Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (67 page)

This man may or may not adopt me, she means. I may or may not be nutty, defective, genetically weird.

I may be cursed or wrought with temper and disobedience or be boring to him. Or have persistently the wrong look on my face.

I may not be acceptable—to S.L.

His devotion goes in and out of focus. In the fluster of the moments is the fluster of a man with certain male gifts, male expertise, in small
machines, in certain kinds of business deals, certain kinds of competition and male acquaintanceship and friendship, in giving pleasure and in running things by showing or withholding approval.

The last skill is marred somewhat by his
tragic sense,
which has a major component of sheer nerves, a fear of being wrong and accused of it—punished for it.

So he tends to blur things a lot, to blur them and then, to be doubly willful, as if to insist that you get the point, he’s gone as far toward being pointed as it is fair to ask of him or as he’s willing—shrewd, demonic, cunning, and hidden warrior—to concede.

Devotion and eternal promises are usually contingent in real moments.

I could feel him being on trial, being in a state of reality of being tested but testing, too, trying me out, us out.

Neither S.L. nor I know if I am
sick to my stomach
or not—I feel him as partly hollow: him, the presence of his consciousness, was an actual chamber in the air for me, it was built onto my own head like a larger set of extra rooms and porches.

Some kinds of anxiousness are like fringe territories of sleep, the sinking and rising state and the undefinability of the medium of the air and ground. He has in himself a black shadow—guilt, self-doubt. Even if he was a truly pure substance, a mechanical but maybe holy figure, he would still doubt, but he is a liar, and a man whose lies were not always kind and not always self-serving, not
always
dangerous.

This man lies and fucks around, he’s a thief off and on, he has certain kinds of impostures as when he makes deals and gives orders and whatnot, and he slanders and he sells his good opinion—he’s not a snob, he’s complicitous—still, he’s not doing those things right this minute, and the extent to which he’s stained—dirtied by his life—the degree to which he’s no good because of all he’s done or whether, in spite of that or because of it and the way he does it, he is really good, and a decent man: that’s an unclear issue.

He’s not insane; he says so, as he lifts me to look at his Buick: “That cost plenty, I was insane not to get a LaSalle, well, what the hell, I’m not insane, I’m as American as apple pie and a real sucker when you get right down to it.” He said suddenly, “I alius embezzles me a littul money when I gets me dun chance, Marsa Sweetie-Poots. This car was a steal, but green is a bad color, nest paw? This is a reward for keeping my mouth shut but I ain’t a-gonna tell you the story today but when a man
fucks where he knows better that he shouldn’t fuck, he gots to sell sedans for the price of an itsy-bitsy coupé—heigh-ho, heigh-ho—that man is a friend of mine. You think well of that streamlining, Marsa Who-Who? Has GM done it up brown this year or
not?
What do you say, Sweetie-Piekins, isn’t that a knockout eight cylinders, isn’t it, isn’t it?”

I do think so, sort of yes. The car is enormous and clouded with moisture on metal and glass. For me, it is half cowlike, half grassblade (in its color) and entirely, seriously alive, as toys are, plus some added grownup, sizable element.

“I come home at night and pay my bills—I’m a father—so don’t make my car a lemon, you hear me, Ga(y)oddd.” He puts me down. “I’m reformed, I’m what you call a reformed character—when I get around to it. Actually, maybe, I am reformed when you come right down to it. That’s how it goes, another day, another dollar.… It all depends on Washington, D.C.”

I’m an experiment that includes my moral effect on S.L. And actions of the national government can affect this.

He tells me so: “I’m a reformed character, I am, I hereby promise to keep my trousers zipped. And my pockets dry. If things work out with you, Pooty-Poo, you show me you’re one hell of a
well
kid and you’ll be one hell of a
swell
kid in my book and I’ll show you a good time more than youuuuhuuuu dreeeem uvvv.” Pause. Then softer, or blurred, but over a hard thing, a rigid thing, he says: “I’ll show you what a father is, I’ll show you love and a half.”

He has to be corruptible at every moment, it’s part of being a man, a businessman, a man who’s on his toes; it’s part of being on the
qui vive
(he liked that phrase for a while), it’s part of his charm and his heat, part of his sense of the moment, it’s part of the reality of how things are.

He wants me to be corruptible but loyally so, along a single line, specialized in my corruptibility, not universally corruptible.

It’s not impossible that this can be managed.

Carrying me, he walks past the raindrop-beaded fringe curtaining of a wet-leafed willow.

He’s full of head-cockings and self-searchings; he says, “What’s what is this: I’m going to tell you something, Little One; I’m a free man, no one will let a man be a free man; but anyway, I charge for my services.”

There’s a sense in which I never knew what he meant.

It was all, all of it, over my head.

“It’s a hell of a fucking wet day, you know that, gorgeous? It’ll put roses in your cheeks. And that means thorns up your ass. Ho, ho, ho, ho.”

THORNS UP YOUR ASS
meant
a spoke in your wheel,
a comeuppance, a rival’s success, and your having to be humble; but often, it maybe only meant, in a kind of meanly knowing way,
Nothing’s perfect
—for you, either.

But he said, “Everything’s perfect, we have a little heaven right here: just stop and think about it.”

Then, a minute later, his breath is not convinced; he sort of blames me, or fate—I mean, he feels it really could be
perfect
and it isn’t.…

He’s in his thoughts and far off and then his attention comes rolling and roaring back like a train backing up in a switchyard, a monstrosity thing, a giant engine suddenly switched from track to track, then to a track aimed toward me. He smiles distantly: his attention, although it is fixed on me, is changeably receding: “A freckle-faced kid but you don’t have freckles—well, you could be well and sweet and make me happy.”

Then he turns into a new version of a sentry-nurse, half a beaming lighthouse, public, publicly friendly-faced, fatherly in the damp air. A wind has started up, and the clear spaces are larger, but we are still closed in. “But we’ll do what we can, can, can, to keep the wolves at bay.… And it’s all a can of worms, but so what? That’s what I say to you.” This is a variant of saintly-but-sneaky—he’s in motion; he’s all thunder and big stuff—dangerous amusements: he displays a high-keyed grimace, a locally sophisticated smile at the foggy air: he’s an O.K. fella, shy, distracted—handsome: that’s what he looks like right now, in the mist-walled moment:
Root for me.
He is not meanly vain, not now, only sometimes, in the way he dismisses everyone and the way he expects indulgence for what he does (because
when all is said and done, I’ve done my work, I’m a real man, goddamn it);
as a practical matter, real men are forgiven, they have absolution, sort of, as they go along, unless things go really wrong. With me here, he’s being
patient
—up to a point; he’s a good man, not a bastard—but he’s
a man.

He’s sort of on fire physically with restlessness, so that his softness and crooningness have a comic beauty.

He knows that. He has a depth of comic knowingness about himself and people—it’s noticeable.

I would say he has a public anxiety to feel deeply, this is part of his persona, to be someone who is
real
and
strongly true
—not a thief, not an embezzler, a man of great emotions, the best emotions, the greatest version of the emotions that there is.

He needs to feel he feels deeply as he needs to take a full breath from time to time. In his business life and with Lila, he is more ironic and sarcastic and good-hearted and shrewd and careful than he is a man of deep feeling. He’s experimenting now with deep feelings.

It’s as if he had dark shafts and mines in him in which fires rage in veins of coal—long-term fires.

He is filled by his appetite to feel. I can imagine stuff earlier that day, business meetings, and getting the car taken care of; he maybe carried on with a woman he doesn’t much like, a secretary—women encouraged him; he encouraged them to. Once, in a corner of a fire stairs, after a business meeting in which he was set apart from the money boys and felt hurt (I overheard him telling this to some men in a bar where I sat quietly), the consolatory sex—“They have the gelt, I have the prick-a-prick”—was lousy, or so he said, and now he’s like a child—innocent and infinite in passion. He’s like a child but one who’s infinitely powerful.

I feel his attention as a refined space that I am in.

He says, “If everyone would listen to me, the world would be a finer place to live in.”

He is deep-humored, with ogling eyes; his eyes do that as a joke. They’re deep-lidded and nursey, nursery kind and sweet, still a lecher’s eyes: he is a man of local wit.

Daddy lives physically, altering his surfaces and his tones as he goes along: “I don’t like books, they’re too mean, but I would like to write one book, I’d call it
The Book of Pleasures.
I am a perfect gentleman now that I am here with you. It’s a dogfight to see who takes care of you, Pretty One. Everyone in the house fights to be your nurse.” Nurse to the silent child. “I can see why. I’ll tell you something: a little sweet pity feels good on a wet day. It’s good to be near a warm heart on a sad day.”

The thickness and foreignness of his voice are mystery and clouded-ness—his has the nature of a voice from the cloud. The sound spreads out and does not focus: it is as if a steeple spoke. And Max’s voice is this man’s voice—Max is my real father: this voice used to play other games, used to speak differently.

The bluff of claiming equality with a man is not possible in the matter
of voices. In the transposition of my fathers was a great booming that affected my pulse. The way one has two parents—or one—or three—is like being in the soberly silver and dark air, with what was nearly a rainlight in it, walling us into the mist and occasional drips and spits of water and even a second or two of rain—this commits you to metamorphosis with good reason. I was a changeable realist. I don’t know if that is the same as disloyal or not. S.L.’s masculine intentions included having grains or particles in his voice of knowledgeable rhetorical music as such things go around here, and spreading and temporary shadings—masculine and cultivated—meanings that I cannot hope to match. The thoughts do not seem to come from his mouth and throat but from his will, a cloud; and they fill the entire field of unity of vanity that is suspended from his presence and that surrounds him and keeps him separate, as a matter of spirit, from the earth, from the rain.

The voice emerges from around the wells and barricades and roofs and arches of his body—
nicely ripe flesh, on this fella.
The voice was skylike for me—a sky over the real landscape and over an implied one in him and a ghostly version, a predicted one in me. The puffed and scaly and whistled and whittled and chiseled syllables pass above the ground of the world and over the listener’s half-conscious consciousness of speech. The lip shapings S.L. does seem more like pantomimes of meaning than aspects of taming and guiding the noise of his voice. His throat-hurled noises and the palatal echoes and nasal shadings are special to him—that stuff can’t be notated. He applies a male, pale lacquer of breath outside a syllable so that
are you smiling
has in the final breath of each syllable, in the paling and dwindling
r
and in the fluted
u
and the vertically falling and rising narrow
i
and in the pursed and then flung-open
ling,
an untoned wind of poetic intention: “Ahrrr—uhhhhh—ahhh
YuHuuUuuuu
uhhhhh ahhh
SMIIIIII
ieh, eh, ehhh, LiNGggg—ahhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh.” Two nasal notes, at the end, are a shift downward: all his tones, even those meant to cheer you, have a subcurrent of male lament. Male grief.

All his tones are new for me, are a different philosophy of speech from my other father’s, and from the women—different emotions, different sorts of attempts at meaning, different meanings, secrets:
secrets from women
—everything he says refers to everything differently. Think of the chambers of reference for me. I can’t listen hard and see clearly at the same time. I can hear and see at the same time in a nervous blur without thought, in action—if I can say that. Mostly, if I hear him well,
the fog-chambered street vanishes, the silver and brown spaces, some of which are bright silver off and on as the clouds and the sky shift in meaning and in luminescence. Instead, I see what he says, blinkingly, a squinched, knotted, vertiginously knotted picture, knotted on itself and yet clear, too, a sort of active picture, mysterious and lucid, as a dream is, but with his direct authority.

His mood, his moods, his ultimately gentle but also jaggedly tough, bigly harsh speech, his breath—his real breath is geological (and geographical) noise, and in it are veinings and plates, are words somehow. I guessed at them as at doorknobs, coat hangers, coffeepots. I guessed at them; I leaped at them; I caught them in the teeth of my mind. Then they were like toys in the light in my room at a given hour. The speeches were like boxes with toys and shadows in them, or like a shelf with toys on it, or a window with toys on the windowsill: the lines or shapes of words are in a jumble of glare, they are fields of attention that I find myself in or am whisked past. This campaign, this hobby cheered me.

In the brown-as-if-muddied and swathing and damp air, he is a serious and committed aesthete of flesh as well as of masculine style in consolations and in male bravuras of speech, his voice in its vocal careenings and its strutting. By the time we had walked along the street a little way, he had a memory of moments when he had felt strenuous charity toward the cleaned up (and pretty) kid.