At first, Tad was relieved to wake up. Instead of his usual wish-fulfillment dream—doing weightless triple back flips and flying through the air for his visibly impressed, if nonetheless faceless, peers—he had been trapped in a nightmare in which beautiful, naked, and, worst of all, tall young men and women were menacing him with knives. He had been brooding late the previous night about his freshman week at Hale, where he’d been teased about his shortness and townie accent, even though Hale students are supposed to be liberal. Blending that nostalgic anxiety into the triple-strength brew of his own sudden unemployment, personal scandal, and possible homelessness, it was no surprise he then had the dream he did. Unfortunately, he had to escape from his imaginary tormentors into reality.
The dream had had a calm-enough beginning, and seemed to take place at a weirdly contoured college campus that was evidently on another planet, because although the black sky coruscated with garlands of winking stars, Tad knew it was this world’s midday. Some of the dream campus’s buildings were ancient eroded stone hemispheres, like Druid igloos or the eggshell villages he’d built as a child to rule over in the sandbox. Others were futuristic, seemingly uninhabitable crystals with flaring acute gables made of mirrors. Tad, a tourist in his own subconscious, had to wonder if this was a college or an amusement park.
He ventured into one of the jagged glass chalets and found its vaulted interior was full of exotic birds in flight, which even in his deep sleep he knew to be a glamorous but bad idea. True to dreams’ subservience to thought, some of the birds immediately crashed into the mirrored walls and fell dead at his feet.
Perhaps because he was afraid he’d be blamed, the sleeping Tad then bolted, and began to run from building to building, desperate to find his dormitory, or at least the classroom he belonged in. After a tangle of moments, he’d found his alien dorm room, and then suddenly he was inside what was clearly the Victorian splendor of Hale’s secretive Serpent Club, which in true (or, anyway, waking) life he had visited only once, late at night, with his drunk roommate, who was a member. The difference on this planet was that the club was lit by Polynesian torches (Tad worried for the tapestries), and the beautiful, naked, and, worst of all, tall young men and women—apparently they were college students and not amusement park patrons after all—surrounded him with the aforementioned knives.
In his dream logic, Tad had thought all this was a bit extreme even for a fraternity initiation. Then it occurred to him that this was a curvaceous but pagan alternate world, one where, like his own, he didn’t measure up to its savage yet exacting standards. Here, though, their way of rejecting him was ritual sacrifice.
So, when the trapdoor of consciousness dropped him back into his own calm and assassin-free apartment, Tad had a moment of happy stillness before he remembered his sharp-toothed waking problems, and felt anxiety swarm back into his corporeal chapel. As he accepted the fact that he was awake, he recognized the nearby door and window as old friends and bedside guardians, first blissfully thinking he was in his childhood room in threadbare but safe Waterville, and then realizing he was in the flimsy sublet Manhattan apartment from which he was soon to be ejected.
He winced, shut his eyes again, and waited for the routine but excruciating sounds of construction that usually woke him. At an unseen site a few blocks away, every morning at eight, a sadistic symphony resumed, the world’s largest inadvertent alarm clock. Tad didn’t even know what was being built, or destroyed, but it always sounded like a gargantuan Darwinian battle between a groaning metallic pterodactyl and a solid-lead woodpecker about ten stories high.
A minute passed, though, and the silence still clung to the room, kindly, maternally. Where was its abusive masculine counterpoint, noise? The battery-powered clock on the wall made uh-uh-uh sounds as the seconds passed, tiny heaves like an ant doing push-ups. Then Tad remembered it was Sunday—Sunday, the day of cease-fire, the break between rounds of the fight, the day courtrooms are closed, bad news comes wrapped in color funnies, nothing can be repaired, and even God isn’t working.
He lay inert, eyes still shut, still half-asleep, his human chassis on cinder blocks of exhaustion. As the inarguable atoms of daily life rushed around his head, he reckoned the date, as a sailor might calculate his longitude after surviving a squall. It was … December twentieth, or, as he and his brothers used to reckon it in their childhood eagerness to get to the big day, Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve. The holly-decked juggernaut was entering the home stretch. The winter solstice meant the next few days would be the darkest of the year. And, to compound the call to significance, it was also, as he’d realized, Sunday, itself a scale-model weekly version of Christmas—a stern miniholiday pressuring you to relax and be grateful, to enjoy yourself solemnly, and, above all, to belong.
The initial safety of the bedroom shifted into hard focus as Tad cautiously reopened his eyes. Every morning has its own birth trauma. Every day has its dog. The third dimension, even at its nicest, has dangerously definite lines and angles—the slash where ceiling meets wall, the furniture that clearly exists as obstacles (a mere twister could turn any chair into a deadly threat), the cookie-cutter assault on the eyes where violently rectangular windows leap into view, light blasting its dispassionate scrutiny through them from the crowded, windy, and heavily trafficked outdoors.
Tad could feel the drone and dross of the moving air, hushed but varying like indifferent applause. He sensed descending like silt the tension of imminent phone calls, the ineluctability of bills, and the mundane lurches and gurgles of activities in other apartments. He heard someone’s footsteps hurrying toward him down the hall, which might have alarmed him, but he knew from experience it was a trick of the old building’s ceilings, and the person was upstairs, not in this apartment. Outside, a drowsing dog barked, its own tiny territory invaded by its own nonexistent dogcatcher. Then a car backfired, and after the barking, it, too, sounded like senseless, snappish aggression. Elsewhere on earth, grass, plankton, arsenals, and populations grew. All this palpability presented itself to Tad as an opponent to be wrangled. Dreams you ride, but life you’re supposed to drive, and it’s a faulty, strictly manual transmission. He closed his eyes again. As a child, he had done it to make himself invisible to others. As an adult, he did it to make the world invisible to him.
He loved life’s details, relished even its absurdities, delighted in the oddity of human and animal culture, but simultaneously dreaded living. He loved people when he was alone but was terrified by the dynamics of actual company. He was his own best friend and his own worst enemy, which averaged out to mean he was barely acquainted with himself. He wasn’t anything so binary as manic-depressive, but both at once, and through his veins coursed a red-blooded blender drink of joy, fear, and confusion. He knew the celestial setup of heaven—angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim—but whenever his father, the almost-superfluous press rep for the not very pressworthy mayor of Waterville (the town that was host to hearty Hale) mentioned offices like comptroller or council speaker, Tad closed his ears. He knew how plenary indulgences worked in purgatory, and how to pay Charon to cross the River Styx, but he didn’t know escrow from escarole, and when people discussed hedge funds, commodities, or the Federal Reserve, he chose not to understand. He loved the idea of protecting the innocent and romancing Rapunzel, but in those arenas he was mainly a Soldier of Fiction. Even as a teen at Waterville Latin, his would-be wiseacre friends had adapted a flip slang greeting to feature him specifically. They’d usually mock-hail one another with “How are you? Mad? Sad? Glad? In between?” But as Tad’s trademark edgy ambivalence became familiar to them, they adapted their greeting to “How are you? Mad? Sad? Glad? Or … Tad?”
He had been reading in his folklore studies about an ancient Arabian tribe for whom to touch a maiden was a commitment to marry her—a stricter version of the “You break it, you’ve bought it” policy—and at this moment he was similarly reluctant to commit himself to reality by touching his feet to the floor. He reviewed in his mind what the day ahead might contain, as if to find a carrot worth moving his ass for. Though he imagined himself isolated in life’s melee, a small skewed-orbit Pluto in the solar system of society, he had still, somehow, been invited to seven different Christmas parties that day. They were all crowded together at a week’s remove from the holiday’s ground zero, because those who throw Christmas parties know that to do so any closer to the actual holiday would mean their invitees might stiff them to be with their more genuine friends and family.
Tad added up the invitations in his mind, and even as he tried to enjoy the pleasant fact—or fancy—that they were a supposedly lucky seven in number, it also reminded him that two competing theses were being written on the number seven in his graduate department alone, and he had better get cracking on his Social Hierarchies of Imaginary Places before someone else stole his footnoted thunder. He didn’t really want to write it—the research he had yet to do was vast—but without it as a goal, his life seemed meaningless.
He breathed deeply and reminded himself that he had to look for a new job and an apartment, and the parties he was invited to, however unappealing several of them were, might yield some leads. Network and survive. A midwinter day’s work. Besides, the most unlovable assembly may offer free food. He groaned (his last official act as a sleeper), swung his body outward like the plank pirates’ victims must walk, and touched his feet to the floor. From air lock to space walk. Perhaps by Arabian standards, he was now married to reality, but it was in name only.
He sat up, thereby achieving full three-dimensionality. The sheets of his bed lay tangled and creased like those on a sickbed, or one where love has been recently made, but to Tad they resembled a relief map of the Arctic. He ambled listlessly to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet and offered the gods of regularity a sacrifice he had made himself.
How could anyone ever love me, he thought, in his depression, when I emit shit on a daily basis? After a moment, he upbraided himself for upbraiding himself. Everyone shits, he reminded himself, in the same way he had to remind the very youngest potty-conscious students at the Excelsior School, where he’d worked until Friday. And some of them are loved. Of course, he mentally argued the case with his several selves, even the most loved keep the process as secret as possible.
Unsettlingly, perhaps because of all his recent trauma, instead of the single brown Germanic blimp that indicates solid health, there in the bowl bobbed a tattered yellow flotilla, feather-edged and legion. As the fragile archipelago swirled away in the flush, Tad was surprised to be reminded of the teeming circles of angels surrounding the Light he’d been admiring in Gustave Doré’s drawings of Dante’s Paradiso. The Milky Way galaxy itself, he mused, also resembles a toilet in midflush. Was seeing angels in the toilet or toilets in the cosmos—firmament as excrement—a sign of madness, sadness, or gladness? As long as you find things interesting, he tried to reassure himself, you will survive.
As he washed his hands, disavowing his dump like Pontius Pilate, he reviewed a few of the day’s options, options being a rare opportunity for him. His family was gathering for brunch, but after his oldest brother Les’s recent suicide attempt, the mood would be strained. One of his downtown artsy friends had begged him to attend a charity matinee of his one-man show, but however worthy the charity, it was still a one-man show. His graduate department at the Alternative College was having an open house, but since he hadn’t done any work on his thesis for over a year, he’d be on the defensive, and he didn’t want even to pretend to listen to people discussing their thousand-page manuscript on the futility of language. He’d just been fired from teaching at the Excelsior School, so showing up at their party would be arguably psychotic. One of his best friends from Hale had invited him for dinner, but Tad’s strong-willed ex-girlfriend might be there, and as beautiful as he remembered her to be, he didn’t want to see someone he’d misused, however unconsciously. There was another, unearned invitation he couldn’t remember at the moment, and, finally, Dean Parish, a man with whom he’d had a disastrous single dalliance, had sent him an engraved invitation to a very fancy late-night soiree, presumably as a gesture of reconciliation. In theory, Tad liked forgiveness, but the prospect of seeing thoughtless Dean, for whom he’d mistakenly left thoughtful Angelo, his lover of five years, made his shoulders ache. All these assemblies were supposed to be sources of comfort and company, but with his freshly kindled brush fire of crises, Tad wondered if he could socialize while in a secret state of panic. The past three days had almost unhinged him, and there was no spiritual screwdriver in sight.
First and fearmost, he’d been dismissed from his job at the tony East Side elementary school where he had been the staff storyteller while he worked on his dissertation. His dismissal wasn’t just a mere downsizing, although he had felt miniaturized to about an inch tall as he’d dragged himself out the playground gate. The crisp new principal, Mr. Hyer—as he insisted even the adult teachers and employees address him—had reflexively fired Tad when a prescription-drugged divorced mother had imagined Tad was touching her son improperly.
The fact was, Justin loved piggyback rides, and no one but Tad was available to oblige him, since the boy’s real and indifferent father was off supervising a Hong Kong bank’s navigation of the consequences of reversion to the Mainland. Tad took pride in the child’s trust, and the fact that Justin saw him as large and competent. The only completely relaxed relationships Tad had were with children, because they embodied pure hope. They managed to find life extremely interesting; they were its happy ending, only at the wrong end of the story, as if God had gotten His film reels mixed up. More wonderfully, children looked up to Tad, and they were free of sexual and career agendas. Even their selfishness he found bracingly straightforward. They were as innocent as animals being videotaped, unaware of society’s judgmental camera. They had no plan but the moment, few concealed emotions, and no business trips beyond make-believe. And, the joy of childhood included the fact that, except for refrigerator art, there was no paperwork.
Justin had chattered to his mother endlessly and enthusiastically about how much he loved Tad. It was a phrase the unscary talking monster puppets on morning television encouraged children to utter, and there had been a recent craze for it among the students at Excelsior. One jaded eight-year-old had even taken to saying it constantly to adults he disliked, as a kind of secret insolence, to watch them coo back at him like duped pigeons, and only when it became clear he was spoofing—he had loudly avowed his love for the janitor and for a picture of George Washington—did Mr. Hyer ask the student body to start saying “I love you” more selectively.
Justin’s mother withstood the lovefest, but when the boy accidentally referred to Tad as “Daddy,” the overcaffeinated and underoccupied divorcée, in her own confused anger, chose Tad as a scapegoat for her husband’s abandonment. She had heard Tad was gay, and like many people with minds resembling country clubs (they only allow notions they’re already acquainted with), she assumed this meant he coveted children. Mr. Hyer made no attempt to argue with the woman, who was also a board member. To him, the customer was always right.
Remembering the accusation racked Tad anew, like a hangover made even more arduous when you remember what happened. The charge was false, unprovably false, and Tad and most of the staff knew it—even Mr. Hyer probably knew it—but the principal served the board, however skittish in their wealth, and in this particular pecking order, Tad was the sacrificial pawn. Old Mrs. Lord, the previous principal, wise and firm and pressure-resistant, would never have yielded. She was a child-rearer, not a fund-raiser, and valued programming over ratings. Besides, she had her own gay middle-aged son, a marriage counselor who, though never married himself, had written the best-seller Men Are Convex, Women Are Concave. Mrs. Lord had doted on Tad’s doting on the children at Excelsior. But Mrs. Lord was dead, and the dead lose all veto powers.
Tad needed to unwrap a fresh bar of soap in order to shower, and he squirmed at its sharp edges, like rubbing a wooden box against himself, as he lathered up under the spigot’s impersonal torrent. How could he face the call to Fezziwiggly carelessness when he’d never felt so careworn in his life? Garth, the actor who held the lease on this apartment, had phoned on Saturday with the news that he was leaving his national tour to return to New York and that Tad would have to find a new place to live. Garth felt that playing the starving but surprisingly well-toned Second Peasant in the forcibly induced hit Dickensian musical reduction, A Song of Two Cities, did him no good in the hinterlands. He’d accepted the same meager role as a replacement in the Broadway cast. Being an extra in a national tour was the lowest, by Garth’s figuring—at least once you’ve ascended from community theater to the professional stratum—and being an extra on Broadway was a step up from that. It would allow Garth to audition to replace actors in featured parts, or, better yet, for a chorus role in the original cast of a new bad show. Above that, of course, towered the upper reaches of leading roles and actual stardom, and, as theoretical as life in other galaxies but just as dazzling a distant possibility, roles in television and—though its all-powerful name, like Jehovah’s, must not be spoken, at least not to fellow actors—movies. Stardom promised exemption from being billed “in alphabetical order” or “in order of appearance.” It was the far-flung first link to his name above the title, a private suite above steerage, the immortal boy in the bubble, the rajah in his howdah, unfireable above his supporting cast, fame as rebirth, the salmon paradoxically spawning itself.
That was all fine for Garth, the safety net of a Broadway salary, Les Confortables, but now Tad would have no home from which to look for a job, and no job to pay for a home. His old parents, who were flying in from Boston, would find this excruciating news, since as a graduate student in folklore, he was virtually unemployable. It would pinball off their unwitting prejudice to remind them Tad was gay and so, by traditional standards, a failure. It would ruin Christmas, especially after Dad’s heart attack and Les’s suicide attempt, so Tad resolved not to tell them. Self-doubt usually assures itself it’s actually thinking of others. The people he’d see at the day’s looming festivities would probably gloat inwardly or pity him, depending on whether they felt below or above him, respectively, and he decided to play those particular summit meetings by ear.
Several times as he showered, Tad thought he heard the phone ring, bringing hope or sympathy, but he knew from experience it was actually Garth’s plumbing, which made the water pounding the tub floor ring at the same treble as the phone would. It reminded him of his adolescent apprehension, when he always thought he heard parental footsteps approaching his room while he masturbated, when in fact what he heard was his own pounding heart. Still, his superstitious side couldn’t resist turning off the water to listen for the phone, only to be ridiculed by his practical side for doing so when silence followed.
Finally, he stepped from the shower and rubbed a towel on his still-boyish red mop. Red hair, he had long bitterly noted, usually indicates best friend rather than main character, dummy rather than ventriloquist, Jimmy Olsen rather than Superman, farmhand rather than love god. He shivered as his bare feet met the cold tiles—another soft thing about dreams: no floors—and stood on tiptoe to see himself in the mirror above the sink. On top of everything else, or, rather, under everything else, why did he have to be so short? Mimi, the coolly inefficient Frenchwoman who had come in Mr. Hyer’s entourage to serve as his assistant, seemed determined to mistake him for a child whenever he appeared at her desk to ask why she hadn’t done something she’d assured him she would. “Yes, little buoy?” she’d say in her cushiony accent. “May I help you?”—obliging Tad to remind her he was a colleague before asking where his photocopies were. They were never ready, but she spoke with such circuitous condescension, it was somehow Tad’s fault by the time she turned away to answer the phone. Sometimes you have to be kind to be cruel. Tad suspected she was using her foreignness as a cover, to allow her to mock him with impunity.
There in the mirror, like a reluctant twin peering over the fence, was that furious baby face, downy and disheveled like Donald Duck, the face old ladies still beamed at on the bus, the face that had gotten him cast as the Littlest Angel, even though—already an expert on fantasy at age ten—he’d protested to his teacher that the whole story made no sense, because angels were created as God’s minions at the dawn of time, and little boys didn’t die and “become” angels. She’d told him this was a make-believe heaven, rather than the actual one. Later, he was assigned Peter Pan (surprisingly, a gratifying power trip), Oliver Twist (more passive but still pivotal) and, at Hale, that master manipulator Puck. Tad had liked being supposed elfin as a child—it had given him a feeling of magical power—but as puberty demanded he enlist in its debauch, his smallness had become problematic and somehow another symbol of failure to progress. He wanted to dominate, and most men and women wanted to dominate or protect him.
He was thirty-four now, literally older than Christ, about to hit the decaying side of the biblical warranty of threescore and ten, and everything he’d tried, including growing up, had seemed to come to nothing. He really wasn’t determined enough to be a professional actor, and anyway, he found auditions humiliating. His doctoral thesis was now years overdue. His uneventful years of living with tryingly virtuous Angelo were now fading in memory, and he wasn’t proud of the way he’d taken advantage of the one person, however intellectually limited and tone-deaf, who’d loved him unconditionally.
The only project he’d successfully completed was getting into and graduating from Hale, revenge for his dead grandparents, who’d cleaned bathrooms and served meals to the insolent rich boys there. He’d also cured himself of his Waterville accent, by dutifully repeating out loud the standardized dialogue on afternoon soap operas: “Whom … will … Maeve … plot … to … destroy … next?” As a life’s work, though, these were, at best, preliminary.
He hung up the towel without bothering to refold it. There would be no need to shave for a few days. He had done that on Friday, the crucifixion day, before his meeting with Mr. Hyer, which he’d foolishly thought would involve a Christmas bonus. Still, a slight red stubble glinted on his soft chin, odd, like paprika on strawberry ice cream. “ ‘Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin,’ ” he recited. Even in nursery tales, the males have to stake their self-esteem on their virility. The pigs prevail in the story, but in real life the wolf would win. In real life, the cat gets the mouse. The hunter kills the rabbit. That was the consolation of folklore. Jack beats the giant, but Jack could never beat the insurance company.
Tad shivered as he recalled his nightmare, and then remembered in rattled dismay that he’d unpacked his suitcase in it—there’d been a dorm room sequence—and so he must have left all his clothes behind in dreamland, and they were now irretrievable. After a moment, the illogic of his imagined loss struck him. It was a joke and a relief, and he shook his head in typically mixed grim amusement as he dressed. As his mother would have pointed out, had she been able to bear hearing about nudes with knives, he hadn’t really been stabbed and he hadn’t actually lost any clothes. So, life should seem good. Zero in some cases is a positive number.
He put on clean blue jeans and a white button-down shirt—a noncommittal costume that was innocuous to a wide range of social situations, a sort of sartorial Esperanto—and ambled kitchenward, past Garth’s framed old fifties movie posters that hung in the hall. One hysterically advertised a forgotten sci-fi epic, Battle for the Earth, with the overwrought motto “Incredible realism claws at your disbelieving mind!” He’d never heard of anyone in the cast, but presumably they’d all once hoped this now-sunken venture might give them a leg up in Hollywood’s classic mud wrestle. The lurid poster art showed what looked like an overgrown slice of pizza with everything making off with an ill-advisedly underdressed female astronaut, and Tad could only assume that here was a creature who was trying to marry up. He felt a pleasant discomfort at the squirming woman’s pomaceous, radiation suit–bound body, but he figured he was simply responding as ordered to the poster’s hard-sell fantasy.
Next to that poster hung a companion piece, promoting a similar slice of delirium, this one called Colossal Planet. Its fevered artwork showed a clean-shaven man in a torn loincloth, wrestling with the enormous pythonlike coils of a Princess phone cord, as the menacing face of a kitten filled the horizon behind him, its eyes twin crescent moons. Trapped, in a world he didn’t choose! Unlike the picture starring the unearthly pizza, this film featured someone Tad had heard of, and hated. Tad Vessel, who played the man made microscopic, had been a teen star of sixties beach movies—the second lead, who usually wants to give a concert to save the seminary—and Tad’s mother, who was almost as superstitious as she was taught to be by her ghost-invoking Irish immigrant mother, had named him after the actor because the young nurses in the maternity ward had all been talking about him with reverence when her son was born. Tad had to live with his name’s insipidness, like a tattoo of a koala applied in ineradicable maple syrup. No nickname he promoted for himself ever took, as if his birth certificate were destiny. When Vessel had announced publicly he was suffering from AIDS, Tad used the opportunity to come out to his mother, only to hear her say, “It’s all because I named you after him!” Since her own mother had believed wholeheartedly in banshees and demons, for her to be merely secularly superstitious was a kind of advance. “I love you in spite of that,” she’d added, and it was the effortful way she said in spite of that that he’d had to live with ever since.
The kitchen’s old wooden cupboards creaked and clicked even when untouched, as if apathetic poltergeists were browsing for food but didn’t have the will to do so vigorously. Tad didn’t find anything that qualified as breakfast in them, or in the refrigerator, empty except for one last cellophane-wrapped, rubber band-bound hot dog, a dachshund in a strait-jacket. There was also the leftover fruit salad he’d bought to be virtuous and had yet to eat. He was too tired to chew, so he put the salad in vegetarian Garth’s blender, then watched the chunks of fruit disappear into a churning pink vortex, like the limbs of a swimmer yanked under by a shark.
As he sipped the grainy juice that resulted, the TV news nattered on in the background like a garrulous neighbor, only instead of yard sales, it announced tribal warfare in Africa, genocide in Southeast Asia, and a pending sexual harassment suit involving a dog owner on behalf of her pet, claiming a neighbor’s dog had made unwanted sexual advances to hers. Tad sighed, and was startled to hear his mother’s resignation in his voice.
The phone rang, and he answered it. Let the games begin.
“Hi, Tad, it’s Bonny.” It was his brother Les’s wife. She was trying to be cheerful, but he knew she was under great strain. “Your folks got here last night—ha ha, you can hear your Dad editorializing in the background! Whew! He thinks every room is a political convention! Nat and Rekha are here, too, so we’ll have all three brothers for a … a nice get-together.” She sounded harried.
This was the first time the Learys hadn’t had Christmas at the folks’ sagging home in Waterville. Tad, Nat, and Les had all relocated to the New York area, and Dad’s heart attack had signaled to all that it was time to regroup for this year’s Annual Report. When Christmas shifts from the aging parents’ home to that of the child with the biggest house, it’s the passing of the torch, a shift of capitals and empires, like the Roman Empire or the papal seat shifting, from Rome to Avignon or Byzantium, from New York to Washington, D. C., from the Old World to the New.
“I look forward to it,” Tad responded, unsure if he should violate Bonny’s policy of cheerfulness. “How’s Les today?”
“He’s all right,” she said, though Tad could sense her tension. Facing bankruptcy, Les had attempted shooting himself, only to have the bullet pass lightly through his brain’s frontal lobe, not lobotomizing him exactly, but leaving him unusually tranquil for a zealous chief executive. “He’s not in pain or anything, and that’s what’s important. In fact, right now he’s taking a nap. Listen, you know his birthday is Wednesday, whether or not he does.”
“Oh, right!” Les was eight years older than Tad, and to Tad the child, pragmatic teen Les had always been remarkably free of bitterness about having his birthday eclipsed by Christmas rowdydow. Les never brooded like Tad; he loved working the present. “I almost forgot!”
“I know it’s dumb, but I made a cake for him, and it looks like there aren’t any birthday candles here.”
“You want me to bring some?”
“Would you please?”
“No problem. I’ll be there right around eleven.”
Tad remembered he hadn’t done any shopping for family gifts, and his two small nephews might expect presents even though the holy day was a few days off. They were too young to be gracious if they didn’t like what they got, and their playtime obsessions changed almost weekly, so Tad decided to gather clues at brunch and choose presents after that.
Last Christmas, he had made a point of not getting Angelo a gift—it had been his passive way of provoking the breakup he’d thought he wanted. It had worked, the way shooting Archduke Ferdinand brought on the war, but now he regretted his backhandedness. He tried to change his mental channel as his inner closed-circuit aired, just for him, Angelo’s confused, wet-eyed expression, the second annual broadcast of A Special Awful Christmas.
Tad considered heading downtown on his bicycle, but the television had forecast snow, and he didn’t want to pedal home at midnight in a blizzard. He grabbed his black leather jacket, which he’d gotten after the breakup to boost his sense of power, even though he’d been disconcerted when his middle brother, Nat, had seen it in September and said, “Is that your gay uniform?” In puerile, macho defiance of recently rough Fate, he took no gloves or hat. In old Irish songs, the suitor stands hatless in the rain outside his sweetheart’s, dies as a result, and is lionized for doing so.
In the small vestibule of the building, he saw on the table for errant junk mail a charity solicitation from the American Cancer Society aimed at one of his neighbors who had just died of the disease. Planned Parenthood had sent Tad a booklet, also unnecessarily, and there were a few unclaimed catalogs for clothes and holiday cheese wheels. Again, Tad felt remiss for not yet having done his Christmas shopping, and again he criticized his self-criticism, since he still had four days to do it, and most humans procrastinate.
He emerged onto the still side street, with Riverside Drive’s low stone wall and ceiling of frail branches a few yards away. Technically, he was living on West Eighty-fourth, but he preferred to refer to it by its honorific, Edgar Allan Poe Street. Given the choice between math and English, statistic and mythology, Tad took the latter. Taxi drivers, of course, never knew where Edgar Allan Poe Street was, so Tad sometimes had to submit to the gridwork terminology.
After being indoors all weekend like an animal eluding hunters, he was surprised by the toothachy cold, and the sense that the now-leafless city was draining from full color to black and white. From the park he heard several birds chirping, unexpected on a December morning, and the sounds struck him as anomalous, scraps of inappropriate happiness, like God doodling on a gray pad. Then he remembered how brother Nat had explained to him as a boy that birds never sang out of happiness, despite the saccharine animated cartoons that depicted it that way, but to stake territorial claims or to conduct mating rituals. The animal kingdom was not about happiness. He also noticed on the sidewalk a hopscotch court sketched in chalk, and was struck that in his preoccupation he hadn’t seen it there before. There were no children in his building.
“Admiring my handiwork?” He looked up, to see one of his neighbors, tired-looking but good-natured public school teacher Estelle, her long dark hair in unfamiliar braids. She was forty, but the braids made her look like a sleep-deprived teenager.
“Estelle! You drew this? For your students?” Tad now wondered whether he could survive teaching in a public school, and respected her for doing it.
“No, no, it was a folly!” She was a southern girl who relished unusual vocabulary. “I’d been thinking about my childhood in Mobile, as opposed to my nowhood! Christmas does that, I guess! And, I thought I’d try to reenact some part of it to see if I could get a Proustian bliss fix out of it!”
“And …” Tad was unnerved by an idea he would have stooped to if he’d thought of it. “How’d it work?”
“Lord!” she exclaimed, turning up her Alabama accent. Tad noticed she made it into two syllables, as in lowered the boom. “Tad—hopscotch is exercise. And not just the jumping—the drawing with chalk on my hands and knees got me winded, too! But I can throw the stone with more accuracy now. Isn’t that just adulthood for you? More accuracy but less energy!”
“And does that explain the sudden braids, too?”
“No!” She blushed. “I’m going to see my ex-husband. He’s in town for the holidays. He used to love me in braids! I think he liked the fantasy of deflowering a schoolgirl!” It was merry to her, or she played it that way, but it gave Tad shivers after his Excelsior scandal. Why would Estelle bother? he wondered. Did she expect a reconciliation?
“Well … I hope …” He was going to say “it works,” but decided she might not have actual seduction in mind. “I hope you have a good time!”
“Do you ever see your Mr. Silvarini?” she asked, her southern inquisitude mixing affection, gossip, and love of history. Estelle had never even met Angelo, but she seemed to take an interest in others’ romantic disasters, as if cataloging them might give her some handy insight.
Tad was flustered, ashamed to admit he didn’t even know if Angelo was still in New York. “Um … well …”
“Greetings, neighbors!”
It was the first-floor tenant, beefy sixtyish black trumpet player Roscoe, whose last name Tad had forgotten and kept meaning to double-check on the junk-mail table. He wore an old-fashioned porkpie hat, and looked vigorous enough to go sixteen bars without taking a breath.
“Sunday in New York!” Roscoe said with forced but effective geniality, and Tad wondered if that was the title of a jazz standard.
“Roscoe! Brunch-bound?” Tad played All’s Well When It Isn’t as well as any New Yorker.
“Yes, but not to mine. I got three gigs today. This is the apex of The Christmas Party Zone!” Roscoe carried his trumpet case in one hand and a bulky suit carrier over his shoulder. “After all this celebration, I’m goin’ to need a vacation.”
“Oh, well … Keep a-goin’!” Estelle drawled, apparently quoting some childhood verse that Tad couldn’t place.
“It’s not all biz-niss,” Roscoe drawled back at her. “I’m seein’ my son later.”
“Your son!” Subletter Tad knew next to nothing about his neighbors. “I didn’t know you had—I mean, have a son!”
Roscoe was clearly proud. “He just passed me in height. He’ll vote for the next president.”
Estelle, too, seemed uninformed, and she lived here. “You’re, uh, divorced, Roscoe?”
Roscoe shrugged. “Well, it’s not that simple.” A world where divorce is what’s simple is a complicated world. To change the subject, he turned to Tad. “Are you still workin’ on that heaven thing?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I mean that book or whatever you were writing. I told you, I’ve got a lot of old gospel songs on seventy-eights with some mighty unique heavens.” Roscoe half-sang a few bars, lightly, and it reminded Tad of his grandmother speed-speaking through a hectic rosary. “ ‘You don’t have to look swell, not for this hotel …’ And there’s one about life as a baseball game where Satan pitches and Jesus is the catcher, waitin’ to welcome you Home. And of course there’s righteous High Struttin’ heaven, puttin’ on a crown and walkin’ around.”
“Seventy-eights! Roscoe, I don’t even have a turntable. I mean, Garth doesn’t.” Tad felt sheepish that he was a man without means, a wayfarer.
“I got one. Come down after the holidays are out of the way. We’ll do gin and Jesus!” Roscoe called over his shoulder as he headed up the block toward West End Avenue. It didn’t seem like a convenient moment for Tad to tell him he’d no longer be there after the holidays.
“The weather report says heavy snow later!” Estelle said, fitting a pair of earmuffs on her head like a pilot readying for takeoff. There’d been no real snow yet in the season, though there’d been some halfhearted meandering dandruff the day before. “You need a hat, young man! You’ll freeze to death!” She headed toward Riverside Drive as Tad paused, unsure if she was being funny or if she had unconsciously slipped into teacher mode for a few seconds.
He decided to stick with his hatlessness, and set out to seek his fortune.