Jernigan, page 21
At Hickory Farms I bought a shrink-wrapped box the size of a Monopoly set, with summer sausage and assorted cheeses. Cheshire and I forget what else. It was probably all the same Wisconsin cheddar with different food dyes. Right, the kids were really fucking likely to know the difference. Then back all the way in the other direction to Waldenbooks. By that time I was about ready to bag it. There wasn’t any Iris Murdoch, and there really was a difference between Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood, though I couldn’t have told you what, and I would probably pick the wrong one. When the only Jane Austen I could find was fucking Pride and Prejudice, I figured, Hey, end of expedition. Get Martha a gift certificate too, and you’re out of here. Hundred dollars, bringing her main gift up even with Danny’s, though his fifty at Record Town still put him ahead. So: Danny one fifty, Martha a hundred, Clarissa seventy-five. Plus the small stuff. I hoped this all made the right statements. Though of course the overarching statement was that I didn’t know these people. As I walked back to South Entrance the snowblower man was putting his brochures away in a cardboard box and stores were shutting off overhead lights. At The Gap a salesgirl ducked in under the half-lowered metal-link gate.
Back at the house, I hid the toys and the Hickory Farms box under the bed, then filled a water glass halfway up with gin and worked away on that until I “fell asleep” on the sofa, I think sometime during Star Trek. Before Martha rolled in, at any rate. The Star Trek was the Joan Collins one, where Joan Collins is the pacifist back during the Depression who has to be hit by a car and die so that all subsequent history won’t be changed. See, if Joan Collins lives, America doesn’t enter World War II and so forth and so on. It’s the one where Bones is on some drug that makes him crazed, which is how the whole problem gets started in the first place, and they all jump through the time portal.
I woke up with a nightmare. Robert Stack was in it, and when the terror let up enough I tried to think why Robert Stack. It actually took me a couple of minutes to get The Untouchables. Oh for Christ’s sake, I thought, tell me something I don’t already know. The tv had been turned off, and the tablecloth draped back over it. I had a wicked headache, of course, and my hand was throbbing like a bastard. I went into the bathroom, pissed and took five Advils from a brand-new bottle—she’d noticed we were out—then went to the kitchen and drank some cold water out of the refrigerator. Mouth dry. Of course. I swore I wasn’t going to drink tomorrow, tomorrow meaning whenever I woke up again. I went into the bedroom and found Martha there asleep, or pretending to be. And then I was asleep again too, though I can’t imagine how. What with the hand and the head and, always, the thoughts going.
2
I woke up at noon or whatever the hell it was and she was gone again. On the way back from the kitchen, where I’d put water on for coffee, I looked over and saw the tree had been trimmed. Cruddy bunch of ornaments: metallic plastic with a line down the middle where the molded halves had been joined. Although it was cruel to judge her taste harshly just because she couldn’t afford better. Or maybe it was just lousy taste. Certainly she’d used too God damn much tinsel. Unless one of the kids had done it. (Little joke.) I picked off maybe a third of it—any more than that would’ve been obvious—and hid it in a generic cornflakes box I found in the garbage. Another thing I didn’t like was grocery bags on the kitchen floor for garbage, although because it wasn’t your kitchen you couldn’t say so. Then I rearranged the garbage to get a dripping can on top of the generic cornflakes box. By this time the water was boiling. Say, what a day this promised to be: everything just going snap snap snap. I chose the blue cup instead of the white one and spooned in my three spoonfuls. Blue suggested the sky and, therefore, transcendence. Though white also suggested transcendence, so there you were.
I brought the coffee into the living room and sat in the Morris chair to get the old day mapped out. One thing, I definitely wasn’t going to get drunk. Hand still hurt, but it was only the third day, could that be possible? Saturday Sunday Monday—so yes, third day. So I guess you had to expect. Now. As to the day. First: go out to a drugstore or something and get the wrapping paper and Scotch tape and to-from tags that you forgot last night. Then: back here and get those sons of bitches wrapped. And then: try to arrange them under the tree so it looked bountiful. And then? Despite the coffee, I suddenly could not stay awake. Bedroom too far. I just set the cup down, boy, and got up, lurched across the room and pow, dived down into that couch.
The next thing I knew, the kids had come in. “Sorry,” said Danny, in some context. I guess they’d been loud. Done something.
“No no,” I said. “Time I was waking up anyway.” A lowdown shame, really, for him to have to see this shit again and again. Well, maybe it would be a warning to him.
“What?” he said, putting hand to ear.
I shook my head and waved him away—dismissed—and off they went to their room or something. I must have looked pissed off. So let him think so. It was all too much even to begin to try to clear up.
I did finally get the stuff wrapped and under the tree and the rest of everything taken care of—meaning mostly that I washed out the blue coffee cup and turned on the tv. The one thing I really had to be sure and do was stay awake until Martha got in. Not a word exchanged since Sunday morning; even old Jernigan knew that wasn’t the way to get the holidays rolling.
I decided that the problem wasn’t having a drink or two per se. It was that I’d been drinking gin, which was no good for you. Vodka, on the other hand, probably didn’t leave you feeling so vile the next day, and it gave you a completely different head. Not so alienated. This is the kind of shit you tell yourself. So after the news I went out to the discount liquor place and got a quart of that Absolut vodka. Some expensive shit, boy; made you realize what a high roller Uncle Fred was getting to be. But hey. Also stopped and picked up a big thing of V-8 juice and a cellophane package of bran. Not getting enough fiber in my diet, that was another thing. So I mixed the vodka and V-8 half and half, stirred in a good big heaping teaspoon of bran, shook a bunch of black pepper on top to make it festive, and hunkered down in the Morris chair with the old Nothing but Wodehouse, for all the world like a man settling in with a Bloody Mary and some light reading. Kids were all snug up there in their room; that was the way I wanted to think about the kids up in their room. First I read Ogden Nash’s foreword, which told how hard it was to decide what to put in the book because P. G. Wodehouse was so good.
There are horrid omissions even in this monumental tome, and to you who mourn them, I can only say that this heart breaks with yours, and to ask you to consider for a moment the difficulties of the editor who is delegated to select the best from an author who seems always to be at his best.
Say what? I read this again, trying to figure out what the fuck tone he was trying to strike, and whether times had changed or this had been stupid even back then. (Not to mention that superfluous to: shouldn’t it be just “and ask you”?) See, what complicated the whole thing was that you weren’t supposed to think Ogden Nash was stupid just because he wrote light verse. You were supposed to think he might actually be smarter than somebody pretentious like Allen Tate or something. Some revisionist thing. Maybe I’m making this up. Well, anyhow, this was what reading was: not just going along with the words but thinking about things at the same time.
Now, after the foreword I would go on to maybe a couple of the Mr. Mulliner stories, then start on Leave It to Psmith, which I’d be in no danger of finishing tonight. I’d go until eleven, then put on the Independent News, with what’s his name, Jerry Girard Very Independent Sports. Jerry Girard was the best local sports guy because he said what he thought. Then The Honeymooners at eleven-thirty and at midnight Star Trek. And probably at some point during Star Trek (I hoped it would be when a commercial was on) Martha would roll in and we could get this latest thing smoothed over and then we’d just see from there.
But Martha threw this whole scheme out of whack. I thought I had her schedule figured out and then pow, in she waltzes during the first commercial break in the Independent News! “Hey,” I said, “just what the hell time do you get off work?”
I could hear, as I was saying it, that it sounded like real peevishness instead of parody peevishness. Really losing my sense of pitch here.
“It’s freezing in this house,” she said. So maybe she hadn’t even heard me. People seemed to be having trouble with that lately. She bent down prettily, her coat still on, and opened the stove. “How can you stand to sit there?” she said. Stand to sit, I thought. Huh.
“I’ve got my love to keep me warm,” I said.
Now, this I’d meant to be a sort of courtly compliment, I think, and not the cruel irony it must have sounded like. Though who knows what the hell I meant. Just Jernigan running his endless mouth. And a beep and a bop and a beep.
She started putting things in the stove. “You know,” she said, “I really can’t figure out what is in this for me anymore.” She clanked the stove shut. She fetched a sigh. “Did you remember to feed the bunnies?” she said.
“I was just about to go down there,” I said. “I thought you did a beautiful job with the tree.” All I could do, though, not to say something about the tinsel.
“Thank you,” she said. You couldn’t tell exactly how she meant it. Coldly correct was my guess.
“Beautiful,” I said. “Beautiful job.” This was not moving the conversation forward.
She headed for the door to the basement.
“I was just about to do that,” I said.
“Then I guess you got lucky, didn’t you?” she said, and closed the door behind her. Not quite slammed.
When she came back up she closed it with almost exactly the same degree of force, if I was judging accurately. You’d measure it in foot-pounds per square inch or something.
“I had wanted to talk to you,” I said, “regarding Christmas. I mean, what’s the usual drill here? Like do you have your Christmas Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? You know, like for opening stuff.”
She sat down on the couch, the end away from the tree. “You’re obviously so unhappy, Peter,” she said. “Why do you even care?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” I said. “You know, who thought up the whole God damn tree in the first place? I mean, check the packages.” I pointed to the tree. It would have made a feeble show without that box from Hickory Farms. But the point was, there was a box from Hickory Farms. A God damn good-sized box, for smaller boxes to sit on. And there were three white envelopes, heavy with promise.
“I got the tree,” I said, “got my shopping done, got shit wrapped days in advance, so I don’t frankly see what you’re basing anything on.”
“Oh all right, fine,” she said. “I’ll play, Peter. We used to open our presents Christmas Eve. Now what?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.
“I wasn’t even going to tell you,” she said, “but Tim has invited us over to his place Christmas Eve. It didn’t seem like you’d be very into it.”
“You made that assumption,” I said.
To her credit, she didn’t even nod.
“Call him up,” I said. “Tell him we will be there. Kids too.”
“They won’t want to go,” she said.
“Well fuck that, they’re going,” I said. “Call him up.”
“It’s eleven o’clock at night, Peter.”
“So tell me something else,” I said. “How did this mysterious invitation get issued, exactly?” Now I was getting mean and crazy. “Two of you talk on the phone or what? What do you do, go see him when you’re supposedly at this alleged job of yours?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “he sent us a written invite. He believes in using the mail.”
“Just like you,” I said. I meant like m-a-l-e; it didn’t seem to register. “You believe in the same thing,” I said. Shit. “Skip it,” I said.
She wiggled out of her coat and sat back on it. So I guessed it must be warming up in here.
“We make love,” she said, “and then when I wake up you’re gone, and that’s all the contact we have for two days. And then I come home to this. You know, what’s it for, Peter?”
“The holidays,” I said, “can be a very difficult time.”
“What do the holidays have to do with anything?”
“If we can just get through the holidays,” I said. Maybe she thought I was suffering from memories of Judith. I was surprised I still had enough taste not to say so directly. At any rate, something made her decide to get up and pat me on the shoulder. That couldn’t have been easy.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “Are you going to stay up and watch your program?”
“Fool about my program,” I said.
“I think it relaxes you,” she said. Based on what, I couldn’t imagine. “Don’t stay up too late, okay? Maybe you could get back on a better schedule.”
I watched her walk toward the bedroom, getting smaller and smaller. I measured her with my right hand. After seven steps she fit between my thumb and middle finger as they made a C backwards.
3
He’d asked us for six, but Danny and Clarissa fiddle-fucked around until Martha yelled at them through their closed door, and we didn’t roll in until a quarter to seven. Which I told Martha probably didn’t matter because people counted on you to be a little late. (Mr. Reasonable.) That might be true of some people, Martha said, but Tim was “very direct.” So excuse me.
When he opened the door I remembered him: sharp nose and timber wolf grin.
“Tim, you remember Peter,” said Martha, getting both names in there; his for my benefit, mine for his. Was I right to admire such adeptness, or was this just an ordinary social thing?
“Peter, yes.” He stuck out a hand. Full of shit, of course. “You didn’t have the beard,” he said. Okay, so he wasn’t. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Noel Noel and all that good stuff. Clarissa? How you doin’, sweetie? You look good.” Kiss on the cheek. “And this is Danny?” Handshake. “And as for you—” He spread his arms and Martha came to him. The hug went on until I shut the door behind us, more loudly than I’d expected. It got his face out of her God damn hair at least. “Come on in the living room where it’s warm,” he said. “They’re calling for snow tonight.”
“Right, we heard the news,” said Martha. “Wouldn’t it be great?” Which sure as shit wasn’t the line she’d been taking when we left the house. She’d gone on this rant about how the roads were going to be treacherous and the cops would be stopping drunk drivers.
“Nice,” I said, looking around, though I might as well have kept my mouth shut since he was following up with Martha about how great a snowstorm would be. The outside was this dreary flat-roofed cement-block bunker-style thing. But inside it was all fresh and severe: white walls, stained pine doorframes and baseboards. Stained but stained discreetly: Golden Oak, say, rather than English Walnut. Track lighting along a couple of the exposed rafters, just old two-by-sixes but stained to match the trim. Worn Oriental rug on the gleaming hardwood floor (gleaming too much: polyurethane), Navajo rug on one wall. Red-enamelled woodstove going, stained pine bookshelves with a Bang & Olufsen turntable, all very Svenska-benska. He took our coats into another room, and we stood looking: Danny at that turntable, Martha at the Navajo rug, Clarissa at a white wall apparently. I stared at the coffee table, inside the L of burgundy-colored sectional. Not a table, really, but a giant glass box—big aquarium probably—with chrome-plated metal edges and a thick glass top overlapping a few inches on each side. Inside, for rusticity I supposed, a bale of hay.
“Sit,” he called. Martha and I sat on one side of the right angle of sofa, Danny and Clarissa on the other. This Tim came and stood over us. I stole a glance at the front of his jeans, as if that was going to tell me anything.
“This wasn’t here,” said Martha, pointing at the Navajo rug.
“No?” he said. “Let me think, when did that come into my life?” Even he seemed to lose interest in the question. “Anyhow, who’s for some Christmas cheer?”
“In for a dime, in for a dollar,” I said.
“Sure,” said Martha. “Clarissa? Danny?” The two of them were already whispering together. “You guys are old enough, don’t you think, Peter?”
I just stared at her.
“Good,” said this Tim, showing those timber wolf teeth. “Now. I don’t know if Martha forewarned you, but I don’t buy commercial liquor. What I can offer you is stuff I distill myself, which I guarantee won’t blind you or anything.”
“No need to sell me,” I said. “I’m not mistaken, Martha had some of your stuff around when we first, how you say? Got together. The memory lingers.”
“Well,” she said. “I like that. The booze he remembers.” She gave a laugh to let this Tim know it was all in fun. Boy did I want to get the fuck out of there.
“Good,” he said. “People have been known to freak out a little. Now. I’ve whipped up some eggnog to put it in, or you’re welcome to drink it straight. Or with water. Or I think I’ve got some Diet Coke and maybe tonic.”
“Real eggnog?” said Martha. “From scratch?”
“Cross my heart,” he said.
“Well, I’ve got to try that,” she said. “I’ll probably weigh two tons.”
“Peter?”
“Straight up,” I said. “You know, not to knock your eggnog.”
“Good man,” he said. “One eggnog, one straight up. Clarissa?”
She just looked at him.
“Anything to drink?” he said.
