“Oh Lou, we’re two old bags—admit it,” Rhea says, swatting at his frail shoulder.
She shows him the pictures of her kids, holding them close to his face.
“She’s cute,” he says about the oldest, Nadine, who is sixteen. I think he winks, or maybe it’s his eye twitching.
“Cut it out, you,” Rhea says.
I don’t say anything. I feel it—the finger—again. In my stomach.
“What about your kids?” Rhea asks Lou. “You see them much?”
“Some,” he says, in his strangled new voice.
He had six, from three marriages he bored through and then kicked away. Rolph, the second oldest, was his favorite. Rolph lived here, in this house, a gentle boy with blue eyes that broke a little whenever he stared down his father. Rolph and I were the same age, exactly. Same birthday, same year. I used to imagine us, tiny babies in different hospitals, crying at the same time. We stood naked once, side by side in a full-length mirror, trying to see if being born the same day had left a clue on us. Some mark we could find.
By the end, Rolph wouldn’t speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in it.
Lou’s big bed with the crushed purple spread is gone—thank God. The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Lou’s tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Lou into clear plastic bags I try not to look at.
A dog barks. Lou’s eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse-butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.
So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I can’t help it, I start to cry. Rhea puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesn’t hesitate. Her skin hangs loose—freckled skin ages prematurely, Lou told me once, and Rhea is
all
freckles. “Our friend Rhea,” he said, “she’s doomed.”
“You have three children,” I sob into her hair.
“Shhh.”
“What do I have?”
Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies
on
computers. A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I’m trying to learn Spanish. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.
Three children. The oldest, Nadine, is almost my age when I met Lou. Seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line. “It was all for no reason,” I say.
“That’s never true,” Rhea says. “You just haven’t found the reason yet.”
The whole time, Rhea knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.
“I got lost,” I say.
It’s turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she’ll say, “Forget the Spanish,” and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we’ll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.
The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Lou watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. “Haven’t been. Outside. In weeks,” he says, coughing a little. “Haven’t wanted to.”
Rhea pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital bed could cause an explosion. I’m afraid the real Lou will be outside by the pool where he lived with a red phone on a long cord and a bowl of green apples, and the real Lou and this old Lou will have a fight.
How dare you? I’ve never had an old person in my house and I’m not going to start now
. Age, ugliness—they had no place. They would never get in from outside.
“There,” he says, meaning by the pool, like always.
There’s still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a fruit shake next to it. The nurse-butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.
Or Rolph? Could Rolph still be here, taking care of his dad? Rolph in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if he’d walked in a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Lou yelling for me, “Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn!” Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I’d done by then.
In the mirror, Rolph’s chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.
And when it happened, in Rolph’s tiny bedroom, sun sneaking through the shades in stripes, I pretended it was new. He looked inside my eyes, and I felt how normal I could still be. We were smooth, both of us.
“Where’s that. Thing,” Lou asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to, in his red bathing suit, tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didn’t hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?
The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. “I got old,” he says.
The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.
“What about Rolph?” I ask, my first words since “Hi.”
“Rolph,” Lou says, and blinks.
“Your son? Rolph?”
Rhea shakes her head at me—my voice is too loud. I feel a kind of anger that fills up my head sometimes and rubs out my thoughts like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this pool—his son’s, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.
Lou is trying to speak. We lean close, listening. Habit, I guess.
“Rolph didn’t make it,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.
“What’s the point, Jocelyn?” Rhea asks me, and in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realize that I already knew about Rolph. And Rhea knew—everyone knew. An old tragedy.
“He was. Twenty-eight,” Lou says.
I shut my eyes.
“Long time ago,” he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest. “But.”
Yes, it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.
“Losing a child,” Rhea murmurs. “I can’t imagine it.”
The anger squeezes, it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Lou’s hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. I’m that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Rhea shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and we’re just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When he’s absolutely still, I let him float to the top.
I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Rhea is touching his chest.
It’s a bad day. The sun hurts my head.
“I should kill you,” I say, looking at him straight. “You deserve to die.”
“Enough,” Rhea says, with her sharp mother’s voice.
Suddenly, Lou looks in my eyes. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, that man who said,
You’re the best thing that ever happened to me
, and
We’ll see the whole goddamn world
, and
How come I need you so much?
And
Looking for a ride, kiddo?
Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it on his bright red car.
Just tell me where
.
He looks scared, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. “Too late,” he says.
Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on a party Lou was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. “Like a baby,” Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.
Every night, my mother ticks off another day I’ve been clean. It’s more than a year, my longest yet. “Jocelyn, you’ve got so much life in front of you,” she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there’s a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.
Lou is speaking again. Trying to speak. “Stand on each side. Of me. Would you, girls?”
Rhea holds his hand, and I take the other one. It’s not the same hand as before, it is bulbous and dry and heavy. Rhea and I look at each other across him. We’re there, the three of us, like before. We’re back to the beginning.
He’s stopped crying. He’s looking at his world. The pool, the tiles. We never did get to Africa, or anywhere. We barely left this house.
“Nice to be. With you girls,” he says, fighting to breathe.
Clutching our hands, as if we might flee. But we don’t. We look at the pool and we listen to the birds.
“Another minute,” he says. “Thank you, girls. One more. Like this.”
X’s and O’s
Here’s how it started: I was sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park reading a copy of
Spin
I’d swiped from Hudson News, observing East Village females crossing the park on their way home from work and wondering (as I often did) how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind, when I made a discovery: my old friend Bennie Salazar was a record producer! It was right in
Spin
magazine, a whole article about Bennie and how he’d made his name on a group called the Conduits that went multiplatinum three or four years ago. There was a picture of Bennie receiving some kind of award, looking out of breath and a little cross-eyed—one of those frozen, hectic instants you just know has a whole happy life attached. I looked at the picture for less than a second; then I closed the magazine. I decided not to think about Bennie. There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about
not
thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours—days, if I have to.
After one week of not thinking about Bennie—thinking so much about not thinking about Bennie that there was barely room left in my brain for thoughts of any other kind—I decided to write him a letter. I addressed it to his record label, which turned out to be inside a green glass building on Park Avenue and Fifty-second Street. I took the subway up there and stood outside the building with my head back, looking up, up, wondering how high Bennie’s office might possibly be. I kept my eyes on the building as I dropped the letter into the mailbox directly in front of it.
Hey Benjo
, I’d written (that was what I used to call him).
Long time no see. I hear you’re the man, now. Congrats. Couldn’t have happened to a luckier guy. Best wishes, Scotty Hausmann
.
He wrote back! His letter arrived in my dented East Sixth Street mailbox about five days later, typed, which I guess meant a secretary had done it, but I could tell it was Bennie all right:
Scotty baby—Hey thanks for the note. Where have you been hiding yourself? I still think of the Dildo days sometimes. Hope you’re playing that slide guitar. Yours, Bennie
, with his little wiggly signature above the typed name.
Bennie’s letter had quite an effect on me. Things had gotten—what’s the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.
I happened to have the next day off—the day after Bennie’s letter came—so I went to the East River early that morning and fished. I did this all the time, and I ate the fish, too. Pollution was present, yes, but the beauty of it was that you knew all about that pollution, unlike the many poisons you consumed each day in ignorance. I fished, and God must’ve been on my side, or maybe it was Bennie’s good luck rubbing off on me, because I pulled from the river my best catch of all time: an enormous striped bass! My fishing pals, Sammy and Dave, were shocked to see me catch this superb fish. I stunned it, wrapped it in newspaper, bagged it, and carried it home under my arm. I put on the closest thing I had to a suit: khaki pants and a jacket that I dry-cleaned a
lot
. The week before, I’d taken it to the cleaners still in its dry-cleaning bag, which caused a breakdown in the gal behind the counter—“Why you clean? You already clean, bag not open, you waste your money.” I know I’m getting off the subject here, but let me just say that I whipped my jacket out of its plastic bag with such force that she went quiet, and I laid it carefully on the dry-cleaning counter.
“Merci por vous consideración, madame,”
I said, and she accepted the garment without another word. Suffice it to say that the jacket I put on that morning to visit Bennie Salazar was one clean jacket.
Bennie’s building looked like a place where they could implement tough security checks if they needed to, but that day I guess they didn’t need to. More of Bennie’s good luck flowing down on me like honey. Not that my luck was generally so bad—I would have called it neutral, occasionally edging toward bad. For example, I caught fewer fish than Sammy, though I fished more often and had the better rod. But if it was Bennie’s good luck I was getting that day, did that mean my good luck was also his good luck? That my visiting him unexpectedly was good luck for
him?
Or had I somehow managed to divert his luck and siphon it away for a time, leaving him without any luck that day? And, if I
had
managed to do the latter, how had I done it, and (most important) how could I do it forever?