The man threw back his head and got his chin into position under the chin-cup at the end of the pole that held his son in the air and set it in place, and spread his arms. But then I saw two rapid jerky adjustments — maybe the son was more nervous too and fidgeted for a moment — and one of the movements made the chin-cup slide off the man’s unusually slippery chin. It slipped down his neck, and his neck tendons became dozens of individual cords as he grimaced, and the pole continued to slip until it came to rest in the hollow just above his collarbone, where he held it by tightening his neck muscles so that the pole wouldn’t drive right into the soft tissue there. He held that, quivering, for a few seconds, until the orchestra made the sound of triumph, and the applause came, and then he lifted the pole off, brought it down, and the son jumped into his arms and the two of them took a bow in their matching leopard-skin caveman outfits.
Anyway, I gave Henry a bath, and saw all of his forehead, as you do when your child is in the bath — all that high, smooth forehead, as I rinsed out the shampoo, and I pointed towards the back of the tub, meaning “Look way back,” so that his head would tip back enough for me to rinse the shampoo from the hair just above his forehead, and I saw his young face, trusting me not to drip water in his eyes, his mouth chapped below one side of his lower lip because he sticks the tip of his tongue out and to the side when he is concentrating, which is a genetic behavior that he inherited from my father-in-law (who puts his tongue at the corner of his mouth and bites it while performing some act of minor manual dexterity; their heads and ears are similarly shaped, too) — and I thought, I’ve got only a few years of Henry being a small boy. Even now when he stretches his legs out, his feet push against the tap-end of the tub. I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—“Nice growing!” I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub. Generations of people grow to a point where they touch both ends of the tub. This is all too much for me.
15
Good morning, it’s 4:04 a.m. and I made the coffee very strong this morning. Two extra scoops in the dark. The cat wanted to be fed, but the cat rule is not before six-thirty, otherwise there will come days, I guarantee it, when I will want to sleep and the cat will want to eat at what will have become his accustomed time. When we’re still asleep and he thinks that it is breakfast time, he slides his claws into the fabric along the side of the mattress and then plucks the bed like a giant harp.
Passing through the dining room, after an eye-moistening crunch of apple, I saw a coppery flare of sloshing liquid where my coffee mug must be. Once again I thought it must be moonlight — moonlight in the morning coffee — but no, there is no moon available. And then I recognized, by experimenting with where I held the coffee, that I was seeing a liquid reflection of the light from my new friend, the little green bulb in the smoke detector.
The mug of coffee rests on the top of the ashcan, and it gets hot on the side that is near the fire. But it stays cool on the side I sip from. This particular mug has a blue stripe around it and a small chip in the sipping area. Each time I take a sucking mouthful of tepid coffee I have the sharp-edged, chalky, chipped-ceramic experience as well, a good combination.
I’ve got my eyes closed now. The flames make semaphoring rhythms against my eyelids. An itch just made a guest appearance on my cheek, in the foothills of my beard — as the fire gets hotter it can make your face itch — and I noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of using my tongue to prop my cheek from underneath, in order to stretch the skin a little and establish a solid base against which to scratch. I wonder now when I first began countering the force of my finger-scratch with tongue pressure through the cheek. Years ago, it must have been; I’ve kept no record. Once I had a briefcase that got a long scratch in it. I was looking for a job after college, and my father, in whose house I was then living (my parents having separated a year or two earlier), bought me a hand-sewn briefcase made of dark leather — not the lawyerly kind with the expandable bellows but a simpler design with two leather handles that slid down into the recesses in the sides of the central compartment. The briefcase sat on a chair in the middle of my room — every day I woke up and saw it there and was made happy by it. In it was a file with all four of my unfinished poems and another with my résumé and several more empty folders ready for the time when I would have more things to file. My father was at work by nine, so I didn’t see him in the morning, but he would leave notes for me — NEW BOX OF CHEERIOS, a note would say, in his fast but calligraphy-influenced printing, with a late-Victorian arrow pointing to the unopened Cheerios box, which was displayed at just the right angle to the paper. Next to the Cheerios was a bunch of bananas (often), and he would draw a hand with an extended index finger calling attention to that. NOTE FRESH BANANAS! the message would say, and the exclamation point would have its own drop shadow. I wish I had every morning note my father ever wrote me. I have some, I think, I hope.
So I would get up around ten-thirty and take a shower and talk to Claire on the phone, and then I would go out into the world with my new briefcase to seek my fortune, which involved walking around downtown for about an hour until I got hungry. One day I went to a cafeteria to have a hamburger. I was sitting down at the table with my briefcase in one hand and my tray holding a hamburger and a medium root beer, coleslaw, coffee, and a piece of pecan pie in the other, when the cup of root beer somehow tipped over and gushed into my new briefcase. I used some foul language and poured the root beer out of the briefcase into the tray. I took little pleasure in my lunch, although the mushrooms on the hamburger were quite good. When I was done, I called my father from a pay phone and told him what had happened. He said to go to Paul’s Shoe Repair and buy a can of Neat’s Foot Oil and rub it in. I did. I didn’t just rub it in, I poured it in, from the inside. This worked: the combination of root-beer sugar and shoe oil made the leather darker, and there was an odd smell for a while, but the briefcase was fine, better than ever.
Then at my grandfather’s funeral, one of my overly successful first cousins, all of whom went to Yale Medical School and are full of shallow competencies — humph! — said, “Here, I can put this in the back,” and wrestled my briefcase out of my hand and flipped it up and let it land on the spare tire in the trunk of his rented car. He took hold of both sides of it and pushed it back deeper into the trunk, not noticing that there was a long bolt with a rough edge projecting up from the bottom of the trunk, onto which the spare tire was clamped, and that as he pushed my briefcase across this bolt, it would scratch the leather. This was no surface scratch — this was a deep, straight gouge, a wound three eighths of an inch wide that went all the way down one side, exposing the leather’s untanned layer. “Sorry,” my cousin said. I took my briefcase over to a stone parapet with a round decorative cement globe in an urn and I bounced my fist a few times against the urn’s rough surface. When you make a tight fist, your little-finger muscle, which runs along the side of your hand, can bunch up and become surprisingly springy, and if you time the the fist-clenching just right, you can use the sudden bunching of the muscle to help send your fist back up in the air for the next bounce. At the airport, my father looked at the briefcase scratch, and he said, “I’d take it to Paul’s Shoe Repair.”
Paul sanded down the roughness of the scrape and dyed it a chocolate brown that wasn’t a perfect match but was still very close. I used the briefcase for almost fifteen years, until finally both handles tore. Now it’s in a box in the attic.