Family Night (2 page)

“She’s right, I’m a Blitz hound. First, they have to remove the gargoyles. Gargoyles are priceless. It takes hours and requires patience. Then, you’re rewarded—the building starts to shiver and sink away. A perfect vertical descent. Detonators set in an exact chronology so that even the dust ascends in distinct levels.
There it goes; there goes the old Rialto
.”

Cam said, “I worked on a salvage crew once. We went through the building before another crew wired it up. I unscrewed all the
EXIT
signs, the doorknobs, the wall plates for scrap. You know how many
EXIT
signs in your average-size municipal building?”

Margaret saw it was getting off-track. “It’s different when you have a human element,” she said. “Your father is alive, living in his own free realm—”

“Retired in Rio somewhere. He’s in his
GQ
golden years,” Tracy said.

Cam smiled. Margaret knew that Cam held on to an image of the young model, the face in all the newspaper ads, a stunning double frozen-in-time. Cam’s father, Lewis Goddard, was only sixteen when he became a model for Arrow Collars. He was the last to pose for the series painted by the illustrator J. C. Leyendecker.
Arrow made collars before they started making shirts with attached collars. Cam’s father was one of Leyendecker’s most popular models toward the end of that collar era, and since he was young to start, Cluett, Peabody & Company kept using him as a photographer’s model in new shirt campaigns, starting with one they called “Versatility in White.” Margaret had seen tear sheets of the Leyendecker drawings and the later ads from newspapers, the
Saturday Evening Post, Esquire
, and
Collier’s
.

Leyendecker’s images were crisp, almost too severe. He painted with a broad, deliberate stroke, which revealed a subject overwhelmed, almost harried by a masculine vigor beneath a polished, halting refinement. Lewis’s face was perfectly balanced, yet it looked like a study in extremes. The eyes were electric, deep, accented with transparent cross-hatched shading. His nose was straight but not too narrow or snivelly, his hairline a firm black, angled in correct alignment to the conformation of the skull, sideburns trimmed level at the first crest of the ear. Margaret was most excited by Lewis’s mouth; a tug of muscle made a central indentation from which the lips seemed to swell either side, full and yet seemingly reserved, blank. Waiting for an erotic imprint. Then, the cleft. His chin was so deeply notched, the left plane plunged into shadow before surfacing again on the right.

Cam shared some of his father’s features, but the Arrow Collar ads were such pleasing grotesques, one couldn’t be sure of their truth. Elizabeth said Lewis had the habit of wearing dark eye pencil even when he
wasn’t working. When he enlisted in the Second World War, they didn’t send him overseas. It wasn’t because he was a little older than the others, in his mid-thirties. He was simply too pretty. The sergeant in command placed Lewis in a kissing booth in Times Square, where he recruited one hundred WACs a day.

Elizabeth told Margaret and Cam about Lewis’s silk and suede braces, his cashmere socks, his eighteen-karat-gold signet ring awarded him by another model. She resented these luxuries, yet she was forgiving of worse affronts, such as the time he borrowed her lip-liner and wrote another woman’s name across his bosom.

Tracy came into the room with a bottle of beer for Cam. He handed the bottle to Cam and waited until he took a pull. “How do you like it? It’s a longneck. I have to hunt for longneck bottles anymore. It’s the end of the line for these,” Tracy said. Tracy locked his eyes on Cam as he swallowed. Cam looked past Tracy and rested the bottle against his knee, marking circles on his jeans.

Tracy was testing it out. Maybe he could reach her brother with this shit, but Cam leaned back in his seat. He was putting it together. He was smiling.

“Okay,” Tracy said, “we’re all in favor of a manhunt? Organizing our posse, right? Cam takes the white horse, we ride the paints—”

“We can’t do it,” Margaret said. “We don’t have the particulars. Anything could happen. Remember the innocent people who witnessed atomic tests without a proper explanation of the risks? The children held out their hands to catch the fallout, tiny white rosebuds of soot? That could happen to us.”

Cam said, “What could happen? We could get nuked? You’re being hysterical, Margaret. Anyway, I didn’t say I was going to do anything about Lewis,” Cam said.

“Thank goodness. It’s Tracy’s manifesto,” she said.

“Yes, and I stand behind it. A man has to face his past,” Tracy said.

“You’re a shitload of chitty-chat,” Cam said to Tracy. Cam looked at Margaret. She was smiling at her brother’s conclusion, but she met Tracy’s eyes. Tracy wasn’t easily offended, and sometimes his resilience to remarks seemed almost threatening.

She looked at the two men. She had a sick feeling, as if all her smooth-muscle groups were tugging in counter directions. She sensed a shift from one sort of struggle to another; it was an unfamiliar hunger, a new evocative burden. She tried to think of her eight-year-old daughter.

Celeste was due back from a weekend at her father’s. Celeste always suffered small injuries at her father’s. Her teeth got chipped, her ankles twisted, her fingertips scalded. Margaret longed to take possession of her again and could never rest until her child was returned. Each time her ex-husband dropped off her daughter, Margaret had a habit of shutting the front door just as he started to say his last remarks.

Cam told Margaret he’d like to see his niece, but it was getting late. The roads might be icing. Cam stood up to leave. Then, he couldn’t find the brass finials for the stove.

“They were right there on the coffee table.”

“I don’t see them,” Tracy said.

They looked around the room and lifted the feather cushions from the settee. Margaret stooped over and looked under the chairs. Nothing. Cam knew something was funny. He let his head fall back on his shoulders and stared at the ceiling. Then he stared out the window.

“What the fuck is going on?” Margaret said.

“They just disappeared,” Tracy said.

“They can’t disappear! They must be worth a lot of money.”

Tracy said, “It’s like a paranormal event. Weird.”

“What are you talking about?” Margaret said.

Cam walked into the kitchen, turned on the tap, and rinsed out his beer bottle. He was giving Margaret some room to take care of it.

Tracy said, “Don’t look at me. I don’t have those brass things. It’s weirdsville, if you ask me. Maybe it’s dematerialization or electrobiology. I’ve heard of these things happening at convents and monasteries. Loaves of bread fly out the window. Pebbles turn into grapes; the grapes turn into wine. Presto.”

Margaret walked into the kitchen and back through the bedroom. “Tracy, my brother has to drive a long way. All the way back to Wilmington.” She knew Tracy had the brass ornaments. For sex purposes or emotional ransom, for a practical joke. She didn’t really want to know the reason.

“They could have rolled. Did you look everywhere?” Tracy said.

“Where is everywhere?”

“There—”

Margaret saw the finials behind the stereo speaker.
She nudged them out with her toe and handed them to Cam. They all walked outside to Cam’s truck. The men were grinning, looking straight ahead, the way she’d seen boys grit their teeth after a successful hazing. Cam got into his truck. Margaret said good-bye, but Cam didn’t answer. He gripped the side mirror, waggled it until it was adjusted right. Margaret told her brother that whatever he decided to do about his father would be his own doing.

T
racy spent a great deal of time with his Sex Anonymous sponsor. He was helpless against his lust for fresh emotional swells and depths of feeling, but Margaret was never certain if Tracy’s private demons were a respectable threat or if perhaps they might be a sign of an extended, swooning adolescence. It might be an unwillingness to let rich feelings subside with age. She tried to contain her own disturbing impulses, but if she addressed a particular fear, it broke off into several splinter groups.

After her divorce, Margaret went to one meeting of Emotions Anonymous when her phobias increased and she couldn’t ride the city buses. Each time the driver tugged a lever to check the hydraulic door, she hated the screak of the vinyl caulking. It was the same consideration that made her shy from elevators when the vertical seals squashed shut. Even public telephone booths used these rubber sweeps. She was told that she suffered panic reactions. Perhaps, after a bad marriage, a buildup of psychic toxins are released in a swarm. Emotions Anonymous was slow and gluey with saccharine phrases of encouragement. Tracy continued with Sex Anonymous.

“Just how many kinds of anonymous groups are there?”

Tracy said, “It’s a fad. It’s like clipping a deck of cards to the spokes of your bike. It’s fifty-two different cards, but they’re all clipped to one wheel turning the same way.”

Margaret said, “Some people have real problems. You know, health risks and such. They don’t require anonymity at the YMCA Stroke Club.”

“You’re talking about
support
groups. Look at the paper, there’s a list of them. Here’s one, ‘Stuttering Support,’ and ‘Chronic Pain’ meets at seven
P.M
. ‘Single Again,’ they’re having a cookout—”

Tracy’s therapist had recommended Tracy attend some Sex Anonymous meetings when he thought he had located Tracy’s masochistic streak. The therapist said this streak was exacerbated by Tracy’s rather flagrant, self-possessed androgyny. Tracy was married,
divorced; he had several serious seasons with different women. Then there was a year when he was knighted in the piss halls, escorted by a moody entourage to the gay bars, the Venetian Room, the Boulevard Room, the Back Room. Margaret noticed the names of these bars sounded much more intimate than places he might take her. Their favorite spot, the Penalty Box, displayed photos of hockey players and boxers.

The therapist was certain that Tracy’s splintered orientation came from surgery trauma.

“He says my operation gave me lifelong reverberations,” Tracy told her.

“Your appendix?” she said. She knew he had his appendix out when he was seventeen. It was a routine operation which went awry when the cyclopropane tank malfunctioned, the gauge froze and stopped supplying the anesthetic. As the OR staff fumbled to administer a different drug, Tracy regained consciousness, waking to a sharp saucer of pain, rimmed and stinging. Then it was the sight of his belly clamped open, his penis taped against his thigh. It took a moment or two to sedate him again as he struggled to escape from the table. A nurse kept her palm cupped against the vent in his abdomen as he thrashed his legs. He saw her eyes above the green pleats of her mask; her eyes were pinched at the corners and looked quite merry. She couldn’t suppress her bliss when the ho-hum operation turned into a Keystone Kops sort of thing.

During his weeks in the hospital, Tracy had dreams about the nurse in that mask. Sometimes the mask was
not a mask but a bikini bottom pulled taut over his own mouth until he couldn’t breathe.

“How does your therapist know?” Margaret said. “Do you tell him everything?”

“It’s his job to identify something and label it. A shrink has to label everything. They once called it a ‘sea change,’ it happens,” Tracy said.

The term “sea change” was a little too romantic for what it really was—a small clutch of gay lovers, each of them jealous of one another. It was just Tracy researching his own capacities. One evening, a fellow wielded a Swingline industrial staplegun and Tracy broke off from that circle. Margaret tried to imagine how Tracy had allowed someone to sink staples all over him. The scars were tiny yet deep, rows of parallel flecks across his chest and belly.

When she was fourteen years old and in love with a teen idol, she purchased magazines with centerfold posters of her favorite young singer. There were always staples interrupting the smooth shading of his skin, staples slashing his face, his hips. She liked to trace his sideburns, the planes and shadows of his lips and all the pores of his skin, the little squared dots of whisker coming in. Her stepmother was pleased that she loved something unreal. The radio called him an overnight sensation; Margaret believed it was just jealous ridicule on their part.

“Did you ever love a magazine idol?” she asked Tracy.

“Natalie Wood. Then and now.”

Margaret looked at her feet as she ground the heel of her shoe back on. “Natalie Wood is really perfect for
you,” she told him, trying not to sound stung. “Natalie
looks
like you. You could be related.” The actress made Margaret forget to ask Tracy about his sessions with the Swingline.

But Tracy wanted her to make further admissions. “Where’s your centerfold now? He’s a wormy pinup, thin as an onionskin in some landfill. He’s a rotted cameo, a composted Adonis. He’s getting lots of necro—”

“Okay,” she said. She never knew what to do when he talked like this. She remained sitting at the kitchen table as he stood over her. He weaved slightly, side to side. He was weighted, off-balance, sinking into misery. This was exaggerated by the fact that he was physically lanky. A man with this kind of build, svelte and eager, looks twice as gloomy. His hair fell across his eyes in paralyzed curls. His brow crinkled and looked like a heavy filigree, an ornate fresco about to topple from the crown of a building. Then he stood before the little mirror in the hall and raked his hair with his hand. He picked up a protractor and with its sharp point he made a part down the middle of his scalp. He didn’t wear a part in his hair. His hair was naturally wavy and lifted off his face, angling back in lovely drifts, but he had an odd habit of stopping now and then to part it. He tossed his head and the hair resumed its thickness.