Inner Tube: A Novel (12 page)

“Do you ever want to turn around and go backwards?”

I didn’t quite know what she meant, but I said sure.

“Like you missed the turnoff somewhere and are getting more and more lost? It’s that way for me about half the time. And Boston, the people around me all trying to be so hip and loose and ending up mostly just trying.”

“Could be you’re getting too old for school.”

“Compared to what? Remember, I had two whole years to think about it and what did I do but go running on back. The institutional setting. And I haven’t earned a single gripe, have I? So I’ll get my degree and go to work for a museum or someplace where I can restrict myself to old things. Because I’ll tell you, this new stuff is too goddamn flat for me.”

I pictured her on a landing strip in the middle of Nebraska with no trees anywhere around; and I could share the terror of a horizon that began at the edge of her shadow and never really stopped.

I said, “There’s a Randolph Scott western on channel two.”

Where I wanted to give comfort, I could offer only distraction. And the bruise above her eye, now shading into a dismal range of purple-brown, was like a litmus gauge of her feelings.

“It’s late and I really have to turn myself off,” Carla said.

Persuading her to take the bedroom, I stretched out on the couch with a folded topcoat for a pillow. I didn’t expect to sleep much anyway. I saw the strand of light under the bedroom door go out. I picked at dead skin on my lip and listened to the radiators knock. Herding my thoughts through the minefield of inadmissible love was no easier than it had ever been. I composed a fantasy of Carla and me living in a windmill. We had leaded windows and wooden utensils and a garden like a Brueghel painting. There were soft, forgiving contours as I dozed slowly off.

I came awake to the sound of running water. Carla emerged from the kitchen with a drinking glass and became in the blue cast of the streetlamp a character from a 1915 children’s book. I pretended to sleep, my lids raised just enough to see. She had a man’s white shirt on and her hair spilled over the collar in a way that made me dizzy. Pressing the glass against her swollen brow for a moment, she looked down at me with what I imagined to be tenderness. I would never know. She placed the glass on the floor next to me and went back to bed.

I did not sleep again until the sun was up, and briefly then. But Carla moved on in that time. Her note said she was taking an early train in order to catch a friend’s on-campus dance recital. For breakfast I had a bowl of coffee ice cream. I dusted and mopped and rearranged the contents of the refrigerator. Finally I went in and sat on the bed. I noticed that it was snowing, had been for some time. There were pigeon footprints on the white sill. I would never know. Rolling onto my stomach, I inhaled what I could from the indented pillow.

The phone rang only minutes after I plugged it back in. It was Ted. He sounded unhinged. He told me he’d been drinking all night, submerged in remorse and confusion.

“I don’t understand what she does to me. It’s unearthly. She’s so steady. She’s so impervious. How do I figure out what goes on inside her?”

I hung up on him. What he had to say I already knew.

T
HIS, SOMEHOW, IS MY
fourth day off in a row and I feel listless, out of touch. Didn’t I have more stamina when I was young? Wasn’t it easier keeping the balls in the air? I head out for the Boyers place to say how’s business, hoping something or other will chime.

They’re in the garage, packing up orders—boot knives, freeze-dried stroganoff, like that. The slogan is stenciled on the wall:
YOUR KEY TO SURVIVAL IS KNOWING WHAT THE DOOMED WILL NEVER LEARN.
Last year Sonny went up to Denver for a three-week course in mail order merchandising.

“Where you been holed up?” he says.

Dawn turns her back, picks at a line of window putty.

“You know, the usual places.”

She’s wearing cracked mules and a coral housedress; her soft swaying bulk seems lethal. Sonny busies himself moistening strips of package tape on a gray sponge ball, and something strains against the seam of his mouth. It’s awkward in here, thick with the poorly hidden anguish of a hospital waiting room. Always expecting bad news, these two. Maybe they’ve had some.

“So how’re the boys?” I say clumsily.

Dawn sends a black look to her husband. “Off at Curry’s on a sleepover.”

Sonny, breathing hard, makes a wet weave of the tape.

“Clear them out to clear the air,” she adds cryptically. Her tough, shiny hair is rumpled, like a doll’s pulled from the bottom of a toy box. “Not like they done anything.”

I notice the can of Mace fastened to Sonny’s belt and I wonder about domestic strife with so much weaponry at hand. I study cobwebs, look at my watch.

“It’s not any of their decision,” Sonny says.

Dawn brushes past me. “Ain’t anybody’s.”

Then, through gypsum board, we can hear her clanging and banging in the kitchen. The chalkboard is in there, the textbooks reinforced with masking tape, homemade stools where the boys sit to receive instruction from their mother—a little diorama of the pioneers.

Sonny drops onto a stack of sealed cartons; his lips contort. “They say if you give respect you’re supposed to get it.”

Things aren’t chiming so much, but I’m curious, drawn in. Otherwise I’d make some sense, say, “Came at a bad time,” and get moving. All these tools collected here, canteens and manuals, the hard details, convince me there’s something to look for. I want to light a cigarette but I’ve left them in the car.

And now Sonny has on his bully pulpit face. He wants me to know that every American child will consume by the age of eighteen the energy equivalent of sixty thousand gallons of gasoline, that in a minute’s time twenty-five babies are born for whom there are no protein resources.

“Dawn doesn’t want to grow up.” He shrugs. “I just don’t get through to her.”

“Why can’t you meet in the middle?”

Smiling, Sonny confides that later in the week he is scheduled to enter Cherry Ames Hospital for a vasectomy.

“Dramatic,” I say, but it isn’t the word I want.

“I know, I know. My old man was alive, he’d say just chop the damn thing off and be done with it. I come from five brothers and three sisters, fruitful. But that was then and this is now.”

Suddenly I feel like a tired cop pressed by duty against the rancor of strangers. I really want that cigarette.

“And it’s no more than what she wants for herself. She’s got to grow up and face up.”

He looks straight at me, his tight eyes asking me to take sides.

Trying to change the subject, I ask, “Still planning that extension off the back of the house?”

But for Sonny there is only one subject. “Crying for the space, God knows. All squeezed like we’re in a toothpaste tube. Something to face up to is the plain and simple limits of where we’re at. I’m not getting rich with this mess,” slapping the cartons under him, hunching himself as if yoked, in traces. “Just to get us all through, all together. I’m no fucking swami.”

The family man deflected by his family. He looks up, down, looks ahead, looks for an escape hatch. The only reassuring thing I can think of is it isn’t me.

“Self-sufficient,” I remind him. “You’re keeping an edge.”

He agrees reflexively and begins an aimless rummaging through the clutter of his family business. What the doomed will never learn. But it seems that Sonny, if only for the time being, has gone off the edge of his map. This comforts me; I feel less out of touch. And probably Sonny will regain his bearings in the clean, fresh, pastel symmetries of Cherry Ames, in the confidence of highly trained professionals and the irrevocable snip.

No daughters for Dawn. I see her sulking at the sink, molars clenched as she peels crust from a skillet. Her grudge will be immaculate and worth holding on to. Her back will be a broad wall in the bed, her face thick and curt in the long mornings.

I am expecting to be asked for dinner, and certain I will stay.

S
ON OF A LOAN
officer, debating team captain and cum laude grad, Tory essayist, figure man, braggart, moralist, fixer, my father goes through life with antennae fully extended, alert for the smallest threat and ever ready for battle. No grievance escapes notice, and no surly mechanic or slow-witted bank teller escapes imperial rebuke. He is a tireless author of letters to the editor, will hang on the phone an hour or more, waiting his turn to cross swords with a radio talk jockey.

Never, in any comradely way, have we been close, but at the time when such things still mattered, I did all I could to displease and disappoint him. We overlapped, then, as adversaries, like ink stains on an office blotter. His dictates and my flaunted heresies notched together, achieving an intimacy that we never could.

When Carla and I were still quite small, he began to organize us in dispute games, assigning pro and con roles on a current events topic or courtroom recreation. The winner was rewarded with a blue ribbon strip pinned on by the loser. Another learning experience was trying to mediate between him and our mother—in short, learning not to. Their harsh, spiraling set-tos were precious to them, the cream in their coffee, oddly but consistently comforting, and not to be intruded on. Later, having the eligible skills, Carla and I were allowed to come in and widen the war, sniping away at targets of opportunity until we, and usually mother too, were routed by Gordo. His triumphant rages would immobilize the house. He’d bellow and stamp like some parodic Lear while we hid out in our rooms.

Carla pretends that he has softened in recent years, paled like his pearl-gray eyes. But I say once a bully, always a bully. She wrote me to describe his long afternoon walks, his enthusiasm for azaleas, the swaying of his liver-spotted hands over reference books as he composed another crossword puzzle.

“He’s not as ashamed of retirement as I thought he’d be. True, they’ve kept him on some sort of oracular retainer….”

No doubt. This is the man who finessed the Hotel Armonk case and quashed a governorship. Carla, gently wishful, veils the record of the past with her azaleas. But I remember the cruel mimic, the arm-twister, the scary drunk who grew more silent and impermeable as the level in the bottle fell, the unending smallness of this man who had his monogram faced in brick above the fireplace and once threw a close friend’s toupee over a yacht railing in order to resolve a cribbage argument.

“I’m certain he’s ready to reconcile,” Carla went on. “If only you’ll make the first move.”

Dear, dimly available sister, it’s already done. We are as reconciled as two sums in an accounting ledger.

I was living in L.A. the last time we spoke. Violet and I were separated but not yet divorced, and I was brimming over with aimless nostalgia. It was Easter Sunday and the Long Lines were overloaded with ritual calling.

“What’s up, Dad? Are you dyeing eggs?”

“No.”

“It’s eighty degrees here and I can see palm trees from my window.”

“Eggs, trees. I suppose you’ve got a couple of canaries with you.”

The gaseous hush of vodka was in his voice.

“Just me, Dad. Me, myself, and I.”

“Fine, fine. And what are you doing for money?”

“That’s not why I called.”

“All right then, surprise me.”

I could see him looking at his watch, at his dull reflection in the black surface of the hall table.

“Actually, I was trying to remember which cheek your ski-pole scar is on. It’s been that long.”

“The Alps, my God. Now there’s one sight I go right on seeing. Nothing on your horizon, is there? Movieland. All that stucco. Marquees and fruit juice stands instead of peaks.”

“And not a crumb of snow.”

“So then. You’re still with that whatsername of yours?”

“Not right now.”

He filled the space for judgmental militance with a slow question. “Shall I send a check?”

“That’s not why I—”

“Yes, fair enough. You don’t have to shout.”

No, I really didn’t have to. Finally.

“Your sister has invited me for holiday dinner,” he went on blandly. “The wine will be corrosive and the lamb will be underdone. Some little barefoot friend of hers will ask me to dance.”

“Give Carla my love.”

We exchanged bad jokes, promised to send postcards, and that was it.

D
EFINITIVE TECHNIQUE. PRECISE SCRUTINY.
A conviction that nothing is missed. Certain group vanities are encouraged among the staff here, keeping foremost in mind that we register only as units in a system. A system, elementary in its perfection, to surround and contain a precise whole. And each movement within the system a refinement, a distillation. They want us comfortable in such beliefs, like mice in a warm winter burrow.

Do I contradict? I typify. Another nibbling mouse, a 2T five-year man sent down to this edit room dismal as a Bulgarian subway, on an errand that demonstrates the system’s reach, the ability of its agents in the field to surround and contain. Their booty is now before me, racks and racks: the random tape inventory of a small independent station in west Texas, now, along with its owner, defunct. It had offered the sort of programming favored in trailer parks and residential hotels, old reruns and cut-rate movies, a world of black-and-white. It had offered a removal in time, an undoing of age and failure, something to still the guts. Cramped, retching feed clerks, the manicurists and windmill mechanics, muttering, smoking, sniffling, conjuring dust shapes from out of the furniture, were soothed by
Petticoat Junction
and
Mr. Ed.
In sepia Mexican melodramas, they found a past more favorable than their own. And now, under my hands, all would enter into the system, a minute flicker of refinement.

The tepid denouement of
Bachelor Father
unspools before me, a commercial extolling the spreadability of a peanut butter named for J. M. Barrie’s androgyne. I reach for cold coffee and a fresh log sheet, am riven by a voice.

“Rich in emulsifiers,” my mother says.