The Death of All Things Seen Page 7

  Janice Marsh let out a squeak like a mouse. With her books clamped to her chest, she was the very picture of what men were fighting so hard to keep safe.

  Then Nate’s father wanted to shake Nate’s hand in a sudden shifting reconciliation in the way a drunk might advance and retreat on an argument. There was no call for language like that. He was sorry. He insisted Janice stay. He wanted her to hear what he had to say.

  Nate stood protectively by Janice.

  His father blocked the stairway. He set his Scotch on a step beside him and began to show them how you strangled someone. He had strangled more than one gook with his bare hands. That, he said, was what hand-to-hand combat was about, his hands still around the throat of an invisible enemy. The Japs, they had to be flushed island-by-island during the push through the fortified caves of Saipan and the lesser islands along the Marianas archipelago, the weapon of choice – the flamethrower.

  He took a long drink, one foot on the step above. He had seen GIs bleeding out on the hillside quagmire of godforsaken islands, heard the murmuring phantasmagoria of the rumored kamikaze attacks that had sent a thousand souls into the listless blue of the Pacific to endure insufferable thirst and the circling menace of sharks.

  He said how he’d seen armies of crabs with the faces of Samurai warriors pouring onto the beaches, as though the enemy they’d killed was coming back again and again.

  What he said he learned in the atolls was that people fought hardest for the things they didn’t believe in because there was no alternative. Kamikaze attacks and ritual hara-kiri, the war in the Pacific was nothing like the known terror of the Nazis with their Lebensraum. The Pacific theater of war was a journey into the vegetative tangle of nameless archipelagos of what should have been Paradise Found, with its parrots, palm trees, and eternal sunshine, when what it had ended up being was a proving ground for obliteration.

  He explained why they took so few prisoners. The Japs wouldn’t submit to surrender. They fought to the death, so the bomb had to be dropped on them. There was no other way. They had to be brought to their knees. Each American fighting had that settled in their hearts. They had nothing in common with the Japs. Independent thinking was an alien concept to them. They were bound to their imperial emperor, to collective ceremony and tradition. America with its democracy and convertibles offered them nothing. Their understanding of Uncle Sam was all pin-up girls and Coca Cola.

  *

  Nate’s leaving party was in the carriage house two weeks later in the détente that nothing could be said between him and his father. Nate was served papers to appear for active service at Fort Pendleton out in California. He avoided his mother for her betrayal.

  He stayed at the college in the dorm room of a friend in advance of leaving. His going away party was a divided gathering. Present at the party were those who supported Nate and supported the war versus those who supported Nate but not the war.

  What they all shared though was a feeling of awe for this young man who was willing to lay his life on the line.

  Nate’s father came out toward the end unannounced. This was how the carriage house should have been lit up every weekend. He moved through the throng, amidst the smell of pot and the sweet odor of keg beer, amiable, cordial and convivial. He called the girls Duchess. They thought he was charming, or they lied and said so.

  Then the speeches started, the eulogies, his father staring over the rim of his glass. His eyes were locked on Nate. It was apparent then, what his father would do, that he would eventually intervene. It was what Nate had subconsciously hoped.

  But just then there had been a charade to uphold, and if Nate had not succeeded in high school, if he was never captain of the football or hockey team, if he played lacrosse, and played it badly, here was a moment when girls might later name their son after him, remembering him for the innocence of a boy who had stepped forward, when nobody in school had looked closely at how brave Nate Feldman really was.

  *

  Nate looked up. His breath frosted in the coldness. He was standing vigil to a pile of bones six feet beneath the ground. He had been a day and a half in America, and there were things still to be settled, not just with the dead, but with the living.

  Back in his car, Nate took out his phone. He could not bear to call Norman Price.

  Instead, he wrote a brief email.

  I am contacting you on the off-chance you might remember Mr Theodore Feldman as longtime employer of your mother. I should be delighted to make your acquaintance if you have the time.

  7.

  THEY WERE ANTICIPATING a mid-morning departure for the journey out to Norman’s home to view and appraise a property that wasn’t moving in the doldrums of the post-financial crisis. Credit had dried up. He described it on the white board as a case of perceived value not equaling purchase price, or pv☹pp.

  It was a small miracle getting ready, what with the issue of Randolph obstinately refusing to go into his cage. Given his size, there was something grotesque about the entire operation.

  Joanne moved in the harried clip clop of her heels. In a flounce of blouse, she looked like a buccaneer. She wore a push-up bra. Her cleavage showed. She leaned and waved a newspaper squeak toy encouragingly under Randolph’s nose to lure him into his cage. It didn’t work.

  Exasperated, she dropped the toy and went back to working a pair of earrings into her ears. She hadn’t been out in the real world in a long time, well, not in the company of a man. She made a pout with her lips, applying lipstick and blush. She looked suddenly appealing, or more feminine, and all that she had lost was suddenly apparent.

  Norman might have said something kind, but decided against drawing attention to the situation. Joanne was up on her toes in her high heels. Along the back of her left thigh where it widened above her knee, there was a run in her tights. He decided not to mention this either, while Grace shouted in her aggressive Chinese, her face right in Randolph’s face, in the way Chinese did not yield personal space. She left momentarily and reemerged with a naked Barbie doll.

  It did the trick. Grace talked to Randolph, and then to the doll, as though it was necessary and unavoidable, like how a general might speak to his troops on the eve of some futile battle. Randolph entered the cage, the quarry of the Barbie between his slobbering jowls.

  On the way out the door, in the turn of the double-lock bolt, Norman was suddenly aware of the disconcerting sound of crunching and snapping plastic.

  *

  Norman’s driver’s license had expired. It had escaped his attention until they were downtown before the Hertz agent. Joanne had a license, but, embarrassingly, all four of her credit cards were maxed out. She set them down, one at a time, like a bad poker hand, before a tanned, buff assistant manager in the corporate yellow of a Hertz polo shirt that made him look gay, even if he wasn’t, which he was. Norman was sure of it.

  What struck Norman was how the agent barely noticed him. The essential gaydar of how he had lived his old life was eclipsed in the presence of Joanne and Grace. He tried again to make eye contact with the assistant manager, the exchange not reciprocated.

  On the fourth card, the assistant manager traitorously turned his back and made a phone call, so Norman understood it would have been more awkward explaining Grace’s presence in the company of Joanne than if he had been in the presence of Kenneth. He felt his virility, his sense of who and what he was, under threat. He felt a sudden seething reverse discrimination at this outright betrayal by one of his own kind.

  Eventually, the manager, an African American woman of considerable bulk, came forward as Joanne began an unduly complicated story of how she had gone through an acrimonious break-up and had been cut off by a vindictive partner. It didn’t explain Norman or Grace, or how they figured.

  The manager interrupted Joanne. All four declined cards were not in Joanne’s name. Furthermore, the authorized cardholder had canceled the cards. The cards were being held for security purposes. It was company policy. For a m
oment, it seemed the police were on their way.

  Norman preemptively offered to pay with his card. He put on a voice of gay affectation again. He couldn’t help it. He made his appeal to the assistant manager, who disconcertingly looked to his manager, as if Norman was being confrontational and downright politically incorrect and homophobic. This was suddenly more than about a goddamn car rental. There was again the insurance issue, which couldn’t be covered by Norman’s card, since Norman wasn’t a licensed driver. It was company policy. It took a trip to an ATM to withdraw funds from Norman’s account, and then a trip to Joanne’s bank to pay down the sole card in her name before they could rent a car.

  They went with Alamo Car Rental, a downmarket rental agency along the L track, where the wind swirled in the dark hulk of shadows. A train rumbled overhead on a steel spine of track throughout the transaction. All told, it cost him $2,645 to pay down Joanne’s card and secure the rental. They went with the full-sized at a teaser rate of $399 plus tax for the week. They then discovered Joanne couldn’t decline the supplemental coverage at $29.99 a day, since she had no car insurance.

  There was no actual total cost, just a line item of costs and associated taxes, and they were coerced into purchasing the full tank option, so the car was to be handed back on empty or as close to empty as possible.

  It was 1.15 p.m. before they were done and paid when the issue of where to eat reared. Grace was hungry, and she had to go as well.

  They ate on Randolph Street, the street name bringing to mind the caged specter of Randolph, back in the apartment, suffering the interminable nature of their absence and the terrifying possibility they might never return, the Barbie long dead, and Randolph never understanding why they left in the first place.

  In the clawing, protracted indecision, against the run of time, as Joanne purchased a Happy Meal, in the quiet salvage of something fast sinking, Norman reached for a napkin and wrote, ‘Why They Left and Where They Went – Theories of an Abandoned Dog’.

  *

  The day brightened into an incandescent blue sky. They left the funneling shadow of the downtown heading for the shimmer of Lake Michigan and the northern suburbs. The air had a sudden windblown crispness. This was a Wednesday in deep winter, the cold freeze of an Arctic high-pressure system that dipped into the south. It was good to be out among the living. Norman felt it suddenly, after the anxiety passed and they were on the road.

  Joanne hadn’t driven in a long time. In fact she hadn’t since her days driving her infamous Pontiac Sunbird that her father had cobbled together for her drives to and from Chicago during college. She talked with an overriding sense of brimming enthusiasm. She was recovered from the debacle at Hertz. It was good to be behind the wheel of a car. She liked movement and the feel of the open road and held the decided understanding that money, despite what people said, could and did buy happiness. She said something to that effect on the run up along Lake Shore Drive, passing the intersection where Helen Price had driven into the lake.

  Norman let the coincidence pass without comment. A bleak awareness registered, but only for a moment. It passed just as quickly. This was the discharge of a life. He had moved on, or felt he had. He was, at least, trying.

  He looked up and had to catch his breath. In truth, it was difficult deciding what he thought about the house really. It was one of those post-war ranches tacitly conceived for all eventualities, not least of all for returning amputee war heroes looking for the unencumbered run of a wheelchair through a house with long hallways and well-lit rooms, a GI, still young and finding a wife in the flush of youth willing to accommodate stumps, so a great intimacy might be shared, so there would be children eventually, and the children of children yet, and they would see it as a couple, in this house, before their lives were over.

  These homes, they were mausoleums really, passed from one anonymous family to another. He felt the act of home buying should have come with an exorcism, or perhaps something less mordant, a prayer for continued journey, a reading forth of names, if simply to acknowledge and appease the dead.

  Norman looked away from the lake. He was trying so very hard to contain a feeling, to move toward a point of normalization, when beyond the cutting cynicism lay a deeper reality of why, if he’d had his way, he would not have gone out to the house. What he remembered of the house, what he thought about it, was something else entirely.

  He had captured it in one of his early shows, a converging homosexual awakening that had coincided with the unfolding bogeyman drama of John Wayne Gacy.

  What had frightened him at the time was the contained life a person could live, how Gacy had lived and murdered in the precincts of his own home. It taught Norman how life could be concealed, compartmentalized, how a perverted sense of one’s desires – or, equally, one’s ambitions – could be serviced amidst the lives of others.

  In the associated coming of age of his own homosexuality, in stashing his magazines in, of all places, the crawlspace in his home, he had come to align himself with Gacy – sexual release associated with the smell of crawlspaces, mildew and fetid darkness; sex connected with the rasping scrape of a shovel; sin spaded in mounding dirt; the grey slur of concrete poured in the finality of a conquest, desire literally paved over when things were done.

  Norman crawled from the memory.

  *

  Joanne had a tendency to drive too close to the break wall barrier. Norman watched and said nothing. Joanne was in the process of trying to angle out of her coat. She had the heater on high.

  A car behind beeped. Joanne swerved and righted with an over-corrective measure. She beeped at another motorist who beeped back and gave her the finger. She rolled her eyes at Norman when it had been her fault entirely.

  Norman was glad of the distraction, Joanne pulling him back into the orbit of normal life. She started the story again about her beloved Sunbird in the general non sequitur of how she negotiated and made connections in life. The Sunbird had died near a Wendy’s out near Skokie on the very night she and Peter had gone to see Schindler’s List.

  She described the theater as packed with what she called ‘sniffling Jews’ with boxes of Kleenex. She said it without provocation, her statement connecting with her working class Buffalo roots, though Joanne could see in Norman’s eyes the remark needed further explanation.

  There was a story to the story in most everything Joanne said. So it was the case with Schindler’s List. It turned out that back in high school she had dated a junior of Armenian heritage, a wrestler. It accounted for her nascent anti-Semitism. She asked Norman if he knew about ‘The Forgotten Holocaust’, because, apparently, the Jewish holocaust sat as a great and particular national grievance to the Armenian people that their holocaust had been one-upped by the Jews.

  Norman knew about the Armenian genocide. He pretended he didn’t, leaving Joanne to communicate the scant details of what she knew. This was how history was best come upon, or so Norman believed, Joanne processing the travails of a high school boyfriend’s parents that in all likelihood had allowed this boyfriend to get into Joanne’s pants in the fumbling reach of new boundaries, in the way life and history were more fully revealed in the act of lived experience than in any history book.

  Norman was confident Joanne couldn’t pick out Armenia on a map, but he felt a deep authenticity in the run of her words, in how she couldn’t shut up. He was more interested not in what she said, but how she said it, how the profane, blasphemous and plain hurtful could be so wrapped up in such a good-natured heart, because Joanne was all that, kind-hearted and strong, and nobody could deny it.

  She was, he understood, the sort of ingénue, one of those daughters, who, under more pressing and simpler times, could be coaxed into believing almost anything about anybody and counted on to bear from her hips a race of madmen.

  He might have said so and ruined what they had between them, so he kept his mouth shut. Minutes then passed in silence.

  *

  Along the dapp
led light on Sheridan Road, Joanne pointed to the palatial homes of those who had made it in Investments, Securities and the Law. She slowed down, shielding her eyes against the mid-afternoon glare.

  ‘You see all this, Grace? In America you can be anything you want to be.’

  Norman said, without turning around, ‘Joanne and I, we just didn’t want to be.’

  Joanne fake-punched his shoulder. ‘Don’t tell a child that.’

  ‘Okay, let me clarify. We wanted it, but we couldn’t get it.’

  Joanne shook her head and looked into the rear-view mirror. ‘Don’t listen to him, sweetie. You think positive and anything is possible.’

  Joanne eased back into her seat. She shook her head in mild admonishment and bit the underside of her lip. A half-minute passed. She seemed deep in thought, her lips moving silently. ‘Why do you have to go tell her something like that? Her success is not predicated on whether we fail or succeed. That’s a legitimate fact.’

  Her face was suddenly serious. She looked at Norman as she finished, so he was struck by the inclusive we, but he said nothing.

  ‘I think being a realist is not the same as being a pessimist. Look at Obama. Son of an immigrant Kenyan, raised by his mother and grandmother.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I think that speaks volumes for who we are as a people.’

  Norman added compliantly, ‘The Audacity of Hope. I read it, and the companion volume by Clinton, The Audacity to Grope.’

  Joanne’s eyes narrowed. ‘And you want to be taken seriously as an artist?’

  The word artist got to Norman in a way few other compliments could. He felt a sense of her view of him. He was an artist.

  He conceded, ‘Maybe you’re right about Obama. It’s a significant step toward equality, or the perception of equality.’

  Joanne looked at him, trying to determine whether he was serious or not, and deciding he was, she said, ‘And that’s the first step, the ability to dream.’