Exley, page 3
My dad didn’t answer. My poor dad. Because I was pretty sure that when the nurse said my dad had been “quite the sleepyhead,” that meant he’d been in a coma. There were a bunch of tubes running out of him and into a bunch of bags and machines; one tube went from his nose to a machine that looked like the kind of thing clowns blow up balloons with at your birthday party. The machine didn’t seem to be on. I tried hard to trust the machines and the tubes and to not think at all about what would happen if they stopped working. I tried hard not to think of what might have put my dad in a coma, just like, over the past eight months, I had tried not to think about what he was doing in Iraq: if, at that moment, he was trying to kill someone; if, at that moment, someone was trying to kill him. Because I knew he was; I knew they were. Because every time I did think of that, I started to cry. And as everyone knows, Crying Doesn’t Do Anyone Any Good. That’s why I’d been trying to Stay Positive for the past eight months, and I tried it now, too. I thought that at least my dad was back in Watertown. I walked closer and touched my dad’s legs, his arms, through his blanket. They were still there. At least he had his legs and arms. And the Dixie cups were a good sign: that meant that he was awake enough to drink out of the cups, at least some of the time; at least, even if he’d been in a coma and was asleep now, he’d woken up earlier today. At least he was alive: I could see his chest rising and falling. But there wasn’t a book open on it. This was weird. Before he’d gone to Iraq, my dad was an English professor at Jefferson County Community College. I don’t think I’d ever seen him lying down without reading a book. Or sleeping without a book lying open on his chest. And when I say “a book,” I mean just one: A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley.
I took the book out of my backpack, pulled a chair close to my dad’s bed, sat down, took a deep, deep breath. This is the kind of breath you take before you do something that you’re not supposed to but that might be, probably is, the right thing to do even if you’re not supposed to do it. Anyway, I took the breath, and then another, then looked at my dad. His left eye was closed, but the right one was open and looking at me.
“Hey, bud,” my dad said in a croaky, tired-sounding voice.
“Dad!” I said. I jumped out of my chair and hugged him, or tried to. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to hug someone who’s connected to tubes, but the trick is to hug that person hard enough for him to know that you’re doing it, but soft enough so that the tubes don’t. Anyway, I hugged my dad as best I could. When I stopped hugging him, I sat back in my chair. Both of my dad’s eyes were closed now, and I was scared for a minute that I’d done something to the tubes after all. But then my dad said, “For Christ’s sake, bud, what time is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked around the room for a clock but I didn’t see one. When I looked back at my dad, his eyes were still closed, but there was a slight, sleepy smile on his face.
“It’s time for you to stop holding A Fan’s Notes and start reading it to me,” he said. “I know you can do that, can’t cha?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to act like it was no big deal, even though my heart was beating so fast I thought I might need one of my dad’s machines to slow it down. I opened the book. I skipped all the early pages that aren’t numbered and so aren’t really part of the book and went to page 1. I read the title of chapter 1 — “The Nervous Light of Sunday” — to myself, and then the first sentence out loud to my dad: “ ‘On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–, while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York . . .’ ”
Before I go any further, I should say this: you might not know that Exley’s book had Watertown in it, but I did, just like I knew it had swearing and drinking and sex and crazy people and insane asylums and electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy and misogyny and football and English teachers in it, too. I knew all this even though I hadn’t actually read the book. And how did I come to know that?
Mother Told Me
Mother told me. This happened when I was only eight years old. We were in our living room. The living room was also my dad’s study. I mean, it was a normal living room — it had a couch and a couple of comfortable chairs and they were pointing toward a television and there was a fireplace that we never used because, as Mother liked to say, “Someone forgot to buy the wood,” and, as my dad liked to say, “For Christ’s sake, you don’t buy wood, you chop it,” and, as Mother liked to say, “I wouldn’t complain if you chopped it instead of buying it,” and, as my dad liked to say, getting up from the couch and looking under the cushions, “Jesus H. Keeriiisst, who stole my ax?” — but my dad also had a desk in the corner. When he read at his desk, he sat on the window seat behind it. The window seat opened. But not, of course, when my dad was sitting on it.
Anyway, I was standing in the middle of the room, holding the book I was supposed to read for school. I was in the seventh-grade advanced reading class, but everyone else in my grade was reading the book, too. Usually, there weren’t enough copies of books to go around, and so we had to share or get a copy from the library or buy our own. But this was part of a special government program called America on the Same Page (there was a sticker on the book that said so) and so we each had our own copy. On the front cover of the book was a picture of a boy with ragged short pants and no shoes, wearing a straw hat and standing in a field by himself with the sun setting behind him. Mother asked if she could see the book. I handed it to her. She looked at the front cover and then the back, then smiled at me and handed me back the book. “It looks like an interesting book,” she said.
“It looks like a book for kids,” my dad said. He’d already looked at it and announced I shouldn’t have to read it, which was why we were even having this discussion.
“Miller is a kid,” Mother said. “He’s only eight years old.”
“For Christ’s sake,” my dad said, “I know how old he is.” He took the book out of my hands again and read out loud from the back cover: “‘A contemporary classic about an innocent child making his way through the complicated world of adults.’” His voice sounded high and funny, the way your voice sounds when you hold your nose while talking, although my dad wasn’t holding his nose when he read from the back of the book. He handed the book back to me and said to Mother, in his normal deeper voice, “It’s a book for kids, Carrie. Miller doesn’t have to read kids’ books anymore.”
“Just because you say he doesn’t have to doesn’t mean he shouldn’t. He’s only eight years old,” my mother said again. She was a lawyer and knew that when you had a good point, you made it better by repeating it.
“For Christ’s sake,” my dad said, “I know how old he is.” Then he looked at me with big eyes. He looked at me this way a lot. Like he wanted my help. Mother saw the look, and I think it made her even madder, because she said, “I don’t think you do.” And then, while they had an argument about whether my dad knew how old I was, I stood between them and read the book. The last book I’d read was Waiting for Godot. That book was a play, and like Mother, the two guys in it tended to repeat themselves — not to make a point but to show that there wasn’t one. This book was a novel, about a good boy with a good family who lived on the outskirts of a good town and owned a good farm with good land and grew good food and led a good life even though the boy missed his good dad, who had died of a bad heart before he could see his good son grow up to become a good man and go off to fight in a good war.
“Dad, I’m done,” I said, handing him the book. I should explain something. It’s not just that I can read anything. It’s that I can read anything fast. This is why I’ve skipped grades. That’s why I was in seventh grade when I was eight years old, in eighth grade when I was nine. Some people thought I was a genius. But I wasn’t. I could just read things I wasn’t supposed to be able to read, faster than most people were supposed to be able to read them.
“Already?” my dad said.
I shrugged and said, “It was pretty easy.”
My dad looked at Mother and smiled at her in an I-told-you-it-was-a-kids’-book sort of way. She didn’t smile back; she almost never smiled or frowned. When she was happy, Mother crossed her arms over her chest. When she was unhappy, she put her hands on her hips. Right then, her hands were on her hips. That should have told my dad everything he needed to know. But my dad never seemed to be able to read Mother: he was always looking at her face, which told him nothing, not at her arms, which would have told him everything. My dad found Mother inscrutable; I knew this because he often said to her, “Carrie, you’re inscrutable.” But she wasn’t: she was absolutely scrutable, as long as you knew the right part of her to scrutinize.
Anyway, Mother’s hands were on her hips, but my dad wasn’t looking at her. He was looking in the direction of his desk. “You know what you should be reading at that school of yours . . . ,” he said. He walked over, reached down, picked a book off his desk, walked back to where I was standing, and handed me the book. I had time to read the title — A Fan’s Notes — before Mother snatched it out of my hands.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked. My dad looked away from her and didn’t say anything. Maybe because he already knew why not.
“You know why not?” Mother said. She wasn’t looking at me when she said this. She was looking at my dad. “Because of all the swearing and drinking and sex and crazy people and insane asylums and electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy and misogyny and football and English teachers and . . .”
That “and” hung there for a while, like a promise of something worse to come. “. . . Watertown,” Mother finally said. Like I said earlier, I was born in Watertown. My dad was born in Utica, which is in upstate New York and, according to my dad, just like Watertown except not as far north and so not as great. But Mother was from Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I haven’t been there, but she always said it was beautiful. Maybe that’s the problem with being someplace beautiful: it makes it impossible to live anywhere else that’s not. Because Mother had a tough time living in Watertown, where she’d come to work as a lawyer for a soldiers’ spouses’ advocacy group, met my dad, had me, and never left. Whenever she said the name “Watertown,” it sounded like what a dog would sound like when it said the word “cat.” In any case, I put my head down — you put your head down when your parents talk like this — and waited for whatever Mother would say after “Watertown.” But she didn’t say anything. After a good bit of silence, I heard someone’s footsteps leading away from the living room, and a second after that, I heard the front door slam. I looked up. Mother was gone and my dad was standing there by himself, holding the book, looking sheepish and a little scared. My dad was a big guy. His forearms were thick, hairy, sun-spotted logs. But he was sensitive, too, like a bear with hurt feelings. After Mother left the room, I wanted to hold his hand and tell him everything would be OK.
“I’m sorry, bud,” my dad said, “but your mother doesn’t want you to read this book.”
“Why not?” I said. “Are there bad guys in it?” I didn’t normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults.
“Your mother thinks so,” my dad said. “Your mother thinks there are bad guys everywhere.” His voice cracked a little, and I thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t. “Just promise me you won’t read it,” he said. My dad said this in such a way that it was clear I’d be a bad guy if I read the book, and he’d be a bad guy if he let me, or at least Mother would think we were.
“I promise,” I said. My dad nodded. After that, we didn’t say anything for a while. I don’t know what my dad was thinking. But I was still thinking about A Fan’s Notes.
“Is this book your favorite?” I asked him.
“This book is ‘my delight, my folly, my anodyne,’ my intellectual stimulation,” my dad said. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean, and my dad must have realized it, because he then said, “Bud, it’s the only book I’ve read in the last fifteen years.”
I put my hand out. My dad hesitated, then handed the book to me. On the cover it said FREDERICK EXLEY in red letters, and underneath that, A FAN’S NOTES in yellow. There was a drawing of a desk, with a typewriter on it, pieces of blank white paper flying from the typewriter out an open window and into the blue, blue sky. There were leaves on the floor (they must have come in through the open window), and also on the floor was the shadow of a man standing in the doorway. But the cover didn’t say what kind of book it was, whether it was a novel, like the America on the Same Page book, or a play, like Waiting for Godot, or what. When I was in third grade, some of the kids in my class couldn’t remember the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and so my teacher, Miss M., made two posters. One of them said, FICTION — BOOKS OR STORIES THAT ARE NOT TRUE, LIKE MAKE-BELIEVE OR FANTASY STORIES. The other said, NONFICTION — BOOKS OR STORIES THAT ARE TRUE AND REAL. THEY TEACH AND INFORM US. I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was “A Fictional Memoir.” I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn’t make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy. Anyway, I closed the book and looked at the cover again. The corners of the cover were torn and wrinkled, the spine was split, and so many pages were dog-eared that you might as well consider the whole book dog-eared. It looked like it really was the only book my dad had read in fifteen years: it looked used, but more than that, it looked loved. When I saw how loved it was, I suddenly wanted the book, bad, wanted to know what was in it. But I couldn’t read it. I’d promised my dad. I handed the book back to him and he took it, and I said, “Can I at least sit next to you while you read it?”
My dad smiled and said that I could.
Where I Needed to Go
Anyway, back in my dad’s hospital room, I read that first part of the first sentence and then looked over at my dad. His eyes were still closed; his chest was still rising and falling. I tried again: “‘On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196–,’” I read, “ ‘while sitting at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in my home town, Watertown, New York, awaiting the telecast of the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys football game, I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.’ ”
Then I stopped and looked at my dad again. He was still asleep, but his chest wasn’t rising and falling as much. What did that mean? Did it mean that my dad wasn’t breathing as hard as before? And was that a good thing or a bad thing? Either way, I knew my reading hadn’t kept my dad awake, which is what I wanted it to do. Did it mean that I hadn’t read the first sentence the way it should be read? Or did it mean that I shouldn’t have read the first sentence at all? It had a heart attack in it, after all. Considering how sick my dad was, maybe he didn’t want to hear about Exley’s bad heart just now. I could understand that. Maybe the second sentence, or paragraph, or page, would be more appropriate. But I didn’t know for sure — because of course I’d never read the book, because my dad had made me promise I wouldn’t. So I just sat there, looking at my dad, wondering and wondering what to do, until I remembered Z.
Z. was a kid in my first-grade class. When Z. and I were six years old, Z. got cancer: he was bald, and dying. Everyone knew this, including Z. Every night in the hospital, he’d watch his favorite baseball team, the B.’s., and his favorite baseball player, M.R. Watching M.R. made Z. happy, but it didn’t make his cancer go away. So one day M.R. came to visit Z. in the hospital. There was a picture in the newspaper; in it, M.R. had his arm around Z.’s shoulder and Z. was smiling, like he knew, now, somehow, that everything would be OK. And it was. Z. is still alive, and his cancer is gone and his hair is back, and he’s in fourth grade, where I should be.
Anyway, once I thought of it, I knew what had worked for Z. and M.R. would work for my dad and Exley. Or at least I knew it would work if A Fan’s Notes was a true story, if the Watertown in the book was the Watertown I lived in, and if Exley was still in it. There was only one way to find out.
I got up from my chair, kissed my dad on the forehead. It felt slick and cold, like someone had rubbed a greasy ice cube on it. I told him that I’d be back soon, and that I was so happy he was home, and that I loved him. I didn’t tell him where I was going, because I thought he might not like it. I just put the book back in my backpack, shouldered the backpack, and left the room, then the hospital. My bike was where I’d left it: in the bushes right outside the front doors. I got on it and pedaled. Because I knew where the New Parrot was: it was past my school, up the big hill, on upper Washington Street, going south out of town. I knew exactly where it was and where I needed to go.
Things I Learned from My Dad, Who Learned Them from Exley (Lesson 1: Exley Is Everywhere)
Every Sunday morning my dad and I would walk down to the Crystal, which was my dad’s favorite restaurant and bar, eat breakfast, take a few laps around the Public Square, then walk home. Usually we’d run into someone my dad knew, and my dad would talk to him (it was almost always a him, and it was almost always someone my dad knew from the Crystal, and as a matter of fact, it was usually someone who was either going to or coming from the Crystal) for a while. I’d never paid much attention to the guys my dad talked to. I just stood there and let the noise of their talking go back and forth over my head and didn’t think about anything in particular until my dad said, “OK, bud, let’s get going.” But the Sunday after I found out about A Fan’s Notes — how my dad loved it, how it was set in Watertown — every guy my dad talked to I thought might be Exley. When my dad talked to the guy wearing a baseball hat and a Watertown High team jacket in line at the ATM, I asked my dad if he was Exley. When my dad talked to the guy in the grease-stained white apron having a smoke outside the Crystal, I asked if he was Exley. When my dad knelt down and gave a quarter to the guy sacked out on the sidewalk in front of the army-navy store, I asked if he was Exley. When my dad talked to the guy unlocking the door at the used-book store, I asked if he was Exley, even though I’d been with my dad before to the used-book store and was pretty sure that guy was a girl. “For Christ’s sake, Miller,” he said that last time. I knew I was bugging my dad; I knew I was making him sorry that he’d ever mentioned A Fan’s Notes in the first place. But I couldn’t help myself.
