Boarded Windows (11 page)

T
ODAY I WALKED FROM MY SUBURBAN STUDIO APARTMENT to a member’s-only warehouse where I bought an enormous jar of pickles. There’s no real walking or biking route from my apartment to the warehouse, and I’m currently without a car as well as a job—I should clarify: my car just needs a new intake manifold, and though I’m not steadily employed, I’ve been doing some second- and third-rung modeling, catalog work as a paternal type when I’m lucky, and some more embarrassing shoots—so for most of the way I walked on the interstate’s shoulder, with the burger wrappers, the tire molt, the bottles of motor oil, the cans of soda, a Sudoku book, a pair of women’s underwear (someone has been raped, I thought), the fallen animals: doe; fawn; raccoon; rabbit; a surprising, heart-tugging number of large, disgustingly mangled turtles. A few drivers slowed down for me, yelled solicitously out their windows; some honked and heckled, but most whizzed by, their cars and trucks blowing hair (my own) into my face, billowing my T-shirt, atypically tucked into my cut-offs to keep the wind-lifted grit out of my underwear. Scores of grasshoppers hopped at my sneakers and seemed to singe my calf hair.

I spent a long time in the warehouse. It was dark outside by the time I started for home. For safety, I walked most of the way in the ditch, and down there I especially wished I’d worn long pants and more supportive shoes. It was a walk that, afterwards, had to be described in English, American English. I don’t quite know what that means. It’s a variation on something my mother Marleen used to say, which as it turned out wasn’t hers either. For a few years in Enswell she routinely took long walks. On some weekend days, she’d walk for three to four hours, probably covering nine to twelve miles; on some weeknights, she’d walk about half that distance. From time to time I joined her, but as a rule I stayed home, watched TV or played with my plastic football men. She liked to walk in long lines rather than big circles or squares. She’d walk to a set destination by the straightest route possible, stand in place for a few minutes, then turn around and walk home. Most of her destinations were specific, such as a bingo hall, but some were vague, like: a ways out of town. And sometimes, to get to these spots, she walked on the highway’s shoulder. So my walk today was in part a tribute to her.

She walked for meditation, exercise, and, especially during my elementary-school years, almost all her transit. At some point toward the end of the ’76–’77 winter, the transmission of her demographically predictable strength-through-joy subcompact gave out, and since money was tight just then, she decided not to have it fixed, to get by awhile on foot. When spring came and smiled on our carless existence, she sold the subcompact to a lay mechanic. Enswell wasn’t and isn’t a big city; one could negotiate a pedestrian life. It was a haul to get to the fairgrounds, say, but most things were within what an average healthy adult in no hurry would call walking distance: my school was only three blocks away; Tuttle Ag Pumps, where my mother worked, was a mile and a half away; and we lived right off Foster Avenue, the main drag, and were thus close enough to the essential stores (grocery, drug, hardware) and to several restaurants, Bey’s Food Host by far my favorite. Still, it was often inconvenient, not having a car, especially during winter. Sometimes we had to cheat by calling a taxi or a friend. Some people took us to be poor, which we weren’t quite.

When Wade more or less lived with us, my mother occasionally and grudgingly borrowed his car, a muscular dolphin-blue coupe with the abbreviation
SS
on its grille and elsewhere. Or he gave us rides, or we all rode together, if that’s what we were doing, going somewhere together. I loved that car and its radio. Almost always I got to ride in front, between Wade and my mother. Wade wasn’t really into engines or exhaust tones or remedies for axle tramp and so on—he’d gotten a good deal on the car from a luckless client and didn’t keep it long—but he was a good, relaxed driver, and once between Enswell and the village of Frith, after the rolling hills, now sometimes scarred with ATV tracks, gave way to a long stretch of flat, he got the car up to 120 and stayed there for several miles while the Atlanta Rhythm Section made love to phantoms and Paul McCartney turned his back on inclement weather. My mother’s whoops and gurgling laughter filled the car despite the blasting wind and radio, and as I remember it the laughter wasn’t at all borrowed or obligatory, though probably there was something movieish about the drive. I suppose most automotive fun carries a cinematic taint.

We went without a car for six years. Then, within a month of our arrival in Minneapolis, my mother and I traveled by city bus (on which two unchaperoned boys my age shot me mocking stares) to a large suburban car lot. It was a hot morning in August. We each carried a small plaid suitcase from a set. As we walked through the lot to the showroom, I lagged ten paces or so behind my mother, as if with our matching suitcases I could feign independence. The showroom was vertiginously cooler than it was outside. My mother walked up to the first free salesman she saw and set her suitcase in front of him. He looked down at it. “I’m going to buy a cheap used car from you today,” she said. “Cash on the barrelhead.” The salesman scratched the back of his left knee with his right toe. “Then my son and I are leaving for the Grand Canyon. I want to make it to Kansas City today. If you can sell me a car in a half hour, we’ll be there by dinner.” This salesman was mellow. He didn’t comment on my mother’s speech or ask her to clarify “cheap,” he just motioned for us to follow him, led us to a disregarded part of the lot behind the service garage, and showed us a dented but low-mileage American sedan going for three thousand dollars, painted a caramel not unlike my mother’s hair that season. “The Grand Canyon is an incredible place,” he said. My mother smiled. After that, she generally lost interest in long walks, or maybe her interest had already started to wane during our last year or so in Enswell, I’m not sure.

Anyway, when she got back from her walks, I would ask her how the walk had gone, and she’d say, “It would have to be described in French.” Decades later, I realized that she’d been borrowing one of Malte Laurids Brigge’s lines from Rilke’s novel, which I suspect she first read on Wade’s recommendation, since it was a novel he “loved.” Wade was a lover; he claimed to love people or at least women liberally, but he didn’t apply the word glibly to things. I don’t recall him ever saying, as I do, “I love this song!” or “I love that shirt!” No misunderstanding: I don’t think it’s silly to love a song or a book, and in some cases one might forgivably love a shirt. But for some reason when Wade told me he loved Rilke’s novel, a book then unknown to me along with its author, the words seemed wrong from his mouth, perhaps disappointing. “To be loved means to be consumed in flames,”
writes in the novel. “To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.” So by its own terms, it’s selfish to love
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge;
it aligns one with the book burners, though a book burned privately and in the right spirit, a spirit in fierce yet pacific opposition to hate and fear, could be a sort of offering, and I can almost imagine how beautiful such a ceremony might be.

W
ANDA’S SUNDAY NIGHT GIG WAS AT A NEWISH comedy club in the warehouse district called Jest in Time. The club was unexpectedly light, woody, and contented, its small round tables, armless Windsor chairs, and newly refinished floors all softly dyed in close shades of beige or natural. Two of its walls were mirrors, but despite that clue it took me awhile to remember that the space had previously been a dance studio, the Belknap Center for Dance, where a friend of mine’s much older half sister had taught and once in my presence done something unorthodox with a portable barre. Wade and I were happily not talking at a table near the knee-high stage, above whose cream backcloth was a vinyl banner, its squiggly lavender stripe the lesser of the room’s two intrusions of bold color. I scanned the room, counted heads (sixteen nonstaff, some of them presumable members of the headlining improv troupe), and was momentarily tempted to move to one of the white beanbag chairs tossed pixieishly in the club’s northeast corner, shaded by a large plant that I couldn’t identify. A red leather coat—here was the other show of bold color—lay on one of the beanbag chairs. My Coke was Pepsi and came in a heavy tumbler, clinging to which was a cocktail napkin featuring, I saw after the napkin fell on my lap, the club’s mascot, a laughing alarm clock whose pipelike limbs seemed to be dancing to the Dire Straits album playing on the club’s glassy sound system. I stared at the damp napkin, torn around the mascot’s face, and started to feel sad about the club’s impending failure.

The emcee introduced Wanda as Shucks Mueller instead of Miller and ignored Wade’s shouted correction. Wanda had tucked most of her hair into a frayed straw boater and was wearing her light-green houndstooth sports coat, a wide-lapelled size forty-six that held her trunk like a hot-dog bun round a pencil. Her floral kipper tie was of the same vintage (early seventies) and taste (bad) as the coat, but her trousers—cream flannels once worn by her remarkably thin Rockefeller Republican grandfather—were elegant, although short, even in this satirical context, complicating the rest of the costume’s easy-target vulgarity. Her set was a slightly modified version of one I’d seen a few times before, made up mostly of domestic jokes about shrewish, foolish, or whorish wives. At the start of the performance, she or Shucks was uxorious, slouchy, beleaguered; by the end s/he was bumptious, enervated, abusive. At one point, the dildo strapped to her (let’s stick with feminine pronouns) waist must have slipped through the slit in her (my) boxers, and she pitched the proverbial tent in her grandfather’s flannels, which were stained at the crotch with my semen, and which, along with Wanda’s white Corfam loafers and her pale skin, blent into the backcloth so that she sometimes looked like the floating torso of a minor-market weatherman.

Only the most perceptive audience members would have noticed that stain, but it was the kind of detail Wanda cared about. One night several months earlier, I’d come home from work to find the flannels laid out on the living-room floor and Wanda reading in her underwear on the couch. As a greeting she asked me to unzip my pants and hover over her grandfather’s. She pointed to a piece of red sweater lint to the right of the zipper, my target. At first the idea seemed disrespectful to her sweet, still-living grandfather. “These are really nice pants,” I said, kneeling to palm the soft fabric, reaching inside to finger the silk lining. But then Wanda got on her knees and elbows (her knees near the one-and-a-half-inch cuffs, her elbows on the thighs), unzipped me, and started sucking deeper and rougher than normal, which encouraged me to grab her hair and carry on with an aggressiveness that later engendered some guilt along with decades of masturbatory support. Eventually she pushed my thighs to slow me down, and with my cock still partly in her mouth said, “Tell me well in advance of when you’re going to come.” “It’s gonna be hard for me to hit that exact spot,” I said. She stopped sucking and said, “If you miss, we can try again later.” That promise and her breath on my penis acorn elicited a drop of pre-come, and she slowly pumped my cock over the target (my knees hurt on the hardwood floor) till I came quite precisely where she wanted me to, shooting just one errant, briefly shaking glob on the floor, which she scooped up with a grapefruit spoon and rubbed into the trousers. The stain hardened to a faint caramel similar to the paint on my mother’s old sedan.

Wade laughed heartily throughout Wanda’s set, not at every joke but at quite a few, and sometimes punctuated his laughter with a startling clap. In imitation, and because of the weed (the smiling box officer had sniffed conspiratorially at the smell floating off our hair and skin), I laughed a lot too, more than I usually did at Wanda’s act. Wanda’s steadiness as a performer was nearly professional, but our laughter seemed to distract her. “Maybe we should cheese it,” I whispered to Wade. He looked at me quizzically and continued as Wanda’s volunteer claqueur, and I, against my will and without reinforcement from the rest of the crowd, continued to find his laughter infectious.

After the set, Wanda, carrying two rum and Pepsis and now in jeans and one of her hot-rodded T-shirts, joined us at the table. She graciously if coolly accepted Wade’s compliments and my less effusive ones. The crowd had doubled by the time the improv troupe, Without a Paddle, went on. Their set was boring, inane, beneath satire. Here and there Wanda and I exchanged groaning glances, while Wade’s head kept bobbing in and out of a churchy doze. My interest endured mostly by dint of the five-person troupe’s one female member, a short, wide-hipped woman, about my age, whom I’d noticed jittering around the club before the show. Onstage, the Without a Paddle players sometimes wore wigs, lab coats, or grass skirts, but mostly they wore their own clothes—drab, state-university clothes except in the case of their token woman, who came out in the more bohemian outfit I’d seen her in earlier: white jeans; Doc Martins; and a mannish V-neck sweater, now topped with an unbuttoned red leather jacket, the one seen earlier on the white beanbag chair. One of the arrowhead ends of the jacket’s belt was now tucked into a slanted pocket, but the other end dangled toward the floor. The jacket was just slightly darker than the red-red of stop signs and fire trucks, and accorded perfectly with the woman’s sangria lipstick and short, almost en brosse dyed-black hair. In my memory, I suppose this jacket has become the “rose to match my red ideal,” to traduce a line from a Baudelaire poem notably interpolated and given a honky-tonk mise en scène by Bolling Greene.