Jernigan, page 20
“I’m beginning to lose my stolid patience,” he said.
“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t blame you. It’s not a very edifying spectacle.”
“And don’t glamorize this crash-and-burn shit,” he said. “Not that I don’t know the temptation, but this is your life here.”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” I said. I drank the rest of my Bloody Mary and reached for the vodka. “May I?”
“Be my guest,” he said. “In fact, you are my guest. I might add, though, since we’re—”
“Let’s not even get started on that,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he said. “To tell you the absolute truth, I may actually not have all that much of a right to preach to you on that score.” He waited for me to mix mine, then poured enough vodka into his to raise the level an inch. “Boys will be boys, right?”
“To boys being boys,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I stared at the row of Christmas cards on the mantel. “No tree?” I said, to let him know that his marriage wasn’t so fucking perfect.
“You know it’s funny,” he said. “We actually went to the Koreans’ on Broadway and looked at their trees, and we both got really depressed because they shape the God damn things with hedge clippers or something. They’re all like that.” He drew an isosceles triangle in air with his two forefingers. “They look like they came out of a fucking barbershop. Next year maybe we’ll have time to drive up somewhere and get a tree looks like a fucking tree.”
“We got a tree,” I said.
Uncle Fred looked at me. “You’re really in piss-poor shape, aren’t you?”
I raised my glass and drank to that.
“Peter,” he said. “If you need to get away and think about things, you’re welcome to come here. You and Danny both. I know Penny will second me on this. Of course, we’re talking floor space here, but it is at your disposal. Any time. Middle of the night, makes no difference.”
“Shit,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Or listen,” he said. “Another idea. If you want to be someplace and not have us underfoot, think about the camp. Since you’re starting to get that mountain man look anyhow.” He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Looks good on you, actually. At any rate, my neighbor up there tells me they got a foot of snow already, but if you didn’t mind braving the cold a little, that stove heats up the whole trailer in nothing flat, and there must be two three cords of wood sitting there. Unless somebody made off with it. Now, I drained the pipes last time I went up, but I can tell you how to get the water going again. Hell, you could cart your stuff up there and move in if you felt like it. The place just sits.”
“Sounds like a good fit,” I said. “You know, I mean I probably won’t end up doing anything that extreme, but I do appreciate it.”
“Listen, you’d be doing me a favor by making it look like somebody lived there,” he said. “They’ve broken in five or six times now. You know, local thug kids. One time they stole all the light bulbs out of the lamps. Everything but the God damn books: those they don’t touch. You know when I went up there last time, to close the place up? I found a rubber stuck to the floor. Had to take it up with a putty knife.”
“Thanks for sharing that,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll know I’m not operating purely out of the goodness of my heart. We never go up there in the winter because we neither of us ski or any of that shit. And now it’s getting so we have less and less time in the summer. Or inclination, I guess. The drive eats up half your weekend right there, and then there’s all the stuff you feel like you have to do or it’s all going to fall down around your ears. Did I tell you Penny and I were talking for a while about actually building up there? Not down where the trailer is, but like halfway up the hill there’s this outrageous spot where you can see off for like miles. But—by the way, Penny does not know about finding the rubber.”
“We reach,” I said, and made a diamond with thumbtips and fingertips.
“Good God,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a Trekkie on top of everything else.”
“Nah,” I said. “I just watch.”
“So anyway,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. I have all these great memories, you know, going up there with my dad. But the place just seems violated. And the winters are really for shit.” He drank off a little more Bloody Mary, poured in more vodka and stirred with his index finger, which he sucked clean and wiped on his pants. So okay, there was always that about Uncle Fred and me, deep down. I mean, what’s male bonding ultimately about? On the other hand, what wasn’t vile, deep down? Although you didn’t want to think of that as vile but simply as another way of being. The thing was not to look deep down.
4
I woke up on a couch. In Uncle Fred’s apartment. Almost dark in here. Right: I could remember asking if he minded if I just lay down for a few minutes. All that stuff still cluttering the table, glasses and plates and food every which way, and that bottle sticking up like a lighthouse above a stormy sea. I was alone in here and you could see the room darkening by the second, although that probably wasn’t true. From where I lay you could raise your head and look down the hall all the way to their bedroom door. Closed. Except my head hurt when I raised the son of a bitch. I listened for sounds of fucking. The hand hurt too; I had accepted that it was just going to hurt from now on. I kept listening. I heard a car horn down in the street.
I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. Apparently I hadn’t taken my shoes off; hoped I hadn’t put dirty shoe bottoms on the nice cushions. Bathroom door was open, but the bedroom door was definitely closed, not just almost. So either fucking or napping. Or first one then the other. I shut the bathroom door to piss. It turned the whole water yellow, so I’d have to flush: if it made noise it made noise. But first I went through the medicine cabinet. Penny had a thing of Pamprin in there, so I popped that open and took four. Washed them down with cupped handfuls of water, drinking like a frontiersman.
I went back and lay down on the couch again to wait for my head to stop hurting. It was as silent as before. Christ, what if they were in there like what’s-his-name? If they’d put on this show of being oh so happy and had actually chosen today to carry out their suicide pact. And my fingerprints all over. Oh, I wasn’t serious. Just one more thought; it doesn’t pay off anyplace later in the story. I got up again and went to the table and had a good old belt of that Absolut right out of the bottle. Then I went back to the sofa and picked up a copy of Vogue lying there on the floor. That’s what there was to read, unless I wanted to get up again and get one of the pieces of the Times. In the “Mind Health” section I found an item headed INSPIRED BY PLEASURE.
The creative muse is a surly mistress, demanding a hefty fee in anguish before she grants an artist’s plea for inspiration. Well, here’s some good news: Alice M. Isen, Ph.D., Kimberly Daubman, and Gary Nowicki of the University of Maryland find that what creativity really requires is … feeling good.
I tried to understand why this was good news. Then I looked through for ads with pictures of naked bodies. I found some, most notably an endearingly swollen breast with nipple, and tried to get excited. Finally I put the magazine back as I’d found it—at an angle from the sofa a bit sharper than forty-five degrees—then got up and had a last swallow of vodka and looked around for something to write a note with. Best I could do was a felt-tip pen I found on the kitchen counter. I tore a paper towel off the roll that hung from the underside of the cabinets and wrote HAD TO GET BACK. THANKS AGAIN FOR EVERYTHING.—j. A job just writing that much, since the ink seeped and spread into the soft paper, and the tip of the pen dug in and ripped it if you bore down at all. Now, where do you put it so they’ll see it? I unscrewed the cap of the vodka bottle (took one last swallow), placed a corner of the paper towel over the mouth and screwed the cap back on. There: looked like somebody wearing a cape. Absolut Man, I thought: Dump ta dum!
When I got out on the street I couldn’t remember where I’d left the car. Right, 105th. Which was actually easy to remember because a five was like a two: Penny and Fred lived on 102nd, therefore the car was on 105th. What do you mean, a five is like a two? Like a two reflected upside down.
Boy, did I not want to go home. I drove a few blocks down West End, intending to go to 96th and get on the West Side Highway the opposite way from all the happy weekenders coming back bumper-to-bumper from their happy weekends at fucking two miles an hour. Then I just pulled over and double-parked by a pay phone. I couldn’t leave the city without giving old Miranda one last shot. Stupid, I grant you: You see Miranda and then what? You see Miranda and, one chance in a million, spend the night with Miranda and then what? I tried to make up a joke in my head with the name Miranda. Everything worked: Miranda decision, Miranda warning. Miranda rights, there was another one, something about how every man should have his Miranda rights. Oh, not in order to use such a joke on Miranda herself. It was just something I was doing in my head. If your name was Miranda, that stuff was probably like the old Are you Upjohn? to somebody named Upjohn. If there was really such a name as Upjohn, which sounded improbable to me just then. Well, Upjohn Laboratories.
I got the number from Information again, and this time she picked up the phone herself. “Are you Upjohn?” I said, giving the whole thing probably one twist too many.
“What number are you calling?” she said.
“Miranda,” I said. “Just joking. Peter Jernigan again. God, Jernigan again—sounds like Irish time here. Listen, how are you? I left you a kind of confused message before.”
“Right,” she said. “I was sort of half asleep when you called. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m, you know—” Get it together, I thought. When somebody says How are you? it’s not a real question. “Couldn’t be better,” I said. “Listen, I happen to be in your, well, I was visiting friends right in your neighborhood, and I was wondering if, I mean this is very spur-of-the-moment stuff, but if you weren’t doing anything I thought I’d invite you out for a quick drink or whatever. If there’s, you know, someplace in the neighborhood.”
“Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “The thing is, I’m supposed to do something later on.”
“Oh, well, look,” I said.
“It was really sweet of you to call,” she said. “I hope you’re doing well.”
“Yeah, relaxing, little of this, little of that,” I said. “I actually find that if things are going well, that you’re actually more creative rather than—”
The telephone went clunk. My quarter dropping from somewhere inside to somewhere else inside.
“Hello?” I said.
“Are you calling from a pay phone?” she said. She made it sound disreputable.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, listen, I shouldn’t keep you. Why don’t I, the next time I get to town, call you at work or something and maybe we can get together for lunch or whatnot.”
“Well, the thing is,” she said, “I’m not going to be there much longer because I decided to go to business school.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “I think that’s splendid. We’ll have to get together and hoist one to your success.”
Silence.
“Well,” she said, “the thing is that once classes get going I’m not sure I’m going to have an awful lot of time.”
“Listen,” I said, “I know exactly how it is. The important thing is to get your work done. So anyway, I should be getting along. It was good to talk to you, and—good luck, right?”
“I’m glad you understand,” she said.
I got back in the car and went right into the dash after that Walkman. Megadeth, Webb Pierce, any fucking thing, whatever was in there, just get it going. I put the ear things on and turned the music up so loud it hurt. Then I turned it up louder, until I couldn’t tell what it was.
VIII
1
When I came in, the house was dark. And cold. Again. Always. I pulled the string and the kitchen light came on. On the counter next to the toaster sat a Christmas tree stand. Like a big spider: red metal bowl up on green metal legs. Under one foot, a note: IF YOU CARE. I tried to think back. Hadn’t we left things in reasonably decent shape? So what was the new offense? I wasn’t crazy enough to think Martha could have known by spooky mind power about my calling what’s-her-name, which I just wasn’t going to think about. (Miranda.) One of those disgraces best dealt with by putting off thinking about it. Once you’d moved on in time a little bit—making an analogy here between time and distance, though I’m not sure you can—it would be back in the past and therefore smaller. The law of perspective, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book. Like an A-bomb blast, which seared you less the farther away you stood, in a featureless Jon Nagy landscape. I’m not explaining this right.
What I was supposed to do now, to show I cared, was get the tree set up. So I dragged it into the kitchen, laid it on its side and unscrewed the thumbscrews on the Christmas tree stand so I could slip the collar over the sawed-off end. Then I tightened them again, going around and around, three turns each screw, so as to keep the trunk dead center. The screws bit into the soft wood and I clenched my teeth. When it hurt my fingers to turn the screws anymore, I stood the tree up. Son of a bitch was cockeyed anyway. So fuck it. I carried it stand-first into the living room, as if it were a battering ram, and set it in the corner, between the end of the sofa and the window. My idea was to keep it away from the woodstove. If that wasn’t where she wanted the thing, she could move it. I filled a saucepan and poured water into the metal bowl so the tree could drink. Then I got the woodstove going and huddled on the sofa in my overcoat. What was it, Sunday? So 60 Minutes was on, unless it was over.
I tried to think when Christmas must be. Late in the week, wasn’t it? Friday? Saturday? Not enough information to think with: you’d need today’s date and then you could go on from there. I hadn’t bought anybody anything, assuming that we were exchanging gifts, as on a normal Christmas, and in what sense was this Christmas not normal? Technically speaking. There were grownups, kids and a tree: nothing to suggest an exemption. I thought, You could drive over to the mall right now and get that old Christmas shopping done, boy. Tomorrow the crowds would only be worse, and worse still the next day and even worse than that the day after.
But Christ, I just got the God damn stove going.
True, but you’ve still got your coat on. And now that the sun is over the yardarm you could work the old Diet Coke can trick with some gin, make the drive to the mall into a little adventure. All that old sun-over-the-yardarm shit, that’s the way your real drunks talk.
I was proud to have remembered how to talk like that. I mean, it was all just an impersonation.
So let’s hit it.
The vast lots around the mall had parking places galore. Even the video game arcade just inside South Entrance was deserted except for a black teenager wearing a turned-around Mets cap, his nose to the screen, and a girl sitting on the floor beside him, hugging her knees. Sunday before Christmas. Either I’d hit it just right or the stock market thing really had hurt business.
Now, the thing to do was keep it simple. Obviously you had to spend more on Danny than on Clarissa, though Clarissa’s gift must still be substantial, because. So: fifty-dollar gift certificate at Record Town for Danny, fifty-dollar gift certificate at something like Benetton or The Gap for Clarissa, and maybe a hundred-dollar gift certificate at Sam Ash Music for Danny, assuming Sam Ash Music did that and why wouldn’t they. And then maybe a few little crappo things so they’d have stuff to open, though I couldn’t think what. Hickory Farms might have some kind of food. Well obviously. What I mean is, maybe the kids would like sausage and cheese and shit to eat in their room. Or some kind of silly toys from someplace. Puzzles where you had to roll BBs into holes, or one of those water-filled things where you had to spear drifting rings with a swordfish’s nose. I mean, since they were in there getting stoned anyway, right?
Which left Martha. What might she like? A box of .22 shells? That was ugly, scratch that. I thought she’d said something once about Margaret Drabble, unless it was Margaret Atwood. Or Iris Murdoch. So maybe Waldenbooks was the best idea, except wasn’t giving her books a way of saying, Keep your face in these and leave me the fuck alone? Although when things were in this kind of shape, any gift short of crotchless panties pretty much said the same thing.
It wasn’t really much of a stand against disorder, I know, but I did do a good job of organizing my stops: getting the gift certificates first and saving the heaviest things to lug around, the books and all, for last. I found the perfect place for Clarissa, better even than The Gap: this place Mandee. You see their ads sometimes, where slutty girls talk in rhyme. Probably all her girlfriends went to Mandee, if she had any girlfriends, and she felt left out because there was never any money. The thought of it made me sorry enough for her to kick her gift certificate up to seventy-five. With Danny’s hundred at Sam Ash Music plus fifty at Record Town, that was saying she was half to me what Danny was. Hey, Christmas, right? After I got the gift certificates squared away I went looking for the little toys. Couldn’t find one of those swordfish deals, but they did have an underwater penguin standing before a sylvan backdrop. (Why a penguin among green trees? Why, for that matter, green trees under water?) Five little plastic rings that you had to get over the penguin by tilting the thing just right. Also a sliding-squares puzzle that, when slid together correctly, showed Superman in flight. And two decks of Bicycle playing cards and a paperback Hoyle. Oh, not that I really pictured our little family learning canasta together, but at least the stuff would be on hand if things should ever get straightened out. Hey, if nothing else, it would be evidence that everything had been tried. Then on to Hickory Farms. I might as well admit that, due to the disposition of the stores, this rational and orderly scheme of going from lighter burdens to heavier in fact required going back and forth and back and forth. So again and again I walked past Bedford Falls Video, with old Entrepreneurial Steve probably in there radiating disapproval of me, and past the exhibit of snowblowers out in the center of the mall, where a salesman in a maroon blazer sat behind stacks of brochures. Through a bullhorn he prophesied an early winter.
