“As I don’t have to tell you, everything also means nothing.” says my father. “Isn’t that so?”
“In this restaurant, everything means everything. What do you want me to tell you? You want me to tell you bluefish, I’ll tell you bluefish.”
“Is it fresh?”
“Like my daughter’s tongue,” he says.
They joke back and forth like characters in a play or a movie made out of a play. I have the idea that there are cameras filming them, that hidden microphones record their conversation.
When the waiter finally goes off with our order, my father asks me what I think of him.
“He’s not very fast,” I say. “He talks too much.”
“What I’m asking is if you recognize him,” my father says. “He looks familiar, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Where would I have seen him?”
“He’s a comedian. He used to do commercials on television.”
I’m willing to believe his other stories — it’s like not bothering not to believe them — but not this one. “I’ve never seen him on television,” I say.
“He used to be on all the time,” says my father. “You couldn’t turn on the set without catching him doing something. He was a man of a thousand faces and two thousand voices. He was a brilliant comic, too brilliant for his own good. Viewers tended to remember his persona and not the product he was selling. The agency that was using him let him go — there was some scandal in the background as well. When they tried to hire him back he refused their offer. He would not be bought off by any amount of money. Besides, he liked being a waiter at Toros, liked the idea of having a secret, of being other than he seemed.”
“Well,” I say, skeptical to the last, “maybe when he was working as a comedian he was realy a waiter in disguise.”
No one is what he seems. Everyone in the restaurant, guest or employee, has an astonishing private history, which my father reveals to me in his blaring whisper.
Lunch is being served. Though I think of passing it up this trip, the stewardess vetoes my decision by letting down my little table and serving me.
For the last year or so I’ve been incredibly impassive, sitting still for whatever comes by, unable to put one foot in front of another without being told I had no other choice. Lunch sits in front of me on a plastic tray and I pick at it — not the swiss steak but the potato puff and the salad — trying to determine whether I’m really hungry or only filling time. The man next to me lights up a cigarette to accompany his second cup of coffee. A woman of about my mother’s age turns around to tell him that there is no smoking allowed in this section. My neighbor takes two more drags before snuffing out the cigarette.
“Thank you,” the woman says with heavy sarcasm. “It only took you four hours to get the message.”
“What message is that, lady?” he asks, winking at me. “If my smoking bothered you, why didn’t you say something before?”
The woman, who is English, offers him the back of her head, says nothing that we can hear. An unintelligible whine of complaint hangs in the air. She turns once again and says, “The rules are made for some, I dare say, and not for others.”
“What is she talking about?” he says to me. “We’ve been in the air close to five hours and I’ve smoked two cigarettes, really half of two cigarettes. Does that make me a public nuisance?”
He can’t let go. Even after he opens his attaché case to get at some business documents he’s already read three or four times he continues to justify himself. I turn my face to the window, make no response. “Am I being unreasonable?” he asks me.
“Everything’s unreasonable,” I say.
Do I surprise him? He accepts the remark not as intended, but as a gesture of empathy, the men against the woman, the Americans against the English. “You most of all,” I could have added, though stopped short of saying what I meant.
When the trays are cleared away, the panel in front of our section lifts up to reveal a screen. We are requested to draw the shades over the windows and to put out the pintpoints of light overhead. I seem to be the only one in my immediate area without headphones, had probably been sleeping when the stewardess offered them for sale.
I watch the movie without sound a while, which has its own interest. It concerns a retired rodeo star who is reduced to making drunken public appearances on behalf of an unlikely breakfast cereal. After a scene with in which the cowboy, too drunk to go throuh his paces, watches an impersonator perform in his place, I close my eyes, let them close. The movie washes over me.
The multi-national company that manufactures the cereal with the cowboy’s pictures on the box also has in its employ an international ring of assassins. One of them has been assigned “to terminate” the cowboy’s career. The assassin, however, makes the crucial mistake of perceiving the false cowboy as the real one. I wake before the scenario can play itself out, the assassin waiting in ambush for the false cowboy’s scheduled arrival.
What will the real cowboy do when he learns that his double has been killed in his place?
In the real movie the cowboy redeems his debased life by trekking through beautiful countryside accompanied by a woman and a horse, avoiding unseen pursuers.
The plane begins its descent, stuttering slightly as it falls, the sky darker as we come closer to the earth. I reach in my jacket pocket for a stick of gum, come out empty-handed. Ears ache as if wooden nails had been driven into the drums on each side. I am not ready to come down.
I can imagine my father, beardless with two days growth, sitting in one of these black director’s chairs, his legs crossed, an unattended cigarette smoking in the ashtray. He is going through the manuscript of a screenplay, making notes to himself in the margin with a red pen. The ending isn’t right, isn’t right as an ending or isn’t right as the last scene of this particular film. It’s even possible that the ending is not at fault in itself but symptomatic of the failure of the whole work. My father has been too long on this screenplay to know, has lost all sense of balance. His watch, which he glances at to gauge the time he has before leaving for the airport, has stopped, something he won’t discover until hours later. If he intends to take the car to Heathrow, he’ll have to leave the house in fifteen minutes, he thinks, though in fact he is already several minutes late.
The plane comes out of its descent, begins to level off, offers the illusion of rising again. The man next to me says that he heard there was an Air Traffic Controller’s strike at Heathrow and that we would have difficulty landing.
“What a bore!” one of the English ladies in front of us says.
I am in no hurry, consider the possibility of the plane hanging around for awhile. It’s been my limited experience that anything is possible. The fantasy wills itself. One of the emergency doors is suddenly blown open and everything not nailed down is sucked into the maelstrom of the sky, three hundred or so passengers dropping into London like a rain of hailstones.
I try to imagine what it would be like to fall into my father’s life like a bomb.
2
In the final scene, his hero, the international detective Henry Berger, would track the conspiracy to some unnamed European country and into a palace of mirrors to be cut down at gun point as he enters the building by the one person he continues to trust. The film would stop just as the bullet struck him, or fractionally before, a look of astonishment and disillusion on Henry Berger’s face, the reflection of it echoing through the maze of the room. “I love it,” Max Kirstner said, “but is it, I wonder, absolutely on the mark? Irony tempered by human understanding. This script must be beyond bloody reproach, my friend, or so subversive that the sharpest accountant in the industry doesn’t know he’s being had. What it wants at this stage is a touch more compassion.” He spoke, particularly when the news was bad, at astonishing speed.