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Was this as close to love as I was ever going to get? The closer I got, the more I wanted to destroy the things I loved. Something rose up in me, threatening me. I had to deflect it somehow.
I’d never been able to beat back the loneliness of a solitary life, but as part of a couple I felt invisible and deformed, and even at those times when I meant what I said, my words of affection had to be forced through sarcasm and shame. When I misbehaved, acted out discreetly, impulsively, I felt unbreakable and invincible, although of course the guilt eventually tore me apart. And sometimes I examined those parts, and sometimes I pushed them away, but that was just pushing myself away, the pure, monstrous reality, the real me, and without those parts I was an empty shell. The longer it went on, the worse I felt, until I was out of control and panic seized me and I ran back home.
FIVE (#ulink_4287f33a-288f-546a-b3aa-fb41875f9f9c)
I’d spent the winter engaging in daydreams, fantasies, alternate realities, while flipping through emails in a secret folder, and looking at selfies of this same beautiful woman, barely clad in a towel at a fancy resort in Zurich, or on the swings with her kids at the park, or modeling the necklace I’d sent her at Christmas.
We met here a year ago. She took a class in the studio next to mine and pulled some late nights; we shared a bench in the courtyard, downwind of a cigarette. She was a nice woman with a few complaints, suggestible, not finished, wrapped up in her kids. She was unmoved by her own painting and thought her classmates were hilarious if a little hard to take: the lady who painted in her bra, the hipster who flirted with her in his little fedora. We bumped into each other in the laundry room, and went for a walk on the jetty at sunset, and talked about marriage, and stayed out late, and spilled our guts.
Wasn’t that the whole point of this place? To take a break and clear your head? And who really gave a fuck what two people did at an arts conference in some swinging summer paradise? Real life was so lonely anyway, and I figured I’d never see her again, so on the last night we went back to her dorm room and goofed around.
When the conference ended, we started zipping notes back and forth, just a few, then more and more. For a while I thought she’d leave him, and if she left him, maybe I’d leave Robin. But then she didn’t, and I didn’t, either. I saw her once in the fall, for an hour of furious hand holding and making out in a candlelit booth in New York City. And once in March, at her house in Connecticut. Then things got heavy and she stopped talking to me.
In June I sent her a birthday card and asked if she’d be coming back to the conference. It took her three weeks to say maybe. And now, after signing my contract and promising to play softball, as I headed to the tent for lunch, I thought about what might happen if she did. It didn’t help to think about it, but I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it anyway. I got excited. I still had passion. I came over a rise and the whole town lay beneath me, the buildings old and stinking of charm and practically spilling into the bay. I caught a whiff of sea life, a funky low-tide odor. For so long, I’d been deprived of even accidental physical contact. I needed love; short of love, I needed something. I saw myself as adventurous, amorous, and brave. I got stuck in some loop of possibilities and had to stifle a ridiculous little moan. I felt a dog-eared excitement, and rode that familiar surge of energy. By the time I reached the tent, people had worn a muddy track across the lawn between the check-in table and the buffet.
“Ha ya doin’? Everything good at home?”
“Yes!”
“You believe we’re back here again?”
I got something to eat and scanned the tent for the face I’d kissed and held, for those long legs of such smooth, glassy skin, striding briskly in the fresh breeze off the bay, for that stranger who’d hovered over me, gasping and weeping.
I didn’t see her, but students sometimes walked into town for meals. I went over by the brick wall and sat with some other faculty members, Vicky Capodanno, a painter, Tom McLaughlin, an old guy who’d written a memoir of his childhood, and this idiot biographer named Dennis Fleigel, who was waving his sandwich in the air. He had his foot propped on Vicky’s chair as she cut her salad.
“I read your book,” he said. I put my bag on the wall and downed my lemonade. I just wanted to eat. “Graphic novel, comic book, whatever you call it. What do you call it?”
“I’m not in that argument.”
“Do you check the number on Amazon?”
“It’s not in print.” I was eating some kind of chef’s salad, dry raw beets, chunks of cheddar, and these mysterious white cubes of something. This was a new, wholesome food service. “Hello, Vicky. Hi, Tom.”
“Richie,” Tom said. “How are you, bud?”
Vicky looked at me with deep intensity. “How are you?”
I couldn’t remember if I’d ever responded to her last email, from Vermont, where she’d gone to take a break from New York, trying to quit smoking, childless and out of romantic options, wondering how I was, asking for photos of me with my kids, or just my kids, or any cute kid stories—and I grinned at her like a lobotomized dope.
“I was just saying,” Dennis said, “that my book was selling, it sold pretty well, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years, word of mouth was good, but then that movie came out.”
“What movie?”
“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out, my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand, and it never went lower ever again.”
Charlene Wetzel joined us, smiling, and said, “I think I have a stalker.” More people sat down. “He wore sunglasses in class,” she said. “Last year, it took a few days. This year, first day: stalker.”
Heather Hinman, who taught poetry and had a coiled energy that included her hair, said that one of her students asked what font she typed in. Roberta Moser put her plate down and told us that she’d just finished an interview with the local NPR and that the questions were dumb.
I began to feel hopeless and desperate in a familiar way.
Dennis explained that NPR was fine for pushing an art film or a book, but that the machinery that promotes a studio movie is so much bigger. “Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie killed Ring-a-Ding Ding the book, and it never recovered.”
“What are we talking about?” Roberta asked.
“My book Ring-a-Ding Ding,” Dennis said, “and how it got killed by Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie, which I also wrote.”
Roberta smiled at Dennis. “I still don’t understand.”
Tom McLaughlin brought over a bottle of wine. Frederick Stugatz sat down with Ilana Zimmer, who put some wine to her lips and said, “I just got back from six weeks as artist in residence at the University of Bologna.”
Heather took a drink and said, “After this I go to Ole Miss.”
Frederick said, “After this I go to Berkeley.” He turned and stared at Ilana, who ignored him.
Dennis said, “Ring-a-Ding Ding the book is about a sensitive brute who happens to be the twentieth century’s greatest entertainer. The movie Ring-a-Ding Ding is a piece of shit. But that’s not my point. My point is that the kid who’s supposed to be eighteen was played by a twenty-six-year-old, and the eighteen-year-olds who saw it thought the guy looked like a senior citizen.”
Dennis had red hair and a pink forehead and surprisingly bright blue eyes. If you tried to make eye contact, he couldn’t see you. I liked to think of this as the result of some head trauma. It was a kind of blindness that made him unlikable but high-functioning. He’d written four biographies and two screenplays and went on morning talk shows when his books came out. I could imagine back in caveman days someone like him being cut from the tribe, dragged away, and thrown off a cliff.
Heather buttered a roll. She used to be a drunk but now wrote poems about bartending, drinking binges, blackouts, and AA. Roberta was a filmmaker. She’d been making a documentary for the past nine years about corrupt black mayors of major American cities, filming them in jail, running for office again, taking walks with their aged mothers. Frederick taught the musical book, whatever that was, and had been the genius behind last year’s musical about Karl Rove. Ilana Zimmer had headlined an indie rock band, with one hit in the eighties, then had a ho-hum solo career, and now dabbled in kids’ music. She ran a songwriting workshop every year in Frederick’s class. Vicky had paintings in museums around the world that were violent, cartoonish, biting, dark, and funny, that dealt with war, religiosity, porn, rape, but also the cost of art education, women’s bodies, and people who lived in garbage dumps. And Tom McLaughlin had been a high school English teacher for forty years, then retired and wrote a rambling memoir of his childhood growing up over a pool hall in Alffia, Texas, population 71, with wrenching scenes about killing cattle and the death of the town; it became an instant classic, then a hit movie. He sat there like the most relaxed guy in the world, his face heavily lined, familiar in a way from posters of him around the conference—they were hard to miss, his head gleaming and speckled with age spots.
The thing to do here was relax and not worry about where I ranked among them. I pushed my plate away and started drawing on the tablecloth. I drew the bay, a single steady line, wispy clouds in the distance, and walking along the shore I drew Batman, the Caped Crusader, looking a little haggard and overweight. Last year’s tablecloths had been made of a thick, toothy paper, with a spongy plastic coating underneath, but this was thin one-ply, and the ink bled like I was drawing on toilet paper. It was a waste of time, but I didn’t care. Batman was the first superhero I’d ever drawn. I hadn’t drawn him in thirty years. Why now? Drawing him middle-aged with a big keister seemed to answer something. He stood in the surf at low tide with a touristy camera around his neck and his tights stained dark from wading.
One line led to another, the feeling of deadness went away, and this arrangement of markings became a scene with a little girl about Kaya’s age holding Batman’s hand. Was it a memory? Was it cathartic? Did it work? I didn’t care. I kept going, surprising my eyes with what my hand could do. In Batman’s other arm I drew a little boy in a swim diaper—my knees bouncing under the table—until, shading in the bay around their ankles, I pressed too hard and tore the tablecloth.
Then I thought of home and felt my throat close up. I wondered how I’d protect my kids from hundreds of miles away. I worried that Kaya would ride her tricycle into the renovation pit from the construction next door. I worried that Beanie would suck the propeller out of my old tin clown whistle. Joey, the high school kid down the block, sometimes cut through the alley in his Subaru with his foot on the gas, even though a dozen kids under the age of ten jumped rope and played games there. A spasm of electric jolts shocked my heart, from the heady mixing of blood and guilt that brought on flashes of horror and feelings of dread and excitement, the fear that I would do something sexy and rotten and get away with it.
Stewart Rinaldi pulled up a chair and said, “What did I miss?”
“We’re talking about my book,” Dennis began, “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”
No one could stop him from explaining that the movie killed the book. When he finished, no one spoke. Beside me, Charlene folded things into a sandwich.
“Pass the salt.”
We had nothing else to say, or didn’t want to try for fear of starting Dennis up again. We didn’t discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn’t believe in any of that. We’d been teaching together for years. We sat in circles, bragging about things that mattered only to us. We were artists. We believed in ourselves.
And yet, things were happening out there. Obama had drawn a red line but Assad refused to back down, while hundreds of thousands fled, in what was looking like a massive refugee crisis. “Call Me Maybe” held steady at No. 1. Ernest Borgnine died. Kim Jong-un had been named Supreme Being of North Korea. The Republican primary had been brutal, awash in dark money, the first since the Supreme Court decided that mountains of secret cash in exchange for favors was totally fine. Romney emerged as the nominee, a hollow, arrogant flip-flopper. He’d spent the summer refusing to release his most recent tax returns, while his legal representatives explained away the Swiss bank account stuffed with tens or hundreds of his own millions. He was in London this week, having FedExed his wife’s half-million-dollar dressage horse over to compete in the Olympics.
We didn’t care about that stuff. We cared about art. We cared about lunch. Finally Dennis stood, picked up his bag, and walked out of the tent, past the drinks cooler, toward the library.
“Ring-a-ding ding,” Roberta said. “Does that ring any bells?”
“Forget it,” Tom said.
People liked Dennis as a teacher. Around the faculty, though, he lost control. He engendered pity, which must’ve bothered him. The interns were clearing off the buffet table behind us, watery bowls of lentil salad no one wanted. Roberta said Dennis’s wife had moved out, and Charlene shook her head and said it was a long time coming. Frederick turned to stare at Ilana, who pretended not to notice. Vicky asked why we had to sit here, year after year, talking about Dennis Fleigel, and wondered if anyone wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, and gave me a deep, meaningful look, but I didn’t want to linger, to catch up, didn’t want to be her beach pal. I couldn’t listen to the grievances of childless grown-ups anymore, their boredom with their free time, wondering what they’d missed. Whatever had caught up with them was making them depressed.
SIX (#ulink_ca088b97-a535-5be9-b375-a6179aec3f86)
In college I couldn’t figure out what to major in. Over in English they were complaining that language itself had become brittle and useless, and over in art, so-called postmodern painting was being taught in a way I didn’t understand, as the subject as object ran into ontological difficulties that couldn’t be solved with a paintbrush. I started making comics for some relief—leaning heavily on my own journals, since I’d never learned how to make up anything—an episodic, thinly veiled series of stories about a girl and boy who fall in love, stay up late, eat pizza in their undies, make charcoal drawings, create installations of dirt and lightbulbs, hate their fathers, move into an apartment together, build futon frames, flush their contact lenses down the drain, throw parties with grain alcohol punch, get knocked up, have an abortion, read Krishnamurti, graduate, break up, fuck other people, and move together to Baltimore, to an abandoned industrial space where sunlight comes through holes in the roof, dappling the walls.
After college I published it myself, on sheets of eight and a half by eleven, folded in half and pressed flat with the back of a spoon, stapled in the middle, and handed it out personally at conventions for a dollar. Making comics kept me from going apeshit. Later, at the ad agency where I worked, I upped the production value, made the leap to offset printing, sending it through on the invoice of a client in St. Louis, who, without knowing, paid for my two-color card-stock cover. I didn’t dedicate myself to it, didn’t plan on toiling for years. I figured I’d do a few more, get a job as a creative director, drill holes in my head and use it as a bowling ball.
One day I got a call. “We like your comic. We’d like to publish it. Would you be interested in that?” I remember walking around the office, heat boiling my face, wondering who to tell. Soon my work began appearing in a free alternative weekly. A year after that, I cut a deal with a beloved independent publisher for a comic book of my very own. When I finally held it in my hands, twenty-four pages, color cover, I lifted it to my face and inhaled. I caught the attention of agents and editors, and a couple of big-name cartoonists, who championed my work, and the thing took on a life of its own.
All of a sudden I’m cool, phone’s ringing, there are lines at my tables at conventions. My cross-hatching improved; my brushwork became fearless. I put out two issues a year. The comic grew to thirty-two pages, then forty-eight.
TV and film people started calling. I quit my job and helped write a pilot. I flew to Brussels to be on a panel of cartoonists. I designed a book cover for a reissue of On the Road, did a CD jacket for a legendary L.A. punk band. I lived on food stamps, even as my ego ballooned. I broke into magazines, and caved to the occasional job for hire, and torched my savings, and somehow got by.
But in my own comics, I handled the hot material of my life. My characters were shacking up, doing PR for the Mafia, suffering premarital anxieties and fertility issues. My publisher suggested collecting these comics into a book. The book held together like a novel. It came out six years ago.
They couldn’t sell the TV pilot. The book went out of print. I couldn’t tell stories about myself anymore. I’d flip through my sketchbook, dating back to before Kaya was born, life drawings, junked panels, false starts, art ideas, rambling journal entries, then babies in diapers and crawling and wobbling, and all this tearstained agonized writing about how tired I was. Then I’d start to think about What I’m Capable Of, but then I’d think, Who cares. Fuck comics. I couldn’t write about these scenes of domestic bliss, maybe because they lacked the reckless, boozy, unzipped struggle of my youth, or maybe because my wife and kids were some creepy experiment I couldn’t relate to, or maybe because they were the most precious thing on earth and needed my protection from the diminishing power of my “art,” and writing about them was evil.
In my stories I’d been some kind of wild man, some bumbling lothario wielding his incompetence, mistaking his sister-in-law for a prostitute, knocking over the casket at the funeral of his boss, battling suburban angst and sexual constraint in a fictionalized autobio psychodrama. My success at selling that renegade message opened up a sustainable commercial existence, the very existence I’d been trying to avoid. Instead, I embraced conformity, routine, homeownership, marriage, and parenthood, in exchange for neighborly niceties and a sleepy, toothless rebellion in the pages of a crusty political magazine trying to be hip. I worked as an illustrator now, or what might be referred to as an “editorial cartoonist.” I’d also done other types of unclassifiable commercial whore work, promotional posters for a Swedish reggae festival, fabric patterns for a hip-hop clothing company. I had a handful of regular clients from over the years, a hotel soap manufacturer, a Canadian HMO, a fried chicken chain in the Philippines whose in-house art department called when they got totally overwhelmed, although it had been a while, actually, since I’d done any of that crap.
Magazine work asked less of me, and paid more, and at times could almost be fun. I’d done drawings of Anthony Weiner, the Arab Spring, bedbugs, the uprising in Syria, Walmart slaves, Obama as a jug-eared mullah, Obama in his Bermuda shorts in the Rose Garden burying tiny flag-draped coffins, the whole clown car of Republican kooks who’d been rolling across the country all year—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt, Rick Perry, and several of Mitt. In one he’s waving from his yacht, and in another he’s wiping his ass with an American worker, and in yet another he’s burying his loot in the Caymans. I’d also done full-page drawings for longer features, assigned by Adam, my art director: Somali pirates, Gitmo prisoners force-fed on a hunger strike, and a dozen covers—“The CIA in Damascus,” “Stop Eating So Much Meat,” “The Breast Issue,” “Our Complicated Relationship with Drones.” I could make a living if I worked fast, on three things at once, and didn’t mind the art department yanking my chain.
SEVEN (#ulink_a443187d-e1a1-59ed-be30-3b05d337b683)
At midnight Beanie got hungry, and at three A.M. he made a sound like a cat being run over by a car, for an hour without stopping. At six he got up for good.
“I hope you have a better night tonight.”
“Please don’t talk about it.”
I regretted having called. They were at the park now, in unrelenting heat and humidity. I sat on a low brick wall by the flagpole, the Place of Good Reception, overlooking the sweep of the harbor, the bridge in the distance, seagulls curling in arcs under high pressure and plenty of sunshine, the temperature a breezy seventy-eight degrees, a skosh below the seasonal average.
First thing this morning they went off to gymnastics camp, where we’d enrolled Kaya for the next four Saturdays, and met a nice blond lady who knelt beside Kaya when Robin tried to leave, and a dark-haired unsympathetic woman collecting the pizza money, and a teenage gymnast, holding a sobbing girl, about Kaya’s age, in a pink tutu with a blue lump on her forehead and an ice pack on her wrist.
Kaya had enjoyed the trampoline but not the rope thing. Then some boy shoved her, waiting in line for a cookie. She’d let another boy lie on top of her during circle time, they bumped heads, and now she had a swollen lip. She quit after lunch and said she’d never go back.
Robin’s parents had made it to dinner last night after all, but it seemed that Dave hadn’t changed Iris’s clothes, and her hair was dirty. The last time I’d seen my mother-in-law, she’d used mascara to draw on eyebrows, and wore eye shadow that looked like fireplace ash, and had a bruise from a fall discoloring one side of her face. Every time she walked into a room Robin would walk out, as if an alarm had gone off, explaining loudly that one of the kids needed a cracker, and her mom would sit and tell me how fat people were in Florida, or call Robin’s stepfather Dan, or tell me she had a baby in her belly that was painful sometimes.
Robin mentioned the urinary tract infection her mom had, a result of Dave’s neglect. He’d done his best to nurse her along, while also resisting and denying the obvious. By the time he’d finally given in and had Iris tested, she’d been tying her blouses in front for a year because she couldn’t figure out how to button them. I’d gotten used to the pantomime at dinner, nodding and smiling when she abandoned her fork and pawed through her plate.
Dave and Iris had worked hard all their lives, and this caretaking and dementia were their only retirement. He didn’t have religion or children or close family of his own, but he’d confided in me that after Iris died, he planned to take a bicycle tour through the wine regions of Tuscany. He enjoyed the light-tasting Chianti of Florence, as well as the more full-bodied pinot chiefly associated with Pisa. He’d already done the research.
“I need to talk to her nurses,” Robin said. “I have to call the house when Dave’s not there.” I could hear Kaya singing in the background. I could picture the bench where Robin sat at the park by a sweltering playground. “If he’s home, they won’t say anything.”
It was the song Kaya had been singing in the kitchen before I’d left. “Shakira, Shakira!”
“They’re not nurses,” she said. “They’re probably corn farmers. Or soldiers. When did the war end in Sierra Leone?” I said I didn’t know. Kaya yelled for Robin to watch her climb.“He’s so incapable of dealing with his grief.”
Actually, I thought Dave was holding up pretty well, considering. The steroid he took to suppress whatever was choking his lungs had terrible side effects. His face was bloated and his skin had turned red, thin, and fragile. His beard had gone white. He looked like Santa, if Santa started drinking every day at lunch, which Dave did.
“How come this morning at an air-conditioned gymnastics place for seventy-five bucks an hour she wouldn’t get off my lap, but we come here in a million degrees and she can’t stay off the monkey bars?” I figured it was because she knew the layout, but kept it to myself. “I got so mad at her for quitting. I started screaming, ‘You never try. Why is that?’ I’m sitting outside gymnastics, sweating my ass off, holding Beanie, she can literally see my head from the window, and twice she came out crying, saying she missed me. I just wanted to close my eyes for five seconds. You know how you say I never admit I’m wrong? Well, I was wrong, and I’m not just telling you I abused her to make you feel guilty. I went too far.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I had to shove him into his stroller so I could deal with her, but he wouldn’t let go, and I pressed down so hard I thought I broke his rib cage.”
“Jesus.”
“At lunch, the nice counselor let her sit on her lap, but the mean one told her she was a big girl and should stop crying. I’m going to find that one and explain to her that it doesn’t do any good to tell that to a four-year-old.”
“You tell Kaya that all the time.”
“That’s different.”
“Why is it different?”
“Because she woke me up five hundred times last night. Oh, here she is. You woke me up five hundred times last night.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” It was true: Kaya didn’t sound sorry. I looked out at the bay, the sky, the seagulls, thankful for the distance between us.
“I’m locking her in her room tonight.”
“With what?”
“I’ll buy a hook.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I wouldn’t do that to a dog.” Two sailboats tacked at the same angle as they cornered around the jetty.
“She’s not used to being ignored in the middle of the night. One peep and you’re there, hovering over her. Maybe now she’ll finally get sleep-trained. Now she’ll learn to spend the night in her bedroom alone.”
“You’re going to sleep-train her in one night?”
It went on like this for a while.
“It’s you, you feed and flirt and sing and have conversations at three A.M.—”
The bay, the water, the seagulls.
“When you’re here, it’s always ‘Daddy Daddy,’ keeping them out of the basement so you can work, brokering that. When you’re not here, it’s quiet and I feed them early and put them to bed early, not at nine o’clock—”
“Hey, why don’t you take the night shift for the next four years?”
“Because I need drugs to sleep.” Beanie let out that piercing cat scream. I heard her whacking him on the back. “And when I take medication, I need more sleep. I’m not doing this for you next summer, so have fun.”
“I’m having a blast.”
“I don’t care what you do up there, but if you give me a disease I will cut it off. Got it?”
