Jernigan (25 page)

I waved it away. “Please,” I said, meaning
Please, no more
.

“Little more of the old
Maria sangriente?”
Uncle Fred was now a person whose wife served brunch.

I shrugged, and with my right hand twisted my left forearm.

“I thought as much,” he said. “Penny,
ma chère
. Would you be so kind?”

“You
guys,”
said Penny, getting up. “I’m going to go hide the lampshades.”

“Hell, better hide your dresses too,” he said. “No telling
how
merry this is gonna get. But first.” He snapped his fingers twice.

She curtsied, holding out an imaginary skirt, then opening her fingers to let it fall back against her blue jeans. “He’s actually pussy-whipped,” she said, screening her mouth with the back of her hand. “I just do this so I won’t look like a castrating bitch in front of company.”

“Enough girlish prattle, dear,” said Uncle Fred. “You’ll charm us another time.”

She went into the kitchen and came back agitating a cocktail shaker full of something red, but using only her wrists so as not to drop the bottle of Absolut under her arm. The shaker was decorated with tilted martini glasses and modernistic boomerangs. “Here,” she said. “I’m just going to leave you boys the wherewithal. I’ve got to work for a couple of hours or I’m going to be in terrible shape tomorrow. You can talk about broads while I’m in there. Mikey, you’ll clean up, won’t you?”

“Don’ worr’,” he said. “Zio Federico take care ev’ryt’ing.”

“Thanks, Penny,” I said. “It was delicious.”

“You know you’re welcome to stay for dinner.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Let me think about that. Right now, the very idea.” I patted my stomach.

“It’s taken us so long to get you here,” she said, “that we’re not going to let you go without a struggle. Mikey, why don’t you just get him too drunk to drive?”

“There’s
a thought,” he said.

“Ciao
for now,” she said, wiggling her fingers goodbye.

When she was gone, I said,
“You’re
a lucky son of a bitch.”

Uncle Fred thought about that. “Yes,” he said.

“You know, I actually
like
the dining table in here,” I said. “Cozier.” Since the last time I’d been here, Penny had taken the dining room for workspace. Now they ate in a corner of the living room.

“Yeah, I think so too,” he said. He mashed his last few crumbs of scrambled egg into the tines of his fork and ate them. “So what did you
really
do to your hand?”

“I told you,” I said. “It’s a gunshot wound.”

“Christ, it probably is,” he said. “Fucking crazy bastard.” He lifted the vodka in one hand and the shaker in the other. Those proportions seemed about right.

“Half and half,” I said. He mixed one for me and a weaker one for himself.

“Ice?”

I shook my head. “I try to stay away from that shit,” I said. “Turns to water on you.”

“Hear hear,” he said. He tasted his. “Hmm,” he said. “Not too shabby. So tell me about this Glendora. Did
you
get lucky?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

We both waited.

“Tell Uncle Fred,” he said. “That is, if you’re in the mood for it.”

“It’s not all that interesting,” I said.

“Fuck a bunch of interesting,” he said. “Is this thing ongoing? Offgoing? On-and-offgoing?”

“As of today,” I said, “I guess it’s ongoing.”

“Although you’re not too happy about it.”

“How does he know these things?” I asked the ceiling.

We waited again.

“So,” he said. “Who do you like for the Super Bowl?”

“It’s a real mess,” I said.

“Who
is
this person, anyway?”

“Well, see,” I said, “originally Danny was going out with her daughter and he was spending a lot of time over at their house. And they decided, I guess, the kids did, to introduce us. Because she was divorced, and I was, you know, whatever I was.” Widowed. “Which was actually pretty irresponsible, that she and I hadn’t even talked on the phone when the two kids were spending so much time, but I guess you get busy and stuff. At any rate, long story short I ended up with the mother, and now we’re all, like,
there.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“Sounds a little weird to you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m just sitting here being nonjudgmental.”

“Funny,” I said, “I could’ve sworn you thought it was a little weird.”

“So
is
it?”

“It’s getting there,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “Can you get out? Is that an option? That is, it’s obviously an
option
, but is it something you’re seriously thinking about?”

“Problems with that too,” I said.

“Danny and the girl.”

“Among others,” I said.

“Do you
like
this woman?” he said. “She have a name, by the way?”

“Martha,” I said. I thought a little and said, “I guess not really. I mean, I
should.”

“Well, then it’s simple, no? Rule One: Don’t be with somebody you don’t want to be with. Bad for you and bad for them. Right? Fuck a bunch of
should.”

“Right,” I said.

“Do you think she loves you?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “She’s, I don’t know … Anxious to please.”

“Except you’re not pleased.”

“When did you ever know me to be pleased?” I said.

“There’s that,” he said. He took a sip of his Bloody Mary. Then he set it down and said, “Nevertheless.”

“Look, Danny’s only got another two years of school,” I said. “Year and a half. Then he’ll be off to college or something, and then who knows. In the meantime—”

“In the meantime you’re going to rot yourself,” he said. “Or is that too harsh?”

I took a good gulp of Bloody Mary.

“I’m not trying to be Mr. Work Ethic here,” said Uncle Fred, “but what do you
do
all day?”

I shook my head. “Think and get into trouble,” I said.

“Your?”
he said.

“I do watch some television,” I said.

“I’ll bet,” said Uncle Fred. “You have the
money
to move someplace else, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sort of. Not really.”

“Like to clarify that a little for the folks back home?”

“Well, see, there’s the money from the house,” I said. “But a lot of that is for Danny’s college, and the rest of it, if I just stick it in a checking account or something, it’s going to get eaten up in taxes.”

“So where do you have it now?”

“Well, right now it
is
in checking, but—”

“I’m beginning to lose my stolid patience,” he said.

“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t blame you. It’s not a very edifying spectacle.”

“And don’t glamorize this crash-and-burn shit,” he said. “Not that I don’t know the temptation, but this is your
life
here.”

“No, you’re absolutely right,” I said. I drank the rest of my Bloody Mary and reached for the vodka. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” he said. “In fact, you
are
my guest. I might add, though, since we’re—”

“Let’s not even get started on that,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “To tell you the absolute truth, I may actually not have all that much of a right to preach to you on that score.” He waited for me to mix mine, then poured enough vodka into his to raise the level an inch. “Boys will be boys, right?”

“To boys being boys,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I stared at the row of Christmas cards on the mantel. “No tree?” I said, to let him know that his marriage wasn’t so fucking perfect.

“You know it’s funny,” he said. “We actually went to the Koreans’ on Broadway and looked at their trees, and we both got really depressed because they shape the God damn things with hedge clippers or something. They’re all like
that.”
He drew an isosceles triangle in air with his two forefingers. “They look like they came out of a fucking
barbershop
. Next year maybe we’ll have time to drive up somewhere and get a tree looks like a fucking
tree.”

“We
got a tree,” I said.

Uncle Fred looked at me. “You’re really in piss-poor shape, aren’t you?”

I raised my glass and drank to that.

“Peter,” he said. “If you need to get away and think about things, you’re welcome to come here. You and Danny both. I know Penny will second me on this. Of course, we’re talking floor space here, but it
is
at your disposal. Any time. Middle of the night, makes no difference.”

“Shit,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Or listen,” he said. “Another idea. If you want to be someplace and not have
us
underfoot, think about the camp. Since you’re starting to get that mountain man look anyhow.” He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Looks good on you, actually. At any rate, my neighbor up there tells me they got a foot of snow already, but if you didn’t mind braving the cold a little, that stove heats up the whole trailer in nothing flat, and there must be two three cords of wood sitting there. Unless somebody made off with it. Now, I drained the pipes last time I went up, but I can tell you how to get the water going again. Hell, you could cart your stuff up there and move
in
if you felt like it. The place just sits.”

“Sounds like a good fit,” I said. “You know, I mean I probably won’t end up doing anything that extreme, but I do appreciate it.”

“Listen, you’d be doing me a favor by making it look like somebody lived there,” he said. “They’ve broken in five or six times now. You know, local thug kids. One time they stole all the light bulbs out of the lamps. Everything but the God damn books: those they don’t touch. You know when I went up there last time, to close the place up? I found a rubber stuck to the floor. Had to take it up with a putty knife.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll know I’m not operating purely out of the goodness of my heart. We never go up there in the winter because we neither of us ski or any of that shit. And now it’s getting so we have less and less time in the summer.
Or
inclination, I guess. The drive eats up half your weekend right there, and then there’s all the stuff you feel like you have to do or it’s all going to fall down around your ears. Did I tell you Penny and I were talking for a while about actually building up there? Not down where the trailer is, but like halfway up the hill there’s this outrageous spot where you can see off for like miles. But—by the way, Penny does
not
know about finding the rubber.”

“We reach,” I said, and made a diamond with thumbtips and fingertips.

“Good God,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a Trekkie on top of everything else.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just watch.”

“So anyway,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. I have all these great memories, you know, going up there with my dad. But the place just seems violated. And the winters are really for shit.” He drank off a little more Bloody Mary, poured in more vodka and stirred with his index finger, which he sucked clean and wiped on his pants. So okay, there was always that about Uncle Fred and me, deep down. I mean, what’s male bonding ultimately about? On the other hand, what
wasn’t
vile, deep down? Although you didn’t want to think of that as vile but simply as another way of being. The thing was not to look deep down.

4

I woke up on a couch. In Uncle Fred’s apartment. Almost dark in here. Right: I could remember asking if he minded if I just lay down for a few minutes. All that stuff still cluttering the table, glasses and
plates and food every which way, and that bottle sticking up like a lighthouse above a stormy sea. I was alone in here and you could see the room darkening by the second, although that probably wasn’t true. From where I lay you could raise your head and look down the hall all the way to their bedroom door. Closed. Except my head hurt when I raised the son of a bitch. I listened for sounds of fucking. The hand hurt too; I had accepted that it was just going to hurt from now on. I kept listening. I heard a car horn down in the street.

I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. Apparently I hadn’t taken my shoes off; hoped I hadn’t put dirty shoe bottoms on the nice cushions. Bathroom door was open, but the bedroom door was definitely closed, not just almost. So either fucking or napping. Or first one then the other. I shut the bathroom door to piss. It turned the whole water yellow, so I’d have to flush: if it made noise it made noise. But first I went through the medicine cabinet. Penny had a thing of Pamprin in there, so I popped that open and took four. Washed them down with cupped handfuls of water, drinking like a frontiersman.

I went back and lay down on the couch again to wait for my head to stop hurting. It was as silent as before. Christ, what if they were in there like what’s-his-name? If they’d put on this show of being oh so happy and had actually chosen today to carry out their suicide pact. And my fingerprints all over. Oh, I wasn’t serious. Just one more thought; it doesn’t pay off anyplace later in the story. I got up again and went to the table and had a good old belt of that Absolut right out of the bottle. Then I went back to the sofa and picked up a copy of
Vogue
lying there on the floor. That’s what there was to read, unless I wanted to get up again and get one of the pieces of the
Times
. In the “Mind Health” section I found an item headed
INSPIRED
BY PLEASURE
.

The creative muse is a surly mistress, demanding a hefty fee in anguish before she grants an artist’s plea for inspiration. Well, here’s some good news: Alice M. Isen, Ph.D., Kimberly Daubman, and Gary Nowicki of the University of Maryland find that what creativity really requires is … feeling good
.

I tried to understand why this was good news. Then I looked through for ads with pictures of naked bodies. I found some, most notably an endearingly swollen breast with nipple, and tried to get excited. Finally I put the magazine back as I’d found it—at an angle from the sofa a bit sharper than forty-five degrees—then got up and had a last swallow of vodka and looked around for something to write a note with. Best I could do was a felt-tip pen I found on the kitchen counter. I tore a paper towel off the roll that hung from the underside of the cabinets and wrote
HAD TO GET BACK. THANKS AGAIN FOR EVERYTHING
.—j. A job just writing that much, since the ink seeped and spread into the soft paper, and the tip of the pen dug in and ripped it if you bore down at all. Now, where do you put it so they’ll see it? I unscrewed the cap of the vodka bottle (took one last swallow), placed a corner of the paper towel over the mouth and screwed the cap back on. There: looked like somebody wearing a cape. Absolut Man, I thought: Dump ta dum!