Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (25 page)

“Daddy, it smells in here,” Willa said, burying her nose in my cashmere sports jacket.

“I know, baby, but I’m going to clean it up, okay? I just have to say hello to Grandpa first.”

“Can I come with you?”

Let’s see, how much trouble would I be in with Ellen if—worst-case scenario—Willa saw Grandpa lying in a pool of his own blood? “Why don’t you wait here? Grandpa might not be dressed yet.”

“Mmkay.”

I left her sitting on the living room couch with the TV remote in her hand and her nose stuck down inside the collar of her pink-and-white dress.

I turned hesitantly toward my father’s bedroom. I pushed the door open and the putrid smell got stronger. I walked into the room and stood at the end of the bed. It was really dark but I could make out a form, a lump lying on the bed buried under the covers.

“Pop?” If he were dead, it would probably smell even worse in here, I thought.

“Pop, come on, it’s Grey.” Something moved. I went around to the side and pulled a fistful of covers back.

I had to fight the impulse to run. I so wanted this—him—not to be my problem. Undershirt stained with food and sweat, pajama bottoms stained with urine, red-rimmed eyes, greasy hair, yellow teeth, dirty fingernails. I desperately wished Ellen were here to help. She was always so good with him. And then I stopped and looked at him again. Had I ever been this bad? Was I ever this much of a burden to her? Bad, yes, but
this
bad?

And suddenly I was very glad she was not here. “All right, Pop, up an’ at ’em,” I said, looking into vacant eyes.

“Nnooo.”

His voice was ragged. Lack of use. Crying. Probably a combination.

“Yes. I’m gonna help you. We had a date today, remember?”

I took off my sports jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my dress shirt. I kept talking to him from the bathroom while I turned on the shower.

“A date?” he mumbled.

He was using words. Progress. I pulled him into a sitting position.

“Sure, it’s Father’s Day. We’re going to the Polo Lounge. You and Willa and me.”

“Willa?”

“She’s right here in your living room, waiting for you.” I hoped knowing that his only grandchild was sitting in the next room would provide incentive. Instead, Pop started to cry.

“I can’t, I can’t,” he sobbed.

This was not the particular kind of shitty I was expecting today. I sat down on the bed next to him and put my arm around him. He leaned his greasy head against my shoulder.

“Yes, you can, Pop. I’m going to help you. I’m going to help you feel better, okay?”

He looked at me with the scared, watery eyes of a child lost in a department store. I hadn’t done this in a long time. It’s nothing like riding a bike, but it does come back to you just the same.

I spent the next twenty minutes helping my sixty-year-old father take a shower—making sure he washed his genitals and shampooed his hair and cleaned his nails. Then he sat on the toilet seat while I shaved him.

Some people learn to bake by watching their mothers. I learned this.

When I went to check on Willa, she was sitting in virtually the same position I’d left her in.

“Sweetie, you could have turned on the TV.”

“I have to pee.”

There was a bathroom right off the living room. “Well go ahead. You don’t have to ask.”

Willa shook her head.

“Why not? What’s …” I flipped the light on in the bathroom and found myself staring into a toilet bowl full of festering excrement. Apparently, even flushing had been too much of an effort for Pop.

We had long since missed our reservation by the time Pop got around to putting on the new clothes I’d bought him. Willa was starving. I poked around in Pop’s cabinets hoping for an unopened box of crackers but came up empty.

Willa opened the refrigerator door before I could stop her. The smell nearly knocked us both over. I slammed the door shut and rolled my sleeves up for the second time in an hour. I took a deep breath and opened the door again. Christ, the contents of the vegetable drawer had liquefied. It was impossible to tell what had once been what. I pulled out the whole thing and poured the rotten mess into the trash. On the top shelf, a distended plastic bottle of milk struggled to hold its shape against the gases building inside.

And then I realized it was pointless. Even if I cleaned out his refrigerator and threw out the piles of moldy takeout containers and detoxed his bathrooms, my father still couldn’t stay here alone tonight. I was going to have to take him home with me.

A surge of acid shot up from my gut into my esophagus. Thick metallic-tasting saliva filled my mouth. My esophageal sphincter began to spasm. I dropped the sponge I’d been using and clawed at my sternum.

Willa looked up from the TV. “Daddy, you don’t look so good.”

“Fine … sweetie … jacket … please?”

There were four Rolaids left in the package I carried in the breast pocket of my sports coat. I ate them all. By the time I finished chewing the chalky white tablets, I looked like a rabid dog. They barely took the edge off. I was going to have to get something stronger.

My father shuffled slowly into the room just then, looking remarkably normal. Except for the fact that he was effectively doing fifteen in a sixty-five-mile-an-hour speed zone. And the fact that he’d neglected to take any of the tags off the new clothes he was wearing. And that he was wearing slippers. Other than that, he was good to go.

I put his toothbrush and some clean underwear and pajamas in the Saks bag. Anything else he could borrow from me. As soon as we got home I would be on the phone with all three of my siblings, reaming them out for not living close enough to deal with this shit. One of them would be on a plane first thing in the morning to take over. There would be no negotiation. Tomorrow I’d have my secretary get a professional cleaning crew in here. Or maybe I’d just torch the place. In the meantime I had to find us someplace to go for Father’s Day lunch. Someplace we didn’t need reservations. Someplace that served enormous goddamned Bloody Marys.

We went to the Hamburger Hamlet. Nothing fancy. And Willa was happy because, as far as she was concerned, they made the best root beer float in town. But little by little, I could see that Pop was starting to scare her.

“Is he sick?” she asked.

“Well, kind of.”

“What does he have? Is it catching?”

“No, sweetie, it’s not contagious.”

“Why does he look like that? Why do you have to feed him? Why is he crying?”

She started to shred her napkin and stopped eating and I knew it was time to go. And when we got back to my place, the last thing I wanted to do was pick up the phone but it was the first thing I did.

“El?” I had only meant to ask her to come pick up Willa—to spare her having to witness any more of this.

“Grey? Hello?”

But when I heard her voice, all I could think of was everything I really wanted but hadn’t dared to ask for. There was too much to say. I wasn’t allowed to say any of it. So nothing came out. It had begun as such a simple request.

“Greyson? What’s wrong? Is Willa hurt? Is she sick?”

“No. No, no, God no. It’s nothing like that.”

“Well, then what? You sound …”

I sighed. I started to speak and my voice broke. I cleared my throat to cover it. “Shit. It’s Ray, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I opened the door to let her in a half hour later.

“Jesus, Grey, how many times do I have to say it,” she said, hugging me. “Your father is not your fault.”

“Say it again?” I whispered into her hair.

“He’s not your fault and you’re not him.”

“Thank you. Again.”

“Anytime.”

After seventeen months, Ellen let me come home. Just in time for Christmas. I made sure it looked like something out of a Bing Crosby movie. I bought an enormous tree, strung lights across the roof and in the trees outside, and bought out half of Saks and most of Toys “R” Us. Other than the fact that there was no snow and it was seventy-eight degrees, it was a perfect white Christmas.

Things at work were less than perfect. I was constantly being disappointed. By my team, by everyone. Assholes. I was surrounded by assholes.

“No, Marvin, the
problem
is that you’re someone’s nephew with a degree in business from Cal State who doesn’t know shit about movies. Making them, marketing them, or watching them for that matter.” I paced a straight line the length of my office, back and forth in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto Burbank—olive trees and gargantuan billboards advertising the studio’s latest movies. “The problem, Marvin, is that you have no taste. Uh … Huh. Huh. Well, you go right ahead and tell your uncle if you feel you need to. Oh … okay, Marvin, I don’t think you want to threaten me, you two-faced conniving little shit.”

I slammed the phone down. Who the fuck did that little cock-sucker think he was? More to the point, how could he not know who he was dealing with? Hanging up on Marvin Jacobs didn’t make me feel any better. Just caged. I rifled through the carefully constructed piles of scripts on my desk, scattering them.

My secretary, Rene, came in and closed the door behind her. Stood there with her arms crossed. “Well, that was special. What was your strategy? Bad cop, bad cop?”

“Not worth my time or breath.”

I walked over to the door and yelled down the hallway to Christine, my VP of Production. “Where the hell is Zantaugh’s rewrite?”

She walked briskly out of her office. “Uh … Grey, it’s not in yet.”

“What? Why the hell not? Lean on him.”

“Well, it’s not due for another week.”

“Fucking writers. Whiny, overpaid. What do they have to do except sit in front of the goddamned keyboard?”

Christine laughed. I thought I saw Rene shoot her a look.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“You always say you could get offered the biggest box-office draws in town and you still won’t make the movie unless the script is there. You sort of need writers for that.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t hate the pasty-faced, sensitive, artistic assholes.”

The smile fell off Christine’s face. “Jesus, Grey. You okay?”

“
I’m
fine. Just tired of being the only one who’s getting anything done.” I yelled down the hallway again. “Zach, when am I going to see a first cut of
Comes a Stranger
?”

Nothing.

“Zach!”

The young creative executive came jogging into my office. “Sorry. I was on a call. I—”

“
Comes a Stranger
. I should have seen first cut weeks ago. I’ve been too fucking indulgent at staff meetings. And you’ve been too fucking vague.” I ignored the terrified look on his face. “Do we have a problem? Is it Leland?”

Zach looked quickly at Christine and then Rene, who both stared at the floor.

“They don’t know the answer, Zach. It’s all you. Do we or do we not have a problem?”

Zach spoke softly. “Editing is taking longer than we thought. Leland sits there and agonizes over every frame. I mean the movie’s great but it’s long. Too long. And he won’t let the editors do their jobs.”

“Apparently you haven’t been doing yours either, have you?” I snarled. “You told me you could handle Leland. You should have come to me weeks ago. And I should have known better.”

The kid looked pale, sweaty.

“I’m sorry, Greyson. I thought if we could just get past this one section …”

“Where’s he working?”

“On the lot. In one of the editing suites in the Bogart Building. But he’s gone for the day.”

“Good.” I grabbed my jacket off the back of my chair. “Call the picture and sound editors back in. And show me.”

Christine, Zach, Rene, and two or three of my other executives who were still in the office struggled to keep up with me as I zigzagged across the lot, cutting through buildings, past the commissary, the soundstages on which America’s favorite sitcoms were filmed, and through the streets of a permanent set that was made to look like Anytown, USA.

“Do you want me to show you what we have so far?” Zach asked. His voice was trembling a little as Jerry Nunez, the picture editor, arrived with a key and opened the door to
Comes a Stranger
’s editing suite.

“No. You can go. All of you. Jerry and I are going to finish this goddamned movie.” But no one left. They just stood there, watching as Jerry and then Bertram Doyle, the sound editor, and I sat at the Steenbeck, expertly making the cuts I demanded.

“Greyson, you can’t do that!” Christine hurled herself between me and the massive flatbed editing machine. “Leland has final cut. You can’t just go in without his permission and cut his picture.”

“Watch me.”

“But … Leland’s … he’s the director. That’s like—”

“Leland works for me. If he can’t get it done, I’ll do it myself.”

“But you don’t know what he wants.”

“It’s not about what he wants anymore. This is business. Besides, I know this script inside out. I can do this.”

“He has a contract. He could sue and he’d probably win.” She knelt down beside me and tried to take my hand, but I shooed her away. “Greyson, you’re not thinking clearly. This isn’t good business.”

“Go to hell,” I told her.

The next morning, I found a cease and desist letter on my desk. Leland threatened to sue me if I didn’t hand over his movie, and the studio said contractually I had to. Their fucking loss. If you want to get anything done you’d better damn well be prepared to do it yourself.

And even then, the assholes will bring you down.

In February, Taysen said my blood test showed my lithium was below the therapeutic level. So he increased my dose. And within a week I became a lumbering, inarticulate idiot who nodded off in any meeting that started after 2:00
P.M
. In the mornings, my hands shook so badly I had to hide them under my desk. I told everyone I had hay fever.

After I burned my hand pouring coffee because I couldn’t hold the pot steady and then dropped the mug and the rest of the coffee on my bare feet, Ellen decided she was going to have a word with the doctor.

“He can’t live like this! He can’t do his job like this!”