Anyway, I still can’t write.
But my impending birth had at least compelled him back to his desk, and he sweated it out for a month, sitting again at the blank page, forcing his fingers onto the keys. Taking them off, looking at the ceiling, sighing, fingering the keys again, eyes on the page, back to the ceiling. He blew away the grit at the roller wheels. New deposits accumulated. The chair’s thick steel spring squawked when he shifted to relieve his mortified glutes.
At the desk he wore an odd look on his face, that of a partygoer cornered by an inveterate blowhard. Eight hours a day, that’s how he sat, his face screwed into a hopeful wince, waiting for silence to shut up so he could get a word in edgewise. One afternoon the light bulb on his desk popped and the windowless little space snapped into darkness. He sat, unmoving, for an hour. A mouse scraped at the lath in the wall. The dark persisted. The mouse came out and poked around at the baseboards. My father sat and he waited and nothing happened. He changed the light bulb and he sat in the light and nothing happened.
Back from the widow’s walk? my mother would say when he emerged at the end of another day. Somehow instead of infuriating him, her unwillingness to engage his despair calmed him. She looked different. Patches of melanin were darkening her cheeks. Her hair was thicker. She was dusky. She was expanding. So I sit and nothing happens, he thought, so what? So I never get back to it. So what?
And then, with no preamble, no attention to phase of moon or alignment of sign, on a day like any other day, he’d begun to write. His fingers had moved, and what had come out had been bad, absolutely terrible. He’d smashed out a first chapter, knowing all along it was garbage, something the critics would hate, something the fans whose letters compared him to Beckett, the ones who sent him their own work in over-taped manila envelopes, would hate. It would be a wilted disappointment to the preening young magazine editors who had found Slingshot to be so compelling, a warm dose of schadenfreude for the academics who’d invited him to headline symposiums and sniped about his unworthiness while he was barely out of earshot. A signal to the intellectually fashionable that, right on schedule, it was time to toss S-shot and return Cortázar to his rightful place on the coffee table.
Its terribleness sent the juice roaring through his veins. This was resurrection through failure. He would write something so stupid that Rod McKuen and Richard Bach would get in a fistfight over who got to pen the cover blurb.
Oh, make no mistake, this was a guaranteed bestseller he was working on, an insipid fantasy that required nothing of the reader but a willingness to lie back and be buried in waves of warm pluff. This was a book that would take over airport kiosks and bus stop placards. Oh yes, he’d found a new way to evade the truth. The old Saltwater had cashed out, flown south, phoned it in, flushed his talents, and shat the bed. This was the new Saltwater, the grand, sweeping generalist; this was the crater-faced vampire who sneered at cameras and poured beer on Mailer’s head; the one who’d thrown a chair at Pynchon, who’d snagged it midair and thrown it right back.
God, what glorious bullshit.
That was how it had started, his way out. By the night of the blizzard, he’d been at it seven years. The only surprise had been how difficult it was to write a bad book, because not only was there the problem of writing the bad book, he had to do so while inhabiting the invented Saltwater who would dare undertake so cynical a task. Soldier on, good soldier.
When my mother had called from the Vornados’ penthouse that night to ask him if he wanted to come up, he’d assumed she’d asked only out of a sense of irony. The last place he wanted to be was a party. Must be a good one if she was still there, though. Or maybe she had found someone to pitch her latest series to. Maybe she did want him there. He should go up, put on the Saltwater show, help her beat the carpets to see if any money fell out, but…
But he was hungry, so he’d thrown the fish on the stove.
A predictable slapstick. My father flailing around the kitchen. Fire, water, brown steam, a window flung open, the blizzard sweeping in, smoke carousing, my father cursing the weather, the fish, the pan, the heat, the cold, flapping dish towel, cupped palms scooping at the smog, which, due to the equilibrium created by the wind blowing in and the heat attempting to pour out through the window, only swirled and eddied in place for a moment until the wind direction shifted and the smoke vanished, as if sucked into the vacuum of space. He slammed closed the window, dug out a plastic bag from beneath the sink, one with a yellow smiley face on it, and chipped the charred remains loose with the spatula. Somehow they still reeked of brine.
Getting rid of the fish should have been simple enough. The trash chute down to the incinerator was in a shared vestibule immediately outside the kitchen, but when he opened the door, he was greeted, to his great annoyance, by a Christmas tree. It had been wedged into the garbage chute in a manner that resembled the hasty and incomplete disposal of a murder victim, and protruded a good four feet from the wall, the trunk conspicuously addressing Turk Brunn’s service door. The floor was thick with brown needles except for a spotless wedge of gray concrete before that same door, the effect of a foot arcing wiper-style, as if to attempt to conceal a person’s involvement in an unneighborly act of Christmas tree disposal.
He tugged on the trunk but the tree didn’t budge. He looked down at the plastic bag in his hand, Have a Nice Day, and sighed.
There was protocol for situations like this one: a handwritten note on one of the ecru notecards readily available from the tables in any of the Apelles’ seventy-two elevator bays for the express purpose of communicating minor grievances, a format embraced at the turn of the century by the Wasp scions who’d first inhabited the building, a tangible projection of the building’s high-minded ethos, a sort of marketing campaign promoting civil discourse. But my father opted for a more direct approach. He wedged himself between the trunk and the door and tapped lightly, just a single knuckle, a courteous Hello there, don’t mean to bother. Eliciting no response, he tapped harder, and harder, adding knuckles, pausing to listen for a response, until he was pounding with his fist, bashing the metal as if it had done him a mortal wrong. Nothing. He pounded some more, and then he put his face in the seam where the door met the jamb and he said in a ponderous whisper, I know you’re in there, Turk. I know you’re in there. I know you’re in there. And then he pounded some more, until the head of Hastings Sebenlist, the stockbroker who lived in 14F, emerged from the door to my father’s right, bald, wrinkled as a thumb knuckle. His reading glasses were perched on his nose, and over the tops of the lenses, Sebenlist’s and my father’s eyes met. Sebenlist’s eyes went to the tree, back to my father. Soft music streamed out of Sebenlist’s apartment, and he raised his hands in lamentation, though whether it was directed at my father or the tree was unclear, before ducking back inside.
Sebenlist knew trouble when he saw it. My father’s trouble with Turk, though, was not some long-standing feud, not the deep, geological accretion of anger that piled up over years of neighborly friction. She’d babysat for me, cradled me in her arms and sung me to sleep. True, an arrangement fostered almost entirely by my mother, but he hadn’t objected. After I had gotten a little older, Turk would let me rummage around in her storage room, and we’d have tea. My father liked Turk, didn’t he? She’d read his books, and not only that, she treated him as though he belonged to that order of writers he wished to belong to. Sometimes he’d have a cigarette with her in the vestibule and they’d gripe about their latest shared outrage, the Knicks or macrobiotics or Tom Wolfe.