So if Ken said these things to me, does it really matter if he was in the water or not? If meeting Ken so close to a death brought writing into my hands, and if I cast that out as a dreamy lake front scene, who gives a shit if he was in the water? His big hearted wrestler’s body. His irreverent mouth. His dead son. My hollowed out gut. Me in my better world. From the water I could see him on the shore, a little miniature Kesey doing his former Kesey thing, the smaller man within a man like a Russian doll.
That night I swam the lake and back trying to drown out voices.
Father
BEFORE MY FATHER’S HANDS MOVED AGAINST US HE was an architect; lover of art.
Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War.
Before my father was a navigator he was an artist.
Before my father was an artist he was an athlete.
Before my father was an athlete he was an unhappy altar boy.
That’s the best I can do. I think.
Goddamn it.
Let me try again.
Before my father’s hands moved against us he was an architect; lover of art.
His hands. I remember his hands at work over great white expanses of paper, rows and rows of pens and pencils and sophisticated erasers, a T-square sliding up and down a wire on the drafting table, his tall form bent over the territory of his designs. I remember the sound of classical music coming from his room, orchestral arrangements weaving up my spine, the names of composers going into my head. I can still see the great thick-paged architectural and art magazines on the coffee table. This striking man teaching me how to draw, what is shadow, what is light, composition, perspective. I walked with him through the spaces of other men’s buildings, and in place of bedtime stories, I heard about Le Corbusier, Antonio Gaudí, Carlo Scarpa, Fumihiko Maki. The beauty of him speaking about art, slowly, a cigarette pointing toward heaven, swirls of smoke like curls of water around the sanctity of his speech. I walked with my father through Fallingwater.
Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War.
I can only go to black and white photos here. When I hold them in my hand I suddenly have to face the fact of real war, and his body in it. The photos have barracks and rifles and uniforms. The photos have jeeps and helicopters and the landscape of the military. The photos are of my father with men I never met nor ever will, men who may be dead by now, men who went to war before I was born, before Vietnam.
There are two kinds of photos. In the first kind each frame is filled with an extraordinary architecture — Korean Buddhist temples and shrines.
The second kind carry men. There is a black man who reappears in several of the photos. When I hold the photos, my father isn’t the abusive fuck. He becomes a different story, the one he and my mother and uncle and aunt told and retold about the lengths he went to concerning his best friend — a black man whose name I will never know. I can’t remember it. I was a child when these stories were told.
But the stories are all about how my dad would sit out in the car with this guy when the other guys would go out to eat or drink or dance when they were on leave. How he’d go in and get food or beer and bring it out to the car or the curb or some vacant lot near whatever establishment and they’d sit and share it together.
I look at the black man in the photo. I wish I could talk to him. Ask him questions about my father then. Was he funny? Was he kind? Did he ever make a drawing for you? What things scared him, or hurt him, or made him happy? What was my father like during wartime? What is a man?
My father was handsome.
Before he was a soldier he was an artist.
Sometimes, when we were alone, I would ask my mother questions about my father when they first met. She would nearly always go into the spare bedroom, pull a shoebox down from the closet, sit down next to me, and unfold a piece of drawing paper. On the paper was a redbird. A beautifully drawn — I mean artistically stunning redbird. She would smile, and keep her eyes down, and say in her soft southern drawl almost in the voice of a girl, “Your father won an art prize for this drawing.” In the same box, she would unfold a yellowed scatter of pages filled with beautiful handwriting. “I won a prize for this story.”
And then she would carefully fold it all back up, put it back in the box, return it to the closet.
When I hold photos of the two of them in my hands my heart aches. My father looking all James Dean with his rolled at the cuff denims and his white muscle tee with cigarettes tucked in the sleeve and his mirror sunglasses. My mother in her 50s dresses with wide skirts and her hair tied back, her lips that were red as a coca-cola can looking black in the black and white photos. They were gorgeous. Hollywood. She was smiling. He looked like someone a woman would fall in love with.
There is another photo of him sitting at a picnic table. He has khaki pants on and a white shirt. The way he is sitting? His crossed legs and bad posture and long fingers running through his thick hair? His other hand wrapped around his neck so that his elbow folds softly in? He has the body language of an artist. I know. I married three in a row.
Before my father was an artist he was an athlete.
I know how to tell this story. I know how to story over things.
His senior year. Bases loaded at a catholic school. Cleveland, Ohio, the gray of pavement and winter sealing fates. Nuns and Fathers in black, black coats and boots and hats on the bodies of family members. The boys on the field as beautiful as boys on a field are; strange angels. Breath making fog from mouths. Eyes keened in on plays and moves and the edge of things. Top of the ninth. The board wearing its scores, though no one needs to look. At the moment sweat is forming at his upper lip, and just as his arms uncoil to connect thick whack and send the little world out of the park, at that moment all the nuns and all the fathers look up, like faith. Right then the end of things rings in the boy like hope. He sees college. He sees leaving home. He sees a chance at inhabiting the word athlete. His arms surrender. His body shivers. A cheer rises up like a chorus. Everyone is a single voice. Except one. At that moment a man leaves. His back stopping the action.
The home run. The father gone. The boy turning into man — he must have looked … beautiful.
That’s it.
That’s as far as I can go.
To go further into his story, it takes the air right out of my lungs as if I’d been swimming all night.
I do know his tongue was cut. When I look at my son and think of that I think I could kill a woman who would cut a boy’s tongue.
Before my father was my father he was a boy.
Just a boy.
Before I hated him I loved him.
How To Ride a Bike
WHEN I WAS 10 TO CHEER ME UP FROM MY DESPAIR OF my sister’s leaving, my father brought home a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars. I saw him pull it out of the trunk of the station wagon. I saw him wheel it up to the front porch. I saw him kick the kickstand and let her rest. The window a membrane between us.
I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen — except for my green metal toy army jeep. Still. Its hot pink glory. Its streamers like hair. That big white banana seat. I gasped.