“What, you mean like cancer?”
This is like the time Sonny told me you could make an emergency radiation suit out of plastic trash bags and duct tape. He can be as literal as a chunk of laterite.
“Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics.”
“Stick to the facts,” Sonny says irritably. “Anyhow, time’s coming when there won’t be any laws.”
Velma says, “You got music tapes for that thing?”
“There’s some Johnny Paycheck out in the truck. Some Allman Brothers.”
I say, “Sonny, it’s real simple. People don’t want to hear bad news.”
Velma says, “Just put the damn music on.”
19
I WAS TEN YEARS old when I saw Khrushchev on the Saw Mill River Parkway. My mother was driving me to camp, where I didn’t want to be, when the pace of traffic slowed abruptly. I hoped for a flaming crack-up, something to turn us back. Cars pulling onto the grass verge, people aligning; we joined up. A woman in tennis whites told us who we were waiting for.
“How theatrical,” my mother said, her ultimate accolade.
We all waited in cruel, quiet sun for the godless tubby who’d promised to bury us. A million happy families turned to landfill. The motorcade roared into view; we screamed, jumped, waved, and it was already gone. But I’d seen Khrushchev, a pale split-second smear inside the black car.
I see him now on my screen, horse teeth and rumpled suit, stale piroshki easily imaginable on his breath. Quaint postures of 1959, the American National Exhibit in Moscow, the Great Kitchen Debate. Nixon, with his sturgeon eyes, talking up a Washday Whiteners Gap, an Electric Can Opener Gap, reminding the man who gaveled the UN with his shoe how many work-hours it takes the average Ivan to buy a pair of his own.
Or something. I’m running the clip without sound, fascinated by the Supreme Soviet face, that touching, hog-farmer gramps face all round and warty, the nose a prize root vegetable, the skull shiny as ice in a washbasin.
I remember my mother saying, “He could be such a star. Like Red Skelton.”
I remember her mysterious tears when she left me at camp, the smell of perfume spilled in her handbag, the ideology of withdrawal that saw me through the summer.
“Coming?” Ellen atwitter with notepad and reading glasses.
“Nice hair. What’d you do?”
“Slept on it wet. Come on or we’ll be late.”
She’s still new here, still worries about demerits. We chase up to the West Tunnel conference room, but nothing much is going on. Familiar faces browse over platters of sliced fruit. Familiar turns of phrase: “Another strategic fallback.” “He’s a razor blade in the waffle batter.” “Pissing up my back, telling me it’s rain.” “More proof that galaxies are moving outward.”
Ellen gazes in dismay at her black pumps, like broken glass on the rug amid all the bright nylon recreation shoes. She takes my hand in her cold one and flattens the edges of her mouth.
“I need to slow down.”
A grimacing brunette slinks by with handouts and it’s clear from the title page that we’re in for a slow afternoon — The Framed Cognitive Modeclass="underline" A Metastrategy for Systems Performance. Ideology drifting, ubiquitous as soot.
We look for seats in the back, end up next to Foley.
“Behold the jewel in the lotus.”
Foley, the ruined newsman, the idealist deformed by dreams of conspiracy, once a public relations man in Haiti, now sending alimony checks to a nurse in Oklahoma. He wants you to think he’s older than he really is, wants you to ask what the hell he’s doing here so he can say, “Well, it’s better than writing for the airline magazines.”
“Behold.”
He shows Ellen the overhead autocam that records all meetings. She tries unsuccessfully to reflect mischief into his grave eyes.
A rustling as of choir robes. Mounting the lectern is our Section Director, the gray and immutable Dr. George Borrow. He semaphores his tufty eyebrows, smooths his text. The autocam beams down.
“Our Framed Cognitive Model is a self-refining road map for organizational development with applications that entail both enhancement and modification of core options usage. Shifting complexities must be charted and triaged, thereby clearing the path for a truly expansive…”
I scan appropriate, still faces around the room. Wrapped in attention. Foley conducts self-palmistry, staring down into open hands. Ellen writes the same sentence again and again on her notepad: I will not exert my intelligence. Her thick fingers surround the pen like tentacles, her thickness everywhere a sign of bravery. I admire her nihilism, its vitality. But here she is, like me a moving part, and neither one of us with the dangling logic of Foley at his tether end.
The hunger injected into this room is for purity and control. Abide and conquer, a pride of arrogance. Arguably, my desires are just as cold, areas of the heart selectively deadened as in a procedure to correct arrhythmia. I detail myself as the accommodator, the soft self watching its every motion, and Ellen shames me with her strength of dread. But aren’t things more difficult for her? More sapping? I will not exert my intelligence.
It’s late when I get back to #6 and I’ve had too much alcohol for what I find there: socks and underwear washed and hanging from the shower rod, roadside flowers by the bed, red lip imprints on the mirror where her note is taped.
Maybe the joke’s on me, but decided to pretend today was Valentine’s. Took a soak in your tub, pictured you on the other side of the door getting ready to take me out. So tonight on your new sheets you’ll maybe dream of me?
I love you—
Heidi
I love you, that useless incantation; the thing she’s never said before, not even while coming. And Heidi signed with two hearts to dot the i’s. So full of impulses, this unfair maid. (“You let me be aggressive,” she says with gratitude.) Ambushing me unfairly at the edge of this unpleasantly thickened night. Shifting complexities. Right.
I avoid the bed, pulling from the swamp of books Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, full of words that sizzle, of defiance I wish I still could summon. Much as I need distance, distraction, the type bleeds away off the end of the page and I get up to pace the room, which, I suppose, in our mimicked domesticity, is as much Heidi’s as it is mine. Striated, intricate as fingerprints, her careful kisses on the mirror form an ideology of their own. It hovers, a cloud, appealing for belief.
I unmake the bed she’s made, settle onto new sheets the color of pistachio ice cream. I undress myself in darkness with her sharp, impatient hands. My eyes travel to Heidi motionless and white under the trellised roses of sheet music. I can dream of her if I can do no more.
20
HEIDI’S MOTHER KNEW HER parents from pictures. She was two when they dropped her off at Grandma’s, said they were going to the races in Wheeling for a couple of days. The sole trace of them after that came six summers later from an uncle who thought he’d seen them boarding the Lake Erie ferry. So she grew up in the brick house across from the Lutheran church with a woman who was easy to fool and too old to care.
Heidi’s mother never was pretty, but she knew how to be popular. She wore tight sweaters and high heels that made her toes blister. She taught herself to play bumper pool, and Patsy Cline songs on the guitar. In Zanesville in the 1950s you could make a name for yourself without giving it all up. Men stocked her grandma’s freezer with game. They let her tell lies and drive their cars. One night she knocked someone down outside a roadhouse called Pogo’s Hi-Life and kept going. When the cops came for the apprentice barber whose name was on the registration, he went quietly. That’s how popular she was.