The rest of the time, Alex watches MTV and the Discovery Channel. They’re a lot more interesting than Dad. He cries, too, sometimes, lets the tears drip down his body while he’s shirtless, and he tries to joke with himself by saying it’s a good thing the safety pins are stainless steel.
“Dad,” Alex says one day, and Dad is hunched over his table and has needed a haircut for a long time. “Dad? Do you think she did it on purpose?”
There is no answer.
“Do you think she really just wanted to sleep forever?”
Alex doesn’t know why he’s trying, but trying seems more important than getting an answer. He feels like an explorer, climbing to the top of Everest in a blizzard. He’s a bold adventurer.
Finally Dad looks up, and his eyes are ringed with dark circles that look like bruises.
“She needed to be watched more,” he finally says. “She needed to be watched. Very fragile, you know. I should have watched.”
It’s all Alex can coax out of him, and Dad repeats it several times, and finally his old man clambers atop the worktable and starts flailing at model airplanes. His arms wildly windmill about and plastic clatters and then plastic flies and airplanes are going into crashdives left and right. Dad looks like King Kong at the end of the movie as he snatches a Sopwith Camel free of its little cable and flings the bi-plane across the room to shatter against the fireplace hearth.
Dad can reach no more, so he leaps down in a rage and grabs a cue stick from the pool table and trashes yet more planes and Alex covers his ears and wails as if he really were in a war zone, and finally Dad falls sobbing to the floor, his fury spent. Alex looks up, and most of the planes are downed, with occasional chunks of debris still dangling from the wires, and now Dad looks like what he really is: a demented little boy in a room full of broken toys.
Dad cries for several more moments and then scrambles about the floor, scooping up the broken models and cradling the wreckage to his chest. He stares off into space, damp lines running down his cheeks.
“What am I doing?” he whispers. “What am I doing?”
He gathers what he can, whatever he hasn’t overlooked because it’s too little or too far-flung, and he carries the whole jumble back to the work table and lets it clatter into a heap. And there he sits, while Alex stares, Dad, looking sorrowfully at all the broken pieces.
“I need more glue,” he says at last and gives a decisive nod of a chin that used to seem a lot firmer and a lot stronger to Alex’s eyes. “That’s it. I need more glue.”
Without another word, he rises and walks past his son and a minute later comes the sound of the BMW starting up and then Dad is gone.
Alex rises too, wanders over to the worktable and delicately fingers the broken plastic. Last remnants of a mismatched squadron, sleek on the outside and hollow on the inside.
In the last few years, Alex has been astounded at how little he weighs. At least it seems that he should weigh more, that there should be more mass to him since he’s flesh and blood and bone. Now, though, he’s not so sure. And he wonders if maybe he’s hollow too, because now it feels that over all these years, these fifteen years, he was just another model. Dad’s big project from 1982.
Is he real? Does he exist? He wonders like he’s never wondered about anything. Just one word from Dad would clarify matters. Just one word might work wonders. Just one word.
Alex goes to the garage and brings in the ladder and sets it up in the rec room. He looks at all the tiny wires hanging down and frees up the few that still have bits of plastic attached. Dozen and dozens of tiny cables. And their hooks.
Maybe it will hold and maybe it won’t. At least he knows he’s certain to get a good distribution of weight.
He positions himself at the apex of the ladder and lies out flat, balancing precariously, and now he’s parallel to the ceiling and looking at all the eye-screws Dad has imbedded up there to hold his treasures.
Alex takes each cable and meticulously hooks them into the safety pins.
And when he pushes away the ladder he feels important at long last, and thinks that whenever Dad makes it back home, he’s bound to take notice this time.
Androgyny
The afterglow fades, always.
The quicker it happens, the more compulsively you’re left to wonder about the night’s beginnings. Even if the object of earlier affections is still lying beside you, cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions turn cruel and demanding:
How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?
Gary knew it would happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, past the French Quarter’s upper boundary. Fewer than a dozen drinkers, most of them hardcore, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria grew on the floor.
Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged. Look in her eyes and you reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the fun of whatever waited to be found.
It took twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, taking the stool next to him. This he took as a good omen: She was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.
“What are you?” was the first thing she said.
“Career? Astrologically? How do you mean?”
She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off. No tourist ever comes around here unless it’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native, either. Are you.”
“Long-term transient,” Gary said, and clinked his glass to hers. “But not all who wander are lost.”
One eyebrow ticked upward as she appraised and approved, or pretended to. “You’re literate enough to read bumper stickers, at least.”
Talk progressed, easy and loose and non-binding. They traded names, Gary for Lana, and libidos simmered during the seductive ballet. He liked best these encounters where roles were blurred. Who was predator, and who the prey? A tossup, one answer as valid as the other. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter, as long as the orgasms were mutual.
Six years of high-ticket vagrancy had shuffled him through a succession of primary, secondary, and graduate schools of one-night stands and short-term loves. Money was no problem; an umbilical credit card kept him linked to the New England bank account. He never had to stick around when it no longer seemed wise. He didn’t want to leave behind a legacy of pain any more than he wanted to lug one around inside.
“You like riddles?” she asked after four rounds of drinks had worked their magic.
“Usually. Let’s hear it.”
“It’s not easy.” Lana smiled mischievously. “But. Do you know what the worst part of being me is?”
“The worst thing, let’s see.” He studied her a moment, the fine-boned face, the tall straight posture, the so-black hair, shoulder length. She didn’t appear to have lived too harsh a life thus far. Her eyes knew pain, though, and her soul was evidently as on display as her small cleavage. “You don’t know how to love.”
A coy shake of her head. “Wrong. So wrong.”
“You’ve never been in love.”
Another shake. She was enjoying this immensely. Sometimes this was the most fun game of all, opening yourself like a maze and escorting strangers into blind alleys.