Falling Sideways (17 page)

Or not?

He lifted a slender tin box of Henri Wintermans Royales from the side pocket of his jacket, and his eye caught the warning plastered there: “Cigar Smoking Can Cause Cancers of the Mouth and Throat, Even If You Do Not Inhale.” Tell it to Bill Clinton. Funny, how they capitalize the words. Old-fashioned types. He lit one. The secret to enjoying cigars was variety. The rough dry smoke in his mouth was bracing. He wondered if he would get cancers of the throat and mouth. Why plural? More than one kind?

A smiling woman approached him. Unpleasantly plump, she put her false smile in his face and said in twangy American, “You are stinking up a perfectly good day!”

“Madame,” Breathwaite said, “turn and observe those humps of evil out in the bay.
They
are stinking up a perfectly good city. Turn your attention where it is needed.”

Clearly she hadn’t expected that. With outrage tight in her lungs, she pronounced, “You are
very
selfish, sir!”

Breathwaite stepped away from her and chucked his cigar to the tracks in the path of an incoming red city train, considered chucking himself after it, and cocked his head with interest at the impulse.

You can’t die yet. Think of all the great whiskey in your cabinet.

The train jiggled him back to East Port, the American woman glaring at him all the way. Breathwaite was surprised at himself. Normally he would have simply trampled the cigar underfoot without a word.
Growing confrontational in my time of crisis?

Kirsten was not home, so he installed himself on the balcony with an honor guard of bottles on the little wrought-iron table before him, admiring their different shapes, the quality of the afternoon sunlight filtering through their different hues. From the pale yellow amber of the Glen Grant, to the deep dog-eye glowing brown of the Wild Turkey 101-proof eight-year-old straight bourbon whiskey, to the similar but slightly lighter red brown of the Balvenie DoubleWood and the mellower, yellower Bushmills Black Bush triple-distilled in sherry casks, to the elegant reddish yellow thirty-two-year-old Bunnahabhain Family Silver Vintage 1973 Limited Edition, which he had been nursing for the past five years and was now slightly less than half-full. Or to put it another way, slightly more than half-empty.

It occurred to him that it was highly unlikely he would ever have another bottle of that. He could not even recall what he had paid for it, other than that it was pricey. One hundred dollars? Two hundred? When these bottles were empty, he would have to develop a taste for cut-rate supermarket whiskey.

Hello, my name is Fred, and I am not an alcoholic, I just love whiskey. I am a connoisseur. Who will take whatever he can get however he can get it.

With these bottles he could entertain himself an entire evening, taking a dram every half hour or so. Correctly tasted, a single dram warmed your mouth and your chest, your heart and your consciousness, keeping the reason from stifling for at least half an hour.

How optimistic seemed the bottles that were full or near full, how sad the single remaining finger in his Glen Grant. The Family Silver still had five fingers—five skimpy drams—five more tastes. Properly stewarded, a week’s worth of evenings.

He considered starting with the Glen Grant but was reluctant to kill the bottle. One less soldier in his guard, even if a short-timer. So he went for the Wild Turkey and cracked the seal. Bonded bourbon. Legs to stand on. He nosed it well. Sweaty socks, chocolate, nut. Poured a third of the dram into the furrow of his tongue and let it roll, ignited it with air, and swallowed, smiling, happy as any southern gent, chest full of the home fires.

Like a cigar, Fred?

Why, yes, Fred, thank you.

Not at all, Fred, my pleasure.

Know what, Fred? I don’t mean to be sentimental or anything, but you are a true friend.

Right back at you, buddy! Now fire up at will! Take a good one!

Fresh robusto, all Cuban, rolled to the lyrics of Neruda. Smell of fertile earth and sun and skilled peasant fingers. With his hole cutter, he pressed a neat dime-sized opening in the head of the cigar, studied its even contour, ran the tube beneath his nostrils again, then struck a long cedar matchstick and roasted one end before putting the other between his teeth and drawing the flame up to it.

Thank you, God, for the fruits of this good earth. And thank you, Fred.

Right back at you, buddy.

As his mouth filled with smoke, stimulating the benevolent phlegm at the top of his throat, he regarded the lines of Langelinie Bridge spanning the train tracks below. Jerry-built footbridge that replaced the graceful structure that had been there for a century before, since 1896. A new bridge was coming, but not for another few years. Would he live to see it? Beyond that, the domed roof of Bruun Rasmussen’s auction house, where he had passed many a pleasant evening battling for the objets d’art and furniture with which he had decorated and appointed his roomy shelter here. Figuratively speaking “his.” Rented.
Dear landlord, please don’t put a price on my soul
. He remembered battling for the Dan Turèll barber chair two years before. He gave up at nine thousand. It went for ten thousand. Breathwaite would have placed it on this very balcony so he could sit in Uncle Danny’s elevatable stool and contemplate the view over the city, hoping that the chair would exude some old infused Dan T poetic sentiments.

Breathwaite could sense that Kirsten was home now. Connected by the invisible tendrils of their years together, he knew her movements. He needn’t look. From where he sat on the balcony, his back to the apartment, he knew. The aroma of her thoughts, her dreams, her concerns, wafted through the labyrinth of rooms between them. Sour and sweet, her breath, never foul unless she was ill, the heady fragrance of her body, sea salt, seaweed tang below, her soul the floor of an ocean. Sweet angelfish. All sweetness and light while the sun shone.

Then abruptly he recalled the turd of hers he saw floating in the bowl the other month, black and ragged as a cheap Italian cigar, ginny stinker. A sweet-ocean angel’s secret. Odd to have lived together so long and that the first time in thirty years he ever saw her shit. That was not a turd to be proud of, but certainly an interesting one. Inconsequential, of course.
My mistress’s shit is nothing like a rose.
No need to tell her he saw that twisted little marvel, yet he was uneasy with secret knowledge of her. If he kept something from her, what might she keep from him? Surely it was mad to extrapolate at such length over a little ginny stinker of a turd.

What would she say if he said suddenly, burst forth with confession:
I saw a piece of your shit the other day. It looked like a ginny stinker.

She would say,
Your mother again?

And then he heard what he was thinking.
Ginny stinker.
His mother was the ginny stinker. Her angelic face, angelic name (Raffaella Belmare), her sweet nature, kind touches, her sensuous Italian lips, and she was the ginny stinker. Story of his life. Incomplete puzzle. Little piles of broken images. Explanations built from grains of dust.

His mother, Raffaella Belmare, had been born out of wedlock in Naples, in Caserta. As was the custom for those born out of wedlock in Caserta, her last name was conferred upon her by the mayor, who gave her the name Belmare because her eyes were the green of a beautiful sea. Did the sin of her own mother haunt and follow her?

Whatever the reason, perhaps simple lechery, perhaps neglect, perhaps just a moment’s weak hunger grown from discontent at her husband’s virility or lack of it, Mom cheated on Dad. With Jimmy Powers, handsome wiry mick who drove the van that collected our laundry once a week. Dad and I went to the one o’clock show instead of the four, to see Gregory Peck in
Moby Dick
, cultural experience, and when we got back, the laundry van was in the driveway, but Mom was not in the kitchen. Mom was not in the dining room. Mom was not in the basement or the living room or on the porch. Dad said loudly, “Okay, let’s see if she’s out in the backyard,” and when we were out back we heard the ignition of the laundry van kick in and then Mom came out and said, “You’re early!”

The flush of her face and edgy smile told the story. Dad said nothing, but his eyes were sad. He was a pacifist. Or was he afraid? I was not afraid. Jimmy Powers was the father of Hughie Powers, with whom I went to St. Gabe’s. Hughie with his chiseled face and dazzling smile of teeth, so admired by the girls. I found him in the schoolyard next day. His eyes were frightened as a baby’s when he saw me, and that only fueled my intention—for his fear announced the fact that he knew all about what had happened, that everybody knew all about what had happened.

I approached him, not certain what I meant to say or do. And then my right hand decided for me. It swelled up like a cement hammer and blasted him full in his fake-smiling teeth. One of them flew out, and another one lodged in my knuckle. He bowed forward at the waist, whimpering, hands cupped in front of his mouth to catch the blood as if he could use it for anything once it was out.

No satisfaction at all. Solved nothing. Helped nothing. Did not ease my pain. Made it worse. I had felt so certain that action was the only viable path and learned from that, that certainty was not necessarily a good foundation for action. Best to make decisions and to act when you are not feeling so certain and self-sufficient. Certainty is a drug whose effect is fleeting and fickle.

That evening, I was reprimanded in the kitchen by my father. Gently but firmly. While my mother sat with her hand over her sensuous, angelic lips. The reprimand was unnecessary. I was already disgusted with myself for the way my knuckles had felt smashing into his teeth, for the sight of his broken tooth that I had to pick out of the skin of my knuckle.

Dad said, “You know, or ought to know, and should have thought about, the fact that Hughie Powers’s mother is in the hospital having a baby. These things have to be taken into consideration.”

Oh, Dad. Did you take into consideration that Hughie’s dad was so horny because his wife had a bun in the oven, is that it? Well, why was
Mom
so horny, Dad?

Those mean Sunnyside streets Breathwaite had left so far behind, where the currency of negotiation was a punch in the mouth or a kick in the balls. Might is right. Walk it like you talk it. Are you good with your dukes? Solved
nothing
. So much more civil here in the shelter of beauty and art with my dear Kirsten. She thinks all this is not important to her, but I know better. What she fails to realize is the importance of its importance to me. If we lose all this and have to move into our little summer house or into some dismal northwest-side two-room—as my own parents had to do for unclear reasons forty years ago—her brave smile each morning will be a mirror of my failure, and she will see that in my face as surely as my mother saw it in my father’s doubt, whether he was a pacifist or a coward, and it will make her sad.

Being sad is the most damaging weapon Kis has against me. She doesn’t complain or nag or bitch or argue; she just deflates, loses her sweet happy vigor, and when I ask,
Sweetheart, what’s wrong?
she only says,
I’m sad
. Or,
I get sad.

I sometimes wonder if she is fully conscious of this and the debilitating effect it has on me. The total capitulation. Calls for a reshuffle of all priorities. Only thing that matters is to undo Kis’s sadness. How tyrannical is your sweet love, how powerful in its gentleness your tyranny.

It makes me sad.
Oh, the tyranny of a sweet angel’s sadness. Sweet angels have the power to swangle you. That’s what it was, a swangling—a force that drained all color, sweetness, joy, hope, from the day. Copyright that word. Coin it and copyright it. Patent it.
Swangle
, verb, transitive: the action of a sweet angel to crush with sadness a man’s fragile sac of gems.

Such methods of withholding: no morning kiss, no smile, no good-bye when you leave for the office, unless you go in to her and say,
No good-bye? No kiss?
And you have to lean down for it, and it is not much of a kiss or a smile, and she doesn’t see you to the door as she otherwise always made a point of doing, waving as you got onto the elevator down to your day.

Swangled.

Now she stepped out onto the balcony with a smile. “You’re early,” she said. And bent to kiss his mouth. Then straightened to take in his honor guard. “Bad day?”

“It just occurred to me to claim this rare afternoon of October light for myself.”

“Good idea!” she said. “You should do that more often. Worry them a little. Make them appreciate you more.”

She will know,
he thought.
If I am not careful, she will tune in and suck the information from the secret recesses of my mind. Or read it subliminally in the language that my body transmits without consulting me.

But she left him with a smile to tend to her own affairs, and he went on to the Black Bush and the recollection of a conversation he had with his youngest son, Jes, some three years ago, when the boy had still seemed to consider his father worthy of listening to. It was the boy’s eighteenth birthday, and Breathwaite had introduced him to the secrets of whiskey with a dram of Black Bush. Breathwaite liked a whiskey that was corked rather than capped. He loved the sound of the cork popping from the neck of the Black Bush, the fine bouquet it dispersed. He explained this to Jes, who tasted in accordance with the ritual suggested.

“Wow, Dad! That is fantastic!”

On the second dram, Breathwaite grew expansive: “Son, the secret to a happy life is good whiskey, good sex, an appreciation of poetry, a large living room, a trustworthy accountant, and a reasonably hefty net surplus in the bank.”

Jes’s smile was all admiration. “You forgot family.”

“I did not forget family,” said Breathwaite, instantly reframing. “Family is a sine qua non which I take as a given. Without your mom and you, I … and your brothers, of course … I might as well cash it all in.”