He netted enough from the movie deal to buy the apartment in the Apelles. Not just any apartment—one so large he and my mother had never found a purpose for the fifth bedroom, which remained empty, like an artist’s painstaking reconstruction of an unoccupied room on display for some downtown gallery, a commentary on America and manifest destiny or process or a piece of anti-art. It was chilly in the winter, stuffy in the summer, smelled of damp plaster, a featureless white space with two windows in the wall. As far as my father was concerned, it was just an empty room. Tabitha, our cleaning woman, said it had weird energy.
How right she was. It’s where I sleep now.
Maybe the room was a metaphor for something, an empty chamber in my father’s soul or a symbol for some piece of the writing machinery that had gone missing, because after Slingshot he’d dried up. He couldn’t believe that he’d fallen prey to so clichéd a trap, but there it was, day after day, a blank page in the Olivetti. Time passed. Deposits of soot and dust gathered in the crease where the rubber rollers met the page and were buried underneath something more permanent, something granular. For so long he’d been misunderstood. For so long he’d been able to hide behind prose rubbed smooth as an aluminum wing, words flashing bright as seraphim. His books were fireworks, lights and noise and smoke and the next morning, an empty sky. But five million readers in twenty-two languages had screwed it up for him, or he’d screwed it up for himself, he wasn’t sure which, and he’d been forced to fashion the new Saltwater, one who might survive the public glare. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his invention had fallen prey to the great myth of writer’s block. The invention was, after all, a hack.
Why was it so important to be misunderstood? I know now that anyone concealing a secret, however small, wishes to divulge it. Secrets will fight their way to the surface, as a splinter wedged deep in the ball of the hand will eventually surface, forced out by the generative forces of the body. My father was caught between his desire to divulge and his desire to conceal. While he could contain his secret, however, as he had for nearly thirty years, his books were falsehoods, and he deserved his obscurity. He’d unwittingly done something honest in Slingshot, though. He’d divulged some of himself. And that meant the thing was close to the surface. It was going to emerge. He could feel it.
So he drank. He wept with his head in my mother’s lap. He behaved badly at parties. He wasted days writing pseudonymous columns for small-town newspapers upstate. (His writer’s block was never bad enough that he couldn’t pen a screed.) For a while he’d pedaled an exercise bike for five hours a day while watching TV. Here and there he got into fights with critics in the letters sections of various reviews, and one night, swollen with fury at a windbag who’d called his characters nothing more than Freudian archetypes, he’d impregnated my mother. My conception, a complication. First he couldn’t write another novel, and now this.
Schiff, his therapist, had suggested that the pregnancy might reconfirm his ability to create something.
Gimme a break, my father said. I write something, I get paid. A baby’s nothing but a deficit! A bum shook his cup at me the other day and I started laughing at him. I laughed right in his face. Do you have any idea what a baby costs?
Schiff, father of three, raised his chin.
Anyway, I still can’t write.
But my impending birth had at least compelled him back to his desk, and he sweated it out for a month, sitting again at the blank page, forcing his fingers onto the keys. Taking them off, looking at the ceiling, sighing, fingering the keys again, eyes on the page, back to the ceiling. He blew away the grit at the roller wheels. New deposits accumulated. The chair’s thick steel spring squawked when he shifted to relieve his mortified glutes.
At the desk he wore an odd look on his face, that of a partygoer cornered by an inveterate blowhard. Eight hours a day, that’s how he sat, his face screwed into a hopeful wince, waiting for silence to shut up so he could get a word in edgewise. One afternoon the light bulb on his desk popped and the windowless little space snapped into darkness. He sat, unmoving, for an hour. A mouse scraped at the lath in the wall. The dark persisted. The mouse came out and poked around at the baseboards. My father sat and he waited and nothing happened. He changed the light bulb and he sat in the light and nothing happened.
Back from the widow’s walk? my mother would say when he emerged at the end of another day. Somehow instead of infuriating him, her unwillingness to engage his despair calmed him. She looked different. Patches of melanin were darkening her cheeks. Her hair was thicker. She was dusky. She was expanding. So I sit and nothing happens, he thought, so what?
