Enhancement mechanism: I close in and in on the trompe l’oeil skyline until the benday dots of the composite photograph are like a galactic cloud of dust and gas within which time stands still, all motion is perpetual. Negro elevator boys flinch and roll their eyes, powerful men spray frustration through thatchlike mustaches, taxicabs lurch and revolving doors revolve.
With the frame advance control I achieve a kind of lurching space travel, hopping from blur to blur until, deactivating gridlock, I retreat and retreat…. And here’s Margie in an elfin sportswear creation — white shorts and tunic with saucer-size black buttons — practicing her conga moves in preparation for a trip to Havana with Dad, who’ll be closing a big deal with Señor Mercado, owner of vast sugar plantations. (I remember eating flan in a Cuban place on Eighth Avenue with a girl who admired Angela Davis.) Margie’s boyfriend, the human ashtray, Freddy Wilson, watches disconsolately from the candy-stripe sofa.
“Sure I want you to have a good time, but what about all those shiny-haired caballeros down there?”
“Honestly, Freddy, do you think I’d fall for…”
But wait. Here’s Vern emerging from the elevator, puffed with pride at having just been named to a seat on the Traffic Commission.
“Oh, no, it’s Dad! Freddy, you’ve got to hide!”
(I remember part of an old dream: On the lam in bayou land, paying for roadhouse tamales with a Calvin Coolidge twenty-five-dollar bill.)
Freddy crouches on the terrace. Tipsy with civic triumph, Vern decides to view the beauties of Manhattan, to fill his lungs with sweet spring air. Wretched craven Freddy, born to lose, would sooner dangle from a chrome railing eleven stories over Park Avenue than jeopardize little Margie’s Havana spree.
I look to my manifest for a client name, but the space is blank. Curious. Paperwork, repellently, is a strong point of mine. Up to my elbows in the long gone, but what I can’t remember is why I’m here so late, whether there really is a client, if I’m just running myself through a maze again.
Vern grabs the phone like it’s a rainbow trout about to get away.
“But, Mr. Honeywell!”
The Mercados are in town and, of course, Honeywell’s invited them to stay at the Albright apartment, given them a key, they’re on their way now…
“But!”
(I remember thick, loud people who came one summer, and how the man put me on his lap, said, “Little fella, put up those dukes.” Later, I poured bacon grease in his bathrobe pockets.)
Margie chirps and gurgles like a drive-time dj.
“Oh, Freddy, you’re so wonderfully brave.”
She packs him away in the foyer closet, but Vern has the damning evidence of Freddy’s straw fedora, and teeters in his righteous advance like he’s just fallen out of a hammock.
“We had a bargain, baby, and you’ve broken it.”
“But, Dad!”
“And as of now, I’m taking that Havana trip alone.”
(I remember a dozen collisions with El Gordo, more, and all his rigid relish. How he would rise up like a man pushing darkness away; how, in my night mind, I’d have him begging me to pull the trigger.)
“That must be Freddy now. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget,” Vern bleats, greeting Señor Mercado with a windmilling uppercut.
Mrs. Mercado, cocooned in wine-red sateen — or what I imagine to be wine-red sateen (Ella Dean, my algebra tutor, and her soapy breath) — faints through the doorway and into Margie’s arms.
“Well, Dad, looks like we can cancel your travel plans too.”
“You’ve got to think of something, baby. I’ll be ruined.”
Vern whines pitifully; the sick undercurrents of this father/daughter bond have become impossible to ignore.
Enter now Roberta, Vern’s girlfriend, conveniently situated across the hall in apartment 10B, totally out of place among these overwound toys. She is lithe and cool; her thin smile emerges from out of a fog of Virginia tobacco.
“Looks like fun. Can anyone play?”
“Roberta, this is no time for…”
(Betsy from up the street who took me down to the cellar to watch her sit on a pop bottle, smiling thinly as the glass neck disappeared inside her.)
I imagine Roberta growing up in a Boston townhouse, learning High German from her nanny, attending Mount Holyoke and being seduced by a lit. prof, with the highest, blackest heels. Now she writes articles for gardening magazines and takes Vern for all she can.
Margie has that hophead gleam in her eye. (Carla’s nostrils pouring smoke like tailpipes and me thinking: Yes, she’s older.) “We can say there was a prowler.”
“They’ll come to any second now.”
“Don’t worry, I know just who can play the part.”
Freddy gropes out of the closet, puckers faithfully when Margie tells him to close his eyes. Throwing mums over her shoulder (wet aromas of the Lexington Avenue florist where I worked, boy chants from the Catholic school next door), Margie crowns him with a vase.
Roberta looks bemused, as though observing a square dance in the West Virginia hills. (A man told me, at a truck stop outside Wheeling, that bears had stolen furniture from his house.) “Why don’t you phone the police, Vern. Before we’re all unconscious.”
Margie kissing the adhesive tape she’s plastered over Freddy’s mouth, Señor Mercado gesturing ethnically, his hand-painted tie flapping like a second tongue, the perky violins. Produced by Hal Roach, Jr.
I shut down all the machinery I can and sit in almost-silence. It turns me backward, pushes me and pushes me into places everyone has been: up against the picture window that overlooks the lives of Bat Masterson and Huckleberry Hound, among the pages of glossy magazines, along overlit streets and in the vicious parking lots of doughnut shops, outside and inside of uneasy photographs, under a Christmas tree, behind a fixed expression, above the clouds. I remember that the man who played Molly Goldberg’s husband was blacklisted and subsequently killed himself; I remember the first appearance of a gourmet entree you could boil in a bag. And, turning backward, I remember that all experiences are equally synthetic.
I sit so very still because it is dangerous to move. I am like a little old man in a hard chair on a decrepit porch, and memory is a tumor pressing against some vital spot. If it were possible, I would close my eyes. But I’m mean with fatigue and sick from remembering. I roll tiny sips of sour mash around in my mouth and aim evil thoughts at anything that passes by my porch.
37
I’VE BEEN ABSENT FROM work three days and nobody has called. That I find this disturbing shows how hard I am to please. Too ego-bound to favor anonymity as I claim? Oh, well. I got to beat Opatowski at chess, and hear from Tubbs, the cook, of his week as a Sonny Liston sparring partner in Miami Beach. I got to play with Heidi all yesterday, letting her put me in makeup, exploring her mouth like a dentist, lollipopping her icy toes. All this easy leisure and I feel like there’s a high, rough wall at my back. Too indulgently morbid to accept pleasure? Que sera. I can let today flap by with the wings of magpies rioting for beer nuts, or with the pages of The Charterhouse of Parma. But I need to cadge a little spirit. Right now, Sonny Boyers seems as kindred as they come.
Coils of wire, buckets of roofing sealant — there’s more salvage in the yard than usual. To one side of the garage, where the boys’ swings used to be, is a corral holding goats with red plastic tabs in their ears. Dawn comes to the door, a bowl of raisin-flecked dough braced in front of her, to say Sonny is out testing products, if I feel like hiking after him. She points to a web of arroyos behind the house and I look at the web of cellulite on her arm. She doesn’t invite me in. The more I learn about her…