Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (20 page)

Chris has been pretty busy working on the yard with Julia, and it looks pretty good. I can't exactly see it at the moment; it's about 3:00
AM
and quite dark outside, but during the day you can really see the progress they've made. With the weeds gone you can see all the patches of dead grass where I'd left boxes (these dead patches remind me of the shadows burned onto the ground after Hiroshima, atomic shadows, though perhaps I think that because of a documentary on World War Two Julia was watching the other night on PBS). Every day, Chris and Julia have been out in the yard, digging up the dead lawn. I keep my window open so I can hear the oddly satisfying sound of their
tools ripping into the earth, wet and crunchy. They've tossed most of the dead lawn into a pile in the corner of the yard that through my window the other day I heard Chris refer to as Jabba the Hut, which Julia laughed at, despite her once admitting to me that she found
Star Wars
“more interesting for how it reflects techno-anxieties of the post-Watergate era than for its space-opera sock-puppetry.”

To get back to the point, though, the only other verifiable fact that Edie slips into these scenes of George giving Betty rides home after her dalliances with Jack is a reference to Betty's roommate, Anne Toth. Edie uses this to point out that later Toth would tell investigators that Betty had been running around with “a guy named George.” While it is true that Toth said this, and it appears to add some validity to this portion of Edie's tale, Edie completely omits the rest of Toth's interview where she describes this George as being “swarthy, about 5'9” or 5'10”.” Betty Short may have been cavorting with a George, but not our George. We McWeeneys have complexions closer to a breed of subterranean mole rats and have never been accused of possessing anything near swarth. Plus, my father, as much of a giant as he seemed to me when I was young, was only 5'8”. But an important question here is why would George actually take Edie along for these rides? True, our mother (and I, gestating inside her) was out of town, and Aunt Paige had not yet moved to California and become the go-to babysitter, but our father, more than anyone else in our family, had a tight-lipped sense of propriety, and having his five-year-old daughter tag along on these sorts of errands is something he simply would not do. Especially when those errands turn blue, the conversations blatantly flirtatious (Betty to George: “I'll bet you're the real brains behind that show”) and bluntly suggestive (Betty again:
“I'll bet you got a big ol' brain” . . . I mean really, come on). As we watch Edie watch George and Betty's relationship develop over the course of these car rides, Edie seems to be able to understand what is happening between them, despite being only five. For example, the first time Betty invites our father up to her apartment, Edie is in the backseat and thinks to herself—Adult Edie rather creepily mixing kid-speak with her adult's understanding of the scene—“Daddy stuttered, fumbled with his seat belt, and accepted Betty's offer of herself” (174). I have three points to make about this, which I will list in ascending order of importance. First, did 1939 Ford Mercuries have seat belts? I have not been able to find the answer to this, but I think we can safely say the answer is no. Second, I find it very hard to believe that a small child could really understand what it meant when a woman asks a man to come upstairs. And third, Edie is then left alone in the car while our father goes upstairs to allegedly bonk Ms. Short. Although I understand that paradigms of child-care shift over generations, and George's parenting instincts here (and, I can confirm, in real life as well) are weak, the likelihood of both George and Betty (who acts very maternally toward Edie in other circumstances) simply leaving the little girl in the back of the car for the fifteen-minute duration of their fuck is pretty slim. And that's another thing, Edie says he was upstairs with her for “about fifteen minutes,” but how does she know? It's doubtful the car had a clock, doubtful she had a watch, doubtful that she'd be able to tell time anyway. Of course, when this invitation upstairs becomes a regular thing, George and Betty Short no longer leave young Edie in the car, but the question then becomes why would they leave this child sitting on the couch with only a copy of
Photoplay
magazine to entertain herself and only a thin muslin curtain
between her and the noisily passionate porking (although, form a purely aesthetic perspective, I do like that detail about Betty having a curtain instead of a bedroom door, the way the afternoon sun hits it so Edie can see “the Turin-like sweat stains of whoever had slept on that sheet before it had been hung up, an oddly private and personal remnant left on this sad flag of privacy” [178]). But the biggest piece of evidence proving the falsity of these scenes (But wait, now that I think about that pretty curtain description: How the fuck would a five-year-old raised in a relatively secular household know what the Shroud of Turin looks like? Bad writing.) The biggest piece of evidence proving the falsity of these scenes arises when we look at the quasi-domestic behavior Edie observes between George and Betty in their postcoital moments. After just a few midday shags, we're treated to this passage:

I sat on the couch, probing my fingers into its torn upholstery, exploring its foamy wounds with care, and watched my father emerge from the bedroom, casually tucking his shirt back into his pants, strapping his suspenders back onto his shoulders with a self-satisfied snap. He looked down at me, said nothing. Then Betty was there, next to him, freshly sexed. She was holding his tie—brown, knit, square-bottomed—and gently flipped up his collar. She put the tie around my dad's neck, adjusted its length, and made a perfect four-in-hand knot. She patted the knot as if to say, There, tied tight, a secret safely concealed. (182)

To find out how Edie showed her hand in this passage—among others—we have to look back to my father's novel. When the protagonist
of
Untitled
is enjoying the early months of marital bliss with his new wife, George writes:

After afternoon love-making, when he had to get back to the studio, after he'd tucked his shirt back in, snapped his suspenders back on, Irene would always take great care to retie his tie for him. She'd adjust the length just so and make a perfect four-in-hand, always concluding with a little tap-tap on the knot and a reassuring, “Tied tight.” (85)

I'm going to withhold comment on the temporally jarring overuse of the preposition “after” in that first sentence, and just say that if Edie remembered the tie-tying scene, she didn't remember it from real life; she remembered it from our father's novel, which he wrote nearly two decades after the point in time she claims Betty Short tied our father's tie. And this is not the only thing Edie “remembers” from our father's fiction. Consider her description of how Betty Short's apartment smells: “a vague citrus bite mixed with a coiled saline funk from the fishmonger downstairs who used lemons to wash away the smell of his work” (173). Now look at my father's novel: “Irene made
trout a la nage
for dinner, and he watched her wash her hands with a sliced lemon” (102). Edie also writes that a neighbor “had the loping gait of a circus clown,” and on page 143 of our father's novel appears the phrase “clown-footed.” Edie's memories are, in other words, plagiarized memories. Edie contrasts the development of George's illicit relationship with Betty with an increasing and silent tension between George and Jack. Again, despite the fact that Edie wouldn't start first grade for another year and our mother
was on the other side of the country, I want to cast doubt on the likelihood that Edie would actually be present for afternoon script meetings between the two, as well as the likelihood that she could recall their conversations in such detail, but more than that, these scenes betray a flawed logic in Edie's narrative. She wants to suggest that the friendship between the two men is growing tense because they are both having affairs with the same woman (George getting “sloppy seconds . . . literally,” as one of my students crudely pointed out), but as it becomes clear later on, Jack is completely unaware that George is also sleeping with Betty. So the tension we see during these scenes should, in theory, be one-sided. But it's not. We see Jack becoming just as guarded and defensive toward George as George is toward Jack. Granted, there are some nicely observed moments in these scenes, like when George and Jack are debating the conclusion of one particular
Rampart
episode—just how empathetic should Det. Mike Nolan be toward the woman who murdered her abusive husband?—and, clearly annoyed by Jack pulling rank to get his way (arguing that Nolan should not show any empathy), George just sits there silently, “tapping an unlit cigarette against the tabletop, flipping it upside-down, tapping it again, flipping, tapping” (198). This is a small gesture of quiet anger that Edie and I learned to recognize. While our mother seemed to smoke because she always needed something to keep her hands busy, our father was not a fidgety-fingered man. He was not in the habit of idly tapping things that did not need tapping. He was also not a man given to overt displays of anger. So when something happened that seemed like it should anger him, we became attuned to these little gestures. When our mother told us over the dinner table that she was going back to Africa: silence,
tap-tap. When I, at the angry age of thirteen, told him that my friend Bobby's father could beat the tar out of him in a fistfight: silence, tap-tap. But even though I recognize this gesture, and its inclusion in this scene with Jack is like ice water on the back of my neck, I wonder how it reads to those unfamiliar with our father's particular signifiers of impotent emotion. Or did Edie include this patented George-gesture not for her readers but for herself? Or, perhaps, for me? It's hard not to see the conversation she is trying to have with me through her warped narrative. Hey, Paulie? Yeah, Edie? Remember Dad, that thing he did with the cigarettes? Yeah, Edie, I do. The real question is why can she have this conversation only by injecting us into the Black Dahlia story? Here our family stands, superimposed into the middle of a widely recognized story of unsolved murder. We don't fit here: You can see the faint and fuzzy penumbra all around us that signals to the audience shoddy special effects, bad blue screen, the scene rejecting the subject. Can she decide to hate our father only by convincing the world to hate him as well? (I just realized that I never actually told our dad that my friend Bobby's father could beat the tar out of him in a fistfight. I know I thought about telling him that many times, and there is a scene like that in
Rarer Monsters
, and in writing that novel I must have imagined the scene so many times and in such detail that I suppose I imagined it into existence for myself. But I should come clean and revoke it as a memory. Strike it from the record, Your Honor.)

Although I understand that, while a great deal of the counterevidence I have offered here so far is empirical, verifiable, and substantive, it might seem that the cornerstone of my argument against Edie's recovered “memories” is simple incredulousness (how likely is it that
Edie actually witnessed what she claims to have witnessed?), so I want to defend that stance on the basis that incredulity, while it might seem more like a disaffected attitude than a legally valid defense, is a result of reason, critical thought, and deductive reasoning. It is, in fact, the cornerstone of legal judgment. I bring this up because as my sister's tale becomes less and less credible, as she stretches the reader's capacity for belief, her feet drifting farther and farther from the ground, it is my job to stay firmly planted in the soil. And so my incredulity should hold just as much weight as tangible counterevidence when you are considering my case against hers. For example, I have no physical proof that my then-five-year-old sister did not attend the New Year's Eve party at Jack Hale's Spanish-style home in the Hollywood Hills; I cannot confirm with an outside source that screenwriter Waldo Salt did not play “got your nose” with my sister before giving her a sip of his Manhattan; I have no corroboration to say my sister did not witness Jack taking George aside in the kitchen moments before the jazz trio in the corner of the living room began playing what Lionel Barrymore appraised as “a very Negroid rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne'”; I have no empirical evidence to prove my sister did not overhear Jack tell George that Betty, who was not in attendance, needed to get down to Mexico to “get a scrape” and that George needed to arrange it; I have no substantial way to unsubstantiate these claims—but keep in mind: neither does Edie. She has only her memories to offer here. So we are left to weigh the probability of the whole scene. And let's face it: It's pretty low. Would a drunken Eddie Cantor really interrupt the band's rendition of “A Night in Tunisia” to do an improvised minstrel act? Would so many of the guests really mistake my sister for child actress Margaret O'Brien?
Would our father really react so calmly to the assignment Jack had given him? It's only minutes later, after all, that he calls New York to talk to my mother, wish her well, and say how much he's looking forward to her return. But keep in mind it would have been 3:00
AM
in New York, and my mother was staying with her parents who would not have tolerated a telephone ringing at that hour. But that's the way Edie tells it. After this calm, adequately affectionate and spousy phone conversation, our father—fresh with the knowledge that either he or Jack had knocked up poor Ms. Short and that it was now his duty to take care of it—did the rounds at the party, said his polite goodbyes, wished everyone a happy New Year, then took Edie home. Edie ends this chapter with a rather pulpy line about the fact that two weeks later, Betty Short's body would be discovered, lifeless and bisected, in a vacant lot. This cheap suspense tactic highlights one of the problems I've been trying to address with this part of her book: the conflation of the perspectives of Adult Edie and Child Edie. And while this normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, here it confuses what is remembered with what is projected onto the memory, and in doing so it undermines the very nature of those memories. Although, now that I think about it, the impossibility of untangling memory from projection is one of the more resonate lessons of postmodernism, but that still doesn't mean we cannot, or should not, try. I am not sure if that makes as much sense as I want it to. The thought is there in my brain, but when I see it here on the page it seems like an approximate translation of the original thought. I'm feeling incredibly focused right now, but I can't quite nail down this thought. Of course, I haven't really slept at all tonight, so I should give myself a break. It's 6:00
AM
, and the sun is finally starting to come up. I
can see the backyard now through my window. The soil, which will soon be covered in new sod, is damp and has that freshly plowed looseness, like it's just inviting you to sink your hands into it. I'm feeling incredibly focused right now and practically tumescent when I look at how much work I've been able to get done tonight, but I should really stop for now. I can hear Julia in the kitchen, the sibilant whisper of her slippers against the linoleum, the considerately soft pinging sounds of her morning tea-making ritual. When I go out there she's going to be annoyed with me for staying up all night again to get work done. She thinks I've put this all behind me and am now plugging away on a new novel, so she's going to give me that condescending eyebrow-raise, that look that asks, “Why do you write?” which I never seem able to answer. She won't believe that I stayed up all night unassisted, so I'll have to tell her I fell asleep at my desk, but it will be difficult to pull off a groggy early-morning mien, considering how fucking focused I'm feeling right now. The guy I usually get Ritalin from sold me a gram of blow last week and it's been helping me through these marathon work sessions. It's the first time I've done it in almost twenty years and I'd forgotten about this overwhelming sense of competence and clarity. Back in my twenties, I'd never tried writing on it, but I really should have. It's making my morning classes a little rougher, though. I have a class in three hours and I should grab a catnap before then, but even with a hundred milligrams of Trazodone, I don't think it's in the cards, so I'll have to go the other direction, take a little bump and just power through. Julia is at the kitchen table now. I can hear her mug when she sets it down on the Formica. I will go out there, kiss her on the forehead, say good morning. I like the way her skin smells when she first wakes up, a mix of sweat and lavender.