Even though thou seekest a body, thou wilt gain nothing but trouble.
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Slater steps onto the front porch to scoop up the morning newspaper. When he stands, he finds himself looking up at the eaves, just above the mailbox. Only yesterday, there was a large wasps’ nest there. He is embarrassed to admit to himself that he had not realized what the thing was. Living in Manhattan had not exactly made him an expert on Oklahoma entomology, unless one counted a nodding acquaintance with cockroaches. But he had received a sharply worded note from his mailman: unless he removed the nest, there would be no more home delivery.
He is so allergic to stings that he has to carry an EpiPen to avoid anaphylaxis, so he was chary of dealing with the nest himself, and he sure as hell was not about to ask his wife to do it for him. At first, when looking through the Yellow Pages for a bug-extermination service, he was unable to find any. He soon realized that the heading “exterminators” no longer existed. Bug killers were now termed “pest control” experts. Slater felt like a wuss for seeking one at all. He remembered his father going out on the back patio of their family home carrying a Louisville Slugger and, with a powerhouse swing that would make Bonds on ‘roids look tame, sending a nest flying from the patio.
When the pest control van drove up yesterday morning, things grew rapidly worse: the exterminator was a woman. Slater was given the humiliating task of standing by while a petite female with a blond ponytail sprayed the nest with a can of something and then collected 125 ducats for being braver than the man of the house.
Though Slater had always thought his father was manlier than he was, he had not realized the old man was a stand-up guy until Poppy was gone. He and his sisters had often complained about what a coldhearted guy Poppy could be, and his suicide certainly seemed to confirm their opinion. Later, though, they learned that Poppy was a serial blood donor who had earned several plaques and a write-up in the Albany newspaper for record-breaking donations, that he had always given 15 percent of his income to Jewish charities, and that he had designated himself an organ donor. This last was not to be—the mandated autopsy interfered with Poppy’s attempt to give part of his body to someone who needed it more than he did.
Slater and his sisters were stunned three months ago when legions of mourners showed up for Poppy’s memorial service, people they had never before seen—weeping, all of them, as if these strangers themselves were Poppy’s family. Droves of them approached Slater, tearful or sobbing, to tell him what a wonderful man Isaac had been, how he had chauffeured them around, cooked for them when they were sick, come to their kids’ graduation ceremonies and bar mitzvahs, always weighed down with food and gifts. Their tears dried up momentarily when they began regaling Slater with tales of how funny Poppy had been, how he had been able to coax them out of their darkest moments with his good cheer and his hilarious jokes. Poppy, it seemed, was perceived by everyone but his family as a hybrid of Santa Claus, Robin Williams, and David Ben-Gurion.
Before retirement Poppy was a longshoreman, a thinking man’s dockworker like Eric Hoffer. When he was young, he met Hoffer and even knew Harry Bridges, and he remained a staunch union man until the day he took his own life. Suicide or not, everyone else at the funeral seemed to have believed all along that Poppy was a mensch.
Now a lone wasp buzzes on the porch, flying frantically around the spot where the nest used to hang. The poor schmuck, thinks Slater, it went out for a while and came back to discover there has been some sort of wasp holocaust, leaving him alone in the world. Slater cannot help it, he feels bad for the creature and rather wishes he had not caved in to the mail carrier.
Back in the kitchen, he decides he would rather go out for breakfast and turns off the kettle. He knows his wife will sleep for at least another hour, so he leaves a note on the whiteboard: Beth—Went to Sancho’s—back soon. Usually he vets students’ projects on Saturday mornings before he and Beth go out for a bike ride, but he has a hankering for huevos rancheros. Granted, the eggs will be Oklahoma style, not Tex-Mex, so he knows the unmistakable flavor of ketchup will taint the dish. The “Mexican” restaurant in Hope Springs is a place called Siesta Sancho’s, which has a red and green neon sign bearing a logo, the form of a man slumped against a wall with a sombrero pulled over his eyes, the prototypical racist vision of the lazy Mexican. The restaurant also sells T-shirts with the same snoozing image on the front. The shirts with the dozing, mustachioed, sombreroed Hispanic are pervasive in the town of Hope Springs.
He goes quietly into the bedroom, where Beth sleeps belly-down, breathing deeply, her gray-flecked black hair curtaining one eye, an arm flung across the spot where Slater slept. In the mornings she has begun to give off what he thinks of as a doughy smell, like sourdough bread except less appealing. Nothing that comes with aging is beautiful or fresh—this much he knows. And if Slater is repelled by his wife’s yeasty smell, she has complained somewhat bitterly that he often “reeks” of garlic. Maybe her doughy smell and his garlicky smell commingle in their bed to mimic the scent of Texas toast.
Slater picks up from the floor a pair of Levi’s and his Tool T-shirt and slips them on. Oh, shite, the T-shirt conjures a less-than-pleasant recollection. He wore the Tool tee on campus earlier this week, nearly late for teaching his senior seminar. While normally he would have worn at least an Oxford-cloth shirt and khakis, dressing in jeans and a T-shirt is acceptable in his department—the architecture professors never dress up the way some of the other faculty do. A few of the guys in English and in Theater are downright fops. But wearing the Tool shirt turned out to be a particularly unfortunate choice. As he rushed across the parking lot and toward the architecture building, he heard a girl, probably an undergraduate, say to her friend—not even bothering to lower her voice—”I bet he is a huge tool, too.” Her friend laughed.
Was simply being a fifty-nine-year-old noticeably balding guy wearing a rock-band T-shirt reason enough to be considered a frickin’ tool? Maybe he had heard incorrectly—maybe she actually said, “I’ll bet he has a huge tool.”
He puts on his Mets cap, glad that Beth is not awake to call him on the choice. She has often told him that most people are not fooled by the hat ploy. When she sees a man wearing a cap, she assumes the sartorial choice was made for one of only two reasons: he is very short and compensating by adding a hat, or he is bald. Well, what the fuck is he supposed to do: spray his bald spot with brown dye the way guys on TV do?
When he steps out onto the porch again, this time he notices that the neighbors have affixed yellow ribbons to the trees in front of their houses. Who are they mourning now? he wonders. He has noticed for quite some time that Oklahomans seem somehow to enjoy PDGs: public displays of grief. There is always a flag at half staff in Oklahoma, often for some dead football coach or deceased Republican former governor. Just as, during the historical Oklahoma land rush, many cheated by sneaking in early in order to claim the better homesteads, now they rush to get to the memorial services “sooner,” among the first to be photographed publicly sobbing. The Sooners come in droves, bearing teddy bears and plastic-wrapped bunches of flowers, weeping and mugging for the cameras.
He guesses that huge PDG exercises are the only thing other than football championships that provide a sense of glamour here. Whether this aspect of Oklahoma culture is a sad consequence of the Oklahoma City bombing he cannot say. He and Beth came here several years after the terrible disaster at the Murrah Building. Slater was offered an endowed chair at the university, and when he reluctantly but sensibly accepted, Beth left her New York job in advertising and opened a gift shop in Hope Springs.
The yellow ribbons are perhaps Iraq related, he figures. He and Beth are antiwar blue voters, living in a red state that is gung ho about the war. He remembers the yellow-ribbon type very well from the Vietnam War days. There was always a certain sort of person who loved wearing POW bracelets, loved war. In Oklahoma many of those people, older now, have young adult children who wear WWJD? bracelets, expecting the entire world to believe that, every second of every day, they are wondering what Jesus would do.
Slater seats himself in Sancho’s and without consulting the menu orders a pot of coffee and the huevos. He has chosen a booth in the rear of the restaurant, his back to the wall so that no one can see his bald spot. He removes his cap, then remembers he forgot to bring the newspaper. Slater habitually carries a small notebook in his jacket pocket in case he thinks of something he needs to take care of or wants to make a quick sketch. He pulls out the notebook and a pen and begins to make some notes in order to pass the time—no, face it, Slater, in order to seem occupied, to avoid looking like a sad sack.
He has recently begun to find himself making lists, lists that serve no real purpose. He compiles the lists, then seldom peruses them again. He looks at the list he began last time he jotted in the notebook.
THINGS NEVER TO DO:
1. Never answer the door to someone carrying a clipboard.
2. Never sit next to a midget on the bus.
This one is certainly moot, as he has not been on a bus since they left New York. He crosses out the word “midget” and replaces it with “dwarf.” After a moment he crosses that out too and writes “little person.” Then he changes it back to “midget.”
3. Never trust someone who is always smiling.
Slater now adds
4. Never call a pest control service—do your own killing.
He looks up for a moment and is surprised to see walking into Sancho’s the psychologist who runs the suicide survivors workshop. “Dr. Jane” they call her. He thinks her last name is something like McPhee or McMillan—it can’t be McGraw, that’s Dr. Phil, isn’t it? Dr. Jane is the group facilitator, also a “suicide survivor.” Slater has heard from friends who have been in rehab that the facilitators are always fellow addicts or fellow rape survivors or fellow something-survivors. Slater prefers the more antiquated terminology: “victim”—he and the others in the group are all victims of suicide, no matter if the word “survivor” is now the preferred nomenclature.
Dr. Jane is ordering coffee, and he cannot help but catch a good view of the back of her. She wears one of those ruffly knee-length full skirts he has been noticing on campus, but he can see that she has a nice ass for a woman her age, and her tanned legs are still shapely. He knows that when she turns toward him, she will have cute little painted toenails emerging from her sandals. He feels himself stirring like some jackedup seventh-grader drooling over a sexy high school girl, and his face heats. He is still married to Beth, has been married to her for thirty-some years, will probably always be married, and Dr. Jane is aware he has a spouse. He pages through the notebook, not wanting her to see him staring.
She passes by his table on the way to her own, her eyes not visible behind Jackie-O sunglasses, and as she breezes by (yep, there are the red toenails), she only nods slightly, with a tiny trace of a close-lipped smile of acknowledgment. Damn—he did not realize until now that he has some sort of crush on her. He figures this is no different from the crushes students develop on their professors; he has heard about what shrinks call “transference.”
Metallica’s Black Album plays on Slater’s car stereo as he drives home from breakfast. He turns up the volume even louder, the sound thumping through and from the car the way the gangbangers at home drove around, glaring out their car windows at anyone who dared to object. He presses the lever to open both front windows, treating his neighbors to a sweet taste of metal as he drives down his own block. When he pulls into the driveway, he spots a man who appears to be in his twenties, jogging along, wearing running shorts and a Siesta Sancho’s T-shirt, accompanied by a Doberman. The guy slows to a walk and stares Slater down. He and the dog are both lousy with muscles.
“Got that cranked up kind of loud, huh?” the guy says. His face wears no expression: he is either naturally poker-faced or making an effort not to show his cards. Is his question a benign inquiry, or is it a challenge? Slater is not sure.
“Rock on,” Slater responds.
“Sure thing, old-timer,” the jogger says, then canters off.
I ought to kick his ass, Slater thinks. It is not a serious thought, but he feels the sting: old-timer. He has become a codger, Slater realizes, a schlemiel.
Beth is sitting at the kitchen table when Slater enters. In front of her rests a ceramic pot of what smells like mint tea, and she sips from a cup as she watches the tiny Sony tucked into a niche on one wall. “How was Sancho’s?” she says, her gaze still fixed on the screen.
“Ketchupy.”
Beth asks if he thinks the weather is okay for a bicycle ride, but Slater finds he has lost his zest for exercise. “Hon, would you mind? I wanted to watch the Mets game this morning, and then I need to do some prep work for the Price Tower trip.” In fact, he had planned neither; he just wants some time to himself.
“Price Tower?” Her expression registers no recognition.
“Beth, I told you, I’m taking my undergrads to Bartlesville this week—a field trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright building.”
She says that oh, yes, now she remembers about the Price Tower trip but then returns her attention to the TV and says, “Will you look at that, Dave?”
When Slater follows her gaze, he sees a wedding cake on the screen. Beth picks up the remote and turns up the volume.
“—entirely out of Krispy Kremes,” he hears the TV person say. Apparently a woman in Muskogee is selling wedding cakes made from Krispy Kreme doughnuts. What is more notable, it seems the woman can barely keep up with the orders for wedding cakes made of doughnuts and is looking to expand her facilities. Beth laughs good-naturedly.
Slater says nothing. This is the woman with whom he occupied the administration building at Columbia during the student strikes in ‘68, the black-haired antiwar firebrand and fellow SDS member, the woman with whom he expected to be arrested. But on the evening of the second day of the building occupation, Beth’s period arrived a week early, leaving her sitting in a pool of rancid red fluid, some of the other students around them whispering and looking sideways. That was the end of their revolutionary stint; Slater had to wrap his jacket around Beth’s waist and escort her out of the building, where media people rushed them, wanting to interview them about their defection from the cause. His father had been so pleased to learn that Slater was going to be a part of the student strike that Slater was never able to admit to him that he and Beth had made a premature exit.
Slater drives to downtown Hope Springs to pick up some items for the field trip to Bartlesville. He buys a case of Mountain Dew and a Styrofoam cooler at the Discount Depot, then stops at the pharmacy to pick up some Tylenol and enteric aspirin and a box of Band-Aids. But when he tries to pull open the glass door of the pharmacy, nothing gives. He takes off his shades and reads the sign on the door: Closed for Memorial Day. See you tomorrow. Annoyed, Slater heads back to his car, realizing he will need to make a sortie into Walmart. But suddenly he sees something that takes the breath out of him: an old man wearing an American Legion cap, sitting in a lawn chair on the corner, selling paper poppies. Slater feels gut shot, even lurching to one side, off balance. Poppy.
Nearly every time he has to reveal to someone the oppressive fact that he lost his father to suicide, the first thing the person says is “How did he do it?” People ask horrible questions, rude and gruesome, and do so with benign, even consoling looks on their faces. Slater has to wonder if he himself might have asked such terrible things, before he became a “suicide survivor.” Slater continues to be stunned that rather than offering a politely sympathetic phrase such as “I’m very sorry to hear that, Dave,” they seem to perk up—their voyeurism kicks in immediately. The only thing folks want to know about is the morbid details: did he blow his head off, stab himself in the heart, jump off a bridge, drink drain cleaner? What was that song from the seventies?—”Just blow out your brains, James; jump off the Brooklyn span, Dan; gas yourself in the car, Gar; swallow cyanide, Clyde.”
And if asking Slater to furnish the grim details of the means of death is not enough, the next question is inevitably “Did he leave a note?” Why does anyone care, and what does a note have to do with the death of one’s father? Is someone’s terrible demise supposed to become a source of entertainment?
Fine, cough it up for everyone, he has decided; serve up the ghoulish details on a plate; give them the complete personal horror show. No, there was no note, folks. Poppy’s goodbye consisted of messages left on the answering machines of David and his sisters. “Sorry I missed you,” Poppy said. “Love ya.”
That “Love ya” was the closest his father had ever come in Slater’s entire life to saying I love you, son. His father had never once said the words “I love you” or even “I’m proud of you,” not a single time in Slater’s lifetime.
How did he off himself? Slater wishes he could report that his father blew his brains out, a death both dramatic and masculine, a real crowdpleaser. But no, Poppy never owned a gun, much less shot off his head like Hemingway or even like poor old Hunter Thompson or that kid Cobain. Poppy’s death was more like Marilyn Monroe’s, an uncharacteristically womanly mode of death. He simply swallowed an entire bottle of barbiturates, crawled between the sheets of his bed as if he were retiring for the night, and expired. The family knew Poppy had been despondent since Mom’s death, but they did not learn until after his exit that he had been diagnosed with a malignancy in one lung; Poppy had not chosen to share the bad news with his family. Couldn’t he have just had chemo like everyone else?
Beth had been astonished the first time she heard him refer to his father as Poppy. They were still students at the time, only just beginning to become a couple, when in conversation he mentioned Poppy.
“Poppy?” she said, not even bothering to hide her laughter. “Goo-goo Da-Da.”
Slater explained that the name Poppy was not a diminutive of Papa but rather referred to the brilliant red flower. Like most men in his age demographic, Poppy had served in World War II. Every year on the eve of Memorial Day—in those days not yet celebrated on Mondays—he came home from the docks wearing a bright paper poppy on his lapel. Slater and his sisters found it hilarious, their father wearing what seemed to them to be a corsage. Mom shushed them, explaining that veterans sold the poppies to raise funds for disabled soldiers, and that Dad was being patriotic. Still, they had begun calling him Poppy after that, and the name stuck.
He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and buys five poppies from the old veteran.
Sorry I missed you.
After waking, Slater lies in bed and halfheartedly considers masturbation, remembering a crudely humorous slogan he once heard: After fifty, never trust a fart or waste an erection. Well, he has not yet pooped his pants, but the few spontaneous erections he has now more often than not go to waste. Maybe he has been dreaming about that attractive shrink.
He has not for a fairly long period of time felt himself seriously tempted by an extramarital affair. He and Beth put all that behind them long ago, after some calamitous dalliances in the seventies. In any case, the cheery Baptist women who populate the town are not to his taste. Even if he could stomach them, they wouldn’t consider a Jew—he might as well tattoo the mark-o’-the-beast on his forehead. There is no synagogue in the town; he and Beth have to drive an hour and a half to Tulsa during the High Holy Days.
Slater kisses off the possibility of morning onanism and instead gets out of bed. Beth has kicked the blankets and sheet away from her in the night, and her nude body lies motionless on the white bottom sheet like a cadaver on a slab. He cannot help but stare at her thinned-out pubic hair. Where there was once a luxuriant thatch, now there is only the gauziest webbing, her sex revealed like a baby’s.
In the bathroom, he decides to change the cartridge in his Quattro and to use some of Beth’s aloe moisturizer after he shaves; tonight is the weekly meeting of the grief support group.
Slater observes his hairy chest in the medicine cabinet mirror as he shaves his chin. One cannot ignore the ratio of hair loss to hair growth that is seen on aging bodies. The more hair Slater loses from his head, the more grows on his chest and back, and as for the nose, fuhged-daboudit—he has had to order one of those trimming devices from the Sharper Image. They say bald men are more virile, so he can perhaps understand the growth of body hair, but what about his ED, as they call it in the pharmaceutical ads. In the three months since Poppy’s death, he has been unable to have an erection with Beth. He resorted to ordering Viagra from the Internet, and he and Beth had sex successfully one time about a month ago. The stuff worked great, but it gave him such a blinding headache that he never risked it again. Hell, he read somewhere that even Tommy Lee had tried Viagra, and that the drummer suffered the worst headache of his life.
Beth’s sex drive is no longer what it used to be, either, and she too suffers from the inverse hair issue. Though she has barely any pubic hair, he has caught her in the bathroom ripping hair from her upper lip with wax strips, and shaving her toes in the tub. A velvety growth of hair coats her neck, and her formerly pristine thighs now sprout dark hairs. Whoever came up with the expression “aging gracefully” was entirely full of crap.
“Metaphorically at least, he died in my arms,” a woman in their circle of metal folding chairs says. She is from Los Angeles. Slater has wondered fairly often why so many of the members of the grief support group are originally from outside Oklahoma. Well, if being devastated by a suicide is what it takes to introduce Slater to some other expats, so be it. He has come to cherish these Wednesday evenings, even though there is bound to be a lot of weeping every week, sometimes his own. The metaphor woman owns a bookstore in Hope Springs, and her fiancé blew his brains out in their bedroom. Slater’s chest burns with pain for the poor girl. Those who commit suicide are in fact murderers; Slater has long known this to be true.
The woman herself now addresses this very issue. She tells the group that her little son from an earlier marriage, an eight-year-old boy who had been very fond of his future stepfather, said to his mom, “Reed thought he was killing himself, but really he was killing all his friends.” Much nose blowing ensues in the room, and Slater’s eyes sting.
Dr. Jane volunteers commentary on the possibility of the woman’s son obtaining some counseling, but Slater cannot concentrate on what she is saying. Rather, he finds himself looking again at Jane’s bright toenails, pink this time, easily visible in her thong sandals. It’s not that he has a foot fetish; rather, he finds looking at her lovely feet quite a bit easier than looking at her uptilted nose or directly into her eyes. Now that he realizes he is hot for her, he feels self-conscious. Slater does not wish her to find his behavior “inappropriate,” nor to think of him as some sort of randy bastard, even if that’s what he is.
But now Slater feels like a kid in grammar school, because while he has been inattentive, it seems Dr. Jane has steered the conversation elsewhere. “David, what about you?” she says.
Slater feels his ears flame as if he were under a sun lamp. He is embarrassed that he missed the switch in topic. The fact that she called him David instead of Dave heats him up a bit; sometimes using one’s proper name instead of a customary nickname seems the more intimate choice. His groin burns hotter than his neck, and for a moment he thinks he feels dizzy.
“Searching,” Jane prompts him. “Did you engage in those behaviors?”
He cues right in—just last Wednesday they had been talking about “searching behaviors” in the bereaved. It seems that after one loses a loved one, particularly if the loss is unexpected and sudden, the aggrieved person begins searching for the lost one, walking about the house in a daze, looking under the blankets on the bed, opening closets, and even looking into the bathtub. Equally prevalent is the desire to wear clothing of the deceased. Newly bereaved people are often seen wandering their houses in a fugue state, wearing the lost one’s bathrobe or sweater. Sometimes they open the front door and peer out, as if the dead person is simply tardy and any minute will appear on the porch. This all takes place during what Dr. Jane terms the denial phase of grief.
Slater reports that, no, his situation did not mirror the woman’s, as his dad was not living with him and Beth at the time of his death and thus Slater had no reason to look for him. Someone else picks up on the conversation and begins to share her experience. But what Slater has not told them is that there was an odd incident, one that frightened Beth. The night after his sister telephoned to tell them about Poppy, Slater walked in his sleep. Beth found him pacing up and down the hall naked at three o’clock in the morning. When she turned on the light, apparently he looked past her with unseeing eyes, and in a voice she later described as “unearthly” he said, “Poppy?” She had to touch his shoulder and tell him several times, “Dave, you’re sleepwalking, everything’s okay, come back to bed.”
He engaged in sleepwalking one other time in his life, when he was four years old. His father went into the hospital for a ruptured appendix—whisked from the house by ambulance attendants and not coming back that evening. The toddler Slater was found by his mother in the middle of the night walking the house in his yellow jammies, making an eerie moaning sound that awakened her. In fact, he can still, more than half a century later, remember his mother picking him up in her arms and carrying him back to bed after he murmured “Daddy?” several times. In the morning, she told him he had been sleepwalking and reminded him that Daddy was in the hospital but would be home very soon. He does not share these recollections with the group; he keeps things to himself, his father’s spawn.
What he encountered that night when his mother discovered his nocturnal roaming was a floor made of air, through which he was about to plummet; a cataclysm; the imploding of the universe.
When the university van brings them home from Bartlesville after nine, the students are still talking to one another sotto voce or listening to their iPods, but Slater is wiped out. Field trips are not as invigorating as they used to be when he was a young assistant professor at Pratt. He thinks of all the corny old jokes the borscht-belt comedians used to make about the legs going first. Too bad this turns out to be true—his calves began throbbing while he and the students were still walking Price Tower.
“Did you know that the most common post-disaster injury is cut feet?” one of his students says to her seatmate. Slater is unable to hear the whispered response.
Once the van has pulled into the lot outside the architecture building, Slater makes sure all the students are safely out of the van and into their cars, then climbs into his own car, his knees cracking like adolescent knuckles. God, he feels like he could use a nightcap, but this is a college town and he does not wish to run into any of his students in a bar. He opts to go up instead of down—caffeine rather than alcohol—and stops the car in front of Sancho’s.
In his car in the darkened parking lot, Slater’s view through the restaurant’s enormous plate-glass window is unobstructed. Sancho’s blazes in front of his eyes like a brilliant outdoor movie screen, and he feels as if he is back in his childhood, sitting in the backseat of the family car at the Pageant drive-in theater. And it is not Liz Taylor or Pier Angeli who stars in this movie but a more current leading lady: Dr. Jane sits in profile, backlit like an ingénue, sipping from a cup. He recognizes her by her upturned shiksa nose, adorable.
Fatigue renders him loopy. His mind swings from its hinges for a few moments, his thoughts careering into irregular space: I wish for just one day I were not married to Beth. I wish I had hair like Stone Phillips—if he’s not wearing a rug, the guy must have had a transplant. I wish I were named Stone instead of Dave. I wish I still lived in New York. I wish I had been a better son. Please, God, let me find a way to get Jane into bed with me and not get caught. God, send Poppy back, if only for a day, an hour.
He watches Jane take a few more sips from the cup. One last thing slides into his mind as it reels along askew, something he once overheard one student say to another as the pair walked across the quad: You can’t pray for what you want. God is not a short-order cook.
Slater knows he should go home to Beth rather than approach Jane in Sancho’s, but he resists the sensible part of his brain, the part that would have him wimp out. I’m going in, he decides—I’m not a eunuch yet. He first takes a whiff of his underarms, just in case the long day in Bartlesville has rendered him rank. He seems to pass muster, so he gets out of the car and approaches Sancho’s.
He decides that rather than letting on that he has seen Jane through the window, he should make the encounter seem like a bit of serendipity—he does not want to come off as a stalker. He will casually order a cup of joe and then walk by her table, ostensibly on the way to a seat further in back. If she does not ask him to sit down, he will assert himself, say, Might I join you?
But after he has the coffee in hand and turns away from the counter, something changes. Jane has seen him and is smiling, has even raised one hand slightly in greeting. He wonders how her face looks so young—he is fairly sure she is about his age. Beth posits that Jane has “had some work done” and points out that Jane’s hands look much older than her face.
She seems glad to see him. Her teeth are so white, he thinks. He feels himself smile, too, and strides toward her table, but—oh god, this cannot be happening. It’s one of those cartoon moments, a scene enacted myriad times in Hollywood comedies, the smile-over-the-shoulder scene, a bit of cheesy slapstick. It seems she is in fact smiling at some guy behind Slater; the smile and the little hand raise are for the other man.
He hears Poppy’s voice in his ear: Tough it out, boy. Never let ‘em see you sweat. He will not let Jane know what has just gone down. He pretends he has only now noticed her and nods in what he hopes is a businesslike manner as he passes her table. Once he is seated, his face engorged with heat, he takes the opportunity to scope out his competition, who is now seated at Jane’s table, facing Slater.
It would have been too much to expect that Dr. Jane’s companion appear effeminate or perhaps homely or even mildly handicapped. No: the bastard could give Johnny Depp a run for his money. He has dark hair, enough for five men, and wears a tight red T-shirt and Levi’s, the red shirt inflaming Slater’s ire, the showy son-of-a-bitch. And not only does he appear to be far more handsome and fit than Slater, he also appears to be tremendously younger; the guy looks barely thirty. For one goofy moment, he thinks maybe the guy’s her son.
But no, Jane and sonny-boy are doing what the entertainment programs on TV call “canoodling,” nothing flagrant, but a lot of looking into each other’s eyes and a bit of fingertip touching.
What was I thinking? he wonders. I’m done, the guy with the Doberman had it right when he called me “old-timer.” My parents are dead and I’m flat-out next in line for the Slater family plot. And there will be no one behind me in that grim queue. Maybe we should have had kids; at least some of my DNA would remain in the universe. No wonder I can’t get it up: I’m kaput.
In the car on the way home, Slater attempts to tamp down his distress by turning up the volume on the radio, the Oklahoma City NPR station. The first thing he hears is the interviewer asking someone described as a scientist/professor, “So, are you saying that the invisibility cloak may no longer be simply science fiction?”
The man answers, “Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as he wears a cloak made of this material.” It seems the guy is in the process of creating a cloak made of what is termed metamaterials, which can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation and visible light in any direction. The scientist claims, “We think we can present a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.”
When Slater was nine years old, one of his uncles gave him a radio-controlled whoopee cushion for his birthday. The thing looked like a typical accent pillow and could be strategically placed for the chosen mark to sit on. The young Slater could control the device from another location, causing deplorable honks of flatulence to issue from the unsuspecting sitter’s behind. The first time he tried out the device on his parents and sisters, everyone in the room laughed when he cried out, “It’s a dream come true!” But the real dream-come-true would be an invisibility cloak. Since early childhood he has had a persistent fantasy of walking the earth in a mantle of invisibility.
The wind has picked up, and as Slater drives home he can see that it’s about to rain. A loud, sharp crack of thunder causes him to flinch. But the thunder booming above him also initiates kinesis of his mind. He finds himself transported back to the first time he can recall hearing thunder, before he even knew what it was. He was at the time about the same age he was when his father had the appendectomy and had felt not exactly frightened but surprised when he heard a peal of thunder above the family home, as if a convoy of trucks was driving across the roof. His father explained to him then about thunder and lightning and took him to the window to observe the lightning flashes. He told his son that soon rain would begin to fall.
When Slater asked how his father knew this, Poppy told him that rain inevitably followed thunder and lightning. “When it starts to rain, can I go outside?” he asked Poppy.
His father said as long as he cleared it with Mom, that would be fine. His mother dressed Slater in a slicker, red rubber boots, and a sou’wester rain hat, and he stood at the window until he saw the rain begin to fall. Poppy joined him then, wearing a Giants sweatshirt and a hard hat. He held young Slater’s hand in his callused paw and led him out into the garden. They sat on deck chairs near the lilacs and honeysuckle, faces upturned, Davey Slater opening his mouth to catch the raindrops.
In the driveway in front of his house, Slater sits in the car in the rain, staring at the porch light that Beth has switched on, feeling immobile and heavy as if his body is a sack of meal. His heart breaks for a moment when he spots that poor wasp still circling on the porch, slow to get the point that he is now homeless.
He sits at first inert in the car, but before he knows it, his notebook is out and he is making a list beneath the glare of the dome light:
THINGS TO DO IN THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK:
1. God forgive me, but: follow Dr. Jane home and get the goods on her—is red shirt her lover? Does she look as good naked as she does with her clothes on?
2. Wear the cloak to the grief support group and listen to what they say about me when they think I’m not there.
3. Follow Beth—see if she has an alternate life. Does she have some man with billows of hair, who never smells like garlic?
4. For this one, need time machine as well as invisibility cloak: Let me be with Poppy when he dies. If I cannot change what happened, at least let me be there to prevent my father from dying alone.
Slater stops writing, then rips the page from the notebook and crumples it. He does not wish anyone ever to learn of his base wishes and pitiful regrets—let him put an invisibility cloak around those.
He thinks of Dracula. Dracula wore a cloak. And Superman, though his was more of a cape. If Slater wore a Superman cape, he could fly through the sky with his arms out in front of him like the young, unmaimed Chris Reeve, perhaps carrying a Lois Lane (or a Dr. Jane) in his arms, a hero. Or he could don a darker cape, the Dracula stealth cape, which he could wrap around his creamy prey before he sank his teeth into her lovely stem of a neck and took them both all the way, all the way to eternal life.
Suddenly Beth appears in the driveway and raps her knuckles on the driver’s side window. When he rolls down the window, Slater sees his wife is weeping, her nose streaming and eyes red. He looks at her, at first uncomprehending. But then he realizes, my poor Beth, she knows the man she married might now as well be a thousand miles into the stratosphere.
“Come inside, Dave,” she says. “You’ve been sitting here for half an hour.” The rain has become a soaking downfall, and Beth’s hair hangs in wet sheaves, lightning illuminating her face like a flashbulb shot capturing a catastrophe. “It’s just the grief,” Beth says, “the grief, that’s all it is.”
He leans out the car window, reaching toward Beth, the cold rain soaking his outstretched hand. His wife’s weeping has a muffled quality, as if she cries behind a partition. She seems far away, pearly in the downpour like a Las Vegas stage illusion.
What is vivid in this moment is Slater’s vision of what might be possible. He sees himself now, flying back to the scene of that dismal afternoon, this time wearing his invisibility cloak. He swoops down on the casket before the ghoulish undertakers can lower his father into the soil.