My Beautiful Failure (12 page)

W
hen I got home Dad was finishing another painting in the fruit-bowl series. The new painting showed the earth split in two like a coconut. The pieces sat in what looked like a woven basket, but when you looked closely the strands were human fingers. The title was
Who Will Re-pair?
Jodie and Linda oohed over the details. Jodie’s barrette dangled from two strands of hair like an oversize zipper.

I pictured people coming in to the show and trying to make sense of this. I didn’t want Dad to be judged. By anyone. He was foolish to get his opinions from two silly girls.

Nor did I want him judged for what happened in the winter. It was one thing for me to know something was wrong with Dad—that was necessary for getting the problem solved. It was another thing for people outside to know.

He was my dad, after all. He was Bill Senior. And I was Bill Junior.

M
r. Gabler stopped by my desk, waiting. But I had nothing.

“What is the problem this week?” he asked. “I gave you some leeway. This is a real failure to execute.”

How could I muff that assignment again? It wasn’t even that difficult. I could have done it in fifteen minutes. But for the second class in a row I’d spaced out.

“What was that all about?” Gordon asked me after class. He gets superb grades without appearing to try. He hardly ever mentions the work, but he never misses an assignment.

Of all the people in the world, Gordy was definitely someone who could be trusted with the truth. “My dad wants to have an art show,” I told him.

“Why are you telling me this like it’s bad news?”

“It seems unrealistic,” I said. “I think he might be”—I turned around to face him so I can speak in a lower voice—“getting sick again.”

“Sick how?” Gordon asked. His expression: face very
straightforward, almost at military attention, and lips kind of pursed together to make sure no sound of his own squeaked out. It was the visual equivalent of Richie’s listening voice, and I felt for that minute like I was the most important person in Gordy’s world.

“Do you know what bipolar disorder is?” We were at his locker, number 217, and I stared at the front of 219 while I said those words. That Gordy would know something about Dad that Dad didn’t know himself—it was like one of those hospital gowns that open in the back, so everyone but you knows that your rear end is showing. It was humiliating.

“I know some people who’ve been diagnosed with it,” Gordy said, digging out his lunch bag and a five-dollar bill. I wondered if he meant Brenda. But I didn’t push.

“I’ve been reading up on it,” I said. I turned my head and met Gordy’s eyes. “Some people don’t start out bipolar, but if they’re depressed and start taking antidepressants in too high a dosage, they can become manic. Then they spend the rest of their lives swinging from one extreme to the other.”

“You think that’s happening to your dad?” We walked into the courtyard. Some of the granite slabs in the ground around the school were so huge that the builders decided to just leave them there, creating an open space in the middle of the buildings. On sunny days the stone got warm by lunchtime. It felt
rewarding
to sit on, the way a stone summit felt when you reached it during a summer hike. There were benches, too, but we sat on a rock to finish our conversation.

“It might be. My mom isn’t picking up on it. I’m a little surprised, because she’s usually really skeptical about drugs.”

“Does he need the drugs?”

“I think so. He dropped them last winter, and it was a bad scene. You remember.”

Yes, he did. If I was Dad’s caregiver, Gordy had been mine. It was Gordy who bought me a cheese-steak sub when my whole family was undernourished, Gordy who covered me with a blanket while I napped or cried on his living room couch, and Gordy who took me to a Buddy Guy concert in Boston when I needed to run away from home.

“What makes you think he’s manic?” We both watched the tennis courts now, and that made it easier to talk. A girl from music history class was walking onto the court with her friend. The stood at the net, deciding who would serve. The red-haired one passed the balls to the dark one, and they linked pinkies for a few seconds before starting the game.

The facts sounded innocuous. I dropped my voice to make the point. “He’s painting all the time.”

Gordy waited.

“Okay, and there’s more to it than that. He’s spending too much money and has an unrealistic sense of his own abilities. And when I say he’s painting all the time, I mean with every free minute and giving up sleep to do it. He’s going to make forty paintings in forty days and then display them and invite, I don’t know, the MFA or Channel 7 News.”

“You care about your dad a lot, don’t you?” Gordy said.

I nodded. I couldn’t say anymore, so I squeezed Gordy’s arm. We heard the
thwop-thwop
of the tennis ball, like a metronome, and the girls’ laughter after each point.

A
ndy was waiting for me in the lunch line.

“’S’up, Hagrid?” I asked, knocking him on the shoulder. He almost fell into the tray caddy, and I was surprised by my own force.

Andy pressed his back against the wall. “I see cars down there,” he said in an ancient, wheezing voice. “I see little tiny people. I’m just going to jump and end it all!”

“Stop laughing, Andy. She’s my friend, and you hurt her.”

“She’s an acquaintance. I’m your friend.” He smiled as if he had grappled me, or perhaps Margaret, into submission.

“The meter could be running out on that.” The lunch line took three steps forward.

“I didn’t hurt anyone,” he said, still teetering and talking in his old-man voice. “It was funny.”

I grabbed a tray. I wanted to shove him into the tray caddy and bash my tray over his head. “She’s my friend,
and you made a fool of her,” I said. My voice got conspicuously loud, and I had to remind myself that this business was confidential. “I can’t say too much, but you should have seen how happy she was after that call.”

“Okay. I made someone happy.” Andy walked up to the food lady and ordered the sloppy joe. “And it was still funny,” he added.

“It was not funny.”

Being short, Andy usually had excellent posture. It was only tall guys who had the luxury of slouching. I felt myself straighten up. Adrenaline charged into my shoulders and upper arms. Andy’s gaze fell to my chest. Ray, the guy who set up the steam tables, was looking there too. I realized that I was making a fist.

“Are you planning to hit me?” Andy asked, talking in his own voice again.

“Of course not. I don’t hit people. You want to be a fool, be a fool.” I pushed him ahead in the line and ordered a sloppy joe for myself. “But don’t make a fool of other people.”

A
bright November day. Through the screen door, I saw Mom and Dad taking a break in Mom’s rose garden. Mom had neglected the garden last year, so this year she made the most of it. Everything was raked and deadheaded and pruned. Each rosebush had its own square, cut into the grass and lavished with manure. A statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, presided in the middle, and two or three flowers had lasted into November. Although the neighbor’s leaf blower sounded like a burping machine gun, Mom and Dad, in their white plastic stackable chairs, drinking store-brand diet cola, apparently thought they were in paradise. When the blower stopped you could hear the Asianlike tone of a wind chime.

Dad removed his straw hat and leaned over Mom’s chair, hiding both their faces with the hat while he kissed her. When he had disappeared to the front of the house, I approached her.

“Mom,” I asked in a low voice, “how many of the paintings have you actually seen?”

“Two or three,” Mom said. She leaned back in her chair to get the sun on her face. Disturbingly, she was still smiling from Dad’s kiss.

I moved Dad’s chair so my mouth would be close to Mom’s ear. “Have you seen the one of the whale trying to swallow another whale headfirst, so they both get stuck and have to stay that way forever? Don’t tell me that’s not the product of a fevered imagination.”

Mom’s red lipstick stretched in a laugh. “I didn’t quite get that one either.”

“Does anyone get it, other than Dad? I think he has a secret system of meanings that’s all in his head.”

Mom squeezed my hand, and I felt some of the affection from Dad squickily transfer to me. “Maybe he’s an unrecognized genius. Not everyone will get or like what he’s doing. How do you think most middle-class Spaniards reacted when they first saw Dalí’s
Persistence of Memory
?”

“Which one is that?”

“With the melting watches.”

“I call that one
Melting Watches
.”

“Your dad might be ahead of his time,” Mom said. She flicked a beetle off one of the flowers. Mom wasn’t really a reliable judge of anything. She was just in love with Dad.

S
o, what would be my role for the show? I would monitor it and make sure Dad didn’t go off the rails. Unless I was at school or Listeners, I made a point of being close by for every major discussion or decision.

I stopped at the house before my Listeners shift and found Dad designing a poster for the show while his brother Marty looked over his shoulder. Of the two of them, Marty was the sociable schmoozer. Marty owned a bar/restaurant and knew a lot of people in town. He had a full head of blow-dried hair and always ironed his jeans before wearing them.

“I can’t wait to get the word out,” he told Dad. “I’ll stand on the street corners if I have to.”

I looked over Dad’s shoulder at his iPad. In white type on red, the poster said

BILL MORRISON
40/40

Forty Paintings in Forty Days

“Where’s the ticket price?” Linda asked. “Real museums charge admission.”

“But galleries don’t,” Dad replied. “Besides, I’m an unknown.”

“Don’t put yourself down, Dad,” Linda argued. “You have the same right to be famous as anyone else.”

“I know. But the word ‘unknown’ isn’t negative. It’s neutral. Let’s say I’m not known yet.”

“That’s better.”

Dad popped different images into the poster to see which looked best. He tried
Diverted Horizon,
in which the horizon line was six inches higher on the right than on the left;
Adverted Horizon
, which contained an entire sunset inside a hyperrealist beer stein; and
Perverted Horizon,
one of the paintings in black and gray.

“It looks like the moon setting,” Linda said. “Except that the moon doesn’t set. Does it?”

“Do you think it does?”

“I guess so. But no one ever talks about it.”

“That’s the whole point of the painting. The major objective in art is to avoid clichés.”

Linda was writing ideas on a clipboard. “We should serve hot chocolate and offer a gift-wrapping service to put people in a buying mood.”

“I can make bows,” Jodie said, writing on the clipboard from the other side.

“Of courth you can,” I said.

“What do you mean, of course?” she asked.

“Because it’s just the kind of thing you would do. Something that looks sweet and nice but is actually useless.”

“Cool it, Billy,” Uncle Marty said. He laid his arm across the top of the couch, behind Dad’s shoulders.

Dad looked up at me. “I will not allow you to use my show as an opportunity to be cruel.”

“But don’t you think the commercial stuff will make your show seem tacky?”

“No, I don’t think. I’m glad for the help. And I’m going to give Linda a percentage on everything she helps me sell. And Jodie a percentage on the gift wrapping.”

“Are you going to get a credit card reader?” In case anyone thought I was serious, I snorted.

Dad handed the iPad to Marty, and I knew I was in trouble. “Now listen up, Billy, because I’m only saying this once. You know all about listening, don’t you?”

Not that again.

“This show—Billy, look at me—this show is one of the four most exciting events of my life. The other three were my marriage to your mother and the births of my two children. Are you putting that in perspective?”

I looked down at my feet. If Dad had continued in a teasing vein, I could have gotten more potshots in. But he had me cornered. “Yes, I am,” I said.

“I’m not fabricating that. It’s the truth. It’s what I’ve told Fritz. So now you know. And no naysayer is going to make it less than it is. You seem pretty risk averse, Billy.”

“Billy has a lousy attitude,” Jodie said, hitching a free ride on the reprimand.

“Okay, Jodie,” Dad said. “That’s too personal. I want to design my poster, not referee your arguments.”

“You’ve surrounded yourself with yes men, Dad,” I
said. “If you told these three you were going to make a rink back there, wear a skating costume, and call the show Bill Morrison on Ice, they’d say it was a great idea.”

“Billy,” Marty said. “Now you’re being offensive.”

“What if it snows? What if there’s a sleet storm or an ice storm and the art gets ruined? What if there’s a blizzard and no one comes? What happens to your precious art show then?”

“There’s something you’ll need to learn for your career as a musician, Billy,” Dad said.

“I’m not a musician. I’m a psychologist. Going to be.”

“Whatever you become, this skill might come in handy. It’s called improvising. Going with the flow. Deciding in the moment. That’s what I’m doing now. Life is full of the unexpected, and the best thing we can do is embrace it. Success is determined by a combination of planning and improvising. Let this show be an example to you.”

The four of them went back to fine-tuning the poster and deciding what they could sell.

It was like they didn’t remember last winter. All of them had been there. We must have had six different plans, each of which we tossed out the window so fast, we didn’t hear the previous one shatter on the pavement. And what did I do as each plan failed? I improvised. I came up with new ideas, and when I had no ideas left I stayed there, sitting with Dad.
Listening
to Dad.