What Was Mine: & Other Stories (10 page)

I’ve been called in to do the lights for this- installation. “Called in” makes it sound too businesslike. My brother, the artist of the piece, called me at home and asked if one more time, as a personal favor, I’d do the lighting. I’m retired, out on disability. Actually, they paid me to go, but this isn’t a story about me. I’m forty-four—not as old as you’d expect. When people hear “disability,” they imagine an old guy. My brother is forty-one but has lied even to the newspaper in saying that he’s thirty-five. That would mean nine years between us, and I wish there
had
been nine years, because when my brother was more or less turned over to me as my responsibility, I was ten or eleven, and he was seven or eight. He wasn’t a baby I could push around. He had a mind of his own, and I was a skinny kid, though I was taller than him, but my scrawniness gave him the idea he could take advantage of me, and I didn’t stand up to him. It was too much responsibility, a ten-year-old being the guardian of a seven-year-old, but when Martha (that was our mother) had the last baby she was forty years old and suffered terrible postpartum depression, and when she never did come around, my father took things into his own hands and turned Claude over to me, for all intents and purposes. I helped him tug his sweater off, got up in the night if he was having a nightmare, and eventually became his protector, strong-arming bullies who pushed him, when I’d put on enough weight to intervene. At first it was all too much for me. It amounted to child abuse, the way my parents sloughed off my younger brother on me. The oldest was gone: enlisted in the Marines at eighteen, and gone. He had a whole houseful of kids by the time Claude and I started high school.

Get this: “Claude” is not his name. It’s Jim—plain, ordinary Jim. Not even James. I think the name he took is a little sissy, myself, but he didn’t arrive at it randomly. “Claude” was a villain who kept cropping up in his nightmares. My belief is that the name Claus—as in Santa Claus—got transformed into Claude. When he was a baby, he used to call Santa only “Claus,” drawing out the “au.” You could say to him, “Do you hear Santa Claus on the roof?” and he’d echo the name, but only the second part. “Claaaaaaaauuuuuuse,” he’d say, like somebody going superslow, trying to learn a foreign language.

Don’t get the idea that Christmas was a happy family occasion at our house. One year Martha tore out a gob of hair and stuffed it in the toe of Dad’s Christmas stocking. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her face close to his and hissed, “I knew you were pulling out your hair. I told the doctor you were,” and she screamed, as always, and he let go and that was that. Just that vein bulging near the bridge of his nose, and his frightened eyes, though he was the one who was always terrifying everybody. Christmas cards—the kind with “From Our House to Yours”—came every year from Richard, the oldest. There was a new kid in every picture, but never once did he visit, and never once did we hear at any other time but Christmas. You figure it: the second kid and Claude are now pals. They play on a basketball team together. One of Richard’s six kids decided, after he read about Claude in the paper, to send him a postcard and see if his uncle would meet him. Now the two of them are as close as two fingers in a splint. They’re their own private duet, like Irene Dunne and Allan Jones.

My idea for lighting the manhole is simple: one spotlight recessed in the ceiling, and no other lighting of any sort in the room. Trust me on this: it works, without seeming like some artsy lighting you’d see in some Off Off Broadway play. I don’t want to push the point and say it looks elegant, and, God help me, I am so tired of hearing the word “stark” that I’d never use it myself. The light seems like somebody—me—made a clear decision, and that clarity becomes something you consider when you view the installation. It might remind some people of those little overhead lights in airplanes that always make you jump when they come on, they’re
so
bright, and you wonder if the person next to you is going to give you a dirty look for reading. I was in an airplane recently, reading the newspaper, and when I looked out the window the sun had begun to set and the most amazing streak of pink fading to orange was parallel to the plane. In a gesture that was all reflex, I suddenly realized, I’d put my fingers to the window, like a kid looking into Macy’s window at Christmas.

Let me digress here: number one, I am not obsessed with Christmas. You won’t hear any more from me about it, and two, what I’m talking about is not my life, so I’ll try to stay out of the story, also. Just one quick thing: a woman sitting on the plane across the aisle from me was telling the man sitting next to her, “I could have saved myself one marriage, and seventeen years, if I’d admitted my disappointment the year we were engaged, when he gave me a pen and pencil set for my birthday.”

Speaking of pens and pencils, both Claude and I were pretty good students, but his greatest ability seemed to be with mathematics, so I was surprised when he ended up studying art in college. When you’re among artists and you express surprise that they’re often so good at math, everyone chimes in, saying that of course mathematics is all about thinking in three dimensions, and that music is all tied in to mathematics, et cetera. People feel that certain painting is like opera, and that sculpting has to do with poetry. They’re very impassioned when they talk about this, and they will at the drop of a hat. In any case, Claude was generally a good student, particularly bright at math, but I don’t remember him doing anything but trying to imitate Chinese brush paintings when he was about ten or eleven. Maybe other people would have been more perceptive, but I didn’t think he’d become an artist.

We were always pulling pranks. I’d short-sheet his bed. He’d blow up a balloon just a little bit and put it in the pillowcase so I’d hear squeaking when I laid down my head. Like all kids, we went too far. He once dumped out the antibiotics from my bottle of medicine and replaced them with just vitamin C or whatever vitamin it was, and I got sicker and sicker. I’d put a smear of Vaseline in his underpants, and when he pulled them on in the dark bedroom he’d be startled and look to see if he was bleeding. Better yet, he wouldn’t notice until he sat down, and then the strangest expression would come over his face. I also put marbles in his vegetable soup, which still makes me cringe, because he could have choked to death if he hadn’t found the first one.

Martha’s pills we didn’t mess with, you can well believe. She took pills to sleep while she was still at the dinner table, and pills with her coffee to wake up. We were the children of addictive parents—thank you for the insight, nephew Raymond. Don’t say male bonding is just a lot of horsing around—look at what got revealed to Claude when he was shooting the shit, as well as the baskets, with his nephew. And do you know how it all fits? The way painting is music and music is mathematics? Because
Dad
was addicted to
Martha
. Never left. Renewed the pill prescriptions and never did much of anything constructive, unless you consider turning a seven-year-old over to a ten-year-old constructive. Not only that, but I won Claude playing poker. That was what we were playing for, or at least what Dad announced was the prize once I’d won. I think he even said that old line about “To the victor belong the spoils.” That was because he’d had to get up in the middle of the game because Claude was having a nightmare. I could tell Dad was pissed off. Claude had spilled his milk at dinner and refused to give the baby a kiss on the forehead before Martha put her to sleep, and then, once he was down for the night, he started screaming. Dad had just had it. He gave me the responsibility for Claude once I’d won the poker game.

It’s probably pointless to go into other lighting I considered for the manhole. I thought about having crossbeams intersecting above it. Even a flashlight on the ground, as if someone had dropped it there. You think of the complicated stuff that might seem meaningful first; then you simplify too much, because the first idea was excessive and it embarrassed you. One recessed light, shining straight down.

I’m very happy for Claude’s success. I do find something strange and moving about these pieces. Though I’d primarily classify myself as a general handyman who has some better ideas about plumbing than your average Joe, I do feel that I’ve learned something about how lighting can work to enhance or detract from a piece of art by lighting these creations of Claude’s.

This is installation #6. Today is May 4, 1990. As per Claude’s request, I am once again recording some thoughts you can listen to on your way into the gallery.

Please exercise caution as you proceed. Let your eyes adjust to the dark. There is only one installation, at this time, in the gallery.

B
illy called early in the week to tell me he’d found out that Friday was Atley’s birthday. Atley had been Billy’s lawyer first, and then Billy recommended him to me. He became my lawyer when I called Billy after my car fell into a hole in the car wash. Atley gave me a free five minutes in his office so that I could understand that small claims court would be best. Billy had the idea that we should take Atley to lunch on his birthday. I said to him, “What are we going to do with Atley at lunch?” and he said that we’d think of something. I was all for getting some out-of-work ballerina to run into the restaurant with Mylar balloons, but Billy said no, we’d just think of something. He picked the restaurant, and when Friday came we were still thinking when the three of us met there and sat down, and because we were all a little uptight the first thing we thought of, of course, was having some drinks. Then Atley got to telling the story about his cousin who’d won a goldfish in a brandy snifter; he got so attached to the fish that he went out and got it an aquarium, but then he decided that the fish didn’t look happy in the aquarium. Atley told his cousin that the brandy glass had magnified the fish and that’s what made it look happy, but the cousin wouldn’t believe it, so the cousin had a couple of drinks that night and decided to lower the brandy glass into the aquarium. He dug around in the pebbles and then piled them up around the base of the glass to anchor it, and the fish eventually started swimming around and around outside the top of the submerged glass in the same contented way, Atley said, that people in a hot tub sit there and hold their hands next to where the jets of water rush in.

The waiter came and told us the specials, and Billy and I both started smiling and looking away, because we knew that it was Atley’s birthday and we were going to have to do something pretty soon. If we’d known the fish story beforehand, we could have gotten a fish as a gag present. The waiter probably thought we were laughing at him and hated us for it; he had to stand there and say “Côtelette Plus Ça Change” or whatever the specialty was, when actually he wanted to be John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, He had the pelvis for it.

Billy said, when he was eating his shrimp, “My parents had a New Year’s Eve party the last time I visited them, and some woman got ripped and took my father’s shoe and sock off and painted his toenails.” At this point I cracked up, and the waiter, who was removing my plate, looked at me as if I was dispensable. “That’s not it, that’s not the punch line!” Billy said. Atley held his hand up in cop-stopping-traffic style, and Billy made a fist and hit it. Then he said, “The punch line is, a week later my father was reading the paper at breakfast and my mother said, ‘What if I get some nail-polish remover and fix your toes?’ and my father said, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was
scared
to do it!”

“I had such a happy childhood,” I said. “We always rented a beach house during the summer, and my mother and father had one of each of our baby shoes bronzed—my sister’s and mine—and my parents danced in the living room a lot. My father said the only way he’d have a TV was if he could think of it as a giant radio, so when they finally bought one he’d be watching and my mother would come into the room and he’d get up and take her in his arms and start humming and dancing. They’d dance while Kate Smith talked or whatever, or. while Gale Storm made her
My Little Margie
noise.”

Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One was that she really liked champagne. Another was that she had been in Alateen. Her father had been a big drunk. He’d thrown her mother out a window once. She’d gone back to him but not until she’d taken him to court.

“I’ll tell you something,” Atley said. “I shocked the hell out of one of our summer interns. I took him aside in the office and I told him, ‘You know what lawyers are? Barnacles on a log. The legal system is like one big, heavy log floating downstream, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Remember every time one of those judges lifts a gavel that it’s just a log with a handle.’ ”