God's Gym (15 page)

We almost missed the Giacometti.

Not there yet.

It closes next weekend.

Right on time, then. I'm away next week.

Oh, you're going to Arizona next week.

I've been letting other things get in the way. Unless I set a hard date, the visit won't happen. You know. Like we kept putting off Giacometti.

You booked a flight.

Not yet.

But you're going for sure. Next week.

I think so think so think so think so think so.

I loved the slinky dog. He was so ... so ... you know...
dog.
An alley-cat dog like the ones always upsetting the garbage cans behind my father's store. Stringy and scrawny like them. Swaybacked. Hunkered down like they're hiding or something's after them even when they're just pit-patting from place to place. Scruffy barbed-wire fur. Those long, floppy, flat dog feet like bedroom slippers.

To tell the truth, too much to see. I missed the dog. I was overwhelmed. By the crowd, the crowd of objects.

Two weeks after the Giacometti exhibit, I could make more sense of it. A fat, luxurious book by a French art critic helped. It cost so much I knew I'd force myself to read it, or at least study the copious illustrations. The afternoon in the MOMA I'd done more reading than looking at art. Two floors, numerous galleries, still it was like fighting for a handhold on a subway pole. Reading captions shut out the crowd. I could stand my ground
without feeling the pressure of somebody behind me demanding a peek.

I wondered why Giacometti didn't go insane. Maybe he did. Even without the French critic I could sense Giacometti didn't trust what was in front of his eyes. He felt the strangeness, the menace. He understood art always failed. Art lied to him. People's eyes lied. No one ever sees the world as it is. Giacometti's eyes failed him too. He'd glance away from a model to the image of it he was making, he said, and when he looked back to check the model, it would be different, always different, always changing.

Frustrated by my inability to recall the dead friend's face, I twisted on the light over the mirror above the bathroom sink, thinking I might milk the friend's features from mine. Hadn't we been vaguely similar in age and color. If I studied hard, maybe the absence in my face of some distinctive trait the friend possessed would trigger my memory, or vice versa, a trait I bore would recall its absence in the friend's features, and bingo, his whole face would appear.

There is an odd neurological deficit that prevents some people from recognizing faces. Seeing the stranger in the mirror, I was afraid I might be suffering from the disorder. Who in God's name was this person. Who'd been punished with those cracks, blemishes, the mottled complexion, eyes sunk in deep hollows, frightened eyes crying out for acknowledgment, for help, then receding, surrendering, staring blankly, bewildered and exhausted, asking me the same questions I was asking them.

Rather than attempt to account for the wreckage, I began to repair the face, working backward, a makeup artist removing years from an actor, restoring a young man the mirror denied. How long had I been losing track of myself. Not really looking when I brushed my teeth or combed my hair, letting the image in the mirror soften and blur, become as familiar and invisible
as faces on money. Easier to imagine the son than deal with how the father had turned out, the splotched, puffy flesh, lines incised in forehead and cheeks, strings dragging down the corners of the mouth. I switched off the light, let the merciful hood drop over the prisoner's head.

People don't really look, do they. Experiments have demonstrated conclusively how unobservant the average person is and, worse, how complacent, how unfazed by blindness. A man with a foil beard gets paid to remove it and then goes about his usual day. The following day a researcher asks those who regularly encounter the man, his coworkers for example, if he had a beard when they saw him the previous day. Most can't remember one way or the other but assume he did. A few say the beard was missing. A few admit they'd never noticed a beard. A few insist vehemently they saw the invisible beard. I seem to recall the dead friend sporting a beard at one time or another during the period we were acquainted. Since I can't swear yes or no, I consign myself, just as Giacometti numbered himself, among the blind.

Are prisoners permitted to cultivate beards. Would a beard, if allowed, cause the son to resemble the father more closely. How would I recognize a resemblance if I can't visualize the father's face, or rather see it all too clearly as the anonymous blur of an aging man, any man, all men. Instead of staring without fear and taking responsibility for the unmistakable, beaten-up person I've apparently become, I prefer to see nothing.

Time at last for the visit. I'd written again and the son had responded again. A slightly longer reply with a visiting form tucked inside the flimsy prison envelope. Of course I couldn't help recalling the letter within a letter I'd received from the lawyer, Koppleman. The son instructed me to check the box for family and write
father
on the line following it. To cut red tape and speed up the process, I assumed, but for a second I hesitated, concerned some official would notice the names didn't match, then realized lots of inmates wouldn't bear (or know) their father's name, and some wouldn't claim it even though it's registered on their birth certificate, so I checked the family box, printed
father
in the space provided.

Aside from a few sentences
re
the enclosed form, the second letter actually shorter than the first:
Why not. My social calendar not full.
A smiling leopard in a cage. Step closer if you dare.

An official notice from the warden's office authorizing my visit took months to reach me. I began to regret lying on a form that had warned me, under penalty of law, not to perjure myself. Who reads the applications. How carefully did prison officials check facts applicants alleged. What punishments could be levied against a person who falsified information. The form a perfunctory measure, I guessed, so bureaucrats in charge of security could say they'd followed the rules. A form destined to gather dust in a file, properly executed and stamped, retrievable just in case an emergency exploded and some official needed to cover her or his ass. Justify his or her existence. The existence of the state. Of teeming prisons in the middle of the desert.

During the waiting my misgivings soured into mild paranoia. Had I compromised myself, broken a law that might send me too packing off to jail. I finally calmed down after I figured out that short of a DNA test (a) no one could prove I wasn't the prisoner's father and (b) it wasn't a crime to believe I was. If what the son had written in his first letter was true, the prison would possess no record of his father. The late friend past proclaiming his paternity. And even if he rose from the dead to argue his case, why would his claim, sans DNA confirmation, be more valid in the eyes of the law than mine. So what if he had visited. So what if he'd married the prisoner's mother. So what if he sincerely believed his belief of paternity. Mama's baby, Daddy's maybe. Hadn't I heard folks shout that taunt all my life. Didn't my own mother recite the refrain many times. Nasty Kilroys scrawled everywhere on the crumbling walls of my old neighborhood hollered the same funny, mean threat. Careful, Jack. Don't turn your back. Kilroy's lurking. Kilroy's creeping. Keep your door locked, your ole lady pregnant in summer, barefoot in winter, my man. In more cases than people like to admit, paternity nothing but wishful thinking. Kilroy a thief in the night, leaves no fingerprints, no footprints. Mama's sweet baby, Daddy's, maybe.

Psychologists say there's a stage when a child doubts the adults raising it are its real family. How can parents prove otherwise. And why would kids want to trade in the glamorous fairy tales they dream up about their origins for a pair of ordinary, bumbling adults who impose stupid rules, stifling routines. Who needs their hostile world full of horrors and hate.

Some mornings when I awaken I look out my window and pretend to understand. I reside in a building in the bottom of somebody's pocket. Sunlight never touches its bricks. Any drawer or cabinet or closet shut tight for a day will exude a gust of moldy funk when you open it. The building's neither run-down nor cheap. Just dark, dank, and drab. Drab as grownups that children are browbeaten into accepting as their masters. The building, my seventh-floor apartment, languish in the shadow of something falling, leaning down, leaning over. Water, when you turn on a faucet first thing in the morning, gags on itself, spits, then gushes like a bloody jailbreak from the pipes. In a certain compartment of my heart where compassion's supposed to lodge, but there's never enough space in cramped urban dwellings so I store niggling self-pity there too, I try to find room also for all the millions of poor souls who have less than I have, who would howl for joy if they could occupy as their own one corner of my dreary little flat. I invite these unfortunates for a visit, pack the compartment till it's full far beyond capacity, and weep with them, share with them my scanty bit of prosperity, tell them I care, tell them be patient, tell them I'm on
their side, tell them an old acquaintance of mine who happens to be a poet recently hit the lottery big-time, a cool million, and wish them similar luck, wish them clear sailing and swift, painless deaths, tell them it's good to be alive, whatever, tell them how much I appreciate living as long as I've managed and still eating every day, fucking now and then, finding a roof over my head in the morning after finding a bed to lie in at night, grateful to live on even though the pocket's deep and black and a hand may dig in any moment and crush me.

With Suh Jung's aid—why not use her, wasn't it always about finding uses for the people in your life, why would they be in your life if you had no use for them, or vice versa, and if you're using them, doesn't that lend purpose to their lives, you're actually doing them a trickle-down favor, aren't you, allowing them to use you to feel themselves useful and that's something, isn't it, better than nothing anyway, than being useless or used up—I gathered more information about the son in prison. Accumulated a file, biography, character sketch, rap sheet a.k.a. his criminal career.

You're going to wear out the words, she joked as she glanced over at me sitting beside her in the bed that occupied the same room with a Pullman fridge and stove. Her jibe less a joke than a complaint: I'm sick and tired of your obsessive poring over a few dog-eared scraps of paper extracted from Arizona's bottomless pit of records, is what she was saying with a slight curl of one side of her thin mouth, a grimace that could have been constructed as the beginning of a smirk she decided was not worth carrying full term.

I kept reading. Avoided the swift disappointment another glance at her tidy body would trigger. Its spareness had been exciting at first, but after the slow, slow, up-close-and-personal examination of her every square inch afforded by the bathing rituals she performed on me and I learned to reciprocate once my shyness abated, after we'd subjected each other's skin to washcloth, oil, the glide, pinch, stroke of fingertips and tongue,
her body had become in a few months much less intriguing, less compensation for her tart remarks. Now I had no patience for her impatience with me, her taunts. The eroticism between us had dulled rather too quickly, it seemed. An older man's childish unreasonableness partly at fault. Why else would I be disappointed after a few weeks because her hips didn't round nor the negligible mounds beneath her nippies swell. Her boyish look not a stage, it was what I was going to get, period, even if the business between us survived longer than I had any reason to expect. No, things weren't going to get better, and I was wasting precious time. Given my age, how many more chances could I expect.

Here's what the papers said: He's done lots of bad things, the worst kinds of things, and if we could, we'd kill him, but we can't, so we'll never, never let him go.

Are you surprised, she'd asked.

I didn't know what to expect, I had replied.

Heavy-duty stuff. If only half the charges legit, he's a real bad actor.

I'm not traveling out West to forgive him or bust him out or bring him back. Just visit. Just fill in for the dead father. Once. One time enough and it's finished.

No matter how many times you read them, she says, the words won't change. Why read the same ugly facts over and over.

(A) Because my willing, skilled accomplice gathered them for me. (B) Curiosity.

His crimes would make a difference to me, I mean if I were you. This whole visiting business way over the top, you admit it yourself, so I don't pretend I can put myself in your shoes, but still. The awful crimes he's committed would affect anybody's decision to go or not.

Is he guilty. How can you be certain based on a few sheets of paper.

A lot's in the record. A bit too much for a case of mistaken identity. Huh-uh. Plus or minus a few felonies, the man's been busy.

Are you casting the first stone.

A whole building's been dumped on the poor guy. And he's thrown his share of bricks at other folks. I'd hate to bump into him in a dark alley.

Maybe you already have, my friend. Maybe you have and maybe you've enjoyed it.

You're more than a little weird about this, you know. What the hell are you talking about.

Just that people wind up in situations there's no accounting for. Situations when innocence or guilt are extremely beside the point. Situations when nothing's for sure except some of us are on one side of the bars, some on the other side, but nobody knows which side is which.

I know I haven't robbed or kidnapped or murdered anyone. Have you.

Have I. Do you really want to know. Everyone has crimes to answer for, don't they. Even you. Suppose I said my crimes are more terrible than his. Would you believe me. Would my confession start your heart beating a little faster.

(a) No. And (b) you're not scaring me. Put those damned papers away and turn off the light. Please. I have work tomorrow.