Christ, you’re a piece of work, aren’t you? Feeney said.
My father blinked. He realized everything he’d said had been directed at Feeney, trying to impress and destroy at the same time. He feared his friends’ money and their confidence and their success and it was small, infinitesimally small, of him to malign them, even if by some miracle of inebriation it sounded to them like nothing more than a tone-deaf pseudo-academic roast. Small because he felt calm around them, yes, and that was a gift they gave him. He basked in the warm glow of the control they exerted over their lives, the opportunities that their money afforded them. He found comfort in their presence. But he was only here because he was added patina, and that was humiliating. He was here as author Erwin Saltwater, and he knew it because they tolerated him. Because Bo didn’t slug him. Because Jane didn’t tell him to shut the fuck up. He’d concocted the diatribe to thank them for their hospitality, to sing for his supper, to provide them a story they could tell their friends. Mission accomplished.
They’d moved on like it hadn’t happened. Feeney was talking about the markets again. He talked like a flood sweeping through a village, in a chaotic rush of words that tore trees out by the roots and plucked houses off their foundations.
My mother turned to my father. Age of intentional inauthenticity? Been sitting on that one for a while, have you?
I suppose, he said. What is wrong with me?
Where would I even start? she said.
“Blue in Green” ended and Jane turned the record over. My father’s eyes were closed. The needle popped, dropped into the groove, played a few bars of dust before the piano and the drums came sliding in like something out of a heist movie and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley came in behind them, saxes crackling with spittle, and then Davis, restrained, creeping over the shoulders of his bandmates. “All Blues.” My father let himself back into that old apartment on 77th. The landlord had installed his own mother in a top-floor unit one winter. Because he ran the boiler only enough to keep the pipes from freezing, she’d contracted pneumonia and died. That’s how my father had heard it. He had trouble remembering her face. She was a black sweater and gray skirt, a column of dust planted in orthopedic shoes. She wheeled her supplies around in a squeaky folding grocery cart scrounged from a dumpster. She scrubbed the lobby floor on hands and knees, her phlebitic legs sticking out hideously like marshland maps cut and crossed by violet creeks and streams, the central rivers in cerulean. More than once he’d had to step over them to get to the stairs. Always mumbling to herself in Polish. My father could have spoken to her, but he hadn’t. On weekdays she cleaned her son’s other buildings. On Sundays, she cleaned the one where my father lived. Saturdays she went to synagogue. When her neighbor on the eighth floor had fallen ill, she’d made a pot of krupnik, wasn’t that what someone had said? Things he’d heard after she was dead. She hadn’t been old. Another thing he’d heard was that she’d been in the camps, but that she’d managed first to get her son on a train to Spain, then a boat to the U.S., and he’d grown up with his aunt and uncle on Long Island.
My father had lived on the second floor, in a studio with a mattress, his books, the Olivetti, and a portable record player. Some days he listened to “Blue in Green” three hundred times, at the tune’s end his hand automatically reaching for the arm, fingers casually dropping the needle back at the beginning while their twins waited patiently atop the keys. This fine synchronization of body with machine rendered him calm enough to write, the repetition silencing the demon voices and tics that sabotaged his concentration.
That song was the score to his first book, a companion and an ally, and the Vornados had boiled it down to tar to patch holes in their conversations. The old woman was ingrained in the music, down in the grooves of his memory, her scrub brush, the swish of the brushes on the drum kit, her voice whining with the horn, with the sirens, the slamming of doors above and below, the concrete footfalls of his upstairs neighbors, the bass, the hissing of the radiators, the street, the snapping of the Lettera’s typebars. How romantic it could be in retrospect. Why not also pretend that she might have been a beautiful woman before the war, a woman of culture? Of course she hadn’t been.
Feeney was arguing that increased sales of nude pantyhose correlated with the increased availability of pornographic films. He was trying to get a rise out of the women, employing the genial lechery men used to compete with the detrimental effects of women’s lib, the main of which, as any male of the species could tell you, was a complete loss of humor in the fairer sex. My father wanted to hear “Blue in Green” again, this time loud enough to drown out Feeney, but it wouldn’t do to get up and flip the record over. Earlier, he might have had the right, but now he had to make an effort not to be such a grade-A prick. Instead he went and got another drink, waving the bottle, a peace offering, at everyone, who shook their heads no, and when he came back he sat on the other side of my mother, closer to Feeney and the Vornados, and when there was an opportunity, he apologized, bumblingly, with a convincing degree of sincerity that he felt at the time was genuine. Bo patted him on the leg and Jane waved him off again, just as she
