Nightwork: Stories (7 page)

“So why bother?” we agreed, and I often didn’t
see my father. Easy to make excuses in the gaudy life—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—riding on my way somewhere and smoking a cigar, stinking up the driver’s daddy’s car.

“I live here,” I said by way of a good night at my grandfather’s door, yet forgetful of the driveway lights, which shone through falling snow, pooling white on white when next I saw them.

Morning, my grandfather at the table talked of lights left on. He said, “You are not with your father. There are rules in this house, remember,” rules I was told my father never followed—which was why, then. The inexorable logic, how hard I worked to live by it as Grandfather’s darling. No thank you, no I couldn’t, no, please, to what he took from Daddy to give to me.

Petting my watch on any Sunday’s visit, my father said to me, “So the old man won’t die with it still on his wrist.” Lucid on the subject of anyone’s belongings, noticing the second wife’s new rings, my father seemed alert to the getting. The shadow boxes and the canes, the grandfather clock, the shoehorns, the brushes, the studs, the links, the pins—such enameled old blue—my father knew the history to and wanted them. He said so. My father said to my grandfather, “When were you last dancing?”

My grandfather’s smile had teeth for this part. Such things as he had were his to give, which he did when he was not afraid of dying—or so my father said. My father said to my grandfather, “Maybe not dancing, but traveling—are you thinking of traveling again?” To the places I had seen in photographs—Grandfather
backdropped by the walleyed rams at Karnak—would he travel there again, as once he had, a young man in a high collar, unused to such heats, yet smiling?

Upright before whatever scene the camera found him, my grandfather had traveled, had been to, had seen the famous cities before the modern wars rubbled them. He had plundered the shops famous for their porcelains and brought home plate and platter and sconce: the teardrop chandelier above the table where we ate, and the canes, of course, from London. I heard him speak. Those are Portuguese, those Italian, but the bronze Diana—oh, God, who knows from where? “I bought it,” he said, “but your grandmother was offended by the figure’s upturned breasts. Your grandmother,” he said, “you can imagine how she suffered your father’s first attack, the second—all those wives.”

Grandfather’s disappointment, I could hear it in his voice when he said his good nights, the way the words came out words—and was it with some longing, and for what, from a man who had had and had? Mistresses, my father told me, he had glimpsed in the crowds of the company parties, ladling the punch, stacking plates high with sandwiches. “My poor mother,” my father said.

Sometimes on our Sunday visits, my father cried to remember her. “Mother, Mother,” he said while my grandfather looked on and the second wife coughed, embarrassed.

The way my father dressed, grown fat from too much sleeping, in mismatched clothes, seedy as a poet now that he knew himself as poor—and happy to be
poor. Look how he was loved, and he pointed to the men who swayed at his door, saying, “Professor James, sir, may we come in, please?”

“Don’t ask them in,” I said. “Be someone different.”

Be one of the boys at the concerts, at the ceremonies, at the breakfasts. They rarely spoke of my father, or if they did, it was, “How’s Jim?” How was it at this last new place? Expensive as hell was what my grandfather said, but we wanted him well again—didn’t we?

My grandfather said, “Poor Jim.”

The second wife said, “Of all the men.” She said, “I gave him you, didn’t I?”

But everything we did, I thought, we did for money.

In my grandfather’s house, I was given the room with the western view that lit up the matchstick winter trees, a book’s worth at a strike—wasteful, too early, short. Winter afternoons, pitched in dark, we sometimes slept in the library, lap-robed in Sunday’s papers, my grandfather snoring clogged snores from stories. Warty giants who lived in caves beyond the umbered forest—my grandfather was like one of those in his sleep, or that was how I saw him if I was first to wake. I saw the large sore nose, its old-age red, and the rest of him brown-speckled like an egg, and yet I kissed him.

“Too much,” my grandfather said. “That’s enough.”

There was more he was saying, except I moved
away with my part of the paper, which was never Grandfather’s part of the paper. His part of the paper was nothing to read.

My father said he could not read. He said, “Now they’ve got me on this stuff, I can’t concentrate. I can’t see. All I do is sleep and sleep.”

I had never seen my father asleep, never known him to be other than fever-pitch awake; flame-tip skin and heat I had felt from his fingers at my cheeks. Not afraid of touching, my father was not, and his roiled speech—sometimes hard to follow what he said. “These drugs,” he said. “It’s not my fault”—any more than he was here in this last new place. “My own father,” my father said. “He did this to me.”

“Did what?” I asked. Left alone sometimes in his room to talk, we talked about my grandfather: hard as the stony place that he had made into a home—and me in it. What was he doing with me on the estate? was the question.

My father lifted at the skirt of his short robe. He asked, “What does he want from you?”

I scratched him.

“You would think we were lovers,” he said, and I hit at his arms, pushed at his chest with the heels of my hands, pushed at the softening parts—at his belly. He laughed and then grew angry and slapped small slaps fast, all over me, until I was backed up against the door and crying; surely, a snotty, messy kind of crying, the body in an ooze, although what I remember is the joy I felt to call my father fucker—“You fucker.”

I told my grandfather, “I wish I were yours.” Almost any Sunday I said it. Even if the second wife
were present, as she sometimes was, I said, “I never want to live with my father again.” The second wife thought it best, too. In my grandfather’s house, there was routine: cook’s soft-boiled egg in the morning and a table-set dinner each night. Not as it had been with Daddy, the second wife was sure of this, how it was with my father—she had known me eating at the sink from a bag, school shoes still missing and late for school—yet she had let my father drive me.

“Good-bye. See you later. See you next Sunday, next month, next year. You wouldn’t want me to give up work. None of this, of course, means I don’t love you. Remember how it was. You understand. This is better.” Any one of us could have said as much.

Besides, I wanted every morning to break up buttered toast into the eggcup.

I wanted lots and lots of new clothes.

Keys to the car, plane ticket, passport, backstage passes.

I wanted to be between visits on a Saturday when we walked Grandfather’s gardens—him with the pruners in his pocket and a cane he used to beat at things while he pruned in rolled-up sleeves. The steeped-tea color of my grandfather’s arms, sure in every gesture, aroused me. I wanted to brush against and lick him: the pouch at his neck, his white, white hair. Stooped, skinny, abrupt in motion, loose clothes slipping off, my grandfather used his pruners. He worked beneath a weak sun and did not sweat or smell of anything more than his ordered soap, green bars with age cracks that looked like saved stones from the bottom of the lake. The lake, from whichever angle we looked, was
chipped blues or grays, or buckled, as with ice; and when it was ice, we stayed indoors. We watched for winter birds—blood smears in the trees or the blue jays he detested swinging on the onion sacks and pecking at the suet. The snow was dirty; shucks of seed skirted the trees. There were pawprints and footprints and dog’s canary piddle—too many visitors on any one day.

I’m sorry, I get confused.

The snows that filled the wells of ground about my grandfather’s gardens were unmarked and falling in the lights I thoughtlessly left on.

My father was sick and had been sick for as far back as my grandfather could remember.

Imagine what it was like to have a son who said such things!

But what my father said about me! I had heard him before on how it was with me—me, a hole, a gap, a breach, a space, an absence and longing. Empty. Feckless. Stupid.

“Who can ever fill you up?” my father asked.

Then I was using something sharp on him, just to draw a little blood. I was being showy and so was he, my father—he knew about acting. He was smiling while I cut him, so that it must have been the second wife who screamed—not me. Why would I have screamed? My grandfather in the room saw what I was doing.

METROPOLIS

T
he things my son may see living with me—the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men—shame me. Somewhere obscured in the obscuring city is his father, we imagine. My son and I stand at what was my window, my room, where now another man sleeps, if he sleeps. But he is gone, too, in these early, strangely inky evenings—rarely blue when we stand at the window, and my son asks, “Where do you think Dad is now?” I do not know the answer to this or to lots of other questions my son might ask me, which may be why my son is angry.

Teachers, mothers, women mostly, tell me my son is angry. They tell me this in the way women do in stories about other boys now pacified and prosperous
in the alchemy of growing up. “But these boys were once angry,” they say, prayered hands and lowered heads. The women carry the word
angry
into talk as with pincers. Bad, bad to be a boy and swinging something he is using as a weapon against a wall.

Should I start at the beginning, then, I wonder, when the rage I felt bleeding on and off for weeks made me needle myself to bleed this child out and try again? I wanted a someone committed to staying. But my son held on; I thought he had to be a girl. The boy’s head lifted to view in his easy birthing, the doctor said, “I think it’s a girl,” and that was what we saw, the doctor, the nurses, the father, me. Before the boy part slipped out, we saw this bright girl mouth pouted for kissing. “Ah,” we said.

The astonishing heat between my legs after my son was gone I remember, me on a gurney in a screened-off pen and calling out for ice.

“Do you have any thoughts?” the teacher asks me when I go to see her about my son. But the rown-leaf color of the desks, the exhausted chalky air, streaked with light as if by candles, the tallowed apprentice quality of objects, crude child maps of the explorers, all catch in my throat like ash.

The dying man who sleeps in what was once my bed sleeps poorly and smokes, listens to the radio. My thoughts are of him and of what my son may hear when the dying man comes home, sanding the floor with his long and heavy feet. Up and down, up and down, past the locked bedroom where my son and I sleep, the dying man moves. He calls out from what was my room, “I am dying. I am dying in this fucking
bedroom.” Night after night, I hear him. Pressed against my son in my son’s bed, I hear the dying man and wonder. Does my son hear, is he really sleeping, and how is it I have let this happen to us—opening the door to men who come in or who do not come in, threatening ruin, slapping money on my bureau, saying, “I am dying,” or “This is all I have,” or “This is all you want.”

The teacher, I imagine, has no troubles with money or with men dying. Heavy ankles, yes, and plainer, pulled-back face, but no debts rattling behind her; the teacher wears grown-up clothes and knows how to tie a scarf. Plump and silky, it settles at her neck; I would pet it but for my chewed-up thumbs that seem to snag whatever nice things I touch.

“Anyone would leave you,” the dying man says.

I want to tell the teacher that the dying man has newsprint on his fingers, and that my son has seen things, too—the staples in my head.

“You’re upset,” the teacher says. “Maybe you don’t want to talk.”

I shake my head, saddened and amazed.

At home, my son has seen me mad enough to kick in glass, blood pooling in the cuff of my shoe.

My son’s wet mouth, I could drink from it still.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say to this teacher, and want to hold out my hands and feel a ruler on their backs. Bad, bad to be a woman, indiscriminate and needy, linking arms with any man who promises relief.

The teacher, I think, knows this and all else there is to know about my carelessness.

•  •  •

Here’s scary—a man downstairs in a small light, drinking—and a woman just above him, waiting in a dark bed. From last summer this was, or the summer before; we were in a cabin in the country. The kitchen floor was dirt. Combed black dirt, it stuck to the wet around my son’s mouth—there was no end to cleaning my son—no end to cleaning the cabin. Hypnotizing dust motes I remember and the pine furniture ablaze in the late-afternoon sun, corn silk and fruit flies, spoons stuck to breakfast dishes.

The dying man has called out for his mother in the middle of the night. I have heard him and have sometimes answered his call, banged my way through the dark to the foot of the bed where he sleeps and asked, “What is it?”

“He is angry,” the teacher says, and she describes my son in the class, talking softly as he does, growing louder—the sly smiles to friends, the audacity, the tinny glare about the boy defiant. Bored or hungry, sometimes ignorant of what inspires him to speak, the boy says he does not know why he does it. “A monologue,” the teacher says, “with glancing reference to the class; otherwise, just bloodshed.”

My son’s drawings are all of men.

I see small heads, squared bodies—a robotic, bolted quality about them, no knees, didactic jaws. They are armed; many of them smoke. Trails of ash and fire are the loose horizontals in these drawings of stiff men standing in air, guns pointed and firing. The blood splatter is colored in.

“Is this normal?” I ask the teacher, and she says she does not know, that she only wanted me to see.

Back-to-back on the acrid, skinny mattress we shared in the cabin, we lay apart and still.

I want to tell the teacher I don’t sleep with the dying man anymore, but that there is the night to be got through, living around the dying man, leaving something in the kitchen he may or may not eat, then locking ourselves in, my son and I, in my son’s room. How quietly he lies when I scratch his arm, me under the covers of the boy’s bed, which means I’ll stay the night—tonight, the next night, and all the nights I lie in wait of the dying man’s dying.