Life Goes to the Movies (21 page)

“In the war.”

“Which war?”

“Vietnam.”

“Dwaine had a brother in Vietnam?”

I said nothing.

She asked, “Older or younger?”

“Older. Look, don’t you think it would be better if Dwaine told you these things himself?”

“It would be,” she replied bitterly, “except Dwaine didn’t tell me, and besides, he’s not here, remember? Sorry, Nigel. I
don’t mean to jump down your throat. I’m upset, that’s all.”

“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” I said. “Dwaine’s like that. He does things on impulse. He’ll be all right.
He’s like a cat; he always lands on his feet.” I scratched a mosquito bite on my neck:

“There’s something else I need to ask you, Nigel.”

“Shoot.”

“Is Dwaine an alcoholic?”

The tip of a laugh almost snorted its way through my nostrils, but I managed to convert it into a cough. How could Venus not know that Dwaine drank?
His drinking was as much a part of Dwaine as that whale of a forehead, as that fake front tooth.

“He drinks,” I said.

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking is he an alcoholic?”

“I’m no expert on these things, Venus.”

“Just say what you think!”

A pause. “Yeah. I guess so.”

She thanked me and hung up.

10

Three weeks later Venus phoned again. She said she was leaving Dwaine. She’d been offered a job with a theater down in North Carolina and was
taking it.

“At least it’ll give me some time to decide whether or not I want to stay married to a lunatic,” she said.

It was a Thursday morning. The house was empty. My mother was at the bridal boutique and my father had just left for Waterbury to buy some electronic
parts. I sat in the breakfast nook. The cold September sun leaked in through the gaps in the yellow kitchen curtains to bounce off the chrome top of my
mother’s stove.

“To think of all the crazy things I could’ve done with my life,” Venus said, sniffing. “I could have gotten a full body tattoo.
I could have dined on Japanese blowfish livers. I could have bungee-jumped off the top of the Empire State Building. But no, I had to go and do the
craziest thing of all and marry Dwaine Fitzgibbon.”

“Why didyou marry him?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Because he was exciting. Because I felt sorry for him. Because he asked me to. I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything? Why did youlet me marry him?”

“ … ”

“You could have stopped me, you know. But you didn’t. Why didn’t you, Nigel? Why did you leave New York? Why didn’t you stay
and fight for me, if you liked me so much? If you were in love with me, instead of running off like a coward? What were you afraid of? The city?
Dwaine? Me? Life? Everything?” I heard her blow her nose. “I’m sorry, Nigel; I don’t know what I’m saying.
I’m blaming you, like it’s your fault that I did something so totally stupid. You had nothing to do with it. And anyway Dwaine’s my
problem. I shouldn’t take it out on you.” She sniffles. “It’s just been hard. We never do normal things together, dull,
ordinary, boring things. You know, like watching the six o’clock news on TV, eating a quiet meal, playing Scrabble. Every moment has to be
fraught with passion or fury or comedy or conflict, there can’t be any non-dramatic moments, like every frame has to be filled, like—like
it’s all one big—”

“Movie?” I guessed.

“That’s right, like a big movie. That’s just how it is with Dwaine, isn’t it? I used to believe him when he said he wanted
movies to live up to reality. But it’s not true. He wants reality to live up to the movies. He insists on it. My God, how can he stand it?
I know Ican’t.” She sniffled. “God, I’m such a wreck. I haven’t slept in three days. I’ve got these great
dark circles under my eyes. My cheeks are turning yellow. I look like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a progressive liver disease.”

I offered up a few lame excuses on Dwaine’s behalf, but whatever I said only pointed up his deficits and made things that much worse. Anyway it
was too late; she’d already made up her mind.

“Unless he quits drinking and starts going to A.A. meetings—” she said.

And then we were interrupted.

11

The odd mewling sound came from somewhere outdoors. I parted the yellow curtains. Through the garage door window I saw the rounded top of my
father’s car. I told Venus that I was sorry, but something had come up; “I think my father may be in trouble. I’ll call you
back,” I said and I hung up.

Barefoot, I hurried out into the garage. My father sat in the back seat of his Morris Minor, tears in his eyes. His face was ashen. “Ah, there
you are, Nigel, old boy. Perhaps you’ll enlighten me: Where the devil is the bloody steering wheel?”

I drove him to the emergency room. As my mother and I waited they tested his brain. The results indicated a minor stroke brought on either by
late-onset diabetes or a sky-high cholesterol count, or both.

Too much coarse-cut Chiver’s orange marmalade on buttered Thomas’ protein toast. Too many soft-boiled eggs.

12

My father recovered, or seemed to. But then it happened again. We’d gone for a little hike. It was one of those mild Indian summer days, with a
wet, mossy smell in the air. A rainstorm the night before had rinsed all the colors of the world, leaving them so clear and crisp they looked as though
they could shatter like glass.

The hike was my father’s idea. We drove to Newtown, five miles away, to an abandoned railroad bed we had explored when I was five or six years
old, and where a pair of tunnels carved into the limestone passed over and under each other. I remembered how, back then, as we walked through one of
the two tunnels, I saw a hornet’s nest looming, big as a barrel, fat white hornets buzzing all around it. I refused to go on. “I’ll
get stung!” I said. “Rubbish!” my father replied, urging me forward as I buried my face in his ratty cardigan. Sure enough, as we
passed by the nest a hornet stung me with a blinding white flash. The pain swelled like a dissonant symphony in my cheek. I wailed all the way back to
my father’s car. “There, there, old boy,” he said, holding me.“There, there.”

This time we didn’t enter either of the tunnels. Instead we walked the opposite way down the gravelly railroad bed to where it cut past a stand
of willow trees. There, at the base of the embankment, lay a pond, a small one, its surface covered with small yellow leaves shed by the willow trees.
The sun felt warm on my arms and neck. I couldn’t resist. I sat on a rock and untied my shoelaces. My father said, “What are you
doing?”

“Going for a dip, what does it look like?”

“Are you daft? It’s much too cold!”

“Rubbish!”

In fact the water turned out to be surprisingly warm. I had already entered when, to my surprise and delight, my father followed suit, going in slowly,
his way, massaging handfuls of water over his sunken sagging gray chest, his ancient uncircumcised penis casting a drooping shadow as I treaded water
nearby, floating via the faintest butterfly-like movements of my fingers. Together we swam across the pond, me freestyle, my father doing his
sidestroke-scissorkick, our bodies cutting black trails through the carpet of golden leaves.

We were headed back to the car when suddenly my father couldn’t remember the word for forest. He said “wood”,
“arms,” “alberi” (Italian for “trees”) … As he kept trying to speak simple words gave way like
those flimsy rope bridges in old Tarzan movies, leaving him stranded at the edge of a chasm. He kept struggling, his whole face turning a series of
increasingly deep shades of red until I made him stop. By the time we got to the hospital, my poor father couldn’t remember his own name.

13

Papa was still in the hospital when, as if protesting his absence, The Building burned down. I was sleeping in my basement bedroom when the pounding on
the kitchen door woke me. I opened it to the silhouette of a fireman, his helmet haloed in flickering orange light.

“You folks own that building down there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well—it’s on fire.”

Minutes later my mother and I stood with winter coats over pajamas watching as firemen smashed windows and aimed their languid hoses at flames that
licked telephone wires. My mother raised a handful of trembling fingers to her Sophia Loren lips.

“O dio,” she said.

That same morning, after sunrise, I sifted through the sour ashes and muck. Boxes of drowned transistors, lenses and tubes, a waterlogged oscilloscope,
a typewriter, its keys splayed and already rusted. I salvaged a few of my father’s old notebooks, some relays and transformers and a big box of
lenses. Except for a light coating of soot, miraculously, my father’s painting-in-progress, the one of the monastery built on top of the
Palisades overlooking the Hudson River, survived. Otherwise the loss was total.

I was just about to leave when I noticed something gleaming in a mound of ashes and vermiculite, a copper turning from my father’s lathe.

With it in my shirt pocket I climbed back up the hill.

Figure
In
Orange
Message Movie)

S
oon after earning my bachelor’s degree, in the fall of 1983, I was hired by a small local advertising agency specializing in periodical inserts,
those pesky little promotional cards stamped BUSINESS REPLY MAIL that clutter everyone’s favorite magazines. The firm was housed in a converted
brass wire and screw factory in Waterbury, twenty miles north of Barnum. My office faced out onto a concrete lot presided over by a tall brick
smokestack with a red blinking light on top of it to ward off small aircraft. The railroad ran close by. Every hour endlessly long freight trains
jounced the implements I kept in a distributor cap by my drafting table. I was in charge of design and layout. I wrote some ad copy, too.

Meanwhile I sent my C.V. off to the big Manhattan agencies, one of which hired me.

2

The advertising agency I work at takes up the top four floors of the Danforth Building, an art deco skyscraper on Lexington Avenue in the high forties.
According to local myth its architect and builder, Raymond Charles Danforth III, dreamed of building the world’s tallest skyscraper, only to see
his dream shattered when, late one night within days of his building’s completion, a shimmering 197-foot-tall ziggurat of stainless steel was
hoisted by derrick out of the rival Chrysler Building’s unfinished crown, flipping Danforth the equivalent of an architectural middle finger.
Danforth lived out his remaining years in seclusion, seldom venturing forth from the penthouse he built for himself on the top floor—and which
the president of my agency now occupies. The suite’s southern-facing windows, the ones that would have gazed upon the Chrysler Building, Danforth
had painted over with a trump l’oeil skyline, one wherein that otherskyscraper didn’t exist.

My office has one slim window, a slit of glass where a partition has lopped off a once imposing view of the harbor, with ferries, freighters and other
vessels scratching chalk marks in the pea-green water. If I crane my neck slightly I can even see the Statue of Liberty, as small as the tip of my
mechanical pencil, her torch restored recently back to gilded glory courtesy of President Ronald Reagan, Lee Iococca, and the freshly bailed-out
Chrysler Corporation.

I am of the city, one with its plan and purpose. I remember those days back in art school, after Dwaine left, scudding along anonymous streets like
yesterday’s Postkicked by a dirty breeze. Now I’m as integral to the city as its subterranean steam pipes and vertiginous towers,
as its yellow taxis and black headlines. Entering my building’s polished lobby each morning, standing before its rows of filigreed brass
elevators, I feel a solid rush of pride, as if I, not Mr. Danforth, built the skyscraper named for him, girder by girder.

I’m not just living the American Dream, I’m driving it, engineering it —like those streamlined locomotives that thunder across the
screen in old movies—throttling it toward that elusive vanishing point on the horizon known as Success.

3

The advertising business has long thrived on its system of mentors. Mine was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, Yonkers born-and-raised goombah named
Donald “Donny” Colosimo. A foaming pompadour surfed over his Neanderthal forehead. He wore fat rings on all seven of his fingers (the other
three lost to a Viet Cong bayonet), and psychedelic paisley neckties with clashing rainbow suspenders. Stubble shadowed his jowls by noon. He had a
solid reputation for goosing female coworkers as they bent to slurp from the water fountain.

Bad taste was Donny’s creed. He practiced it like a fundamentalist zealot, he preached it like an apostle. According to Donny, good taste was
elitist, fragile, feminine, transitory, devious and doomed. Bad taste—on the other hand—was pluralistic, patriotic, honest and rugged. Bad
taste had staying power. It was the future.

“Good taste is dead,” Donny proclaimed. “I killed it sixteen years ago. I drove a stake through its refined heart.”

4

Our first lunch together isn’t a Smith & Wolensky steak and martini job, but sushi and cold soda at the Golden Cucumber, around the corner
from the United Nations.

In keeping with the global theme the Golden Cucumber’s ceiling is festooned with flags from around the world, with the stars and stripes taking
center stage. “You see that,” says Donny, pointing a wasabi-laden chopstick at it. “That’s the flag of the United States of
America. It’s a pretty flag, a very pretty flag. I lost three fingers for that flag. But it’s not the flag we salute.” He peels the
label off his cola bottle. “This is the flag we salute, our biggest account, or it will be soon. Up there is the flag of America. This is
the flag of the flag of America. And this,” he takes out his wallet, takes a twenty from it, “is the flag of the flag of the flag of
America.” He lifts a brown slab of raw eel to his mouth. “Capeesh?