The Funnies (11 page)

“This morning. Marty's away at a conference already.”

“And you haven't talked to anyone in town, have you.”

She narrowed her eyes further, until she looked asleep in an anxious dream. “No,” she said. I suddenly realized what Pierce was getting at.

Neither of us said anything. Pierce picked up his water and the ice clinked in the glass. Anna said, “Is your father home, boys?”

I looked at Pierce. His face was flat and impassive as an empty saucepan. How does he do that? I thought.

“Boys, I asked you a question.”

It was me who finally spoke up. “I'm afraid he passed away on Tuesday,” I said. “Of a heart attack.”

Her eyelids flapped open for only a second before they squeezed half-shut again. The Ironic Housewife was gone. “Bullshit,” she said. She licked her lips. I understood suddenly that my father and she had been lovers.

“No, he's dead.” And I was not unaware of the pleasure I got out of saying this so bluntly, and disliked myself for it. My skin actually crawled.

She stood very still, her eyes closed, a long time, and the pitcher tilted, spattering iced tea on the cement. I felt it, splashing my legs like rain.

* * *

Sunday morning I got up at seven, tramped out to the studio and made a gigantic pot of very muscular coffee. I watched it as it brewed, the Mr. Coffee gurgling before me like a good baby. At the drawing board, I moved Friday night's glass to the floor, gulped half a cup black, and pulled out a thick sheaf of Wolff B sketch paper. Immediately I started drawing from memory the cast of the Family Funnies, beginning with my father, his foggy eyeglasses blotting out his eyes, and following with my mother, Lindy, Bobby, and so on, down to the dog, Father Loomis and a variety of neighbors (pointedly none of whom, I noticed, was Anna Praegel).

It was a liberating way of going about things. The drawings were terrible, but there were a lot of them, and I figured this, far more than any lame attempt at “quality,” was what Brad Wurster was after. I had finished ten pages by ten
A.M
., not a bad pace. I stretched in the chair, got up, poured more coffee. It was too stale to drink. I turned off the burner and went into the house. Pierce's bedroom door was shut, and I could smell cigarette smoke. The answering machine was blinking: one, two calls.

“Tim, this is Susan. I just wanted to check on your progress, see if you've called Wurster, et cetera. We should meet this week. Maybe you could come to New York. You have my card.”

Beep. “It's Amanda.” Her voice had a morbid resonance to it, like she was calling from a mausoleum. She sighed. “I miss you, sort of. Call?”

I fished Susan's card from my wallet and dialed her home number. When she answered I heard a lot of talking going on and some quiet jazz music playing. “Yes?”

“It's Tim Mix.”

“Oh, hey,” she said. “Let me pick up in the other room.” I heard her ask someone to hang up for her, and then a few moments of labored breathing before Susan came back on the line. “Okay!” she said to the hanger-up, then to me: “How's the cartooning?”

“Oh, coming along,” I said. There was a breezy informality to her manner—whatever fun she was having was leaking through the line. “What's going on there? Party running late?”

“No, right on time,” she said. “Brunch.”

“Ah.”

“So do you want to come up to New York this week? Expense account. Lunch is on Burn Features.”

“You bet.”

“Obviously it's the weekend, so I don't have any messages for you from corporate. But I'll know later in the week. Maybe Thursday? Are you free then?”

“Us cartoonists have nothing but time on our hands,” I said.

“Ah, yes. Why don't you meet me at eleven for dim sum? Have you been to Delicious Duck House?”

“Never.” She gave me an address in the Village and I wrote it down. “I can't do dim sum, though.” I told her about Wurster. “Late lunch?”

“Oh, okay.”

“You seem to have a thing for brunches.”

“Two large meals early in the day. That's how my family always did it. Are you saying I'm fat!” She said this in a mock-hysterical voice. Was she happy to talk to me? I got the feeling she was. I tried to conjure up a picture of her in my mind, but all I could remember was zaftig and fair, like a pastry.

“Uh, no.”

“Yeah, well. See you Thursday.”

When I hung up, I immediately dialed Amanda, to avoid giving myself time to think about it. She dropped the receiver answering, and for several seconds I heard her fussing with it. “Hello? Hello?”

“It's me.”

“Hey, stranger. Are you coming home tonight?”

“I have an appointment at seven tomorrow, in New Brunswick.”

Silence. “So you're going to do it.” It was hard to read her tone: a kind of wry mock-impartiality, like an NPR newscaster.

“I guess I am.”

“And you're not coming home?”

“I didn't say that,” I said. But I had meant it, hadn't I? Now, however, it seemed that I had changed my mind.

“So you
are
coming.”

“Sure.”

“Will you make it home for dinner? I'll cook for a change, har har.” Amanda was the house cook, usually. It was a bone of contention between us that while I was perfectly willing to cook, she was not willing to eat what I made. She thought I should learn to cook more elaborate and—she said—“subtle” food. You can take the man out of Tory's, but you can't take Tory's out of the man.

“Seven okay?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Well, I'll see you then.”

“Kiss kiss.”

I was well into my next ten pages of drawings when I realized that I hadn't asked Pierce if I could use the Caddy. I took a break sometime around one and knocked on his door. He didn't answer.

“I know you're in there,” I said. “I'm just wondering if I can take the car tonight and tomorrow, until around five.”

The creak of bedsprings. “Where are you taking it?”

“West Philly. Then New Brunswick and New York.”

“Somebody's going to rip it off.”

“I'll be careful,” I said. “I'll lock all the doors.” No answer. “I'm really in a bind here, Pierce.”

“Whatever,” he said finally. I stood by the door for another minute until I realized this was just what he was always accusing me of doing. Then I went back out to the studio.

* * *

When I was finished I had twenty-two pages, smeared with sketches. They looked nothing like Family Funnies characters. The sight of them filled me with despair. In a few frenzied hours I had managed to demote the FF cast, if such a thing were possible, from paper-thin buffoons to abject cretins. My mother's stylish shapeliness came off as frumpy and slutty, and all of us kids looked like malnourished ragamuffins begging in the street.

I found my father's leather portfolio jammed between the file cabinet and flat file, and stuffed it with my sickly sketches. On my way back to the house, I tossed it into the trunk of the car.

* * *

Traffic was bad on 95 South. A truck had jackknifed at the Coleman Avenue exit. I sat wedged in the bottleneck for over an hour, and when I finally squeezed through, found the open highway transformed into a Formula One fantasyland, where everyone seemed to have forgotten that the roads were policed and drove well over eighty in all lanes. I held close to the limit, two-fisting the wheel all the way to Vine Street. For some reason, a thin layer of sand coated the floor of the car, and as I drove it worked its insidious way into my shoes.

By the time I got home I was an hour and a half late and noxious sweat had broken out in my armpits. Amanda was waiting for me. “I called and called!” she said. “Pierce had me half-convinced you'd made off for good.”

“Traffic,” I said. “Accident. Not me.”

This seemed to quench the fire in her eyes. They were good eyes, green and expressive, the shape of flying saucers. One pupil had a notch in it, like the pork roll my mother made us for breakfast when I was a child, and so she had a special contact lens. We kissed. It was so easy, so good that I forgot I had been dreading it.

We ate cold Pad Thai. I took a hot bath, and Amanda led me still warm from it into the bed. For the first time in days, I felt like I was somewhere I belonged. We made rare and surprising love. We slept.

But in the morning I went to the extra room and looked at what I had been working on. It was untitled, like all my work. There was a latex cast of the sidewalk; an old couch, left for the trash, that I'd found; a garbage can with an apartment number spray-painted on it, filled with “clean” garbage I'd gathered and painted to look rancid. It was dreadful. Worse, it was an exercise in pretension, saturated with the embarrassing conviction that I could create new contextual meaning for a scene simply by moving it into my apartment. Yet here it was, the only thing I'd thought about for the week leading up to my father's death.

I remembered his letter, still in the pocket of my sport coat, which was now balled up in my duffel bag in the vestibule.
It isn't right for you and never was
, it said.

“So,” Amanda said, behind me. I jumped.

“Jesus!”

“The Genius, Regarding his Masterpiece.”

“I want to set it on fire.”

She punched my shoulder. “You set me on fire last night, baby. Heh heh.”

“Oh, hey, yeah.” I didn't know what to say.

“So you've got an appointment. Your new employer?” She was smiling, but the question was pointed and a little defensive, which tone I was supposed to notice.

“My tutor. Brad.”

“Sounds hunky.”

“We'll see,” I said.

She took my hands. In her loose nightgown—a St. Vincent DePaul find from the week we moved in together—and her bowl cut, she looked like a child, someone the ten-year-old me would date. “We haven't talked about this, you know, Tim.”

“I guess we ought to.”

“You're pretty much moving out, I gather.”

“It won't be so bad,” I said. “We're not so far away.”

“I suppose not. There's still the car, by the way.”

“Oh, God…”

“I know,” she said, sighing dramatically. She tapped an imaginary wristwatch. “You have to go.”

“Sorry.” We stood inches apart, her arms crossed, mine hanging limp at my sides. Finally I reached up and rubbed her shoulders. It was a lame gesture, but she let herself be placated. I managed a smile, then went to the bedroom to pack up some more of my clothes.

There was a smell the two of us made living in the same place, and it was here now, where we'd slept. I could remember what her life smelled like without me: coffee, paint and houseplants, with a whiff of bleach from somewhere. We'd met at a party in art school, got drunk, fooled around, and didn't see each other again for five years, when we did exactly the same thing. The second time it stuck. Everything from then on in was opportunistic: around the time I was kicked out of my building, her absentee roommate, who'd gone to France to pick grapes and never returned, made it official. My temporary stay stretched into years. Our two cars turned into one. Our smells commingled.

And I noticed this because the night before, the place smelled like her again, just her. I might have been gone a year, for all my nose knew.

Packed, I lingered in the bedroom, watching a dog eat garbage in the alley through the narrow rear window. It was time to go, but I was having trouble: she would be out there, waiting with my parting kiss, and though I had practically become one, I didn't want to feel like a guest.

In the American West, if you want to go someplace, there's only one way to get there. That's what I brought away from the irritating, rainsoaked road trip I took with Amanda one summer through Montana and Idaho. All our shortcuts, inferred from the road atlas, turned out to be long, muddy mistakes.

But there's something to be said for that kind of simplicity: if you want to go, you just do it. You don't worry about the route. This is not the case in New Jersey, where all roads lead everywhere, and route mapping is not simply a skill necessary for efficient travel, but a kind of aesthetic category, ripe for pseudo-intellectual cogitation and debate.

To get to Brad Wurster's studio, I could take Route 95 North from Philly past Trenton, then take 1 North to New Brunswick. Or get off 95 around Bordentown and take 130 to New Brunswick. There was, of course, the New Jersey Turnpike, or scenic 27 through Princeton and Kingston. I could even, given enough time to waste, go back through Riverbank, get on county 518 in Lambertville, and tool at about thirty-five miles an hour all the way to Kendall Park, just a short hop to my destination. Each route had, of course, its elegant little perks, which I knew well from my many bored high-speed drives in high school: the Mister Icee outside Franklin Park, the driving range at Cranbury, the water slide by Penns Neck, on a road otherwise choked with car dealerships and strip malls. But it was all a game, really; it was five-thirty in the morning, I was already late, and I would have to take the turnpike.

I listened to talk radio on the way. A guy named Manny was unleashing an ill-informed and redundant invective against the current gubernatorial administration, and the show's host tried vainly to uh-huh him back to planet Earth. I couldn't remember the governor's party affiliation; she was one of those Democrats who love the rich, or a Republican with a short haircut, crouched in some ideological foxhole in the no-man's-land of waffledom. Manny was insisting that she had had numerous extramarital affairs while a member of the state senate. The host, a smooth-voiced baritone named Bill, said, “Well, Manny, I haven't heard those allegations myself.”

“Every last word's true! I got a source at the
Star-Ledger…”

“You see, I'm wondering, Manny, if that issue is even relevant to our discussion. I mean, we are talking about the Clean Water Bill here. And besides, let the innocent among us cast the first stone, or whatever.”