Moments of bestillment are not unusual for Ann or me. What can I get from her, after all? What can she get from me? A pillow. (She could’ve easily purchased it online.) All we share is the click of reflex, a hammer falling on an empty chamber, like a desperado whose luck’s run out.
“Has Clarissa told you about…” Ann begins to say.
But I’m struck by three things at once, none of which I’ve noticed before. There’s not one photo anywhere — not the children, not Teddy, not her garrulous dad or sorrowing mom. Not me, natch. My face is recorded only in the grainy capture of some camera in the ceiling. The bedroom might have pictures. Or the bathroom. Speaking of which I could stand a leak, but won’t be asking. Old Buck’s Percheron comes uncomfortably to mind.
The second presence (the photos’ absence is a presence) is the clutter of Christmas cards on the teak coffee table — also an issue of the Carnage Clarion, a copy of USA Today, and underneath all, snugged out of disapproving Feng Shui sight, the silver shaft of a putter! Ann still engages in the Republican national pastime, tremor and all, with the bamboo carpet as her “green.” I wonder if she has the pop-up cup that ejects her ball each time she drains one. She used to.
The Clarion headline reads “Life in the Post-Antibiotic Era”—something we all need to be interested in. I wish I could see who’s sending Christmas cards. Undoubtedly the inmates draw lots for who to befriend. Plus Haddam merchants tapping into the money trove a place like this betokens. I see a card with our son Paul Bascombe’s return address in KC. 919 Dunmore — a name he loves. He “builds” his own cards with skills honed as an apprentice joke-meister at Hallmark. Mine this year bore a plain front, inside which was printed “An invisible man marries an invisible woman. Their kids are nothing to look at. Merry Xmas. Preston D. Service.” Ann’s, I’m sure, is something different.
The last room-addition of note are three new oil paintings — of fruit — framed and hung on the green wall (for optimism), above the big cherrywood cabinet inside which probably lurks a big LG for when the Masters gets going in April. One by one the paintings portray: a sliced red apple, a sliced-open honeydew, a sliced green kiwi — all with backgrounds of rustic wood table tops, rough-hewn chairs, crisp white napkins, spilled wheat grains and tempting nuts of varying brown, yellow and purple hues. All could fit perfectly in a suburban ophthalmologist’s office — non-confronting, non-anxiety-producing, toothsome, and straight out of the Feng Shui central office in Youngstown… if all three sliced fruits didn’t look like glistening, delving vaginas, cracked open and ready for business. At first glance you could believe they’re not what I say. But not twice. I’m unable to take my eyes off them. They’re far from anybody’s version of “suggestive” (I’m thinking of Buck again and his stiffy). They’re, in fact, an in-your-face, front-and-center manifesto requiring those who enter here to be on speaking terms with what the pictures depict, since the person living here damn sure is, and life’s too short to beat around the shrubbery.
Ann’s just said something about our daughter. But I’m unable to say anything. The least wrong remark would be met with a steely gaze, as though I held certain “views” about how things should be art-wise. I don’t have views how things should be art-wise. Mature women, I know, can get pretty hardware-store candid about sex. (Sally’s an exception.) Years of sexual oppression at the rough hands of men, men and more men finally get brought to an end by our untimely deaths; only by then there’s not much time left to do much more than talk in mixed company about gynecological issues, and hang paintings of glistening pussies on the wall in the old folks’ home. Possibly that’s why many become lesbians late in life. Who blames them?
Though Ann’s new wall art produces an instantaneous non-verbal response. Faint stirrings below-decks; shiftings in the apparatus, brought on not only by the fruit painting over the TV cabinet, but by their frankness as expressions of Ann’s new bedrock reality and straight-on determination to let life — hers, Buck’s, everybody’s, mine — be what the hell it’s going to be. Put color pictures of genitalia on the wall and see what happens to your social life. It may all be a drug reaction, of course, and not destined to last.
“Did she?” Ann’s looking at me displeased, her chin destabilized, her mouth drawn into a tight line of effort.
“Hm?”
I’m concentrating hard on my Default Self. Streamline my utterances. Nothing from the past. Optimistic high road. The future’s a blank. Be nice. I’m not worried about my own rudimentary stiffy. They’re not as prompt as they once were — though never unwelcome. But I’m suddenly burning up in my heavy coat, as if somebody’d turned on the steam. It may be more pelvic pain beginning.
“I asked you if Clarissa’d spoken to you about Paul’s ‘great new idea.’” Paul — he of the mercurial Christmas cards and suburban garden-supply (A Growing Concern is his company’s name) — has decided he needs to “grow” his business into the vacant building next door (a former Saturn dealership) and to open a rent-to-own operation, dispensing common household goods to deserving young people just starting out and who don’t want to go into killer debt for a dinette set, cheap oriental carpets, a veneer bedroom suite, and fake hunting prints for the walls. Rent-to-own, Paul believes, is genius. His sister and I, however, are his silent partners and money bags. And I have done my homework on this. He has no idea of the initial outlay, about how stingy are the profit margins, and how much time he’d spend hiring and supervising repo gorillas to shadow his customers’ houses and trailers to get his shit back when they stop paying — which they always do. I don’t intend throwing away a penny at his nut-brain scheme, since I’m reasonably sure his “need” has only to do with the phrase “rent-to-own,” which he thinks is side-splitting — like A Growing Concern. Paul, in my view, is best off wrestling sacks of sphagnum moss and toting flats of nasturtiums and bleeding hearts to the backs of Volvos, then standing by cracking wise with his female customers. I sometimes think of my son as being disabled, though he’s not. He, in fact, pays his bills and taxes, votes Democratic, owns a car and drives it, is sadly divorced, reads books, attends Chiefs’ and Royals’ games, and manages to arrive to work each day in complex, rising spirits. He merely possesses what’s been described (clinically) as an “unusual executive function.” Thus, like most parents of adult children, I’m often wrong about him. From outer space, his life’s as normal as mine, and it is enough that we love each other. Though if I don’t hurry up and die, I fear he’ll end up sleeping in my living room.
“It’s a non-starter,” I say relative to Paul’s plan — my utterances kept to a minimum. My boner’s stalled out already — disappointing, but a relief. My jacket had it camouflaged.
But I’m sweating inside my shirt. It’s a hundred degrees in this apartment. My heart does one of those juddering things that aren’t A-fib but scare the shit out of you by reminding you they could be — and will be if you live long enough. Possibly it’s not pelvic pain.
“Are you all right?” Ann’s keeping her distance at the door I’ve entered through. She’s giving me a pseudo-concerned stare, which probably means she wants me to leave. Paul’s business plans are come and gone.
“I am. Yeah.”
“You look a little tissue-y. Do you want me to call someone? We have doctors here.”
“It’s hot as a fucking kiln in here,” I say. “Why do you keep it that way?”