I heard the dialogue from the movie at the other end of the house.
Her skin was Camay-pure and her hair was dark and straight and she usually wore it short because short was easy. Her voice was shaped, it was deep and toned, sort of vowel round and erotic, particularly over the phone or in the bedroom dark, with brandy static in it or just the slightest throaty thing of night desire.
She used to sing in a church choir in her Big Ten town, she liked to call it, but quit over some belittlement, some perceived slight—how she would hate to hear me say perceived.
I handed her the mineral water and she said something about Brian. I thought she might be trying to preempt my own Brian remark. She’d felt it coming in the routine reading of signals in the marriage sensurround.
“Did he recommend another movie where everybody ends up in a storm sewer shooting each other?”
“This is how Brian relieves the pressure of being Brian.”
I remembered a party where she stuck herself in a corner of the room with a man we both knew slightly, a university poet with long raked hair and stained teeth, laughing—he talked, she laughed, innocent enough, you say, or not innocent at all but completely acceptable, a party’s a party, and if the huddle went on far too long, who is to notice but the husband? And I said to her later. This was a long time ago when the kids were small and Marian drove a car without a pencil in her hand. I said to her later, self-importantly because this was the point, to speak with exaggerated dignity, to speak to the depths of my being and make fun of myself at the same time because this is what we do at parties.
I said, I suffer from a rare condition that afflicts Mediterranean men. It’s called self-respect.
I stood in the doorway watching the movie with her.
“Will Jeff be living with us forever, do you think?”
“Could happen.”
“The job at the diet ranch. Fell through?”
“I guess.”
“He didn’t say?”
“I’m watching this,” she said.
“Did you do the newspapers?”
“I did the bottles. Tomorrow’s bottle day. Let me watch this,” she said.
“We’ll both watch it.”
“You don’t know what’s going on. I’ve been watching for an hour and a quarter.”
“I’ll catch up.”
“I don’t want to sit here and explain.”
“You don’t have to say a word.”
“The movie’s not worth explaining,” she said.
“I’ll catch up by watching.”
“But you’re interfering,” she said.
“I’ll be quiet and I’ll watch.”
“You’re interfering by watching,” she said.
The remark pleased her, it had a tinge of insight, and she stretched smiling in a sort of coiled yawn, hips and legs steady, upper body bent away. I guess I knew what she meant, that another’s presence screws up the steady balance, the integrated company of the box. She wanted to be alone with a bad movie and I was standing judgment.
“You work too hard,” I told her.
“I love my job. Shut up.”
“Now that I’ve stopped working too hard, you work too hard.”
“I’m watching this.”
“You work unnecessarily hard.”
“If he tries to kill her, I’m going to be very upset.”
“Maybe he’ll kill her off camera.”
“Off camera, fine. He can use a chain saw. As long as I don’t have to see it.”
I watched until my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen and turned off the light. Then I went into the living room and looked at the peach sienna sofa. It was a new piece, a thing to look at and absorb, a thing the room would incorporate over time. It took the curse off the piano. We had a piano no one played, one of Marian’s Big Ten heirlooms, an object like a mounted bearskin, oppressing all of us with its former life.
I turned off the light in the living room but first I looked at the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the peach sienna sofa and the Rajasthani wall hanging and the books on the shelves. Then I turned off the light. Then I checked the other light, the light in the back hall, to make sure it was still on in case my mother had to get up during the night.
I stood in the doorway again. Marian watched TV, body and soul. She lit another cigarette and I went into the bedroom.
I stood looking at the books on the shelves. Then I got undressed and went to bed. She came in about fifteen minutes later. I waited for her to start undressing.
“What do I detect?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Between you and Brian.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“What do I detect? That’s what I mean.”
“He makes me laugh,” she said finally.
“He makes his wife laugh too. But I don’t detect anything between them.”
She thought about ways to reply to this. It was an amusing remark perhaps, not what I’d intended. She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I’d done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room.
6
* * *
We laid in a case of the flavored seltzer she liked and we set her up in a quiet room, Lainie’s old room, with the resilvered mirror and the big-screen TV.
It wasn’t long before Jeff stopped wearing the baggy shorts and turnaround cap and began to resemble himself again. His personal computer had a multimedia function that allowed him to look at a copy of the famous videotape showing a driver being shot by the Texas Highway Killer. Jeff became absorbed in these images, devising routines and programs, using filtering techniques to remove background texture. He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter.
The device weighed only three and a half ounces and it showed the distance I ran and the calories I burned and even the length of the strides I took—clipped to the waistband of my trunks.
I was eleven years old when he went out for cigarettes, a warm evening with men playing pinochle inside a storefront club and radio voices everywhere on the street, someone’s always playing a radio, and they took him out near Orchard Beach, where the shoreline is crannied with remote inlets, and they dropped him into the lower world, his body suspended above the rockweed, in the soft organic murk. Not that I really recall the weather or the cardplayers. There’s always a radio and someone playing cards.
At home we wanted clean safe healthy garbage. We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins. We faithfully removed the crinkly paper from our cereal boxes. It was like preparing a pharaoh for his death and burial. We wanted to do the small things right.
He never committed a figure to paper. He had a head for numbers, a memory for numbers.
We fixed her up with the humidifier, the hangers, the good hard bed and the dresser that belonged to Marian when she was growing up, a handsome piece with a history behind it.
In the bronze tower I looked out at the umber hills and felt assured and well defended, safe in my office box and my crisp white shirt and connected to things that made me stronger.
In the bronze tower a fellow executive cleared his throat and I heard something go by in the small hoarse noise, a secret linger of childhood, the game he played inside his life. Maybe it was a hundred and eight degrees out on the street. He was spying on himself. The third person watches the first person. The “he” spies on the “I.” The “he” knows things the “I” can’t bear to think about. Maybe it was a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, telephones warbling in modulated phrases. The third person sends his nobody to kill the first person’s somebody.
I used to say when they were small. I told them more than once. This is the washer, this
is the packing, this is the spout.
In the bronze tower we used the rhetoric of aggrieved minorities to prevent legislation that would hurt our business. Arthur Blessing believed, our CEO, that true feeling flows upward from the streets, fully accessible to corporate adaptation. We learned how to complain, how to appropriate the language of victimization. Arthur listened to gangsta rap on the car radio every morning. Songs about getting mad and getting laid and getting even, taking what’s rightfully ours by violent means if necessary. He believed this was the only form of address that made an impact on Washington. Arthur recited lyrics to me once on the company plane and together we laughed his wacko laugh, those enunciated ha-has, clear and slow and well spaced, like laughing with words.
Coming home I liked to put suntan lotion on my arms, face and legs and go running down the quiet streets of oleanders and palms and along the drainage canal banked with red dirt. I ran in dense heat and strong light and I thought about the protection factor bumping up to sixty now, I wondered about this even though I’m olive-skinned, dark as my old man—from fifteen to thirty to sixty, where once upon a time a factor fifteen was the absolute maximum sunblock scientifically possible. Running past tree trunks limed white against the unrelenting sun.
You have to cut it thick. That’s what he said about the bread, the round crusty loaf he called Campobasso bread, after the name of the store, which itself was named for a mountain town on the spine of Italy. The best bread, you cut it too thin, he said, it’s worthless. I watched him shave and I watched him cut bread, holding the loaf on its side with one hand, thumb of the other hand, the knife hand, edged over the haft onto the back of the blade to guide the slicing, down through the crust and into the springy middle of the bread.
When Lainie had her baby, her girl, I felt a soft joy settle in my chest. Or a solace, maybe, an easing of some perennial clutch or grab, some taunt of malehood. All these women now, from my mother in her pale green room to this raw arrival kicking in mortal fret, all gathered near the chimneypiece. It was a kindness that the child should be a girl. I felt an expansive ease, an unthrobbing of some knot in my body. I watched her naked in her mother’s arms, swimming in a ribbon of light.
Tuesdays only we did plastic, minus caps and lids. Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and Old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish and devastate.
Residents of Phoenix are called Phoenicians.
They talked about the things I did not talk about, although I told her about the stolen car, and we said to each other, Marian and I, we said if people ever saw our son in the commission of a crime they wouldn’t know how to describe him except for his skin color and the jokey sticker fastened to the rear bumper of his Honda, if in fact his Honda was an element in the crime, the bumper sticker someone gave him—Going Nowhere Fast.
Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed? First we saw the garbage, then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo. How does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years.
According to street legend he never wrote a number on a piece of paper.
Night after night we sat in the stale glow, my mother and I, and watched reruns of “The Honeymooners.” Ralph Kramden wailing his unstoppable pain. Maybe my mother identified with wife Alice. The apron and cloth coat and underfurnished flat and food smells in the hallway. But Alice had a bus-driver husband who kept walking in the door instead of going out. He drove a vehicle licensed by society. And Ralph and Alice had no kids to worry and torment them. You had the kids without the husband. Not even a body risen from the rock-weed and found floating by two guys early one Sunday in a rented row-boat with a cage for trapping crabs—the nibbled body of Jimmy Costanza, age whatever.
I went back to the coastal lowlands of Texas and did an interview with the BBC wearing a hard hat and miner’s lamp and standing in a salt passage two thousand feet under the earth. The producer stood off camera and asked questions and I tasted salt dust stirred up by the forklifts and tried to frame responses that would please her.
You had the man who did the job unlicensed by society. In the hallways and alleys you heard the footfalls at night and must have wondered if that was Jimmy coming back. From the dead or the dark or maybe just New Jersey. And that was you dressing quickly at first light before the heat came whistling up the pipes—early mass among the Italians in their graveclothes. You had the kids with their taut nerves, the little woodpushing wonder who was harder to love than a handful of coffee dregs. Alone those cold mornings going to mass. And the older son with his distance and dimmed moods and undimmed rage, up on the roof in the evening sleet to smoke a cigarette.
I look at the Lucky Strike logotype and I think target.
I watched men in moon suits bury drums of nuclear waste and I thought of the living rocks down there, the subterrane process, the half-life, the atoms that decay to half the original number. The most common isotope of uranium is bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium that fissions, if we can generate a verb from the energy of splitting atoms. This isotope has the mass number two three eight. Add the digits and you get thirteen.
But the bombs were not released. I remember Klara Sax talking about the men who flew the strategic bombers as we all stood listening in the long low structure of sectioned concrete. The missiles remained in the rotary launchers. The men came back and the cities were not destroyed.
7
* * *
Marian leaned into me and laughed, watching the land surface expand around us. It was first light, a foil shimmer at desert’s edge. At three hundred feet we caught a mild westerly and drifted toward the eyelid slice of sun. But we didn’t think we were moving. We thought the land was gliding by beneath us, showing a cluster of mobile homes, a truck on a blacktop to the south. And dogs barking up at us—they barked and leaped and ran yapping into each other as we strayed across the trailer park, passed from dog to dog, new dogs appearing at the fringes, twisting in midleap, dogs from nowhere, multiplying yaps and howls, a contagion to wake the known world.
Then we were out over open earth, bone brown and deep in shadow, and we hung in the soft air, balanced in some unbodied lull, with a measure of creation spilling past.
The pilot yanked the blast valve and we heard the burners pulse and roar and this made Marian laugh again. She talked and laughed incessantly, happy and scared. The basket was not large, barely taking the three of us plus tanks, valves, wires, instruments and coiled rope. Every propane wallop sent a man-sized streak of flame into the open throat of the nylon that bulbed out above us.
Jerry the pilot said, “We need this wind to hold just like it is. Then we make it okay, I think. But we got to be boocoo lucky.”
This made us both laugh. We were lighter than air, laughing, and the balloon did not seem like a piece of science so much as an improvised prayer. Jerry spaced the burns and kept an eye on the pyrometer, adding just enough heat to make up for routine cooling inside the envelope. It was a game, a larger-than-life toy we’d found ourselves wickered into, and our eyes went big at the whooshing flames.
The balloon was candy-striped and when Jerry pointed south we spotted a road and a car, the chase car, a matching candy van that towed the small open trailer used to convey the balloon and basket.
The surge of flame, the delayed rise and Marian saying, “Greatest birthday present ever.”
“Ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said.
She said, “What made you think of it? This is something I’ve always wanted to do without knowing it exactly. Or knowing it but not at the level of ever making plans. You must have read
my mind.”
Then she said, “I didn’t know how much I needed to get out and see this landscape again. Too cooped up with job. But I never dreamed I’d be doing it from here. When you said four a.m. I thought what sort of birthday are we talking about.”
“Now you know,” I said. “But you only know the half of it.”
We leaned close, my arm around her, our thighs pressing, and we were rocked and whirled, although not turning—whirled within ourselves, blood-whirled into quickened sense. I had my free hand around an iron bar, part of the rigid frame connecting the basket to the load cables, and I could feel the metal breathe in my fist.
About twenty minutes later Jerry touched me on the shoulder and pointed straight ahead and I saw the first splash of sunlight on wingtips. The piece began to emerge out of distance and haze, the mesh rectangle completed now, ranks of aircraft appearing as one unit of fitted parts, a shaped weave of painted steel in the monochrome surround.
Jerry said, “Now if the Air Force don’t shoot our asses off, we’ll just mosey on over.”
And that’s what we did, approaching at an altitude of four hundred feet. I felt Marian hanging a sort of tremulous gawk over the padded edge of the basket. It was a heart-shaking thing to see, bursts and serpentines of color, a power in the earth, and she pulled at my sweater and looked at me.
Like where are we and what are we seeing and who did it?
The primaries were less aggressive than they’d seemed earlier. The reds were dampened, taken down by weather or more paint, deeper permeations, and this brought them ably into the piece. There were orderly slashes across the fuselages in one section, beautifully mixed blues and flat blues and near blues. The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment—the work’s circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.