By the time Ted got back to Marty’s, it was well past two in the morning. He entered the house as quietly as possible, reminding himself how he used to sneak back in during high school, guilty and stoned. Come to think of it, he was sneaking back in now, all these years later, guilty and stoned. The more things change. As he walked through the foyer, he could see his father illuminated by the TV static, asleep on the Barcalounger. We met by the light of the test pattern, he thought. Ted tiptoed toward the stairs, not quietly enough. Marty spoke.
“We didn’t finish our heart-to-heart, did we?”
Ted stopped and walked back into the living room. He turned off the TV and stood in a darkness broken only by a streetlamp outside. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s fine.”
“Is it okay? Is it fine?”
“I thought we could pick up where we left off tomorrow.” Ted would be just fine to never pick it up again.
“I don’t know if I have tomorrow. I got no time for bullshit. Cancer has made me a Buddhist: I am totally in the Now, baby.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because you asked me to, Dad. Good night.” Ted made to go.
“You shouldn’t smoke the pot.”
“What?”
“That’s bad stuff.”
“You’re gonna father me now? Are you kidding?”
“I’m gonna father you till the day I die. A week from Tuesday. Till the day one of us dies.” Ted could see even in the dark room that his father was very tired and, having been woken from his slumber, vulnerable, his dreams clinging to him like his cigarette smoke used to.
“Okay, Dad, I’m listening. You got a pot story?”
“I tried it once. The pot.”
“The pot.”
“Got paranoid at a boho party on Charles Street, in the fifties, I think. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at me, recited the whole of ‘Howl’ with his hand on my knee. Looked like a hairy-knuckled spider. Faygeleh. Never again. I don’t know why you’re so pissed at me, Teddy.”
“You don’t know why I’m so pissed at you?”
“No, your mother loved you enough for the both of us.”
“Huh.”
“She was all over you, tried to make you into a momma’s boy, took away your fight.”
“Your grasp of family dynamics is profound.”
“Oh, Mr. Columbia makes an appearance. Guess what? I didn’t go to Columbia. I went to NYU on the GI bill. I didn’t go Ivy ’cause I couldn’t afford it and because I had to kill Adolf Hitler with my bare hands and schtupp Himmler in the tuchus.”
“I was a sick baby.”
“You were a sick baby, yeah, but she babied you forever. One sniffle and it was high-alert DEFCON Four or whatever. I couldn’t get to you through all that mother love.” Ted the writer wondered if “mother love” was one word—motherlove.
“Well, maybe she gave me all that mother love, as you call it, because you would not accept her wife love.”
“That’s a decent point. You should thank me.”
“Why now?”
“Thank me for, with my coldness as a mate, freeing up your mom to, you know, give you all the mother love that Freud says creates confidence in a young man. Siggy say a man who is sure of his mother’s love can achieve anything.”
“Confidence? Is that what you see here? I’m Mr. Peanut!”
“You just have that stupid job to pay the bills so you can write.”
“Don’t you dare take my side now. Too late!”
“What?”
“Don’t make excuses for me.”
“If somebody else talked about you the way you talk about yourself, I’d kick their ass.”
“Well then, maybe you should kick my ass. Like the good old days. Or maybe we should get Death Nurse down here to help us. Help us seize control of our narrative—is that the bullshit you’re buying? You’d think a con artist who made his living making people want what they don’t need would no longer be blinded by a nice set of tits. You’re like a death in Venice, the con man finally gets conned.”
“Beautiful tits.”
Ted just looked down and shook his head. Marty could get expansive on the subject of tits. He was brightening; it was actually kinda cute. The life force, ragged and impotent but still there in the old man. Cute and infuriating.
“Come on, Ted, they are beautiful tits. She’s like a spic Ava Gardner.”
Sometimes the only way to stop Marty was to agree with him. Ted weighed in on the tits in question: “Good tits.”
But Marty was just getting started. “I’d slay dragons for them.”
“They’re dragon-slaying tits, sure. But I don’t wanna talk tits with my father.”
“Bullshit. You’re only here ’cause she might show up. I’m not your pimp, you ingrate.”
Ted was trying, trying to be kind, but Marty would just turn and turn and turn on him, twisting him around and around any subject, like a crocodile in a death roll, with Ted, the prey, in its mouth. Spinning and spinning. Marty gave him vertigo. And there might have been some weird shit in the Rasta weed. Maybe some insecticide they spray it with? Paraquat or something he’d heard about on the news? There was no quality control anymore.
“I’ll go then. I’ll go in the morning.”
But it wouldn’t be over that easily, and Ted actually didn’t want it over. Not deep down. He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn’t heard it yet. Marty was the lightning and the thunder.
“Just tell me what you want me to apologize for and I will. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t have time. I know I was a lousy husband and a lousy father, so are millions of other guys. It’s called being human.”
“That was really beautiful. Really cleaning up your side of the street. Means a lot to me.”
“I’m sorry, okay?”
“For what?”
Ted was aware of his own sadism, but he felt entitled to it, justified. He wanted his father to spell it out. He wanted to rub Marty’s nose in his own piss.
“Everything.”
“Huh. Like what?”
“Everything. I said everything.”
“Everything like what?”
“Everything everything.”
“You don’t even know.”
“What?”
“A million little things.”
“I’m sorry for a million little things.”
“And three or four big things.”
“And three or four big things. Happy?”
“Not yet.”
“Jesus, Ted, are you wearing the wedding ring I gave your mother on your pinky?”
“She gave it to me. She left it to me in her will. Lotta good it did her.”
“Yeah, but I’m sure she wanted you to give it to a woman.”
“What woman?”
“A woman with a vagina, for fuck’s sake. Those kinds of women. The ones with vaginae kind.”
“It’s like you want me to apologize to you.”
“I’m all ears, baby.”
“Yeah, okay, you win. I’m sorry for being a shit son, sorry for being the greatest disappointment of your life, sorry for being born.” The pot was stronger and weirder and kept coming on. Ted felt the urge to giggle. He giggled. His father looked slightly horrified; this was even macabre for Marty.
“That’s funny?”
“I think maybe it is.” Ted giggled again, verging on a stoned laughing jag.
“Shit, maybe you’re right.” Marty managed a little laugh himself.
“We are some funny fuckers.” Ted now burst into outright laughter. Marty followed suit. “Don’t laugh too hard,” Ted managed, “you’ll suffocate. You’ll die laughing.”
“You were always a funny little fuck, Teddy. To this day, only four-year-old with a sense of irony I ever met.”
An ironic four-year-old. A four-year-old with a firm grasp on gallows humor and the tone of disappointment. The language of the dispossessed and hopeless doomed forever to say one thing and mean another. Living in the gap between things as they are and things as they should be. Little ironic Teddy. Ted was grateful his father had provided that image for him; it filled him with a small sense of self-knowledge and destiny.
“Nicest thing you ever said to me.”
“You being ironic?”
“I don’t think so…?”
It was the question mark that struck them both as hysterical. They were in a groove. It felt good.
“Go to bed, Ted. Don’t go to bed angry.”
“Okay.”
“Wake up angry.”
“Good advice, Dad.”
They were both wheezing now, unable to stop the laughing fit.
“Come here and give your old man a kiss good night.”
Ted didn’t move. He was aware of not wanting to touch his father, as if the two men ran on separate currents, and contact would create shock, like they were magnets pointing the same repulsive poles at one another. Marty sensed this primitive revulsion and said, “Nobody touches the old and the sick.”
Ted softened and came forward, and put his lips on his dad’s forehead. His skin was cold and damp, inert. They could barely see each other. It was safe to love each other in the dark, Ted thought. They couldn’t see how badly they loved each other, how they always botched it, didn’t have to own that chasm of need. Ted felt his father’s soul open up to the kiss like one of those plants that grow only at night, he thought, without any irony. A nightshade. My father the nightshade.