"Hi, Maddie!"
"Bernie asked me about Indians. Or, as I explained, Native Americans."
"Oh?" I said.
"Yes, and we started talking about the Plains tribes in particular."
"They're the fun ones," I said, regretted it at once.
Maddie seemed to waver between confusion and scorn.
"Yes, well, Bernie wanted to know about the lives of the Plains tribes, and we touched upon the famous Sun Dance."
"Sun Dance?"
"Yes."
"What's with the clothespin?"
"Well, Bernie's Dad, it was all I had on hand. I wanted to give Bernie a sense of the ordeal. The piercing of the skin and the looping of rawhide straps through the wounds. They would fasten these straps to the sun pole. The young warrior would have to tear through his own flesh to free himself."
"Oh," I said, "like that movie."
"Movie?"
Maddie seemed unfamiliar with the medium.
"Before your time," I said. It was a phrase I was trying not to rely on so much these days. "Anyway, I hope you weren't going to make Bernie tear through his flesh."
I chuckled, caught a trace of Purdy in the sound.
"Daddy, I don't want to tear my flesh."
"You don't have to tear your flesh, Bernie, I promise."
Maddie made a stern face. I grinned, felt somehow chastened, though for what I couldn't be sure.
"No, obviously we wouldn't tear his flesh."
"I was just joking around."
"But I hope you've read our newest Statement of Pedagogical Goals. It was emailed as an attachment over the weekend."
"I don't think, well, now, not all of it, no."
"Oh," said Maddie, "because we assumed no response meant tacit agreement with our change in direction."
"Change in direction?"
"It's in the attachment, Bernie's Dad."
"Right."
"We believe that many of the problems children suffer from-sensory integration issues, boundary instability, lack of impulse control-stem from our collective refusal to expose children to certain dark edges of experience."
I felt my phone pulse in my pants again. I wondered if it could be Purdy, or Vargina. It was probably important. I couldn't answer it down here because the reception was sketchy, and besides, it was bad form. But I was just here to pick up Bernie, not to listen to Maddie prattle on about child development theory. I was in a hurry, and anyway, Maura handled the theory. I just wrote the checks. Or used to write the checks. Maura had borrowed from her folks for the last installment.
"Yes, edges of experience," I said. "Sounds good."
"I'm glad, because it's what we voted on at Blue Newt. A parent rep was present."
"Blue Newt?"
"Our upstate retreat."
"Right. Sure."
"I hope you'll read the attachment in its entirety."
My phone pulsed again. I lifted Bernie into my arms, carried him to the stairs.
"I definitely will!" I called. I wondered if I should try to get Nick a job here. He had the dark edges down.
"Bye, Maddie!" called Bernie.
"Bye, Bernie and Bernie's Dad!"
Out on the sidewalk I took out my phone. My carrier had called, probably with some intriguing amalgam of offer and threat.
"Dad?" said Bernie.
"Yeah?"
"Is Maddie going to tie me to the sun pole?"
"No, Bernie," I said. "Not if you're good and take your bath without screaming tonight."
"Okay," said Bernie.
"How about some pizza?"
"With torn flesh on it?"
"What about pepperoni?"
"Is that torn flesh?"
"Yeah, there must be some tearing involved. There's definitely some grinding of flesh, not to mention slicing. But I'm sure there's some tearing."
"Are there eyeballs in it?"
"Do you want eyeballs in it?"
"I do."
"Then eyeballs it is."
"Raw eyeballs?"
"Absolutely."
"Thanks, Daddy."
"Hey," I said, remembering now a tip from one of the parenting manuals Maura and I had read a few months ago. "I really liked how you just said 'Thanks, Daddy.' That was wonderful."
"Pansy," said Bernie.
Fourteen
Bernie fed, bathed screamlessly (perhaps for fear of Sioux pain), read to, sung to, and tucked in, I poured a glass of Old Overholt, turned on the TV. It was not often I had the run of the remote this early in the evening, but after a few moments I stopped clicking and settled in with a romantic comedy from the late nineties, the rare thing Maura would have maybe lingered on, caught up in some memory of watching this movie with old friends. It was strange to sit here and watch it alone. A few years, or even months ago, I would have scoffed, begged Maura to pop up the dial for some punditry or playoff scores or a breakdown of cavalry tactics in the Crimean War.
This wasn't just some macho reflex. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day, I always said, because I believed in Art (I harbored a secret capital, like a secret Capitol), but don't ask me to endure the corporate weeps. When it came to cinema, I sold out my aesthetic principles only for zombie flicks, monster mashes, jelly-tentacled beasts who lived in toilets, slurped out our kidneys the hard way (watching Bernie get born, that angry purple mango plunging out of Maura, only further lubed my oozing worldview, my drippy grid), or else those special-ops terror soaps, the nutter mullahs and Glock minuets.
I'd never conceded to the rom-com pone, the coffee bars and turtlenecks, all that greeting card ontology. We were all garbage eaters, but there were too many varieties heaped. The idea was to limit yourself to one or two, or else you'd become an American.
But just like one, I'd cheated, changed. Or maybe it was just the way of things, in line with the theory that the older men get, the more they become old women. Now I preferred the feces the wardens of our souls dolloped on the fem trays. Just a little more texture. I couldn't remember if I'd seen Caller I Do in a theater, but I'd watched it piecemeal over the years. B.B., Before Bernie, Maura and I spent frequent Sundays on the sofa, shades drawn, soaking ourselves in the healing springs of bad television.
This particular movie took place in Hollywood's New York, a wonderland of pensive latte-sipping and meaningful strolls through Central Park. The city looked crisp, exquisite. The citizens lived like simple millionaires. Our principals were a lonely man and a lonely woman, each with a buffoonish, homely sidekick who would have been thought attractive in real life, and a fascinating, but finally unfulfilling-because there was nobody to "share it all with"-career. They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene. Sucked into the vortex of high formula, a slow sob rose in my body. Just like porn or bang-bang, this was the pure stuff, concocted for the baser circuits, the lizard board.
Now the climax arrived, the charmingly improbable half-nude chase through the gallery district of Dumbo, the couple finally reunited in embarrassed ecstasy as pretentious art aficionados punctured their skeins of cynicism and cheered (had they just exited the latest Billy Raskov exhibit?). The sob rippled up, burst in my throat. Maura and I had already found each other. The desperate, emboldening quest for love, the beautiful, electrifying unknowingness of it all, was forever gone. (Unless we divorced, started over, which would surely be disastrous. She'd find happiness with some curt, sporty banker. I'd live in the laminated basement of a Cypriot retiree near the airport, never talk to a woman under seventy-five again.)
"Fucking pussy," I wept, sipped my drink. "Fucking pussy-hurt pussy."
They sped the credits but I did catch a name. The governor's daughter. An early producing gig. Maybe a favor from one of her father's liberal Hollywood foes? She'd gone on to become an important person in the business. Once, I'd watched her hold up a statue, make a speech on television about film and justice. I thought she might apologize to the nation for stealing my Spanish knife.
Good old Constance, she had hid behind the others that night the governor's daughter claimed her nine-tenths of the law. Her black pigtails doubted me, indicted. Constance knew it was my knife. I'd shown it to her in my room, under the blue light. But that night at the party she made no sign she remembered. She just stood there in her tank top, pink with tequila and summer, watched me squirm. Maybe she believed I had it coming.