Beginners

  She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more, she knew that, but she couldn’t get it into words. After a time, she quit talking about it.

  Viewfinder

  A MAN without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

  “How did you lose your hands?” I asked, after he’d said what he wanted.

  “That’s another story,” he said. “You want this picture of your house or not?”

  “Come on in,” I said. “I just made coffee.”

  I’d just made some Jell-O too, but I didn’t tell him that.

  “I might use your toilet,” the man with no hands said.

  I wanted to see how he would hold a cup of coffee using those hooks. I knew how he used the camera. It was an old Polaroid camera, big and black. It fastened to leather straps that looped over his shoulders and around his back, securing the camera to his chest. He would stand on the sidewalk in front of a house, locate the house in the viewfinder, depress the lever with one of his hooks, and out popped the picture in a minute or so. I’d been watching from the window.

  “Where’d you say the toilet was?”

  “Down there, turn right.”

  By this time, bending and hunching, he’d let himself out of the straps. He put the camera on the sofa and straightened his jacket. “You can look at this while I’m gone.”

  I took the photograph from him. There was a little rectangle of lawn, the driveway, carport, front steps, bay window, kitchen window. Why would I want a photograph of this tragedy? I looked closer and saw the outline of my head, my head, behind the kitchen window and a few steps back from the sink. I looked at the photograph for a time, and then I heard the toilet flush. He came down the hall, zipped and smiling, one hook holding his belt, the other tucking his shirt in.

  “What do you think?” he said. “All right? Personally, I think it turned out fine, but then I know what I’m doing and, let’s face it, it’s not that hard shooting a house. Unless the weather’s inclement, but when the weather’s inclement I don’t work except inside. Special-assignment type work, you know.” He plucked at his crotch.

  “Here’s coffee,” I said.

  “You’re alone, right?” He looked at the living room. He shook his head. “Hard, hard.” He sat next to the camera, leaned back with a sigh, and closed his eyes.

  “Drink your coffee,” I said. I sat in a chair across from him. A week before, three kids in baseball caps had come to the house. One of them had said, “Can we paint your address on the curb, sir? Everybody on the street’s doing it. Just a dollar.” Two boys waited on the sidewalk, one of them with a can of white paint at his feet, the other holding a brush. All three boys had their sleeves rolled.

  “Three kids were by here awhile back wanting to paint my address on the curb. They wanted a dollar, too. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” It was a long shot. But I watched him just the same.

  He leaned forward importantly, the cup balanced between his hooks. He carefully placed the cup on the little table. He looked at me. “That’s crazy, you know. I work alone. Always have, always will. What are you saying?”

  “I was trying to make a connection,” I said. I had a headache. Coffee’s no good for it, but sometimes Jell-O helps. I picked up the photograph. “I was in the kitchen,” I said.

  “I know. I saw you from the street.”

  “How often does that happen? Getting somebody in the picture along with the house? Usually I’m in the back.”

  “Happens all the time,” he said. “It’s a sure sell. Sometimes they see me shooting the house and they come out and ask me to make sure I get them in the picture. Maybe the lady of the house, she wants me to snap hubby washing his car. Or else there’s junior working the lawnmower and she says, get him, get him, and I get him. Or the little family is gathered on the patio for a nice little lunch, and would I please.” His right leg began to jiggle. “So they just up and left you, right? Packed up and left. It hurts. Kids I don’t know about. Not anymore. I don’t like kids. I don’t even like my own kids. I work alone, as I said. The picture?”

  “I’ll take it,” I said. I stood up for the cups. “You don’t live around here. Where do you live?”

  “Right now I have a room downtown. It’s okay. I take a bus out, you know, and after I’ve worked all the neighborhoods, I go somewhere else. There’s better ways to go, but I get by.”

  “What about your kids?” I waited with the cups and watched him struggle up from the sofa.

  “Screw them. Their mother too! They’re what gave me this.” He brought the hooks up in front of my face. He turned and started pulling into his straps. “I’d like to forgive and forget, you know, but I can’t. I still hurt. And that’s the trouble. I can’t forgive or forget.”

  I looked again at the hooks as they maneuvered the straps. It was wonderful to see what he could do with those hooks.

  “Thanks for the coffee and the use of the toilet. You’re going through the mill now. I sympathize.” He raised and lowered his hooks. “What can I do?”

  “Take more pictures,” I said. “I want you to take pictures of me and the house both.”

  “It won’t work,” he said. “She won’t come back.”

  “I don’t want her back,” I said.

  He snorted. He looked at me. “I can give you a rate,” he said. “Three for a dollar? If I went any lower I’d hardly come out.”

  We went outside. He adjusted the shutter. He told me where to stand, and we got down to it. We moved around the house. Very systematic, we were. Sometimes I’d look sideways. Other times I’d look straight into the camera. Just getting outside helped.

  “Good,” he’d say. “That’s good. That one turned out real nice. Let’s see,” he said after we’d circled the house and were back in the driveway again. “That’s twenty. You want any more?”

  “Two or three more,” I said. “On the roof. I’ll go up and you can shoot me from down here.”

  “Jesus,” he said. He looked up and down the street. “Well, sure, go ahead—but be careful.”

  “You were right,” I said. “They did just up and move out. The whole kit and caboodle. You were right on target.”

  The man with no hands said: “You didn’t need to say word one. I knew the instant you opened the door.” He shook his hooks at me. “You feel like she cut the ground right out from under you! Took your legs in the process. Look at this! This is what they leave you with. Screw it,” he said. “You want to get up on that roof, or not? I’ve got to go,” the man said.

  I brought a chair out and put it under the edge of the carport. I still couldn’t reach. He stood in the driveway and watched me. I found a crate and put that on the chair. I climbed onto the chair and then the crate. I raised up onto the carport, walked to the roof, and made my way on hands and knees across the shingles to a little flat place near the chimney. I stood up and looked around. There was a breeze. I waved, and he waved back with both hooks. Then I saw the rocks. It was like a little rock nest there on the screen over the chimney hole. Kids must have lobbed them up trying to land them in the chimney.

  I picked up one of the rocks. “Ready?” I called.

  He had me located in his viewfinder.

  “Okay,” he answered.

  I turned and threw back my arm. “Now!” I called. I hooked that rock as far as I could, south.

  “I don’t know,” I heard him say. “You moved,” he said. “We’ll see in a minute,” and in a minute he said, “By God, it’s okay.” He looked at it. He held it up. “You know,” he said, “it’s good.”

  “Once more,” I called. I picked up another rock. I grinned. I felt I could lift off. Fly.

  “Now!” I called.

  Where Is Everyone?

  I’VE seen some things. I was going over to my mother’s to stay a few nights, but just as I came to the top of the stairs I looked and she was on the sofa kiss
ing a man. It was summer, the door was open, and the color TV was playing.

  My mother is sixty-five and lonely. She belongs to a singles club. But even so, knowing all this, it was hard. I stood at the top of the stairs with my hand on the railing and watched as the man pulled her deeper into the kiss. She was kissing back, and the TV was going on the other side of the room. It was Sunday, about five in the afternoon. People from the apartment house were down below in the pool. I went back down the stairs and out to my car.

  A lot has happened since that afternoon, and on the whole things are better now. But during those days, when my mother was putting out to men she’d just met, I was out of work, drinking, and crazy. My kids were crazy, and my wife was crazy and having a “thing” with an unemployed aerospace engineer she’d met at AA. He was crazy too. His name was Ross and he had five or six kids. He walked with a limp from a gunshot wound his first wife had given him. He didn’t have a wife now; he wanted my wife. I don’t know what we were all thinking of in those days. The second wife had come and gone, but it was his first wife who had shot him in the thigh some years back, giving him the limp, and who now had him in and out of court, or in jail, every six months or so for not meeting his support payments. I wish him well now. But it was different then. More than once in those days I mentioned weapons. I’d say to my wife, I’d shout it, “I’m going to kill him!” But nothing ever happened. Things lurched on. I never met the man, though we talked on the phone a few times. I did find a couple of pictures of him once when I was going through my wife’s purse. He was a little guy, not too little, and he had a moustache and was wearing a striped jersey, waiting for a kid to come down the slide. In the other picture he was standing against a house—my house? I couldn’t tell—with his arms crossed, dressed up, wearing a tie. Ross, you son of a bitch, I hope you’re okay now. I hope things are better for you too.

  The last time he’d been jailed, a month before that Sunday, I found out from my daughter that her mother had gone bail for him. Daughter Kate, who was fifteen, didn’t take to this any better than I did. It wasn’t that she had any loyalty to me in this—she had no loyalties to me or her mother in anything and was only too willing to sell either one of us down the river. No, it was that there was a serious cash-flow problem in the house and if money went to Ross, there’d be that much less for what she needed. So Ross was on her list now. Also, she didn’t like his kids, she’d said, but she’d told me once before that in general Ross was all right, even funny and interesting when he wasn’t drinking. He’d even told her fortune.

  He spent his time repairing things, now that he could no longer hold a job in the aerospace industry. But I’d seen his house from the outside; and the place looked like a dumping ground, with all kinds and makes of old appliances and equipment that would never wash or cook or play again—all of it just standing in his open garage and in his drive and in the front yard. He also kept some broken-down cars around that he liked to tinker on. In the first stages of their affair my wife had told me he “collected antique cars.” Those were her words. I’d seen some of his cars parked in front of his house when I’d driven by there trying to see what I could see. Old 1950s and 1960s, dented cars with torn seat covers. They were junkers, that’s all. I knew. I had his number. We had things in common, more than just driving old cars and trying to hold on for dear life to the same woman. Still, handyman or not, he couldn’t manage to tune my wife’s car properly or fix our TV set when it broke down and we lost the picture. We had volume, but no picture. If we wanted to get the news, we’d have to sit around the screen at night and listen to the set. I’d drink and make some crack to my kids about Mr. Fixit. Even now I don’t know if my wife believed that stuff or not, about antique cars and such. But she cared for him, she loved him even; that’s pretty clear now.

  They’d met when Cynthia was trying to stay sober and was going to meetings three or four times a week. I had been in and out of AA for several months, though when Cynthia met Ross I was out and drinking a fifth a day of anything I could get my hands on. But as I heard Cynthia say to someone over the phone about me, I’d had the exposure to AA and knew where to go when I really wanted help. Ross had been in AA and then had gone back to drinking again. Cynthia felt, I think, that maybe there was more hope for him than for me and tried to help him and so went to the meetings to keep herself sober, then went over to cook for him or clean his house. His kids were no help to him in this regard. Nobody lifted a hand around his house except Cynthia when she was there. But the less his kids pitched in, the more he loved them. It was strange. It was the opposite with me. I hated my kids during this time. I’d be on the sofa with a glass of vodka and grapefruit juice when one of them would come in from school and slam the door. One afternoon I screamed and got into a scuffle with my son. Cynthia had to break it up when I threatened to knock him to pieces. I said I would kill him. I said, “I gave you life and I can take it away.”

  Madness.

  The kids, Katy and Mike, were only too happy to take advantage of this crumbling situation. They seemed to thrive on the threats and bullying they inflicted on each other and on us—the violence and dismay, the general bedlam. Right now, thinking about it even from this distance, it makes me set my heart against them. I remember years before, before I turned to drinking full time, reading an extraordinary scene in a novel by an Italian named Italo Svevo. The narrator’s father was dying and the family had gathered around the bed, weeping and waiting for the old man to expire, when he opened his eyes to look at each of them for a last time. When his gaze fell on the narrator he suddenly stirred and something came into his eyes; and with his last burst of strength he raised up, flung himself across the bed, and slapped the face of his son as hard as he could. Then he fell back onto the bed and died. I often imagined my own deathbed scene in those days, and I saw myself doing the same thing, only I would hope to have the strength to slap each of my kids, and my last words for them would be what only a dying man would have the courage to utter.

  But they saw craziness on every side, and it suited their purpose, I was convinced. They fattened on it. They liked being able to call the shots, having the upper hand, while we bungled along letting them work on our guilt. They might have been inconvenienced from time to time, but they ran things their way. They weren’t embarrassed or put out by any of the activities that went on in our house either. To the contrary. It gave them something to talk about with their friends. I’ve heard them regaling their pals with the most frightful stories, howling with laughter as they spilled out the lurid details of what was happening to me and their mother. Except for being financially dependent on Cynthia, who still somehow had a teaching job and a monthly paycheck, they flat out ran the show. And that’s what it was too, a show.

  Once Mike locked his mother out of the house after she’d stayed overnight at Ross’s house….I don’t know where I was that night, probably at my mother’s. I’d sleep over there sometimes. I’d eat supper with her and she’d tell me how she worried about all of us; then we’d watch TV and try to talk about something else, try to hold a normal conversation about something other than my family situation. She’d make a bed for me on her sofa—the same sofa she used to make love on, I supposed, but I’d sleep there anyway and be grateful. Cynthia came home at seven o’clock one morning to get dressed for school and found that Mike had locked all the doors and windows and wouldn’t let her in the house. She stood outside his window and begged him to let her in—please, please, so she could dress and go to school, for if she lost her job what then? Where would he be? Where would any of us be then? He said, “You don’t live here anymore. Why should I let you in?” That’s what he said to her, standing behind his window, his face all stopped up with rage. (She told me this later when she was drunk and I was sober and holding her hands and letting her talk.) “You don’t live here,” he said.

  “Please, please, please, Mike,” she pleaded. “Let me in.”

  He let her in and she swore at him.
Like that, he punched her hard on the shoulders several times—whop, whop, whop—then hit her on top of the head and generally worked her over. Finally she was able to change clothes, fix her face, and rush off to school.

  All this happened not too long ago, three years about. It was something in those days.

  I left my mother with the man on her sofa and drove around for a while, not wanting to go home and not wanting to sit in a bar that day either.

  Sometimes Cynthia and I would talk about things—“reviewing the situation,” we’d call it. But now and then on rare occasions we’d talk a little about things that bore no relation to the situation. One afternoon we were in the living room and she said, “When I was pregnant with Mike you carried me to the bathroom when I was so sick and pregnant I couldn’t get out of bed. You carried me. No one else will ever do that, no one else could ever love me in that way, that much. We have that, no matter what. We’ve loved each other like nobody else could or ever will love the other again.”

  We looked at each other. Maybe we touched hands, I don’t recall. Then I remembered the half-pint of whiskey or vodka or gin or scotch or tequila that I had hidden under the very sofa cushion we were sitting on (oh, happy days!) and I began to hope she might soon have to get up and move around—go to the kitchen, the bathroom, out to clean the garage.

  “Maybe you could make us some coffee,” I said. “A pot of coffee might be nice.”

  “Would you eat something? I can fix some soup.”

  “Maybe I could eat something, but I’ll for sure drink a cup of coffee.”

  She went out to the kitchen. I waited until I heard her begin to run water. Then I reached under the cushion for the bottle, unscrewed the lid, and drank.

  I never told these things at AA. I never said much at the meetings. I’d “pass,” as they called it: when it came your turn to speak and you didn’t say anything except “I’ll pass tonight, thanks.” But I would listen and shake my head and laugh in recognition at the awful stories I heard. Usually I was drunk when I went to those first meetings. You’re scared and you need something more than cookies and instant coffee.