Life Goes to the Movies (24 page)

“Will you behave yourself, Mr. Fitzgibbon, or do I have to send you back into the Bubble?” she says in her central casting brogue. Dwaine
does a burlesque of cowardly obedience, toes touching, shoulders scrunched, hands folded over his belly. When she turns her back he shoots an anemic
tongue out at her. Nigel snickers; he can’t help it.

“So.” Dwaine fakes a jab at Nigel’s shoulder. “Have you heard the one about the mental patient? He’s lying in his
hospital bed with a peanut balanced on the tip of his dick. The nurse walks in, sees him and says, ‘And just what do you think you’re
doing, Mr. Bradshaw?’ ‘Me?’ says the guy. ‘I’m fucking nuts!’”

Under the banks of fluorescent lights Nurse O’Shan escorts them to the Conference Room, passing a series of opened doors along the way. Standing
in one doorway a resident makes a sacrificial offering of a small turd, cupped in his palms like a jewel on a velvet pillow. Nurse O’Shan guides
him gently back into his room and closes the door behind him.

“So—how are you, babe?” says Dwaine, putting an arm around Nigel as they follow the nurse down the carbolic acid scented corridor.
“Still working at—?” He butchers the name of the ad agency where Nigel works, and where he has just been promoted to Junior Executive
in charge of the Purina account. “Saving up for that Bimmer? Moon roof, leather seats?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but I still ride the subway with the rest of the hoi polloi.”

“I am disappointed indeed. What sort of ad man are you, babe? Don’t you want to be gripped by the smell of Corinthian leather as you
sit stuck in traffic at the approach to the Midtown Tunnel?” He cuffs Nigel’s chin. Nigel looks down at the floor, at the scuffed tiles
gliding by under his shiny shoes, moving in tandem with Dwaine’s squishy blue hospital slippers.

“What about you?” Nigel asks. “How are you?”

“Me? I’m fucking nuts!”

7

In the hallway outside the Conference Room the attendant rises from a table where he’s been sitting reading the current issue of People,
with a grinning photo of Steven Spielberg on the cover. The attendant checks them for contraband, including food (other than soft drinks or tea),
newspapers (for some reason books and magazines are okay), and weapons—a category embracing everything from toenail clippers to a surface-to-air
missile. Nigel is told to turn out his sports jacket pockets;Venus empties her purse. Margaret O’Shan consults her wristwatch. She tells them
they have fifteen minutes, then leaves, her sneakers kicking up fresh white plumes.

“I bet in a week I can plant a bug so far up her ass she won’t know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch.”

“Be nice,” says Venus, who keeps on her plaid jacket though the Conference Room is as warm as a solarium. There’s a single barred
window through which daylight enters tentatively, and a long folding table surrounded by cheap white plastic chairs. The furniture smells of some form
of disinfectant. A framed glassless Van Gogh print, a view of the garden through the epileptic artist’s asylum window, is the room’s chief
adornment, its irony (presumably) inadvertent. Dwaine doffs the Yankees’ cap, unveiling a shaven skull, its stubble as ashen as Venus’s.
Side by side their heads are as smooth and pale as Brancusi marbles.

“You like my new haircut?” Dwaine says, seeing Nigel eye his flesh and bone moon. “The V.A. barber here is a fucking Nazi. I tell him
to give me a pair of whitewalls, with a Ricky Nelson flip, so what does Herr Himmler do? He spins me around in his damn barber chair so I can’t
see the mirror and zzzzzzzzzz—drives a pair of dog-clippers down my skull like it’s a ’62 Corvette and my head is Route 66.”
Dwaine’s voice, Nigel observes, is low and slurred, like his batteries need charging. “It’s the drugs,” Dwaine explains.
“They’ve got me on enough lithium to float the Hindenburg.” Like a dog he rests his chin on Nigel’s shoulder.

“We brought you some tea,” Venus says, pulling out the Hellenic to-go cup in its crumpled brown bag and stepping forward with it.
“We’d have brought you a bagel, too, but they said it’s against the rules.”

“Yeah, I might choke myself with the damn thing, or pummel an orderly or two, and then where would I be? They don’t call them blunt
instruments for nothing.” Dwaine turns to Nigel, smiles. “So, what are you out hawking these days? Cheez Whiz? Marshmallow Fluff? S.O.S
pads?”

“Don’t tease him, Dwaine.”

“I’m not teasing, I’m just asking, wondering what’s bubbling on the Madison Avenue Wunderkind’s front burner? Huh? Pop
Tarts? Tang? Strawberry Quick?”

“Meaty Dog,” says Nigel reluctantly.

“Meaty Dog? They’ve got you selling dog food?”

“Dwaine, come on—”

“Wait, wait. You mean the one where they brand the name into the hamburger patty? That one?”

“They’re called Ranch Patties. Meaty Dog Ranch Patties. And the branding iron says ‘100% Beef.’ ”

“The branding iron—that wasn’t youridea? Was it?”

“I had some input on it,” Nigel has to admit.

“By God, I’m standing next to a genius! Don’t tell me to hush-up, Venus, I’m serious! I lovethat TV
commercial, I do. It’s made an indelible impression on me, if you’ll pardon the pun. I’ll bet half the people in America have seen
that commercial, at least half. That makes you more influential than Picasso and Martin Scorsese put together! Hey, do they really brand every ranch
patty like that? I mean, if I should go out and buy a box of Meaty Dog Ranch Patties, will I see the name burned in there like they show it on
TV?”

“For God’s sake it’s a commercial, Dwaine,” Venus says.

“I knowit’s a commercial; I’m asking the babe, here.”

“No. No, you won’t.”

“In other words it’s fake?”

“Yes, yes, it’s fake.”

“I knew it!”

“Dwaine, stop! That’s enough!”

Venus has spoken loudly enough to make the attendant put down his People and poke his nose into the Conference Room.

“Is there, uh, some problem in here?” he asks.

“No problem at all,” says Nigel. “Everything’s fine.”

8

“They say I’m hearing voices.”

“Who says you’re hearing voices?”

“They, they. The people in charge of this place, doctors, nurses, shrinks.”

“What makes them say that?”

“I don’t know: could it be that I’m hearing voices?”

“Are you hearing voices?”

“They say I’m hearing them.”

“But are you?”

“I don’t say it.”

“So you’re not hearing voices?”

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“Well what are you saying, Dwaine?”

“I’m saying people are talking to me.”

“People?”

“Yes, people.”

“What people?”

“Different people. People from the past. People who are long dead and gone, or should be. People who aren’t in the room when I hear
them.”

“So in other words the voices are in your head?”

“No, Venus, the voices aren’t in my head, the people just aren’t in the room.”

“Great,” says Venus.

“What?”

“If you say you’re hearing voices then they’ll never let you out of here.”

“I didn’tsay I heard voices, I said people are talking to me. If the people happen to be invisible that’s notmy fault, now, is it?”

“Who are these people?”

“I toldyou: ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“Yes, ghosts. Spiritus mundi. Restless souls. They wander into my room when the lights are off and I’m lying in bed. If they have bodies
then I don’t see them. One of them sounds like Mister Magoo. And one sounds like Henry Kissinger or like Peter Sellers playing Henry
Kissinger.”

“It’s no joke, Dwaine.”

“No kidding it’s no joke. Who said it was? Do you think Ilike having Henry Kissinger sneak up on me while I’m lying in bed in
the dark? You think it amuses me? You think I’m amusingmyself? Is that what you think? Huh? Is it?”

9

Dwaine’s forehead burns. His eyes glow bright. He licks his lips, hangs his head, says, “Sorry, sorry.” He starts crying. Venus holds
him. Over his quaking shoulders she looks at Nigel, who steps over to the window and looks out past its white bars at a beech tree growing there, a big
old grandfather of a tree, its trunk six feet wide at the base at least, its bark gray and smooth like an elephant’s hide. He thinks of the
ginkgo tree outside his apartment window. He wishes he were sitting there, in his window bench in his pajamas. Home.

Somewhere out in the corridor a grown man’s voice cries, Hey mom, mom, mooooommmy! A second voice, as if in response, yells,The banks! The banks! The banks!

Nurse O’Shan knocks, enters.

“Time’s up,” she says.

10

Out in the hallway the attendant frisks Dwaine again. The nurse escorts him back to the Bubble. Venus and Nigel follow. At the ward entrance Dwaine
kisses and hugs them both goodbye. While hugging Dwaine, Nigel slips him the pen he’s been hiding up his sleeve all this time, a Pentel Rolling
Writer, black.

“Use it in good health,” he whispers.

Outside Venus and Nigel hold hands again. Like lovers who’ve just watched a sad movie they move through the daylight as through fog, their
thoughts still wrapped around the plot and characters, not willing to break the mood with small talk. Instead they stop to admire the tulips growing at
the base of the miniature lighthouse, then look out across the river at the Palisades, a turquoise wall stretching all the way down to New York City.
At the top of the cliff Nigel notices a white structure jutting out from some trees, with a cross on its roof and a peculiar, star-shaped window under
the cross. Spanish mission. A monastery. It puts him in mind of something.

They turn and keep walking down the hill.

The River
of Mixed
Feelings
(Tearjerker)

W
e put the brass cage holding Venus’s parakeets, Abbot and Costello, in front of the bay window. We’d bought it down at the Sixth Avenue
flea market, where we spent most of our Sundays hunting for items with which to adorn our home. We spent hours one day debating which of our latest
flea market paintings—the reverse one of the Titanicabout to hit the iceberg, or the painting-by-numbers of a grizzly bear pouncing on a
salmon in a rushing stream—to hang over the English bar unit, and devoted a whole weekend to restoring a beaded Victorian room divider, replacing
beads of amber, hornblende, and tourmaline, staining white cotton fibers with tea bags to make them look genuinely aged.

As far as Dwaine was concerned, Venus’s moving in with me was strictly a matter of convenience. Venus alone couldn’t swing the rent on
their Chinatown apartment, so she moved into mine. She slept in my bedroom, while I slept in the living room, on my leather couch, alone.

That’s what we told Dwaine, anyway.

Venus’s belly grew. With my ear pressed to it I heard the throbbing of more than one human heart. I put my lips to that bleached round softness
and simultaneously kissed my lover and my child. If a boy we’d name him Bill or Greg, if a girl Jane or Sarah with an ‘h’. Good,
solid American names.

By wearing loose clothes and keeping her visits with him to a minimum and brief Venus was able to hide her pregnancy from Dwaine. Until they
divorced—and she fully intended to divorce him—she didn’t want him to know that a child that might be his grew inside her.

I’d planned our whole future. We’d move to a larger apartment, and from there to a house in the suburbs of Long Island or Westchester.
Money wouldn’t be a problem. I had feathered our nest with junk bonds. My stockbroker recommended them to me. He told me they were a sure thing.

Coming home from a long day’s work at the ad agency I’d hear the whirs of Venus’ sewing machine blended with the parakeets’
vehement shrieks, and my heart would do a brief fluttery dance in the stairwell.

2

Four months into his confinement the hospital authorities gave Dwaine his first day pass. We met him at Grand Central, and spent the day in town.
Dwaine still spoke in a slow, syrupy drawl. Otherwise he looked healthy. He wore street clothes: jeans, a plaid shirt, a windbreaker.

A lovely day, cool and sunny, a blue sky feathered with wispy clouds. We walk down Lexington Avenue, headed for Chinatown to have lunch there. On the
way we pass a sidewalk vendor dusting off his display of sunglasses with a feather duster. Dwaine tries on a pair of Ray Charles wraparounds.

“How do I look?” he asks us.

“Like a sign that says don’t fuck with me,” says Venus.

“Good. That’s just how I feel.”

Near the seaport we stop at the new Vietnam War Memorial, a sculpture of glass bricks etched with soldier’s letters to home, dwarfed by financial
towers so tall they blot out most of the sky.

“Those are the real war monuments,” Dwaine concludes, looking up.

We take turns photographing each other with Venus’s Kodak Instammatic. I take one of Dwaine and Venus, Venus takes one of Dwaine and me, Dwaine
takes one of me with Venus. A stranger takes one of all three of us together. (I still have that photo, the only one of us all, sunny and smiling,
members emeritus of the Proto Realist Society, looking like we don’t have a care in the world.)

In Chinatown over bowls of slippery noodle soup Dwaine tells us his latest movie idea. The plot revolves around a controversial Polaroid snapshot in
which Marilyn Monroe’s lips feature prominently, along with a very private and sensitive part of our 35
^th
President’s anatomy.

“I’m going to call it Jack’s Balls,” says Dwaine.

“Charming,” Venus says.

“A family picture,” I say.

“I’ve got the cast all figured out,” Dwaine goes on. “Warren Beatty as JFK, Karen Black as Marilyn Monroe, Pacino as Bobby
Kennedy, Walter Matthau as J. Edgar Hoover, Dustin Hoffman as Fidel Castro, and Peter Lawford as, uh, Peter Lawford. Pretty neat, huh?”

He inhales an endlessly long noodle.

Then Dwaine fills us in on the latest apocalyptic doomsday scenarios; he collects them the way some people collect comic books or cobalt blue bottles.
He’s got quite a collection. Are we aware that Muslim extremists are plotting to poison New York City’s drinking water supply? That
paramilitary groups are stockpiling ammonium nitrate to blow up Yankee Stadium during the next World Series? That the CIA is bulk-producing the AIDS
virus in a Guantanamo Bay facility and shipping it to third world countries in boxes of Carnation powdered milk?