Famous Builder (27 page)

A question for B.: How to deny the baby’s mother the pleasure of stopping a young man cold with her new track suit?
Hey, girl.

The imagination breaks down here. No answer, no reply.

4.

From Oscar Wilde: “The truth of masks.”

5.

How much of my current interest in clothing is exacerbated by spending the semester in Salt Lake City?

In a recent poll, my temporary city rates lower than Birmingham, Alabama, on a ranking of the country’s “well-dressed” places. Walking past the big wedding cake of the Tabernacle, I’m not sure I believe that, though the fashions you see on the street do strike me as dated. (What could “dated” mean, however, in a world in which the cycles move faster and faster, when bleached denim is declared “in” again the second dark, raw denim hits the front table at the Gap?) Around Temple Square, kids still wear oversized pants and child-sized tops emblazoned with the emptied, smiling faces of Kate Jackson and Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Or more poignantly, ripped T-shirts that yell FUCK OFF in dripping black letters.

It goes without saying that fashion means more here than it does in, say, New York or Los Angeles, where personal style is taken for granted, where trying too hard simply translates as neediness. But something is clearly at stake for those Salt Lake kids who refuse to dress in button-downs and khakis, who chose to distinguish themselves from the pack and the underlying notion that they’re effortlessly, endlessly duplicatable. Their clothes are nothing less than political. They’re saying,
Listen, I have a self. I have the right to stand out. I’m not merely a member of the group. I don’t want to be married at sixteen, I don’t want to go off to Kampala for two years.
Et cetera. I’m reminded of a recent TV commercial for the Salt Lake City transit system that promotes public transportation during inclement weather. A cartoon snowflake cries, “I’m unique, I’m unique!” seconds before it’s smashed brutally, joyfully by an oncoming bus.

6.

Is my lust for clothing a sort of fashion penance? Am I just paying the debt on all those mistakes in my past, the childhood garments from Grant’s or E. J. Korvette, the adult attempts at, say, grunge? Last week, while organizing some old photographs, I came upon a picture of myself from 1993. I’m grinning, wearing a vintage olive green coat with fur collar, something I found in the thrift store of an Episcopal Church in Chatham, Massachusetts. I loved that coat at the time. I wore it everywhere from poetry readings to the opera, but now I’m just alarmed by the sheer wrongness of it. Such a tube-like fit: What on earth was I thinking?

7.

Do such revelations cause us to look down at what we’re wearing right now? In five years will we look back at pictures of ourselves, flustered, humble? Or will the evident changes in our faces help us resist that?

8.

(insert to manuscript, January 16, 2002)

What I have on right now, from the bottom to the top:

Two-tone brown Camper bowling shoes from Santa Monica Shoes, December 2000; white Dickies work socks from Urban Outfitters, 14th Street and 6th Avenue, New York, September 2001; white jockey shorts from Banana Republic, Philadelphia, May 2001; G-Star raw denim cargo pants from MAP, Provincetown, October 2000; black leather Diesel belt, Elisabeth, Prague, July 2000; long-sleeved gray-violet thermal shirt with white stitching, Urban Outfitters, Houston, fall 2000.

And there you have it, a layer cake of time and place.

9.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to The Paul Lisicky Hall of Shame: 1971—a sheer brown shirt with four-inch fringe at the sleeves. 1973—a pair of oversized aviator glasses with a strange trapezoid above the nose that trapped skin oils. 1979—a body perm (enough said). 1983—a black Ralph Lauren polo shirt with yellow collar and lavender horizontal stripes. 1985—an oversized pair of black velour corduroys. 1988—a colossal black overcoat (vintage again) worn solely because it was bought on St. Mark’s Place. 1992—cranberry-colored Doc Marten boots. 1993—grunge! 1994—double-processed white/blond hair that the hairstylist came close to dying a Windex blue. 1995—earrings, earrings. 1996—pointy vampiric sideburns.

10.

On our way back from the outlet mall, Michael and I take the long route home down Sunrise Boulevard. We’re in traffic. Outside a beauty shop, The Pygmalion Salon, stands an older lady in a boxy bright orange dress imprinted with windowpanes. It’s breezy, and any work that’s been done to her hair suddenly doesn’t matter anymore. It stands up in wild white tufts through which bits of her freckled scalp are visible. I’m in awe; I can’t take my eyes off of her. How fearless she looks beneath that rushing sky, standing beside the bus stop in her bright orange construction. The Peggy Guggenheim of Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t so long ago that she was beautiful. Her entire look is shaking its fist at time’s ruthlessness, its steady, exacting damage. It says one thing alone: Not my style. You’re not going to take that from me.

11.

I’m fascinated by someone at the gym.

With her impossibly shiny hair, in her ankle-length black coat, the Cher of Salt Lake (my private name for her) sweeps past the stationary bikes in a skin-tight, low-cut top in the dead of winter. She resists eye contact, silencing the whole room, albeit briefly. Some gawk, some simply pretend that she doesn’t exist. (Didn’t that old man with the holy undergarments beneath his running suit feel a twinge?) Yet there’s no way you can’t take notice. The Temple is literally across the street after all, and there’s something heroic, finally, about her fierce little waist, her topknot inspired by Sharon Tate, her decision to display her sculpted, surgically enhanced breasts. There’s a side of me that wants to yell out and cheer. It’s not that she’s particularly charming, cheerful, or available. I’m not even sure she’d ever acknowledge my hello. But I can’t help projecting myself into her, imagining what it might be like to walk through the world that way. Oh, to silence with beauty. My eyes roll back in my head as if I’ve been shot up with heroin.

It would be simplistic to say that her appearance is about asserting her superiority over us. Of course, that’s a part of it, but it would seem ungenerous to attribute her work to hostility. Her appearance indicates that there’s a larger world outside the mountain-walled valley of Salt Lake. She gives us permission to take delight in ourselves, to stand in resistance to the towers of the church across the street and all of its concomitant prohibitions. She embodies an eagerness to know the terms of the world, to try them on, then discard them when need be. She tells us that you don’t have to live the life that was handed you, that you may indeed claim your self.

Could it be that just beneath the constructed surface of every glamorous person there’s a ghost of somebody else, awkward and sad, who refuses to stay dead?

12.

I go through my closet and decide what to keep, what to give away. Luckily, we’re moving from Salt Lake in exactly two weeks, and I probably should be doing anything but writing. But moving is always the occasion of reevaluation and of taking stock. It stirs up time, and one can’t help but go through all its attendant activities without looking backward and forward at once. It doesn’t get any easier. Even if you’ve moved a dozen times in as many years, as I have. Cherry Hill, Anchorage Point, Provincetown, Iowa City, Key West, Salt Lake City, Houston, not to mention shorter stays in other places: London, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Prague, San Miguel de Allende. All these names and places fade as we turn our eyes toward New York.

I stand before an open box making myself sick over my decisions. There’s no law saying I have to get rid of anything; certainly I could just pack up every T-shirt and pair of jeans and send them off with the mover. But moving seems to necessitate something like paring down, so that’s the way it will be.

To keep: the plaid yellow jacket with the slightly threadbare collar.

To give away: the black rayon shirt with the pockets over the chest.

But it’s harder than I think it is. There I am, six years ago, standing at the register of a now defunct store, pleased with my new jacket (there’s nothing else like it at the time), hopeful about my new life in Provincetown. In only a few short weeks I’ll wear it every Wednesday night to the Crown and Anchor, where I’ll take it off as soon as I pass the bouncer. I’ll fold it precisely, then tuck it beneath the stacked chairs. I’ll dance for two and a half hours straight, without a break, utterly alone and
with
people at once, almost convincing myself the whole experience is sealed, safe from the workings of time. I’ll put it back on when I’m finished, my sweat soaking into its sleeves. I’ll wear it walking through the dunes one brisk October morning. I’ll wear it when I’ve heard a female friend, the window washer who says hello to me on the street every morning, has died unexpectedly of pneumonia. I’ll wear it for hours and hours until I’ve latched onto the next jacket, and I’ll lose interest in it, until I’ve stopped wearing it at all.

But maybe I’m just being the worst kind of sentimental. Maybe I’m investing my memory with a significance it doesn’t merit.

I stare down into the yawning dark with my flashlight. Shirts and jackets and shoes and trousers: I have hours of work ahead of me. I’ll be up all night if I keep up like this.
Good-bye, you.
And I drop the jacket into the giveaway pile.

13.

It’s evening now, a breeze through the open window. It’s chilly enough to merit something warmer, so I reach for my father’s robe, which I haven’t yet packed, and slide my bare arms into its sleeves. It’s looking shabbier by the minute. A few nights ago I lay down on the living-room floor in it, the lustrous wool picking up more animal hair than I thought possible. I sit before my desk now, naming the sources of each individual strand, courtesy of our two dogs and two cats.

(Not long ago Mark told me that his friend, Mekeel, had a dream in which she learned that he must buy me a new robe. He thought she was probably right; he’s hinted on more than one occasion that I might look better in something else.)

I stare at the picture of my father sitting on the dock behind my childhood summer house. With my chunky black horn-rims, I now look just like he did in 1962. He looks amazingly content, fully himself, no sense of doubt about the future. I’m resembling him more and more by the minute. On my last visit he introduces me to their downstairs neighbor, Jim Malone, a retired dentist, who cries instantly, “Man, you look just like your dad.” Something that would have flustered me when I was younger.

(I push my glasses up the bridge of my nose. Will these, too, end up in the great Hall of Shame?)

Once again, I’ve forgotten to call. Now if I could only get him to keep his word. Although my father’s been promising to set up an e-mail account so we could stay in touch more easily, six months have gone by without any progress on the matter. This seems to be his method of dealing with getting older: delaying choices as if the passage of time isn’t quite real.

But who am I to judge? For the moment, at least, everyone I care about is well. I hold in my breath. Like Virginia Woolf, I want to whisper to each passing moment, “stay, stay, stay.”

I tie the robe tighter around my waist. If I’m lucky enough to get old, I wonder how I’ll be? Like my father, putting things off, moving through the years as if he’s convinced he’ll escape death? Or like the elderly woman in her shocking orange dress, saying no,
no
with her style, lunatic, defiant, refusing to accept the inevitable?

The man and his friend Denise drive down Route 73, groaning at all the trophy homes behind the big box stores. He’s not entirely surprised that the 32-foot globe at the New World entrance is gone. So much of what they remember has been torn down, refurbished, paved and planted over: the Holly Ravine Farm and its petting zoo, the Clover supermarket, the broad green entrance lawns of Wexford Leas with its brick tollhouse. Still, he sighs. A wince, a film falls over his eye, and it’s 1972: the boy and his mother stand in a field to watch a pinpoint above the South Jersey farmland. Blades beat, crowds mill. Drivers pull onto the shoulder of the road to see what all the fuss is about. And then the big, bald revelation, just as the Friday
Courier Post
predicted: REPLICA OF UNISPHERE TO BE TRANSPORTED BY HELICOPTER TO ROSSMOOR DEVELOPMENT. The boy and his mother gaze skyward, a little skeptical, yet certain that change is on the way. They clap, giving themselves over to the collective shock and thrill (wasn’t a statue of Jesus transported like this in a Fellini film?) when the great globe falls from thirty feet above. The ground rumbles. The helicopter blades go
trk-trk-trk-trk-trk.
The boy and his mother feel more than they have a right to—weren’t they just making vague fun of the developer’s appeal to the good life, even as the boy clutched the brochure to his chest? The crowd scatters. The sky darkens with the passage of the cold front. And yet mother and son keep watch until their backs are tired, as the banged-up world’s lifted onto its pedestal.

Denise looks out at the serviceable two-story Colonials that have taken New World’s place. “Whatever happened to it?”

“The world?”

“The development. These aren’t the models I remembered.”

The man tells his friend—have they really known each other for eighteen years?—about the sewer moratorium that stopped the project. (Among all that fills his head, he can’t believe he’s cataloged this lowly fact.) Only a few dozen homes—Tudors, Haciendas, and Contemporaries—out of a proposed thousand were built before a local firm later took over the project and renamed it Willow Ridge.

“This is just”—she gestures at the boxy, bland houses beside the road—“isolating,
grim.
Do you remember what New World meant?”