Drowning Lessons (24 page)

I roll the Remington Microblade Shaver across his livery-spotted face.

Out on the street, in front of our tenement on East Eighty-fifth, we wait for a cab. It's freezing cold rain, and the taxis whoosh by, on-duty lights glowing. They hate stopping for a wheelchair man, means they've got to get out of their nice warm cabs and help fold up the chair, help put it in their trunk. So we wait in the icy rain, chunks of dead winter floating like icebergs down flooded gutters. Already it's half past two; The Sinking Ship Man hates to be late. He doesn't think of it as a party he's going to. To him it's
a transatlantic crossing. His wheelchair, that's the ship. And out there somewhere, on Fifth or Park or Madison or Broadway, is an ice patch, or a slippery curb, or a crazed taxi driver, or a pizza delivery boy on a bicycle with no brakes … waiting, just waiting for disaster.

Four, five, six cabs whoosh by, like full lifeboats.

“No taxis,” I say. “Let's call it quits.”

The Sinking Ship Man shakes his shaky head.

“Giving up so easy, Lightoller?” he says.

Finally, out of desperation I almost jump out in front of a speeding empty cab, waving my arms like a mad lady.

“You're a fine first officer,” he tells me as I help get him in.

Yeah, I think to myself, of a sinking ship.

In The Sinking Ship Man's study there's an old photograph that he keeps and makes copies of and sends to folks as a thank-you card. A picture of him in kneesocks and an old-fashioned hat standing with a lady on the deck of a ship. “Two more passengers for T——'s list, April 10, 1912,” he always writes on the back of the card.

The lady: his mama.

Now I'm his mama, or close to.

“What time is it, Lightoller?”

He calls me Lightoller sometimes. Name of the first officer of the T—— (you won't get me to say it, uh-uh, no way). I guess it's a compliment, since Lightoller saved a lot of people that night. I tamp the rain off his face. The party's on East Sixty-eighth, an elevator building (thank God). The Upper East Side Anglophile Society, something like that. Overstuffed chairs and people; tuna and egg sandwiches cut into triangle-shaped wedges; black women
like myself bending over with white gloves and silver trays; farty folks having tea, pretending to be like English people.

“Who are these people we're going to see, Lightoller?”

“The Camerons.” I name our hosts for the fiftieth time.

“That's right: the Camerons for cocktails.”

“It's a tea party.”

“Tea is always nice,” says The Sinking Ship Man. “Did you remember to bring my pen?”

He always wants his fountain pen so he can sign autographs with it, even though now his hand shakes so bad you can hardly read what he signs. Still, I bring it. Always.

“Now don't you eat too many sweets,” I tell him.

“You look out for me, Lightoller,” he says. “You always do.”

They said it was an elevator building, but I know better. They say, “No steps,” but there are always steps in this world. I get him off the chair and hold him and feel him trembling up against me and put one foot at a time, right foot first, and leave him holding up against something while I go and get the chair, then I push him up the ramp to the elevator, and it's a steep ramp (it's always a steep ramp), and then it's wait for the elevator and up one, two, three stories to these people who don't have any clue what I've got to deal with just because they want to have tea with Mr. Bishop and ask him all kinds of stupid questions about a ship that sunk so long ago who cares? When it sunk they weren't even born, most of these people: even
I
wasn't born. Still, they want to know. So I sit listening to the same questions over and over, so oftentimes my life feels like a broken record of a band playing on a sinking ship that keeps on sinking and they just keep on playing and never, ever stop.

We reach the third floor.

Oh, I know what to expect. First of all, there'll be a big lifesaver done up with the T-word hanging up on the door (never fails). Inside, a string band or, if they can't afford a band, a solo cello, will be playing old-fashioned music — waltzes, ragtime, and everyone's favorite, “Nearer My God to Thee.” There'll be what they call a keynote speaker, author of the latest book on the T-ship, as if there weren't already enough books. Then, to great fanfare, the host or hostess introduces my boss, The Sinking Ship Man.

“Oh, Mr. Bishop, so nice of you to come!”

“Oh, Mr. Bishop, so glad you could join us!”

“Oh, Mr. Bishop, we're so honored to have you!”

“Oh, Mr. Bishop! Oh, Mr. Bishop!”

You'd think he was a movie star or something. They shake his trembly hand, kiss his livery-spotted cheeks, hug his thin, brittle bones, stroke his whispery hair, congratulate him. What on earth are you all congratulating him for? I want to say, yell. For being on a sinking ship when he was too young to know any better? For having survived, like it was anything other than sheer luck and the fact that he was a baby? Like we all in this world haven't survived disaster? For having lived to be a whispery old man, like
that's
anything other than sheer luck, and maybe bad luck at that? How about getting here today, in this freezing rain? Maybe that's what they're congratulating him for, in which case, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid it's me you ought to be congratulating, since I'm the one who got him here, since I'm the one who survived that particular disaster. How about offering me some white-gloved tea and little funny-shaped sandwiches?

I wonder sometimes: am I jealous of The Sinking Ship Man? Have I sunk that low? Everyone knows Lightoller was the hero,
not the captain. The captain — he just went down with the ship, like he was supposed to. He would have been a coward to do anything else. Lightoller — he saved all those people. So what am I doing — standing here with my mouth shut acting invisible? Don't I deserve to be noticed? Do I always have to blend into the shadows like my mama taught me? Would it be nice to be a big shot — just for once?

And it's not like I don't care, either, because I do. I've been caring hard for these last fifteen years. Look at him, I want to say, will you just please look at him. For a split second stop thinking about a sunken ship and look at this man with his trembly hands and livery spots and toothpicky legs and whispery white hair. Stop thinking about that pile of rust under the bottom of the ocean and take one good, close look at this sunken wreck of a person, this tragic, old, salvaged ruin you have dredged out of warm sleep. Shake hands with him, ask for his autograph, tear off a few rusty bits of his hull, why don't you, or haul up some coal from his bunkers. You want trivia? He's a fountain: drink him dry. Memories? He's giving them all away, along with his bones and his teeth. You'll kill him soon enough, like you killed all the other survivors, sucked them dry of their memories till they shriveled up and blew away. That's what they want to do to you, Mr. Bishop, I want to say. They want to suck you dry and leave nothing and I let them; I have to let them. It's my
job
.

But I don't have to like it.

“Mr. Bishop, blow out your candles on your cake!”

The cake: shaped like the ship, black frosting for the hull, red frosting for the funnels, blue for the sea, white for the iceberg. When he blows, I'm afraid he'll go in his pants or worse, have a heart attack, die on the spot with his livery-spotted head in the
cake, in the ship that refuses to stay sunken, that keeps rising back out of the ocean like a bad dream.

“Look, Mr. Bishop, a piece of coal!”

Look, Mr. Bishop, a shoe, a saucer, a spoon! Won't you please touch it, please feel it, please caress it, please bless it?

“More tea, Mr. Bishop?”

“More tea, Mr. Bishop?”

“More tea, Mr. Bishop?”

I wipe crumbs off his lap.

“Time to go now,” I whisper in his ear.

Only I don't have to whisper it. Just the touch of my skin being tickled by the long hairs growing from his ears and he knows, he knows.

Evening. I tuck him in.

“Goodnight, Lightoller.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Bishop.”

I know he dreams, know his shivering in his sleep is more than just a disease at work. He dreams of a ship on a cold April night, himself high, high up in the crow's nest, the freezing wind tousling his whispery hair, peering through thick fog, seeing something like blue knuckles on the horizon, growing bigger and bigger until it's as big as the fist of God. “Iceberg, dead ahead!” he cries in his sleep. Then he's the second officer saying, “Hard astarboard!” Then he's the helmsman, turning the wheel. The iceberg glides by, like a mountain. Next he's the wireless man sending sos. Then he's the steward knocking on cabin doors. Then he's a rich man being helped by his valet into his life vest … Somewhere on that sinking ship there's a scared little boy who's about to lose his daddy, who he never dreams about. He's too busy being all those
other people, and the captain, shouting, “Women and children first!”

I look down at him sleeping, shake my head. He knows his ship is doomed. Don't we all know it? Still, he won't abandon her. Nossir. He'll go right down to the bottom with her. And me, whatever my real name is, I'm going right down with him; I always have; I always will.

I stand watching him dream. I've done all I can. I've passed him into the lifeboat of his medical bed. I'll spend a few minutes standing there watching him toss, turn, and shiver in his sleep, his boat-bed sliding down a set of long ropes, slapping at dark waves, the other passengers rowing him off into his sinkingship dreams. I watch him, thinking we've done it; we've made it through another blessed day, and there's nothing more left for me to do but go off and sleep somewhere myself and pray he'll still be here tomorrow, that I'll still have a job, oh, dear God, I solemnly do pray.

I stand there watching him, shaking my head, hopeless.

After a few moments I give myself the order:

Abandon ship.

SINCE COMING TO
New York two years ago, I've suffered from fainting spells. I'll be standing somewhere, doing nothing,
minding my own business
— at a street crossing or an intersection, somewhere where a decision has to be made. The first time it happened, I froze at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second, near the public library. I must have been blocking the crosswalk. People kept jostling me, cursing under their breaths. My back broke into a sweat. The moisture crept down my spine to gather at the waistband of my undershorts. My white shirt, the only dress shirt in my wardrobe, clung to my skin in ruddy patches as I stood in demented sunlight, paralyzed. Everything seemed to rush out of me then until nothing remained but a cold, clammy sense of my own uniqueness and a sound like a projector reeling. Then my knees went out from under me, and I toppled.

Strange, goggle-eyed faces lowered cell phones and peered down.

You okay, mister?

Mister, you okay?

Someone handed me a copy of the
News of the World
. “I believe you dropped this,” the good Samaritan said.

At first I thought the fainting spells had something to do with my father, who'd died a few years before, since his face would always appear fleetingly among those looking down at me. My aunt and uncle took me to three doctors, one a specialist in inner-ear disorders, each of whom drew blood and reached no conclusions. Uncle Nick thinks I'm neurotic, that I should drink more ouzo and otherwise fortify myself. “You don't eat enough lamb shank; you don't eat enough spanakopita,” he tells me, tugging down the lower lids of my eyes to see how anemic I am. “That or you need a kick in the ass,” he says.

The evening after my first fainting incident, riding the subway train home with the
News of the World
spread open before me, I read,
“A passenger from the Titanic wreck has been discovered frozen solid inside an iceberg. Scientists and archaeologists are debating whether to thaw him.”

I thought of my dead father: to thaw or not to thaw?

I turned a page, read on.

“A Haitian voodoo priestess claims that Hitler has been resurrected as a zombie and is raising an army of the undead to invade the United States. One eyewitness has reportedly spotted the Führer, a known vegetarian, sitting on a campstool in a graveyard, chewing on raw chicken livers.”

“A
purpose
!” says my uncle, slamming his fist down hard on the dining-room table — hard enough to rattle the plates in the china cabinet behind him. He knocks back a glass of ouzo. “That's what all humanity is after. To struggle for something well within your grasp — that's
wisdom
!”

Uncle Nick sits at the head of the long dining-room table, holding forth, as he himself would describe it. “To quote the great man Epictetus,
whosoever longs for or dreads things outside his control can be neither faithful nor free
.” Aunt Ourania, Nick's dark little ball of a Greek wife, watches in jittery silence as he chews, swallows, sips, considers. Nick fancies himself likewise Greek, though like my father he's only third generation. Ourania, my aunt, he met at a motivational forum that he presided over, this one for the Greek Restaurant Association of New York — one of dozens of such forums conducted by him each year in gray and mauve conference rooms across America.

Meanwhile my cousin, Marcia, his twenty-two-year-old daughter, eyes me with sullen contempt from the far side of a sage-encrusted lamb shank. Is she contemplating her lost virginity? She is; I smile. From the depths of one of Dante's lower regions, she repackages my smile into a sneer and ships it back to me.

“Am I right, Nephew?”

I'm getting that floating feeling again, like I'm in one of those sensory-deprivation chambers. The dining-room table, the floral wallpaper, the empty ouzo bottles lined up like infantry before the fireplace, Uncle Nick's lamb-and-ouzo-scented words — they all close in on me. Sundays are cruel.