Another Broken Wizard (18 page)

Dad made a face of disappointment.

“It was just a fistfight. I’ll be more careful.”

With his mouth ajar, Dad surveyed the bruise again and croaked ‘doctor?’

“Come on. It’s just a black eye.”

Dad started to shrug, then winced, and settled for pursing his lips.

“We have Tennessee at San Diego for the early game. Then it’s the Seahawks at the Giants.”

Football had always been a blessing for us. It meant spending time together without talking, especially with Dad struggling to speak and the left side of my face a purple reminder of so much he disliked. The nurses came in for their sometimes baffling and sometimes awful errands. They made a point of ignoring me. The black eye had changed me from the devoted and dutiful son to the violent and unemployed son. The black eye was one of those things that created a subtle but real exile from the middle class. Dad’s friend Robert showed up a half hour after the game ended. Another friend, Dan Wong, showed up just before the kickoff of the second game, with three big foil bags of chicken wings. Dan was half-Chinese and the other half must have been a bear. He was just over six feet tall and he had arms like legs and legs like torsos.

“So Jim, I have to ask, what the hell happened to your face?” Dan asked at halftime.

“I was at a party with some old friends and a fight broke out.”

“No kidding, where was it?”

“It was in Worcester.”

“Ohh,
Wistah
. You gotta watch out in
Wistah
,” Dan said, exaggerating his own accent.

“How about you Dan, where do you live?” I asked.

“I just moved from Newton to Natick—South Natick, actually.”

“Is that the part by the mall?”

“You mean the Natick Collection? No, it’s actually the old part of town, by the Charles River.”

“Oh, that sounds nice,” I said, wondering to myself how the hell I had gotten into a pissing match with this guy.

The second game was less fun than the first. Dad slept through it and Dan Wong stuck around. I left before it was done.

33.

The guard was watching the playoff game on a little TV at Mom’s apartment complex when I pulled up. He let me through without asking any questions.

“Oh my God, what happened?” Mom asked fast upon the hello.

“I was at a party in Worcester and there was a fight. It’s no big deal. Just a bruise.”

“It looks bad. Did you go to the hospital?”

“No. It’s nothing, just a bruise. It just happens to be on my face. I got plenty of these growing up.”

“Can you see out of it?”

“Yeah. It’s fine,” I said, booming my voice a little.

“Do you want some ice?”

“It’s too late for ice. Don’t worry about it.”

Her low-ceilinged apartment was bright, like there were one too many lamps on. She was wearing a baggy red-and-green sweater with a pattern of abstract wreaths. It had been more than a week since Christmas and I felt guilty. But then I thought of all the shit I had to do because she left Dad. That balanced out my guilt. It was a great feeling, just take my word for it.

“Well, what do you feel like doing?” I asked.

“I’m okay with anything, we could eat in, eat out. Whatever you want.”

We went back and forth like this some more. She and Dad used to do it too. It’s supposed to be a polite, pliant, generous gesture. But it seemed more like they had both just run out of appealing options. Indifference is a type of politeness, but not the best one. I finally said we should stay in, that I was beat. More than I wanted to admit, I just wanted to sit down in front of the television. I wanted nothing more than to be obliterated by its boundless reservoir of dinosaurs, convicted murderers and others worse off than me. It was the thing I’d hated most when I hated the suburbs—the way my parents and so many other people I’d needed in some way would get lost in self-abnegation before the flickering box. But, can of Diet Coke in hand, I succumbed just the same. No one gets converted to this way of living, I thought, they just get tired. And I was that. Someone on the TV swabbed a belt buckle and it turned bright blue in the dark. That was important to finding the killer, the TV said.

The TV was loud as hell. I turned it down. But Mom reminded me her hearing was bad and I turned it back up, just a hair past what the TV’s speakers could gracefully deliver.

“We can get whatever you want. I’m going to have one of my diet meals I think,” Mom said.

She had been on a diet since about nine months before she left Dad.

“Okay, maybe just some Chinese.”

Mom lit a cigarette, then got up for a fresh soda. A heavyset, grayish man on TV talked about the DNA content of saliva. Mom sat down and watched with me. A ruddy man in sun glasses enumerated the difficulties of surrounding a house like the one the killer lived in. Mom tried to make conversation while I focused on the TV, playing the role of Dad’s ghost.

“So when was this party?”

“Last night.”

“Was Joe there?”

“Yep.”

“Did he get in the fight too?”

“Yep.”

“He didn’t get hurt, did he?”

“Just bruises.”

I don’t know why, but it was like a Chinese finger trap—the more questions she asked, the less I wanted to answer them. I couldn’t make my answers much more curt, so I just took longer to deliver them—who else was there? why did the fight start? was anyone else hurt? was the place where the party was held damaged? did the hosts own or rent? and so on. Finally the show started up again. It isn’t walls that separate us, but TVs.

“Did Joe know the ones who started the fight?”

“Can we wait for the next commercial for the rest of it?” I asked. I should be more even-handed about all that comes with being an adult of divorce, but it doesn’t come easy. The killer almost escaped, was caught and arraigned. A commercial came on.

“So, did he know them?” Mom asked, not missing a beat.

“I don’t think so ...”

After more parrying, Mom left to pick up the Chinese food. I ate it, and she picked at something from a rounded cardboard tray that approximated food. By then, we’d changed the subject.

“I swear, he’s got to be the only dumb Jew I’ve ever met,” she said about a man she worked with, and we laughed a bit.

Mom paused as if to say something important. I held my breath and hoped it wasn’t a boyfriend. I wondered what it would be like to punch a man twice my age. But it was a false alarm.

“How is your father?”

“He’s recovering. He woke up today. He’ll be fine.”

Then Mom looked at me as if to invite me to say more. But I just shrugged, looked down and ate. There could be no possible benefit in passing information from one of them to the other.

“How are you doing?” Mom asked, indicating the whole situation by how she said the words.

Mom had her bouts with depression. The latest one directly preceded her leaving Dad, and she was attuned to it. I appreciated her asking, though she might not have known it.

“I’m fine. Just doing what I have to.”

After dinner, I could have stayed at Mom’s. But I said I had to do laundry back in Westborough.

“So are you going to have time this week? Maybe we could get dinner,” Mom said.

It sort of drove a knife into my heart. I said yeah, said I’d have to see what was happening at the hospital and so on.

It’s hard to love your parents enough. It’s just how they sit in you. No gesture or gift ever seems to communicate or exhaust it.

But, driving past the reservoir and the apartment complex that faced it, a terrible feeling, even beyond that, a sense of immense waste hit me. Traffic snagged while a pair of drivers sorted out a fender bender by the stop light. I idled with everyone else by the eastern shore of the reservoir, looking at the old dam and its granite church-like building, wondering, what did I waste? What was I wasting? Bright, white lights shone down from the apartment complex above me. Past that glared a black and yellow sign for a sushi restaurant. The landscape gave no indication anywhere of exactly what had gone wrong, only that something had.

Back at the Fountainhead, I called Serena and got her voicemail, which was a relief. I tried to sound sweet on the message. The effort counts almost as much as the real thing. It wasn’t even eleven, but I was exhausted.

On the inflatable bed, I closed my eyes and adjusted the too-small blanket. I thought of how scary it must have been for Mom to leave Dad after thirty-seven years, of how unhappy she must have been to leave. It was her overmatched fight against the 10,000 varieties of death. It made getting to sleep hard. Lying there, I was pursued by the feeling that something irreplaceable was being wasted. It vibrated in my gut.

I got out of bed and found my wallet with Ira Volpe’s card in it. I figured there’s no bad time to call a police station, and called his office line. His line rang a half-dozen times before I was transferred to an old woman with a reedy voice and little patience. She told me Detective Volpe wasn’t in and I should talk to one of the detectives who was. Before she could transfer me, I asked when he would be in. She said he’d be in at five, five-thirty that evening, then clicked me over to a sleepy sounding man who I hung up on.

By then, my gut had calmed to a basic sort of dread. I could sleep on that.

34.

Sunday, January 4

They’d moved Dad from the ICU to a regular room in another wing of the hospital. It was bigger and less futuristic, with curtains and fewer machines. Dad even had a roommate on the other side of a curtain. It was an older man in worse shape than him. The guy’s wife was holding his hand. They whispered occasionally—a real, live ghost at the feast. I’d brought a bag full of boneless chicken parts for the game. I tried to find a place for my coat and reached for a chair that was actually a toilet with a removable bottom. The days ahead flashed, coming toward me as unstoppably as kickoff.

“You want some chicken?” I asked.

Dad scrunched up his face to indicate no, and we watched the game. It was competitive and physical from the get go. Dad was nervous and engrossed, struggling through his pain and lingering chemical torpor to harrumph at the TV. It wasn’t until halftime, with the Patriots holding the lead, that we talked.

“You barely made it. I was getting worried.”

“I overslept. I was up late.”

“Were you out in Worcester?”

“No, I was just watching TV.”

“Did you see your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s she?”

“Fine.”

It still hurt him to speak. So I kept my own questions to ones with yes and no answers. You could guess everything going on with Dad just by looking at him—the pain, the drugs and so on. The people on the other side of the curtain whispered some more.

The Pats held the Colts to a field goal in the second half and had the game wrapped up with five minutes left. The win was an irrational glimmer of optimism for us. We’d hacked the ice off the aluminum bleachers at the old stadium with our drivers’ licenses. We’d watched when fans carrying off a goalpost were half-electrocuted by a power line outside the stadium. We’d had football to talk about and watch together during that first rapprochement after a bitterly contentious adolescence. And the Patriots started winning when things began changing with us. That’s what it meant, coincidence or no. After the game, I gave Dad a hug, gently. His own hands were light and trembling to reach my shoulders. The hug was awkward for me and painful for him. I sat back down to bask in the triumph reflected in the tiny hospital TV’s recap.

“These chicken things are good. I’m going to get some soda. You want anything?”

Dad said no, looking more alert and less pained than I’d seen him since the surgery. In the long, windowless corridors of the hospital, I wondered if it was dark yet. The hospital was neither day nor night. I had a Diet Coke can in each hand and was leaving the cafeteria when I ran into Olive.

“Well, if it isn’t the invisible man. Do you have a minute?” she asked.

Her voice showed aggravation, but she looked good. Olive was wearing a tight black and white dress from a thrift shop with an even tighter black sweater over it that opened to offer up her pale cleavage. She had on dark red lipstick, a lot of eye makeup and smelled of cigarettes. It all turned me on. I could tell she had something rehearsed, a speech that started with how I said I’d call, carried on into an ultimatum, and concluded with a proclamation that she didn’t care what I did. But my black eye turned the tide. It hurt less, but a dark purple and yellowish outline was setting in, making it look worse.

“My God, what happened to your face?”

“I was out with some friends in Worcester and I got into a fight. It’s no big deal.”

“Does it hurt?”

I shrugged to indicate that though it did hurt, I certainly wasn’t about to say so. It was a cheap ploy, but I wasn’t above it. We went back to my usual table, where I could watch Whiskeynose locked in his booth with his tiny television.

“So what’s new with you? How’s your Dad?” I asked.

“Dad’s going to have to do this again, it turns out. Maybe next year, but they’re talking about doing it while he’s still here. They don’t like the look of another one of his valves. So the whole clan is going to get to do another stint in the hospital—hooray.”