He tightened his grip on Robbie’s hand. Needles and knives. Too much symmetry. She must have said something else while he sliced his thick paper. He didn’t trust his memory on this; no, not at all.
She’d helped him out of the car in the hospital parking lot, right over there, just beyond those trees — touching him more gently that night than at any other moment in their life together.
Throwaways. Tender provisions. Refuse of a sad and patchwork existence.
Laughter. He turned. Buddy Holly and the angels on an afternoon constitutional.
The doctor approached him, wiping his thick black glasses on his smock. “Hello,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
Frederick introduced him to Robbie. The three of them sat on a bench and watched the patients stroll, stretch, wave their hands at the clouds. “I bring them out in small groups once a week for about thirty minutes of exercise,” Porter, the doctor, explained. “There’s not much room on the ward.”
Frederick tried to locate correspondences between the men’s mannerisms and his own. Defensive jokes. Fidgeting fists. Is this me? “So … all these men are schizophrenics?” he asked.
“Not all. I treat a variety of mental disorders. Human frailties, it seems, are ubiquitous.” Porter laughed sadly. “For some of these fellows, the biggest problem is loneliness. Their families have tossed them off. We — whoops, excuse me.” He rose and walked swiftly to a knot of bony men scuffling in the grass.
“What’s … schizophrenics?” Robbie asked his father, twisting his mouth around the hard, skittery word.
“Double-minded men,” Frederick said.
“What do you mean?”
Sand from a nearby playbox blew into his eyes. He blinked. “Well, let’s say you’re in a store and you need two different things, right?”
“What things?”
“Oh … a cabbage-sized pearl or a pair of paper shorts.”
Robbie laughed.
“But you don’t have enough money. You have to choose just one, though living without the other is really going to hurt you. So you stand there and you stand there and you can’t make up your mind?”
“Uh-huh,” Robbie said slowly.
“That’s what I mean. But that’s not it, exactly.” He scratched the back of his head. He rubbed his eyes.
“I’d take the pearl. Paper shorts would itch.”
“I don’t know what I want, exactly. I mean, I don’t know what I mean.” Frederick felt annoyed. He couldn’t explain. “Wait a minute.” His breath quickened. “Stay here,” he said.
He’d glimpsed the Head Angel, the man he guessed was Sal, from Porter’s description. Tall. Fair. Sal wore a faded orange blanket over a white pajama gown. He was humming “Amazing Grace,” stepping regally around the grounds. Frederick approached him carefully, from the side. “Hello,” he said.
Sal beamed at him. His blond hair, thin over a flat, shiny pate, curled in the breeze.
“I admire your … effulgence.” Frederick laughed, touching the blanket with just the tip of his thumb: a gentle, probing joke.
Sal hummed. At his feet, a ceramic tortoise; brassy doorknob legs.
“I’ve seen your blessings at night,” Frederick said.
The angel continued to smile, the hollowest expression Frederick had ever seen, except for Mark’s when he was lying in the hospital, snakebit and babbling.
Was illness a state of grace? Or vice-versa? Could a blessing be a wound?
Why do so many artists drink so much?
“Maybe you have …” Frederick felt silly now. “A special blessing? Just for me?”
Porter called, “All right, guys, time to pack it in.” Sal looked bewildered for a moment, then wandered off, still grinning, nearly tripping on the tortoise.
Frederick felt his face grow hot. He nearly sagged to the ground, shocked at himself. He hadn’t experienced such crushing disappointment since his first church confession as a kid, when admitting his sins — cigarettes, lustful thoughts, excessive pleasure in the fleshy smell of paint (surely a distraction from God’s glories) — changed nothing.
Holy fools.
What did you expect, he grilled himself now, watching Porter gather his patients. He’d known they weren’t really angels, these poor, stricken men.
Still, he’d been so enchanted by the evening displays, the fragments of flowers fluttering down in the dark. The reckless, unreasoning part of him that always found beauty in paint, romance in a casual smile on the street, democracy in the latest election, had hoped for a miracle, a benediction, thick as pancake batter, to smother his transgressions.
“They’re a little too energetic today. Gotta cut it short,” Porter said. He called goodbye. Sal’s blanket dragged the ground, leaving a muddy trail, spiraling, strange, as if from a curious mammal rarely glimpsed.
“Those men were funny,” Robbie said. “Their heads were too big.”
Frederick knelt, shaking, by the bench near his son. He rubbed his sandy eyes until he saw only white. “Robbie? Listen, honey, we don’t have much time together. There’s something — ”
What? What did he have to say? The perfect phrase? What was it? Would it change anything?
“I’m thirsty, Daddy! You said lemonade.”
“Right. Yes. In a minute, I promise. But first there’s something I want you to know. Are you listening?”
Robbie puffed his bottom lip.
“You understand, we’ll have to tell each other goodbye pretty soon,” Frederick said.
“Like those men? Goodbye, goodbye!”
“I mean bigger than that.” Frederick’s knees hurt. “Just because Daddy’s moving, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. You know that, don’t you, son?”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me.”
“What?” Robbie squinched his eyes.
“I want you to forgive me.”
“Okay.”
An automatic, unknowing response. But it was better than nothing. Better than the void. “Let’s get that lemonade now.”
On his last day in town, he walked to the half-price bookstore, sold his mystery novels, rebought Wittgenstein, added Hegel on the cycles of history, and an early Kant: airplane reading, companions for his first few days in Manhattan while he unpacked everything else. No more escape fare. Time to be rigorous.
That meant the whiskey too. Out it went, savoring one last drop before the toss into the trash; the booze sizzled in his gullet; the toss, he thought, was heroic.
He’d written Kenneth Koch, Walker Percy, Maurice Natanson, Joseph Lyons, soliciting articles for Bliss. Though the editors referred to it as an art journal, they’d told Frederick they wanted to cover contemporary politics, literature, philosophy as well. They’d been impressed by Frederick’s knowledge of these matters — impressed that anyone from Texas knew such things.
“Self-taught,” he’d said (not entirely true — his father, an architect, stern as any priest, had insisted Frederick breathe the Modern growing up).
He’d hit it out of the park, the interview. He was delighted even more when the editors accepted his title for the magazine.
Bliss. Thy name is New York.
One more box of peas. The freezer was empty. He’d tidied up nicely. The remains of his ivy were gone.
James Dean’s laughter rose above the willows, from the theater. Tonight, East of Eden was on. Frederick had seen it last Sunday — frenetic direction, cut-rate histrionics. Well. The cut-rate had its charms, Frederick thought, trying to empty his mind of Ruth’s tears. At least it was easy to take.
In their (purposeful) clumsiness, their ordinariness, Mark Jarvis’s follies achieve a rare elegance: the sanctity of the everyday, the much-handled, the overlooked. In other words, they’re eerily like us. Treasure them, as you’d treasure your family —