Know Your Beholder: A Novel

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I haven’t left my house in almost a month.

It’s either Tuesday or Wednesday—most likely Wednesday—and three days ago a foot of snow fell on Pollard, Illinois, and its surrounding farmlands: storybook snow as soft as sifted cake mix. Although an old municipal plow has scraped down the street exactly twice—the driver’s head enshrouded in wool—clearly it’s been an effort in futility as the snow continues to fall at a dizzying rate.

I’m in the attic. I’ve been spending the last few hours counting the number of people laboring down the middle of my street on cross-country skis. Laboring, not gliding, as one might expect from a sport that uses a pair of long, preternatural runners. There have been seven skiers so far. Velocity-challenged and hunched over, the cross-country skier fights the snow, driving his poles into the frozen crust, desperate for purchase. The snow doesn’t welcome his pursuit the way it coaxes the downhill skier with its powdery, virginal shimmer. It bewilders rather than bewitches.

The cross-country skier exists as if trapped in a purgatorial silent movie.

It’s strange how full-body winterwear makes gender difficult to identify. Each goggled cross-country skier seems androgynous, machine-like, somehow pneumatic. It appears that the sport is a solitary pursuit, as I have yet to witness duos or trios. Perhaps there is something about the threat of being snowbound in a small town that inspires the lone adventurer? Where are they going, one by one? Are they skiing away from lives of ill repute? Or to a lover? Or simply to the library to return overdue books because the car won’t start?

Whatever the case, those lone skiers, as they probably already know, are not going to find much in Pollard aside from Our Lady of Snows shrine, an embarrassing, miniaturized counterfeit of the shrine at Lourdes, France (ours looks more like an interstate rest stop for science-fiction enthusiasts than a place of pilgrimage dedicated to Christ’s mother), and an enormous bookbindery on the outskirts of town.

What snow does to a small town like Pollard is vastly different from what it does to a mountainside. Whereas it beautifies the mountainside, beckoning photography and sporting life and teams of people in expensive, pastel-colored, waterproof Gortex to gather on outdoor lodge decks and drink mulled wine and hot toddies, it shuts the small town down, rendering it municipally constipated.

Mountain snow has the power to be painted. Small-town snow just gets dirty.

Architecturally speaking, the houses on my street are sort of interesting in that they are mostly mid-nineteenth-century, three- to four-story Victorians in various states of structural and aesthetic decline. The less compelling houses are a pair of low, flat Tudors and something four lots down that looks unfortunately log-cabinish. From my vantage point (the attic), the neighborhood has been suddenly blessed with an innocent gingerbread-house quality, featuring meringue-like gables, sugar-glazed finials, and frosted yards. Things look downright Alpine. But Pollard is no mountainside. Soon it will be dirty.

It’s warm and dry here in my attic room and the portable humidifier beside my writing desk issues a calming, attendant hiss and the occasional gurgle. It smells cedarn up here today. I’m dressed in two pairs of slightly yellowing, old-school, waffle-patterned long johns (long johns on long johns, if you will), a moth-bitten, Brillo-pad-gray cardigan sweater, a pilling wool winter hat the color of kelp that mostly hides my asinine hair, merino Ingenius camping socks, and a light-blue terry-cloth bathrobe that has become a low-grade monastic cloak. It is definitely the outfit of the nonattendant. The uniform of a Life in Default.

I am also now sporting a beard, and have developed a very real anxiety about it smelling gamy, like wet squirrel or coon. Beard pong can be an acute social/hygienic problem and when I encounter my tenants at the front porch mailboxes or in the basement laundry room I make an effort to keep at least an arm’s length between us. Though I twiddle and stroke the beard compulsively, I don’t know what it looks like, as I’ve been doing my best to avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces of any kind out of fear of what I’m liable to see staring back at me. I’m starting to imagine the beleaguered Civil War soldier. Or the banished indie record store warlock. Or a derelict from the northwest United States. Like one of those Olympia, Washington, societal dropouts who eats only frosted Pop-Tarts, living out a nineties grunge fantasy. The beard is mangy and random, with riptides and lots of wiry rogue strands.

The word
wayward
comes to mind.

But I’m a musician, so doesn’t that make my current state okay? Musicians have beards. And many musicians live outside of time. There’s Time and then there’s Musician’s Time.

This morning the molten plates of my personal history took a tectonic shift when I realized it’s been nine days since I’ve removed the bathrobe. Yes, attired in ancient terry cloth, I’ve slept, eaten, landlorded, gone to the bathroom, washed dishes, and guitar-noodled for some unfathomable number of hours.

One of the strange symptoms of even the mildest form of agoraphobia is that it gets progressively difficult to distinguish between personal and household odors. Beyond my beard, which I really can’t smell, as I’ve no doubt grown immune, the rest of my person stinks of the attic’s aged cedar, fiberglass insulation, and the faint aroma of dead mice. Mold memory. A skosh of Lysol-covered bird death. At least I’m still brushing and flossing. My mother used to say that when you give up on your teeth you might as well lie down in a ditch and wait for the dirt. I guess I’m still keeping that proverbial ditch at bay.

I inherited this house from my father, Lyman Falbo, after he retired from the accounting firm Falbo Financial Management, which he founded in the early seventies with his college roommate, Big Stu. Three years ago, upon selling his share of the company and handing over the reins to Big Stu (now Skinny Stu after turning vegan), Lyman took his second wife, Sissy Bisno (now Sissy Falbo), to live out their days in a cream-colored, heavily stuccoed ranch house in a cul-de-sac retirement community in Jupiter, Florida.

Sissy, a waggly-breasted, six-foot Lutheran widow, boasts burled hands, the shoulders of a veteran lumberjack, and a face somehow reminiscent of a young Garrison Keillor. I’m convinced that if I were to challenge her in any number of one-on-one combat exercises, she would put me on my ass six ways to Sunday. Her bidirectional, east-west breasts jiggle around so much underneath her many lilac-colored church sweaters that you have to wonder about not only their shape, volume, and bra strategy, but also their quantity. Does she possess three breasts? Five? Some large, some small, some upside-down or sideways? She’s forty-nine but looks sixty-five, and I would swear one arm is longer than the other. I keep looking for the thing that attracted my above-average-handsome, sixty-two-year-old, semi-wealthy, charming-in-a-golden-retriever-sort-of-way father, but I’m at a loss.

Lyman claims she’s a great swimmer, uncorks a deadly tennis serve, and possesses a beautiful singing voice. Her former husband, the late Southern Illinois meat-packaging mogul Chuck “the Bull” Bisno, died under the knife, during bypass surgery following a massive heart attack, and Sissy and Lyman “found each other” (the agreed terminology of their first encounter) at the weekly Wednesday night Grief Support Meeting held in the basement of First Lutheran Church. They fell in anodyne love shortly thereafter.

Why Lyman, a stalwart Roman Catholic his whole life, suddenly decided to sample the First Lutheran programming is anyone’s guess. My dead Roman Catholic mother, Cornelia, would be horrified.

Cornelia Wyrwas and Lyman Falbo fell in love in Chicago. Having just graduated from Kansas State University, Lyman was on an entry-level-job interview at an accounting firm in the Loop. Cornelia, seventeen at the time, was changing linens at her parents’ small bed-and-breakfast on Milwaukee Avenue, where Lyman was staying. I don’t know the moment they found each other, be it on the stairwell, in the dining room, or at the threshold of some potpourri-scented linen closet, but I imagine them making love on the B&B’s creaky antique furniture, Lyman covering Cornelia’s mouth, my virgin mother biting his fingers and bleeding onto fresh sheets (which she would later have to abscond with and drop in some far-off Dumpster she would walk to in hand-me-down shoes), the two of them spooning awkwardly afterward, my father inhaling the scent of her blackberry hair, the light from a bedside harlequin lamp spilling softly across their young, postcoital faces, my mother whispering Polish into the musk of his boyish neck.

Lyman’s new wife likes to make casseroles and Lyman likes to wear suits even when he’s not within twenty miles of an office building. They like this about each other and they both like that they like this about each other.

Since meeting Sissy, Lyman has been taking a large daily dose of Lipitor. He also rides a stationary bike until he starts to wheeze asthmatically, and eats a low-cholesterol, high-fiber diet.

Despite her seemingly plentiful mammae, Sissy and Chuck Bisno never had children, so marriage was a relatively clean move for Lyman. In the twilight of his life, he pretty much gets to have his new lady all to himself.

Based on an early visit to their Florida home, this is what I observed: Sometimes they play gin for a buck a point. Sometimes they’ll watch PGA golf and she’ll sit on his orthopedically replaced knee and he’ll position his hand between her gargantuan shoulder blades and call her his “girl” as if he’s talking to a beloved German shepherd. She doesn’t mind his taking his post-dinner carminative pills in front of her, and doesn’t mind even further when, while encamped on the living room sofa (Sissy crocheting scarves for Midwestern relatives, Lyman watching his prized DVD boxed set of
B. J. and the Bear
), he releases farts that sound like a drunk attempting a blues scale on a waterlogged clarinet. Lyman will even pat his tummy and send her a thumbs-up down the sofa.

It took more than a year after they left for Florida to rid the house of the scent of filterless Pall Malls and hemorrhoid ointment. The Preparation H was my mother’s, bless her heart, and even though she died of a brutal, soul-crushing stomach cancer two years prior to my father’s leaving-slash-retirement, I believe Lyman still hoards tubes of the ointment, whose strange medicinal odor of mink oil and boiled turnips serves as a sentimental reminder of his true love and substitute mother. The Pall Malls were Lyman’s and I’m convinced that despite his grisly alkaloid teeth, receding, stout-colored gums, and two-packs-a-day habit, he will live to be a hundred and twelve.

The house is a Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch; deep, overhanging eaves; decorative milled panels; pointed dormers; lots of well-glazed, double-paned, stormproof windows; authentic nineteenth-century wainscoting; ample parking space; three ancient climbing trees; and a handsomely paneled, industrial-carpeted, mold-free basement that has never flooded. Despite recent insulation upgrades, it still gets cold in the winter but stays somewhat cool through the humid part of the summer. In other words, heating it is a hellacious money-sucking bitch, but it’s tolerable in August.

During my time on earth, the house has survived three tornadoes, a first-floor electrical fire, an authentic wild boar, and a wave of resilient, late-seventies termites that took six months of an archaic baiting process to get rid of.

In the house’s original state, there were three upstairs bedrooms and one on the first floor, just off the living room. Now the first floor functions as a single-family unit. A year ago I converted the second floor into a pair of one-bedroom apartments, adding a dividing wall of Sheetrock, a bathroom, and two kitchenettes, whose need for a shared wall and shared plumbing and electricity eliminated my boyhood bedroom. Three months before that, half the basement was outfitted with a false gypsum ceiling, the industrial carpet, pairs of bathrooms and kitchenettes, and eight panels of Sheetrock, to prepare for the two one-bedroom units down there as well—humble, dormitory-like, but very livable—I’d even say cozy. Although I’ve been running oscillating fans for weeks, however, the basement still smells like joint compound and bleach.

My first basement tenant is scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow. His name is Bob Blubaugh, which sounds like some unfortunate character in a bad American independent film. I don’t know much about him beyond that, like me, he is in his midthirties and, unlike me, he was an alternate on the 2002 American Olympic luge team at Salt Lake City. Over the phone his voice was soft and clear, verging on soprano, and I imagined it emanating from someone with an inflamed, permanently chapped face.

Also living in the house are my ex-wife’s brother, Bradley, who stays on the second floor; the Bunches, a former circus couple who rent the ground-floor family apartment; and Harriet Gumm, an art student who occupies the other second-floor unit.

The remaining basement unit will be filled soon. Just this morning I received three responses to my Craigslist posting, which makes eight total. Of those eight, I will winnow it down to five and I predict three of them will actually show up for a look-see. It’s winter break at Willis Clay and outside of a man with the unfortunate name of Victor Mold, each person who responded to my ad claims to be a student, which means they will likely be financed by their parents, which is as close to a sure thing as it gets when it comes to renting out a basement apartment with a false gypsum ceiling during the worst economic crisis in recent history. Tomorrow I’ll do some reaching out via e-mail.