Otherwise Engaged (5 page)

I wonder aloud to Reuben whether things would have been different if they’d had the half slab instead of the full slab. Baby back versus country style.

Reuben is not visibly amused, not by this or even by the name of the church my father proposed: Reality Church. I found it among some notes in my father’s journal, the day my brother, Mark, and I went to the Filbert Street flat in San Francisco to clean out his belongings. He had also listed sermon topics.

Reuben wants to know everything I removed from my father and Leigh’s flat. The Chinese lamp, the real Panama hat, the eyeglasses, and the journal. The fact that I counted his hats, that there were twenty-two; it all seems important to Reuben, everything I took with me that day.

Then after all this he leans back and says, “I gotta tell you, I’m not crazy about alcoholics.”

I don’t respond to this. He tilts his chair back even farther. I wonder if he will fall over.

Then he cocks both eyebrows, and says, “So how do you feel about tomorrow being his birthday?”

“I don’t feel anything,” I say. Which is the truth.

“Oh,” Reuben says. “So that’s what he took.”

I tried to talk with my mother about the divorce once, without success. She shut me down instantly, like a camera lens snapping a photograph at night. After several separations, leaving my father behind involved an elaborate spell; my silence was part of that. Yet they excelled at divorce, remarrying right away, fixing up their own places. It was as though they had secretly taken correspondence courses. The whole country acquired this skill, seemingly through the air, during the late sixties.

Years later, when my brother, Mark, and I became teenagers, we lived downstairs from my mother and stepfather, segregated from the main part of the house. There was an intercom, they could tell us when to turn down the music. If we needed to send messages, we wrote on a blackboard near the upstairs back door, which was deadbolted. Deadbolted from their side, from the inside. There was no way in. Blackboard chalk is what we had. Allowances. An electric frying pan, a small refrigerator. Everything we needed.

I mention this time to Mark on the telephone today and he asks me if I remember being locked out of the downstairs, having forgotten my key. The main house upstairs was deadbolted, so I was then locked out completely, from all of the house. And what I did was I broke into the downstairs. I smashed the glass on the door to my room, and entered like
a thief. It was never repaired. From then on there was a draft in my room, from the cardboard makeshift window: my punishment. I hadn’t remembered any of this until now. With my brother’s help I come back to myself at thirteen, crashing through the glass.

The Persian mystic poet Rumi says, “Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”

The cherry-wood sleigh bed we ordered from the American Express catalog came at 5 to 5. I waited all day for it, developing a fairly serious relationship with a dispatcher named Hank. Then Michael came home and took out his electric drill and his large metal toolbox with the double-drawer set, and within an hour it was assembled. Ceremoniously, we tipped the box spring into it. Our mattress protruded like a dislocated bone above the shiny new cherry-wood frame. Wrong side rails. We stared at it. We turned it diagonally and sideways, captivated. It seemed like there must be some way to make it fit, if we thought about it long enough. We are educated people, from good schools.

Michael took the bed apart and stacked the frame in the narrow Victorian hallway. This gives us about a three-inch passage. I will have to take another day off for the men to come pick it up and then another day off to have them redeliver the right one. In the meantime we have only mattresses on the floor.

Michael poured himself a shot of vodka from the emergency freezer bottle, raised his glass in a toast, and said, “Now we know why it was only five hundred dollars.”

I went into the bathroom and took a Valium. I have twenty-seven left, from the bottle of thirty that Reuben
gave me. I can only have twenty-seven more bad things happen to me.

Saturday. Michael walks in this morning and says, “We’re going to go to the zoo. That’s what I’ve decided.”

He likes primates; this is why he wants to go to the zoo. There’s never been a better man, or one more strange. I ask him what he likes about monkeys, leaning back into my pillows and drinking coffee. Just enjoying his face.

“I like monkeys because they’re more evolved forms of human beings,” he says. “Their trunks are built for strength and their legs simply get them around. They’re not hung up on legs, which are false gods.” He pauses, considering. “Their bodies are covered with fur, so they have a really good look. You take an orangutan and when he raises his arm the hair drapes about a foot long, like something Cher would wear.

“They’re great improvisational comedians. Like, a gorilla will have a tractor tire in his left hand and suddenly he notices someone in the crowd who’s pissing him off. And he drags the tire across the yard and he starts to beat a stick against a tree. He’s handling this guy, but
he’s still got the tire
. He hasn’t let that go.

“They don’t just go abruptly from one thing to the next, like we do.”

“What else?” I ask.

“They’re very direct. If they don’t like you, they throw their feces at you. That’s a freedom that we don’t have.”

He thinks a minute.

“That they even thought of that is cool.

“It’s a big thought, it’s a big idea. It’s not like turning to a person and saying, ‘You’ll never amount to anything.’ ”

Michael has always wanted to own a monkey, ever since he was a small boy. When asked why, he replies, “It would be my best friend.

“When I was twelve I went to the monkey cage at the zoo and I did something, like I smoothed my hair, and the monkey copied me completely. He put me in my place. He showed me how affected I was as a human.

“Monkeys can lead you to other great discoveries,” he says. “I always thought that you peel a banana from the top down. But you give a monkey a banana, and it splits it open from the side.”

“What about the way they smell?” I ask.

“The cages are what smell,” he explains. “They have to roam the house free. They probably need a separate mother-in-law apartment.”

The other thing Michael loves is frogs. You even mention the word “frog,” and he gets a silly look on his face, like he’s just fallen in love.

“What’s up with the frogs?” I say. Like Barbara Walters, I am prepared to ask the hard questions.

“You just have to look at one to know,” he says dreamily.

There is a silence. I know we won’t go to the zoo now; it has started to rain. But we can go there in our minds, through Michael’s voice.

My father, Jack, who when I was little used to make up stories about Clarence the Clam and Wally the Whale, also had this ability. But then he lost it. He stopped going places in his mind. Or maybe the places he went, he didn’t want to tell about.

• • •

Jack was forty-two when he died; his second wife, Leigh, was thirty-five. When it happened, my mother and Don had already been married nine years. She swore that the night my father died, his spirit flew around knocking things over in her house. A picture flew off the wall; books fell out of the bookcase.

I remember her face as she wept into a huge brandy snifter, trying to fit her whole head into it, “Now I have no one to torture.”

They met at Bible college, Johnson University. Bea and Jack. They fell in love, and since it was 1955, she quit school and they were married. He became a Presbyterian minister in Oakland, California; they had two children. In 1968 he grew a beard and left the church and my mother, moving with what seemed great relief across the bay to San Francisco to begin his new career in bartending. My brother, Mark, was eleven and I was two years younger.

After Jack moved out he had about a million apartments and jobs, mostly tending bar in fringe locations, collecting jokes late into the night. On our joint-custody weekends with him, my father took us to Giants games, packing his own cooler full of sangria. We went pee wee golfing and he ceremoniously sucked on his bota bag of Merlot at each hole, dancing a little swaying dance if he made it in below four strokes.

I loved Jack in a mythic and deeply suspicious way, but in the end I was freed. I can see clearly now. Death gives you a perfect little black frame, and after a few years, the picture develops.

My father was a drunk. The kind that never goes for help.

Beer with breakfast, Rolaids and aspirin throughout the day. Old at forty, prematurely gray and bloated, sweating out yesterday’s scotch and always with a drink in his hand,
always
. Repeating himself and telling the same stories twice nightly, each time with a slightly different cadence, the accent on a different phrase. Although he had eschewed the church, he never lost the evangelical, the habit of drawing out his vowels and pausing for emphasis. The sense of rapture denied lingered around Jack; his midnight glass-in-hand silences spoke of fevered regret, a great joy misplaced.

In 1969 he took what would be his last trip to his highly religious father’s house in Missouri. His father said, “Son, I understand you’ve strayed from the faith. I understand that.

“But how did you get so
far?”

When I was twelve Jack claimed not to believe in God anymore. He would look down at me, lift his eyebrows way up into his Panama hat, and say, “There’s no one up there,” and then he would laugh a dry little laugh, thinking the secret thoughts of fathers. Down but not out.

In my mind I see him cruising in a long-finned green ’64 Buick Le Sabre convertible, adjusting his hat so it won’t fly off. I remember him driving my brother and me to the bus depot at twilight with no headlights on at the end of one of our weekends together, a Hamm’s beer tucked between his legs on the car seat. I learned about the unsafety of men from him. It was a lie, but I learned it nonetheless.

His first job after the church was tending bar at Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf and then the Tiddly Room at the Caravan Lodge. Then the Fog Cutter on the Embarcadero, which is now Pier 23, which he would have hated. Then the
Vieni-Vieni, on Colombus. He moved around a lot; he gathered no moss. Then on Independence Day 1979, he gathered a logging truck which knocked him eighty-five feet, and that was that.

In the final months, I rarely saw Jack. He was driving long shifts for Yellow Cab, barreling up and down the deep San Francisco streets with abandon; happy, alone, oblivious to the scream of brakes. Telling jokes and collecting jokes. He rolled on, away from bartending and toward his new career.

I wish I could be a fare in his cab. Take a ride up California Street and watch the seagulls circle the top of Nob Hill. I would ask him to describe what had happened to him. Not the accident. Before that.

At my wedding, there will be no one to give me away. I resent the implications of that whole gesture, the woman being transferred bodily from one man to the next. But I have been cheated out of it. I have been cheated out of objecting to it.

I was twenty when Jack died. My stepmother, Leigh, was thirty-five, just about my current age; my father was two years younger than Michael is now. I find these facts grotesque, unbelievable, and yet oddly comforting for Michael and me. We have passed an exit.

I recall that I once asked my father not to drink so much. I said that it upset Leigh, whom we adored.

He said, “Mind your own beeswax.”

I don’t remember our last conversation.

We never remember what is important, only what matters to us.

• • •

On the first night I met her, Leigh took off her shoe and threw it at her son Jason across the dinner table. He said something that upset her, and she took off her clog and pitched it at him. I thought this showed considerable zest. Leigh reacted to stimulus on a moment-to-moment basis. If shoes needed to be thrown, she threw them. You can’t teach that.

She was always earning my admiration with exhibitions of fearlessness. Once at a party Leigh was talking to a small group of friends when Jack heard her say the word “prick,” and he remarked on how he didn’t like her saying it. He had an ugly sort of entitlement happening around his mouth as he did this. Leigh stopped and looked at him for a long moment as if gauging the distance between their bodies and the inherent wind factors, and then she leaned forward slightly and spoke clearly, three times in rapid succession.

“Prick. Prick. Prick.”

Leigh nipped things in the bud, it was exciting to be around her. And Leigh could cook, could lay waste to whole kitchens. When she was done, the floor would be covered with onion skins and butter wrappers and crumbs; the sink would be coated with nutshells and potato peelings. Inexplicably there would be a hammer on the stove, standing on its head.

Leigh did something to spinach with garlic and olive oil that made it like silk. I’ll never know what that was. She took that with her, along with a special chocolate mocha cake that elicited groans. People would travel from afar and they would stop at her kitchen on Chestnut Street for that cake. She served it with whipped cream. Because Leigh wasn’t afraid of whipped cream the way most people were. She wouldn’t whine about the calories and the butterfat. Leigh
would just whip up a bowl of heavy cream and then she would place it by the cake pan and you’d walk in and there it would be. Whipped cream, with warm cake.

Leigh broke the spell of gloom for my brother and me. She did it with her cooking and her laugh. For Jack, too. She made it look easy, life. She made living seem natural. She loosened the vise of circumspection. She loosened the vise of self-consciousness. You found you could breathe in a room with Leigh. You took long, healing breaths.

It was Leigh who said, “Don’t believe your own shit.”

She taught me how to make spaghetti sauce and how to sing a high note when you added the tablespoon of sugar, which was Leigh’s secret to ideal spaghetti sauce. That must have been one of the last times I saw her alive.