The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Pearl again.

“Forty years later, after coming to Providence for your commencement, I stayed for a week with Fay, now living in a posh condominium in Queens. One morning, she went shopping, and when she returned, the first thing she said was, ‘Milt, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the mall. You’ll never guess in a million years.’ I tossed out the names of some of my boyhood friends with whom I’d lost contact.

“‘Believe it or not,’ Fay told me, ‘I ran into your old flame, Pearl. Her name’s not Feinberg now. She married one of the boys from our old neighborhood who used to play tennis with us. Her name is Richman, the name of her late husband. She still looks beautiful; her hair is gray, she has two daughters and several grandchildren and lives in Queens. She gave me her phone number. I told her you were visiting from California and filled her in a little on what you were doing. She said she’d like to hear from you.’

“Well, 1978 was one year after your mother’s death. I was still working my way out of my depression. And the day before, I had seen the new Neil Simon play Act Two, which dealt with the anguish and torment faced by the leading character, a writer, who meets a young woman shortly after his wife’s death. He wrestles with the thorny problem of whether he should keep seeing this new woman in his life. He tells his brother, who encourages the relationship—‘life must go on’—that he has strong guilt feelings about the new relationship because of his still passionate feelings about his late wife. The writer winds up continuing the relationship and—as the curtain falls!—marrying her. I totally rejected Neil Simon’s cozy and glib ending. ‘How could he marry her so soon after his wife died?’ I said to myself while seated in the theater. ‘What were all those professions of undying love of his deceased spouse that he made in the opening act? Just foreign propaganda? And what about those Valentine gifts he sent every year like clockwork? Phony as a three-dollar bill.’ Those were the reasons I gave Fay for why I didn’t feel up to calling Pearl, let alone visiting her. But the biggest reason was my shame about the shabby way I had treated her, the god-awful way I ended it. Never calling or writing. Nothing. Shameful. Unforgivable.”

Superheroes

My cat, Zoomer, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling onto their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while Laurie, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second favorite activity is to lie between the three of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Natalie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably reacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. Zoomer loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie across the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room—a lion surveying the savannah, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that, thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer.

From room to room he drags “his” teddy bear—what Natalie calls his girlfriend—and, despite his supposedly having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window at his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles, pseudo-disappointedly, for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really, Zoomy’s a pussy.

In the movie Spider-Man, when Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re changing, and that’s normal. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. To Peter, his sexual maturation is the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world. One of the amazing things about my father is that he still believed in this transfiguration deep into his 80s.

The first time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was “incredible.” “What do you mean ‘incredible’?” he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling up his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes painfully clear that Peter’s newfound prowess is procreation or, more precisely, onanism: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” All three times Spider-Man rescues M.J., they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex: Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy emotional cleanup afterward.

Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Even the “squirrelly faced” burglar who steals the New York Wrestling Foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a car-jacking, whispers “Thanks,” then flashes a sweet smile when Peter steps aside so he can get on an elevator. Ferocity and humility are in constant conversation and confusion. (Natalie: “This movie is about how everyone has a covered-up side. People don’t always show you the way that they are.”)

On a Saturday afternoon a few years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake pool, while I swam laps, my father swam a little, then lifted a few weights, took a sauna, and dozed, which he adamantly denied, as he always does. In the locker room, a 10-year-old kid started humming to himself, at first quite quietly, the Batman theme, which my father didn’t recognize at first, but when I told him, he nodded. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling, though not to my father, who finds nearly all manifestations of mass entertainment—with the important exception of sports—appalling. “Popular culture,” as he explained to me in the car on the way home, “is not real community. It’s substitute community.”

At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.

“I want to know if you’re coming or going.”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out, continues to lie very still.

“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake: you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes her hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

Superman.

My father lives in Woodlake, a Bay Area condo/sports complex for senior citizens. This is a place where tough old birds come to die, but they think it’s an Olympic training camp: mineral water and Frisbees. Jacuzzi, sauna, tennis courts, weight room, bingo parlor, dance hall, jet-black parking lot, jet-propelled automobiles, white stucco apartments, ice plant growing everywhere. Ducks quack across an artificial pond. Well-preserved, sun-baked septuagenarians stroll the putting green. Grandmas in string bikinis stride from the swimming pool. Dad’s cohorts scamper around the courts, wearing tennis whites and floppy hats and state-of-the-art shoes and C sunglasses, wielding their oversized rackets like canes and butterfly nets. My father’s studio apartment is remarkable only for the sheer number of rackets, racket presses, tins of balls, shirts, shorts, sweatbands, warm-up suits, sweat socks, shoes, jocks tossed about. It isn’t an apartment filled with my father. It’s a pro shop filled with the sport of tennis.