The Funnies (25 page)

“Um, Tim, did you just call to chitchat? Because you might remember that you dumped me, and now I'm trying to use all the free time to do something useful.”

“Jeez,” I said, already sounding like a seventh grader. “Sorry to be wasting your time.”

“Used to be it wasn't a waste of time, because I could pretend it was an investment in my emotional future.” Dab dab dab. “But now…”

“I get the idea.”

“So have you anything important to discuss?”

I marveled at this arch construction: have you anything? Something new, tossed at me to show what I was missing. And in this state, I missed it. “I guess not. I only wanted to talk.”

“Let me guess. You have a new girlfriend, and she doesn't fit quite perfectly into the little abscess in your heart where I used to sit.”

“Fuck you, no!”

“What then?”

I sighed, stammered, already admitting defeat deep down, already chastising myself for this foolish phone call, which in the long run would only make things worse. “Okay, nothing,” I said finally. “I guess I was thinking we could be friends.”

“Ah,” she said, “Just Friends.”

“Never mind, then,” I said.

“I shan't.” And that was that.

Shan't?

* * *

I finally called Susan at her office after my Friday session. My fingers were so cramped from inking and re-inking the same strip over and over that I could barely hit the tiny buttons, and I dialed the wrong number once before I reached her.

“Susan!” I said.

“Hello?” A long pause. So much for never-forgetting-a-voice.

“It's Tim Mix.”

“Oh, hi.”

“I'm calling about the conference, and to see how you're…”

“It's at the Bridgewater Holiday Inn,” she said, “do you know where that is?”

“Well, I know how to get to Bridgewater.”

“Okay. Well, you go…” And she gave me unnecessarily detailed instructions, which I dutifully jotted down on the crusty block of Post-It notes that had been left by the phone. I decided to flow with the cold currents, and so earnestly parroted the traffic lights and street names and rights and lefts, tossing in an uh-huh here and there in the hope that cordiality could be jump-started.

“So…” I said, when she was through, “are you thinking you're going to be there, maybe?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, I have obligations with other clients this weekend.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” she said breezily, “I want to apologize about last weekend. That was terribly inappropriate. I hope we can put it behind us, you know, and work together civilly.”

“You make it sound like we were in a fist fight,” I said.

“You could say that.” A long pause while that sunk in. “Look, Tim, I think that with us both coming off bad relationships and all, the last thing we need is a…a thing, clogging up the gears.” Her voice was sick with the confrontation, however minor. “Don't you think?”

“I guess.”

“So you're on a panel Sunday. ‘Taking Over the Old Strips.' It's at eleven in the morning, and they said you'd find the room on the general schedule…”

“A panel? What do I do on a panel?”

“I dunno. You sit and talk with other cartoonists in front of a bunch of people, I suppose.”

“Ah.”

“Well…”

I felt the call slipping away from me—had I had a grip on it to begin with?—and said quickly, “So, do you have time for lunch? In New York?”

A sigh. “I really can't today, Tim, I'm sorry.”

I imagined myself as a kind of Promethean figure, doomed to sit on a high peak, enduring brusque phone calls from women I have offended, every day for eternity. My crime? Bringing bathos to the mortals. “Okay,” I said, taking my medicine with a whimper.

* * *

Working in the evening, I heard a car pull up into the driveway, and its door open and close. I peeked out and saw the back half of a big, brown, unfamiliar sedan. Then I heard Pierce's voice, the sound of the screen door, and silence.

Dorn had made me paranoid. I was dying to know who had come. On the other hand I didn't want Pierce thinking I was spying. I decided to wait it out and spy later, when the visitor was leaving.

I was drafting a word-mispronunciation gag. Lindy was sitting on the floor among some messily stacked books, and Timmy was standing nearby, talking to someone outside the panel (another common weirdness of FF Wurster and I had isolated during the week). Timmy was pointing to Lindy and saying, “Bobby likes strawberries and Bitty likes blueberries, but Lindy likes liberries!”

The crisp, inarguable stupidity of this delighted me. Certainly it could pass as an original FF strip, and I figured that, if I got it right, it would be included in the final packet I submitted to the syndicate. I might even bring it to Ray Burn, if Susan still felt like setting up a meeting between us. I did several pencil roughs of the cartoon, which differed mostly in terms of placement: should Lindy be sitting on a couch or chair, or should I stick with the floor? Should Timmy be in the foreground, thus larger than Lindy, or at the same depth? I tried all the combinations, and found that Lindy on the floor, Timmy in the foreground worked best. I sketched this out three or four times, doing my best to make Timmy simply look closer, instead of unusually large. One of them looked okay, though it took me a while to figure out why: a stray line coming off Lindy's hair seemed to form a vague corner in the room, implying spatial depth. I filled in the rest of this line and added converging floor lines, and suddenly the perspective all made sense. Excited, I got out the thick paper and Wolff B. Then there was a knock on the door.

I jumped, bashing both knees against the underside of the desk. “Come in.”

The door opened and in walked Uncle Mal. He was dressed, incongruously, in a pair of cutoff jeans and a loose, short-sleeved button-down shirt, and his sham black hair was mussed on the left, possibly from driving with the window open. His goofball smile was the most honest thing I'd seen all week. “I thought I'd come out and check on you,” he said. “I've visited half your family today.”

“No kidding,” I said, rubbing my knees. They were throbbing so powerfully I thought I could hear them making a sound, a low electric hum.

“Your mom today, your brother just now. Your father's grave.”

“You picked the toughies, didn't you?”

“You're no exception, it seems.” His hands clasped each other behind his back, and he looked around the studio, nodding.

“How's Mom?”

He didn't look at me when he said, “Absent, mostly. Barely your mother anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “We took her on a picnic…”

“She remembered. It was all she talked about. She couldn't recall who took her, though. I thought it might be you two.” He gave his head a quick shake, the way a dog does brushing off flies, then met my eyes. “So!” he said. “How's the inheritance?”

“Not so bad.” I handed him the preliminary sketch. “This is the first official attempt at a cartoon.”

He glanced at it a second, then laughed out loud. “Funny.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yes. A good likeness, too, of your father's work. Your little pants are quite skillful.” He handed the drawing back.

“I appreciate that,” I said.

He spent a few seconds idly nodding. He had something to say, it appeared, but couldn't get it out. I decided to throw him a bone. “Hey,” I said, “can I ask you about a legal matter?”

His face relaxed. “Sure.”

I told him about Ken Dorn, about the merchandising situation with Burn Features. He nodded slowly, seriously as I talked, appearing to relish the gradual unveiling of the problem. For once I could see the appeal of attorneyhood. Problems, all problems, could be applied to an established set of rules for judgment, and solved. The answer to any dispute was there, in the books, waiting to be discovered and applied. He took a deep breath.

“Well, if money was the only consideration here, they'd go with the other guy.”

“Oh,” I said, crushed at having my own thoughts so succinctly voiced.

“On the other hand, you'd be surprised at how often money isn't the point.” He raised a single eyebrow. “Are you going to talk to this Burn guy?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, there you go,” he said. “Sell yourself.” He smiled a little. “If that's not too, uh, distasteful to you, of course.”

I shrugged. “I'm accustomed to the distasteful.”

He chuckled, then leveled, out of nowhere, a serious gaze at me. A little of the nervousness had returned, and he wiped his face with a pale hand. “So are you learning anything about your father?” He nodded toward the drawings.

“A little of this, a little of that.”

“Ah! Good, good. He wasn't all bad, you know.”

“I never said he was.”

At this his face flushed, and I regretted saying it. “Ah, no, of course not,” he muttered, backing toward the door.

“Say, Mal, I didn't mean to—”

“No, no, I'm prying in your work.” He opened the door. “I just want to see how you're doing, is all. I…I miss you kids. Sometimes I wish…”

“What?” I said at last, when he had long trailed off into silence.

He jerked out of it, looked at me as if he'd forgotten I was there. “I wish you'd all been little at once, like in the strip. That would have been…a lot of fun.”

Poor Mal, I thought: never married, a lover of children, left with such a rotten family to play surrogate parent to. Maybe he was right; maybe it would have been fun. Somewhere in the studio there was a promotional drawing my father occasionally sent to fans, of all six of us crammed into the station wagon beneath the weight of our dozen teetering suitcases lashed to the roof rack, waving toward the frame, as if the viewer were our best friend in the world. It was easy to contrast this with our actual vacations. I recalled a final one, a last gasp effort to a secluded lake in the Adirondacks: Rose was absent, having long since moved out, and Bobby, who had just learned to drive, insisted on taking his own car. It rained, our food was absconded with by forest animals, and Pierce, unable to sleep, flung rocks into the water all night long, keeping us up with the splashing. We left in waves: Bitty got sick the third day, and Bobby drove her and Mom back home. None of them returned. Pierce and Dad and I remained, locked in a proud silence, for the rest of the week, subsisting on mouse-gnawed junk food from a nearby convenience store housed in a tarpaper shack.

But now I could see that we were all Mal had. “Yeah,” I told him lamely. “Yeah, that would have been something,” but my face must have told a different story, because Mal only flashed a flaccid grin and walked out, making this the third—and I hoped final—conversation of the day that had ended badly.

Late that night I remembered Pierce had the car on weekends. I tried to talk him out of it, so that I could attend the conference. “Gillian could always come out here,” I told him. “I won't be around until Sunday night.”

He was lying on his bed, reading a paperback novel, but put it down now and gave this some thought. “She's never been here before.”

“Well then, I'm sure she's dying to visit.”

He looked at me as if I were insane. “No way,” he said finally.

Instead, he agreed to drop me off at the hotel. It was far from being on the way to Chatsworth, the Pine Barrens town Gillian lived on the outskirts of, and I couldn't complain. The next morning, I packed a bag with the usual items, plus a few others I thought might be useful—a sketchbook, a few things to read—and met Pierce by the car, where he was standing with shower-slick hair, staring into the distance. He brought nothing, it seemed, but the clothes on his back.

We listened to the radio, an AM station that exclusively played country classics: Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams. The DJ wisely remained near-invisible, as when he did speak it was with a quavering, spooked voice as grave as a crow's. The station fuzzed out halfway to Bridgewater. Pierce reached out and clicked the radio off, leaving us together in the soporific muffled hum of the Caddy's interior.

“So,” I said to my brother.

“So,” he said.

“What did you and Mal talk about?”

He shifted his hands on the wheel, weighing his answer. “He came out and talked to you, huh?”

“Not about you.”

“Uh-huh. Well, nothing, really. Mom. Life. Et cetera.”

I said nothing for a few miles, watching the trees drift by along Route 202. “He told me Mom's even worse,” I finally said.

“She didn't know him.”

“No.”

He turned to me. “Let's bring her home, man. I'm serious. Like, right away.”

I knew this was right: visits once a week were not enough. She hadn't even her memories to keep her company anymore, save for the stray, out-of-context recollection that floated every once in a while past her mind's eye. Or at least it so seemed; what did I know? I was beginning to get an inkling, through the clumsy lens of my own meager loneliness, of the vast, clinical emptiness of my mother's. “Yeah,” I said, feeling my heart shrink to a tiny, callused knob. “Yeah, we have to do that. Do you know the first thing about it?”

He shrugged. “No. Give her medicine? Clean her up, talk to her? What is there to know, Tim? We just give her what she needs.”

“It has to be more complicated than that,” I said, but he met this with only a silence that persisted for the rest of the trip.

* * *

I had no idea if Susan, in her advanced state of indifference to me, had bothered to book me a room in the hotel. I checked in at the desk to discover that she hadn't, though I decided to chalk this up to unavailability, rather than malice. It was quarter to ten in the morning. I asked the desk clerk which way the conference was, and she pointed me toward a double doorway on the left, which opened into a long hallway.