That night there was a big lecture at the dinner table. “When I get my hands on whoever’s doing this…”
He didn’t even use a glove, I thought, watching as he took a piece of bread from the wicker basket we had.
A few nights later, I flushed another empty roll down the john, which clogged again. Out came the plunger, the tools, orders to stand in the doorway. The toilet was lifted off the floor, and as my father cursed and rolled up his sleeves, I must have laughed or at least smiled in some telltale way. “You,” he growled, looking up at me from his kneeling position on the floor, “you’re the one who’s doing this?”
“Me?”
“Don’t even try to talk your way out of it.”
I offered some lame denial: “I hardly ever even go to the bathroom. You should ask Amy or Tiffany. They’re the ones—”
“You are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this toilet again.”
As I backed away, he pounced. Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family’s asshole.
And there it has been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.
What I remember more vividly than the stench, and the sight of my hand when I pulled it out of that terrible pipe, was how strong my father was. I’d put up the fight of my life but might as well have been a doll, the way he wrenched apart my folded arms and took me by the wrist. I couldn’t imagine being that powerful. He’s slighter now, of course. Shorter by a few inches and downright skinny—arms and legs no thicker than the bones beneath them. How was I ever afraid of this person? I wondered now, watching his narrow chest as it rose and fell.
“David!” he used to shout from the top of the stairs. “Get up here!”
“What did I do?” I’d call from my room, certain he’d found me out for something. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t me.”
“Get up here, now!”
Half the time it would be trouble—he’d discovered the branches ripped off the tree he’d just planted, or the football he gave me melted on the hibachi—but just as likely he’d be in the living room and music would be playing. It was always jazz, most often something on the radio. My father’s most prized possession was his stereo system, which he housed in a glass-doored cabinet: turntable, amplifier, fancy tape deck, all of it top-of-the-line and off-limits to the rest of us.
“Sit down,” he’d say, gesturing to the couch. “I want you to listen to this. I mean really listen.”
I knew a guy in high school, Teetsil, who’d do the same thing. “There’s this song you have to check out,” he’d insist, taking Born to Run or some LP by the Who out of its jacket, filling his bedroom with the pleasant stink of new record.
Though I’d pretend otherwise—“Wow, great!”—nothing Teetsil played ever moved me or made me feel any better about the world I was living in. My dad, though, the things he exposed me to blew my mind. “Who is this?” I’d ask.
“Never mind that now, just listen.”
He tried doing the same to my sisters and my brother, Paul, but none of them ever heard what he and I did. John Coltrane’s “I Wish I Knew.” Betty Carter singing “Beware My Heart.” The hair on my arms would stand up, and everything else would recede—my shitty life at school, the loneliness and self-loathing I worried every day might drag me under—all of it replaced by unspeakable beauty. “Are you getting this?” he’d ask, his hands balled into fists the way a coach’s might be, pacing the room as I listened. Afterward, spent, he’d turn down the volume, and we’d share that rare silence that was companionable rather than tense. This was what we had in common—music.
When he was growing up, jazz was the equivalent of rap or punk rock. Listening to it meant something. It made you a certain kind of person, especially to parents whose best-loved instrument was a bouzouki. I don’t imagine Pappoú could have distinguished Miles Davis from a passing dump truck. It was all just noise to him. That might have been part of its appeal to my father, but it had nothing to do with mine. Music is the only way I didn’t rebel against him.
Sitting in the silent afterglow of a song he’d just ordered me to listen to, I’d imagine myself onstage, sweat-drenched at the piano like Oscar Peterson, or perhaps I was the headlining trumpet player or guitarist taking a bow. The audience before me would be going wild with appreciation, though one person in particular would stand out—my father on his feet, cheering. “Did you hear that? That’s my son up there!”
There was a baby grand piano just outside the bedroom I occupied until I left for college, and I’d strike the keys from time to time, imagining how proud I could make him by buckling down and really learning how to play. By the age of twelve, though, I knew a setup when I saw one. There’s an expression you often hear from recovering alcoholics: Don’t go to the hardware store for milk. If I were to master an instrument, or do anything creative with my life, I’d have to do it for myself, and myself only.
As an adult I regularly return to Raleigh and read out loud at what used to be Memorial Auditorium but is now part of the Duke Energy Center. My family will attend, and afterward—without fail—my father will say, “That was nice and everything, but it wasn’t sold-out.”
“Well, actually, it was,” I’ll tell him.
“No, it wasn’t,” he’ll say. “While waiting for you to walk out onstage, I counted thirty empty seats.”
This is him all over. The place accommodates more than 2,200 people, but all he can see are the unoccupied chairs.
“As a rule, five percent of concertgoers who buy their tickets six months or more in advance either forget to show up or make other plans in the meantime,” I’ll tell him, quoting my friend Adam, who started producing events thirty years ago and knows what he’s talking about.
“That’s not true,” my father will say. “Those seats weren’t forgotten. They were empty.” This, as if a marked disinterest in me had turned them a different color.
“OK,” I’ll say, thinking, Who does this—goes to the shows of people they’re supposed to be proud of and counts the empty seats?
Were I playing the piano to a packed house at the Monterey Jazz Festival, it would be no different. “Where the hell was everyone?” he’d ask when my set was over.
He takes a lot of naps now, my father. Two or three a day by my count, at least when we’re all together at the beach. In twenty or so minutes he’d wake up, recharged, and though I wanted to join the action downstairs, I didn’t want him to wake up in an empty room. There was nothing to do but wait, I supposed, and in the meantime I’d put together a playlist we could listen to. A little Jessica Williams, followed by Sam Jones and Eddie Higgins, people he might not have heard lately, a bill guaranteed to really shut us up for a while.
Untamed
Aside from Peter, who supposedly guards the gates of heaven and is a pivotal figure in any number of jokes, the only saint who’s ever remotely interested me is Francis of Assisi, who was friends with the animals. I recall pictures of him, birds perched on his shoulders and his outstretched hands, deer at his feet, maybe a cougar in the background looking on and thinking, There are some birds and deer I can kill, but wait…who’s he? Creatures gravitated to St. Francis because they recognized something in him, a quality that normal men lacked. Let that be me, I used to wish when I was ten and felt so desperately alone. There’d usually be a hamster clutched tight in my fist, trying with all his might to escape instead of resting companionably in my palm the way he was supposed to.
Skip ahead fifty years. It’s late summer in West Sussex and I’m seated on the patio outside the converted stable I use as my office. It might be midnight or two a.m. I’ve brought out a lamp and set it on the table in front of me. To a casual observer, I’m tabulat
ing receipts or writing letters, but what I’m really doing is waiting, almost breathlessly, for Carol.
I grew up in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, so didn’t see a fox until I moved to France in 1998. There were plenty of them in Normandy, and every so often I’d come upon one, usually at dusk. It was hard to get a good look at them, since they’d run the moment they saw me, not as if they were frightened but as if they were guilty. This had to do with their heads, the way they were hanging, and their eyes, which were watchful but at the same time averted.
In Sussex too, foxes are common, though most of the ones I come upon are dead—hit by cars and rotting by the side of the road. The first time Hugh and I visited the area in 2010, we stayed with our friends Viv and Gretchen, who live in the village of Sutton. They’d roasted a chicken for dinner, and when we finished eating Viv threw the carcass into the yard. “For whoever wants it,” he said.
When we got our own house, not far from theirs, we started doing the same thing: tossing our bones into the meadow our backyard opens onto. Whatever we put out vanishes by morning, but who or what took it is anyone’s guess. We have badgers, but, as with foxes, you’re more apt to come across them dead than alive. Occasionally I’ll see a hedgehog on our property—Galveston, his name is—and there’s no shortage of deer and partridge. We have pheasant and stoats and so many rabbits that in the spring and summer it looks as if our house is the backdrop for an Easter commercial.
One of the reasons I don’t want a cat is that it will kill our wildlife. My brother has to change his doormat every two months—that’s how much his savages drag home—and my sister Gretchen’s are just as bad. She’s forever returning from work to find a chipmunk on her sofa, its head chewed to a paste, or a bird that’s not quite dead flapping the stump that used to be a wing against her blood-spattered kitchen floor.
Another argument against pets—at least for Hugh and me—are the fights they lead to. In the midnineties we got two cats, the last of thirty owned by the actress Sandy Dennis, who had recently died of ovarian cancer and who had lived in a house in Connecticut that, on a summer day, you could smell from our apartment in SoHo. Angel and Barratos were black with white spots, both short-haired. We changed their names to Sandy and Dennis, and from the day they entered our lives until the day they died, Hugh and I fought over how to feed and care for them.
I’m of the “Let’s-fatten-you-up-until-you’re-too-obese-to-do-much-of-anything” school, while he’s more practical, or “mean,” as I’m apt to call it. “You don’t know what it’s like, living in a small apartment day and night with nothing to look forward to,” I used to say. “All they live for is food, so why not give it to them?”
This “healthy pet” nonsense—I just don’t buy it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a neighbor with a bag of leftovers, only to be told that their dog doesn’t “do” table scraps. And bones—no way. “He could choke!”
These are the same people who avoid canned food in favor of dry nuggets that remain in the bowl, ignored, for days at a time but are, I’m told, “so-o-o-o-o much better for him than that other stuff.”
I once knew someone in New York who insisted that his black Lab was a vegetarian.
“Just like you,” I said. “Gosh, what a coincidence!”
When the dog charged after a hamburger someone had dropped on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue, he was, I guess, just going after the pickle.
Then there are all the behavioral arguments that joint pet ownership leads to: “Don’t let her jump up on the table/countertop/stereo,” etc. As if you can stop a cat from going where she likes. That’s why you want them fifteen pounds overweight. It keeps them lower to the ground.
Sandy was old and died a year after we got her. We brought Dennis to France when we left New York and shuttled him between the house in Normandy and the apartment in Paris. This led to regular fights over how to get him into his cat carrier, and how often to let him outside. When he died, we fought over where to bury him, and how deep.
All I can say is: Thank God we never had children.
We even fight about the creatures I drag home—things I find, most often, on my walks and wrap up in a handkerchief. They’re usually mice or shrews, already doomed, though not by anything obvious: They haven’t been run over. There are never any teeth marks on them. Perhaps they’re diseased or just too old to run away from me.
“You’re not giving it croutons, are you?” Hugh will say.
“‘It’ is named Canfield, and I’m not forcing him to eat anything,” I’ll answer, dropping what will look like a fistful of dice into the terrarium or, if that’s already in use as a hospice for some dying toad or vole, my backup bucket. “They’re just there if he wants them.”
Onto this battleground, Carol arrived. “It’s the funniest thing,” Hugh said one evening in mid-July. “I had the kitchen door open earlier and this little fox walked by, looked in at me, and continued on her way. Not running, not in any hurry. She looks to me like she might be named Carol.”
The next afternoon I threw a steak bone into the pasture, and at dusk I glanced out and saw a fox with it in her mouth. “Hugh,” I called, “come look.”
At the sound of my voice, the fox—most certainly the Carol I’d been hearing about—returned the bone to the ground, the way you might if you were caught trying to shoplift something. “I was just…seeing how…heavy this was,” she seemed to say, before taking off.
The following night we ate chicken at the table on the patio outside my office. It was dusk, and just as we finished there was Carol. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is that you never see her coming. Rather, she simply appears. When she reached a distance of six feet or so, I threw her the bones off my plate. “What are you doing?” Hugh hissed as she commenced eating them.
Here we go, I thought.
Once a week during this past summer I’d stay awake all night, tying up loose ends. I liked the way I was left feeling at dawn—not tired but just the opposite: speedy, almost, and brilliant. Not long after the chicken dinner, I was working at my outdoor table when, at around four a.m., Carol showed up. We had no meat in the refrigerator, but she waited while I found some cheese and opened a tin of sardines.
Foxes often bury their food, saving it for later. I thought that meant a day or two, but apparently there’s nothing they consider too spoiled. Rotten is acceptable, as is putrid. Since we met Carol, our backyard has become a graveyard for pork chops and beef jerky and raw chicken legs. “What’s this?” Hugh demanded not long ago. He was on his knees in a flower bed, a trowel in one hand and what looked like a desiccated thumb in the other.
I squinted in his direction. “Um, half a hot dog?”
He was furious. “What are you doing? Foxes don’t want junk like this. Hot dogs are disgusting.”
“Not to someone who eats maggots,” I said.
He claims that I’m manipulating Carol. “That’s you, the puppet master. It’s the same way you are with people—constantly trying to buy them.”
He’s under the impression that the occasional chicken carcass is enough, that anything else will “spoil” Carol—will, in fact, endanger her. “Believe me, she was just fine before you came along.”
But was she? Really? It’s a hard life out there for a fox. Yes, there are rabbits and birds around, but they don’t surrender easily. According to the websites I’ve visited, Carol’s diet consists mainly of beetles and worms. There’s an occasional mouse, and insect larvae, maybe some roadkill—just awful-tasting stuff.
“And I’m willing to bet that all those same websites advise against feeding wild animals,” Hugh said.
“Well, not all of them,” I told him.
They do discourage hand-feeding, not because you’ll be bitten but because, once tame, the fox is likely to approach your neighbor, who may not be as receptive to his or her company as you are. I can see how that might be a problem in America, where everyone has a gun, b
ut in England, what are you going to do, stab Carol to death? Good luck getting that close, because the only person she really trusts is me.
You should see the way she follows me to the garden bench, almost as if she were a dog but at the same time catlike, nimble, her tail straight out and bobbing slightly as she walks. Then she’ll lie on the grass at my feet, her paws crossed, and look at me for a second before turning away. Carol’s uncomfortable making eye contact—a shame, as hers have the brilliance of freshly minted pennies. From nose to tail her coloring is remarkable: the burnt orange fading to what looks like a white bib protecting her chest, then darkening from rust to black on her front legs, which resemble spent matchsticks. Because I give her only the best ground beef and free-range chicken, her coat is full, not mangy like those other foxes’. Carol has come as close as two inches from my hand, but I have to look away as she approaches. Again, it’s the eye-contact thing.
In pictures she looks like a stuffed animal. And, oh, I show them to everyone. “Have you seen my fox? No? Hold on while I get my phone…” In my favorite photograph she’s outside the kitchen door. It’s around seven in the evening, still light, and you can see her perfectly, just sitting there. It’s actually Hugh who took the picture, so the expression on her face says, “Yes, but where’s David?”
The response to my photos is wonderment tinged with envy: “How come I don’t have a Carol?” Unless, of course, the person I’m speaking to is small-minded. A lot of small-minded people out where we live raise chickens.