Nothing Is Terrible (12 page)

“I think I don’t need another irresponsible child in my house at this time,” Skip said, and popped the cork on the champagne.

I pointed to the three plastic champagne glasses Skip had put together and said, “Who’s not having champagne?”

“You,” Skip said.

“Oh, I see, so it’s okay to have sex with me but I can’t drink
a teeny glass of champagne with lunch, is that it?” This wasn’t a straightforward complaint so much as it was the opener for a vaudevillian routine Skip and I were working up. Her part in the routine was to blush, remove the fourth champagne glass she had been hiding in the basket, and fill it for me. “Cheers,” she said.

“To my son the math and science tutor,” Joe said, “because we obviously can’t let him work here anymore.”

Skip said, “Listen. Absolutely not.”

Joe said, “So he’s a little angry and smokes marijuana all day and he’s a bit at loose ends which I’m not entirely innocent for since I’m his father so he does the marijuana and gets it out of his system and he’s someone who’s youthful for Mary here and the two of them can relax together because you know what a drag we adults can be.”

“Nothing doing.”

“September, he’s had some tough breaks.”

“Oh, I’ve had some tough breaks,” Stephen Samuels said, ambling toward us through the white room wearing an array of loose, gauzy, beige garments that were wrapped and tucked and folded and belted in ways incomprehensible to me. “I’ve had a hard life. I’ve fallen on hard times. I’m a Dickensian urchin of the streets, where life is but a toy. Early childhood trauma, negative environmental conditioning, all the disadvantages,” he said, illustrating with large elliptical motions of his right arm in the air. “Miscegenation, inversion, economic deprivation, buffeted by the winds of fate. True, I was a bright, resilient child and I rose above the odds, but then I fell back down under the odds.”

“He’s funny, right?” Joe said.

“Hey,
are
you the guy who tried to sell me pot in Central Park or what?”

Stephen Samuels seemed to be pondering how to answer this. “Yes. And to my credit I am the only openly homosexual marijuana dealer in the lower Central Park area. I am also unaffiliated with any of the larger marijuana cartels. I’m a self-starter and a go-getter. Marijuana is a way to both express my discontent and alleviate it. Still, I would love to quit this terrible business to somehow better serve humanity.”

“See?” Joe said.

“Come here, Stephen, and let me give you a kiss,” Skip said.

He approached her and kissed her on one cheek, made an unnecessarily wide arc around her face with his face, and kissed her on the other. She held his hand in one of hers and patted him on the wrist, gazing at him. “You’re all grown up!”

“So give him a job.”

“Oh, I can’t believe this,” Skip said to Joe while continuing to look at Stephen. “I don’t know whether you were kidding about the marijuana or what, Stephen, but you may not sell it at or near my house or use the telephone at my house to sell it. In fact you may not sell marijuana or abet in the sale of marijuana while in my employ. I cannot believe I’m agreeing to this.”

“May I smoke it outside of your house?” Stephen asked.

“That’s your motherfucking business,” Skip said angrily.

“Mothahfuckah!” Mary said, mock-angrily.

So reader, I must admit, to the credit of my guardian, that I did after all receive a form of secondary education loosely
based on the American high school method of one teacher per discipline. Stephen Samuels: mathematics and hard science; Joseph Samuels: fine art; Ruella Forecourt: philosophy; September Hartman: literature (less by inculcation than by osmosis). As for history: nobody at all, as befits an orphan-American.

A couple of years passed until the next event I can think of to tell you about—time enough for a healthy sapling to grow into a small tree. Not that I knew any saplings or trees. In fact, I wish I had planted a sapling when I was twelve that I could have returned to when I was fourteen and sixteen and eighteen, the way a smart young boy did in one of the books I read about people who grow up and, you know, the tree grows up with them. I am and always have been about as far from a sapling-planting mentality as a person could get. I wish there were a tree now to prove I was once twelve.

What I will say about this period of a little more than two years that I will more or less not be talking about is that nothing and nobody at that time could deliver me from my isolation from all humanity; that was mine to be kept whole by; it guarded me fiercely. I don’t mean that there was not an informal mishmosh of good people in my life. I mean that I had a kind of force field around me made of tough talk and fake self-sufficiency, and nobody knew how to break through the force field. Here’s how I like to imagine they could have broken through the force field: they get together and throw me a birthday party where we all eat cake; they sing me that song; then, spontaneously, every single person I know in the world comes over and hugs me and squashes me almost to death. A big group hug from all the people I know, with me at the center.
Lots of things have happened since that time—some of them good, even. My life has changed in ways I intend to tell you all about presently and that might surprise you. But I never did get that group hug. Who ever gets the total group hug? Do you?

Okay, are you familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? This is the principle wherein an atomic physicist cannot bring her measuring rod close enough to an electron to measure it without altering the very properties of the electron she wishes to measure. Never mind that there was not so much as a single girl physicist who got her measuring rod anywhere
near
an electron in Heisenberg’s day that I know of; I think my point is obvious: as it is in quantum physics, so it is in love. And that is why, instead of asking Skip Hartman where she went when she left the house without me, I tailed her. This was on a cold afternoon in the late winter of my sixteenth year.

She walked over to Fifth Avenue and down Fifth to Seventy-ninth Street. I remained half a block behind her. I say “tail,” but this is just a slang term for secretly walking behind someone
and did not in any way satisfy my longing to be a part of her body.

She entered a flower shop, bought a bouquet of wildflowers, went to the corner, and boarded the crosstown bus. The hardest part of running alongside the crosstown bus was running alongside it through Central Park, where it picked up a lot of speed. Luckily Skip had kept me on a strict schedule of sprinting despite a bum knee that I kept bound in a tight bandage. Still, when she got off the bus at Seventy-ninth and Broadway I was trailing her by thirty yards, gasping for breath. And thank the god of all spies for the high breeze on that day; otherwise I would not have seen the few unmistakable wisps of hair that had come partially loose from the Hartman head just before that head dropped below ground level into the Seventy-ninth Street station of the Broadway IRT. She cleared the subway turnstile and I stood halfway down the steps just out of her sight, catching my breath, shivering, underdressed for the cold, carrying no token or money, for I was not a very clever spy.

A Number One train arrived. I eased myself down the stairs, leapt the turnstile, and boarded the train in the car behind the one Skip had boarded; this way I was able to follow her and keep an even distance just by sitting still. She stayed on the train for a long time. We were carried along, each in a separate lighted vessel that trembled in the dark tunnel that ran beneath the lighted air of the planet that kept us apart from the dark and stifling cosmos.

When Skip Hartman got off the train, we were so far underground that we had to take a cavernous elevator up to the street. I did not feel I could risk not getting on the same elevator that Skip got on, so I got on it, standing behind a tall man.
She did not discover me and I was a little disappointed: shouldn’t she know when the person she loved best in all the world was in the same elevator with her? The doors opened and we walked out into the street.

I could only imagine where we were, and I imagined we were in one of the suburbs of the fabled Hartman childhood: Mamaroneck, I thought, or Cos Cob. The houses of Cos Cob were much dirtier and closer together than I had expected. I had expected Cos Cob to be a seaside resort. I had expected Cos Cob to be green, or at least greenish-brown. But this place was a hilly, dirty, poor version of Manhattan. Old women walked the streets in clothes that were mismatched and worn out, their faces hardened by years of food shopping. Block after block we passed mediocre cars and peeling paint and cryptic graffiti, first Skip Hartman and, ten seconds later, I.

She went into a building in the heart of Cos Cob. The building was called Modernity Geriatric Center. I entered, and, based on the few trips I had made into Dante’s
Inferno
with Skip Hartman as my guide, I knew we were in the outermost ring of Hell. Here, there was no plaint that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal air to tremble, and so on. I looked around the lobby and recognized every old person sitting in a chair with bottomed-out expectations as one of those souls in the
Inferno
who had been born before the advent of Christ and whose only sin therefore was bad luck. Because these people could not worship God aright—or whatever the equivalent sin would be nowadays, which hell if I knew what that was—they were condemned to live for the remainder of eternity without hope. Even at the age of fifteen, I knew that was the best treatment a person could hope for in either Hell or an old age home.

I slipped past the indifferent guard at the front desk and followed Skip up two flights of stairs. I walked down a corridor of foul odors peering into each room, until I saw what I was looking for: Skip Hartman sitting on the edge of a bed and saying to the tiny drooling white-haired person in it, “Hello, Daddy.”

“Child, what month is it now?” he asked, in a little voice that resembled hers, only an octave higher.

She smiled warmly at him. “Why, it is September, Daddy, of course.”

“So it is.”

She presented him with the bouquet of wildflowers. He grabbed it from her, embraced the stems, squeezed them to his narrow chest, sucked in the air that was directly above the blossoms, and squealed, “Ooooooh, September, these are beautiful flowers.”

“I’m so glad you like them, Daddy. Shall I put them in a vase in the window where you can see them bright and splendid with the sunlight behind them?”

“No!” he said in a panic. “Let me hold them!” He sucked in the air above the blossoms in a paroxysm. I thought he was going to eat them.

“Yes, hold them,” she said. She reached forward with her hand and he cowered from it. When he saw that she meant only to touch his hair gently, he relaxed and stroked his flower stems and let her touch his hair.

As regards hair, his head resembled that of a mature dandelion; not the full yellow dandelion, that is, but the sparse, balding white one whose hair is in danger of blowing off its head. Skip seemed respectful of this danger as she placed the small groupings of hair in an arrangement that could only have been meant to satisfy her own sense of order, since her father didn’t
care and the other residents and staff of the Modernity Geriatric Center could not have been expected to notice.

“Oh, September, you are touching my head,” the ancient man said softly.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Cut it out.”

“Yes, Daddy.” She smiled warmly again, and glanced in my direction, and gasped. “I knew it!”

“You did?”

“Daddy, this is the girl I’ve been telling you so much about.”

“
What
is the girl?” He was nodding over his flowers.

“Look up at her, Daddy. She is the child who asked me to call her by the name of her dead brother. Do you remember that story?”

“No.”

“Mary, come here where he can see you.”

I said, “Shit, you had a father all this time?”

“Yes, I know that I waited for too long to tell you. To introduce you to my father is a very big step for me.”

I said, “Yeah, well getting screwed five times a week by a forty-year-old is a big step for me.”

Skip said, “You were on the subway. And in the elevator.”

“Yeah.”

“I sensed your presence keenly. I did not understand. It troubled me. I am glad to know you were there, else I would have thought I was going crazy.”

“Yeah, well good fucking thing you aren’t going crazy,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“September, you mustn’t forget me. Tell the little boy my name.”

“Hoving Harrington Hartman, I would like you to meet Mary White.”

“Hoving Harrington Hartman?” I said. “That’s your father’s name?”

“Yes!” Hoving said.

“You people are out of your minds!”

“Come away from the doorway,” Skip said. “Go to him. Go to him and touch him. He likes the physical contact.”

I walked toward him. “Hoving,” I said.

He stared at me as I approached. “Hoving,” he said, laughing. I reached for his head.

“Get away from me, you little pecker.”

I vigorously mussed the tufts of white hair, and he shrieked. A stout old Jamaican nurse marched into the room and addressed us all as children: “What is going on in here?”

“It’s all right, ma’am,” Skip said. “He doesn’t like to be touched.” The nurse left.

We took him to the Modernity courtyard, where it was lightly raining. Surrounded on all four sides by the pale-yellow brick building, the three of us held hands and strolled up and down the narrow slate passageways through the vegetation. “Rhododendron,” Hoving recited. “Ivy, pachysandra, birch, clover.” I thought of the long, thin, inverted-asparagus penis that I had seen hanging down between his little thighs when Skip swaddled him in diapers and thermal underwear for the walk, and his chestnut testicles in their droopy double sack.

“Crow, blue jay, seagull, starling, sparrow, cardinal, robin redbreast,” he said, far away, somnambulating through some lost age of Cos Cob.