The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (21 page)

He cleared his throat in a serious manner, and I worried he suspected me, that he’d subvert my intentions before even exploring them.

“I have to tell you something,” he whispered.

“You have a very pretty hair and mouth”—I took his hand—“and also … I like boobs. I mean your boobs. I mean I like lots of boobs but I mean I think your brets are beautiful. Breasts.”

It felt like the moment at which you stand waist deep in the water, preparing your body for full submersion. Trying to feel what it means to be underwater beforehand, that release, though imagining it proves impossible.

“I have to tell you something too,” I managed through the weight of my tongue.

“Shoot,” he said, formed a gun out of his fingers and pointed it at the sky, then made a little
ka-bloom
sound and blew at the smoking gun but miscalculated and ended up spitting all over one of his knuckles.

We laughed, falling into each other and redoing the big gun joke like can you believe how funny we are? And then redoing the gun joke again and laughing some more. When the explosions settled, we found ourselves with my legs around his waist. I crafted a pistol out of his left hand and my right one, and pointed the tip up at the sky.

Things I remember: the green-blue wrapper of the condom, the awkwardness of teeth in too-eager mouths, the seeming multiplication of limbs, the bits of gravel that made their way onto the blanket. That once he made his way in we gaped at how easy it really was to bind two people together. That when it came it almost hurt, that my hands spread out taut and joyous like starfish on his back, that it was warm and sweet and I wanted to make shelter within it.

W
hen James called to tell me my father died, he told me he planned to take over his garden. “Basil and thyme and I don’t know maybe even an avocado tree or peaches I have heard are not always that hard if you’re … and tomatoes and anything you want, I, and you’ll always come for dinner and I’ll cook for you and it will be so delicious you’ll cry, I, because he’s not there to taste it, yeah, but mostly because he would have been so proud and …”

And he went on and on, and his mania was so generous it felt like an assimilation of gentle, and I felt like he was right next to me kissing my forehead too insistently, and I remembered that there’s not just one who calls me I. There are three of us.

M
y father retained such intellectual strength that over the phone it was often easy to forget the physical weakening, turn an ear away during the gasping pauses, but it was more and more impossible to paint it all brightly when Jackson and I, still a unit, visited him. It rattled Jackson more than it did me, probably because he’d chosen to love my father whereas I had since before I possessed the words to describe the loveliness that was hiding in his neck, safe in his narrative. He didn’t like seeing him bound mostly to his chair, would start biting the half-moons from his fingernails the moment my father started discussing the latest reports from the doctor. As if to thwart the topic’s mention, he always arrived so lively, so well-read, so full of other things to speak of. My father grinned at the interruptions, though when Jackson turned to Julia to overflow his charisma onto her, he would clasp my hand and twinkle at me in the slow the way the dying do, and I would nod. We were both more worried for Jackson than we were for ourselves.

Jackson and I began spending more and more weekends there with the fading of his health, though Jackson claimed it only a reprieve from the city, while I felt more at home under the pressing weight of my father’s disease. A newspaperman his whole life: this was just one more deadline, one more story going to press, and I liked to think of the moment he stopped typing and stood up and pushed his chair in with precision; of the way he would insist, after, on a drive; of the release he always felt, postpublishing; of his byline, the printed letters that formed his name behind the plastic of the newspaper box. Throughout my childhood, I would put a quarter in the slot, watch the frozen president disappear, slowly turn the steel latch, and reach into the dark space to bring my father into the light.

One Saturday at my father’s house, I woke to find my childhood bed still smelling but absent of Jackson. Julia, just waking with coffee in the kitchen, hadn’t seen him, and we set about calling his phone repeatedly, assuming the worst. His car—ours—was gone, and we hoped against hope his sleep hadn’t discovered how to move Park to Drive. When he never answered she grabbed her large key ring and we rolled through the downtown, only finding a new generation of young mothers, teenage café employees flipping signs to open, joggers intent on their journey. Back at home, we opted not to tell my father, distracting him instead with the newspaper, fresh-squeezed orange juice. At ten o’clock Jackson appeared, the look on his face the
holiness that occurs after a long time alone, and told us to get in the car.

It was stunning to see him an administrator, to watch him wrap the blue silk tie around my father’s field of vision, grinning. Julia, who knew and spoke with the deterioration of my father’s health every day, cast nervous glances and fiddled with the radio and asked my father how he was doing back there one too many times. I held his fingers in mine, his portable oxygen tank between my knees as we curved up through the California hills, happy, for once, to yield, to be a passenger. When Jackson finally slowed to a halt on the uneven dirt shoulder, unbuckled the strap across his shoulder, Julia turned to me with such a panicked look that I reached for her hand and told her it would be okay.

“What will be okay,” my father asked. “What?”

“Mom,” Jackson asserted. “Please.” The first word confident, the second desperate.

He helped my father out of the car, put an arm around his waist, and gestured for me to do the same. We made our way down the incline, my father quiet though clearly petrified, his body unwilling to do the things it had loved so.

“Three points of contact,” I offered, then repeated, and he nodded and breathed the way they’d taught him, no matter that the exercises were meant to get him through a day at home, maybe around the block, and never down the untended earth.

It was spectacular and whole and remains an image that feeds me. The reclining padded chair placed just so in the
shallow edge of the clear river, a parasol worked into its crown. Just next to it, a tall metal table positioned in the stones, on it resting volumes of my father’s favorite writers, a single proud sunflower, a pen and paper, a cooler full of fruits and drinks and sweet things. Jackson returned my father’s sight once we emerged from the path onto the little beach, and his already struggling lungs just couldn’t cope, and he had to sit immediately and rest awhile before we escorted him to this throne. He barely touched the books that day, sampled only briefly the cherries, just sat there with his feet up and sipped the bitter favorite beer he rarely indulged in anymore. Across the river Jackson kept disappearing and reappearing on various points of the rocks that faced us, sprouting triumphantly like the unlikely green jutting out in strange angles, and my father yelled and cheered every time he leaped into the water, urging him to jump from higher and higher points and clasping the fingers of Julia, who hovered nearby, trying to find her home in the water.

J
ulia had prepared fanatically, as if trying to impress him or finally say yes, yes, I loved you, love you, will keep loving you.

When I arrived, James, in his mother’s apron, was on a manic upswing, chopping vegetables into fine and finer pieces in the kitchen, carrying snack plates back and forth from the kitchen, asking how I was but lacking the attention span to listen. He was twisting his hair like he used to, and a spray of half-smoked cigarettes kept accumulating on the front porch—he felt, I think, too guilty to smoke the whole thing, knowing this was the pleasure my father had lived and died for.

Photos of my father were everywhere; I could tell Julia wished they always had been, and as such had framed some of them and tried to place others in locations where people put photographs of those still alive: on the refrigerator at a jaunty angle, amid others on the couch-side table in the living room, on her bureau.

I found myself sneering. Hadn’t she been ready? This was obviously an expression of my own guilt for not admitting that his struggle really was reaching its end point. I replayed the last time we spoke on the telephone and attempted to gain some final piece of paternal wisdom. What had he said? And I? And how long did we pause between sentences? And did we laugh?

I tried to tell myself it was a shame, an unfortunate coincidence and nothing more, that the last dialogue I’d had with my father had lacked his general stubborn cheer. He hadn’t even feigned with the “There was something I wanted to tell you but have forgotten.” He came to me as an old man who wanted to talk and me to listen.

There was none of his softness. He cleared his throat and wheezed and began to tell me about the night before my mother died. “There’s no other way to put it, Ida. I had too much to drink. Had too much goddamn liquor. I’d been home all week with you—Mollie was out looking for a job and shopping for goddamn new paint samples for the kitchen even though we’d just—goddamn it we’d just
painted
the kitchen—and getting coffee with all these new women who went to private colleges in Vermont and had kids around your age—and finally I said, look, I’ve been here in this house all week and I need out”—he was talking too fast and stopped to catch his breath in big gulps, which was exactly what the exercises recommend he not do—“and she said okay fine, you’re right. Okay.

“So we got Julia to come over—her and your mom liked each other all right, actually—did you know the boys were
with you the last night your mom was alive? And anyway, Ida, we went down to the Central Club on my insisting. I said, honey, I want a real bar with pool tables and cheap drinks, and your mother said yes even though she didn’t like the idea. That place was pretty bad then, worse than now if you can believe it, and pretty soon after we sat down it was a scary scene. Every guy in the place was staring at her—she was way too pretty, way too smart—and she didn’t like it. I tried to take her mind off of it, suggested we play a game of pool, but your mother … when she was mad like that, she couldn’t focus. She shot a terrible game and the whole time these assholes were starting to snicker, but your mother … she had always refused to let me treat her like a lady, do you understand? ‘None of that Southern charm shit,’ she always said, always pushed the door open for herself, rarely even let me”—he gasped here but in a different way, the kind that precedes a great opening up of the body for a sob—“never even let me coddle her. Ida, are you listening?”

(I was listening, was transfixed. I was also considering what else I had inherited from my father: that insistence that the audience
look
and
listen
. How many times had I pleaded to Jackson:
Look. Listen. Are you listening? Do you understand?
But not stopped to hear his reply. My father didn’t stop either.)