Driver's Education (3 page)

He'd arrived in Westchester an hour earlier, he told me. He'd missed the 1:34 train and thus had been forced to wait for the 2:11. He'd come up from the city to visit my father—his grandfather—who was still living in Sleepy Hollow, in the house where I grew up. The two of them
had planned to meet at the Tarrytown station, where my father would pick him up in that goddamned car. They'd eat lunch. My father would pour my son some Lowland scotch and offer him cheap cigars. They'd pull from their collections of finely woven stories; they'd trade them with each other, sewing them into imaginary shapes.

But when Finn arrived, my father wasn't there. He waited for an additional half hour. He scanned the parking lot for Lucy's rusted yellow frame, ducking between minivans and sedans, hoping she was hiding somewhere between their hoods. He began to think: maybe his grandfather had gotten tired of waiting and left—Finn was, after all, late. Or maybe she'd broken down again? Maybe he'd been forced to call a mechanic? Or maybe he'd remembered the plans incorrectly? Maybe he was meant to take the bus?

He told me that this had happened before.

My father—he's not all that patient. And he does have a tendency to forget.

Still, though, it wasn't until Finn knocked on the front door and my father didn't answer that he became nervous. That he was hit with the suspicion that something was wrong.

•  •  •

By nine o'clock I've led him into the den, where he'll stare at the television for the next six hours while I work. He'll watch shows I've never seen him watch before, shows that I didn't realize were still on the air.
Bonanza, Charlie's Angels, Diff'rent Strokes
. He'll manage to find every infomercial for every product that should have never been conceived: sleeping bags for cats; plates that double as cheese graters; a set of twelve
katana
samurai swords.

My office sits directly above the den, on the west side of the house, and is cut in the same square shape. The room's blue carpet curls up in each of the four corners, where there are small holes in the floorboards; the frayed empty spaces allow the television's strangled voices to seep upward, to ping-pong off the surfaces of my desk, the sagging bookshelves, my ribs. I try closing my eyes before I turn on the computer's screen.

The truth is, I used to be so good at this. Twenty years ago, blank white sheets used to be wide-open highways, clean, paved roads; conduits to thrilling and accessible places away from myself. I used to fly down them with terrifying certainty, taking the banks and curves at breakneck speeds, never shifting down to fourth; never clamping my heel against the brake; never noticing the wheeze of a tank that's out of gas.

After the near success of
The Family Room,
the calls from studios, producers, and directors found their way to me at a wondrous and alarming rate.
Anything,
they'd tell me.
Just write anything, and we'll get it on the screen.

And maybe it was the openness of it all, that blank-check promise of success that gummed me up. As the phone rang and the projects accumulated, filling the empty corners of the house, I fumbled and dropped the keys beneath the seat—unable to find the damn things again. The pages became something else: roadblocks. Detours in flashing lights, half the bulbs gone dead. Robust, angry trucks jackknifed on tight mountain roads. I'd spend months constructing two lines of dialogue, convincing myself I'd been productive if I managed to change two strokes of punctuation. I'd paint scenes with no sense of space, races with no sense of time.

Trash bins became bonfires, piled high with half-used sheets.

In the evenings, I'd call the producers and the agents, situated high in their glass Rubik's Cubes along Wilshire Boulevard. I'd pant into the phone, feigning a sense of excited exhaustion, as if I'd come in from running a marathon, as if I hadn't spent the day recumbent on the floor of my office, picking at the corners of the carpet, watching the way shadows chased themselves on the ceiling.
Just a little more time,
I'd beg them.
I need just a little more time
. They stopped calling back.

I worked odd jobs, and sometimes I still do. These low-glam assignments sent my way by folks who're too young to have heard the news. A one-episode script for a sitcom that failed after a few seasons. Four commercials for an acne cream. A set of jokes for the People's Choice Awards. But no screenplays.

You're right about that, Dad.

It wasn't, though, for lack of trying. I spent years taking stabs at
other genres, forms of storytelling either more marketable or obscure: romance, mystery, comedy, French art house. I'd start each of these projects with a sincere and earnest belief in my genius; a sense that, finally, my feet were lifting off the ground; that, finally, I'd managed to kick-start the engine. But then I'd turn back. I'd look upon the draft's first pages. I'd read,
Why don't we get out of these wet clothes?

I listen to the synthetic cries of his infomercials as I leaf through these drafts, set at angles on my desk; I run a finger along their yellowed edges.

What Happens at the Water Cooler . . . ; The Empty Garage; The Vintage of Love; Punching Horses; Congress! The Musical; Only Swallows Cry at Night; Bottoms Up; The Grass Is Always Greener; The Apples in the Attic; Two Days After Yesterday; The Sand Is Full of Grains; Her Dangerous Heart; The Ventilator; The Vaporizer; The Blender; Punching Horses, Again; Longing Is a Breadless Toaster; Palm Fronds at Dusk; Bottoms Down; Kappa Kappa Killer; Don't-Post-It; Windmills Only Turn Once.

No. No, it was
Palm Fronds at
Dawn.

•  •  •

I arrived at Phelps Memorial Hospital the day after Finn called. I was groggy from the overnight flight, the skin beneath my eyes ringed and purple—but still, he looked worse. His cheeks were flushed red, and his hair—auburn, the color of my father's, the color of mine—was matted with something: sweat. He'd pulled a plastic chair to the side of my father's bed and he lay there, his head resting on the mattress next to his feet, his thin hands folded on top of each other, propping up his chin. There were four empty cups of orange Jell-O stacked at his feet.

My father had had a stroke, is what Finn had told me when he called, and what the doctors at Phelps Memorial reiterated. Technically speaking: a thrombotic stroke, caused by a blood clot in one of his arteries, blocking the flow of blood to his brain. When my father didn't answer the door, Finn had unlocked it with a key he'd been given. There was a kettle of water that was boiling over on the stove, drops hitting the range with an exaggerated hiss. Once he'd switched off the burner, he called my father's name out in the kitchen. And then in the foyer, in the living room, in the garage, under Lucy. He opened closets, pushed
aside moth-ridden coats drooping from their hangers. He said, in that voice he's got that's somewhere between a laugh and a whimper,
All right, Granddad. Now I'm starting to get worried.

Where he found him was in the bathroom. The bathroom Mom used to use, across from their bedroom. He was sitting on the toilet with its lid closed, his pants still up but his belt unbuckled. Finn put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently, but he couldn't lift his chin: he'd raise it to about ninety degrees, so he was gazing at Finn's belly, but then—then his head would fall again, thudding against his concave chest.

“I tried again,” Finn would later tell me. “And again, and again! I said, ‘It's me, Granddad, it's Finn.' But his eyes were droopy. Like sleepy cartoon eyes. He just sort of looked past me.”

I wish I could say I reacted to Finn's call in a way that'd make my father proud. That, after I heard the news, there was the initial icing of my veins, followed by a flow of heated panic. That once I'd found my wits again there was—obviously, and obligatorily—a sense of guilt. Guilt that I hadn't been there; guilt that I hadn't prevented my son from being propelled to that age where death becomes routine. Despite everything that my father had done to me, guilt that when his chin was lifted in my mom's bathroom, it was my son's face he saw with his half-closed eyes. All of that.

Once I'd cradled the phone, I choked on my own throat till I induced tears; I paced the kitchen; I glanced in the mirror, verified that I looked distressed. But if I'm being honest, all that hit me was a slow-burning envy. The sort of twisted jealousy you feel when something awful happens to someone else, something that should've happened to you. That wrench you feel in your gut when someone recounts a particularly harrowing car accident; schadenfreude in reverse. The sudden knowledge that once my father's gone, once he's dust, I won't be able to recount to friends, in hurried sobs, about the Time I Found Him There.

In the hospital, I had stepped out into the bleached hallway so Finn could continue sleeping, and I asked the attending doctor, “So, how bad are we talking?”

“Bad, but not disastrous,” she told me. Doctors are wonderfully inadvertent liars.

“You'll forgive me, but I really don't know the difference.”

The doctor looked too young, too frazzled. I wanted to comb her hair and wash her face. To say,
If you're telling me all this, at least try to look presentable.

“He's lost function in his brain stem and portions of his cerebellum.”

“Again—I'm sorry, but I don't—”

She pulled at her hair, which wasn't blond, but also wasn't brown—some unwashed tone in between. She wrapped it around one finger, like I'd seen my son do while he worked.

“He's lost some basic muscle functions, particularly on the left side. He'll have trouble walking, swallowing, maybe writing. And talking. Definitely talking.”

“Well,” I told her. “Ha. Well, there's a silver lining.”

She continued pulling her hair, a little more aggressively than before.

I turned my feet inward, as if I were preparing for this girl to chastise me. To throw me out of the hospital and leave my father to my son. I said into my shoulder, “Maybe that was a little too soon.”

She only let go of her hair when she shrugged—
He's your fucking father.
She reached into the pockets of her white coat—the sort of pockets that initially you don't notice, but when you do they seem infinite—and she handed me a set of blue brochures. Pictures of old people, falling apart people, their children steadying their walkers. Everyone smiling.

“We have a wonderful stroke clinic here at the hospital.” She nodded at the brochures.

I looked through the thin window in the door that separated me from my father, me from Finn. Finn still slept, though now he was dreaming. Reflexively, a foot kicked out, scattering the Jell-O cups in four different directions.

“And he'll learn to speak again?” I asked.

“Really, Mr. McPhee. Look into it.”

•  •  •

“Coooooooooollllllllliiiiiiiiiiin!!!!!!!!!”

When he calls my name, I hear it in two places: first, through the floorboards, in those spaces where the carpet's peeled away; his voice hits
my feet and reverberates through my shins. Then, through the open door of my office, after it's traveled through the house's diagonal corridors, picking up dust and other bits of life.

He calls again, this time louder, both voices hitting me almost at once: “COOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIN!”

I drop to my hands and knees and crawl to the northeast corner of the room, where the hole in the floor is the largest. “Jesus, Dad.” I have my mouth pressed against the floor. It tastes new, but also very old: industrial musk. “WHAT?”

“IT'S STARTING, COOOOOOOLLLLLIIIIIIIIIN!!!!”

I scramble to my feet and arch my back, feeling the hinged pop of my spine cracking. There's a single round window in this room, cut in quarters by four wood beams. Outside, there are two clouds, one to the west of the bridge, and one to the east; they cast shadows onto the bay. At my desk I check the time: 12:27. I've been slumped here, folded over myself for three and a half hours. I've pulled up a fresh page on the computer, but I've yet to write a goddamned word.

Downstairs, in the den, the blinds have been pulled shut, the light pushing through them in aggravated spits. I carry in two highball glasses of Lowland scotch. If he had his choice he'd start drinking at eight; I insist he wait till after noon.

I find him sprawled in the middle of the couch, his loose skin spreading out, blending into the beige leather. As he's sunk down within the cushion, the belt he has to wear has crept up his torso. It sits uselessly now. It hangs from his chest, where it's bunched his oxford, the collar now clinging to his ears, like a hood. His white hairless stomach lifts, falls, exposed.

“Dad.” I flip on the lights, raise open the blinds. “Let's get you up. Let's fix this thing.”

“I'm fine. We'll miss it.”

“Knock it off, we've got two minutes.”

I crouch before him, planting my heels on either side of his feet. I try to remember what the nurses told me: Slip both hands upward, under the belt. Lift, don't lean. Use your legs, not your back. His head to your chest as you pull upward; hoisting sloshing buckets of water from a well.

“Press into me, Dad.”

“I told you I'm fine.”

“You're not making this any easier.”

People always say that the old have a distinct scent. Cough drops, I've heard. Or vitamins. Also cucumbers. And as his chin dissolves into my chest, as his arms hang limply to the middle of his thighs, I wish that was the case. That he smelled like an accumulation of all those things, instead of like me. Just like me.

“Okay,” I say. “Now—set your hands on my waist.”

He presses his lips together and then curls them inward toward his teeth; they vanish into each other, lineless pockets of skin. He mumbles, but without making any sounds.