Lying in Bed (20 page)

“Mom's dead,” I hasten to remind him.

“John.” His voice, though still in whisper, fills my name with concern.

“Why?” I ask.

“I felt you should be there.”

“Where?”

“At my wedding.” Even at these years' remove, I recognize the old impatience in his tone.

“No. Why,” I explain, “did you say my name that way?”

“What way?”

“As if you care for me.”

He clears his throat. “Listen, I know I can be an eristical son of a bitch,” he hisses in what sounds like confession. “I know I tried to make you do things you didn't want to do. I know I tried to make you see the world the way I see it. That's what fathers do. But I was wrong. I was right. But I was wrong. I'm getting taught how to say that, John. I was wrong. You're my son. You belong in my life. Our life. I have a new wife, John. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

“Where is she?”

“Asleep. It's after midnight here.”

“Where?”

I can feel right through the phone his shaking his head.
The phone moves against my face so that my head shakes with his. “New York. Where do you think we live?
You
phoned
me
.”

“I meant where is she sleeping?” I say deliberately and softly against his bluster.

Is it too intimate a question, particularly from what he thinks is his bachelor son? “Where?” he repeats uncertainly.

“Is she sleeping,” I remind him.

“Here,” he confesses.

“In the same bed?”

“Of course in the same …” He stops. He locks into the memory I've forced upon him. He remembers that he and my mother had separate beds. For as long as I knew them, they had separate beds. But before I knew them, they had shared a bed. My mother told me that after I was born they had started to sleep apart. She didn't mean to imply that I had destroyed their marriage. They had a good marriage. Only that after me they had wanted no more children. I was enough. I was sufficient. I was pretty and bright and showed no interest whatsoever in living in the world as they interpreted it. I was irredeemable.

Now that I know what marriage is, I cannot imagine my father married to anyone. Not to my mother. Not to someone new, whom I can't help but picture as Clara, the very idea of wife, and in what I suppose is some strange variation of the primal scene, I see them lying next to one another and look to the right of me and look to the left of me and feel myself floating alone on this gargantuan boat of a bed and know that I am condemned forever to drift away from my existence.

“You know that I will always love your mother until the
day I die,” my father whispers. His rare redundancy escapes either his notice or his censure, and I imitate him in the latter.

“Can she hear you?”

“No. She's a very sound sleeper.”

“I meant Mom.”

What must it be like to lose your wife? I think of Clara dying, and as painful as that is, it seems preferable to this. If she's dead, I'll always know where she is and be able to make my way to her. Alive, she evades me.

I have never felt such sympathy for him. His wife died. It must be worse, even, than losing your mother. He is unable to speak.

So it is my turn, finally, to tell him about me.

“I got married too.”

I expect him to bellow out his disbelief, but he says, “I would love to meet your wife.”

What a novel idea. I don't see it. She hates him. “That's impossible.”

“Don't ever say that to me, John.”

“It's impossible,” I repeat, because it is.

“No, it's not,” he insists. “If you can't come East, then we'll come to you. My calendar's full, but I'll make time. Just say the word, and we'll be there. I would love to meet your wife. What's her name?”

“Clara.” Saying her name to him—to him, of all people, who pushed me away, who made the world uninhabitable—almost makes her real again.

“Clara.” He gives forth the word with such authority I actually look toward the door as if he's called her forth and brought her back. “I like that. And do you have—”

“I have nothing.”

“—children?”

“Never.”

“Oh, I would like for you to have children, John.”

“So would I. To make up for being yours.”

He breathes deeply. He is unaccustomed to attack. He is, after all, judgment itself, and those who dare malign him he pronounces contemptuous.

“That's a terrible thing to say about yourself.”

He makes me laugh. This is something new indeed. “I was saying it about you.”

I can feel his anger. I can see his eyes narrow and his jaw tighten. The phone bites into my ear. “Me?”

“It's no more terrible than when you said, ‘God help you if you ever become a father.'”

I'm a lawyer in his court, and I've just put forth the evidence that condemns. It's quite exhilarating. Perhaps I could have a career after all. Prosecutor. He always loved prosecutors. He used to tell us at dinner that the only good attorney was the prosecuting attorney. When you believe the world is evil, the possibility of innocence is annihilated.

“I did say that,” he admits. “I remember saying it. I was in grief over the death of your mother. But that's no excuse. I was trying to blame you for something that was my fault.”

“Her dying?”

“Your living.”

Has he ever said anything so contemptible? “Didn't you even want me to live?”

“Of course I did!” he whispers emphatically. He is trying not to awaken his new wife, who sleeps beside him. Can marriage have redeemed him too? “But not in this world.”

“Then what about my living was your fault?”

“Hurting you so.”

When he says that, all the pain I have ever felt seems to rise within me. I double over on the bed until, supple like Clara, my chin is at my knees. My cheek rests on the cold blade of the 2-Pound Camp Wonder. I blubber like any other fool at long-awaited triumph over injustice.

My head is on her pillow. The mouthpiece of the phone is crushed beneath my ear. I can hear my father calling to me. My name pips from his mouth like the diminishing call of a migrating bird. It is as if he is speaking to me in my mind, as I had so often spoken to him in mine, before I found Clara lying in the street and learned to talk to her.

Still bent in half, I put my mouth against the phone and interrupt his search for me by saying, “Do you want to know the truth?”

“Do I have any choice?” he asks wearily. “It's my job to know the truth, John. But as Nietzsche says, truth is ugly.”

“And you love it,” I say with as much bitterness as I can muster. I had thought fathers were supposed to be their sons' heroes, not usurp them.

“Yes, I do.” I hear in his voice his relish for iniquity. If mankind weren't damned, he'd be out of a job.

“Can you live with the truth?”

“Of course I can.”

“But Nietzsche said it's impossible. Nietzsche said—”

“Don't you quote Nietzsche to me, John!”

This is very funny. This is wonderful. This is the best conversation I've ever had with my father.

“He said that the only thing that keeps the truth from killing us is art.”

“Well, he's wrong about that! I don't believe in art, John. Art is what gets in the way of truth. Art is what stands between man and God.”

“Then why did you want me to play the violin?”

He laughs. “Oh, my,” he says. “Oh, my. Because you were lousy at sports. That's why.”

I laugh too. “Do you still want to know the truth?”

“Please,” he says graciously.

“I have nothing.”

“You said that before. What are you talking about? Nothing. What do you mean? Do you need money, John? Is that why you're calling me in the middle of the night? Can you possibly have spent all your mother's—”

“I have nothing,” I repeat, wondering if he can grasp how empty I feel and what a heroic feeling this is.

“That's not true,” he pronounces softly. “You have me. You have your wife.”

I can't tell him Clara has left me. Not when I have just presented her to him as evidence that he and I finally have a kind of perversely coparcenarial relationship so far as the sharing of matrimonial status is concerned.

So I say, “My wife is dead.”

“What!” Does he grip his own sleeping wife's arm when he hears this?

“I told you it would be impossible to meet her.”

“Oh, John,” he whispers now. “Oh, John.” There is such pathos in his voice, I realize that he, too, has come to know the rapture of marriage.

I have him where I want him. I uncurl my body. I don't say a word.

“How did she …? When did she …? How long were you …?”

“It doesn't matter,” I soothe him. “She's gone now.”

“May she rest in peace,” my father intones.

“And one other thing …”

“Yes?” His voice is wary, not out of distrust but compassion for his viduitous son.

“I killed somebody.”

“No,” he pronounces.

“Yes, I did. Really. And it wasn't an accident. I didn't drop one of my books on someone's head. I didn't bore someone to death humming Praetorius. I murdered a man. With an axe.”

“Like hell you did!” he bellows.

I hear a voice. A woman's voice. I look toward the door.

But it's not my wife I've heard. It's my father's wife. He's awakened her finally with his yelling at me, and now he's trying to soothe her with an explanation. “It's my son, darling. It's John. He's calling from California. Go back to sleep now. I'll tell you about it in the morning.”

I hear the sound of a kiss.

Strangely, my own lips pucker. I think of when I was little and my mother would read to me the story of a boy who sucked lemons, and my lips would pucker as did the lips of all the people in the story, and every time my lips would pucker, my mother would lean over the top of the book and kiss them.

And now my opsigamous father is kissing my new stepmother. It's a dismissive kiss, I know—he merely wants her to go back to sleep so he can come back on the phone and tell me I am incapable of what, in fact, I have proved unequivocally able to do—but as it is transmitted to my own lips it becomes rather more passionate. And while this is hardly the primal scene either (one's stepmother is a wholly legitimate object of desire, whereas one's true mother, however genuinely exoptable, is priggishly interdicted), I am embarrassed for both my father and myself. I
am aroused. He is not. That I should feel triumphant makes me shameful, to say nothing of the fact that the woman I am deosculating is his wife, not mine. Mine is as good as dead. Though the phrase should be, should it not, as bad as dead.

My father returns to me. I hear his newly quick breathing. I feel sorry for his (I'm guessing) young wife. She's the one who should be hearing it. If it were Clara next to him, he'd be on her and not on the phone with me.

And then I see her. I actually see Clara, whole, handsome, looking quite herself, lying there beside my father.

No wonder my kiss was so affectionate. I was trying to win her from that thrasonical bastard, who comes back at me—“John, I don't believe a word you've told me”—with disbelief. His voice is stately, controlled. “This business about a wife, dead or otherwise. A murder. You don't have to traduce yourself to get my attention. I know you're not married—nor should you be. And I certainly know you haven't killed anyone. If there's anything I know, it's murderers, and if there's one thing you're not capable of, it's murder. And lest you mistake my meaning, I say that with approval.”

“Thank you,” I reply, having waited thirty-two years to be told that what's admirable about me is I'm not capable of murder. “I have to go now. Something smells. Something awful. Maybe it's the corpse.”

I can't help chuckling and hang up to the sound of my father calling my name.

I'm glad we talked, though I'm not sure why I phoned him. It may have been for something as complicated as condemnation or approval or as simple as a betrayal of Clara, who would rather hear me whisper endearments to some strange maiden than touch voices with the man who
had made it so painful for me to become who I am and whom she married. But in abandoning me, she's made me seek him out, if only to confess. And in seeing her with him, though only in my mind, I betray her more fully than if I fucked my father's own new wife.

Whatever the reason, I feel better. Confession must indeed be good for the soul.

Enough, then, of this lugubrious
Stabat Mater
with its thorns and wounds and
inflammatus et accensus.
I shall leave the bed, though not before I carefully place the 2-Pound Camp Wonder on the floor beside it, lest I accidentally axe my own neck with it and not before I punch out of (or is it into?) the remote that other Pergolesi, love poet. And as I go in search of that disgusting smell, I am Orfeo, singing, “
Nel chiuso centro
,” which Charles De Brosses declared the best Italian cantata of them all. Alas, he so pronounced in 1739. Poor Pergolesi had died in 1736. Not unlike your father calling you to his bosom after you've committed the deed for which, along with your having been born, he would lock you away forever.

When you don't believe in life after death, the word
posthumous
becomes the most malignant in the language. But when you don't believe in life before death, that distinction belongs to
love
.

“
Euridice, e dove sei?
” I recite with the soprano in search of my lost love. Where are you, Clara, light of my eyes? “
Chi farà che torni in vita? Chi al mio cor la renderà?
” Who can bring her back to life? Who can bring her back into my heart?

Pergolesi wrote this piece when he was working for the Princess of Asturias, whose name just happened to be Maria Barbara. This strange coincidence encourages me to think that somewhere in the world I might find another
Clara Bell, to replace the one I've lost. Or shall we die together? I'm not afraid of death so long as I'm with my beloved.