At dinner, there would be a pot roast surrounded by potatoes, which sat directly before the father. Nearer the children were bowls of beets and beet greens, white bread and butter. His mother would talk about the neighborhood women, the book club, the chatter at the bridge game. The father would interject terse commands: Kenneth, fork. Napkins. Sometimes he would strike the table. Sometimes the meal would be interrupted for a round of spankings.
It was a ritual that started in dread and then accrued a kind of hysterical momentum. Each warning would lead to more noise, more pinching under the table, more desperate squealing and giggling. Kenneth would howl and grin, his legs twitching beneath the table, leering eyes fixed on his father. It was always as if the father would single out only one of them. The game was to plead helplessness, giddy innocence, as if innocence had a meaning or a value once the game began.
He would send them all to their rooms, where he would make them wait until he finished his meal. Kenneth would sit on the edge of his bed and bury his face between his knees, breathing. In this self-imposed darkness the fear would become an unwelcome kind of yearning, guilty and hopeless. His hands would grip the backs of his legs through the fabric of his jeans. He would imagine himself in a rough cave lit by a fire, a vision from the movies. On the cave’s back wall, a man struggled in chains, a few narrow cuts across his chest. Then he would see himself and his brother wrestling in the driveway, their hands joined in struggle, Kenneth’s head buried in his brother’s armpit. It would end with Kenneth grinding a rock into his brother’s knuckles.
His father smelled like alcohol and cloves, the scent of aftershave. There was something almost shy about the way he entered the room, adjusting his glasses and clearing his throat, then telling Kenneth to take down his pants. Kenneth could not look at him. He felt detached from himself as he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down around his ankles, covering himself with his hands. Without speaking, his father removed his belt, then he bent Kenneth over his knee and beat him methodically with a small length of the doubled-over leather, breathing through his nose. He did it without emotion or even interest. Perhaps worse than the pain itself was the sullen intimacy of his lap, his rigid grip on Kenneth’s back, the idea that Kenneth couldn’t see his father’s face.
Kenneth thought of the dinner table: the plates a dull white that showed their scratches in the bright light, the tablecloth olive green and mustard yellow. He saw the jelly glasses that he and his siblings used, the faceted garnet-colored goblets for his parents. It was a kind of ceremony: that was why his mother pinned up her hair and put on a clean dress, but also why his father was allowed to unbutton and roll up his sleeves.
The blows came in a slow, precise rhythm that made Kenneth buck and kick. He became smaller and less aware of himself, reduced finally to the smallest pinpoint of whoever he was. When it was over, he lay curled up in the corner of his bed, wheezing and lost. His jeans were still down around his ankles, his warm skin exposed to the air.
“Relax,” his father said. “Let’s try to calm down now. Let’s try to settle down and get some sleep.”
When he left, Kenneth opened his eyes to the room he lived in. There were his careful drawings of Japanese scholars, of geishas with piled hair held in place by lacquered sticks. There were the cutouts of Flash Gordon and Aquaman, the illustrations from The Wizard of Oz. He turned to look at the marks on his buttocks, nursing them with his fingers. In the bronze light of his bedroom lamp, the pictures on his wall had been transformed. They were witnesses to this secret bond he shared with his father.
It was his grandmother’s friend Meg who got him a small part in a movie adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first, he and some other kids in different costumes ran up and down a cellophane-wrapped staircase, reaching up for girls in cellophane dresses who were lifted away on guy wires. Next, they frolicked aimlessly in a forest of artificial trees. There was an odd stop-start quality to it all, a vacant pause between brief snatches of play. They ran with their hands at right angles to their hips, crouched or fell to the ground in laughter, teased one another in smiling pairs. The play began to feel important. They became immersed in it, aware of themselves as children. It was as if they each had unique talents that it was now their duty to exaggerate. Kenneth found himself running around the trees, faster and faster, waving his hands like wings above his head until he was shouting. By then, he was dizzy from the fumes, the acrid smell of shellac, the bright reflections of the lights.
Afterward, in the costume room, they chose him for a special role: the Changeling Prince. He didn’t know what this role involved or even what the story was about. He stood in a shiny plastic suit with three strands of pearls over his chest, a thicker strand around his neck, and two rhinestone earrings that dangled to his chin line. On his head was a turban that culminated in a spray of white ostrich feathers.
He would watch it a half-dozen times in the theater with his grandmother and Meg. Here was the important moment: the woman who played Titania lifting him onto her knee, her body softened by a fill light so that there was no distinction between the beaded fringes of her sleeves and the silver spray of hair that descended like a shawl to her waist. She and Kenneth were in close-up, his dark hair and small features nearly as Asiatic as his rounded turban. The plastic trees and flowers radiated a light that had nothing to do with any actual season or time of day. Onscreen, his body and the woman’s body were hardly bodies at all, more like figments. Gone was any vestige of the actual soundstage: no smell of shellac or hairspray, no visible trace of his own anxious joy.
It affected him like the first manic vision of a would-be saint: his first Hollywood role. Afterward, there would be much struggling and compromise, an endless effort to return to that original moment.
When he was ten, he began begging his father for the leftover ends of film from the home movies they made on their vacations. He examined the black Bolex camera, the riddles of apertures and shutter speeds, the light meter, the different filters for indoors and outdoors. He shot little fragments that evoked unexpected emotions: a few seconds of his sister brushing her hair with her fingers, or stepping out of a car in a long dress. He worked out scenarios in his mind, fairy tales involving kings and sorcerers and princesses, power struggles that ended not with a plot twist but an image: a candle burning on his parents’ dresser, a potted hyacinth on the kitchen table, a patch of sky between cypress trees. He found by accident that if he spliced together snippets from the family’s home movies — group poses at Yosemite or Big Sur — the images took on a different meaning, a lonely, distant quality, as if his family were strangers or dead. The images seemed more real than the moments they recorded. They made everything suggestive and strange, as if highlighted or outlined.
He filmed the family Christmas tree, bestrewn with silver tinsel and colored glass balls. A few weeks later, he filmed its undressing, the ornaments packed away in boxes. Then he filmed the bare, broken tree on the grill inside the fireplace, the flames slowly reaching up to its limbs until it had withered to a charred skeleton. It was only after watching it in his room on the bare wall that he realized what the film was about. It was about the holiday’s actual meaning, the story of Christ told in some strange new language that only he seemed to be aware of.