30 Pieces of a Novel (71 page)

costs down and your bookcases clean.”
“There are dead writers; dozens of really good ones.” Meets Robert's new wife. Robert has three kids from his previous marriage, two from this one, twins. “What do you think,” Robert said, “having a child when I'm well into my sixties?” and he said, “It's your business. But you got a young wife, so she must be pressuring you for kids. I'd do it, exhausted and strapped as it'd make me, if anything ever happened to Sally and I subsequently hooked up with someone so young, as I'm already feeling blue that in a few years my kids won't be around.” Okay, lots of things about him are set, similarities and differences between them are shown, but what do they talk about? They just talk and the talk comes, when they're with each other or on the phone. “I saw a very fine movie the other day—” “I hate most movies; they're all such drivel and so commercial.” “Not all, certainly not this one, and you used to like them.” “There are plenty of things I used to like and no longer do. And not many things to replace what I used to like either. But I was being rude. What about the movie you saw?” “I was driving on the expressway, turned on the radio—” “I hope you haven't succumbed to a car phone yet, Robert.” “Not even a microwave, though I know we'll end up getting both, but I already did get a PC. I'm a hoarder like you say, and it also helps me to get my creative juices flowing, though I doubt it'll ever appeal to you. Too technological, electrical, visual and cold-looking, and you can't pound away at the keys.” “I like my writing machine to fight back and make noise, but not as if it's from the sound track of a cartoon. But I interrupted you before. I'm always doing that and you never do it to me. What did you hear on the radio?” “You're too world-weary, Gould. You were always a little morose, even as a kid, but nothing to the extent you are now. In that respect, and if Mom were alive she'd confirm it, you've changed and I haven't, so we were once the same but are now different.” “No, no, me morose? It was you, my boy, only you. I was always Master Happy-go-lucky Face, usually up at the crack with a jolt and smile and bustling and smiling like that till bedtime, people said. Actually, not you either, as I think the folks said you were kind of a quiet kid but had a lovely disposition, lovely, and nothing in my memory change purse says otherwise, though there had to be times when you were moody and disagreeable; nobody could be that good. As for today, you're the same as you always were,
I suppose, while I'm
somewhat to a lot like you said. Maybe it's chemical, but I'll never take anything chemical to change it so long as it's not thoroughly doing me in.” Robert writes long stories and short novels and gets most of them published by small houses for almost no payment, and very few reviews. He's retired, has a decent pension and some savings, and will soon be collecting Social Security, and his new wife comes from money and his first three kids are on their own, so he can afford to live fairly comfortably. For more than thirty years before, he worked as a newsman. That's how Gould got started in news. Took over Robert's weekend copyboy job in a newsroom in New York after Robert graduated from college and went to work on a Wyoming newspaper. Why Wyoming? He'd sent out lots of résumés, and it was the only place that offered him a reporter's job. Or Robert didn't graduate. Quit school in his senior year, or even his junior year, saying that on-the-job experience was infinitely better for his work than any college journalism courses and a degree. Later, Robert told him about a news job in D.C. when he was working there for a wire service. Then got him a job back in New York as a writer for a network radio news show he produced. When the show folded, he helped get him a job on a news magazine a friend of his edited. “After this, even if I hear of the job-of-a-lifetime for you, I'm not saying anything, as I don't want you becoming too dependent on me. You have to work the grapevine more, maybe even one day hear of a great job for me. But don't tell Dad. He doesn't know how capable you are; thinks of you as the family recluse and that it's my unending duty to look after you and especially, since you followed me into this profession, to keep you employed.” He likes his brother's fiction but he isn't one of the five. No, that's stupid. Then what? “Best I don't show you my stuff,” Robert said, “since I know how you feel about it. The water's lukewarm and not very bracing to swim in, and there's certainly no chance of your drowning, which I'd think is what you'd aim for in what you read. If I mixed the metaphors there and became uncharacteristically bleak, since I don't want to think of anything regarding you and drowning, it was because I thought I was losing my point. And you don't even let your wife see your stuff-in-progress or recently completed, so it'd seem needy and one-sided of me to ask you to read mine. The truth is, we're radically different in what we deal with and our approaches and techniques, so I doubt either of us could offer the other much useful criticism. Also the truth, or the way it looks to me: neither of us is really that remarkable at it and I don't think we'll ever be, sorry as I am to say it. We did too many other things for too long before we started taking this seriously, or that's the way it was with me. As for you, you just wore yourself out working at various hard jobs to be able to afford to do it—but it's just too much fun doing to quit, am I right?” “Same, same, but who knows that if you stopped doing it I might too. We were always so damn close,” and Robert said, “Just normal; don't make us sound like freaks.” The bath. They took them together once a week till Robert was ten and Gould was seven. Or eight and five—he forgets. He could call Robert to find out, but it's been so many years, he's probably forgotten too. Anyway, what's the difference? They were taking baths together long after most brothers their ages did. Their father wanted them to stop once Robert reached seven, or six, but Robert convinced him to let them continue. Their father liked to repeat the story, quoting the exact words he said Robert used. “‘Daddy,' this brainy kid of mine said—the other's brainy too. I'm not by bringing up what his older brother said trying to belittle him. But no kid of six ever had the ability to deliberate and exspritz the way Robert did—‘Daddy, you have to understand it's safer, at Gould's age, for him to be in the tub with someone, and my being there lets you and Mommy do other things. He can get very rambunctious, and if nobody's watching he could drown. I also make sure he really soaps up his washrag and scrubs himself, which we all know he's too young to do if he's taking a bath alone.'” After a while the tub got too crowded for them. “This is getting uncomfortable,” Robert finally said, standing up and stepping out of the tub a minute after he got in it. “I don't like sitting on my legs and wondering if half the water I'm washing myself with is your urine. From now on I'm taking showers and you can have the bath to yourself. Don't forget to wash behind and inside your ears and to clean your poophole and
pupik.”
“I'm going to only take showers from now on too,” Gould said, “but alone.” “Alone, of course, what do you think I'm saying?” Robert took him to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play. So? So the Dodgers were Robert's favorite team, and when Gould was old enough to be interested in baseball it seemed natural to him for them to become his. Robert once said, “Who you rooting for this season?” and Gould said, “The Dodgers, who else?” “You better or you're not my brother.” The folks trusted Robert alone with Gould outside at an early age. Gould trusted him more than he did anyone else. Well, not more than he did his mother. He trusted them the same. Or maybe, after a certain age, he trusted Robert a little more than he did his mother. He'd put his hand in Robert's hand and let him take him anywhere. Same with his mother, but after a certain age he put his hand in Robert's more than he did hers. He went to more places with Robert than he did with her, and it was Robert's job to look after him and see he didn't get hurt or lost. He rarely held his father's hand. His father didn't put out his hand to hold as Robert and his mother did. He can't even remember holding it, while he can still remember what his mother's and Robert's hands felt like when he held them. He must have held his father's hand lots of times. When they crossed the street together, for instance, the few times they crossed one together when Gould was very young and needed to hold an older person's hand. He thinks they were almost always with Robert when they crossed the street, and his father usually said to Gould, “Hold your brother's hand. And both of you watch out for cars and keep your ears peeled in case I suddenly have to tell you something.” He knows he held his father's hand when his father was in the hospital and dying, but that was much later. Robert was there too. A few times they sat on opposite sides of their father's bed and held a hand of his at the same time. Their father was in a coma and probably didn't feel them holding his hands, and he can't remember the feel of his father's hand then either. But to get back to Robert: he was always very smart, responsible, gentle, sensitive, and, as a young boy, precocious. Also, he never beat up on him once. He doesn't even remember Robert pushing him hard at any time or even shouting angrily at him, though he had to have, just as Gould had to have been angry at Robert lots of times when they were growing up, though he doubts he ever pushed him hard when he was angry. This was unusual, he heard, between brothers so close in age: that they never once got into a real fight. Anyway, Robert knew—at the age of ten, Gould thinks it was, but no younger; their folks never would have let him take a subway by himself or with Gould before then—how to get to Brooklyn from Manhattan to see these Dodger games. Their father, before leaving for work in the morning or, if he was leaving before they woke up, then did this the previous night: gave Robert enough cash for bleacher seats and a hot dog and soda apiece during the game and subway fare of course and a couple of nickels for Robert to tuck away someplace in case he needed to call him or their mother. But how'd Robert know how to get to Ebbets Field by subway? Gould couldn't help him. All he remembers doing is holding Robert's hand and being led from train to train and through lots of grimy passageways and up and down several stairways and then the short walk to the ballpark with hundreds of excited people from the aboveground Brooklyn subway station. Someone must have shown Robert the way a couple of times, or just once: Robert was that smart. But you don't let a kid that age go out there on his own the first time with just written directions:
Downtown Broadway local or express to Times Square, switch to the Brighton
or
Sea Beach
or
West End line
or whatever train from Manhattan went to Ebbets Field (he forgets which one did, and anyway the line names might have changed since then and maybe even the routes). Did their father take them there once and that was how Robert knew how to go? He doesn't remember that. He could ask Robert; he'd know because he was old enough then to remember something like that and he has a great memory for everything. Gould doesn't think his father ever took him to any sports event except the boxing matches at St. Nicholas Arena a couple of times. Robert did. Maybe their father took them by subway to the ballpark the first time, gave Robert directions how to get home, and left them there or went some other place in Brooklyn for three hours—his sister's on Avenue J—and picked them up after the game. Robert took him to hockey games at the old Garden on Sunday afternoons to see the New York Rovers play, a few college basketball games there too, again in the cheapest seats. “You're kids,” their father used to say, “and your eyes are better than any adult's, even when you don't wear your glasses, so don't say you can't see from up there. When you get older and start earning your own money, you can buy better seats. But if you see from up there that some of the lower seats aren't being used, run down and grab them. Anybody questions you, just say you lost your tickets to these seats, and if you can't lie, then that you're sorry and you didn't know.” Football games at Randalls Island and other places, the Milrose track meets at the Garden a few times, and lots of Saturday afternoon movies at local theaters, another thing his father never took them to. So? So nothing, he's just saying what Robert did for him then, how he filled in for his father, how close they were at the time and probably why they're still so close today. His father did once take the family to Radio City to see the premiere of
The Yearling
. He got passes from a friend of an executive there when the friend couldn't go. Robert and Gould weren't allowed to get anything from the concession stand, their father said. “You should have thought of your candy sooner, like when we got off the bus and passed a store. They jack up the prices like crazy in these theaters and I'm not going to be a chump and fall for it”—something like that, putting the blame on them a little—“and that junk also rots your teeth faster than anything but sugar cubes bitten down on whole. So it's one more reason you shouldn't have any: I don't want to stay up all night with you when your teeth start aching at one A.M.” Robert bought a box of candy on the sly and secretly shared it with Gould during the darker scenes of the movie. Their father also took Robert and him to a play once. Again, free seats. They went into the lobby, his father asked the ticket taker to call the manager out—“Vic Bookbinder to see him”—the manager came, greeted his father “like a monkey's uncle,” as his father liked to say, said something like “So these are your two boys. Nice-looking kids, and big; that's good,” and showed them three seats way off to the right in a top side aisle in the orchestra and told them to enjoy the show. Musical or play version of
Alice in Wonderland
at a theater in Columbus Circle when there were still big theaters there. They took the Broadway trolley to it, or that was another trip downtown with their father for something, maybe to buy clothes, which they did once a year with him in fall or spring. No, for that they took the subway to 18th or 23rd Street and Seventh or Sixth Avenue where their father knew people who got them into wholesale houses where boys' clothes were made. Robert was a size “husky” and Gould wanted to be a husky too but was told he'd probably never be because he was too thin. Robert and he stood in the back of the trolley turning the nonfunctioning steering wheel as if they were operating the car. But does a trolley have a steering wheel? Why would it if it's on electrified rails? How does one operate a trolley car? They did something back there that was fun while their father read a newspaper folded into quarters and watched out for their stop. Maybe they only sat in the motor-man's seat, if there was one, and pulled a long rod back and forth or kept their hands on it as if they were moving it around and pushed buttons and flicked levers on the dashboard. But he definitely remembers turning a steering wheel, with Robert mainly hogging it and the dashboard controls and seat. After the show Robert asked what he thought of it and he said he liked it, especially the stage tricks with see-through curtains and the wind blowing them from somewhere and the different-colored lights making the scenes turn from night to day and inside to out and sunshine to storm. “I thought it was pure crap, made for sissies and girls.” “I didn't like it that much either, now that I think about it,” Gould said. “But Alice was pretty and had a nice voice,” and Robert said, “I hate blondies, and the most when they're so cutesy-piesy and tweety and sweet. They always look as if they have nothing to say, which might be why they sing so much. You're probably going to marry a blondie, then, and be bored your whole life with her. Anyway, don't tell Dad you didn't like the play; it might hurt his feelings.” And