Self-Portrait with Boy, page 18
I found too all the projects he’d been tinkering with—electrical in nature, mostly. There was a cheap set of speakers that he’d disassembled and apparently been trying to fix. An eccentric lamp he’d somehow rigged together out of a bit of copper pipe, a round flat stone, and a length of electrical cord. He’d even somehow lodged a foraged socket—appropriated from some other lamp, I guess—into the end of the pipe for the bulb. I found an outlet, plugged it in, and watched the 40 watts come to life. It was a pretty object: He’d polished the stone to make a reflective base, and the copper shone. All it was missing was a lampshade.
With numb hands I dug around in the boxes, shelves, and bins. In a wooden chest I found an old canvas sail folded in thirds and a coil of thick wire. I put on some heavy gardening gloves, retrieved a wire cutter from the toolbox, and formed two hoops—one small, one larger—from the wire. I cut the sail with pruning shears and folded it flat, just a quarter inch over the smaller hoop, and angled it out on a diagonal so that it would wrap a quarter inch over the larger hoop below. Then I superglued the seams. When I had finished, it made a simple lampshade, a little narrower on top than on the bottom. I rested it over the top of the metal hanger that surrounded the bulb. The light reflected against the sail and bounced back to the copper and refracted. It gleamed brightly.
* * *
Christmas morning I was up before Toby. The snow had cleared and the sky was bright and the gulls were a ruckus in the sun. I went out in bedroom slippers to retrieve the lamp from the garage along with the green glass pitcher. When I came back into the house I found him sitting at the kitchen table, like a cartoon cricket with his sharp nose and those bulbous eye protectors.
Merry merry, I called. I come bearing gifts!
He lifted his head. Lulu. Was wondering where you gone off to.
I found your project in the garage.
Only project I’m concerned about is coffee. You want to start a pot?
I set the lamp on the kitchen counter, unplugged the toaster, and plugged it in. It was a weird, almost eerie object—like a pile of trash that someone had cast a spell on. The copper and polished stone glowed. Pretty pretty, right? I said.
Ah! he replied.
I set the green glass pitcher in the sink to wash later on, maybe to fill with some pine branches if I could find them. I filled the electric coffeemaker from the tap. Over the noise of the coffee grinder I told him: I made the shade out of an old sail.
I glanced back at him to see if he had heard me. He wasn’t looking at the lamp at all.
Pretty impressive electrical wiring, I said, pouring the grounds into the coffee filter. You’re quite the tinkerer.
You find the lamp? he said. Was going to get myself over to the swap meet in a couple weeks, see if I couldn’t get a shade for it.
I stopped and turned around. But I saved you the trouble, I said. See?
Oh sure, he said vaguely.
Dad.
These darn things, he said, tapping on the plastic over his eyes.
You won’t be going to the swap meet, I said. You won’t be doing any driving at all.
He murmured, Don’t look like it, no.
I made us coffee and bowls of scrambled eggs and broiled toast with lots of butter. We had breakfast with the radio on, Crosby and Belafonte crooning Christmas songs. He ate messily, dropping forkfuls of eggs back into the bowl on their way to his mouth, biting the bare fork. He tried to conceal his agitation but midway through his meal he stopped and sat back in his chair and resigned himself to coffee. The winter sun was coming in creamy through the east-facing windows and his plastic eye protectors reflected the light. I got up from the table and retrieved my Rollei and took a picture of him like that, half-eaten bowl of food in front of him, glowing bulbous cricket eyes.
Don’t, he said, hearing the soft ca-chunk of the shutter release.
I put the camera down.
He said, Guess I’ve got a little thing for you too. Nothing special.
You didn’t have to, I said.
It’s by the mail, he said.
The pile of unopened mail was on a table next to the door, by the rotary phone. Underneath the stack of envelopes was a large coffee-table book.
They were having a sale at the library, he said. Thought you might like it. Didn’t get to wrapping it.
It was a book of nature photography, its cover protected by a dirty plasticine cover, its spine still bearing a sticker with its Dewey decimal number.
I took a chance, he said.
I flipped through the pages. Glossy color photos of young green forests and beaches at sunset. Waterfalls that had been photographed on a long exposure so that their cascades looked soft and blurred as mist. I said, I hope this didn’t cost you anything.
He shifted in his seat. You can leave it here if you don’t like it. Martina’s boy might get a kick out of it.
Outside the gulls were yelping, the buoys clanging.
I said, Dad, do you know anything about the kind of work that I’ve been doing?
You don’t tell me much, he said.
I want to explain something to you about the sort of art I make.
He didn’t reply.
It’s not like this, I said. This isn’t art, Dad. I mean, thank you for the gift. But look. This is a bullshit consumer product. You know what I mean? This sort of photography is created to numb the mind. The sort of work I do, and I want to tell you this so that you know, it’s the opposite. It’s meant to unsettle the mind.
He said, It was only a dollar. You don’t like it, okay.
I said, It isn’t that I don’t like it. How can anyone not like a sunset or a fucking babbling brook? But these things aren’t art; they aren’t art. Maybe they’re beautiful in person, you know, maybe it would calm or soothe someone to be on a mountain in the mist or whatever, but looking at a picture of it? Why? Why? Who opens up a book to look at a picture of a beach? People who hate their lives. The anxious and the weak. This isn’t art, it’s fucking lidocaine.
It’s a goddamn book, he muttered, pushing his chair away from the table. You don’t like it you can leave it.
Why, so you can look at it?
He turned his head away and stood up and reached out his hands for familiar furniture. Immediately I was filled with regret. The comment had come out of my mouth too suddenly, too reflexively. I’m sorry, I said.
No no no no, he murmured, groping toward the kitchen with his mug.
I put the book down on the table and followed him into the kitchen, where he was feeling for the coffeepot on the counter by the stove. Come on, I said, you’ll burn yourself.
I got it, he said.
Let me do it, I said, reaching toward him as he reached past me for the coffeepot.
I got it! he snapped—and grabbing for the pot he knocked it from its heating plate. The glass fell to the floor and shattered, spilling coffee and shards all over the tile. Damn it to hell! he shouted.
Don’t move! I said. I’ll clean it up.
Louise, goddamn it—
I made my way to the cabinet where he kept his rags and cleaning things. Broken glass squeaked on the tile under the pads of my slippers. I came back with a few thick rags and a spray bottle and a paper bag. When I looked up at him again he was standing still amid the mess. Coffee steamed up from the cold floor.
Don’t move, I repeated. I crouched down and began to wipe it up, placing broken pieces of the coffeepot in the paper bag. He stayed where he was but against the countertop his hand was trembling.
He said, I want you to be a decent woman, Lu.
Shards of glass clinked against shards of glass in the paper bag.
He said, You don’t have to like the book. I just want you to be decent about it.
I paused and stood up, the bag of glass in my hand. Behind the fogged-up perforated plastic his eyes, those shapeless black pools, were vague and restless.
You can’t see at all, I said. Can you?
He was stoic, he was distraught. He pressed his lips together.
Oh, Dad.
I put down the bag of broken glass and put my arms around him. He smelled like coffee and salt and sleep. He grasped the back of my shirt with one hand as if he’d forgotten how to hug.
I stepped away. I crouched back down and continued cleaning up. The coffee had cooled on the tile and stained the grout. We both had spatters of it on our pants and slippers. As I cleaned he quietly made his way out of the room, hand-over-hand on the counter. I heard his bedroom door click closed.
* * *
I made a list that morning of all the things I’d have to do before I went back to New York. Call the doctor and schedule a follow-up appointment for Toby as soon as possible. Call Martina and see if she could come in every day. Find other help if needed. Call Medicare and the VA and see if either of them would cover in-home care. Pay Martina for her work so far.
I began trying to build out a budget. It made my head spin.
Around noon Toby appeared in the hallway frowning, his face naked without the plastic bug-eyes or the thick glasses I was accustomed to.
Seeing the raw red bruises under his eyes gave me a visceral reaction. I looked away.
Don’t know how long you’re staying, he said, but we can go to the bookstore tomorrow if you like and you can pick out something else.
No, I said, that’s all right. I went back to my arithmetic. Thank you, I said.
He shifted uneasily on his feet. I don’t want to let you down, he said.
You’ve never let me down, I said—and so quickly I’d barely thought the thought before speaking it aloud I added: Mom let me down.
Self-consciously I looked up at him to gauge his reaction. He stepped forward, keeping a hand on the faux-wood-paneled wall, which was really just paper glued to pressboard with a wood grain finish.
What made you think of her? he said.
I took off my glasses and pressed my thumb and forefinger against my eyes. I don’t know, I said, a little impatiently. I was just going through all that crap in the garage yesterday. I don’t know. I just. I don’t know anything about her. I don’t even know her maiden name.
Okienka, he said.
I put my glasses back on to see him more clearly. Okienka, I repeated.
Holly Okienka, he said. The name in his voice was foreign but he said it with such familiarity I felt a pang of envy.
What is that, Russian?
Czechoslovakian, he said.
She was from Czechoslovakia?
Her parents.
Like Martina, I said.
That’s right.
It was just one small piece of information, just one tiny morsel to feed my hungry mind, but it was so odd and unexpected I had to savor it.
Do they know each other? I asked.
No no. No relationship.
I was quiet a moment.
You want to know who she looked like? he said.
Who’d she look like?
Lizabeth Scott.
Who’s that?
Oh. Ah. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Lulululu. Are you in for a treat. Do me a favor and go look in the videos. Find one called Dead Reckoning.
Practically all his VHS tapes had been reused several times, film after film recorded off the television, the titles crossed out and rewritten on stickers on the sides. If you watched one to its conclusion you’d often see the last few minutes of the one that had been recorded previously, sticking out at the end like a long shirt under a short sweater. I found the one marked Dead Reckoning in Toby’s back-slant scrawl and turned on the old tube TV and slid it into the tape player while he made his way to his stuffed chair in the corner. There was a glare from the window on the TV screen and it was hard to see but if I lay on my back I could look up into the story from an angle. Dead Reckoning turned out to be a B movie from the late forties. Humphrey Bogart plays a WWII veteran paratrooper turned amateur detective, determined to figure out what happened to his war buddy Johnny, who’s jumped off a train and quote-unquote turned up dead. Lizabeth Scott is Johnny’s desperate young widow.
The recording was awful. Every few moments a staticky horizontal would crawl up the screen. Yet the moment I saw her I saw what I hadn’t been able to see in the woman at the gas station or the woman in the shearling coat. It was like finding a game piece that had been lost for years under a sofa gathering dust. All the features I hadn’t gotten from Toby Rile were there. Thin upper lip, high nose, long philtrum. An almost involuntary expression of defiance. Finding fragments of my own face in someone else’s was at once vindicating and unnerving.
In an early scene Lizabeth Scott is in a nightclub and the men are asking her to sing. She’s crabby and petulant but she agrees. In a deep, unpolished yawning sort of voice she launches into a cheesy ballad. Either it’s love or it isn’t. There’s no compromise. Her dusky tone exaggerates her boyish features.
Embarrassed by the schmaltz I glanced over at my dad and saw he had his fist balled up at his mouth, pressed up against his nose.
I spoke loudly to break the spell. This is what she looked like?
He turned away.
It took far too many romances to teach this fool to be wise.
People said she was the poor man’s Lauren Bacall, he said when he recovered. I always hated that.
She’s no Lauren Bacall, I said.
I hated to see him that way, hated to sit there with him. But what I hated most was how mediocre the film was. The characters were flat and the plot made zero sense. I couldn’t keep track of it at all. It was barely a story. In the tense relationship between Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart there is a misogynist recurring theme about how nice it would be if a man could put a woman in his pocket. As in so many sexist movies she resists the idea at first but at the end when she is dying—I won’t apologize for spoiling it, couldn’t spoil it if I wanted to, it is already so bad—she embraces it at last. As if to symbolize her soul leaving Earth there is some overwrought footage of a white parachute against a black sky, and at last the whole thing’s over.
It was two p.m. Toby was sitting by the window with a forlorn expression on his blind old face. I got up to eject the video and leave the room.
Put on the hockey game, he suggested in a strangled voice.
You can’t even see it, I said. I was meaner than I meant to be.
Louise, he said patiently. Put the game on, would you.
I changed the channel.
* * *
That afternoon the beach was cold and bright and the waves came fast and high. The ocean was black but for the blinding whitecaps and the sky was a clear mean blue. A gull was pecking in flip-book gestures at the carcass of the horseshoe crab I’d overturned. Didn’t gulls ever get cold? Why didn’t they fly south like other birds? Up in the dunes a couple of small men drunk as skunks and bundled up in blankets were sharing a case of beer and hurling the empties against the boulder-built jetty. Broken glass flew into the wind. I had to get out of my father’s house. I was being poisoned by mediocrity.
The day after Christmas my energy was renewed. I called Martina and explained the situation and asked her if she could come in seven mornings a week. I could hear children screaming in the background and she asked a little pitifully if she could bring her son with her until school resumed. I said of course. I asked if she could drive Toby to the doctor when necessary. She said she could.
Then I called the doctor and left a message and two phone numbers: my father’s and my own. I said it was urgent. I said call back as soon as possible.
I called Medicare and listened to a recorded message about their holiday hours. I called the VA and got the same thing.
I finished my budget and figured that if I worked five days a week at Summerland and three at the 24-Hour Photo, assuming I could substitute at KCA on average three times a month, didn’t buy any food, and put off paying Phantom Lawyer Glenn Delaney, I could cover the cost of Toby’s surgery via an installment plan. That was the critical expense. I was not under any kind of contract to help pay Glenn Delaney and I could manage without buying food. But I could not neglect the ophthalmologist no matter how much he’d fucked things up, and I could not neglect Martina. Growing up poor hadn’t taught me nothing. If you don’t pay a person she’ll stop showing up. If you don’t pay your bills the collections agencies will come after you.
I explained the plan to Toby over dinner, minestrone soup and English muffins. His vague eyes searched vainly for something to land on. No food? he said. You got to eat.
I said, I can take what I need from Summerland.
Mayor of Tofu Town.
Right, I said. The mayor gets discretionary funds.
Take some staples with you when you go, he said. I can get that stuff from the VA. The coffee’s pretty good.
The coffee’s terrible, I said, but I’ll take it. Thanks.
We ate slowly. We didn’t know what we’d do when we were done. It was just after five o’clock and already the sky was dark. The soup tasted like its aluminum can and I wondered how long it had been in there. The thought nauseated me. I put my spoon down. There was quiet where the clink of spoon against bowl had been and he noticed.
Not hungry?
I don’t know, I said. I wanted him to stop listening, to stop paying attention. I wanted him to take care of himself and leave me the fuck alone.
He continued eating in silence. When the jangle of the phone cut through the quiet I startled.
He tilted his head. She don’t usually call during dinnertime.
