I nodded.
“She said you were feeling sick, the flu or something,” and he let it trail off. Somebody shouted, “You should have seen it in December!” and the string quartet choked off in an insectlike murmur of busy strings and nervous fingers. “Cute kid, Victoria,” he said. “She’s something.” And then a stab at a joke: “Guess you inherited my taste, huh?”
But the dutiful son didn’t smile, let alone laugh. He was feeling less like Achates than Oedipus.
“You need any money?” my father said, and he was reaching into the pocket of his jeans, an automatic gesture, when the rest of the group converged on us and the question fell dead. He threw an arm round me suddenly and managed to snag Victoria and the proud flag of her hair in the other. He gave a two-way squeeze with his skinny arms and said, “See you at the reading tonight, right?”
Everyone was watching, right on down to the busboys, not to mention the biographer, Dr. Delpino and all the by-now stunned, awed and grinning strangers squinting up from their coquilles and fritures. It was a real biographical moment. “Yeah,” I said, and I thought for a minute they were going to break into applause, “sure.”
The hall was packed, standing room only, hot and stifled with the crush of bodies and the coats and scarves and other paraphernalia that were like a second shadowy crowd gathered at the edges of the living and breathing one, students, faculty and townspeople wedged into every available space. Some of them had come from as far away as Vermont and Montreal, so I heard, and when we came through the big main double doors, scalpers were selling the $2.50 Student Activities Board — sponsored tickets for three and four times face value. I sat in the front row between my father’s vacant seat and the biographer (whose name was Mal, as in Malcolm) while my father made the rounds, pumping hands and signing books, napkins, sheets of notebook paper and whatever else the adoring crowd thrust at him. Victoria, the mass of her hair enlarged to even more stupendous proportions thanks to some mysterious chemical treatment she’d undergone in the bathroom down the hall from her room, sat sprouting beside me.
I was trying not to watch my father, plunging in and out of the jungle of Victoria to make small talk, unconcerned, unflappable, no problem at all, when Mal leaned across the vacant seat and poked my arm with the butt of his always handy Scripto pen. I turned to him, Victoria’s hand clutched tightly in mine — she hadn’t let go, not even to unwrap her scarf, since we’d climbed out of the car — and stared into the reflected blaze of his glasses. They were amazing, those glasses, like picture windows, like a scuba mask grafted to his hairless skull. “Nineteen eighty-nine,” he said, “when he wrecked the car? The BMW, I mean?” I sat there frozen, waiting for the rest of it, the man’s voice snaking into my consciousness till it felt like the voice of my innermost self. “Do you remember if he was still living at home then? Or was that after he … after he, uh, moved out?”
Moved out. Wrecked the car.
“Do you remember what he was like then? Were there any obvious changes? Did he seem depressed?”
He must have seen from my face how I felt about the situation because his glasses suddenly flashed light, he tugged twice at his lower lip, and murmured, “I know this isn’t the time or place, I was just curious, that’s all. But I wonder, would you mind — maybe we could set up a time to talk?”
What could I say? Victoria clutched my hand like a trophy hunter, my fellow students rumbled and chattered and stretched in their bolted-down seats and my father squatted here, sprang up there, lifted his eyebrows and laid down a layer of witty banter about half a mile thick. I shrugged. Looked away. “Sure,” I said.
Then the lights dimmed once, twice, and went all the way down, and the chairman of the English Department took the podium while my father scuttled into the seat beside me and the audience hushed. I won’t bother describing the chairman — he was generic, and he talked for a mercifully short five minutes or so about how my father needed no introduction and et cetera, et cetera, before giving the podium over to Mal, as in Malcolm, the official hagiographer. Mal bounced up onto the stage like a trained seal, and if the chairman was selfless and brief, Mal was windy, verbose, a man who really craved an audience. He softened them up with half a dozen anecdotes about the great man’s hyperinflated past, with carefully selected references to drug abuse, womanizing, unhinged driving and of course movies and movie stars. By the time he was done he’d made my father sound like a combination of James Dean, Tolstoy and Enzo Ferrari. They were thrilled, every last man, woman and drooling freshman — and me, the only one in the audience who really knew him? I wanted to puke, puke till the auditorium was filled to the balcony, puke till they were swimming in it. But I couldn’t. I was trapped, just like in some nightmare. Right there in the middle of the front row.
When Mal finally ducked his denuded head and announced my father, the applause was seismic, as if the whole auditorium had been tipped on end, and the great man, in one of his own tour T-shirts and the omnipresent leather jacket, took the stage and engaged in a little high-fiving with the departing biographer while the thunder gradually subsided and the faces round me went slack with wonder. For the next fifteen minutes he pranced and strutted across the stage, ignoring the podium and delivering a preprogrammed monologue that was the equal of anything you’d see on late-night TV. At least all the morons around me thought so. He charmed them, out-hipped them, and they laughed, snorted, sniggered and howled. Some of them, my fellow freshmen, no doubt, even stamped their feet in thunderous unison as if they were at a pep rally or something. And the jokes — the sort of thing he’d come on with at lunch — were all so self-effacing, at least on the surface, but deep down each phrase and buttressed pause was calculated to remind us we were in the presence of one of the heroes of literature. There was the drinking-with-Bukowski story, which had been reproduced in every interview he’d done in the last twenty years, the travelling-through-Russia-with-nothing-buta-pair-of-jeans-two-socks-and-a-leather-jacket-after-his-luggage-was-stolen story, the obligatory movie star story and three or four don’t-ask-me-now references to his wild past. I sat there like a condemned man awaiting the lethal injection, a rigid smile frozen to my face. My scalp itched, both nostrils, even the crotch of my underwear. I fought for control.
And then the final blow fell, as swift and sudden as a meteor shrieking down from outer space and against all odds blasting through the roof of the auditorium and drilling right into the back of my reeling head. My father raised a hand to indicate that the jokes were over, and the audience choked off as if he’d tightened a noose around each and every throat. Suddenly he was more professorial than the professors — there wasn’t a murmur in the house, not even a cough. He held up a book, produced a pair of wire-rim glasses — a prop if ever I saw one — and glanced down at me. “The piece I want to read tonight, from Blood Ties, is something I’ve wanted to read in public for a long time. It’s a deeply personal piece, and painful too, but I read it tonight as an act of contrition. I read it for my son.”
He spread open the book with a slow, sad deliberation I’m sure they all found very affecting, but to me he was like a terrorist opening a suitcase full of explosives, and I shrank into my seat, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life. He can’t be doing this, I thought, he can’t. But he was. It was his show, after all.
And then he began to read. At first I didn’t hear the words, didn’t want to — I was in a daze, mesmerized by the intense weirdness of his voice, which had gone high-pitched and nasal all of a sudden, with a kind of fractured rhythm that made it seem as if he was translating from another language. It took me a moment, and then I understood: this was his reading voice, another affectation. Once I got past that, there were the words themselves, each one a little missile aimed at me, the hapless son, the victim who only wanted to be left lying in the wreckage where he’d fallen. He was reading a passage in which the guilt-racked but lusty father takes the fourteen-year-old son out to the best restaurant in town for a heart-to-heart talk about those lusts, about dreams, responsibilities and the domestic life that was dragging him down. I tried to close myself off, but I couldn’t. My eyes were burning. Nobody in the auditorium was watching him anymore — how could they be? No, they were watching me. Watching the back of my head. Watching the fiction come to life.