Ross was parched from the road. He sat in Bimmer’s chair, big and tweedy. The place was not so bad and was fairly clean. There were absolutely no books around. He wondered if there were a drink around. He’d planned to share some iced beer with Newt, by way of coaching him toward moderation, recovering what a man could be — healthy in a beer advertisement. He was throwing himself into the breech, having lost the taste for the stuff years ago.
“I’m either going to sing or go into the marines,” said Newt. Was he able to sit still? He was verging in and out of his chair. Akathisia, inability to sit, Ross recalled from somewhere. It was a startling thing when one’s own went ahead and accumulated neuroses quite without your help. Ross looked at the girl, who’d come in with a welcome ginger ale, Dr. Brown’s.
“Newt remembered you liked this,” she said.
This was an act that endeared both of them to him. At last, a touch of kindness from the boy, though announced by his wife.
“Well, I need a splash with mine,” said Newt. He went to the kitchen and out came the Rebel Yell, a handsome jug of bourbon nearly full. However, this was histrionic, Ross was sure. Newt did not look like he needed the drink. He had affected the attitude that a man of his crisis could not acknowledge ginger ale alone. Ross, having thought more than usual on the way up to Auburn and presiding too much as father to this moment, sincerely wanted to relax and say to hell with it. He wasn’t letting anybody live. The marines, singing? So what? Give some ease. He himself had been a marine, sort of.
Where was it written in stone, this generational dispute? Are fathers always supposed to wander around bemused and dense about their young? Wasn’t it true old Ross himself had nailed the young diva, weeping runt, with her heavy musical titties bobbling, right in the back door? While Nabby, loyal at home — source of Newt right in front of him — was shaking her mirror so a younger face would spill out on it? Not very swell, really, and his guilt did not assuage this banal treachery. Old, old Ross, up the heinie of America’s busty prodigy. Awful, might as well be some tottering thing with a white belt and toupee, pot, swinging around Hilton Head. What a fiend for one of Newt’s poems, but really beneath the high contempt of them.
“So how’s the poetry making, anyway, sport?”
Newt was tragic and blasé at once, if possible, gulping down the bourbon and ginger.
“Nothing. It’s the light. Light’s not right.”
“But you’re not a painter, Newton. What light?”
“He means in his brain,” explained Ivy.
“My love for Ivy has killed the light.”
Newt had to give himself his own review, this seriously? Good gad. Save some for the epitaph.
“I like it that way,” Newt added hurriedly, but just as direly.
Ivy seemed upset and guilty, yearning toward Ross for help. “I didn’t want to be any sort of killer.”
He liked this girl. She had almost not to say another thing in her favor. She had the pigtail, pleasant down the nice scoop of her back.
“Well, can’t we open the shroud a little here, Newton? Look outside and see if you can see a little hope. Maybe some future memories, son.”
Newt shuffled to the door and looked at the car and boat a whole minute, too long. Ivy got Ross another Dr. Brown’s. The last thing Ross might say in a hospital room someday in the future, nurse turning out of the room: “Nice legs.” Good for little Ivy. Would it never stop? Ross had long suspected, maybe stupidly but as good as any genius, through life and his biographies, that women with good legs were happy and sane. Leg man as philosopher. Well, Nabby’s seemed to persuade mostly joy out of the day, didn’t they? Even given the sullen, jagged life he sometimes showed her. Get out of my skin and look, he thought: Was I ever as, oh, difficult as Newt myself? Probably, right after he’d fired himself from the war, though he hid it in Chase’s house in San Pedro.
“So what do you see, Newt?”
“No wonder Bimmer left,” said Newt.
“Now, can you explain that?”
“Bimmer’s father is a man of. . merchandise.”
Hold off, hang fire, with Henry James. Ross cut himself off. With a new enormous filtered Kool lit — stay with these and you’ve got at most twenty-five years, likely; we don’t have a clumsy century of discord to work it out, Newt, for heaven’s sake — he thought, Don’t give me that merchandise crapola, young man. I bred you in Nabby. You know very well my beach house and all of it could burn up and not impress me a great deal, never did. Let’s take off the gloves, then. I came here.
“Is that why your man Bimmer dresses like a laid-off ploughboy? Missing the fields and horse shit over to the back forty?”
Newt smiled. Maybe this was the real turf, here we were. The smile was nice, at last, but why did he have to destroy his head? His son’s hair was black and beautiful like his used to be.
“So let me declare myself and your mother finally. The quick wedding, there wasn’t any time for presents much.”
Ivy went with him to the Riviera. She saw the CD player inside and gave a gasp of pleasure. It was the piece of luggage full of CDs she wound up with.
“This wonderful suitcase. I’ll bet you want us to get out of this dump p.d.q.?”
Ross felt very mean for his previous plans for the bag.
“Where are you from, Ivy?”
“Grand Bay, close to Bayou La Batre. Right across the bay from you. The poor side, I guess. But I loved it. And I’m not broke.”
“Fine. Very fine.” Unnecessary, but necessary, on the other hand. She’d won him.
“So there we are. Boat, motor, the player. And voilà! (Ross opened the bag, nearly a trunk). Some late wedding music.”
“Must be fifty discs there!” cheered Ivy.
“Thought you and I might break in the boat and pursue the finny tribe this afternoon,” said Ross, brightly.
Christmas in May, he was feeling, was really an excellent idea. Look down, son.
Newt barely glanced into the suitcase.
“Fishing? That’s pretty off the point, Dad.”
“Oh, Newton!” Ivy jumped right on him.
“What’s. .” Don’t, Ross. He was going to ask what was the point, you bald little bastard?
“I’ve promised the kids I’d play some touch with them. Just about to go out there. Then there’s the band tonight. You can come with Ivy if you want.”
“Newt takes the band very seriously,” said Ivy. This seemed to be a helpful truth for both the men. Ross forgot Newt’s rudeness. Or did he know? What part of loony Berryman or Lowell had he researched? Newt glanced at Ivy dangerously. This brought Ross’s nightmares right up, howling. This was the feared thing. His son seemed to want to beat on this strange idiot who’d just opened her mouth.
Ross couldn’t bear it. He went out with a fresh Kool and the remains of the ginger ale and stood in the yard near his sleek Buick, gazing through some cypresses to a man-provoked swamp behind the hideous cinder blocks of an enormous grocery, some kind of weeds native only to the rear of mall buildings, ripping up through overflowed mortar on the ground.
Here he was back in “life,” shit, man with twenty-five years to go, wearing a many-pocketed safari shirt next to a pimp’s car. What did an old American man wear rightly, anyway? Fifty-two was old. Cut the hopeful magazine protests. You spent half your time just trying not to look like a fool. What intense shopping. Hell, shouldn’t he have on a blazer, get real in a gray Volvo? Disconnection and funk, out here with his killer Kool, pouting like a wallflower; son inside wrecking the afternoon with bald intensity. Back to his nightmares, the latest most especially: Ross, as an adult, was attending classes in elementary school, somehow repeating, but bardlike, vastly appreciated at the school by one and all for some reason, king of the hill, strolling with the children, glib, but why? The school was paying him a salary while he was doing what? But at the school gate he was in a convertible with two girls, and two men — one of them Newt — jumped in the car and rammed long metal tongs through the skulls of the girls. Their screams were horrible, the blood and bone were all over Ross. Then policemen appeared and drove metal tongs through the skulls of Newt and the other man. The screams of Newt were unbearable, loud! He’d awakened, panting. Ross almost wept, looking at the back of that grocery now. But it was a dry rehearsal, with only a frown and closed eyes.