“The guy I live with is an illustrator,” she says. “You’ve probably seen some of his stuff. He doesn’t need money, he just wants to have it all. To draw. To have a restaurant. He’s grabby. He usually figures it out to have what he wants, though.” She takes a drink. “I feel funny saying this,” she says. “I don’t know why I started to tell you about us.” Then she stops talking, smiling apologetically.
Instead of coaxing her, I get up and put some things on two plates, put one plate on a table by my chair, and hand the other plate to her. I pour her another glass of wine.
“He has a studio next to the ceramics factory,” she says. “That big building with the black shutters. In the afternoon he calls me, and I take over a picnic basket and we eat lunch and make love.”
I break a cracker in half with my thumb and first finger and eat it.
“That’s not it, though,” she says. “The thing is, it’s always something like Wonder bread. It’s real kinky. I trim off the crust and make bologna sandwiches with a lot of mayonnaise. Or I’ll make Cheez Whiz sandwiches with Ritz crackers, or peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches. And we drink Kool-Aid or root beer or something like that. One time I cooked hot dogs and sliced them to go on crackers and squirted cheese around the circles. We had that and Dr Pepper. The thing is, the lunch has to be really disgusting.”
“I got that,” I say. “I guess I got it.”
“Oh,” she says, dropping her eyes. “I mean, I guess it’s obvious. Of course you figured it out.”
I wait to see if she’s going to ask me to reveal something. But instead she gets up and pours the last of the wine into her glass and stands with her back to me, looking out the window.
I know that ceramics factory. It’s not in a good part of town. There’s a bar just down the street from it, and one night when I was coming out of the bar a kid jumped me. I remember how fast he came at me on his bike, and the screech of tires, as if the bike were a big car. Then he was all over me, half punching and half squeezing, as if my wallet would pop out of hiding like a clown’s head spinning out of a jack-in-the-box. “It’s in my back pocket,” I said, and when I said that he jammed his hand into the pocket and then slugged me in the side, hard. “Stay down!” he said in sort of a whisper, and I lay there, curled on my side, putting my hand over my face so that if he thought about it later he wouldn’t come back and make more trouble because I’d gotten a good look at him. My nose was bleeding. I only had about twenty bucks in my wallet, and I’d left my credit cards at home. Finally I got up and tried to walk. There was a light on in the ceramics factory, but I could tell from the stillness that nobody was there — it was just a light that had been left on. I put my hand on the building and tried to stand up straighter. There was a point when a terrible pain shot through me — such a sharp pain that I went down again. I took a few breaths, and it passed. Through the big glass window I saw ceramic shepherds and animals — figures that would be placed in crèches. They were unpainted — they hadn’t been fired yet — and because they were all white and just about the same size, the donkeys and the Wise Men looked a lot alike. It was a week or so before Christmas, and I thought, Why aren’t they finished? They’re playing it too close; if they don’t get at it and start painting, it’s going to be too late. “Marie, Marie,” I whispered, knowing I was in trouble. Then I walked as well as I could, got to my car, and went home to my wife.
INSTALLATION #6
I’ll get to the point and describe the installation as best I can: it is a manhole cover, and from somewhere — maybe underground, maybe above our heads, but not clearly visible — comes the song “Only Make Believe.” The song is a duet, for those of you who aren’t old-timers or old-movie buffs, sung by Irene Dunne and Allan Jones, I think. In any case, it is a quite romantic song, and the woman’s voice soars convincingly.
I’ve been called in to do the lights for this- installation. “Called in” makes it sound too businesslike. My brother, the artist of the piece, called me at home and asked if one more time, as a personal favor, I’d do the lighting. I’m retired, out on disability. Actually, they paid me to go, but this isn’t a story about me. I’m forty-four — not as old as you’d expect. When people hear “disability,” they imagine an old guy. My brother is forty-one but has lied even to the newspaper in saying that he’s thirty-five. That would mean nine years between us, and I wish there had been nine years, because when my brother was more or less turned over to me as my responsibility, I was ten or eleven, and he was seven or eight. He wasn’t a baby I could push around. He had a mind of his own, and I was a skinny kid, though I was taller than him, but my scrawniness gave him the idea he could take advantage of me, and I didn’t stand up to him. It was too much responsibility, a ten-year-old being the guardian of a seven-year-old, but when Martha (that was our mother) had the last baby she was forty years old and suffered terrible postpartum depression, and when she never did come around, my father took things into his own hands and turned Claude over to me, for all intents and purposes. I helped him tug his sweater off, got up in the night if he was having a nightmare, and eventually became his protector, strong-arming bullies who pushed him, when I’d put on enough weight to intervene. At first it was all too much for me. It amounted to child abuse, the way my parents sloughed off my younger brother on me. The oldest was gone: enlisted in the Marines at eighteen, and gone. He had a whole houseful of kids by the time Claude and I started high school.
Get this: “Claude” is not his name. It’s Jim — plain, ordinary Jim. Not even James. I think the name he took is a little sissy, myself, but he didn’t arrive at it randomly. “Claude” was a villain who kept cropping up in his nightmares. My belief is that the name Claus — as in Santa Claus — got transformed into Claude. When he was a baby, he used to call Santa only “Claus,” drawing out the “au.” You could say to him, “Do you hear Santa Claus on the roof?” and he’d echo the name, but only the second part. “Claaaaaaaauuuuuuse,” he’d say, like somebody going superslow, trying to learn a foreign language.
Don’t get the idea that Christmas was a happy family occasion at our house. One year Martha tore out a gob of hair and stuffed it in the toe of Dad’s Christmas stocking. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her face close to his and hissed, “I knew you were pulling out your hair. I told the doctor you were,” and she screamed, as always, and he let go and that was that. Just that vein bulging near the bridge of his nose, and his frightened eyes, though he was the one who was always terrifying everybody. Christmas cards — the kind with “From Our House to Yours”—came every year from Richard, the oldest. There was a new kid in every picture, but never once did he visit, and never once did we hear at any other time but Christmas. You figure it: the second kid and Claude are now pals. They play on a basketball team together. One of Richard’s six kids decided, after he read about Claude in the paper, to send him a postcard and see if his uncle would meet him. Now the two of them are as close as two fingers in a splint. They’re their own private duet, like Irene Dunne and Allan Jones.
My idea for lighting the manhole is simple: one spotlight recessed in the ceiling, and no other lighting of any sort in the room. Trust me on this: it works, without seeming like some artsy lighting you’d see in some Off Off Broadway play. I don’t want to push the point and say it looks elegant, and, God help me, I am so tired of hearing the word “stark” that I’d never use it myself. The light seems like somebody — me — made a clear decision, and that clarity becomes something you consider when you view the installation. It might remind some people of those little overhead lights in airplanes that always make you jump when they come on, they’re so bright, and you wonder if the person next to you is going to give you a dirty look for reading. I was in an airplane recently, reading the newspaper, and when I looked out the window the sun had begun to set and the most amazing streak of pink fading to orange was parallel to the plane. In a gesture that was all reflex, I suddenly realized, I’d put my fingers to the window, like a kid looking into Macy’s window at Christmas.