“Now that it’s all over the news,” Barrett says, “I find myself wondering why no one ever messed with me, I mean it makes me feel like the fat kid I was. That’s fucked up, I know.”
“As long as you know.”
“Some things can be bullshit and true at the same time.”
“That, as you and I both understand, is ridiculous.”
“Probably. But really. What exactly do you gain by being nobody’s fool, ever? Do you actually benefit from the policy of absolute, no-holds-barred nay-saying?”
“I’m not sure I can have this conversation much longer. Not this early.”
“Right. I’m off to work.”
“Ciao.”
“See you tonight.”
“See you tonight.”
D
o you really like a mess?” Liz says to Andrew.
She’s making breakfast for him, like a farm wife. It’s a little sexy. It isn’t
un
sexy. She could be a substantial woman, firm-featured, stirring the eggs in the iron skillet, living in a house fastened to a chirruping green vastness; a woman too ample, too sure-footed, for the winds to worry; smarter than her man, cagier, lacking perhaps his garrulous, two-stepping charm but possessed of a profound sureness, the depths of which he can barely imagine.
Andrew reclines on a kitchen chair, smoking, in briefs and woolen socks. If he knew how sexy he was, it would ruin it. Or does he know? Is he smarter than he seems to be?
“Huh?” he says.
“What you were saying on the roof. Sometimes a mess is part of it.”
“Oh. Yeah, you know, I don’t like to fight, but I don’t back down from fights.”
“Mm. I guess I mean, do you like a little skirmish every now and then, is it stimulating?”
Andrew, pay attention. I’m asking if I’m too maternal, too offhandedly kind, to hold your interest. Would you prefer someone rougher, someone more punishing, someone who disregards your feelings because she knows she’s a treasure, someone who offers no apologies, ever?
“I got into a lot of fights when I was a kid,” he says. “You know, when you move around a lot …”
They’ve gotten there already.
She plunks Andrew’s breakfast down in front of him. He exhales a plume of smoke through his nostrils, drapes a muscled arm around her hips.
“You’ve always got to prove yourself,” he says.
They’ve gotten there. With Andrew, any conversation leads eventually to reminiscence, though it usually takes longer than this. He’s the most nostalgic twenty-eight-year-old in history. His past is his holy book, his seat of wisdom, and when a question presents itself, if the question is even slightly difficult, he consults the Book of When We Moved to Phoenix or the Book of When I Spent a Whole Year in the Hospital or the Book of When I Started Doing Drugs.
Liz plucks the cigarette from his fingertips and takes a drag, just for the sexy-momma-ness of it. Expertly, she flicks the butt into the sink.
“Eat, child,” she says.
“You’re not having any?”
“I’m still too high.”
That’s not exactly true. But now, right now, coming down, she prefers to be a hallucination she and Andrew are having together. Any demonstration of appetite would quell it.
He chows down, doggishly pleased by food. Snow taps on the windowpanes.
Before he can go on with the Saga of My Childhood Fights, Liz says, “When I was a little girl, I beat up everybody.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I was the terror of the third grade.”
“I can’t picture you as that.”
Picture it, sweetheart.
She strokes his cropped red hair, fingers the line of silver hoops in his ear, which inspires in her a minor spasm of fondness and pity. She knows where he’s headed. She feels guilty, a little guilty, about knowing it, but what can she do? Warn him? Tell him how his blunt-faced beauty will erode; how the whole thug-saint thing works at twenty-eight, but …
She says, “You should never be the poorest person in the neighborhood. It’s funny. My parents were so proud of our little house out on the fringes.”
“Right …”
“Which, as it turns out, meant sending their kids to the good school, because they’d managed to buy a house that was within the district by about ten feet.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“No. I mean, suddenly I had teachers who weren’t drunk or psychotic. But suddenly there were all these kids who hated me for being a shabby, scrawny little thing. Suddenly I showed up wearing shoes that Dora Mason actually recognized …”
“Huh?”
“I went to school in shoes a girl in my class had just given to the church thrift store. Which was a surprise to me. I liked the shoes a lot, they were purple, with these little buckles, I can still see them … Anyway, I guess I’d assumed that my mother would by some magic make sure she hadn’t bought me a pair of shoes that might have been the castoffs of the meanest girl in the third grade.”
“Drag,” Andrew says.
“A big drag. Dora naturally announces the truth about my shoes to the whole class. So I beat her up.”
“You go.”
“I figured, if I couldn’t be popular, the next best thing was to be scary. Which actually worked pretty well.”
Andrew grins up at her, showing bits of breakfast caught between his teeth. How is he not grotesque? It has to do with his innocence, his cluelessness, as fate forms around him, as the future arrives in such subtle increments it’s as unremarkable as the daily mail.
“Don’t beat me up, okay?” he says.
“I won’t.”
And, credible as a child, he returns avidly to his breakfast.
She leans over and places a chaste, kindly kiss on the top of his head. Here is the smell of his scalp, the … rampancy of it, its crisp, unperfumed vitality. There’s a hint of product, some gel he uses (Duane Reade, an obscure pomade he must grab off the shelf because it’s the least expensive one), but there is also that underlayer, the smell Liz can only think of as
growth
, no more preening or conscious than grass, and every bit as common, every bit as sturdily unquestioning. The smell of Andrew’s hair, like that of grass, resembles only itself.
Eventually, he’ll meet someone younger. Men do. He’ll be tormented about it, there’s not a trace of cruelty in him, which means she’ll have to nurse him through his betrayal of her, bolster him, assure him that his happiness matters more to her than anything, which will, of course, be a lie.
And he’ll abandon, soon enough, his already rather haphazard ambitions to be an actor. He’ll come to his senses—he lacks the reckless courage, the delusional optimism. He’ll begin to devise a new life for himself.
Which he will do without Liz.
In time, he’ll get an actual job (
Andrew, it’s already later than you think
). He’ll meet the girl, the one Liz will not, in fact, have to help him feel less guilty about but the girl who comes along after her (or the one after
her
). He’ll father the baby who’ll mean, along with the wonder of a blinking, murmuring creature produced out of nothing at all, that he won’t have the chance at a second reinvention. The money question won’t permit it. This, man-child, is your invention, this woman and child, love them as faithfully as you can, because there isn’t really anything else coming along, not at least for quite some time.
Whereas Liz, if she has anything to say about it (and she has something to say about almost everything), will be a staunch and rather intimidating old woman in sunglasses, gray hair pulled back tight, still making money, all the money she needs; still seeing boys like Andrew, harmed (there’s no denying it) by her love for them, and so all the more bemused by their ephemeral conviction that they are the winners in the world, just as the farmer must discover, to his great surprise, that his heart will explode before he reaches seventy and that his wife will roll on for another thirty years or more, serene and majestic as the freight trains that have been sending their distant oboe moans across the dark fields for as long as anyone can remember.
A
fter Barrett has gone, Tyler sings quietly in the kitchen. Beth will awaken whenever she does (is all this sleep a healing sign, is her system re-marshalling its assaulted reserves, or is her body just … practicing for death?).
This shard of hope …
This knife of ice …
Fucking song.
Why, Tyler wonders, does it seem so obdurately, so perversely and needlessly, difficult? He has talent. He doesn’t aspire (not really, not deeply—well, maybe a little, at odd moments) to genius. He doesn’t need to be Mozart, or Jimi Hendrix. It’s not as if he’s trying to invent the flying buttress, or crack the time-space continuum.
It’s a song. All Tyler requires of it, really, is that it be more than three and a half minutes’ worth of pleasantly occupied air.
Or. Well, okay. All Tyler requires of it is that it be better—a
little better
, please, just a little—than what he’s technically capable of producing. It’s the apple he can almost but not quite reach. Maybe if he shinnied another quarter inch up the tree trunk, maybe if he stretched his arm just a little farther …
There is, Tyler believes, a myth missing from the pantheon.
It concerns a man who produces something. Say he’s a carpenter, a good carpenter; good enough. His work is solid and substantial, the wood well cured, the edges smooth, the joints all plumb and true. His chairs recognize the body; his tables never wobble.
The carpenter, however, finds, over time (time is always the punch line, isn’t it?), that he wants to make something finer than a perfectly level table or a comfortable, welcoming chair. He wants to make something … marvelous, something miraculous; a table or chair that matters (he himself isn’t sure what he means by that); a table that’s not so exalted as to apologize for its modest object-life of load-bearing, a chair that doesn’t criticize those who sit in it, but, at the same time, a table and chair that rise up, revolutionize, because they … what? (
What?
)
Because …
… they shape-shift, and appear in different forms to everyone who uses them (Look, it’s the table from my grandmother’s farm! My god, it’s the chair my son was building for my wife’s birthday when he had the accident, it’s finished, it’s here, how is that
possible
?).
Because …
… the table is the reincarnation of the father you lost—patient and powerful, abiding—and the chair—gracious, consoling, undeluded—is the long-awaited mother, who never arrived at all.
The carpenter can’t, of course, make furniture like that, but he can imagine it, and as time goes by he lives with growing unease in the region between what he can create and what he can envision.
The story would end … who knows how?
It would end when a ragged old peddler, selling worn-out oddments nobody wants, to whom the carpenter has been kind, grants him the power. But this way it ends badly, doesn’t it? The wish goes wrong. The people who sit in the chairs, who rest their forearms on the tabletops, are horrified by their own conjured memories, or furious at these manifestations of their perfected parents, because they’re so forcefully reminded of the parents actually given them.
Or, once the carpenter’s wish has been granted, he finds himself imagining furniture imbued with still more powerful magic. Couldn’t it heal maladies, mightn’t it inspire profound and lasting love? He spends the rest of his days searching for the old peddler, hoping for a second spell that will render those tables and chairs not just comforting, but altering, transfiguring …
There is, it seems, some law of myth-physics that requires tragic outcomes of granted wishes.
Or it could end with the carpenter unenchanted. There’s no peddler in this version, no bestowing of a wish. Increasingly aware of the limits of the possible, but lost to his old satisfactions, the carpenter finds limits to his joy in sanding and measuring, because a table or chair devoid of supernatural qualities will not, cannot, satisfy him any longer; because he has too vividly imagined that which he
can
imagine, but can’t generate. It would end with the carpenter bitter and impoverished, cursing an empty wine bottle.
Or (hey) it could end with the carpenter transformed into a tree (by that peddler, or a witch or a god), waiting for a new, younger carpenter to cut him down, wondering if he’ll be present, some essence of him, in the tables and chairs yet to be made.
Tyler can’t seem to come up with an ending that satisfies him.
Back to the song, then. Try it, one more time, from the beginning.
To walk the frozen halls at night
To find you on your throne of ice
It’s not really all that bad. Is it? Or is it maudlin, is it melancholia masquerading as true feeling? How are you supposed to know?
With a sense of guilty abandon, he turns on the radio. Time to get another voice into the room.
Here’s the practiced sonorousness of a newscaster’s voice, the baritone that’s come to sound like truth, revealed.
“… gathering momentum, it’s going to be close, it all gets down to Ohio and Pennsylvania …”
Tyler turns the radio off again. It can’t happen. Bush has not only killed multitudes, and murdered the economy. He’s a manufactured person, the limited son of Protestant privilege, recast as a devout Texas rancher. It’s a scam, it’s all greed and mirrors, it’s Doctor Wonder’s caravan rolling into town with preposterous cures. How can anybody, how can one single person, be struggling to the polls (is it snowing in Ohio, in Pennsylvania?) thinking, Let’s have four more years of that?
Is “throne of ice” just adolescent romanticism? Where, at what point, does passion bleed into naïveté?
Tyler is thinking about the word “shard” when Beth comes into the kitchen. She’s like a Victorian sleepwalker, alabaster in her white nightgown. Tyler stands, goes to her as if she’s just returned from a journey.
“Hey there,” he says, draping his arms over the fragile bones of her shoulders, gently pressing his forehead to hers.
She murmurs happily. They stand, embracing, for a while. This has become a morning ritual. Beth may or may not be thinking what Tyler is thinking, but she seems to know that a period of sleepy morning no-speak is important. She’s never said anything as she stands in Tyler’s arms after awakening; she either knows or intuits that conversation will take them into a different day, they’ll be two lovers talking, which will happen soon enough but is not what these first-thing-in-the-morning clutches are meant to be; is not this interlude of shared repose, this utter quiet, when they can still hold and be held, when they can stand together without speaking, the two of them, alive, for now, in the ongoing silence.