Give … wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.
Let him drink, and forget his poverty,
and remember his misery no more.
Proverbs 31:6–7
At LAX on his way to the gate, Slater slips on something and nearly bumps into a young woman with an orange tan, wearing backless high-heeled shoes and accompanied by a Yorkie on a rhinestone leash. She stands talking into an iPhone, blocking the flow of foot traffic, stock still, right in front of one of those airport news shops. As she inexplicably holds the phone in front of her face, smiles, and snaps her own photo, Slater stops to examine the bottom of his shoe and determines he has stepped in dog crap.
The woman does not notice or pretends not to notice her dog has defecated, so as Slater walks on he says, “Excuse me! Your dog pooped here!” For a moment she lifts her chin and meets Slater’s glance, but then looks away. By this time Slater has passed her, so he calls over his shoulder, “Don’t foul the footpath!”
He’s on his way back to Oklahoma, having just spent the weekend in Santa Monica, most recently photographing Frank Gehry’s residence. Beth was unable to come along on the trip, needing to act as hostess for a long-planned baby shower for one of her friends’ daughters, which is the primary reason he chose this particular weekend—he does not want her or anyone else to find out about the real deal, the thing that actually brought him to Southern California. Well, the old saw is true, it only hurts when he laughs, so he made sure last night not to watch any comedies on the hotel-room television. He looks at his watch and realizes he has time to kill. Might as well grab an early lunch. He heads for the bar where he knows he can order a quick burger and a double Manhattan.
When he takes a seat, the surge of pain stuns Slater. His entire torso thrums with a burning ache. Must be the elastic pressure belt the surgeon has made him wear. How will he be able to hide the thing from Beth? It’s not as if coming to bed with a girdle on is something that heretofore has been within the realm of possibility. He stifles the groan he feels on the verge of emitting and orders a Rusty Nail. Where did that come from? He has not drunk a scotch and Drambuie since he was young and still teaching at Pratt, and he fully intended to order his usual Manhattan. The pain must have called up a weird unconscious association—there is something toxic sounding about a rusted nail, the taint of tetanus. Discomfort, my ass.
The woman to his left turns her face ever so slightly away from Slater as she reads the Los Angeles Times and sips a glass of white wine. Don’t worry, I’m not going to land on you, Slater thinks. It occurs to him that maybe she smells dog do, so he leans down and wipes off his shoe, then rolls up the paper napkin and wings it over the bar and into a garbage receptacle. He thanks the bartender for the drink and takes a long pull on the Rusty Nail. The slow heat from his throat to his chest provides a winning contrast to the ugly burn tearing through his torso—his “core,” as the guys in the gym now say.
What would his father say if he had lived to know that his only son had plunked down beaucoup bucks to have fat sucked and lasered from his midsection? The answer could not be clearer: Poppy would say his son had turned into a vain ponce, that no real man would spend money on womanly medical procedures. But his father also claimed that any man who would commit suicide had to be a “sister man”—that only a sissy would be too afraid to live. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” his father often said, and at times employed other 1950s clichés, such as “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits,” truisms that even then Slater viewed as tired pap and an offshoot of social Darwinism, not what one might expect from a hardcore labor union man like his dad. As for Poppy deliberately overdosing on sleeping pills, Slater might more easily have predicted him joining the Taliban, or having a sex change operation, or even becoming a Republican.
But Poppy was always a complex guy, no doubt about that. He had been for the most part a kind and doting father when Slater was a kid, taking him to Dodgers games and fishing at Breezy Point jetty and even serving as Cubmaster to his Cub Scout pack. He called his son Davey-Man or Slugger and never missed one of Slater’s baseball games or soccer matches. He hired a metal band for Slater’s bar mitzvah party, a downer for the oldsters but bliss for Slater and the other thirteen-year-olds. But as a father he had a dark side, too, what Slater’s grief counselor called a “Jungian shadow.” He could become sadistic, without warning and for no apparent reason. When Slater was going through his cowboy phase in the first grade, his very favorite song was the country standard “Red River Valley”—ironic now that he has ended up living in Oklahoma. One day young Slater was sitting at the kitchen table in their flat when they still lived in Flatbush, drawing with crayons on butcher paper. Another of Poppy’s contradictions: he played piano beautifully and even composed his own music, not what you might think of as your standard-issue longshoreman. Slater had at times sat next to Poppy on the piano bench, watching him play. On the day of the coloring crayons, David had drawn wobbly lines across the page and was drawing crude replicas of what he thought looked like musical notes.
“How ‘bout that!” Poppy had exclaimed. “Did you know you’ve written down the music for ‘Red River Valley’?”
Slater can still remember the astonished pleasure resulting from his father’s revelation. At six years of age, not once had he considered that his father would tell him anything untrue—this possibility had never entered his mind. With the magical thinking of young children, accepting that he had accidentally duplicated his favorite piece was conceivable, in some giddy, unanticipated way.
But Poppy had not been content to leave the joke there, inside their family flat. His father insisted that David take the piece to school with him the next day, tell the teacher that the crayoned page contained the song “Red River Valley,” and ask her to play the tune on the piano to the class during music time. Feeling shy, David had said he did not want to, but Poppy insisted. The inevitable had happened: Slater took the sheet to the young, freckled woman who was his first-grade teacher, explained that it contained “Red River Valley,” and earnestly requested that she play the song during music time. Slater does not remember everything about his life as a six-year-old, but this moment has a grotesque clarity. The teacher’s facial expression had gone from surprised to blank to contemplative, and then she told him sweetly that she had something else planned for today, but that she would try to play the piece some other time. That had been satisfactory to David, but when he arrived home that evening, his father immediately asked if the teacher played the cowboy song for the class. When Slater reported on the events, his father laughed long and hard, his wolfish teeth flashing. Not until many years later did Slater recall the incident and realize his father had punked him.
Conversely, Poppy had brought up his kids to do the right thing, and in particular never to lie. And Slater never has been a liar, has always aimed to be a mensch. But ever since Poppy killed himself, Slater has found himself in uncharted waters. Though he cannot get it up with Beth, he lusts inappropriately after women in his circle; he skips his office hour sometimes and leaves students in the lurch; and last, but certainly not least, he skulks off to California and has liposuction. While it is true that plenty of straight guys have “procedures” these days, Slater never imagined that he would be one of those men.
He does not really give a damn whether the woman next to him at the bar knows what he has done, so he removes from the inside pocket of his jacket the brochure the surgeon’s assistant gave him when he left the surgery suite Friday.
After a surgery like liposuction, patients may be bloated and feel distended. Liposuction surgery is really a controlled injury—body fluid rushes to the site and the injured tissue becomes like a sponge. Your physician has gone under the carpet of skin and taken away the fat undercoating, so the raw surface oozes serum on the inside.
Before he came to Santa Monica for the lipo, he studied up on the procedure and probably should have decided then and there not to go ahead with it. When he read the Internet info, all he could think of was the liquefaction that takes place after a serious earthquake. During the Loma Prieta earthquake in ‘89, because San Francisco’s Marina District had been built upon superficial sandy materials that were used to fill the old lagoon in 1915, liquefaction had caused water-saturated fine-grain sands and silts to behave as viscous fluids rather than solids. This liquidity caused entire buildings to sink into the muck. Slater’s flesh feels equally unstable, roiling and suppurating beneath the pressure belt.
He chugs most of his drink and tries to catch the eye of the bartender, then pulls a notebook from his attaché case. Making lists has for Slater become like yoga for many others; the process calms his nerves and evens him out. He thinks for a moment, then writes:
THINGS ABOUT L.A.:
Surprisingly good buildings—Santa Monica Heritage Museum kind of cool
Breast implants ubiquitous, even the hotel maids
Very, very white teeth
Bartenders and waitresses ready for their close-up
Armpits on display—sleeves at a premium
Hug each other constantly, just like on Leno
What he should make is a list of ideas about how to hide the lipo from Beth. It’s not as if he could claim that he had undergone the procedure on a spur-of-the moment impulse just because he happened to be in Santa Monica—she would know that one has to schedule this sort of thing in advance, which he had. And maybe the worst part, the part that would be the coup de grâce, is the financial aspect of the caper. He paid more than $7,000 for so-called “smart lipo.” He borrowed from his 403B and had all the paperwork routed to his box on campus, but he is not so foolish as to expect that he will not be caught out by Beth someday. As for the bruising, well, he’ll just have to remove the pressure belt at night and sleep in a T-shirt. There isn’t much chance of them having sex, anyway.
He slides the notebook back into his attaché case and pulls out a stack of mail that he grabbed from his box before he left Hope Springs. There’s this week’s Nation—he’ll have something to read on the plane on the way home. And there are the usual bills. But most of the mail he receives these days seems to come from only four sources: the AARP, though he refuses to join; hearing aid companies; burial insurance companies; and funeral directors. When he opens a brochure from one of the burial insurance companies, out falls a return postcard that the recipient is invited to return to the company, asking for more information. He scrawls at the bottom of the postcard: “Remove me from your mailing list. And while you’re at it, drop dead yourself.”
“Oh! Do you go to Dr. Beauchamp, too?”
The attractive woman on the stool next to him has tapped him on the arm and is smiling like a killer, displaying her lovely teeth, probably porcelain veneers from the looks of them.
Slater is caught off guard. “How’d you …?”
She points to the lipo brochure, which has Dr. Beauchamp’s name and address printed on it, and Slater nods, not knowing what to say.
“Dr. Mike is my plastic surgeon, too!” she says. “I had my thighs done.”
Slater exerts a tremendous effort not to look down at her thighs. “I guess that makes us homeys, then,” he says, raising his glass to her. She clinks her wine glass against his nearly empty Rusty Nail.
“Did he give you anything for the pain?” she says. Her gaze morphs into a feral stare.
Oh Lord—he gets it now—all she wants is to score some Vicodin off him. He does not wait for her to ask, just pulls the bottle from the pocket of his blazer, snaps off the lid with his thumb, hands off one tab to the woman and washes down another with his cocktail.
She emits a husky laugh, extends one slim, tanned hand to shake Slater’s hand, and with the other hand pops the Vico and washes it quickly down with wine. He notices she has those long, squared-off fingernails he has seen a lot of in L.A.
“I’m Stella,” she says.
“Stella by Starlight,” Slater says—always one of his favorite songs.
She looks at him with a frown of incomprehension. “I’m sorry?”
Shite, it’s the age gap again. She must be part of the Diddy generation, or at best a Michael Bublé fan. Well, never mind. “Another round for the lady and me,” Slater tells the barkeep.
Slater wakes just as the plane begins its descent to Will Rogers. He remembers missing his flight from LAX, a flurry of phone calls home, and catching an evening flight, but the time between his leaving the airport bar and getting on the plane is a tad blurry. His last clear memory is of looking at the LAX sign from the plane window as they took off. Yes, he has been lax, no doubt about that.
Apparently he fell asleep soon after he took his seat on the flight home. He had managed to get the window, and the middle seat remained miraculously empty. The little old lady on the aisle has already unbuckled her seatbelt and looks as if she wants to vault for the door. Old gal probably has a weak bladder. The sky outside the window is black, though his original flight was to have landed in the afternoon.
Face it, Slater, you went on a bender. He would have guessed, had he even thought about such a thing, that his days of benders were over, not to mention that picking up strange women was a thing of the long ago past, when he was still single. But one thing he does remember from the late sixties and early seventies is that drugs and alcohol have a way of making strange bedfellows. Not that he and the woman at LAX made it to bed—thank you Jesus, as Oklahomans are wont to say. But a series of nearly unfathomable events went down in that airport bar, this much he does remember. There was the Vicodin and the second round of cocktails. There were still more cocktails after that, followed by a highly, highly ill-advised second Vicodin each, at which point they vacated their bar stools and moved to a small table in the back of the bar. And, yes! they made out, and apparently made out for hours, as he and Stella both missed their flights.
He remembers the taste of vanilla and the scent of jasmine—God, it was a feast of the senses, and he has a shameful memory of fondling the woman’s breasts, and even of her giving him some crotch action. Jesus, from where has all this come? There’s that phrase you hear all the time now, “spiraling out of control.” Well, he spiraled, all right, big-time. At the same moment that he flushes with shame, his oozing torso begins to throb beneath the pressure belt. He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out the Vicodin container, opens it and tips it toward his palm. Holy crap, only two pills remain! He had at least twenty-five when he entered the airport this morning. Stella must have weaseled the rest out of him—he’s been rolled. Reflexively he checks his wallet. While there is no cash left, that is not exactly surprising. Cocktails at the airport bar were an unprecedented eighteen bucks a pop. His credit cards are all there; at least there’s that. He swallows a pill without water, the tablet scraping against his throat.
After his elderly row-mate has made it to the aisle and started moving forward, Slater wrenches his bag from beneath the seat in front of him and scooches out to deplane. The pain of his sluicing midsection is nothing when compared to the anguish that overtakes him now as he steps from the plane and back into his real life. He remembers that acronym FUBAR. Yes, his situation now is fucked up beyond all repair. At fifty-nine and having been married for more than thirty of those years, he has learned that after crossing certain bridges, there is no way back, period, end of story, that’s all she wrote. And the fact is, he has never before cheated on Beth, understanding from the get-go that to do so would change things so irreparably that there would be no recovery. Enough damage to their marriage was done in the early seventies during the Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice days, when he and Beth had experimented a bit sexually, but at least then they had both been in on the poor decisions and bad behavior. Recovering from that folly had taken years. But does necking in the airport really count as cheating? It seems more like momentary foolishness he should just forget about. He steps onto the escalator going down to the parking garage, his bag feeling as if it weighs ten stone, his torso vibrating with pain. He has ninety minutes’ driving time between OKC and Hope Springs during which he has to think of a way to hide two huge misdemeanors from Beth: the lipo and the interlude with Stella. No, don’t even think of her name ever again. Take a page from Slick Willy and think of her as “that woman.” Better yet: don’t think of her at all.
Something edges into Slater’s periphery of pain. Not only is his torso on fire, but his feet hurt, too. The sensation of gnawing, throbbing pain in his midsection is now accompanied by a sharp, lancing stinging from his heels. He finds himself limping, hobbled, tottering off the escalator like some decrepit gray-beard.
And now this recollection comes to him, too, rising from the brownout in which he has found himself: He nearly missed a second flight out of LAX, and only that woman checking the time on her cell phone and yelping had alerted him to the imminence of his outbound flight. He’d had to run forty gates, hell for leather, in order to board before the doors shut. Evidently while he was asleep on the plane, blisters formed on his heels, now pulsing with pain and doubtless weeping like the flesh of his midsection. His limping involuntarily slows as he drags himself toward the lot where he parked his car. People push past him impatiently. He can’t make it, Slater realizes, shuffling off to the side and leaning against a wall. He is forced to remove his shoes and carry them, like a teenager sneaking back into the house after curfew. He slips his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on so he can avoid eye contact with anyone, and limps back to one of the airport shops, where he buys a pair of fleecy little slippers and pulls them onto his battered feet.
Beth is lying on the sofa when Slater lets himself through the front door. No lights are on, but the television disperses a flickering blue glow throughout the living room. He cannot discern whether her eyes are open.
Slater hears the voice of Dr. G., Medical Examiner. “Was it natural?” the doctor queries in her high-pitched voice. “Was it trauma? Or was it a combination of natural and trauma?”
“Bethie?” Slater says. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she answers immediately, her voice flat as if she’s pissed off.
Off goes the TV, and on goes the lamp on the end table. Over the archway between the living room and dining room hangs a banner several feet wide, consisting of individual plastic letters linked together by pink ribbon, the letters spelling out IT’S A GIRL! For a moment his gut ices over, but then he remembers the baby shower. “How was the party?” he says.
She does not answer, but sits up, points at Slater’s feet, and says “What’s the deal?”
“Blisters,” he says, “bad ones. I had to run for my plane. Bought these at Will Rogers.”
“Good grief, Dave, did you have to buy red slippers? You look like a clown.”
“That’s all they had. Left over from the holidays, I guess.” He sees now that clinging to the ceiling above Beth’s head is a Mylar balloon in the shape of a baby bottle, the nipple a lurid pink.
“How was your trip?” Beth says.
“Okay, but I’m exhausted,” he says. “Mechanical trouble with the plane was the last thing I needed.” He forces a laugh. “Unless you count blisters.”
“Did you see Gehry?”
He says no, that he just shot the house and did some research in the library. “I’m going to take a quick shower and then hit the rack. You coming?” He does not wait for her response but drops his bag and heads for the bathroom, where he can stash the pressure belt in the linen closet and from the hamper scrounge a T-shirt under which to hide the oozing lipo area. He first turns on the hot water, then undresses on the fluffy red bathmat that matches his unfortunate new slippers.
Do I tell her, or not? About either of the things I’ve done? He decides he needs to sleep on the matter and stoops to pick up his trousers and remove the last Vicodin from a pocket. He steps into the tub, swallows the tab and drinks from the shower, then lets water pound on his head and steam overcome him. He gives himself over to blind sensation, no past no future. In the here and now, as they used to say in the sixties.
Slater has already taught his morning seminar and is fulfilling his mandatory afternoon office hour. He hopes no one comes into his office today: failing students begging for mercy, truants offering trumped up excuses or asking for Incompletes, TAs overwhelmed by their responsibilities, students or former students asking for letters of recommendation—often the very worst students, who if they had any brains would know better than to ask for a rec letter from the professor teaching a course for which they did not earn an A—and the perennial students who just want to talk. These students want badly to secure positions as designers or PAs in good firms as soon as they graduate, or want to bag assistant professorships somewhere. They mistakenly assume he holds the key to how they can succeed in their professional desires. He often offers benign banalities such as “Do your best work—worry about the work, not the rewards,” or “Brilliant designs will always rise to the top like cream—be brilliant.” He seldom tells them the truth: that maybe one or two students in a section of sixty will ever be good enough to succeed in the private or public sector or academe—that they might as well have gone to trade school in HVAC. Many of them have read The Fountainhead and have a weird-ass misperception of what it is to be an architect.
He does still have passion for teaching, and knocks himself out trying to reach the students, to help along the weaker ones by teaching them everything he knows, and to discover the talented ones and help them find their way. But in his less inspired moments, he sometimes feels as if at least some of the time he might be casting pearls before swine.
Being a professor of architecture has changed a great deal since Slater was appointed assistant professor at Pratt nearly thirty years ago. In those days he was still idealistic: oh, visions of Taliesin! At that time 95 percent of his students were male. The few female students were often homely, hairy, serious young women wearing Birkenstocks, who sometimes smelled of onions or of rank perspiration. Things were simpler then. He had very few female students until the 1980s, and until the late 1990s most of the women ended up transferring out of architecture. Now his seminars are packed with bright, often beautiful young women, many of whom shamelessly flirt with him and/or make crude passes. He wasn’t trained for this shit. The university offers regular mandated seminars on sexual harassment, but these consist only of trotting out the lawyers, who lecture the professors about how to cover their asses liability-wise. What Slater feels is actually needed is behavioral specialists who teach faculty how to deal with advances from students. It would not hurt, either, if there were some special advice available on how to avoid being attracted to some of these girls. Things are especially complicated these days, since many of the male faculty are taking daily-dose versions of ED meds like Cialis and are likely to pop a woody at inappropriate moments. Slater would likely fall into this category himself, if not for the fact that both Viagra and Cialis give him headaches that feel as if a stiletto and a steel drum are simultaneously at work in his cranium.
He has closed the door to his office, hoping to deter students from coming in. If a student knocks and enters his office, university policy dictates that—whether the student is male or female—professors are to prop their doors open wide so there can be no perception or accusation of sexual impropriety. Students sometimes claim they have been the victim of molestation by professors, and it is also not unheard of for a disgruntled graduate student to come to campus and gun down a professor who declines a dissertation or assigns a failing grade. Three years ago one of his suite mates, a visiting scholar from Rutgers, was shot dead in his office; Slater heard the gun go off. While most often the litigious students or the gun-toters are nut jobs, what is also true is that certain faculty offices are furnished with the equivalent of the Hollywood casting couch. One colleague’s office door is closed many hours in the afternoon several times a week, after which a pretty dark-haired young woman is seen to leave the office, carrying an armload of books and wearing a stagy “scholarly” expression on her face. The buzz in the department is that semen stains glow white upon the dark cushions of the guy’s office sofa.
Well, who can blame the guy? Isn’t Slater sick of his currently sexless existence, the life of a eunuch? When tension builds up to an untenable level, he makes a move on Beth, or submits to one of her advances, but invariably he can’t cut the mustard. Things have been this way since the day of Poppy’s funeral, and while he understands his dysfunction to be a byproduct of his grief, that awareness does not help the problem in any significant manner. Beth has obviously begun to resent him, maybe even hate him, and he has started to realize the feeling is somewhat mutual. He is sick of being expected to make love to Beth and no one but Beth. Enough is frickin’ enough, for godsake.
Above his desk hang photos of Wright and Pei and Gehry and Julia Morgan, along with posters of Fallingwater and the Louvre pyramid. He stares at them, oddly transfixed, though the photos have hung there for years. He suddenly feels bogus, as if he should instead have a Ringling Brothers poster hanging there, or maybe a poster featuring a third-string rock band or a movie poster of Brando astride a Harley. He might as well have a vulgar velvet painting of a clown, something fit for the “bonus room” in the cheesiest of suburban tract houses. He is irrelevant in his own profession and an outsider in his own life.
His father would have preferred castration to sitting at a desk or gabbling in a classroom or lecture hall, his arms as unmuscled as a girl’s. A longshoreman’s trade was a masculine undertaking, a job that was vigorous and kinetic.
From one of the desk drawers Slater removes a small, framed black-and-white photo of his parents on their wedding day. Years ago the photo stood on the desktop, but he soon realized that none of his colleagues kept family photos in their offices. Also, the students asked too many questions and Slater grew sick of making the same small talk. Mom and Poppy were married during World War II and wear their uniforms in the photo. Poppy, a curly-haired sailor, is sporting his dress whites, and Mom, a lovely, red-lipped WAVE, wears a dark suit nipped in at the waist, and an unflattering military cap. She always expressed regret about not being married in a white gown and veil, but war was war, she said. At least his parents had not been the sort of dorks who wanted to “renew their vows” twenty years later, aging people donning the youthful attire of dewy brides and grooms. In this instant he recalls something he has not thought about in years: after the war, Mom made David a little suit of clothes out of the fabric from his parents’ military uniforms, a child-sized navy blue suit with short pants. Somewhere there is still a photo of Slater in the getup. He can remember being proud of the suit but embarrassed by the headgear: Mom had for some inexplicable reason made a tartan Glengarry cap, trailing ribbon and all, and everyone but David had found the headgear adorable.
He continues scrutinizing his parents’ wedding photo. Are there visible signs of something in his father’s psyche that would drive Poppy to annihilate himself only months after Mom’s death? Or maybe he is searching for clues to what it is about a couple that can bind them together for fifty years.
There is a knock on Slater’s office door, followed by a female voice. “Dr. Slater?” The voice is thin and high-register; she’s probably an undergrad. At first he does not respond. “Dr. Slater?” she repeats. He calls out for her to come in.
Out of his unconscious rises a random phrase he remembers from long ago—he’ll google it later—”swift and secure flight.”
Slater sits at a table in Siesta Sancho’s with two women from the Wednesday night suicide survivors support group. He and the expat Californian, Holly, and the Oklahoma gal named SueAnn have begun having margaritas weekly after group for a postgame recap. Tonight Slater has declined a cocktail and substituted a club soda with lime, unnerved by the booze fest in L.A. His midsection throbs, but the pressure belt is not visible under his shirt. No one seems to have noticed that his spare tire is gone.
Slater spies a young woman with an iPhone pointed directly at him. He recognizes her as one of his grad students, sitting at the bar along with some other girls. Every now and then, he spots students photographing him about town with their smartphone cameras. Who knew that when he left New York, he would go on to garner paparazzi in Oklahoma, any semblance of privacy kaput? He gives the girl a mock salute and she quickly turns away.
“Sometimes, going to group starts to seem like self-indulgent whining,” Slater says.
For a moment neither woman speaks, and Slater hears the steady crunching sound of Holly chewing the ice from her margarita.
“Do you mean me?” SueAnn says, her round little face reddening. “I guess I shouldn’t have been complaining about Gilbert again.”
Slater feels a pang of regret. Why does he never consider how other people might respond to things he says? “No, no, I didn’t mean you, hon. We’re always interested in what you have to say.”
Holly says, “Dave, is that why you said almost nothing tonight in group—because you didn’t want to whine? Or maybe there was something you didn’t want to say?”
“Nah, nothing like that,” Slater says, telling her he is simply overtired from a trip to California for book research.
SueAnn, who always seems cognizant of uneasiness in others, chooses a topic-changing gambit. “I saw your wife today when I was at work in the store,” she tells Slater. “I recognized her from the time I saw you together at the Farmer’s Market, but I don’t think she recognized me.”
Slater had not realized that Beth shopped at the Dollar Thrift-O. Well, who can guess about someone else’s life, even their spouse’s? He cuts to the chase: “Was she alone?”
SueAnn confirms that Beth was by herself.
“What did she buy?” he asks.
Poor SueAnn actually stutters her answer and seems extremely discomfited; her face again turns a deep red. “I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who rang her up,” she says. “But she’s a real pretty lady, very nice looking.”
“I cheated on her in L.A.,” he announces.
SueAnn’s and Holly’s faces register shock, and Holly even covers the bottom half of her face with her hands. But this much he knows for sure: they are not even half as surprised as he is. Until the very moment the confession spilled from his mouth, he would have sworn on Poppy’s grave he was not going to tell anyone about his misconduct.
“But …” SueAnne says, not finishing her thought. She and Holly both wear the bug-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of actors miming surprise on a TV sitcom.
Slater touches the arm of a waiter passing by the table. “I’ll have a Rusty Nail, please.”
Slater and the women sit in silence. The pressure belt sears his waist like a branding iron.
As he walks from Sancho’s to his car, even though his heels are now bandaged, Slater still feels the pain of each step forward and has to suffer the indignity of walking with a stuttering gait like some old gaffer. But in this instant, out of nowhere, the stabbing sensation in his feet calls forth something. Slater is a kid, maybe four or five, and he is limping along with Poppy, the bottoms of his feet radiating pain. He is wearing his brand-new summer sandals, which his mother, with what Slater years later realized was Depression-era mentality, has insisted on buying a size too large in order for him to “grow into them”—a phrase that actually means the shoes will be too large for several months and will then begin to fit properly just as the weather becomes too cold for sandals. The friction of the sandals slipping and sliding and rubbing against his feet has raised hellish blisters.
It’s just Davey and Poppy, and they are walking from the green DeSoto across a parking lot that is paved with hot asphalt. They are in Queens, at Rockaway Beach. Where was Mom that day? He cannot now guess why he and his father went to Rockaway on their own. But he does remember the smells, the smell of sand and salt water and sweet taffy and popcorn and Sea and Ski sunscreen—still called “suntan lotion” in those days. God, the sensory montage intoxicates him even in this moment. He begged his father to take him directly to Playland, saving the beach for later, but his father, always mesmerized by the ocean, tugged at his hand. In those days Rockaway was still known as the Irish Riviera, and the surfing culture had not yet sprung up. But Rockaway’s Playland was amusement-park heaven to the boy, even more than Coney Island. One of the most calamitous events of Slater’s adult life was Playland being torn down in ‘87 and replaced by houses.
On this particular day at Rockaway, Davey Slater had been able to think only of the carousel and a bag of salted peanuts in a striped paper sack. He envisioned himself astride a huge wooden steed, goading the painted horse with the leather strap and galloping along on the carousel, munching peanuts at the same time. His mouth now waters. But another sensation set in for Davey Slater at that point: he and his father stepped onto the sandy beach, and as he trudged forward, sand bunched in his sandals and settled in lumps that rubbed against the watery blisters on the bottom of his feet. Tears burned his eyes, but he did not want his father to see him crying.
“Never mind, buddy,” Poppy told him. “We’ll do the beach later—let’s schlep over to the rides.” His father picked him up and hoisted him to his broad shoulders, rescuing his son’s stinging feet from the hot sand. Poppy wore a white cotton T-shirt, smooth and soft under Slater’s bare legs. One of Poppy’s cartoonishly large forearms bore a garish tattoo featuring a large anchor and the words U.S. Navy—this in the days before tattoos were within the purview of young hipsters but were still somewhat louche emblems of working-class men and GIs. From the T-shirt rose the new-mown-fragrant scent of the Tide detergent in which Mom washed the family’s clothing. Being astride his strong father’s powerful longshoreman’s shoulders was even more thrilling than riding a carousel horse, and Slater was infused with a nearly beatific joy.
Two smells of that instant now enter Slater’s nose again, not remembered but actually present—the primary scents of everyone’s father in the fifties, Prell shampoo and Old Spice.
He slogs forward, his feet and midsection blowtorching his body, heading toward his car, which will take him to his house, where he will have to talk with Beth. Another of the slogans Poppy sometimes repeated was that people never lie so much as after a hunt or before a war.
Slater has tried for more than a year to tamp down thoughts of his father. He knows that memory is the ultimate gill net, ready to snare you and yank you away from your source of air. But lately he has been slipping down, sinking into that opal-dark pool. He does not seem to be able to remember himself in a very good light. What floats up is the recollection of the time he called his father an asshole, or the time when he was fifteen and took money out of his mother’s pocketbook.
Limping, Slater makes his way toward his Solstice, which is parked in the front of the Sancho’s lot. The neon sign on the front of the seafood restaurant across the street from Siesta Sancho’s looks as if it hovers near the roof of his car. The blue neon fish swimming across the facade of Cap’n Cabral’s seems to swim along Slater’s car, the illusion simply a matter of perspective. In the days when David and his father used to fish at Breezy Point, Poppy had explained to him that when fish are taken out of water, they suffocate not because they cannot breathe the oxygen available in the air but because their gill arches collapse and there is not enough surface area for diffusion to take place; the breaking down is a fundamental principle of engineering. The luminous fish swims out of Slater’s sight.