldn’t be true, could it? Always I had the urge to approach, point at some article of clothing, and ask if it had come from the Almy catalog. Or glance at a pair of socks and say, “Gold Toe, I presume?” “Encyclical,” I would sometimes whisper as I passed, to watch the password fly through flesh, to see a familiar face in sudden comprehension change.
Lately I had felt the air full of silver nosedives; pilots were forgetting how to fly. “Be careful,” I had gasped to my father, lips blue, when it was happening, but he laughed and said he would never catch it—he wasn’t a world traveler like me. That was before it was possible for people not to believe in it at all, before it was possible to convert to a perfect atheism of it. In that brief window when the powers that be had made Masses illegal, he had gone on saying them—for himself, he explained. That would be his testimony in court—I said them for myself, and I left the doors open.
What is your relationship to religion now, an interviewer had recently asked me. I had maintained a perfect silence for three weeks, and then wrote back, “My relationship to religion now is that I always look for a priest in the airport, and when I see one I say priest in kind of a loud voice.” This sounded like a joke but in fact it was a cry: Nothing could resume until I saw my priest in the airport. All flights in the world were grounded until he turned the corner toward me, rolling the trim black suitcase that contained the Mass and holding hands with his younger self.
How was he still alive? The things that had been wrong with him lately did not even seem real … floating toe, for one. But there he was, walking across the lawn toward me, wearing his bloodstained shoes from when he knelt over my brother—though it was true that I now sometimes saw colors over things that weren’t there. Purple blotches over people’s faces, a violent prismatic hole in the center of my vision, a zigzag in the corner of my eye that I referred to as the angel. There was, I was convinced at the time, no name for this, and why should there be? There was a time on earth when things were created. There was a time when they were new.
“Hey,” he said, holding his hands out in his classic dispensing-of-the-loaves-and-fishes way. Does anyone teach you how to say the Mass, I had asked a bishop once. Is there, like, a dance class to show you what to do? No, he said solemnly, they just throw you in there. The bishop was Irish, shy, embarrassed. He knew he was meant to be a priest because he never wanted to go to parties. But the gestures had been born in my father. They seemed to be an extension of his physical surety—which I had taken such pleasure in describing in the pitch. Rocked back on his heels, like the world loved him.
“You didn’t call me on my birthday,” he said, and I started to explain, but he cut me off. “Like my new bod?”
He looked as different as I must have. He had lost eighty pounds, and a column now ran down the middle of his throat. This was made more poignant by the fact that he was, for unknown reasons, wearing a deep-sea fishing shirt. He claimed to have never had it, though he had never allowed himself to be tested—his fake doctor, who also didn’t believe in it, had given him a recent diagnosis of Spots on his lungs, but rather than attributing it to either the new illness or the sarcoidosis that plagued so many former submariners, had told him he was probably just allergic to the rare black-market African wood (bought from an actual van down by the river) that he had been using to make guitars. Amazing sentence, I thought to myself, as all of the sentences about my father were.
Put it in the show, I thought, but who could ever, ever play him? Kurt Russell, of all people, was interested, but he wanted us to fly out to California to reassure him we weren’t making fun of the character, and at this point in time that was impossible. Instead, I had been encouraged to write him a letter. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching you stride across desert landscapes while my father, his attention divided equally between your pecs and your rifle, commented that you were one of the last real men alive.” It was the sort of letter that ensured you would never hear from someone again, that they would walk the long way around your house forever. But that would be for the best, I thought. How terrible to be condemned to live life twice, to look on everything as Material.
“Hey. I’ve been saying Masses for you.”
It occurred to me that those must have been the Masses that were so illegal. When the doors were flung open, so that anyone could walk in, even me.
“Her father belonged to a Cold War Reenactors Club, and one day, during their annual meeting, he insisted on falling to the ground in his sailor suit and reenacting his conversion experience on a nuclear submarine—the one he always likes to call the deepest conversion on record.”
That was the new beginning of the show, I had told Heidi last month; it had come to me while listening to my binaural beats app, which made grandiose claims to sculpt your brain waves. “It will explain everything about me,” I said, meaning, as I always did now, the Character.
“Wait, did this actually happen?” Heidi asked. “No, of course not,” I told her, truthful. But from my current vantage point, I might look back at my life and say that none of it had.
We had played around with all sorts of openings: flashbacks, montages, the Character being born as a puppet through a surreal plastic tunnel, a confessional scene where she spilled her backstory all over a sexy priest, who later turned out to be in costume for Halloween. All embarrassing, all insufficient. But this would do it. A meeting of the local chapter of the Cold War Reenactors Club. It could take place in the same church basement where Alcoholics Anonymous had three meetings a day, with doughnuts and cold coffee. A projector would be playing The Exorcist on a screen at the front of the room, the members would be wearing their sailor uniforms, and then the camera would find the face of my father just as he fell shaking to the floor.
“Picture it,” I had said to Heidi, just as she often said, Here’s the bad version. An establishing shot like the ultrasound of a whale, and then the camera traveling through black chambers toward him, toward the devil, toward God, toward me. The light of the movie, the light on my father’s face; around him, the glow of big red buttons—all of these, calling out the light from inside him, were the radiations that had produced me. “I saw it,” I said, the way I sometimes saw things now, glittering tableaux in deep tombs.
“Where was I conceived?” I had asked my mother, when we were in the research phase. “After he returned from the Holy Land, your father took me up to the lake … well, not a lake, more of a mudhole really.” More of a mudhole really. This is what came to mind now whenever I heard the words “genetic predisposition” or … what had the doctor called it?
Family History. My brothers and sisters had all been conceived on holidays, with fireworks and toasts of champagne, but for me it was the mudhole and the Holy Land, where my father had spent six months on a biblical archaeological dig, and where, my mother further confided, he had tried to buy her a long white robe of the kind the women wore there. He had paid and never received it, thank God—what if he had made her put it on? What if she had been wearing it you-know-when? The biblical archaeological dig was the same one he tried to send me on the summer my friends went to France, but easier and cheaper to have sent me to the mudhole, where I could have started at the very heart and scooped until I found myself: there.
It had rained overnight, and my father’s red shoes were sinking into the lawn. “Where are we going?” I had kept wondering in the car, as we passed the dressed-up concrete geese of the West Side, the pleas for kidney donation, the signs reading PRAY FOR AMERICA, but all anyone would tell me was Schutzenfest. A baseball diamond. A frightening civic building, where you might go to cast your first wrongheaded vote. A dark curve of wood behind the bouncy house, and more people, it seemed, than I had ever seen in my life. Everyone’s here, my father called over his shoulder, his deep-sea fishing shirt seeming to glitter. Everyone else on dry land, but my father and I walked on water. We were not at Schutzenfest, wherever that was, but in the deep dark middle of the sea.
I hated him, of course. I also hated my friends—or to be more accurate, I didn’t know who they were. For the first time in my life I had an Enemies List, which included entries as disparate as “God” and “Gene Kelly.” I had added my mother to it—had actually refused to speak to her for two months—when she had foolishly confessed to visiting a Cracker Barrel on a road trip. How could she, I thought, picturing her among the old-fashioned candy, picturing her length of life as a lemon drop to be sucked. That’s my favorite candy, I thought with hatred, as if it were parked in my own cheek, and she was trying to deprive me of its last moments of sweetness.
And what was the thing my father was always saying now? That he was addicted to reality. How alive he must have felt, saying those illegal Masses, how made for the moment. Not an object of derision, I explained to Kurt Russell, for who was laughing? I heard the sound, but could say it safely, certainly not me.
The ground was littered with tickets. There was the unmistakable feeling of a raffle going on, and my number being chosen again and again. “What are you working on?” people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.
There was a faint hope that this year could be skipped with no loss of essential information, like a rap skit. Don’t write about it, people warned each other, but I had been documenting in secret the whole time. “It was happening in Ohio,” I wrote, “even in Ohio.” Last November, before the vaccine, my brother PJ had sent a text:
Last three boomer-as-fuck posts that my
buddy’s uncle posted before dying lol
The first, reposted from “Mary and Jesus,” was an underwater statue of Christ with the words “You will get miracle in next 1 hour” printed below. The next read “Before you cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas with your loved ones, remember that this may be the last holiday you have. We are not guaranteed a single minute on this earth. Stop living in fear and embrace life to its fullest!” The last was an X-ray of a rib cage with an image of Jesus photoshopped over the sternum. “Do you see Jesus Christ?” the post asked, with a huge green arrow pointing to him. “IF YOU SEE JESUS TYPE AMEN and SHAR.”
That’s one of the symptoms, I told him. You get it and it makes your posts weird for one year. Also it makes your pubes as soft as a chinchilla. I had posted about that myself, in the aftermath, and was asked to write about it for a women’s magazine.
“I … kind of love it,” Heidi had said, about the Cold War Reenactors Club. There was something fresh about her voice and something tossed-back about her hair, as if she had just raised her head from the water fountain. “My body has been good to me,” I could still hear her saying, from the last time we had seen each other, in the heart of the frozen city. Heidi wrote plays because she heard voices. I say uh I say uh. But her dialogue was not broken; she poured out long flexible sentences, rising and falling, in the voice that even I could recognize was a treasure. Hazelnuts, she had declared in a voiceover once, they’re getting more popular. When you were writing with someone you tried on their words to see whether you might say them. I put myself inside Heidi’s broader shoulders, the tossed-back hair, the dancer’s posture, the belly that had then held the twins.
I had watched her, off-Broadway, tell the story of her life, as all the Clintons sat in the same row as me, and Bill got up to piss at the most serious moment even though no one else was allowed. How did you do that? I asked afterward, but she had no idea—when it came to the things you were actually able to do, you could never tell anyone. A gift, like being the only one in the theater who got to piss. When I made her read my part, it meant that I was getting it for free. Her voice came over the phone, swimming through that square of darkness; I built her every moment. Reconstituted her, as they might do in the future, not from our frozen brains but our ideas. The hair thrown back. The water fountain.
My body has been good to me.
I had chosen her because I had a dream about us drifting out to sea on an ice floe. I understood that might not have been an omen of success, to float out to sea on an ice floe. But there we were, together. Rented houses in the Hollywood Hills, rented houses in Brooklyn, rented houses on Tybee Island. The sun slowly going down on each other’s faces. Me telling her everything that had ever happened to me, in case it might be useful. “What is this story about?” the development team had asked us once. A beat of outraged silence in the score. “This story is ABOUT,” Heidi said, and the voice with its lion’s mane became magnificent as she told the whole thing from beginning to end.
“Is she still a poet?” one of them had asked once. “We haven’t seen her writing in a while.” This struck me as the funniest thing I had ever heard; as if you could just stop being what you were. Maybe it’s not set in the past, they suggested. Maybe it’s set now, and she has to move back in with her parents because she gets sick. I thought about this for a long time before clearing my throat. But then none of the prog-rock references would work, I told them. There’s this part where she’s listening to King Crimson with her father in the car, and they raise their fists at the same moment and go AHHHHHHHHHH.
Had I not seen my father since my niece had died? He had insisted on having some sort of Latin singing at the funeral, by a guy who had never done it before, and it could only be described as Gregorian mooing or cow chant, and I could still see us all standing together, our shoulders shaking uncontrollably in the family pew. My father stood in front of us with a look of patient endurance on his face. He could have done the singing—if only, if only, he could have taken all the parts. How do you remember it all, I had never thought to ask; it is a performance, after all, a one-man show. And why hadn’t I put it in, that he was the priest who rolled the whole Mass behind him in a suitcase, and set it up so carefully in my sister’s hospital room?
“But that’s so beautiful,” Heidi said when I told her, and he rolled toward me for a moment holding hands with a younger self.
Next to me Mary stood tall. Her belief in cryptids was as perfect as ever—long necks in lakes, ape asses in the woods, leviathans. Hogzilla, she had sometimes called her daughter, in the Cajun accent of the man who believed that there was a four-thousand-pound pig hiding in the woods near his house. At night we watched Oak Island, a show where Canadian men dug forever in the mud. There was a legend that the Grail had gone to this place—the Grail never went to, like, New York. It went where people believed in it most, where people were willing to dig, and where Canada was not populated with identical interior decorators named Jnoathan, it was populated with amateur archaeologists. They scooped forever in the mud—sometimes they x-rayed the mud, as if it were a body—and when they found a button, they partied for days. To have found actual treasure, let alone the Grail, would have upset them. They were in it for the buttons and safety pins, for what the doctor called Family History.
