Nothing Is Terrible (21 page)

John Hand stared open-mouthed at the crotch of my pants, which I unzipped. “Oh no,” he said, and turned around and started to walk away down the flagstones. “Oh no, no, no, this will not do.”

Skip and Hoving walked inside the house together, and I
finished the gesture of taking the talked-about penis out of my pants. There it was, reader, hanging out for all the world to see, only no one was looking; not John Hand, not Skip Hartman, not even me. So like the fellow said, was it really there?

After we locked Hoving in the guest room of Tommy’s house, Skip and I put Myra in the car and drove down to the Marmot courthouse, where they were holding the prisoner. The courthouse and the police station took up an entire block of downtown Marmot across the street from the Town Square. The Town Square was a prim hunk of wilderness with a pond, a gazebo, tall shade trees, and hillocks and meadows. The courthouse and the police station shared a wide, elongated rectangle of flat green crew-cut lawn. They were fraternal twin brick buildings of three stories, each with a wide marblesque staircase that led up to a row of white Ionic columns.

I pushed Myra’s wheelchair up the ramp along the side of the courthouse steps. The ramp marred the grandeur of the steps and seemed out of keeping with Marmot’s civic intentions. A gaudy chandelier hung from the ceiling of the main hall of the courthouse. A uniformed officer greeted us and led us to the back of the main hall. We took an elevator down a floor and walked (or rolled) along a low-ceilinged corridor lit with fluorescent bulbs.

“Where are we?” Skip asked.

“We’re on our way to the holding facility.”

Wheeling Myra, I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Facility.”

She gradually craned her neck around to look at me. “Fa-ci-li-ty,” I said, and nodded at her authoritatively. She rolled her eyes.

We entered a yellow concrete room with no windows. Another man in uniform who had big red hands waved in front of each of our bodies an electronic object that looked like half the handlebars of a girl’s bicycle. He left and came back with Tommy, and my heart filled with admiration. If there was someone who could make despair into a visual style, it was he. He stood several feet into the room and glanced at the three of us. He looked down at his feet and waved: that was his greeting. His body listed to one side but his head remained vertical, as if his ear were pressed to an invisible door behind which a secret conversation was taking place. He had applied gobs of pomade to his light hair to darken it and bring forward the shape of his skull. His face was shaved. Dark, livid rings marked the perimeters of the skeletal holes that accommodated his eyes. Already a thin man, he had lost ten or fifteen pounds. His personal jail uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue work shirt was neatly pressed and loose on his body. A small yellow Walkman was clipped to the waistband of the pants. The sleeves of the shirt were rolled halfway up his arms with a sharply creased fold in the cuff. He wore brown plastic sandals and gray cotton socks.

“As you know, Myra, I have a lot of problems finding shoes that fit me well,” he said, looking at his feet still. The man with the red hands stood behind him and in front of the closed door of the yellow room. Skip and I sat in molded plastic chairs. I held one of the handles of Myra’s wheelchair and casually moved her back and forth as if rocking a baby to sleep in its carriage. Tommy said, “My right foot is bigger than my left and my heels are very narrow whereas the toes at the front end of my foot are very wide. My feet were swelling up for some reason and they were blistering up along the knuckle of the toe in
my usual shoes, so the town government issued me these sandals, which is why I’m wearing them. Plus I listen to a lot of Bach now so I don’t move around much anyway.

“Sometimes I’m listening to the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello on my headphones in my cell in the middle of the day, and I feel like I can hear Pablo Casals talking to me. Sometimes he’s just saying ‘Unhhh’ and sometimes he speaks in complete sentences like ‘All is not well’ or ‘Everything won’t turn out fine.’ I have a toothache but I’m not telling anyone about it. It doesn’t hurt that much, it’s just that sometimes it makes one whole side of my head hurt. They have a bargain toothpaste here at the jail that I don’t think is effective. Plus I forget to brush because of the Bach. The Bach doesn’t make me feel better but it helps to pass the time because there’s one hour of TV a day and it’s always during a bad show. I can play the Bach whenever I want but I’m trying to be careful so the batteries don’t run down. Could you bring me fresh batteries?” he asked, looking at his sandals.

“I’m so glad you’ve discovered Bach,” Skip said.

Tommy rushed forward, reached under and behind the armpits of Myra, pulled her toward him, and hugged her hard and long. “My sweetheart is in a coma or something,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?” Myra’s mouth hung open and she seemed to be staring at a blank area of the yellow wall. I did not understand what governed her ability to speak and move at some times and not others, but I sensed in Myra at this moment a conscious decision; I sensed whim, whimsy even. Yes, her mouth hung open and a trickle of drool spilled over the bottom lip, but were not the corners of her mouth upturning in the slightest? Perhaps I was not the only person in the world who registered the correctness of the pairing of this woman
with this ailment. Could it be that a certain muted and immobilized girl was playing it up a little, was discovering, for the first time in her life, the pleasures of theater?

Tommy released Myra. Skip said, “I shall bring you the batteries you need. Double A?”

“I don’t want
you
to bring them. I want her to bring them. The invalid. She brings them or it’s no good. You bring them,” he said, pointing at Myra, “or nothing will ever be good.”

“F,” Myra said. Oh, I thought I knew what two words were coming and I hoped she’d be able to produce them.

“Foo,” Myra said.

“What, honey?”

“Food.” (Oh well.)

“Oh, you want to know how the prison food is!” Tommy said. “Everybody,
this
is my wife. The gal I married is in her coma or whatever, but she can still ask after my well-being. God, I love you, honey.” He embraced her again.

“That’s not what she was doing,” I said.

“What?”

“You think everything everyone says in the world is about you. She’s hungry. She wants food.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“Because, you selfish idiot. Who even cares if you’re in jail? I’m glad you’re in jail.”

Tommy lunged anemically at me and the guard caught him. He said, “Okay, fine, Myra, maybe you are hungry. I don’t give a damn about any of you people anyway. You can let me go now, I won’t go near them,” he said to the guard, who was hugging him from behind. The guard let go. Tommy placed the earphones in his ears and pressed the
PLAY
button on the Walkman that was clipped to his waistband. He went and stood facing
one corner of the yellow cement room and waved his right arm from side to side across his torso with flowing undulations of his wrist, as if moving the bow of a cello.

Skip drove Tommy’s big sedan back to the house. I sat in back with Myra. Midway on the ride home, Myra spoke my name. I turned to her. Her hand came slowly up toward my face and poked me in the eye. Maybe she was trying to remove a stray eyelash.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day I woke up at dawn and entered Myra’s room. She lay with open eyes in her dark, half-empty bed. I kissed her cheek. Then I went into the room where Hoving groggily reclined, scooped him up, put him in my car before he knew what was happening, and left Marmot without a word to Skip Hartman.

It was a rainy day. If nothing else, I came away from this visit with a new mental picture of Skip Hartman’s hair. The new hair was without its previous machinelike segmentation, reader. The new hair not only touched her shoulders but cascaded over her shoulders. It had a curl and a wave. Many strands of the new hair fell about her shoulders on their own, away from the central body of the hair. Many of the strands of the new hair were gray against the sort of manila field of the rest of her hair. She was forty-two years old. She was a mature
woman with gray hair who did not need someone like me who was a child and a fool who caused her grief. If I could not witness such a monumental change in the hair of someone I loved while it was happening, I might as well be dead. In the car on the Taconic State Parkway, my face imitated the sky.

Hoving said, “I am not accustomed to traveling in my bedclothes. Now that Labor Day has passed I like a pair of dark worsted wool slacks and a button-down poplin open at the collar.”

“Did you notice her hair?”

“My daughter’s hair has been graying for some time. It’s inhumane to force a man to travel in his pajamas.”

“So change.”

“Change me,” he said with a beatific smile.

I slammed on the brakes and lost control of the car on the wet, oily road and skidded and turned into the skid and came to a stop on the grassy shoulder. I got out, opened the back door on the passenger side, opened the front door on the same side, lifted little Hoving Harrington out, and placed him in the backseat. I removed his overnight bag from the trunk, took off his red flannel pajamas, changed his diaper, and put the fresh clothes on him. I stood outside the car in the grass and leaned in, manipulating his body. Drops of water hit my back through my frayed T-shirt. I noticed Hoving’s large speckled head and the thin, isolated clumps of white hair that made his head resemble the head of an old dandelion.
Look at the old, pale dandelion and the bright young dandelion side by side
, a voice came back to me.
It is lovely to try to hold the two in your mind as one, for they are the same flower. See how the wind comes to kill the old dandelion. It is the very death of the old dandelion that spreads the seeds that make the new dandelion. See how the old
dandelion willingly allows itself to be destroyed by the wind to honor and uphold the next generation of dandelions
.

We beat the morning rush-hour traffic into the city and I called Skip Hartman on the phone.

“Skippy,” I said.

“What?”

“Your hair changed.”

“What?”

“Your hair is different.”

“Different from what?”

“I just wanted you to know I noticed.”

“I see.”

“Skippy?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

She did not respond.

I said, “You don’t have to feed Myra baby food.”

“What?”

“Myra can chew really hard.”

“Yes. Good-bye, Mary.”

“Wait!”

“What do you want?”

“The sun came out in the city. Is it still raining there?”

“Good-bye.” She hung up.

I was in a state of agitation. I changed into my pink Lycraspandex exercise unitard with the white stripe down the side and left the house. I jogged over to Second Avenue and took a right, heading downtown. The unitard made me feel snug inside my own body and I knew that Mittler, whom I was going to visit, would not approve of its color. Mittler favored clothing that was loose and natural and free and brown; he did not want
to startle the animals of Central Park. Mittler was the animal I wanted to startle, or so I imagine I thought, but who knows if, at the age of seventeen, I thought anything at all?

When I reached Second Street I took a left and sprinted until I came to the condemned building. Chet stood out front, looking robust in a clean shirt. The sun shone on his back from the east.

“Hey, Chetty, looking good.”

“September is a good month for me.”

“How’s the dysentery?”

“I’m getting a solid turd.”

“Nice.”

“It holds together.”

“Have you seen Mittler?”

“That I cannot say.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, say.”

“Why?”

“Fuck.”

“He’s not here.”

“Can I wait here with you?”

“It’s funny.”

“What?”

“People want to stick together. It’s bad luck.”

“Bad luck?”

“Well, think of shit. Shit is lucky, compared to people. Sticking together is not a whole lifelong project for shit.
I
want my shit to stick together in nice firm little groups, but that’s me imposing my needs on the shit. The shit itself doesn’t care. The shit doesn’t give a shit.” This he found very funny and leaned against the wall laughing between two graffiti messages, one saying,
NO POLICE
and the other,
BEWARE OF MUGGERS—DON’T
GET CAUGHT ALONE
. After a while he sat down and fell asleep on a mound of sand on the sidewalk.

Chet’s friend who looked like Chet came out of the building. I said hello.

“How they hanging?” she said.

“Seen Mittler?”

“He’s been in the park the last few nights.”

“Central Park?”

“What’d you think I meant, Tompkins?”

“Is Chet all right?” We looked down at Chet.

“Chet’s going to die.”

I ran up to Tenth Street on Avenue B. On Tenth I ran over to Fifth Avenue. I ran up Fifth, and when I got to Central Park I borrowed a kid’s skateboard that kind of was just there in the grass where the kid wasn’t paying attention to it. This skateboard I used to get me up to 108th Street near the tree from which Mittler hung a minimum necessary amount of outdoor supplies with a strong fishing line. Coming over a hill on foot, I saw him in profile at the base of a tulip tree. The shape of Mittler’s head in the northern woods of Central Park in the late morning with the sun coming almost straight down onto his hair reminded me of the noble head shapes of our early hunting-and-gathering biped forefathers.

“Hi, cutie,” I said.

“I’ve been anxiously awaiting your return from Marmot. Don’t call me cutie. I don’t want to know what happened in Marmot.”

“Okay.”

“So don’t tell me what happened there.”

“Okay.”

“I think it’s best if I don’t hear about it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “I’m scouting out this tree.”