Jernigan, page 16
But Jernigan is no life-changer. Though willing enough to lie back and let it happen. So I ended up simply resolving to limit things to maybe a beer once in a while but really just a beer, and to do better with the little daily stuff. A smile of greeting, a thank you after a meal—oh believe me, I know how Reader’s Digesty this all sounds—and really listening to what loved ones are saying instead of finding ways to let them know that you wish they’d leave you the fuck alone. I thought: Martin Sanders’s family is shot to shit, but you still have a family. Or what might yet be made to approximate a family. And you’ve been sinking down and down and down into yourself and taking no care of it. Now that was going to stop. I was going to be part of this household again: take my turn doing dishes and feeding the bunnies. Death-chamber duty too. Danny was going to have a mother and Clarissa was going to have a father and Martha and I were going to have a sex life again and we were going to get a set of friends and everybody was going to do things together. I was going to look into health insurance and so on, and sock away that money from the house in some kind of a good bank thing so it would be there for Danny. I was going to start wearing that fun cowboy jacket. Christmas was only two weeks away, and we were going to have a tree and people over and things in the windows.
I mean, I say Dustin’s death was none of my doing, but I should have picked up the clues he’d taken such pains both to drop and to disguise. When he said kids who talked about suicide were crying for help. When he said he would have felt bad if he hadn’t tried everything. When he said it was when you were alone that things got weird. On the other hand, he’d been a devious little fuck, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to know how guilty everybody was going to feel afterwards. It wasn’t just me, as I found out. He’d told Danny that the other kid in the band, the feral one with the tank top and the platinum hair, was talking suicide. Then there was the kid from the community college—some good police work on this, I have to say—who’d been selling him drugs and who had soaked him a hundred bucks for that twenty-dollar pistol. Dustin had foxed him by claiming he’d been getting threats from a gang of Vietnamese kids at the high school because he was giving drugs away to their paying customers. Except there weren’t any Vietnamese kids at the high school.
And then there was the father.
I never found out just what the trouble there had been about. But I did sit with the father in their living room the day after the funeral to tell him what I could tell him, though he’d already heard it secondhand from the police. And to explain why I hadn’t called him to say his son was staying in my house and was that okay. A medical emergency that evening, that was the way I put it. That the quote unquote medical emergency was also his son’s doing—not that he’d had to twist Clarissa’s arm, probably—didn’t seem like anything the poor bastard needed to know at this point. Jernigan and his lonely burden.
When he went into the kitchen to get me a cup of coffee, I looked around at all the right angles of chrome, glass, stone, black leather. I was the only shapeless thing here. Martin Sanders was thin and looked like a mean son of a bitch. Glasses like Gloria Steinem’s. He could never have had even the minimal flair required to name a kid Dustin. It must have been the wife. Hard, too, to imagine him with a secret collection of videos like the one they found at the house, which sure as hell hadn’t come from Bedford Falls Video. No it wasn’t.
He handed me a black stoneware cup and sat down empty-handed.
“This is my wife’s idea,” he said. “She’s asked me to ask you about it, so that I can then tell it to her. She didn’t seem to feel she could talk to you personally at this point.” He wasn’t doing too well himself. Off came the glasses and out came a white handkerchief from the pocket of the gray wool slacks. When he finished with the handkerchief you could see two little white ovals where the glasses dug into his bony nose.
“It’s the first thing she’s asked of me in God knows how long,” he said. Then he said, “You don’t need to hear this.”
“Please,” I said. “If you need to talk.”
“Let me rephrase myself,” he said. “What I mean is, it’s none of your business. And I want you the hell out of my house as soon as I’ve heard what I need to hear. Is that a little clearer?”
3
It was right around this time, gearing up for the holiday season, that we had the closing on the house. Danny and I brought the last couple of carloads of stuff over the day before, and Clarissa came along on one trip to help him go through his clothes. Most of what we brought was boxes of my books, including the Britannica eleventh edition I’d never unpacked since Barrow Street. Another precious legacy to my son. (Little joke.) The rest of his records, some extra blankets (Martha’s request), a few towels. And the color tv, which went straight up to the kids’ room: in Clarissa’s eyes, my high-water mark as stepfather. Hey, if the kids wanted to think that sticking to the old black-and-white was one more sign of my unselfishness, who was I to enlighten them? Though Danny must’ve known me better.
After signing the papers and handing over the keys, I took the whole family into the city for dinner and a movie. It was going to be dinner and a show but none of the shows sounded any good, big surprise. Martha picked the Russian Tea Room and I said fine. I mean, it could have been Mamma Leone’s. (That was uncalled-for.) We brought a Daily News in with us so we could look at movie times, but there weren’t even any movies anybody wanted to see all that much. So after dinner we just walked down to Rockefeller Center and looked at the tree and the skaters and it turned out to be a good family thing to do and then we went back to New Jersey like probably thousands of other New Jersey families that night.
“Dan, what do you say?” I asked him at breakfast the next morning. (Another thing: I was going to be making it to breakfast from now on. And not because I’d been up all night drinking, either. It would be because at bedtime I would have fucked Martha and then gone right off to sleep.) “You busy this weekend?”
He considered this, obviously wondering what a no would let him in for. “I don’t know yet,” he said.
“Well, here’s what I was thinking. Why don’t you and me hop in the car and drive up around where Grandpa Jernigan’s old place was and get a tree.”
“What do you mean get a tree?”
“Christmas tree,” I said. “You know, ho ho ho?” Forgetting I wasn’t going to be sarcastic anymore. Okay, so just breeze on past it. “I thought we’d cut our own this year,” I said.
“Isn’t it going to end up costing you just as much in gas anyway?” he said.
“Probably,” I said. “Viewed purely in crass economic terms, it’s undoubtedly a washout. But viewed as a father-son bonding ritual? This could be more precious than diamonds. More lasting than fucking bronze.” I couldn’t help it: he was being willfully stupid.
He stared down at the peanut butter melting into his toast. I wouldn’t have known what to say, either.
“Anybody for more coffee?” said helpful Martha. Danny looked up at her. Clarissa, of course, just sat there twisting platinum hair around a black-nailed finger.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be such a prick, pardon my French.” This for Clarissa’s benefit. “I’d just like for us to spend some time together, and I thought this might be a nice way to do it. Go off on a little mission.”
“Why?” he said. “So I won’t kill myself like Dustin?”
“Good,” I said. “You know, you’re really beginning to show some promise there. Keep it up and by the time you’re my age you might be just as big a prick as your old dad.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Martha. “Both of you. You make me want to cover my ears. Danny, why don’t you give your father a chance? And Peter. Stop being so ugly. You might as well take a strap to him. At least that would be clean.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Sorry, Mrs. Peretsky,” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “it is a long way up there and everything. We don’t really have to have such a major expedition. It was just a thought.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t care.”
You sullen little son of a bitch, I almost said.
“Well,” I said, “how about Saturday, then? Leave good and early, get you back in time to do what you want Saturday night—what do you say?”
He stared extra hard at his toast, his brow crumpling with the smile of relief he was suppressing. “Yeah, if that’s okay with you,” he said, in a deep voice that wasn’t quite his own yet. In that moment I loved him so.
And pitied him for what had been done to him, and for the long road ahead. Oh, not the road to Connecticut, I was just using a worn-out metaphor. Though not too worn-out, apparently, for the likes of Jernigan. Because I really did picture Danny, under a featureless sky, on a featureless road heading for a vanishing point, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book. Which Santa had brought me one year. My father’s friends always used to come over for Christmas—most of them didn’t have kids—and when I clawed the paper off and held it up they all laughed and cheered.
4
I laid Martha’s ax on the floor in the back seat of the Datsun and got behind the wheel. Danny slumped in the passenger seat half asleep as I bustled, the cowboy jacket over his knees. “Guess we better take the scythe along too,” I said, as if he gave a fuck.
“For what?” he said, then yawned. It was eight in the morning, bright blue sky, fierce sun, frost still on the grass.
“Case we have to clear any brush to get at the tree,” I said. “Don’t want to snag your ax when you’re trying to swing it.” I swung a hypothetical ax to show him. “You want to leave plenty of room around you.” We were talking about things that mattered to men. I had already had three cups of coffee.
He stretched as best he could in a cramped car—more of a squirm really—and settled back down.
Well so of course no matter which way you turned it, the son-of-a-bitching scythe wouldn’t go. God damn little shitbox foreign cars anyway. I ended up having to find a wrench and take off the blade; the snath had to go lengthwise, one end of it up between the front seats.
“How are we supposed to fit a tree in here?” said Danny.
“O ye of little faith,” I said. “We’re not going to try. Going to tie it to the roof. Like a deer.” He didn’t seem to understand what I meant about a deer. It got me thinking, though: if this went all right and we had a good time, why couldn’t Danny and I start going hunting together? Couple of deer rifles, go upcountry and bring home some real meat instead of your God damn pissy little rabbits. Meat enough to last us.
When we finally got under way, he took the Walkman out of the dash first thing. I mean, he did ask if I minded, but of course he had you there: if you said you did mind and would rather talk, what the hell kind of a tone did that set for any conversation you were going to have? As we crossed the GW, I turned my head for a glance at the skyscrapers on such a clear day, and there he was, head resting on the window glass, eyes closed, mouth open. Fleeting thought about which hospital was closest (but not some Bronx one) before I saw his shoulder rise, then fall, then rise. I reached over and locked his door.
Just below Hartford, he suddenly sat up and took off the earphones. The thing had long since clicked off, but he’d slept on through the silence. “How much longer?” he said.
“Forty-five minutes?” I said. “Little more, maybe.” I didn’t want to say another hour.
“Mmmf,” he said.
“You have a good sleep?”
“Had this weird dream,” he said. “You and Mom were in it. It was like I really thought it was real, you know. Like even after I woke up I still thought some of it was true.” He tossed the cowboy jacket into the back seat and did his squirming stretch.
“What did you think was true?” I said.
“I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain. Where are we anyway?”
“That’s Hartford,” I said, pointing.
“Are we gonna go past the Colt factory?”
“Right,” I said. “You remember that?”
“Sure,” he said. “I wasn’t that little. The horse on top.”
“So what was this dream?” I said, obliged to ask, dreading to hear. The last time I’d heard him mention Judith was the day we’d moved the last stuff out of Heritage Circle. I’d come out of the house with a box of books in time to catch him flipping a thumb at the driveway and saying to Clarissa, “Right there’s the place where my mom bought it.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, “except that you and Mom were both in it and we were doing something. Do they still make guns there?”
“Got me,” I said. “For all I know, they made it into condos now. Colt Condominiums,” I announced in a Don Pardo voice. “All the comforts of home, and none of the horseshit.”
He laughed, probably not so much at the very small joke as at his father saying shit to him. Oh, we were doing fine now.
“So,” I said. “You still think a lot about Mom?”
He shrugged. “Not a lot.”
I waited.
“Sometimes I think it’s sad that I don’t think about her.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I said. “You just have to remember that it’s natural, and that it doesn’t mean you love her any less. It’s just that as you go along, your life fills up with new things, and people, that need your attention.”
“It just seems like I’m going on and leaving her back there alone,” he said. He began to cry. The first time I’d seen since the funeral. Not that I would have been likely to see. Maybe this was cathartic for him, if there was such a thing as catharsis.
“Danny,” I said. “However it is, I don’t think it’s like that. That people are just left alone somewhere.”
“Well how do you think it is?” he said, taking rough swipes at his cheeks with the back of a wrist. “How do you know so much?”
“I’m not claiming to know anything,” I said. “I’m only telling you what I think.”
“You think it because that’s what you want to think.”
“Could well be,” I said. “This is stuff that to be honest I really can’t help you with a lot. If this is something that’s really troubling you, you could …” Yeah, he could what? “I mean, there are people, you know, priests and so forth, who really, you know, in all sincerity believe they have answers to some of these things. I guess what happened with me is that I just sort of indefinitely put off trying to decide about any of it.”
“But how can you stand not knowing?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You know, most of the time it’s just not what you’re thinking about. Not that I’m recommending the unexamined life, mind you.” I jerked my thumb at the window. “There’s your Colt factory.”
A fluted blue dome, elevated on a circle of white columns. Atop the dome, a golden ball. Atop the golden ball, a rearing golden horse. Colt guns are better than anything in the world: that much of the symbolism I understood. The rest of it suggested the thing where the turtle’s resting on the back of whatever it is, back of an elephant. Or the other way around, elephant on the turtle. Some literalist had defaced the ideal blue of the dome with gold stars.
“Dustin used a Colt,” said Danny. “Colt forty-five automatic.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“That’s what Mitchell says.”
“Mitchell’s talking through his hat,” I said. I hit the brakes and shifted down to make the sharp right over the bridge. “It was just some crappy little twenty-two pistol, Danny. Little Mark David Chapman fat-boy special. What, are all the kids romanticizing this thing now?”
“You mean like what Mrs. Peretsky has for the rabbits?”
“So you know about that,” I said.
“Clarissa showed me.” He shrugged. “Pretty weird.”
I pointed again. “Connecticut River, by the way.”
“I know, Dad.”
“So,” I said, “have you and Mitchell been thinking about a replacement for Dustin?”
“You can’t replace Dustin,” he said.
“Well,” I said. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I mean, it was all his songs and everything. We just sort of tried to play what he told us. He could play guitar as good as me any day. He just played bass so he could sing. You know, nobody else could even sing.”
“What about Clarissa?” I said. “Wasn’t she singing that day I walked in on your practice?”
“Clarissa?” he said. “She’s a joke.”
I looked over at him.
“Dustin had her sing on a couple things because I think he sort of felt bad for her,” he said. “But she was really just image. You know, we sort of started out with her and then we didn’t know how to tell her it wasn’t happening. I mean, in a way, if this had to happen …”
“Hold the phone,” I said. “What I’m hearing is that you and Mitchell are using this as an excuse to close up shop because you’re afraid to tell Clarissa she can’t sing.”
“Bull shit.”
“Look. Danny. I realize these things aren’t easy. Obviously Clarissa’s going to get her feelings hurt. I don’t blame her. There’ll probably be a big scene. On the other hand, do you want to give up your music just to avoid a confrontation?” Me and fucking Robert Young, boy.
“I’m not giving it up,” he said. “I’m going to still practice guitar and everything. All I have to do is just make it through the rest of this year and then senior year, and then I can do what I want to anyway.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Dad.”
“Am I also hearing,” I said, “that things aren’t going so well with you and Clarissa?”
“I think she might be a little crazy,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I could just, like, get out of it, you know?”
