Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 7

  I spotted my stepmother by the dry fountain, where she was watching some young people make a film. I left my cistern at my father’s feet and jogged to her. Since I’d seen her last, Lucy had reached a new status of tiredness and age. Looking at her, “lady” is what I thought, a word that summed up her sparse, dry hair, her mottled cheeks, her many clattering bracelets and her lipstick, an alarming coral shade leaking into fresh hairline rills around her mouth. Her right eye was bloodshot and brimming with brine. We embraced. All she wore against the chill was a lamé shawl over a flimsy black top, so thin I could feel the gooseflesh on her hard arms.

  “How long’s he kept you out here?” I asked her.

  “Three hours. I think him and that fat person are about ready to go off somewhere and have a civil union.”

  “We’re going. I’ll grab him.”

  “It’s all right. I’m only cold on my body. He’s happy. Let him play.”

  I pointed at her eye. “Are you high, Luce? Half high?”

  “Big Iranian bitch on my volleyball team. Stuck her finger down my eye. Seeing double now.”

  I said I was sorry to hear it. She shrugged. “Beer helps,” she said.

  Lucy’s gaze drifted back to the little film crew doing their shoot. The movie revolved around a single special effect: a narrow youth with a vest of birdseed glued to his nude chest to provoke a pigeon attack. Cameras were poised but the pigeons were not cooperating. Too much free seed was falling off of him, and so no birds were bothering to peck him on the skin.

  A girl in ratty hair and paint-speckled jeans walked over. She’d written “Producer” in Magic Marker on her shirt. “You’re in our shot. Would you mind getting out of the way?” the girl said, looking at Lucy as though offended by her makeup and glinting shawl.

  “Yeah, kind of,” Lucy said.

  “Excuse me?” the girl said.

  She and the girl might have had words had not my father’s shouting voice come to us from the chess tables, so loud and urgent I thought he’d been attacked.

  We ran to him, but there was no emergency. He’d won a game was all. He was still in a gloater’s ecstasy when we reached him. “Oh, God, yes,” he was saying. “Oh, man alive, does that feel good.”

  “You sure put me in trouble, Roger,” Dwayne said. “One more, now? For tens?”

  But my father wasn’t ready to leave aside the glory of the moment. “To hell with orgasms,” he mused, leaning into the table. “I’ll take a clean rook-ending any day. I mean, Jesus, Wade, what is it? What is it that makes it such a joy to beat a man at chess?”

  “Music,” the hustler said. “Artistry and shit. Now, tens?”

  The storm wind rose, and my father cocked his head to watch a flock of sycamore leaves swirling down. His fur collar stirred against his jaw.

  “You like this coat?” Lucy asked me. “He saw it in the window at Barney’s. Eighteen hundred bucks.”

  My father glanced at us with a halfway scowl and turned back Dwayne.

  “Fischer said, ‘Chess is life,’ ” announced my father.

  Dwayne ran his tongue under his lip. “Fischer said all sorts of stuff,” he replied. “He said there were tiny Jews living in his teeth.”

  “It’s better than life. In the world, there’s no such thing as a clean escape, if you follow me,” my father said. “I mean, you could keep cleaning my clock all night, but at the end of the day, you’ve still got a broken tooth and a snot booger on your collar and a head full of garbage that keeps you up at night, but—”

  “Hey, motherfucker, be nice,” said Dwayne.

  The rain began, a soft silver sound in the high dry leaves. The loose crowd of spectators dispersed. The other hustlers turned peevish faces toward the sky, then rolled up their boards and folded them into long zippered cases.

  “Italian,” my father said. “That’s what I could go for now.”

  “We do have a tab, here, Roger,” said Dwayne.

  My father’s losses came to forty dollars, but Dwayne did not look pleased, even as he pocketed the bills. Dwayne held out his hand to the rain, and the drops made dark spots on his dry hand. He shook his head. “Rain is a heavenly thing,” he said. “And it comes to us from a heavenly direction, but it does make for one unheavenly motherfucker of an evening out here on this boulevard.”

  My father turned to Dwayne and fixed him with a stern, paternal look.

  “You look like a veal man to me,” my father said. “When’s the last time somebody set you up with a nice hot plate of veal?”

  “I can’t recall,” said Dwayne.

  “You come with me,” my father said. “We’ll get you squared away.”

  “Roger—” Lucy started.

  “Uh-oh,” said my father gravely. He was staring down at his right shoe. The laces had come undone, and he squinted up at Lucy and me, uncertain and overwhelmed by this new problem whose scope he seemed unable to gauge. Without hesitating, Lucy knelt and tied his shoe. Then she set off toward MacDougal Street. “There’s a jolly person,” said my father, watching Lucy’s rump swinging in her jeans. “Does she go to your school?”

  The restaurant Lucy chose was an old-style place of dark wood where large men in collared shirts stood at the bar and roared at one another over a calming frenzy of piped-in mandolins.

  “Does this look all right to you, Rog?” Lucy asked my father.

  My father turned to Dwayne and clapped a hand to his meaty upper arm. “What say, there, Wade? How’s your appetite, buddy? Ready to hit a lick on some veal?”

  “Let it happen,” said Dwayne.

  The host appraised us—Dwayne, my father in his haute Western upholstery, Lucy and her weeping eye—and led us to a dark rear room. The only other diners there were a well-dressed elderly black couple who had the enclosed, penitent air of people who had just finished an argument.

  “Piña colada, please,” Dwayne told the host before we sat.

  “Your server will be here in just a moment,” he said.

  “Piña colada! Make it two. One for him, one for me,” my father said.

  “Beer,” said Lucy. “Whatever’s coldest. Vodka back.”

  The host departed in a smolder. My father looked down at my tea cistern, which stood between our chairs.

  “What the hell is that thing?” he asked.

  I explained it to him.

  “You’re in the beverage trade?” he asked.

  “I’m an industrial designer. An inventor. You know that, Dad.”

  He grunted. “Go to law school. Make a difference.”

  “I do make a difference,” I said. He looked at me. I sputtered on about what a grand business it was, to be a foot soldier in mankind’s never-ending struggle for convenience, and how the small, unobserved technologies—remote key fobs, ballpoint pens, Q-tips—shaped our lives in more significant ways than music, books, or film. “People who do what I do, Dad, we’re the executors of important energies, the same stuff that builds nations, the conviction that—”

  The waiter arrived, and my father lunged for his piña colada. Then he sucked at it as though it were an oxygen mask.

  “You have to help me here,” said Lucy quietly.

  “With what?” I asked.

  “Don’t let him get a second drink,” she said. “It’s the meds, I guess. He can’t handle it anymore. He had three wines at the Angus Barn a few weeks back. He was eating stew with his hands. Ow, fuck.”

  Lucy reached a hand under her shirt to attend to a stiff thread poking her ribs. Dwayne watched her with a goatish look.

  “Can I help you?” Lucy asked him.

  “Undoubtedly,” he said. “You’re helping me right now.”

  Lucy looked to my father, who had turned sideways in his chair, watching the black couple’s table, where the waiter was demonstrating a bottle of white wine.

  “Look at that,” he said. “We got here first, and they’re being served already.”

  “No,” I said. “They got here first. We’ve
been served already.”

  But he seemed not to hear. The spectacle of the waiter pouring a tasting portion into our neighbor’s glass captivated him. The man sipped and gave a curt nod. “Look, they poured out the wine for that black man to taste,” my father said, leering in wonderment at the man’s precocity, as though he were watching a squirrel wash a cracker. “Isn’t that something?”

  This stunned me. My father had been in many ways a rough, unpleasant man, though dislike of one race or another had never been one of his pet brutalities. During his legal career, he’d prided himself on being a fierce egalitarian and a stalwart for unpopular causes, though it seemed to me he tussled less for righteousness than the pleasure of the fight. In his pro bono work, he liked representing doers of sensational evil and generally got good results for them in court. Dungeon keepers. Home invaders with a taste for elder flesh. A boy, now famous in death for his botched ride in the electric chair, who killed a woman with a brake shoe and left her infant crawling the shoulder of a rural route. He found much pleasure in recounting for my mother and me the stories of his “guys,” the details of their cases, the last expressions of the murdered, etc., to confirm himself as the captain of all knowledge, ugly and good. Before I’d finished second grade, my father was imparting axioms like “Burt, fight to the death before you let somebody put you in his car. Either way, you’re probably dead, and believe me, it’s better to check out before they get creative on you.”

  But he also went after quieter cases, too: housing and hiring discrimination, worker’s compensation. Though I’d always sensed something cheap and spiteful in my father’s righteousness—an easy way for him to put himself above the rest of us—he did win a lot of money for people who needed it. It’s probably true that my father did more good for other people in his work than I ever will in my career. The merry bigot before me now depressed me as deeply as anything I’d seen in his decline.

  Back at the couple’s table, the asperity I’d noticed when we first walked in seemed to have recongealed. “It wasn’t Villainy, Judith,” the man snapped at his companion. “It was Villandry. That was the place we rode the bikes along the river and the hotel leaked and you ate that pork loin cooked in pâté and you got a stomachache. Villandry. Whoever heard of a town called Villainy?”

  My father shook his head, frowning in mock-rueful satisfaction. “They can dress up, can’t they?” he said. “But they still act the same.”

  Then he stood, and I was afraid he was going to go to the couple’s table and bait them in some way, but he made for the restroom.

  “Is he okay in there by himself?” I asked Lucy.

  “He can still recognize a toilet, thank God.”

  Dwayne took a roll from the bread basket, tore it in half, and pressed it flat into the olive oil dish. He had his eyes on Lucy while he chewed.

  “I know a man you need to meet,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” said Lucy.

  “You ever hear of Aristedes Fontenot?” Dwayne said. “Top sculptor in New York. Friend of mine. I know he will want to make a statue of your face.”

  Lucy took a breath to say something, but instead she hailed the waiter for another vodka.

  “He’s your husband,” Dwayne said, jerking his head toward the bathroom.

  “Yeah,” said Lucy.

  “He doesn’t act like it,” Dwayne said.

  “I don’t see how that’s your business,” Lucy said.

  “Just let me say this,” Dwayne said with a cockeyed grin. “If I had someone nice-looking like you, I’d act like it till there wasn’t none left.”

  Lucy closed her eyes and laughed and Dwayne laughed, too. “I like you, Dwayne,” she said. “Come on, let’s go out back.” She smacked the table with her hand. “You think they got an ‘out back’ at this joint?”

  “Lucy, please stop,” I said. My father had emerged from the restroom and was walking toward us.

  She covered half her face with her hand and looked at Dwayne with her injured eye. “Why?” she said. “He looks pretty good like this.”

  “Talk to me, Dwayne,” said Lucy, when all the bread had been eaten and the conversation flagged and the feeling at the table was of strangers on a cruise, seated together by happenstance. “You make your living that way? Hustling chess in the park?”

  “I suppose, if you can call it a living.”

  “What do you call it, Dwayne?” she asked him.

  “Well, the game is a lucrative addiction. In my soul, I am a musician.”

  I asked Dwayne what he played, and before he could answer, my father sat forward in his seat and began to clear his throat at full volume, an angry, engine-revving sound. “So, Wade,” my father said gruffly.

  “Yes, Roger?”

  My father didn’t answer. His lips moved silently, and I realized he had nothing to say. He only wished to keep Lucy and me from getting a word in with Dwayne, whom he apparently considered a special friend he didn’t want to share. My father’s long-standing fondness for strangers aside, it baffled me that he’d taken such a passionate liking to the hustler. But then, perhaps it was this: perhaps he knew he was slipping away from Lucy and me. He felt the terrible humiliation of it, and could be at ease only in the company of someone with whom he had no past to forget.

  We watched my father, his mouth opening and closing, his shoulders hunched, his eyes cast down.

  “Paul Morphy,” he said at last. “Opera Game. Black takes the Philidor Defense, am I right?”

  “My friend, I could not say,” said Dwayne.

  My father pursed his lips, dismayed. “Waiter,” he called out, rattling the ice in his glass. “Drought conditions over here.”

  “How about let’s hold off there, Pops,” I said.

  “How about you kiss my ass?”

  “In answer to your question, Burt, I am a horn player,” Dwayne said, miming a flurry of saxophone riffs. The fingerings looked fairly professional. “I sing as well. Are you familiar with the recording artist Kenny Loggins?”

  “You played with Kenny Loggins?” Lucy said.

  “I did blow for Kenny on the European tour. My wife and me, we also blessed his outfit with some very beautiful backing vocals. Saw all the top destinations, stayed in fine hotels, rode all the major airlines, Qantas, Virgin Atlantic. I’m glad you brought it up. That was a happy time of life.”

  “You still married, Dwayne?” she asked.

  “Enough about me,” Dwayne said. “I’m getting depressed.”

  “You used to sing, Roger,” said Lucy. “I’d forgotten that about you.”

  “I did?” my father said.

  “Yeah, you did,” said Lucy. “Mornings. You sang a lot in the mornings.”

  My father grasped the saltshaker with both hands and ran his thumbnail pensively along the grid of rumpled glass. “What’d I sing?” he asked without looking up.

  “Sam Cooke. Elvis. Some Leonard Cohen. You did a pretty good Velvet Fog.”

  He looked at her, and I could see the muscles around his eyes tense for a moment and then relax. “You’ve got your facts screwed up.”

  Lucy watched my father for a moment and then turned to Dwayne. “How about you, Dwayne. Why don’t you sing something? Sing for me.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “Sing for me right here.”

  So Dwayne started to hum a little overture, and even that hum was a thing of real quality, a practiced, dusky baritone, and he knew how to make it swell from the deep place in his chest. The couple at the next table looked over at him, ready to get mad, but they held off, looking unsure of themselves, wondering perhaps if Dwayne might be a famous man caught in a late-career spell of bad luck. Then the singing started, some old song I’d never heard before. Whatever it was, Dwayne sang it in a wondrous way. The melody unraveled in a barreling curve that only hovered near the song’s true line, corkscrewing up out of the tune. He sang in many voices at once, a roisterous calliope. At the front, a slick, showy tenor; b
ehind that, a lumbering, tuneful goon chiming in on the bass; and a manic soprano wandering in and out of the line.

  Lucy’s pleasure in the moment was wonderful to see. She let her head loll on her shoulder, showing the handsome vein in her neck. Her face went young with joy and shyness. Sand filled my thoat, and I saw my father’s wife as I’d wanted her many years ago.

  Only my father didn’t share in the gladness of the room. He stretched his jaw in the usual tic. He gripped his butter knife hard enough to pale his knuckles, and I was afraid he was going to smash his plate with it. But then Dwayne wound to his final flourish. Lucy led the applause. Dwayne’s small reptilian eyes swiveled in his head. “Usually, for that type of performance, five dollars is the standard contribution.”

  Lucy laughed. “I’ll give you five bucks, but first you have to sing me one more song.”

  Dwayne shrugged. “You’re fucking with a man’s price structure, but all right. Let’s see.”

  “No more,” my father barked. He was scanning the tablecloth irritably, as though something he’d misplaced was there, hiding in plain sight. “No more songs. This is a restaurant, for Christ’s sake, and speaking of, can somebody tell me where the hell is that veal?”

  “Just shut up,” Lucy told my father. “Would you please shut up, Roger? Just this one time?”

  My father’s nostrils flared, and his features distended in sneering contempt. Cupping a hand to his mouth, he turned to Dwayne. “Now, I don’t know who this woman is,” he said in a voice loud enough for the room to hear, “and I don’t know why she’s in my house with me. But I’ll be honest with you. I think I’d like to try and fuck her.”

  Dwayne burst into braying laughter, and so did the barroom men and so did the boy in the clip-on tie lingering in the door. Lucy’s face was blank. With perfect calmness, she reached across the table and took a cigarette from the pack of Newports at Dwayne’s elbow. We all watched her stand and yank the coat from the back of my father’s chair. He pitched forward slightly. His fork hit the bell of his empty wineglass, striking a high, clean note that went on ringing until his wife was out the door.