The Empty Chair (2 page)

Kipling actually wrote about the Cliff House. You know the Cliff House, Bruce? You said you lived in the Bay Area when you were a boy . . .
that
took me by surprise. The very Cliff House I—we!—remember from our youth! We lived south of LA, see, in Orange County, and would drive to Point Lobos and Sausalito . . . our little unhappy family. Those dreadful, benumbing, contentious vacations. Good Lord! We'd go to the Cliff House and my big sis and me climbed the hundreds of steps to that positively
Brobdingnagian
indoor slide—remember?—made out of slippery, buttery blond wood. I was so struck with fear, my tiny face all scrunched up in tears, like I was heading for the gallows. I never looked down, only straight ahead, at the ass of whoever was in front of me, yet couldn't help but see from the corner of my eye the sliders
whooshing
past, the joyful
screaming
, the chute wide as a highway, like some monstrously tilted bowling lane waiting patiently to strike me out. To avoid the paralysis of vertigo, when I finally reached the top I gave my full attention to the spreading out of my smelly burlap sack, the threadbare magic carpet that would carry me to Hell. You couldn't take
too
much time with preparations because a cackling crowd was endlessly summiting behind you, anxious to fling themselves down that bizarre man-made mountain. So you'd plunk yourself on that useless mat and—Geronimo!—off you'd go, hoping to catch up with your stomach at slide's end. All the while knowing I'd have to immediately begin the climb again, or be called a fag, and be publicly ostracized—

I know, I'm off-track. It's just the butterflies . . .

We're not in a
huge
hurry, are we?

I just need to work up to it. I'm finding my way. Promise.

All right, and do forgive: the Kipling/Twain rendezvous in New York. As it turns out, the two shared a common passion: copyrights. Ha! According to historical reports, Samuel Clemens had
lots
to say about this particular issue. Copyrights! Mania of the Titans!

Kipling was an absolutely superb reporter, even referred to himself as a newspaperman. (Jack London had his own view of the papers. Called them “man-killing machines.”) Kipling was known as a human tape recorder, capable of flawlessly transcribing from memory. Capote used to say the same thing, but Capote was more full of shit than a sewer pipe. Lord Rudy quoted Twain, a little speech I spottily committed to memory, as it touches on a topic mentioned earlier and which I am certain we will soon explore, which acted as a balm at the time—

A conscience, like a child, is a nuisance. If you play with it and give it everything it wants—spoil it—it'll be sure to intrude on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Just treat it as you would anything else. When it's rebellious, spank it. Be stern! Don't let it come out to play with you at all hours. That way you'll end up with a
good
conscience, one that's properly trained. But a spoiled one destroys all pleasure in life! I've done an excellent job in training my own; at least, I haven't heard from it for some time. Perhaps I killed it from being too severe. It is wrong to kill a child . . . though in spite of all I've said, a conscience does differ from a child in many ways.

Perhaps it's better off dead.

Wonderful, isn't it?

Sometimes satire is the only thing that does the job. All right . . .

Enough nonsense.

I began by disclosing that while I prefer men to women on the sexual front, I've had meaningful relationships with both. I told you I was married but separated, and that I
—we
—have—
had
—a child. A son
.
We had a son.

His name is Ryder.

(I won't say “was” because it still is.)

My wife's name is Kelly.

I haven't seen her for seven or eight years. She lives in Canada with her sister. On her sister's property anyway. I send money every month. The occasional postcard or email. She writes back now and then. Her sister worries, endlessly. “She's thin as a bone!” My frontal lobe seems to have taken that information and run with it, because whenever I think of Kelly I picture a haunted scarecrow piercing me with haunted, pleading eyes.

We were living together but hadn't been physically intimate for a long time when Kelly said she wanted a child. She was 35 or 36—I was 29—she'd had four abortions. Also had PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, so the doctors said the odds were slim. We were prepared to go another route if we didn't have any luck but never talked
exactly
about what that route would be. If I recall, adoption wasn't entirely ruled out. Kelly was certain motherhood had passed her by (I was certain too) and as a hedge against likely heartbreak she convinced herself that it wasn't possible, wouldn't happen. Made her peace. When the kit showed the + sign, it shocked her into bliss. Me too (into bliss). I was a little surprised by that. She said it was a miracle baby and I couldn't argue.

Back then, we had the understanding our physical needs would be met outside the partnership. I mean, sex was actually fun—for a while—but once she got pregnant, we were forever done. I knew Kelly was involved with various women over the years but had no idea she pursued men as well. I'm not sure if that would have bothered me or not . . . I mean, another man. I guess it would have, if she didn't invite me to share! At any rate, we were a “don't ask, don't tell” household. If you're wondering why we stayed together, that's a little predictable. Better to ask, What forces prevailed to bring us together in the first place? And for what purpose?

I said it before and I'll say it again: I only know what I know. And what I don't know, I've learned to leave alone.

Until now.

Kelly was an old friend of the Learys' and liked to tell people our son was named after Tim's goddaughter, the actress Winona Ryder. Kelly thinks
she
came up with the name—Ryder—but that's not how I remember it
.
And my ego has nothing to do with it. You see, our son didn't have a name until the very moment he was born. When he popped out, a name popped in:
Ryder
,
from the Djuna Barnes novel. God, I loved that woman! The mad hermit dyke of Greenwich Village. Lived right across the street from e.e. cummings by the way . . . I know that sounds precious, to name your kid after a Djuna Barnes book—about a monster-dad!—but that's how it went down,
as my biker friends like to say. I didn't realize it at the time but I think that when I mentioned it as a possibility, Kelly immediately thought it was some sort of ode to
Winona
—she had a soft spot for glamour and celebrities. She probably loved the idea of being tied into Winona
and
the Learys. When people asked about it she said she liked the karma of the name, as if our son's fate (and her own) was to be part of a famous clan. Oh, she
basked.
I was just happy she went for it. One of the things I love about “Ryder” is that it's close to
writer
. And
reader
too.

My wife—that still sounds weird to me, “my wife,” and it's funny how it still makes me feel good to say it, that bourgeois part—has always been a serious Buddhist. Me, I'm a dabbler. I told you we met at Spirit Rock but technically
that isn't true. We'd seen each other a handful of times before on skid row, at the mission in Alameda. Part of the do-gooder crew serving meals to the homeless over the holidays. I was surprised to find an attraction there, on my side anyway. I wasn't sure what she felt but had an inkling. My hetero radar isn't completely broken, you know. I guess it was karma, as Kelly would say—that I'd feel an attraction toward this woman that was
physical
, aside from anything else. We didn't talk much but there was definitely somethin' going on. We percolated for three years running until we bumped into each other at the retreat. Which brought things to a boil.

Like a lot of people who become interested in Buddhism, I was traumatized by religion,
in my case the Catholic Church. My big sis and I were both victims. Cheryl got pregnant at 16 and confessed to one of the fathers. He told her there were special things he could do to make sure the baby would never come out. He said God would help, as long as she kept his intervention a secret. He tried “the cure” a bunch of times but the baby came anyway.

Oh, they did things to me too . . . that's why as an adult, I was lost. I drifted toward Buddhism, becoming fairly serious in terms of my meditation practice. But I was never as into it as my wife. Kelly went to all the advanced workshops, you know, the ones they won't let you in unless you've received the transmission of whatever obscure teaching from whatever non-English-speaking roshi. Like a lot of folks, she definitely set out to acquire a black belt in Zen. I just wasn't that interested—the minute prayer became work,
I was out the door. I wasn't wild about the hierarchy thing either. Hierarchies bug the
shit
out of me. That smugness, the whole power-tripping, my-silence-is-better-than-your-silence deal. (Anyway, it ain't Buddhism's
fault. “It's the people, stupid.”) Oh boy, did we use to skirmish! Kelly called me a living master of “couch potato Zen” and I called her Brigitte
Bardo.
“Bardo” is Tibetan—have you ever heard?—it means the limbo or “in-between.” There's a bardo between life and death, a bardo between wakefulness and sleep . . . a bardo of dreaming. “Brigitte Bardo” used to piss her off, though not completely, because remember, she was into glamour and celebrity. It was all pretty playful. The mood was still light.

Our little family moved from the Haight—from the same block Kenneth Rexroth once lived, he had these famous salons back in the day . . . everyone used to go, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia, Snyder and Joanne—Kyger—Whalen and McClure and di Prima and Anne Waldman, and of course Ginsberg and Jack—we got out of there and rented a bungalow in Berkeley. I clerked at a bookstore on Telegraph until my lawyer advised it'd be better for my case if I just stayed home and collected disability checks. (More about that in a minute.) I didn't like that but I do as I'm told.
I always obey my nurse.
So I became the house mascot, the flâneur who perfected his couch potato Zen. Kelly taught at junior high a district away. She was wrapped too tight—another phrase used by my Hells Angels friends, some of whom are
very
literate, you know, big readers, and I'm not just talking Stephen King and John Grisham, there was a 400-pound fellow with a swastika tattooed on his forehead who was crazy for Schopenhauer and Spinoza,
good Lord!—whenever I hear about one of their weekend gatherings, I'll try to show up in the bookmobile and they're
tremendously
appreciative, though I suppose I took some getting used to—my dear wife was wrapped too tight
and all that meditating wasn't fixing her. A month after we moved to Berkeley, I began to have the vibe that Kelly was staring down the double barrel of a righteous depression.

One of the larger things on her plate was Mom, a semi-invalid living back East. (Her father passed away years before.) The family business, Ballendine's Second Penny, a high-end antiques shop, had been a fixture in Syracuse for over 40 years; it only took Kelly's alcoholic brother three months to run it into the ground. Her mother had heart problems complicated by diabetes or maybe it was the other way around. The brother was living at home, doing more harm than good. Like all old people, Mom insisted she didn't need help even though she could barely make it to the john. The caregivers my wife managed to hire—she interviewed them over the phone from Berkeley, the brother being a useless piece of shit—usually didn't last the day, and for $4 an hour the best you could hope for was they didn't steal, at least not in front of you, or beat your loved one to a pulp. Like all daughters (the ones
I've
known), Kelly's relationship with her mom was deeply fucked up. Whole lotta codependency goin' on. Clara was a real pro at pushing Kelly's buttons, especially the one marked GUILT. She started flying back there every other weekend. Once she even took Ryder. He came home with a twitch;
I made sure
that
never happened again. I used to have one when I was a kid and now there was Ryder, widening his mouth every 10 seconds like a fish scooped from its aquarium.

I was surprised when Clara died. I mean, shocked at the speed of it. The flying back and forth and whatnot, the hassling with the brother, all that, had only been going on for maybe three months and I was settling in—we both were—for the long run. The money drain, the emotional drain, the massive
inconvenience
of it . . . So when we got the call she was gone, I actually couldn't believe it! I was like:
You're kidding me.
I might even have expressed as much when Kelly gave me the news. Because how many times does a pain-in-the-ass parent die in a timely way, with relatively minimal fuss? Thanks to modern medicine, the death of a parent is usually protracted, more unnatural in cause than natural. And medical heroics aside, the old scumbags seem to willfully
hang on! Like they're
invested
in not making an easy death—not for themselves, not for their kids, not for the caregivers, not for anyone. I don't mean to sound devilish but I thought she'd linger until she was 100 and counting. We
both
did, which has to be most children's secret fear. So in its own way, my mother-in-law's death was as surprising as Ryder's conception. A miracle death! I remember thinking about Clara—just a thought, no malice, hell, I was
grateful
to her—I remember thinking, “You go, girl!
That's
the way to do it—
bravo.
” There was even some money thrown in (another shocker), not a lot but enough for Kelly to take a sabbatical and go find herself.