Inner Tube: A Novel (3 page)

You can see my attention was not where it belonged, and so could my father, artist of laws. His hand fell threateningly on my knee; he hissed. So I fixed my eyes in the prescribed direction, took in the furniture and the cellophane fire that shed no light, passed quickly over yapping faces. I could follow words individually, but completely missed their point. Too, the voice tones were like none I’d ever heard. Considerably later, I learned of projection from the diaphragm and reaching those red
EXIT
bulbs at the back of the theater; but at that moment all dialogue felt alien in my ear. I lowered my gaze to the rows of heads in front of us, studying varieties of hair.

Gordo’s elbow was sharp as my mother entered through French windows at the back of the set. Disillusion took but an instant. She had a white sweater tied round her neck by the sleeves—a style frequently affected at home—and a bundle of fat white blooms across one arm, as if she’d come in from clipping the peonies that marked the edges of our property. Where was the transformation? I knew what “playacting” meant, like any third-grader, and this wasn’t it. I felt like crying when she opened her mouth to speak and out came the teasing snob accent she used to cajole my sister and me into drab chores, or to dinners where we had to keep quiet.

This display of her ordinary self before strangers was indecent. She was exposed, without even the small tricks of glamour a little boy could recognize. I noticed that Gordo didn’t laugh with the rest. His posture was stiff and defiant, chin jutting. Was he reading the same indecency that I did?

The curtain couldn’t fall soon enough for me. With alarming suddenness, the slight pressure in my bladder had grown into a torment. I shut my eyes against it, afraid to move. Then I heard my mother trilling from the stage: “How do I get out of here?”

The lights came up at last and I zigzagged my way to the men’s, praying the hot dribble inside my leg wouldn’t turn into something more. I didn’t want to end up at Aunt Rita’s too. Finding an empty stall, draining myself, I thought for a mad instant of hiding there until the theater was empty and explorable, but knew I’d be found. My father, I was sure, could order up a special police squad whenever he wanted. Nothing to do, then, but thread through the forest of people and find him. At least there’d be chocolate waiting.

His suede shoes made him easy to locate; they matched the carpeting. He wanted opinions from me. I mumbled around my Hershey bar. This was no time for lenience, though, and he prompted me so fiercely I could barely keep up. A Saturday matinee, indeed. What had been offered as a rare treat turned out to be one more privilege earned through adherence to ceremony.

As the second act got under way, I was a determined little gut-squeezer. It would take plenty to make me fall for their pretending. I would follow Gordo’s lead, wedging myself in place like a one-man totem pole, taking it all in and giving nothing back. Coolly, I would tell Carla later on how I’d indulged the grownups. But all this went like dust before an angel’s sneeze when my mother reappeared.

She floated in a strapless satin gown, hair a braided crown that revealed the pale column of her neck. Bright as her eyes, long earrings left glitter trails with every movement of her head. She looked like herself, but had become someone else. Her laughter was slow and low and filled the distance like an echo of itself. Edging forward, edging forward, I finally conked myself against a metal seatback and felt my eyes brim over with the vulgar distraction of pain. Band music spun on a phonograph and my mother danced with a younger woman back and forth across the artificial living room. I had never seen her move with such reckless grace.

Just as it had begun, with the suddenness of a detonation, this vivid interlude was finished. Lights blinked off, then on again, and the parade of dolls resumed. It was a mystery to me that such an abandoning didn’t empty the place. But the laughers laughed, the snoozers snoozed, and I watched while not watching, in the manner of someone who leafs all the way through a newspaper without picking up any news.

After a while my teeth began to hurt from the effort of not seeing and the press of discomposure. I longed to peel back time, to rub out those few glory-radiating minutes of satin gown and low laugh, to save my mother. Because what could she do from her place of elevation but slip, trip, and fall into grayness? Into the sad kitchen where we knew her as reluctant wife and nervous mother who stared into the freezer, rummaged in drawers, talked to herself, was constantly looking over her shoulder: Where was it? Had it been there at all?

After she died, I saw how huge her own longings must have been. It was only on the altar of the raised proscenium that power drew near. She inhaled it through open pores; she swelled with it and rose like a balloon. But there came inevitably a closing line and a final light cue, and the inescapable return to the place where she flaked dried gravy off oven mitts, bandaged knuckles scraped against the cheese grater. What had to be learned was that, over the long run, short respites only deepened the agony. How do I get out of here? You find a place of warm, dark peace where the lights never dim and there is always another page of script: the inside of a television.

The next thing I noticed was the curtain call—all of them up there holding hands, grinning with what seemed to be embarrassment. And why not? My mother looked right at us and gave a small wave. I looked at the ceiling. Out in the street Gordo bought some flowers and put them in my hand.

He unsmiled. “Give these to her when she comes out,” he said.

We waited in a greasy alley. Dusk sneaked in and it was cold. Gordo turned up the collars of both our coats. He stamped and blew steam like an impatient horse. Then the star of the family arrived in a miasma of cold cream, and the two of them launched into a furious argument over Carla.

“Christ almighty!” She was still reaching for those
EXIT
lights. “You call Rita’s right now and get her down here in a cab.”

A dramatic rescue; an on-her-own ride through Central Park as night fell. Carla, however, didn’t appear glad to see any of us, even when fussed over (her dress had been through Rita’s washer and dryer) and given the bouquet.

“That’s all right,” said the star of the family. “There’s another show tonight and you’ll have a seat in the front row.”

Then she led the way to a restaurant with peppermint-stripe decor and an electric train that circuited the counter delivering orders. Carla and I threw petals at each other while the grownups sulked.

“Mom danced with a lady,” I reported, taking my pizza-burger from a little B & O flatcar.

“Liar.” Carla kicked me softly.

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t know about this acting.” Carla addressed herself to no one in particular. “We get sent to bed for it.”

Note:
Phoned main library in the city for data search. The play was called
Three on a Mattress.
It ran seventeen performances.

I
WAS A SMALL
, dutiful boy who was never asked to clean up his room. My grades were steady, my deportment good. “Evasive” was a word I heard often. My mother, concerned that I was old before my time, sent me to a psychologist, who fed me sour-balls and asked repeatedly how I felt about Negroes. A homeroom teacher, one Ted Buttonweiser, wrote my parents, speculating if my lack of extracurricular participation might not mask some deeper problem.

What must, from the outside, have seemed like timidity was inside the caution that proceeds from mistrust. To put a not very fine point on it, I had my doubts about close contact with other people. Still do.

I arrived at my sophomore year of high school with the single flamboyance of hair combed in a downward swoop over the brows à la Merseybeat stars Gerry and the Pacemakers. By now I was worried too. Without metamorphosis, and soon, I might be doomed to a life in which I bored even myself. But, of course, nothing is ever as hard as we make it. It took only one chance afternoon of quaint illegality, cruising the empty streets of a housing development with an unlicensed driver and a Baggie of airplane glue, to show me how little was required and how superfluous my caution had been. It was very much a case of instant possession. When I woke up and smelled the coffee, I moved to Brazil.

In pursuit of the dissolute, we had energy as never before. We were a cadre with secret codes and unbreachable unity; we were shaking things into a new arrangement, like glass bits in a kaleidoscope. I passed my sixteenth birthday at a gallop, wanting to leave myself behind. I saw the most pampered minds of my generation wild-eyed in the wake of petty vandalisms and inert upon leather furniture, their ennui as transparent as gelatin capsules yet to be filled.

All in all, it was pretty routine.

My mother, who took no interest in details, encouraged my new moves.

“Go on, explore,” she’d say, slipping me a twenty.

Explore. Expand. See the world.

Carla, who had been sent to Puerto Rico in April for an abortion, gathered us after dinner one night to view her slides: pretty nurses smiling under coconut palms that flanked the clinic entrance, piles of fruit in the
mercado central,
a porpoise washed up on the hotel beach.

“When did you have time to take pictures?” asked Gordo with ominous calm.

“Was I going to miss an opportunity like that? I just loaded up on Kotex and hit the streets.”

My mother welcomed it all. Prevented now, by herself, from achieving the safety of the stage, she relied on us for dramatic settings. And, obliging her, we expected her indulgence in return.

The day I was expelled from school for a supposed role in the pollution of the faculty lounge coffee urn with tranquilizers, my mother came to fetch me, wearing gumboots and a silver fox jacket. What fine technique as we drove home, such delicate shadings in tone. So skillfully did she modulate between fury and self-reproach that I began to suspect her of rehearsing on the way over. It was a nerve-jangling performance. Makeup striped with tears as we reached the driveway, my mother pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and whispered, “Can you get any more of those pills?”

Gordo, with no appreciation of the exploratory spirit, threatened me with a military school in Maine, which he’d found advertised at the rear of the Sunday
Times Magazine.
But my mother prevailed on him to relent, saying she couldn’t bear my being so far from home. Eventually, he contacted a friend on the board of supervisors and got me reinstated. I wrote an essay on mutual trust for the school paper.

My girlfriend Sabra wrote me a ballad in which she compared her heart to a hydroelectric dam. She fluttered her kohl-rimmed eyes and blocked my approach with her guitar. Sabra was equivocal.

“I’ve been in real trouble ever since I got the idea that my father scratching my back had something to do with sex,” she’d once told me in her lovely contralto.

Her father was a tall, recessive man who did reconstructive surgery. He did not like me and I don’t think he liked his daughters much, either. Their house always seemed half empty, like they were getting ready to move.

In Sabra I could recognize that same caution which I, for the time, had turned upside down. But instead of drawing me to her in recognition and empathy, this irritated me.

“Are you sleeping with her?” my mother asked.

I told the truth.

“That’s all right,” she said gently. “You don’t have to.”

A good friend of mine whose career plan filled several notebooks was stabbed during a concert at the Nassau Coliseum. My mother, citing the necessity of renewal, went to live with an old college friend in the city, came home again, moved to a hotel, was hospitalized for exhaustion. My sister, who’d become involved with a Senegalese exchange student, was beaten and gassed at a demonstration in front of the UN.

Spring came on like waltz music at the scene of an accident, and Sabra and I stopped seeing each other. I considered alternatives: a life of crime, never coming out of my room.

“If I had it to do over again,” my father said in an unusual reflective moment, “I’d be the finest goddamn fishing guide in Nova Scotia.”

I looked hard for omens, but nothing seemed helpful. Then, for reasons never to be clear, Sabra’s older sister took an interest in me. In just a few short months I learned all sorts of things. Like how intimidating it can be to get what you want.

And the necessity for caution.

I
IMPROVISED A TOUR
for a delegation from the Uruguayan embassy. I spoke for over an hour to a woman whose son was the pilot of a hijacked airliner. I smoked hashish in Walter Cronkite’s chair.

When it became clear that my unanimous rejection from college was due in no small part to incendiary statements I had put down on the applications, my parents were furious. But after a few smoldering months, during which I was effectively quarantined, they were prepared to accept, if not forgive, this act of sabotage.

“It’s you who’ll have to live with it,” my mother would say.

She had the inured piety about decisions of someone who never made any.

Gordo, who would happily have spilled blood on his way to Dartmouth Law, was more attuned to specifics. He towed me into his study and uncorked a bottle of liqueur that neither of us liked.

“If you really want to take the low road, that’s up to you. Failure can be comfortable—I understand that, and I wouldn’t deny you. Hell, let’s all be comfortable. With the money I save on your tuition I can buy a sailboat. But where does all this leave you vis-à-vis the draft board, my friend?”

I shrugged and gazed into the purplish depths of my snifter. The old cross-examiner, he had me in a box.

“The truth is, a lot of parents, maybe most, would be inclined to let you pay for your arrogance. The boy wants to swim against the tide, so be it, they say. But we’re not liable if he drowns. Your mother and I aren’t ready to be so blasé. We don’t want to lose any more of you than we already have, and we cannot have you over in some swamp ducking mortar fire or up in Toronto ducking the FBI.”