The Language of Men (27 page)

Eventually the old man I write about no longer works in the basement but at a supermarket. The man is a little younger, smokes a lot of cigarettes, likes to work on cars. He is a taxidermist and a Vietnam Veteran. More and more, a little boy appears in my stories.

I send some of my writing to an old professor of mine that I admired, along with a note explaining who I am and understanding ahead of time if he doesn't remember me. He remembers. He remembers which class I was in. He even references some of my old scenes and characters. I'm amazed, since I had sat in the back of his class and hardly said a word.

He encourages me to apply to a graduate writing program, but I'm skeptical. I had started telling people I'm a writer who temps to make ends meet. Instead of the truth, which is that I temp because I don't know what else to do. I feel I should have a more important reason for filling out the application, but only one seems honest:
It'll give me a purpose.

All of the nonfiction writers in my class are women. I figure I'll eventually switch over to fiction because that's
real
writing. I admire writers like Tobias Wolff or Raymond Carver, tough men whose stories make me feel like I'm spying on a suburban family through their living room window. I read their characters' dialogue over and over and wonder how "Could you please pass the salt?" became such a loaded question.

The fiction writers and even some of the faculty are surprised that I write nonfiction. "You'd make a great fiction writer," they say. Even my brother questions my genre. I wonder why, but at the same time, I have my own doubts. Why do I feel that fictionalized events are somehow more real? Is a self-portrait not as creative as an invented landscape? And why do many of the male fiction students roll their eyes at nonfiction, while the female nonfiction students seem relieved to have me in class? Often during a heated discussion, they'll lean over their manuscripts and say: "Let's have Anthony's opinion."

By the end of the first semester, all of my closest friends are women. They introduce me to writers like Joan Didion, Dorianne Laux, Lorrie Moore. Like these women, many of my classmates write about abuse. Verbal, physical, sexual. Sometimes all three. They write about silence. Their words on the page whisper like a secret. Sometimes I feel like the male representative for our genre, some kind of expert on my gender, but I don't have any answers.

Before summer break, I have to choose a mentor. I meet with a man named David Mura. In one of his essays, there is a description of a place like Sin-derella's—plywood video booths painted black, a quarter for five minutes. The perfect image is always a quarter away. He buys a stack of magazines, but as soon as he opens them, they are not enough. While Carver or Wolff's work made me feel like a voyeur, David's writing seemed to turn the camera on me.

David is in his mid-fifties, a member of my father's generation. I tell him that Vanessa and I are getting ready to leave for Vietnam, that the trip is part honeymoon, part research. He speaks with a faint Japanese accent and though he looks nothing like Mr. Miyagi, I can't help but draw reference to the only other wise Japanese man I know.

"So what are your plans for this semester?" he asks.

"I want to write about my family."

He nods. "That's a good place to start."

A FEW MONTHS after we return from Vietnam, Vanessa writes her thesis: Relationship Power Dynamics and Condom Use Among Female Sex Partners of Injecting Drug Users. I stare at a blinking cursor and decide if, in this scene, my father would say "bearded clam" or "snatch." Perhaps Vanessa knows not to ask for details because she has already seen me frustrated, pacing in front of my laptop.

"I have no idea what I'm trying to say."

"Sure, you do," she says.

She sits across from me in our living room, outlining her paper, gathering the data and figures from her work at the clinic. Vanessa is organized, focused, her work packed snugly into color-coded, three-ring binders. Her planner is a work of art, written with the patient hand of a pointillist painter.

Since we've been back, I've tried to piece together my father's stories with my own. A part of me wishes I could go back to the time before our trip, before I interviewed my father. There are too many voices in my head, too many conflicting sounds and images. I don't know where to start, and even if I did, I wouldn't know where to go from there.

Later that night, I replay my interview with my father. I remember driving from Boston to my parents' house on Long Island, my notebook filled with questions:
Where were you when you found out you were drafted? What was the last thing Grandma and Grandpa said to you? What was it like over there?
As my tires hummed along the road, I felt like I was traveling toward my father's story—our story—a feeling so tangible I imagined its own exit off the Expressway.

After dinner, my father and I went upstairs. I shut the door on the canned laughter of my mother's
I Love Lucy
reruns in the living room. In the quiet bedroom, I heard my father breathing through his mustache. He took off his flannel shirt and draped it over the desk chair. For a moment, it seemed like he didn't know where to sit. Finally, he lay down on the rug, folded a pillow between his neck and the wall, and propped his feet up on the edge of the bed.

"So is this gonna be like,
'In the beginning...'?"
he asked, searching for a comfortable position.

I laughed. "Maybe."

I fumbled with my new recorder, trying to place it in the perfect spot. As he waited for my first question, my father dug his silver dollar from his pocket and slowly spun it in his fingertips.

"So what were you doing around the time you were drafted?"

"The usual. Just hangin' out. Havin' a good time." His tone implied that this answer contained everything I needed to know.

"But what exactly were you doing? Where were you living? What were your plans for the future?" The red light on the recorder burned brighter with each word.

"Didn't have any." He shrugged. "I was working in the supermarket, hangin' out with my friends, and then I got drafted. Just one of those things, you know?"

I watched the seconds tick away as the recorder captured our silence. The excitement and purpose I had felt in the car faded.
What exactly was I searching for?
Did I want a bloody war tale, something my father had never told anyone—not my Grandmother, not my mother, no one? A story that would validate my work, infuse my sentimental scenes with violence, tragedy? Maybe my questions would conjure up forgotten images of napalm-scorched children screaming in my father's arms, or help him remember the soothing words he whispered around the grenade pin in his teeth. I had encouraged such images in the minds of those who asked what I was writing about with my purposefully vague response:
My father's experiences in Vietnam?
You've seen
Apocalypse Now,
you've heard the horror—yeah, that's my Dad.

As he sat on the floor beside me, my father tossed his silver dollar in the air and let it slap back into his palm. Then he looked at me.

"How far is all this gonna go, boy?"

"No further than it needs to."

"Boy's grillin' me like a two-dollar burger," my father said to my mother. He went into the kitchen to get a glass of ginger ale. Don had just walked in and was sitting on the couch, still wearing his coat.

"What are you guys doing up there?" he asked.

"Just a little research," I said.

Don nodded without looking away from the television. I heard the ice in my father's ginger ale knock against the side of his glass as he walked up the stairs, taking two steps at a time.

"Hey, boy, get that thing rollin' again. I just thought of somethin' else."

"WHY DO YOU gotta ask this shit?" my brother says across a table of empty wine bottles. We have just finished an expensive dinner for my father's 60
^th
birthday. I had asked my father if he was satisfied with his life. He shrugged. The question ricocheted off him and landed in front of my mother. She didn't answer.

My brother once told me that he respected my "quest for truth" but sometimes it was a bit much. My quest had been going on for years, as if my interviews would never end. It didn't matter that I didn't have my recorder; I asked questions all the time, whenever they popped into my head. I wanted to know everything.
Mom, what was your first car? Dad, where did you and Mom go on your first date? How old were you guys when you lost your virginity? Was it to each other? What was your wedding song? What was the first movie you saw together?
I didn't know what I planned to do with this information, but I thought: I lived with these people for almost twenty years and there is so much I still don't know.

Perhaps I felt comfortable asking these questions because I had listened to so many conversations between Vanessa and her family-how instead of talking about traffic or re-runs, they grilled each other, in a light-hearted way. With the television on mute, Vanessa asked her Mom about sex and drugs, what her life was like before Vanessa was born, what she wanted to do with her life, and if she felt satisfied with the way things turned out. Sometimes these conversations moved from laughter to tears in seconds, and I'd suddenly become very interested in the food on my plate. But after they cried together, they seemed closer.

I didn't understand why my question at dinner derailed the conversation. Vanessa and I asked each other questions like that all the time. "Checking in," we called it. It was our way of making sure we were living the lives we wanted, that we weren't coasting through year after year. But my question seems too direct for my family, as if I've thrown them on stage and watched them burn in the spotlight. My father looks away. My mother stirs the melting ice in her glass. Don shakes his head.

"Just let it go, man." Don says. "Move on."

I used to think all I had to do was let go. So you were a shy kid, let it go. So you spent most of your life listening, let it go. So you never felt connected with yourself, with others, let it go.

My brother moved on at a hundred miles per hour. He seemed to not only have the ability to let go, but crumple the past into a ball and toss it over his shoulder. Sometimes our phone conversations sound as if I'm tapping into his audio diary. The fast-forward button is stuck and his tape is racing, racing, racing, telling me about all the "justs" standing in his way: If he could
just
leave his job,
just
find a new apartment
just
get his brain out of this damn fog. Once he said to me, "I sometimes wish I'd die before I'm thirty,
just
so I wouldn't have to think anymore." He just turned thirty-four.

I wanted to shout: I feel the same way! All I do is listen and think. This should have been a moment for us to connect. But we didn't. I wasn't there. I was on the phone and I was listening, but I was in a bar years earlier, trying to find the words to express my disconnection from everything in my life, my own fog that descended on me or that I put myself in, obscuring my vision, muffling my heartbeat. I had spent months searching for the words but found nothing. In the corner of the bar, I turned my empty palms up as if they were the only place I hadn't looked. Don sipped his beer and stared at me.

"You know, your depression is really starting to bring me down, dude."

I want to play this tape in reverse, scratch the needle back across the record and hear a secret message. There must be another sound, a faint instrument I haven't heard. There must be.

I had planned to interview my brother. Drive down from Boston to his apartment, set the digital recorder on his coffee table, and start asking questions.
Did you consider yourself a rebellious kid? Do you live more in the past or present? List from earliest to latest the cars you've crashed.
I was set to do it, even told him why I was coming, but I chickened out. I was almost twenty-six, but I felt like the chubby little kid sitting on the hood of Don's Volare, watching him and the other characters in his world. I wanted to ask him about his life in California. Sometimes I'd bring it up and he'd sigh and ask me why I wanted to know about that. I'd shrug and say, "I don't know. Just curious."

As I dug through my backpack in his living room, preparing to change into shorts and go to sleep, I felt my recorder rubber-banded to my black notebook full of questions. My brother was in his room, opening and closing dresser drawers. He came out into the living room, to the kitchen, then back to his room. He forgot something, returned to the kitchen, then back to his room once more. He came back out and stood in the doorway.

"Goodnight, bro," I said, rolling over.

I felt him linger in the room. The floor creaked beneath his feet. "Okay."

Instead of talking to him, I sent him an e-mail. It felt like when I used to write him letters in high school, especially since I still had many of the same questions. But I could articulate them better now, and my email wasn't bogged down with my, and my friends', orders for
Hustler.

He wrote back a long e-mail that I read over and over. He told me he did consider himself a rebellious kid: "Ever notice how many 'troubled teen' books Mom has around the house?" But he also thought that in order to rebel, one had to spit in the face of a controlling element, and he didn't have that. It was my parents' "hands-off" approach that allowed him to run wild. Only when the conflict was unavoidable, when my parents could not ignore the damage my brother did to himself or his cars did they respond—my father's once-a-year blowouts, an Old Faithful of
fucks
letting my brother and anyone else in the room know what was going on inside him.

At the end of Don's e-mail, he wrote about his cars:

'78 Plymouth Volare. Cherry red with a white soft top. Slant 6 engine that wouldn't die. I think I changed the oil once in two years. Slammed that one into a cement divider on the Expressway when it hydroplaned out of control. I stepped on the brakes too hard at the last minute. Car had a habit of sliding a lot anyways and I still get nervous taking sharp turns or hitting the brakes too hard, especially in the rain.