The second coming, p.63
The Second Coming, page 63
On a screen back here in the manager’s office, time-stamped 9:34 a.m., a tall, trim man in a corduroy jacket is seen loping off toward the bushes with a truly preposterously large yellow carton of chicken carried by its own handle and a cardboard caddy with two bigass American coffees. On his head, bowed as if to obscure his face and thwart any identification, he appears to be wearing a Pilgrim hat, black, high-crowned, with a buckle.
A.6: “Memories Can’t Wait” (3:30)
His father was dying, had perhaps for some time been dying, was what Moira had wanted him to know over the phone. Round and round they’d gone, for how long he was afraid to look back at the call history and find out (words, words, words), but underneath, dodge and duck as he might, he was essentially a little boy sticking fingers in his ears and repeating, “I can’t hear you.” And of course he could hear just fine, or better than fine. When she started with, “You should know Dad’s been sick,” it meant “He is dying.” Ethan could hear this not only because he knew the drill, but because his father’s death had been waiting out there for him for a while now, a bony figure keeping its mouth shut behind an arras—he had almost invited it in by his own actions, as he used to think his father had invited his mother’s—and were he still writing a play it was the only thing that could have been left to happen here at the start of Act III, for of course “Your father is dying” meant in turn what Dad himself would never say, which was “Please come home.” It would even be simple enough: go down to Ocean City; take a hard right. But why hadn’t Dad at least told him about the failing kidney? Why hadn’t Moira? Right. Because Ethan’s own rebellions had as much as told them not to. Because he himself had made abundantly clear through his silence that the wreck of his life was their fault, and his sobriety wouldn’t withstand it.
And of course today happened to be the first of his two nights off, the waiter’s early-mid-week weekend. Right around the equinox, his bad moon rising, things in the balance. He had Jolie coming over tomorrow, he should really start cleaning the apartment, but the days were still long enough that the sun had not yet gone down behind its waterfall, and at some point, trying to parry Moira’s thrusts, he’d left the apartment, hopefully locked and with the stove off (though doubtless still in disarray), and had begun to walk south, phone to his ear. I stayed behind through all of Mom and all the shit that came after, he wanted to tell her, while you went off to Boston. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, Moira. When was he ever not fine?” From a distance, if you squinted hard enough to miss the little razor-phone in his hand, you might have thought him one of the city’s ten thousand madmen, talking to himself, locked in passionate debate.
And then he rang off, and somehow he was way down by Madison Square, as if to clock in at the latest restaurant. An investment bank had failed two days earlier, there had been an odd sense of suspension in the dining room ever since, watchfulness with an edge of high hilarity, people spending money like it was a thing that wouldn’t exist tomorrow, rounds of Courvoisier and Dungeness crab, and now whole structures of empire seemed to tremble in superposition about him. People straining to keep holding their breath. To know whether the cash in his pocket would be worth anything on the other side, you’d have to be able to both predict the future and know a lot more about the philosophy of money than Ethan ever cared to. Some twenty blocks farther south of here, though, he knew, was the greatest bar in the world, which would be standing even after everything else was rubble. And apparently his mind had already made itself up somewhere to remove the last block, under these extenuating circumstances; when he looked down, he saw a text he’d sent to Jolie calling off tomorrow, lest she show up and see the state he apparently was in. Surely any day now he would undo or repair this damage, find a way to go across. Meanwhile, in the bar called Heaven, he would be received as a long-lost son or else not known at all. Assuming there was even a difference.
A.7: “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” (3:53)
It is unclear to Teresa whether she even still buys this postulate about people not changing (as, in a dozen different ways, she’s given Moira to believe) or if she’s just too much a product of her own time and place—too much a Masshole—ever to surrender a tactical advantage. Between the week two years ago when, on a visit to her parents, they’d strayed through the city hall in Medford to formalize their decade-plus relationship, Izzy standing by with a Mason jar of confetti…between that week and this one, something like half the states have decided they don’t give a shit who you marry, so Teresa is sure these old coots watching them walk up this particular aisle now wouldn’t notice or care if she were to weave her fingers into Moira’s. It’s just, she isn’t sure Moira would want to if she knew what Teresa has done.
Their seats are in the front row, and she’s had Izzy sit beside rather than between the two of them, in case her own mind changes. But on a white screen stupidly placed under a tree more or less blocking the stupid, stupid boat, pictures of the family now flit past. And though you might think this would make the boat itself less of a beam in her eye, and though the images are still barely visible due to the sun, the striking thing about these Asperns, all of them, is how stubbornly they resist change. It’s like they’d moved out here to try to draw a circle around the family, seal it against whatever forces the mother had set loose by the scale of her longings, safe in this little town that time forgot. Having managed to run as far as MIT—as Berlin—Moira had proved ultimately as privy to the delusion as anyone else, and had ended up back here, a placeholder for the brother…and all the while, Teresa’s realized, waiting on his return. Even now, she can feel Moira counting on her brother to come release her from these burdens she’s had to carry all by herself. And Teresa has realized something else, too, sitting here in front of the murmur she’s trying to hear as impatient rather than just disapproving (and feeling punched in the face every time the guy appears on the screen, his mother’s spitting image): that what she’d told the probation officer this morning was true, that she really does expect him at the last possible minute to show.
See, there’s a paradox, she thinks, though possibly also a solution. She’s long known that you can’t let the past contain all information about the future—there is an actual law of physics—even as she’s been arguing to Moira that at bottom most folks are incapable of change. But what if an inability to change is not predestined but is one of those things a person like Teresa, through sheer New England mulishness, can believe into being? Then, conversely, to change would require the belief that you are capable of it, either your own or someone else’s. About her own capacity to change the woman she loves through her scheming—whatever may become of the brother—Teresa would still take the short side of the bet. But at least it means that, pretty soon here, one or the other of them is going to turn out to have been right.
A.8: “Nothin’ but Time” (10:55)
You have not lived as a citizen of your time, not really, if you haven’t spent a Saturday in summer at New York City’s lone IKEA, way down by the salt domes and abandoned granaries of Van Dyke Street, on the far wrong side of the BQE. Ethan had pitched it to Jolie mostly for the excuse to ride the water-taxi from Thirty-Fourth Street—“the Swedish Children’s Museum,” he’d promised—though how and whether this comported with the unwritten amendments to the custody agreement was anybody’s guess. At any rate, he’d been picturing it as a quick in-and-out affair, to get her a proper kid’s bed, but inside found a logic not dissimilar to a casino’s, with the exits and the action placed maximally distant from each other; and now that they had boarded the escalator to the Showroom Floor, they were too far from the door to turn back. He held Jolie’s hand tighter in his, unable to imagine finding her again should they be separated. But here at the top was a labyrinth of cute roomlets along the lines of what he’d been imagining for the sleeping nook at home—he could actually feel her pulse speed up. Though of course the new bed would have to work for him, too, the other eleven out of every fourteen nights, since he never could get to sleep in the living room anymore, feeling obscurely troubled by the window’s flaws—and all this provided he could talk Sarah into the next logical step, which was allowing overnights on weekdays and alternating weekends.
The kids’ bedrooms were right up front, unavoidable, like a gift shop you had to exit through, only in reverse. “What do you think?” he asked Jolie, striking a mattress. “Too firm?” But it soon became clear that, transfixed as she was by the bedframes, rugs, and lamps, and by his presence, she would have said yes to anything. It was a lady in an Eagles jersey, grandmother of five, who would help them pick out the right one.
And only now, their decision made, did the IKEA reveal itself as labyrinthine in the Greek sense, a prison. Shortcuts dotted on the “You Are Here” maps had been bricked over in real life. Every jewelbox room, every sleek storage unit and kitsch painting on this involuted circuitboard would receive its due. And though Jolie was too much Sarah’s daughter to say anything, she was his as well, and so of course she wanted everything. Even when Ethan had managed to discover some fire stairs, they found themselves fed onto what various signs denominated the Marketplace Floor. Which was crazy—had they not just been in the Marketplace for over an hour? But no, the Marketplace Floor turned out to be a kind of shadow-self of the Showroom Floor; same massed shoppers, same anfractuous path, except here you could actually place in your giant cart the items whose ideal forms you’d only been able to yearn for above (to the degree you’d made it through Plato in college).
He felt on the verge of epiphany about a cultural order that could yoke together such seemingly unlike things: the assembly line that made the furniture, the cattle chute that bore you past it, the ships on the harbor and the landfill beyond—people working at IKEA who could afford only IKEA. It was like a nineteenth-century utopia where all superfluity, all deviation and excess, had been sheared away. His response, this time around, was to let Jolie fill the cart with the sundry fripperies about which he’d been so disciplined above. Her room, the sleeping nook, would become her room again. He himself was no longer even landing auditions, it was as if somehow the terrible self-consciousness of AA had sapped him of his powers (as if now when he said yes to everything, it was for the wrong reasons), and was back exclusively to restaurant work. He didn’t want to think about whether the sum of cash in his pocket was sufficient to cover these lampshades and sheets and fuzzy throw pillows, but perhaps it was like riding a wave, you just didn’t look back, didn’t look down…
It was only in the too-long line that he had time to slow himself and reflect on the other problem: this was just way too much stuff to haul back on the water-taxi or in the yellow cab it would also leave no money to pay for. At some point, he was going to have to tell her what he’d realized—that something was going to have to be sacrificed for something else, or all would be lost. But just look at her, his little girl full of hope: he couldn’t, not now. So he held off, and held off, and inched forward in the line, and for as long as he could, and did, he was the greatest fucking dad in the world.
A.9: “Bigmouth Strikes Again” (3:13)
At 10:05, with the slide show on its fourth or fifth pass and the older folks now audibly restive—when Corinne in tasteful tie-dye has settled into the second row and it has become clear that there will be no brother or niece to fill the two remaining spots up front, leaving herself and Izzy the sole Asperns present to discharge family duties—Moira tries to get Teresa to look at her and then, having failed at last, rises to go do what Ethan can’t, or possibly won’t. She motions for someone to kill the projector in back. The gesture feels spurious, the authority unearned, and as she stares out from this tree-shade into the lightening, looking for further faces, she is startled to see instead toward the back her ex-sister-in-law Sarah Kupferberg, fifteen years older but still as killingly beautiful as on that day at the HoJo, squeezing past to a line of free seats. She is trailing an older man, plausibly her father, whom it occurs to Moira she’s never met. Perhaps she has underestimated Ethan after all, she thinks. Perhaps he’s orchestrated a massing of everyone he can get hold of to bid goodbye to the Molly A and whatever she stood for; perhaps if she looks hard enough even Squatch will have overcome his bruised feelings at her never sleeping with him and have turned out, too, swelling the thinned ranks of the bereaved to make this seem something more than a tax deduction. Something more like a proper goodbye.
But Jesus, what is wrong with her. She has only to look at Sarah’s face more than a decade after Ethan left to see her own vexations mirrored. Some people might change; her brother never does. And is this how Teresa will feel about her, too, should they fail to pull through? She digs out her rolled sheet of paper and is surprised to find herself shaking. She tries to focus on the projector’s lens back there, its cold black eye. Then she switches to Izzy’s bright face and feels her spirits recover; takes it and multiplies it a million times over, uses it to populate the seats. Her son is alive. And she is a professional: she does this all the time. And thus can even confidently go off-book and just say what’s in her heart, battered though it may be.
“Okay, everybody. It’s my pleasure—honor, actually—to welcome you here for this rededication, or memorial, or what have you. I know it’s been some time since my dad died. And longer since he last set sail. A lot of you will remember from the year we won nationals that he was really most himself out on the water. What fewer people know is that it was my mom who actually picked out this boat for him, and was the one pushing for the move out here in the first place. So to the degree that the championship was a credit to the town, they both had a part to play. And I just want to say on all our behalf, it was a way of giving something back to a place that for too short a time gave two such different people the space to coexist. But now, as is only fitting, my son and wife and I would like to give something back, as well…”
A.10: “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” (2:51)
Izzy, of course, knows how important the object world is, for he is its secret master. Not only the swingset chains he can creak just so or where all his army men are buried in the graveyard of the turtle-shaped sandbox out behind the garage, but the whereabouts of his yellow backpack (usually), and the wedding ring one of his moms keeps removing in anger and putting back on, and the clothes he keeps crisply folded in his floral-papered drawers, and the candy bar—the forbidden, the delicious—disappearing into a tux-jacket pocket. The objects of this world are his friends. It’s related somehow to his being an only child and half-magic and a sissy and changed at birth and various other things he’s aware already set him apart but are also all he knows. And the objects are good friends, not false ones. They do not Indian burn or titty-twist, do not make fun of his stutter, do not say Spit it out when he talks to them. And they will tell you things, if you listen. Like with his Cousin Jolie’s violin: he went right up last night after coming home and spotted its case in the room where she’d slept, and when the violin asked him, he spent some time explaining to it with great fluency what he remembered of all that had happened to him back in the hospital, or what he imagined, since he’d mostly been asleep. The mask on his face. The ivy in his arm. The needle as big as this. The violin listened attentively, wanted to know was he scared. He was a little scared, he admitted, dialing the cool dial on the bow with its wonderful flaxen hair, fiddling the little velvet latches, flipping open the secret-feeling compartment with its big scarred gemstone and its water bottle and its passport all ready for running away. The violin was what had told him Jolie would come back here, and the passport how he knows that when she goes it will be for good. If he were an object, Jolie wouldn’t have to be scared of him, and then he could just tell her We’re all scared; you can’t always be running away, but consonant blends were hard, and someone had to be free to run for staying to mean anything, and people, unlike objects, rarely listened to each other anyway. On the other hand, objects rarely surprised you. But then sometimes they did. All of which is to say that he wasn’t much listening to his other mom’s speech, he was more interested in the sound his own voice made in his head, when he turned back to see who that was arriving now to make her hitch and noticed what no one else had, yet: a new something placed beside the laptop on the table at the back. And there, in the wire trashcan where people could recycle their programs later after the boat belonged to the school, was a yellow cardboard suitcase for the chicken Izzy wasn’t allowed to eat on account of the molasses they put in the batter or the crushed-up nuts or something, though honestly it didn’t seem to fit at all.
