In the Land of the Living (28 page)

“Okay, Morris,” Philip said, as if it were a new idea to get off the phone, as if he hadn't already signaled the end. Mack and Leo stood waiting on the rug.

The eldest of the four was the other Morris. He had once played football in school and walked with a limp. He had trained as a lawyer but didn't practice law. He ran the business, which had changed from lumber to real estate. He used to pet Leo's head with a distracted love, and praise his long eyelashes and white teeth. When Leo rode a Honda ATV down a hill of pachysandra and got trapped underneath the machine with the hot motor burning his leg, his uncle had pulled it off him, and when Leo punched his fist through the window in the kitchen door and the broken glass cut his thumb to the bone, his uncle had squeezed his small thumb in a handkerchief while driving him to the doctor and didn't stop squeezing the thumb the whole way. The elder Morris's eyes were slightly Asiatic, like there had been a Mongol chieftain somewhere way up in the family line. He'd survived heart surgery, a car accident that flung him through the windshield, and a wife who deserted him, returned to him, and widowed him in one year. He married again and even sired another child, kept on living like a rugged plant that can't be killed by cuts, poison, frost, or drought. He liked nice clothes and good cigars and claimed he had never been drunk. He paddled a canoe like a painter painting the river, dipping the paddle almost soundlessly into a slow-draining soundless river that was a watercolor of green trees and dead tree limbs, an occasional dark bird slowly climbing the waves of green pines or a dumb brown moose shackled to the mud, brightness of yellow rucksacks and red raingear before the gray of rain and river rocks and smoke rising up into the rain from a corncob pipe.

Philip hung up the phone, greeted his boys with love and manners, and then went straight out the door to buy something without telling anyone where he was going.

Upstairs, in his room, Leo took down from the shelf his dead father's dusty doctor bag. He examined the old blood pressure cuff with
ISIDORE AUBERON, M.D.
on it in black marker and the dusty sextant whose origins he could not remember or never knew. Then he put the cuff and the sextant back on the shelf and took down the little green jewelry box with the rusted latch. There were some pictures of his father inside it, including an unsmiling hospital ID badge, and a handkerchief monogrammed
RIA
on the corner with yellow stains on it. In many reinforcing strokes of black ball-point ink, a child had written on the fake green leather lid of the box:
ISIDORE R. AUBERON STUFF!! KEEP OUT!!

He might have said, had it been time:

Father.

All my life, you lie in your hole and drink my love. You drink my blood and your hole repays me nothing but the guilty black humors of the grave. And still my every cell dare not breathe, my very ribosomes dare not read the Book of Life without I honor you.

I tell you now, for this grave and silent treatment, I hate you. Not Yale, not my brother or yours, but you. And that's not all. I will be better than you. And my other
father and uncles, too. It's not too late. This is only the beginning for me. You'll see. It's a noble thing to hope for, a noble thing to try for! NOT a bad thing! NOT an unloving thing. I go to it.

And I welcome you to come out of your hole in the ground and try to prove me wrong. If ever again I offer you my life, then my life is a brass knuckle fist and I offer it to your still and silent mouth.

But the time had not yet come. He collapsed on the edge of the bed like a suit of armor without a man in it and said only, “Daddy.”

He put the doctor bag and the jewelry box back on the dusty shelf and went back downstairs. He went onto the porch, onto the still and empty kilim rug, where time stopped. There was no one there.

IN AMONG THE
crazy palm leaves on the roof deck of the nightclub called the Velvet Dog, underneath the Terminal Tower, which pointed up into the night and seemed to hang the moon up above them like a Chinese lantern, the friends of the bride danced while the friends of the groom stood around and drank. He drank but he wasn’t listening. The boys were all married and talking about the off-season moves of the Cleveland Browns, an activity that ought to be catalogued in the annals of futility somewhere between sorting books in a burning library, beating dead horses, and rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic.

“The Cleveland Browns are like a Samuel Beckett play with shoulder pads,” Leo said. “Godot never comes. Moses never gets to see the Promised Land.”

Leo looked out at the girls and thought,
Fuck destiny.
The rehearsal dinner had come and gone, but he still had tonight, and the wedding itself, and the reception to make something fun happen.
When destiny sits over you jerking your reins then you’re nothing but a mistreated horse.

He went out onto the dance floor among the crazy palm leaves.

“Cheers,” he said, and raised his glass of whiskey.

“Cheers,” one of the girls said, but Dusty, the attractive one with the nice ass and big tits, wouldn’t even look at him.

“Where did you come from?” he yelled over the thumping music.

But Dusty turned her back to him and continued dancing.

“This is our girls’ weekend,” one of the bridesmaids said. “It’s like a reunion.”

“I learned how to dance in Africa,” he said to Dusty’s back. “Once to the right and then farther to the right, once to the left and then farther to the left. How am I doing?”

Dusty looked over her shoulder at him. “Pretty bad,” she said.

“What happened to your face?” the other girl said.

“I got into a fight with a Nazi,” he said. “I like that name, Dusty.”

“Thanks,” Dusty said.

“Like Susan Clark in
The Apple Dumpling Gang
.”

“Like who?”

“How did you get that name?” he said.

She turned around. “My dad was a fan of Dusty Springfield.”

“Dusty Springfield? Didn’t she do a version of ‘Who Can I Turn To’? You know, ‘Who can I turn to…if you turn away?’”

“Huh?”

“Well, your dad sounds like an interesting man.”

“Not in a good way.” (Her father, a balancing act of wounds upon wounds and cuts upon cuts who kept himself upright at great cost to his spine and his daughters, who smiled with brave shocks of pain in his teeth like a trained bear on roller skates, and in silence seemed almost to groan with the wind that sawed the abyss of his heart—her father would ask things of him one day.)

The song ended. Leo asked what she did in wherever it was she was from.

“I work for the Devil.”

“Oh, for the Devil,” he said.

“Marketing. I have to fly to Cincinnati all the time.”

“Where else would the devil live?”

“Toledo, maybe.” She lived in Chicago, she said. “I went to high school in
Toledo,
” she said, pronouncing it like Toledo, Spain.

“I’ve only ever just driven past the exit to
Toledo
on Four-Eighty.”

Another song started but she didn’t start to dance again. She asked about him then in a somewhat skeptical and hostile way and he said he was a doctor but he guessed he would be a writer now, and she asked him what he wrote and he said fiction, and she said, what about? He couldn’t think of any answer except the true ones, so he said he’d written a story about the ghost of a woman who lived and died alone and decided to go out and try to meet other ghosts (no time like the afterlife), and another about a boy with a dead father.

“Oh yeah?” she said skeptically. “Did somebody die on you?”

“Yes, actually,” he said. And he told her about his father.

“I don’t remember my mother,” she said. “The same thing happened to her.”

“We ought to go buy a bottle of 1974 Burgundy,” he said, since his father and her mother had died within a month of each other in 1974. “We ought to go out together and take the bottle and throw it off a bridge.”

After the ceremony the following night, at the Metropolitan Ballroom, she wouldn’t talk to him again. He said he liked her necklace, which had three tiers of silver and turquoise in it. (Months later, after he looked out at the Duomo through his tears, after the wine and pistachio-encrusted venison at Palazzo Ravizza and the cigar she bought for him, whose smoke annoyed the other Americans having drinks in the parquet sitting room, and after the photograph she took of him, laughing through the smoke—he said he would write a book that would be like hot artillery fired straight into the heart and she said she knew he would—after he was nearly slain by cigar and alcohol and then arose the colossus of Tuscany thinking himself able to speak Italian while the rainstorm battered the shutters, then he learned that the necklace had belonged to her mother.)

He stood over the girls’ table in the Metropolitan Ballroom and offered his hand, and said anybody want to dance? Anybody? But he was looking at Dusty. Because fuck destiny.

“You’re not gonna get me to dance,” she said.

“The fuck I ain’t,” he said.

He didn’t care if she laughed, or if he looked like a fool. She would only touch his damp shoulders with her fingertips and she did laugh at him, but he danced on.

“So you like to pick fights?” she said, looking up at the scratches on his head.

“No, I lied, actually I was bird-watching,” he said. “People don’t realize it’s very dangerous.”

“Yeah, a cardinal could peck your eye out,” she said. “Or a nest could fall on you and really mess up your hair.”

“Exactly. What’s that move you’re doing there?” he said, and tried to imitate it.

“I’m dancing,” she said. “You look a little like a piñata I saw some kids smashing in Tijuana.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re the piñata,
ese
. I’m the stick.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yeah, that’s so.”

The fast dancing stopped. Their friends the bride and groom cut the cake and violins played something old. He grabbed Dusty’s hand and lifted it, tilted his head back gaily and laughed theatrically as though they were both wearing gold brocade and white gloves at some centuries-past ball. She said she always wished she could go to the ball in
Anna Karenina
. Then she looked over at a waiter like she suddenly needed a drink.

And then organ music started from the keyboard, and the singer said: “‘Dearly beloved.’”

“Oh, shit, I love this song,” Leo said. “You like this?”

“I like ‘Little Red Corvette’ myself.”

“‘We are gathered here today,’” the singer said, “‘to get through this thing called life.’”

And then the drums started and this friend of the groom’s, one of the last male gynecologists left in the world and a guy who hated himself and bought his women by the crate, came up to Dusty and grabbed her arm and Leo said, “Not now, dummy,” and he incorporated into his ungainly dance a gentle stiff-arm and actually pushed off on the gynecologist’s face, becoming the first and probably last man in the history of the universe to stiff-arm a gynecologist to the beat of “Let’s Go Crazy.” The gynecologist spun away and, surprisingly, stayed there.

And the singer said, “‘In this life, you’re on your own.’” And an electric bass note jolted the Metropolitan Ballroom twice.

In his drunkenness, and inside the creative field and rhythm of the music (it was a very fine rendition), Leo heard the words with a completely sincere affection, like the words of an army captain under a hail of rockets, and he felt himself a warrior in his once and only skin against the heartless stone and calamity, against all the heartless ignorance of all the dunces of the world, and he felt that his sister-in-arms was right there in front of him and their wounded souls were joined by fifty-four thousand degrees of coursing barrow lightning; he didn’t doubt it for even the mean life of a subatom; his soul moved at two hundred thousand miles an hour toward its secret desire; he wasn’t joking at all; he would take all comers, kill and kick ass, and he would fuck this girl right then, that night. Watch out, motherfuckers! If you don’t hear me coming, you’re gonna feel it when I get there.

At the end of the song he chest-bumped with the groom, who was his old friend Singer. He would have liked the Kinks afterward to snap spinal cords with the whiplash sarcasm of “Father Christmas” or something like that, but it was just as well, as the Kinks might have caused him to kick over an amplifier or knock over someone’s grandmother in an excess of enthusiasm (which would have been embarrassing).

When the reception ended, he followed her back to the Marriott. It was said that people were getting together at the Marriott in some room whose number he drunkenly repeated to himself. He didn’t know what time it was because his watch was broken (and even he knew better than to wear an Actinomyces-reeking digital Timex to a wedding). But nobody had made it upstairs anyway, it seemed, they were just sprawled out on the chairs in the lobby letting the world spin and saying their good-byes, and Leo asked to see Dusty’s hotel room. She sighed and agreed to show it to him, against her better judgment evidently, against the principles of the girls’ weekend. They went up in the elevator without saying anything. Once they were inside her room with the lights off he could see she was afraid to trust him, and he kissed her anyway and swept his hand over her dress, through which he could feel very plainly her warm naked body. He could see that that was as far as it would go.

She gave him her card. The company had been named for the John Coltrane album, she said. The card said
GIANT STEP.
It had a leaf on it. He was afraid to trust its symbolism.

“I’ll come to Chicago,” he said.

“No you won’t,” she said.

“The fuck I won’t.”

And as usual everything was all confused and painful, worried and guilty and mad inside him; his own homunculus, which jerked in his brain like a marionette, and all the simulacra of the world that were imprinted inside him all fretted the inner crown of his skull with ruts of hot pain. When he came out of the hotel doors, his old friend Singer the groom said, Where were you, Slick? And Leo must have looked pleased (he could see that in their eyes all around him), sly and pleased like the cat who ate the canary, and he said, I took a tour of the Marriott. And Leo smoked a cigar with his friend the groom outside the hotel, both in their tuxedos with their ties loose, both of them leaning against the bricks on that warm August evening like two young gods.

It was very late when Leo came back to the den and sat down with Mack in front of
Sixteen Candles
.

“They could never get away with Long Duk Dong today,” Leo said. “You never quote from this one. Or do you?
Sexy girlfriend!
”

“I actually have never seen it,” Mack said.

“
You
have never seen
Sixteen Candles
?” Leo said. “Impossible.”

“I don’t know. I— It just happened.”

“How was Dylan’s?”

“It was good to see them,” Mack said. “How was the wedding?”

“Good, actually.”

“Really? Good.… Okay, man, I gotta go to bed.”

“I’ll come up in a minute,” Leo said. “Do you want the bigger sink?”

“No, that’s okay. You want to go see
The Matrix
with me tomorrow afternoon? I heard it’s good.”

“Sure. I haven’t seen a matinee in years. What about Tom?”

“He’s out of town,” Mack said.

It was easy for Leo to see, as if for the first time, that there was no slight in this sort of invitation. Maybe it was the opposite of a slight, even. Also, it seemed that there was no need to question Mack’s movie opinions, or to apologize for his own. He looked up at the picture of Isidore on the shelf. The dead man sat in front of that awesome portrait of Moshe Dayan in bars of blood and shadow. His father had his long doctor coat on, trailing around him and down the chair like the robe of a king.

“He looks like you, Mack.”

“Yeah. No. He—” Mack said, and then laughed.

“That was an aposiopesis,” Leo said.

“Remind me what that is,” Mack said.

“From
The Aeneid
.”

“I know it’s from
The Aeneid
. But what is it?”

“It’s when a god or somebody starts talking and stops in the middle before he gets all his words out, I think.”

“Oh yeah. That’s what it is. What it was,” Mack said, looking at the picture.

Leo hugged Mack, and slapped him on the back to defend their masculinity, but then he put his head down on his brother’s shoulder and they embraced for a moment and held still. They were Ixion and Tantalus and they’d climb out of Hell.

They parted and Leo said: “And Neptune arose from the waves and said, ‘Where did I put my—’”

Mack said: “I sing of the arms and the end.”

Leo laughed a raggedy, raspy laugh—his voice was almost gone—and it was probably a laugh that was slightly too desperate for mirth. He saw that despite the jokes, Mack had his depressed basketball assassin face on.

“All right, I go to—” Mack said, and pointed up.

“It’s gonna get better,” Leo said. “It’s—” And Leo pointed up.

“I hope so,” Mack said, and sighed.

Then Leo started the aposiopesis again: “And Neptune arose from the waves and said, ‘Where did I put my—’”

And Mack finished it for him: “‘—giant robotic dildo.’”

“‘I know that thing must be around here somewhere,’” Leo said, patting his pockets.

“Sorry, I just assumed that was what you were going to say.”

They howled and cried. “Goddamn, Mack, you are a funny man.”

Leo asked Mack to come into the living room, where there was an old record player. He turned on the lamp with the bronze paint and face of a lion on the base. The lamp lit up the corner of the room well enough to see but its thick shade kept most of the room in darkness.