Those were the fillets my father had dropped without ceremony into the frying pan on the night of the blizzard, my mother and I upstairs at the party, my father’s choice of prep quite intentionally in direct contravention of Bo’s solemn instructions to marinate each in a four-hour milk bath before grilling them. Or you could do it right and smoke them, Bo had said. You can just bring them up to me and I’ll do them for you. I have this Finnish smoker—no one else has one. Just bring them up to me.
My father had grimaced and nodded amicably. There is nothing as unmovable as the opinion of the amateur authority, and nothing so irritating as the inevitable condescension with which he delivers it.
My father’s revenge: He had lit the stove burner, dropped some butter into the iron skillet, and tossed the fish in fresh from the fridge. As an afterthought, he dug a Pyrex lid out of the drawer and clamped it on top to contain the splatter. He wandered back into his office to turn off the lamp, but sat down, just for a moment, to read the last thing he’d written, and that had been the end of the fish. When the acrid smoke reached his nostrils, he was penciling in some anatomical details in his description of the Buddha’s first sexual experience. Wouldn’t the low-hanging earlobes play some role? Aren’t they inherently erotic, those loose, tender flaps of flesh, just hanging there, scrotiform? How could Yashodara’s virginal lips not close around them in a suckling embrace? Or perhaps they were but normal earlobes until Sid met Yash and all the pulling…
He hated that book, incidentally, his comedy about the life of Buddha. He was packing it with choice hippie bait like, Only by looking away shall you see what is before you, and Trust not the eye alone, for it is but a single instrument with which to navigate the world. It was a way out, this dive he was taking, a book not merely dumb but offensively stupid. And so far, so good. In a way, he reveled in its stagnant reek, page after page of sewage.
He had already written three painfully intellectual novels, books full of linguistic backflips and sly tricks that did a decent job of papering over his failure to locate the truth. They were smart and soulless. Fortunately for him, no one was watching. Then his fourth, Slingshot, inexplicably made the bestseller lists. Somehow, without intending to, he’d written a story with universal appeal, a gripping thriller about a mild-mannered Polish man’s daring escape from the Nazis. Reviews appeared lauding his paradigm-shifting approach to the genre. A studio optioned the film rights. His back catalogue started selling. My father’s life was thrown into chaos. On the downtown M11 he’d seen people reading the book, apparently enjoying it, and twice on the uptown he’d been approached and asked if he was the writer Saltwater. (Who? he’d replied.) He’d gone on Dick Cavett’s show and lied as much as possible, and had enjoyed seeing up close Cavett’s superhuman ability to feign interest in whatever pabulum he coughed up. Profile writers showed up and he lied about everything that couldn’t be fact-checked—his process, his inspiration, his intentions as an author. He’d attended an endless stream of parties. When he had tried to avoid them, his publisher threatened him by saying that if he didn’t feel up to taking a cab across town, maybe he’d prefer a European tour. So he went to the parties, and it was there that he honed his imitation of the author of Slingshot, a Saltwater as fictional as any of the characters in the book, a haughty, irascible bastard, rough to reporters, an inveterate drunk. There was no sign of his paranoia, none of the convulsive terror that consumed him upon entering an elevator car or at the sight of an airplane, none of his towering fear of other people.
He netted enough from the movie deal to buy the apartment in the Apelles. Not just any apartment—one so large he and my mother had never found a purpose for the fifth bedroom, which remained empty, like an artist’s painstaking reconstruction of an unoccupied room on display for some downtown gallery, a commentary on America and manifest destiny or process or a piece of anti-art. It was chilly in the winter, stuffy in the summer, smelled of damp plaster, a featureless white space with two windows in the wall. As far as my father was concerned, it was just an empty room. Tabitha, our cleaning woman, said it had weird energy.
How right she was. It’s where I sleep now.
Maybe the room was a metaphor for something, an empty chamber in my father’s soul or a symbol for some piece of the writing machinery that had gone missing, because after Slingshot he’d dried up. He couldn’t believe that he’d fallen prey to so clichéd a trap, but there it was, day after day, a blank page in the Olivetti. Time passed. Deposits of soot and dust gathered in the crease where the rubber rollers met the page and were buried underneath something more permanent, something granular. For so long he’d been misunderstood. For so long he’d been able to hide behind prose rubbed smooth as an aluminum wing, words flashing bright as seraphim. His books were fireworks, lights and noise and smoke and the next morning, an empty sky. But five million readers in twenty-two languages had screwed it up for him, or he’d screwed it up for himself, he wasn’t sure which, and he’d been forced to fashion the new Saltwater, one who might survive the public glare. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his invention had fallen prey to the great myth of writer’s block. The invention was, after all, a hack.
Why was it so important to be misunderstood? I know now that anyone concealing a secret, however small, wishes to divulge it. Secrets will fight their way to the surface, as a splinter wedged deep in the ball of the hand will eventually surface, forced out by the generative forces of the body. My father was caught between his desire to divulge and his desire to conceal. While he could contain his secret, however, as he had for nearly thirty years, his books were falsehoods, and he deserved his obscurity. He’d unwittingly done something honest in Slingshot, though. He’d divulged some of himself. And that meant the thing was close to the surface. It was going to emerge. He could feel it.
So he drank. He wept with his head in my mother’s lap. He behaved badly at parties. He wasted days writing pseudonymous columns for small-town newspapers upstate. (His writer’s block was never bad enough that he couldn’t pen a screed.) For a while he’d pedaled an exercise bike for five hours a day while watching TV. Here and there he got into fights with critics in the letters sections of various reviews, and one night, swollen with fury at a windbag who’d called his characters nothing more than Freudian archetypes, he’d impregnated my mother. My conception, a complication. First he couldn’t write another novel, and now this.
Schiff, his therapist, had suggested that the pregnancy might reconfirm his ability to create something.
Gimme a break, my father said. I write something, I get paid. A baby’s nothing but a deficit! A bum shook his cup at me the other day and I started laughing at him. I laughed right in his face. Do you have any idea what a baby costs?
Schiff, father of three, raised his chin.