My father was a little mesmerized by the sight of the animal, until then nothing but a dark force beneath the water, in a sense nothing more than an exertion of his imagination, and he recoiled when the single steel tooth of the gaff swung down and pierced the fish’s flank. Feeney gathered the fish on board, its blood running pink onto the deck, and Bo leaned over and cracked it on the head twice with a wooden mallet, and the fight was over.
Nice fish, Bo said.
Big son of a bitch, Feeney said.
They can pull, can’t they? Bo said.
A little bit, my father said.
The fish was sleek, robust, its porcelain belly darkening to virescent gray on the sides, and across its back, mottled greenish yellow. It had a perfect mermaid’s tail. The mouth was rimmed with wicked-looking teeth, and its dorsal fin was an elegant fan that receded in an arc like a schooner sail. It lay there, freezing to the waffle pattern on the deck, while the men stood looking down with their hands on their hips.
That one had only been the start. He’d pulled out another one as big as the first, then an even larger one, while Bo and Feeney had plashed their bait into the water with not even a single strike between them. My father’s recovery had a warming effect on all three of them, and Feeney’s verbal jabs landed differently afterward. He was less solicitous of my father, throwing harder, sharper. Bo was pleased—that he’d caught nothing himself didn’t matter. He was like a grandmother presiding over a groaning Thanksgiving table, delighted by her own cooking and her family’s appetite. For Bo, stoned and focused, it had been a righteous experience to watch the man battle those fish. It relieved him of his embarrassment for my father, whose success as a writer meant nothing to him, and though the next day he wouldn’t be able to quite recall exactly why, the feeling of warmth didn’t entirely disappear, and he was thankful for it. This was the way men won other men over: not by defeating them but by making them witnesses to the triumph of inner resources. My father had risen above his limitations to become, for a moment, a hero.
Those were the fillets my father had dropped without ceremony into the frying pan on the night of the blizzard, my mother and I upstairs at the party, my father’s choice of prep quite intentionally in direct contravention of Bo’s solemn instructions to marinate each in a four-hour milk bath before grilling them. Or you could do it right and smoke them, Bo had said. You can just bring them up to me and I’ll do them for you. I have this Finnish smoker—no one else has one. Just bring them up to me.
My father had grimaced and nodded amicably. There is nothing as unmovable as the opinion of the amateur authority, and nothing so irritating as the inevitable condescension with which he delivers it.
My father’s revenge: He had lit the stove burner, dropped some butter into the iron skillet, and tossed the fish in fresh from the fridge. As an afterthought, he dug a Pyrex lid out of the drawer and clamped it on top to contain the splatter. He wandered back into his office to turn off the lamp, but sat down, just for a moment, to read the last thing he’d written, and that had been the end of the fish. When the acrid smoke reached his nostrils, he was penciling in some anatomical details in his description of the Buddha’s first sexual experience. Wouldn’t the low-hanging earlobes play some role? Aren’t they inherently erotic, those loose, tender flaps of flesh, just hanging there, scrotiform? How could Yashodara’s virginal lips not close around them in a suckling embrace? Or perhaps they were but normal earlobes until Sid met Yash and all the pulling …
He hated that book, incidentally, his comedy about the life of Buddha. He was packing it with choice hippie bait like, Only by looking away shall you see what is before you, and Trust not the eye alone, for it is but a single instrument with which to navigate the world. It was a way out, this dive he was taking, a book not merely dumb but offensively stupid. And so far, so good. In a way, he reveled in its stagnant reek, page after page of sewage.
He had already written three painfully intellectual novels, books full of linguistic backflips and sly tricks that did a decent job of papering over his failure to locate the truth. They were smart and soulless. Fortunately for him, no one was watching. Then his fourth, Slingshot, inexplicably made the bestseller lists. Somehow, without intending to, he’d written a story with universal appeal, a gripping thriller about a mild-mannered Polish man’s daring escape from the Nazis. Reviews appeared lauding his paradigm-shifting approach to the genre. A studio optioned the film rights. His back catalogue started selling. My father’s life was thrown into chaos. On the downtown M11 he’d seen people reading the book, apparently enjoying it, and twice on the uptown he’d been approached and asked if he was the writer Saltwater. (Who? he’d replied.) He’d gone on Dick Cavett’s show and lied as much as possible, and had enjoyed seeing up close Cavett’s superhuman ability to feign interest in whatever pabulum he coughed up. Profile
