Fiction Ruined My Family (16 page)

“Why?”

“Apparently his asthma is so bad that he has to sleep upright sometimes to be able to breathe.”

“Why doesn't he prop some pillows up in bed?”

“He's afraid he'll stop breathing if he lies flat in bed.”

I hear my mother light a cigarette and exhale.

“Are you smoking in his house?”

“He's not here right now.”

 

 

 

 

AFTER TWO DAYS of Mom staying with Dad, Eleanor calls from St. Vincent's Hospital.

“Hi. So Dad had a major asthma attack and . . . well, it's weird.”

I hung up wondering what in the world Eleanor could mean by weird. Suspicious? Salacious? Depressing?

It was my birthday, so I had plans with my friends for later that night. But first I had to head to St. Vincent's third floor, down the corridor, through the double doors, past the nurse's station, on the right after the water fountain. I paused before opening the door to his room. I rolled my eyes, inhaled, exhaled, stared at the ceiling, chewed on the insides of my cheeks a little and started in the door. A nurse appeared.

“Who are you, dear?”

“I'm his daughter.” I held up the pass I had gotten downstairs for her to see. The six-by-four-inch plastic pass that read VISITOR was all she needed to verify my genetic honesty.

“Oh, okay, fine, dear. Now, you know your father had some reactions to the steroids?”

The nurse informed me that my father had gotten out of bed the previous night and hurled a wooden chair out the hospital window. The chair landed on Seventh Avenue, apparently killing no one.

“Wow.”

“So I'm going to have to ask you not to give him anything he could possibly injure himself with.”

Did she mean more chairs?

“He's been asking for a pen. And that could be dangerous. No pens.”

I opened the door and went in. He wasn't in the first bed so I walked past the curtain to the second bed. His eyes opened the second I walked in, which disturbed me. I needed a minute to take the vision in. But I didn't get it.

His arms were tied with belts to the side of the bed, his legs were under belts as well. He had an oxygen mask on. He moved his head back and forth to wiggle it off his mouth so he could speak. It was like a gossipy corpse come back to life.

“Jean, thank God.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Your timing is flawless as usual, Jean-Joe. Just flawless. Now, here's the plan.”

I pulled up a chair.

“Now, have you got a pen on you?”

“Yes.”

“Terrific. They won't be back for a while. Let me have that pen.”

“I can't.”

“They just gave me my medicine. The coast is clear.”

“I can't give you a pen, Dad.”

“What do you mean? Crazy talk. Give me the pen.”

“The nurse said you might hurt yourself.”

“Absolute nonsense. Jean, you can't imagine what's going on in the basement.”

“I can't, Dad. I'm sorry.”

My father looked at me from behind the eyes of insanity. He wanted to write down everything he'd seen. And I would not give him the means to do that. My father and I loved stories. And I was denying him this story—the story of his own insanity. Highly medicated, steroid-induced to be sure. But still, insanity.

“This place is an abortion mill, Jeanne. A Catholic hospital. With a goddamn abortion mill in the basement. I was invited to a party down there last night. A gal from the second floor asked if I'd like to go have a drink. A drink sounded all right after throwing that chair through the window, so I went. They've got these enormous black women serving drinks while abortions are being performed. I've got to get this down. That's just the beginning, Jean-Joe.”

Just then my father wiggled his leg and his penis dribbled out of the covers. He didn't notice. He continued talking about the basement and the colored lights and the dancing. I pulled the blanket over him. My father is a Catholic but he's a liberal Democrat, pro-choice, so this party in the basement wasn't some psychedelic representation of his politics. I thought of my friends waiting for me at the restaurant. Carmen and my singer friend Sophia also had charming fathers who struggled to pay their rent and ruined your birthday and talked big. And loved you. Sometimes that was the worst part, seemingly more difficult than the deadbeat dads or the mean dads or the absentee workaholic dads—to have a father who was totally crazy pants who adored you was a special kind of agony.

I told my father once more that I couldn't give him a pen. He glared at me with his bulging blue eyes. He looked like all the pictures I had seen of his mother. She had the same bulging blue eyes. He had Crazy Kate eyes. The story about Crazy Kate's later years was that in the hospital toward the end of her life she saw bugs on the walls and demanded martinis from the nurses. He wriggled the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth, took a few breaths, and then wriggled it off to speak. “I'll remember this, Jean. I'm going to remember this.”

I walked out of the building and sat on the steps of the first brownstone and cried. I had no idea whether he would ever be normal again, if he ever was normal, if he was now a certifiable madman or if I was just a big fucking baby.

 

 

 

 

WHEN HIS BREATHING WAS regulated, the “dementia,” which the hospital claimed was due to a bad reaction of a combination of drugs, went away. He left the hospital and went back to his little studio on the corner of Bank and West Fourth Street.

 

 

 

 

THE NEXT TIME I saw Dad was at the Corner Bistro for Eleanor's birthday. The Corner Bistro is known for its great cheeseburgers, crowded conviviality, and literary weirdos. It could also be one of the smokiest spots in Manhattan. It had served as my father's living room since he had moved to West Fourth Street. It had some appeal at first as a place you hung out with your divorced dad: it was lively and noisy and filled with cute young men and old characters, and its burgers were undeniably delicious. But it had its limitations. You couldn't get a table for a lot of people, a lot of the time you couldn't get a table at all, you were often sharing one with strangers, which is fun under normal circumstances, but when it's your birthday or some cousin is in town you don't really want old drunks ogling your
tetas
and breathing on your beer.

As I headed in I saw Eleanor and Mom at a table in the bar with some strangers, Katharine and Dad were standing just to the right of the table with beers in their hands, talking. Julia was sitting at the bar, talking to the bartender. I went over and gave Dad a kiss hello and leaned over the table and kissed Mom on the cheek.

“Here she is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the turncoat of Fourteenth Street. Don't think for one second, my dear, that I've forgotten the absolute treachery that took place at St. Vincent's.” He laughed and patted me on the back.

“Dad, that nurse specifically told me not to give you a pen.”

“Because they sure as hell knew I was going to take down their whole basement operation with it. What'll you have? Beer?”

I nodded.

“Steve,” Mom chimed in, “you were like a wild beast in there. I don't think you get it.”

“You could have killed someone with that chair, Dad,” Eleanor said.

“Killed someone? Eleanor, I would have enjoyed it. Oh, I was really out of it.”

Julia came over to the table and said in my ear, “That bartender is a total asshole.”

I looked over. I couldn't tell if he was an asshole, but he was oldish and had a big butt.

“Why is he an asshole?”

“Because we're talking and laughing and having a great time and I ask if he wants my number and he says, ‘I'm afraid I've got myself a girlfriend, love.'”

“And?”

“You don't say that to a woman, Jeanne.”

“Why not?”

Dad came over and handed me my beer. I wondered if he had poisoned it, considering how mad he was about the fuckin' pen.

“Because it's rude.”

“It's the truth.”

Julia laughed. “Okay, true. Let's move on, shall we?”

Sipping my beer, I thought about a cigarette, but the place was so fucking smoky already it was killing my potential smoke. It was like trying to be a writer with Dad around, trying to booze it up with Mom around. I wanted to live the poor artist's life in the West Village, I wanted to drink like a maniac, but Mom and Dad had “smoked up the room” already, they were hogging all the death and destruction for themselves, making it hard for me to enjoy destroying myself.

Dad was less than a week out of the St. Vincent's abortion mill, the proverbial hospital “woods,” and now I could barely make out his features a mere two feet away from me because of the cigarette haze. I could hear him through it, though, and he was having a grand time, smoke or no smoke.

 

 

 

 

AFTER MORE BEERS and some burgers, Dad suggested we all move on to his place and have some birthday cake. We made our way down the block to his building and headed up the narrow staircase to his apartment. Dad's apartment, which was never locked, was on the second floor of a charming nineteenth-century red-brick three-story building. There was the owner's apartment on the first floor, two apartments on the second floor and one on the top floor. Dad's upstairs neighbors, a pretty Asian woman and her photographer boyfriend, passed us on the stairs.

“Mei Ling, Richard, these are my daughters: Julia, Jeanne, Katharine and Eleanor, who's twenty-six today. Will you join us for a glass of wine and a piece of birthday cake?”

Julia glared at me. “Jesus Christ, does he have to?”

I left Dad, Mei Ling and Richard in the hall and went inside. Dad simply had no concept that his apartment might not be the Hyannis Port of the West Village; he would invite way more people over to this place than could possibly fit or than he could properly entertain. You entered Dad's and were in the kitchen. The kitchen was a very narrow counter that began at the front door and ran about three feet into the apartment. There were a couple cheapo cabinets above the counter. There was a tiny sink and a half-fridge under the counter. A toaster and a dish rack and the old pasta maker from our house in Bronxville took up all the counter space. This part of the apartment felt like Gregor Samsa's Winnebago. When Dad cooked (opening jars of olives, frying chicken eyeballs), there was a leaf that came up. The drawers in the kitchen held everything from odds-and-ends silverware, pens, letter openers and loose change to a meat thermometer from the early '70s and an electric knife. Opposite the kitchen was the bathroom with its accordion door made of plywood.

The main room was approximately twelve feet by twelve feet. There were two windows facing West Fourth Street. Dad claimed there were two young Swedes who cleaned the apartment directly across the street in the nude once a week. Dad's long desk was the main piece of furniture, with his big PC and printer and scanner and gargantuan
Oxford English Dictionary
. The brown metal fluorescent lamp had seemed cool when I was little but looked depressing now. Ditto for all the gray metal file cabinets. There was a futon couch/bed that never made it to couch mode, it was permanently reclined. There was a skinny spiral staircase that once led to the apartment upstairs but now was blocked off. Next to the vestigial staircase lay the raft, shriveled in a clump. The second room was a tiny space with a drafty window. Most people would have designated this the bedroom and cordoned it off with some decorative touch, like a door, but Dad just filled it with random boxes of books.

Mom opened the accordion door of the bathroom and came out right as I was entering the apartment and there was an awkward “You go,” “No, after you” moment. We all gathered the best we could in a space that had one chair and a reclined futon. Mom took the big swivel office chair and Eleanor enlisted Katharine to help her fold the futon into a couch. Julia scooched onto the chair with Mom, who was teeny enough to allow it, and I scooched onto the futon with Eleanor and Katharine despite their identical
Fuck off
looks.

Dad eventually moseyed in from the hall. “Aren't those two terrific?”

“Dad, do you have to invite everyone you see to things?” Julia said.

“They're not everyone, they're my neighbors. He did some terrific work a few years back photographing Chernobyl, a ghoulish assignment if ever there was one.” Dad went into the kitchen and opened the mini-fridge, calling back to his daughters and ex-wife, “And she's a knockout, isn't she?”

He took Eleanor's birthday cake out of the mini-fridge and brought it into the living room.

“Now, this place is terrific. The best,” he said, putting the cake on the desk.

Claude's
was
the best. And expensive. Which is why we were a little shocked.

“Steve, how about a cake knife?” Mom said, trying to help things along.

“A what?”

“A cake knife? And some plates?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely.” Dad headed back into the kitchen, where he rummaged around. “Jean-Joe, why don't you put
La Traviata
on the hi-fi? It should be right there.”

Eleanor let out a little huff. She hated opera, drunkenness, Dad, Mom and the West Village. Dad came back into the room with a knife and three plates for six people. He handed the knife to Eleanor.

“Eleanor-a, birthday girl, why don't you do the honors?”