Wakefield (33 page)

“What's your favorite stadium, Comrade Zamyatin?” the bartender asks.

“Don't have a favorite,” says Ivan, “but I hate the one in Chile where Pinochet executed people.”

Wakefield basks in this familiarity. His friend has a sense of belonging and of time quite unlike his own fractured one. He's painfully aware that he has more moods than the weather.

His slave-quarter apartment smells dusty and warm, an evocative aroma, like that of an old lover, or rather, of all his old lovers. His bed, behind its velvet curtains, sighs with pleasure at his return. He opens the shutters and lets in the light; it filters through the branches of the old magnolia. A branch has bent over his chaise longue on the balcony, which is covered with leaves. A spider has made a magnificent web over one of the bookcases.

The profound silence of late afternoon in the old quarter is deeper than he remembers. There's only the gurgling sound of the angel in the courtyard fountain, holding the fish spout. He puts a Bach compilation in the CD player and unpacks slowly, laying out the trophies of his journey on the mantelpiece: the whiskey glass from the Home of the Future, the gargoyle's ear from the Tribune Tower, the dirty quartz from Gatobilis, the finely milled eucalyptus-oatmeal soap from paradise, a gold coin from the age of Pericles. He shakes out his kilims and drapes them over the balcony railing to air, sweeps the floors, dusts the bookcases, changes the sheets, then lies down on the freshly made bed and drifts off to sleep to a Baroque melody.

He dreams he's in a seventeenth-century casino. Elaborately coiffed ladies and gentlemen are frozen around the gaming tables, and everything is as still as a painting. Wakefield wanders among the figures—he touches one—they are made of wax. A voice says, “They are waiting for you to make a speech.” There's a sound like a judge's gavel falling on a wooden desk and the figures become animated.

Wakefield awakens at the sound of the gavel, but it keeps pounding. Slowly, it dawns on him: this must be the Devil's starter pistol! He looks around the room, but there's no one there. The hammering continues, joined a few minutes later by a strange scraping sound. Wakefield sits upright in bed and looks at the clock. The digital face is blank; it must have come unplugged. The hammering and scraping become more and more frantic; Wakefield goes into the bathroom and opens the small window that looks onto the courtyard next door. His neighbor, whom he has seen but never met, is standing on a ladder, hammering on the brick wall his courtyard shares with Wakefield's bedroom. Several workmen are milling about, scraping mortar from loose bricks and stacking them in a huge pile.

Wakefield calls out and asks his neighbor what's going on.

“Restoration!” the man shouts back.

“Well, bully for you, but the noise is unbearable!”

“I have permits!” the man shouts, and keeps hammering.

We'll see about that, thinks Wakefield, closing the window.

The hammering stops at dusk and recommences at dawn. Wakefield makes inquiries; the man has indeed been certified by the city to restore the old building next door. The townhouse was the birthplace of a famous jazz musician in the nineteenth century, but over generations it has been carved into a warren of cheap apartments, housing winos, whores, bohemians, and sailors on leave. Now the real estate is extremely valuable, and his neighbor plans to restore the house brick by brick to the original splendor into which the bawling baby musician was born. The powerful city agency charged with preserving historical authenticity has given him the permit. No one can tell him how long the project will take.

When he sees Zamyatin and complains about the noise, his pragmatic friend is not sympathetic.

“The economy is booming, there's construction and renovation everywhere. It's progress, comrade! Why should this optimistic noise stop because you want some peace and quiet?”

It is true, the sound of pneumatic drills and hammers is as ubiquitous in America as the crowds lined up in front of new restaurants on Friday nights. But Wakefield has a feeling that the project next door is of another order. It is neither construction nor renovation: it is something called restoration. He's not even sure what that means, but it sounds ominous, like the guy wants to reestablish a monarchy or something. Maybe Wakefield is being punished. The high tide of prosperity has lifted all boats, including his, and now he feels seasick and sad.

“It's not a crack in your head, it's a flaw in the universe,” Ivan says, mocking his queasiness. “Let's see, what have you done to deserve this? You seduce anxious rich people and cause them to take their anxieties to tropical islands and exotic cities, driving up real estate values and increasing my business, and I thank you! You are like a pimp,” he adds, ordering another vodka on Wakefield's tab. “You can't be a pimp and suddenly hate prostitution.”

Every day, all day long, the hammering continues. The guy next door seems possessed by demonic, maniacal energy, and Wakefield spends more and more time away from his apartment to escape the noise.

One afternoon, while he's reading
Crime and Punishment
in the bar and Zamyatin is chatting up some sexy librarians, a young, smiling woman appears at the window. “It's me, Dad, Margot. I thought I might find you here.”

Wakefield hugs his daughter, profoundly ashamed for his neglect. “You look great, honey! You know, I just got back.… How did you find my hangout?”

“I have my sources.”

She sits down with him and orders a beer.

“My life's a mess. My shrink says we need to talk.”

“Sure, sweetheart,” Wakefield says, trying to quell his anxiety, “what do you want to talk about?”

“My shrink says that I have a problem with men because of you. I really don't know you, you know? Marianna says nobody can know you. She says you're a cipher.”

So it's judgment day, just as he feared. Wakefield is aware that he's been, at the very least, a complete jerk.

“What can I say? I could tell you everything that's ever happened to me, but it won't help much, I promise. Psychiatrists are full of shit, you know.”

Margot seems to have expected this resistance, and she's come prepared to breach her father's defenses. She begins reciting a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It's a sad poem about a guy driving around in a car with changes of clothes for all his different lives. The last line of the poem is about his children: “they've dropped out into the Jungian nothingness / with parents their own age.”

The pathos gets to both of them, actually, and Margot ends up sniffling. Wakefield puts an arm around her and smooths her brown hair with a caress.

“Maybe we just need some time together,” she says, wiping her eyes.

Wakefield feels like the most abject bastard on earth. “I never had much time, honey, but you're right. We should be together while you're here.” He thinks for a moment. “Maybe we could go to a movie.”

He's struck gold; Margot's eyes light up. “I
love
the movies.
The Moviegoer
is my favorite book. I'll skip the cataloguing workshop.”

For the next three days, Wakefield and his daughter go to the cinema, something Wakefield wouldn't ordinarily do. He's always disliked the feeling he gets on reentering reality when the film is over, and being with Margot makes it even stranger. He feels her presence in the dark, his spawn, his flesh and blood, as they say, but she's an alien presence. In some ways, though, Margot is very much him, with her own specific questions. On the one hand, she has questions about herself, her mother, and him that seem to Wakefield a different order of inquiry from his own; they are female concerns, they deal with the dimensions of the intimate circle, and he fears intimacy. On the other hand, her mind moves quickly from the particular to the general. Whether because she is well read or because she is a librarian whose profession demands that she answer questions ranging from the trivial to the cosmic, Margot has sudden insights that startle Wakefield as if they had come from his own mind.

They go to matinees when it's still light outside and come out after dark, and everything seems changed. Reality is so tawdry compared to the screen; melancholy and sadness rule the wet sidewalks, the dirty walls, the stupid faces. He feels disoriented, cast out of the light into this solid weirdness. And he's not used to walking with someone who sometimes takes his arm and leans close to him, puts her head on his shoulder.

Part of the problem with the movies, he thinks, is that a film can tell a whole life story in two hours, whereas real life takes years and years, and though you can talk about your life—as Wakefield does with Margot, in short installments—you can never tell how the story ends. The moral of the movies is that everyone's life can have a plot, but life is really more like the parking lot outside, mysterious and unscripted. You can drive off it and get killed, but it wouldn't make any sense. Margot, however, is excited and animated after each film. Sometimes she calls Marianna from the bar (where they go for a drink after the movies) and tells her the plot, as if the film has somehow advanced her to a new level of understanding.

Every night he walks Margot back to her hotel, usually pretty drunk by then, and they laugh about Zamyatin's increasingly desperate come-ons. He sees Margot as his ideal librarian with perfect muse potential, and he knows she's perfectly unattainable since she's Wakefield's daughter. Every night Wakefield returns to his apartment and lies awake, worried about the racket he knows will start promptly at seven
A.M.
His brief, violent dreams are like movies without a script, and every morning he wakes up as cranky as a kid at the first thud of the hammer.

The day before Margot's scheduled departure Wakefield experiences an unfamiliar feeling. He's going to miss her when she's gone. Walking through the dark streets after their last movie, he tells her about the night manager of the bookstore where he'd worked, the saddest person he ever knew. Every afternoon this man would go to a movie, and when the shift was over at midnight, he saw another one. In those days disaster movies were fashionable. People liked to watch people die or be saved from towering infernos and man-eating aquatic creatures. He would stay in the theater until dawn, then go home to sleep until the next matinee. This man was happy only when he was at the movies. Reality, of which the bookstore clerks were such a substantial portion, disgusted him.

“I suppose when you're gone,” Wakefield concludes, “I'll just have to keep going to the movies.”

“Maybe you can take a date to the movies now, someone who's not your daughter, so there will be no incest taboo.” She lays her head on his shoulder.

When Wakefield was about twelve he had taken his first date to the movies, but he was too shy to put his arm around her, so he held her watchband for two solid hours. The movie was a Western. He can still remember thundering herds of cattle and the smell of her cheap cologne. When they left the theater he felt worn out, like the grass trampled under the hooves of the movie herd. Maybe only adolescents can take the movies, thinks Wakefield, which is why most movies are made for them. They use the dark theater to project their own films of stickiness and desire; the feature film is only background to the more intense drama in the seats.

“I read somewhere that movies are actually alien entities,” Margot tells him. “They're beings made out of light who slowly remake our lives in the shapes of the stories they tell. Don't you love that? Isn't it scary?” She says this as if she doesn't think it's scary at all.

Wakefield thinks it's very scary, but he doesn't let on. He kisses Margot good-bye on the lips and feels for a moment the hidden body that Zamyatin had no doubt intuited correctly. He's glad that whatever Margot's narrative expectations of a dad had been, they were briefly met. He silently wishes her many, many more movies, better and better endings.

With Margot gone, and the infernal hammering showing no signs of abating, Wakefield starts to fantasize about living in a tent somewhere in a vacant lot or, even better, in a swamp or a national park. He reads books about portable houses and nomadic furniture. Anything you can't fold up and take away with you is a blight on the environment and an insult to liberty, one nomad author claims. Wakefield makes a note on a cocktail napkin:
I believe in the tent, the foldup table, and the trailer
. He reads the stats on contemporary nomadism: lots of people, driven mad by instant suburbs, renovation, restoration, and condoification, are leaving everything behind and taking to the road. For every housing development carving up the land, a flock of houses on wheels and pontoons is taking off somewhere. The mobile home, the floating boat house, the tent—these are the abodes of the future! Even newly constructed houses are impermanent. A house in the suburbs is not portable but is certainly interchangeable with any other house in any other suburb, while the suburbs themselves evaporate rapidly and without a trace. America is on the move. Redbone can keep his bunker!

“Personally, I like a place with some history,” Zamyatin says as he and Wakefield nurse their drinks, “but too much history can be bad for your mental health.” He has a theory that poets should live in one place just long enough to acquire nostalgia for it. When that putative Eden is destroyed by History (and History inevitably destroys everything), poetic invention begins. “In your trailer parks,” he says, rather gravely for Zamyatin, “paradise has already been compromised, perhaps by the sins of immigrant parents. I think the presence of wheels under one's consciousness permeates the body with unsteady vibrations that are not conducive to creation.”

“The guy next door probably grew up in a trailer on the edge of a swamp subject to tidal instability, and that's why he's obsessed with bricks,” Wakefield agrees.

Zamyatin closes his eyes oracularly. “His body vibrates and it is only when he touches bricks that he becomes momentarily calm. Maybe he is a poet, like me.”