Drowning Lessons (27 page)

Snow falls as I cross Fifty-seventh. A cold gust blows. I fold up
the collar of my windbreaker, wait for the ache to pass. The sky thickens to darkness.

“I'm looking for pajamas,” I tell the salesclerk at Bergdorf's, a man with a nervous twitch to his upper lip and thick lines shooting up the middle of his forehead.

“What size?” He seems completely uninterested.

“My size. But it's the pattern and colors that concern me.”

I follow the salesclerk's dispassionate back to a display case bursting with pajamas — diamonds, shields, polka dots — and, yes, stripes.

“Any wide ones?”

“Wide?”

“I'm looking for wide stripes. Red and gray, preferably.”

With a desultory air the salesman opens drawers. From one he withdraws a stack of striped pajamas. Second from the bottom, I see them: a pair with red and gray wide stripes.

“It's a medium,” says the clerk, unfolding them. “They run a bit large. These should fit you just fine.”

I nod thoughtfully into my index finger, which I've pressed against my lips as if to suppress a painful outburst — something between a groan and the mewl of a cornered, pocket-sized creature — then take a step back, and then another, as the clerk, a toreador dangling a red and gray striped cape, fixes me with questioning eyes and the department store walls (decorated in wide vertical red and gray stripes) close in on me like the bars of a colorful jail cell. Question: how did they kill him? Answer: they gave him everything he wanted.
(He was all I had. No
—
not exactly.)
I think I'm going to die; I
know
I'm going to faint. Minutes later I'm sitting with a Dixie cup of cool water to my lips, surrounded by concerned faces, including that of the desultory clerk, who
asks me do I still want the pajamas? should he ring them up for me? My mouth goes dry. I stammer.

“Well … actually … I really wanted … pink and blue,” I say, merely to extricate myself. “You haven't got pink and blue, have you, by any chance?”

Spring. Together with my cousin I watched the magnolias in Central Park blow out again, flinging their snowy branches to snare the sky. The daffodils the gardeners had planted bloomed in sudden affray. By May's end I'd never felt better, only lighter, as if my bones had hollowed, like the bones of birds. I no longer floated; my lightness attached itself to earth. When the magnolia blossoms shivered, I shivered with them; when fat raindrops dimpled the glassy surface of the rowboat pond, my skin took their imprint, too. There was no obvious joy in any of this, mind you, only a great substantive indifference, as if the long, nearly total vacuity of the past year — my year of searching for red and gray wide-striped pajamas — had served its purpose, had scooped my longing for old comforts out like so much melon meat, had emptied me of something I didn't need
or
really want, and by emptying me had freed me — or at least delivered me from department stores.

I no longer suffer from fainting spells.

Standing on the stern of the
American Legion
, sifting my father's ashes into its wake, I watch the wind whip them into gray smears. I toss the plastic urn in; it bobs, floats.
O sweet gray banality of life! O bloody shank of day's end! O bourbon-and-ouzo-scented breath of night!
Under a red bay of sky Marcia wraps her plump arms around me.

Uncle Nick has asked me to go to work for him, setting up
his symposiums, peddling his chrome yellow manifestos. A man needs a purpose, after all.
A man without a purpose is a chameleon on a scotch plaid.
In celebration we locked arms across his dining-room table, drained each other's ouzo glasses, then hurled them synchronously into the fire grate, where they shattered like snowballs.
Stinyássas!

So I shall live on, lightening and lightening, until my body cells quaver in frequencies of every wavelength and spectrums of every hue.

Speaking of spectrums: next Sunday I've promised to take my cousin to the Rainbow Room.

Uncle Nick is pleased.

Swimming:
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The Wolf House:
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Color of the Sea:
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Driving Picasso:
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Sawdust:
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Our Cups Are Bottomless:
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The Girl in the Story:
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The Sea Cure:
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Wednesday at the Bagel Shop:
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El Malecón:
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Boy B:
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The Sinking Ship Man:
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(Summer 2005)

My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas:
Glimmer Train Stories
52 (Fall 2003)

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Leigh Allison Wilson,
From the Bottom Up

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Mary Hood,
How Far She Went

François Camoin,
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Silent Retreats

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Low Flying Aircraft

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Mother Rocket

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Drowning Lessons