You Can Say You Knew Me When (5 page)

“Maybe you should stop having kids?” I offered tentatively.

“It’s Amy who wants ’em. She wants five. But I’m through. The only times I’ve had sex in the last five years, out pops a kid.” He took a big swig, burped faintly and whispered, “Only time I had sex with
her.”

“Whoa, Tommy.” I peered around to see if anyone had been in earshot.

“Oh, come on. You understand. You’re a gay guy. You know what it’s like to mess around.”

“You think so?”

“Look, I work in Manhattan. I know about this stuff. The fags at work—sorry, gay guys—they get a lot of sex. Even the ones in relationships.”

“It’s a testosterone thing. No female hormones to balance things out.”

He looked over his shoulder to see if the coast was still clear. “I use an escort service. A call girl. Classy. Clean. She meets me at a gentlemen’s club, I buy some drinks, go back to a hotel. I’m home by one a.m., a satisfied customer. I’ll tell you the truth, Amy’s better off with me blowing off a little steam.”

“So she doesn’t know.”

“I deny it when she asks. You understand.”

“Hey, I’m in a monogamous relationship.”

“Yeah? You make some kinda vow?”

“Not quite,” I said, wondering what that would be like—taking a vow, making public expression of what had previously been a private arrangement. The forever of it, the weight. “Woody’s a great guy, but he’s one-hundred-percent opposed to cheating. I don’t want to screw it up. Based on the way I’ve played around in the past, it hasn’t always been easy.”

“Trust me, you got it easy,” Tommy said. “Being married to the opposite sex is work.”

A moment later, Amy reappeared, flashing him a look that said
enough already,
and this time Tommy extinguished his cigarette and headed back into the living room. I lingered in the cold air until my fingers started to feel numb, and then I, too, went back inside, a little tipsy now, a little less anxious facing the gathered clan.

The next day, after the funeral mass had come and gone, after a trip to the cemetery and another round of food and drink and sneaked cigarettes, Tommy reached past my hand, extended for a farewell shake, to pull me in for a hug. “Don’t be a stranger,” he whispered in my ear. “Family is family.” And for the second time in two days he moved me right to the edge of tears.

“You ever come to San Francisco, Tommy?”

“I’m working on a couple of West Coast accounts, so who knows.”

I smiled at the idea, imagining Tommy making a little time for his black sheep cousin before heading out for a lap dance. “Sure, come for a visit,” I told him. “We’ve got plenty of places to blow off steam.” He gave me a knowing wink and headed down the shoveled walkway to the street, where Amy had their minivan warming up and the kids corralled, all of it waiting for him.

But first: The night of the wake, drunk on vodka after everyone had left, I was enlisted by Deirdre to find my father’s wedding ring. “Find it where?” I asked.

“Search the house. The hospital doesn’t have it. The mortician doesn’t have it.”

AJ was asleep in her arms. He was too big to be carried, I could see that in the strain of her muscles. Or maybe not. Maybe five isn’t too big to be lifted into bed by your mother. What did I know? There were no children in my life. “Will you promise me you’ll look?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean it, Jamie. We need it in the morning, before the funeral mass.”

“I’ll look, I’ll look.”

I did look. I went back upstairs into his bedroom, which still smelled medicinal, the antiseptic fumes a kind of ghostly presence, a reminder of the failure to hold back death. I moved furniture, and pushed aside clothes on hangers, and got on my hands and knees to root through my father’s closet. I found a jar filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. A few boxes of receipts that went back years. Some old hats. A years-old, dusty plaque from his employer—an office furniture company for which he spent the last twenty years writing marketing brochures, catalog copy and annual reports—commending him for perfect attendance. No sick days for Teddy Garner.

Then, buried deep on a shelf, I found a short stack of
Penthouse
magazines, five or six in all, dated from the 1980s. I glanced over my shoulder, worried that Nana might be standing in the doorway, catching me with this pornographic contraband. I tucked them under my shirt and tiptoed back to my tiny bedroom.
Penthouse
had been my porn of choice as a teenager because the “Forum” section, made up of supposedly true stories from readers, was good for at least one bisexual story per issue—my first exposure to man-on-man sex. Sure enough, I opened one of my father’s and immediately found a “letter” from a big-breasted woman recounting the day the pool guy seduced both her and her home-early-from-work husband. The money shot: The stud fucks her husband as he’s ramming his wife. Everyone orgasms together. Crude, but very sexy. Did my father, so revolted by gay sex, actually read this story? He must have, at least once. But it was nearly impossible to imagine: Teddy, in his bedroom, the very room where he told me to keep my private life private, letting his own private thoughts unfold, taboo story in one hand, family jewels in the other.

The next morning I woke and shaved my face clean, watching the brown and orange bristles, my
scruffy
soul patch, slide down the drain. In the mirror, to my own eyes, I looked not so much like a new man as an impostor, trying to pass myself off as the son I was supposed to be. The day was as glacial as any since I’d been back, and the newly shorn spot under my lip seemed to attract the cold the way an open window draws in a draft. All day long, at every step along the ritual path from funeral parlor to church to cemetery, the damp air was an icy kiss pressed to my face, a mark only I knew was there.

I served as a pallbearer, feeling the tremendous weight of the coffin in every muscle as I joined my cousins lifting the heavy box into the hearse, working hard to keep my balance on the ice-streaked sidewalk. No eulogy was delivered at St. Bart’s, but the priest gave a homily in which my father was referred to as
a fighter, a family man, and a son of a bitch.
I mean,
a son of God.
“Son of a bitch” was what I wrote in my journal that night, scribbling furiously, without remorse, trying to fill up the pit in my guts, a throbbing hollow that had grown since I’d gotten here and that now threatened to subsume me.

I never did find his wedding ring. He was buried without it.

In the days after the guests were long gone, the last of Nana’s roast eaten and the last can of carbonated soda guzzled, the folding chairs stowed and the ashtrays emptied, Deirdre kept buzzing with projects. “Take a break,” I urged, but she insisted she was better off.

“Know your strengths and work with them,” she told me. “That’s my motto.”

“You’re too young to have a motto,” I said.

“Jamie, we’re not kids anymore. I have a child of my own.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

I hadn’t spent much time with AJ, so one morning I drove to Deirdre’s house with the plan to take him to kindergarten. I found him alone in the kitchen. The microwave was beeping four high-pitched signals, and AJ was climbing up on a chair to retrieve some kind of plastic-encased breakfast food. “I have to split it open and let the steam out,” he explained to me. “I can wait three minutes for it to cool down.”

Three minutes
. The kind of precise instruction Deirdre had no doubt been giving him all his life.

“So, where’s your mom?”

“Having her morning time.”

“What’s that?”

“In the morning she closes her door and I don’t bother her for five minutes.”

Five minutes went by, then six, then seven. AJ kept count. I went upstairs to her bedroom to let her know I was here. From behind the door, I heard her crying and talking to herself, though I couldn’t decipher the words. I imagined her crying over that never-found wedding ring, but of course it was more than that. Mourning in the morning.

Quietly, I retreated to the top of the stairs, then called out, “I stopped by to take AJ to school.”

She yelled out a strangled, “Oh, hi. Okay, just a minute.”

I microwaved myself a bowl of instant oatmeal—the cinnamon scent brought me right back to long-ago winter mornings in Greenlawn. AJ was pouring himself orange juice from a container, the
glug-glug
of it sending splashes all over the table.

“Here, let me show you a trick,” I said. I grabbed a knife, poked an air slit in the top, then poured a glug-free stream into my glass. “Ta-da!” I swept my arm wide, clumsily backhanding my oatmeal, which went flying to the floor.

The crash echoed. My eyes met AJ’s worried stare. “So you see, AJ, that’s how you keep from spilling orange juice. You throw your oatmeal on the floor!”

He melted into giggles. We cleaned up the mess together, making a promise not to tell Deirdre.

After dropping him off, I returned to find Deidre leaning over her clipboard, snapping her pen. The radio was on, and she was singing along to a pop song I’d never heard. She’d emerged from her crying jag looking as pulled-together as ever.

“You think it’s okay for me to take Dad’s car to the city?” I asked.

“When?”

“Today. I figured I’d look up some old friends.”

“Well, actually—” She presented me with the clipboard. “Here’s your do-list.”

“Not
to do?
Just
do?
”

“Yes, as in
will be done
,” she said firmly.

Beneath my name, she’d written a list: “Attic. Garage. Dad’s closet.” I felt myself wilting. “I need to get out of here, Dee. I’m going stir-crazy.”

“Come on, Jamie. There’s so much.”

“Not today. I’m not in the right headspace.”

“Well, excuse me, but you’re going back to California in a couple days, and then what? We have to sell Dad’s house. If you want anything at all, you better call it, or it’s going to wind up in the dump.”

I looked at the list again. I considered mentioning the porn in the bedroom, but I held back; let it be a secret between him and me. “I don’t have anything in the attic anymore. I cleared out all my stuff when I left for San Francisco. And I don’t want any furniture. I live in a tiny one-bedroom. Plus, I don’t have money to ship anything.”

“Fine. I’ll just throw everything away. Our whole family history. What do you care, anyway?” Her voice cracked and dropped off.

“Okay, okay.” I lowered my head into my hands, willing myself to do the right thing. “I can go to New York another time. No biggie. Really.”

“It would be a huge help,” she said. “So, you’ll start with the attic?”

“Sure. Just tell me one thing: Who died and left you in charge?”

She froze, and then, catching my smile, shook her head. “You know, you’re an asshole.”

“It’s the most reliable part of me,” I said. “I know my strengths. I work with them.”

U
nlike a city apartment, a house with an attic means never saying good-bye to anything. The Garner family attic swelled with the past: boxes of moth-eaten clothing, much of it sewn in that little room at the end of the hall, and the sewing machine itself, which hadn’t been donated to the Salvation Army after all but sat here surrounded by boxes of patterns; the small plaster replicas of the
Venus de Milo
and Michelangelo’s
David,
once displayed on end tables in the living room, and the end tables themselves, carved from an ugly mustard-tinted wood; the electric typewriter, flecked with Liquid Paper, on which I’d tapped angsty poetry in high school; an outdated stereo system that my father always called the hi-fi; a German knife set that I suspected might have some value. How difficult could it be to let go of a card table—a cheap piece of junk when it was bought and now an actual piece of junk, wobbly, broken, its veneer peeling off? Or a faddish appliance—a fondue set, a Crock-Pot, a carpet broom? How about a plastic Christmas tree, originally a convenience for parents of small children but over time a tacky embarrassment?

The more I took in, the more I understood the difficulty: Everything bore my mother’s imprint. Each worthless item was something she’d chosen, no matter how long ago, or had used, no matter for how short a time. Or else it contained a dormant memory that needed only the focus of my attention to activate: the time Dee and I dressed those statuettes in Barbie doll clothes—Malibu Venus, David in madras—then waited for Dad, sighing through his nightly perusal of the newspaper, to notice our alteration, the two of us finally erupting with so much suppressed laughter that Mom dashed in to see what was wrong. Or the time a birthday party devolved into a food fight as my friends used cheese and chocolate fondue for spin art on the kitchen table. Mom was furious at first but eventually relented, flinging a forkful of wet chocolate into my hair.

I came upon a stack of boxes, each labeled, in black Magic Marker,
LEGAL
, and used my fingernail to slit one open. Inside was everything related to the lawsuit my father brought against the hospital where my mother had died. I pulled out a few manila folders and scanned the contents: research into heart disease, photocopies of my mother’s medical history, correspondence between doctors and lawyers. Medicine and law, two languages good at obfuscating meaning. I dug some more, not even realizing what I was looking for until I found it: a file folder marked
SETTLEMENT
. I read a memo from my father’s lawyer, spelling out the situation. After weighing all the evidence, the judge in the case was prepared to decide against him, to give him nothing. My father was advised to accept a settlement of one hundred thousand dollars, enough to pay his attorneys and the private investigators they’d hired and have a little left over for himself, and to promise, in exchange, to drop any threat of appeal. A hundred thousand dollars was more money than I’d earned in my entire life, but considering the many years he’d spent on the case, and the fact that he’d once spoken confidently of
millions of dollars in damages
, my father must have seen this as next to nothing. I couldn’t quite believe it had collapsed this way, a decade-long odyssey abandoned with the scrawl of “Edward Garner” on the bottom line. The lawsuit had never been about the money for him, but about getting someone to take blame for his wife’s death. And no one had.

I hadn’t thought about any of this in years—the shock of her death, the way it extinguished in him what little mirth he’d had. (Never again would he laugh at something as silly as the
Venus de Milo
in a bikini.) I felt an ache behind my eyes, along my neck, and a pressure pulsing in the air around me. I should have gone to New York like I’d wanted. I could have been ambling in and out of galleries, shopping for cheap sunglasses on St. Mark’s Place, smoking a joint with old friends while we reminisced about the shit we stirred up in our twenties.

You have to own your issues.
This was Woody’s voice, the therapeutic language he relied on, which drove me crazy but tailed me everywhere. He’d spent years in therapy, not because of any particular catastrophe, but to develop a protective coating against life’s unexpected twists.
You have to deal,
he liked to say,
and you have to be ready
. I thought of my family as having been dealt a lousy hand, one with the Death card smack in the middle; we had never figured out how to play our cards. When I left my family, I left my
issues
behind. Now here I was back at the table. Okay, I would stay a little longer, long enough to feel these old aches, admit to them,
own
them, then get back to the home I’d made for myself, where I could put them to rest, once and for all.

The sun slid past the tiny windows under the eaves. I pushed past the legal files, dragging a floor lamp on an extension cord, and found other items that had been my father’s—not my mother’s or theirs together, but his alone. A bowling ball and shoes (he’d played in the town league), his Army uniform (he’d done a few years of peacetime duty in Germany, where he’d met my mother), a tuxedo that might have been the one he was married in (no wedding ring in the pockets). I had my eye out for that unexpected something that would ignite the proper emotional epiphany; I would carry this home to Woody to show him that I’d done the work.

After uncounted hours, I didn’t find much. My father was a pack rat, something I realized I shared with him. My father had never gotten over my mother, something I already knew. My parents’ tastes were tacky in a mid-seventies kind of way—something of a badge of honor for a thrift-store hound like me. I could search here all day and never achieve the desired epiphany. I stood up quickly, steadied myself against the wall while the head rush flooded in, shook the pins and needles out of my limbs. I grabbed the case containing the German knives, which would make a good gift for Woody, who never put any effort into stocking his kitchen. I turned to leave.

Then my sights landed on a taped-up shoebox marked
SAN FRANCISCO
. It sat atop a dresser near the door; I must have walked right past it on the way in. I stopped and picked it up. In smaller print was written
JUNE
’60–
JUNE
’61. Another reminder that my father had once lived in my adopted city.

What had he told me about that time? If I remembered correctly, he chose San Francisco because he had a friend there, and because
back then, we all thought we wanted to be beatniks.
He worked odd jobs but never made much money. He saw Monk play live. And, oh yes, his most dubious claim: He had encountered Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats himself, at a bar in North Beach. They had a brief exchange of words; Kerouac was embarrassingly drunk and hostile to his young fan’s enthusiasm. Not long after that, my father returned to New York, broke and disillusioned with all things
beatnik
. That’s all I knew. A sketch, barely an outline.

Even years ago, when I was still making the occasional phone call to my father, I never bothered to find out more about his time in San Francisco. Our calls always flared into harsh verbal volleys—him lecturing, me reacting—and after each one, with nothing but scorched earth left between us, we retreated a little farther from the heat. The Kerouac story is a good example. I never believed it had happened because of the way he’d used it against me: a cautionary tale about the perils of rebellion, individualism, artistic freedom. Eyewitness testimony to
the harder they fall.

How strange to discover that he had saved things from those long ago, much disparaged days. How curious.

I looked again at the dates on the box. My father had stayed only a year in San Francisco. I’d lasted a decade. When I first moved there, he called it Never-Never Land. He was certain I would retreat back East, just as he had. Had I stayed so long just to prove him wrong? As I stood there, surrounded by the full sum of his life—the domestic clutter, the orderly boxes, the failed lawsuit—this seemed like a real possibility. If so, then I guess I’d won. I’d held out. He was gone, and I was Peter Pan.

I heard another voice, that of my friend Brady, who edited the radio show I’d produced:
It’s all material, dude.
Freelance producers are always on alert for the next story, an item to be exploited. When something of so-called human interest drops into your hands, you’re obliged to notice. To take interest. See where it leads.

When I left the attic, I took the box marked
SAN FRANCISCO
with me.

That night after dinner, Deirdre sat me down, with Andy at her side, and told me that they were going to move Nana to a nursing home. Not a nursing home—something for people more active than that.
Senior housing.
They’d worked it all out. There was a place just one town over. Nana could stay there all week, with people her own age, and she’d be able to leave on weekends and visit with Deirdre.

“She can’t be by herself all day,” Deirdre said. “She’s not that strong.”

“But she used to stay here alone with Dad,” I said, “and she managed for both of them.”

“With a lot of help from your sister,” Andy interjected, patting her hand protectively.

Deidre said, “You haven’t seen how she slips sometimes,” then paused to exhale, clearly trying to remain calm. “I want to go back to work. I talked to Carly Fazio and she said her company needs someone in human resources.”

“Who the hell is Carly Fazio?”

“From high school.”

Right: a dark haired girl at the periphery of Deirdre’s social life, that little gang of girls occupying our living room every afternoon, watching
General Hospital
, drinking diet soda and French braiding each other’s hair. I couldn’t summon up a face, much less where she worked, but here she was, Carly Fazio, playing her tangential role in our family drama. I’m sure Diane Jernigan knew all about her.

“What does Nana have to say?”

Deirdre averted her eyes. “We haven’t talked to her yet.”

“There’s money for this,” Andy added. “I’ve been investing Teddy’s settlement money in tech stocks—software, search engines, portals. The money these start-ups are making! It’s incredible.”

“How much did he leave behind?” I asked.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Andy said. “More or less.”

I hadn’t given a thought to my father’s estate, but as this astronomical number hovered in the air, I found myself instantly calculating my share. I lived check to check, only a few hundred bucks in savings, and I had student loans to pay, and credit card debt piling up because I rarely covered more than the monthly minimum. I’d been treading water financially since college. Even a tenth of this money would make a world of difference to me.

Andy talked at length, and proudly, about his
investment strategy
. Online trading was his new religion. His day job at the payroll company where he’d worked for eight years offered little room for advancement. “And the office politics,” he said, “could drive a guy berserk.” Andy was upstanding—he spent time with AJ, followed the Mets religiously, shunned hard liquor because he
just didn’t like the taste
—but I harbored a kernel of resentment toward him. He’d knocked up my sister at age twenty-three, before she’d figured out who she wanted to be in the world, before she and I could form an adult friendship. According to this scenario, Andy had created the Deirdre of today, with the minivan and the do-list and the membership at Big Savers, as opposed to the Deirdre who once sneaked my cigarettes, who might have followed me down the path of rebellion. Now Average Andy controlled my father’s two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar portfolio. As Deidre returned from the kitchen with three bottles of Bud Lite and took a seat, almost deferentially, at his side, I saw him for what he was: the new head of the family.

“Care to tell me what the terms of his will are?” It was terrible to hear my money hunger exposed, no matter how indirectly I’d tried to phrase the question.

Andy explained that most of the money was earmarked to take care of Nana, some of it was set aside for AJ’s education, and the rest of it went to Deirdre and me. Well, mostly to Deidre. “If you want,” he said, “I can invest your share. With the way the market’s working, I can grow it fast.”

Deidre sat quietly, but I felt her watching me. When I raised my eyebrows, telegraphing a question to her, she said, “Ten thousand dollars. That’s what he left you.”

“Well.” I took a long slug from the bottle. I don’t even like beer, much less watery shit like this, but in that moment I couldn’t drink enough of it. I wanted it to flush away the hope I’d let myself feel. “What is that, about two percent? Seems about right.”

Andy cleared his throat. “I wish there was more for you. We both do.”

“Don’t worry, Andy.”

“No, I got to say, it’s sad to me, you know?”

“Seriously. I’m surprised I got anything.”

“But you and him not getting along? As a father myself, I can tell you nothing would get in the way of being close to my son.”

“Well, talk to me the day you catch AJ sucking off his boyfriend.”

His face froze.

Deirdre yelped my name. “You are unbelievable.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But you never know.”

“Guess not,” Andy said, his voice almost hoarse. Poor guy. I could see the wheels spinning behind his eyes, his thoughts trapped helplessly by the muddy image I’d set forth. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess a guy doesn’t want that for his only son. I mean, I can’t lie to you. I don’t want that for AJ. You want your kid to not be different, not get pushed around. You want grandkids some day, and so forth. That’s natural, right?”