I’m going to try to get a little work done before we get wrecked, my father said.
A writer, Feeney said, is an addict whose drug gives him no joy but wastes his body and crushes his spirit. I can’t recall who said that.
You, my father thought. You’re the one who said that. He tugged some of the luggage away from Bo and headed upstairs. He knew his way to the bedroom, where he set up the Olivetti and pulled out his papers.
He had no intention of working. Once the desk was properly arranged, he positioned himself diagonally across the bed to signal that he’d been felled by an irresistible force. The silence and the light unweighted the air here; in the city, the air was fractious, stuffed with matter, and it insisted that he listen and record. It was a nuisance, he realized, as he always did when he was away from it, the city’s false urgency. He closed his eyes and spiraled down quickly and dreamed he was in a swamp, chest-deep in water, pulling a boat by its bowline.
My mother called him from downstairs. It was dark, time for drinks, and he went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, a performance intended to reimmerse him into the world of real things, but that was, in truth, only a means of delaying his entry into the audience downstairs. He told himself that wasn’t the case, that the water was a baptism, a declaration of his intention to interact with his loved ones and his friends, and began the usual argument with himself over his own cowardice and inflexibility. A baptism? It was a dodge, but the problem was, which did he believe it to be? Both, but if a man can’t decide what it means to put water on his face, what chance does he have in a room with Bo Vornado and Sid Feeney?
He went downstairs and took the drink waiting for him and touched me on the head and fielded the polite questions on the quality of his nap and the ribbing from Bo about sleeping on the job and Feeney’s clunky barb about making a buck on his back, and my father laughed and shook his head at the tragedy of his own slothful disposition, saying with disbelief, I know, I know, and then, L’chaim! and dropped the first depth charge of the night, the first one always the most potent, the scotch sliding down his throat like a boy’s fist stripping green leaves from a twig, and he was relieved, overjoyed, even, to feel the searing wash of the alcohol that would make him a tolerable dinner companion, one with no honor to defend, malleable opinions, a man who felt nothing but goodwill toward his fellow travelers.
The night tracked along the usual parabola, no acrobatics. They went through politics, money, art, real estate, things loosening up at the fourth bottle of wine, my father realizing by the fifth that even Feeney had softened when the man said he admired his own father for never, not even on his deathbed, asking god to ease his pain, and appeared to be choking back tears. Carla went home not long after dinner, leaving through the kitchen door with her wrist to her forehead. Around midnight my father made a slow, drunken ascent of the stairs to deposit an already-sleeping me into bed. He got me into my nightgown, put me under the cold covers, tucked the blanket around my body, smoothed my hair. In moments like those he felt that he was a father. The rest of the time he felt as though he’d been sent onto the ice without a stick or pads and told to take control of the puck.
Back downstairs he slumped onto the end of one of the sofas and put his feet up on the hearth. Bo dropped the needle on a record, dim but audible, and my father recognized it from years ago, Davis’s trumpet retracing the lines scored in his memory, the apartment on West 77th, before he’d met my mother, before he’d published anything, when all he did was smoke and throw away what he wrote. Like paying an old friend a visit, recalling himself that way, and though there was conversation around him, he preferred the company of the past.
He, Bo, and Feeney were going fishing in the morning and Bo was outlining his strategy with a nonchalance meant to highlight his lack of obsession about the event, though to my father it seemed fairly obvious he’d been poring over depth charts and buying advice off the locals. Why else would he have said, Well, it’s not like I’ve been poring over depth charts and buying advice off the locals? My father smiled at the ceiling.
What’s funny? my mother said, shouldering him. His weight on the cushion had tipped her into his hip and he felt her thigh there against his and he felt the yawning within his body, an opening hunger for sex.
Nothing. Just listening.
She stay asleep when you put her down?
Out like Liston.
Didn’t Liston take a dive?
I don’t know what I’m talking about. Out like a sack of bricks. Down like a light.
Poet.
Watch your mouth.
There’s a storm, Bo said, coming up the coast, but the fish can’t feel it yet. They’re nice and settled.
The music was good. My father was cataloguing the living room, dim, the lambent cone of orange from the fire, the dull reflection off brass handles and glazed picture frames. The saltbox couldn’t have been laid out this way originally. They’d demolished walls, exposed beams, vaulted the ceiling, installed extra rooms to accommodate their modern appetite for space. But there was something more to
