It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a father.
POPE JOHN XXIII
“No foul play is suspected,” the cable news guy says. Slater looks up from where he is sitting on the sofa with a stack of exams turned in by the students in his Theory of Architecture seminar. Funny how a phrase such as “no foul play suspected” can be clichéd and yet at the same time have the power to set off a Pavlovian response. He feels a spritz of cold sweat beneath his shirt as his father comes to mind. In the case of Poppy’s suicide last year, Slater knew foul play had in fact been suspected by the cops. His father had set up the Salvadoran housekeeper, telling her he was going out of town and asking her to come in and feed the dog while he was away. When she entered the house to feed Poppy’s elderly borzoi, the unfortunate woman found her employer in bed ashen and deceased, with a bottle of Captain Morgan and an empty prescription bottle on the nightstand. The cops then roped the porch with yellow crime-scene tape and questioned her for some time. He guesses he should feel grateful that Poppy arranged things so none of his children would find the corpse, but there is something unsavory about sticking a domestic worker with such a task. Another hackneyed expression comes to mind: “Not in my job description.”
His attention drifts back to the TV, where the news guy elaborates on the no-foul-play story at hand. The item turns out to be one of those Ripley’s-type tales, freakishly unlikely. Some guy in South Carolina had received a heart transplant several years before and bizarrely enough ended up marrying the widow of his own heart donor. But the story had not ended there. Now, six years later, he has been found dead with what appears to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound, which as it happens is exactly the way the donor himself had died.
It enters Slater’s mind that maybe the widow shot both men, but apparently the cops have ruled out that possibility. Could there really be something uncanny about the donor heart? Could an organ—other than the one below the waist—actually cause one man after another to fall in love with the very same woman and then to raise a gun to his head, too? The story momentarily rattles him. But probably the twice-widowed woman drove both husbands to suicide; probably the transplanted heart had nothing to do with the issue.
Now the local news has replaced the national stuff, and on the screen is a haggard-looking woman being interviewed in the front yard of her home. Standing by the chain link fence is an interviewer from one of the Tulsa stations, a reporter wearing a flowered dress of the sort favored by Oklahoma women. The interviewee herself wears a pair of baggy trousers, topped by a maroon Sooners hoodie. She explains in what used to be termed a “whiskey voice,” but from the looks of her deeply furrowed face is more likely a voice ravaged by decades of tobacco use, that sometime during the night, someone had stolen her statue of Jesus from this very lawn. She points to a spot in the center of the yard and elaborates.
“He was rot here,” she says, “rot in the middle of my yard, the sacred heart a Jesus.”
The reporter in the country-cousin dress turns somberly to the camera and informs the audience, “The theft of the statue of Jesus occurred sometime last night. It’s hard to imagine who would do something like this.” She offers a dismayed little head shake.
“Are we gonna let the Debil win?” the complainant says. “Cuz that’s what’s happenin’.”
Beth comes out of the kitchen carrying two glasses of wine. “I think it’s the cocktail hour, Dave,” she says, eyeing the stack of student papers until Slater sets them aside. “What’s new on the news?” She hands him a glass.
“The Devil stole Jesus,” he says, but keeps his tone nonjudgmental. He has never cared to be one of those like Woody Allen who mock other people’s religions. He has no ax to grind against Jesus, even if Jesus-culture is tacky, nor does he make Easter egg jokes, as Allen often did back in his high-visibility days before Soon Yi. Slater says nothing to Beth about the report of the telltale heart that caused men to shoot themselves. He takes a swig of what tastes like Merlot.
Beth leans over to place coasters on the coffee table, and Slater has a close-up view of the backs of her thighs. He wishes he were a bigger person, a more loyal spouse, and that the sight of her cellulite did not impact him negatively. But Slater has begun to discover that he is not a big person, not the man he always intended to be. He has become a clenched-up semi-bitter guy who is often shocked to catch sight of his pinched, unhappy face as he passes a mirror or reflective surface. But Beth had never in their married life worn shorts when they still lived in New York. The women in Hope Springs, though, think nothing of wearing shorts everywhere they go, about seven months out of the year, and Beth has jumped onto that bandwagon. Of course, she’s an educated person, so she does not fall for the sucker-bait ads for creams or pills that are supposed to eradicate cellulite. She is aware that those dimples might as well be part of her DNA now, and that they’ll be with her in her casket someday.
When he was a freshman at Columbia and still a virgin, he had found himself obsessed with the issue of virginity, wishing his own would disappear and imagining that he was the last male virgin over the age of twelve. He sat in many a seminar or studio session on campus paying little attention to the work at hand, staring at the other students in the room and trying to imagine whether they had sex or not. The preoccupation vexed him like a hair shirt until Homecoming Weekend when Cheryl Bernstein came through for him. Now he finds this sort of OCD thinking has returned, as he stares at every woman he meets, wondering if the backs of her legs are smooth or puckered. He has discovered himself in some unseemly moments trying to catch glimpses of Dr. Jane’s thighs when she crosses her legs in her short, flouncy skirts while she facilitates the suicide survivors group meetings on Wednesday evenings.
Beth’s voice thrums along with the television; she is making a running commentary on the annoying number of commercials that clog the networks these days, but Slater cannot divorce himself from the story about the guy who shot himself, the guy with the donated heart. And what was it in Slater’s father’s heart that allowed him to take his life—who could ever know that? Slater remembers a weird factoid from a marine biology course he took long ago at Columbia. The hagfish, which is not exactly a fish but an elongated eel-like creature, has two brains and four hearts. The organism is so flexible it can tie itself in knots.
“Did you ever notice,” Beth says, “that when the drug commercials are forced to list the side effects, they do so in a cheery little upbeat singsong voice?”
Slater shrugs.
Beth mimics the commercial being aired: “May cause blindness!” she says in a buoyant tone, “paralysis or cancer!” She flashes an outlandish rictus of a smile, mocking the toothy grin of the actress enumerating the different ways a medication can maim the patient, and Slater has to laugh. Beth, a theater major in college, has always been a talented mimic.
Slater does not recall anything further about the hagfish, though he finds himself wondering how many reproductive organs the critters might have. With all those hearts and brains, does it also need multiple sets of genitalia? How cool would it be to have two schlongs on hand, or maybe a penis and a vagina both, so you never had to worry about a partner. He had taken an undergrad lit seminar, too, as an elective, and there was a Hemingway story in which the young male protagonist looked longingly at women but made no attempt to meet them. The story said the youth dimly desired a girl but did not want to have to work to get her. What he wanted was a “life without consequences.”
One day when he was five years old, Slater and two of his neighborhood pals had been playing inside his parents’ car. More accurately, the shiny black Plymouth with whitewall tires was his father’s car; few women had drivers’ licenses in the 1950s. Nearly every family owned only one car, and the man did the driving. Times were different then, as if in a different universe on another plane somewhere. In Flatbush in those days, little kids walked to school without escort, frolicked unchaperoned on playgrounds, rode bikes everywhere, alone or with their chums, played out in the street and inside cars. What they were not allowed to do was listen to the radio when sitting inside their fathers’ autos. “You’ll wear down the battery!” was the universal parental complaint in Slater’s neighborhood. On the day he is recalling, Jeffie Rabinowitz and Barbara Zuchelli had been his playmates, Barbara sitting in the backseat and Jeffie manning the radio as Slater sat in the driver’s seat twisting the steering wheel from side to side and making acceleration and braking sounds with his mouth. Jeffie left the radio tuned to a station playing Cliffie Stone’s “Silver Stars, Purple Sage.” Slater has no idea why cowboy songs were so popular in the 1950s, but there was a whole Western vibe going on then in both music and film. And when the family went out to Playland at the beach, there was a vending machine called Allstar Cowboys where one could slip coins into a slot and choose cowboy cards, just as the adults chose packs of cigarettes from nearly identical machines. Slater had purchased stacks of the cards, and before he went off to Columbia, he discovered in his childhood bureau cards including Bill Elliott as Red Ryder and Robert “Bobby” Blake as Little Beaver; that one is funny now.
“Jeez Louise—your dad’s a crook!” Jeffie had opened the glove box and begun rummaging inside with an astonished look on his plump face.
Slater had said, “No, he’s not,” even before he knew why Rabinowitz made such an accusation.
Rabinowitz gingerly pulled a knife from the glove box and unsheathed it, clutching it in one hand and staring at it as if it were a Tommy gun. “Look at this thing!” he said. “It’s gigantic.”
“Put it back,” Slater said, feeling a hot burning behind his eyes and even in his groin. When Rabinowitz did not re-sheath the knife, Slater repeated more loudly, “Put it back.” He added, “And turn off the radio, you’ll wear down the battery.” He heard Barbara gasp when she saw the knife, and knew she would go home and blab to her parents and her nine siblings. He had heard his father tell his mother that the Zuchellis had so many kids because they were papists, but when Slater asked what that meant, his parents would not say. Slater and his friends left the car, the mood spoiled, and Rabinowitz and Barbara both went home. Slater went inside the house, by then weeping like a wound.
“What’s wrong, Davey?” his mother had asked. “Did you skin your knee?”
At first Slater had not wanted to answer his mother, but when she prompted him, he blurted, “Daddy’s a burglar.”
Mom had first laughed, then asked him why he would think such a thing. He explained he had discovered a knife in the glove box of the car, not mentioning Rabinowitz or the radio.
“Oh, honey, that’s a hunting knife,” his mother said and put her arm around him. Slater can still feel the relief that surged through him that day, Poppy in an instant transformed from a potential knifer and robber back to his strong, worthy father, a former football player and a navy veteran, a longshoreman who marched proudly with his union brothers in parades.
Just before Slater and Beth were married, lying in bed one long, lazy morning, he had told Beth the anecdote from his childhood about suspecting his father was a “burglar.”
“It was just a hunting knife,” Slater told her, laughingly ruefully.
Beth had squinted and pressed her lips together, saying nothing at first. Finally she said, “I never thought of your father as a hunter.”
“He isn’t,” Slater said. “Never was. Poppy’s not the hunting type.”
“Well, then,” she said, “he didn’t need a hunting knife. He must have had the knife in his car because he was a punk.”
Slater had stifled a choky gulp from a sudden tightness in his throat. Poppy a punk? The association with his father was foreign and jarring. The word was still significantly insulting in those days, long before punk rock or punk culture. Until the seventies, “punk” was still defined as “a rebel or thug” and alternatively “a young man who is the sexual partner of an older man.” Slater did not know what he felt in that moment, exactly, other than the choking sensation and no slight embarrassment that it had taken an outside party to conclude what was glaringly obvious. Slater faked a laugh for Beth and said, “I suppose so,” but he was haunted for days by the exchange. In less than a nanosecond, the father he revered had been exposed as a punk, what Poppy himself might have referred to as a “no-goodnik.” Eventually he shrugged off the notion and restored his father to his former place in his mental outlook, but he had learned that morning in bed that even one’s own father was never what one thought he was, that the sands could rapidly shift, like when you stood at the edge of the sea and the waves rolled out, the slippage of the sand beneath your feet altering your perspective and leaving you for a moment dizzy.
Slater arrives at the fellowship hall later than usual for the weekly suicide survivors meeting, but Dr. Jane is not there yet. Clay, the quiet guy who drives down from Ponca City, is not present either, so Slater sits next to SueAnn, though she usually chooses to sit near Clay. Slater has the feeling that both Clay and SueAnn are intimidated by the others in the group and even by Dr. Jane. SueAnn and Clay are the only natives of Oklahoma, the rest of the group just by chance consisting of coastal transplants. Slater is from New York; Jane is from San Francisco, here on an NIMH grant; Holly came from Los Angeles to open the only bookstore in Hope Springs, other than the one on campus. He greets SueAnn, and she laughs a bit nervously when she says hello, then resumes sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She wears perfume he has never noticed before, though maybe he just has not been close enough to her. Rather than the floral scent he might have expected, SueAnn’s perfume smells like vanilla. He finds the fragrance more than a bit appetizing.
Dr. Jane enters the room. Slater tries not to look her in the face. The last time he saw her, she was in Siesta Sancho’s restaurant flirting with a guy young enough to be her son. Yeah, well, so what if he’s a bit jealous of the young man. She seems to be surviving her own grief well enough, if she can take up with a handsome youth. Next to him, SueAnn gives off a lot of warmth for such a petite woman. Though she is slightly plump, he would not have thought of her as large enough to radiate so much body heat. Maybe she’s having hot flashes like Beth used to. He debates telling her she might consider knocking off the caffeine but thinks better of it and says nothing.
“Would someone like to begin, this evening?” Jane says, all business now, her “therapeutic mask” in place. Slater wonders if she showed that expression to youngblood when they were in bed together.
“I’ll start,” he says. The rest of them say in unison, “Thanks, Dave,” sounding like the folks in the A.A. meetings held down the hall, and all eyes pivot his way. He notices SueAnn has a little gold cross on a chain, or is it a crucifix? He can never remember the difference. The thing rests on her considerable cleavage, which is pinkish, also probably indicative of hot-flash activity.
“I’m not saying this group hasn’t helped me,” Slater says, “but I feel like everything is backwards.” No one says anything, and Slater does not know what to say either. He had not planned to speak tonight and is not sure what he’s getting at. He goes with the flow, just lets the words edge themselves out.
“Just before Beth and I were married, we lived in a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks from NYU.” He looks around, sees that the three women seem actively attentive. “The fixtures in the bathroom were transposed,” he says.
The women look at him quizzically.
“The faucet with the H on it had cold water, and the one with the C on it had hot water,” he says.
Holly laughs. “When you said the fixtures were transposed, I had this yucky image of the toilet flushing into the bathtub.”
Slater tries not to look at her legs. “As my dad used to say,” he continues, “we’re all creatures of habit, so of course no matter how long we’d lived there, we often forgot that the faucets were backwards and we’d either step into an ice-cold shower or scald ourselves when we tried to throw cold water on our faces.”
Slater cannot find the words to express what he is trying to convey to the group. None of them speaks for a few moments, until Jane offers the hand gesture she sometimes makes to indicate that the speaker should continue: a soft little curlicue in the air.
“Since Poppy died, my whole life is like that cockeyed bathroom. When he was alive, I didn’t love him enough. Now that he’s gone, I love him too much. And it’s the same with Beth—I loved her most of my life, but now it’s like I feel nada.”
There is silence in the room for a few moments, and then Dr. Jane begins pontificating about the effects of grief on familial relationships, but Slater has heard it all before.
Now Holly speaks. “Dave, have you ever read much Bellow? Saul Bellow?” she says. When Slater acknowledges he has not, Holly continues, “I read something in his collected letters. I never forgot what Bellow said: ‘Losing a parent is like driving through a plate glass window. You didn’t know the window was there until it shattered. But then for years to come, you’re picking up the pieces, down to the last splinter of glass.’”
Surreptitiously, little SueAnn touches him on the arm, her fingers hot as a sauna. When he looks sideways at her, she leans in and says sotto voce, “I don’t love anyone no more, either.”
Slater walks across the quad toward his car after his nine-o’clock design studio. The students had been there overnight for a charrette and were wired from caffeine and “smart drugs” and whatever else young people use to stay awake; when he was in school, the students had only coffee and the occasional bennie to get them through the all-nighters. The sound of horns and drums erupts into the morning air. The marching band, practicing for the weekend game, is playing the song “Oklahoma!” As he heads away from the architecture building, a memory long buried rises: One year, his father had marched in New York’s Labor Day parade, and from the sidelines in the crowd Slater had seen his father march right by him in the ILA drill team. Poppy had been practicing with the team every weekend for months before the parade and was designated as one of the marchers who carried and brandished a cargo hook as the drill team marched in formation. Slater was thrilled, as the cargo hook maneuvers had long been his favorite part of the parade—not counting the times the NYFD hook-and-ladder unit stopped and raised the ladder higher than the buildings on the parade route and a fireman ran up its steps and everyone cheered. Slater’s mother had been pregnant again that year, which may have been why they were able to get a seat at the curb, nothing blocking their view of the bands and marchers passing by. Now Slater gets into his Solstice and slams the door shut, but he still hears the muffled sound of the marching band playing “Oklahoma!” with much swagger. The band in front of the ILA drill team on that Labor Day was playing “Oklahoma!” too; the movie had come out that year. Poppy told his family before the parade, “The minute you hear ‘Oklahoma!’ start watching for me at their stern.”
He envisions Poppy, one arm behind his back, marching in unison with a line of union brothers also with one arm behind their backs, all with their right arms raised high, their cargo hooks slicing the air in dazzling arcs. The motions the men made with their hooks were balletic, but they also held a defiant subtext: every longshoreman knew cargo hooks had been used as weapons by union men during strike-busting attacks against them in the 1930s. It seemed to Slater on that Labor Day that his father was the handsomest man on the drill team, the one most crisply in step, the tallest marcher with the most concise slices in the air with his hook. As his father high-stepped by them, Slater’s heart leapt up. He dropped his bag of peanuts to the curb in order to applaud.
Slater has to pick up an exchange student from Japan at the airport this morning. He is running a tad late, as one of his amped-up students asked for feedback after the bell rang and they lingered in the studio a few minutes. He swings the car onto Main Street, which will take him onto the turnpike to Tulsa, at the same time leaning toward the glove box for enough quarters for the tolls. Someone honks, and as he raises his head, he imagines that he sees Beth coming out of a building. The guy who honked seems to be in a hurry, so Slater does not slow down to check out the Beth lookalike, but the woman is exiting the town’s Kingdom Hall. A short laugh escapes Slater’s throat: Beth walking out of a Jehovah’s Witness house of worship, no frickin’ way. He looks into the rearview mirror, though, and damned if there isn’t a silver Odyssey like Beth’s parked right in front of the hall. He turns onto a side street and decides to swing back around and get a better look. He speeds up, since the woman is walking toward her car and he does not want her to get away.
Slater manages to wheel into the area behind the Kingdom Hall and still be able to see the Beth doppelgänger walking toward the Odyssey. She does not wear shorts, as Beth often does, but a white suit of some kind, a skirt and jacket he has never before seen. She opens the car door with one hand, but he can see that in the other hand she carries—not a Bible, which would be weird enough—but what appears to be a stack of those pamphlet things they call the Watchtower. It is Beth. He sees the vanity plate as she drives off: LUVNY. He is tempted to follow her, but he does not know what he would say when confronting her. And the fact is, the kid from Japan will be waiting alone at the airport and Slater is already running late.
He heads back onto Main Street toward Tulsa, trying to make sense of what he has seen, to impart some sort of logic to the incident. In any case, she’s usually opening her gift shop at this time of the day, and don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses meet on Saturday or Sunday mornings, not Thursdays? The road in front of him swims before Slater’s eyes, and he tries to blink away some unpleasant floaters from his field of vision. A couple of weeks ago in the therapy group, Clay used the term “poleaxed.” Now Slater knows what the word actually means; he has just been hardcore poleaxed.
The first time Slater was aware of being a disappointment to his father was at Atlantic City. The family had driven to the shore for a summer vacation, and Slater and his parents were exploring the boardwalk after a morning on the beach. Slater remembers first noticing people pointing at something and hearing someone say, “Oh, there he is!” Coming toward them, growing larger and larger as it approached, was a huge peanut wearing a top hat. The hat added to the peanut’s height and made it considerably taller than Poppy. As the thing came closer, Slater could see stippling on the inhuman shell-body.
“Look, it’s Mr. Peanut,” Mom told Slater. As Mr. Peanut continued walking toward them, Slater could see that he wore a monocle—what Slater thought of then as a round glass thing over one eye. The glare from the sun had the effect of occluding the eye, turning the peanut into a Cyclops. Slater was terrorized and grabbed his mother’s hand. The peanut wore white gloves that frightened Slater; the arms and legs resembled human limbs, but the cloth hands seemed unnatural, spectral. The face on the peanut bore a grisly fixed smile. When the thing brandished his cane at them—Slater now knows the mascot intended only a friendly greeting—Slater lost it. He remembers howling and grabbing Mom’s waist and hiding his face in her maternity smock. Mom had patted him on the back and reassured him that Mr. Peanut was a good guy, and soon the embodiment ambled away down the boardwalk.
“Let’s get you some cotton candy, Davey,” his mother had said, clearly trying to calm him, but his father had remained silent. Later, back in the car, Poppy turned his face toward the backseat and said, “You need to toughen up, kiddo. Men aren’t afraid. Boys aren’t afraid of peanuts.” Slater can still see his father’s expression: he had the same look on his face as when he helped Rabinowitz’s father pump out the septic tank at their fishing camp.
When Slater wakes, Beth is already awake, lying on her side looking at him. Now, there’s something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Back in the day, he would often wake to find Beth propped up on one elbow, gazing at him with a tender expression and a smile, but now she usually gets up before he does and he wakes by himself.
“Why aren’t you up already?” he says. He has a hard time looking her in the eye, not knowing how he can bring up the topic of his sighting of her at the Witnesses’ house of worship.
She tells him she’s not going to work this morning, that she has a doctor’s appointment. Who knows what’s true anymore? He segues away from this conversation.
“You know what I was thinking about last night at group, Bethie?” he says. “That apartment on Houston where we lived when I was adjuncting at NYU—remember that place?”
“Oh, god, yes,” she says, laughing. “The studio with the bed that slid under the bathroom.”
Beth’s memory is correct. The studio had a certain charm to it, in Slater’s view. There were bay windows, oak strip floors, crown moldings, and other nice touches. But the building’s version of a Murphy bed was a mattress that slid from the wall in a tray that rolled out into the room at night, then back on the rollers in the morning to its resting place directly under the bathroom, which was three steps up from the rest of the studio. More than once they had joked about their bed’s resemblance to the cadaver trays that slid out from a wall at the morgue. He says, “Remember when we first moved in, and our dining table for the first few weeks was a cardboard box?” They had sat on pillows on the floor.
“You were really romantic, though, Dave. When I came home from work, you’d have paper placemats on the cardboard box and candles lit, and a rose in a little bud vase you found in one of those trinket shops in Chinatown.”
Beth seems a bit wistful, and the memories are sweet for him, too. “You had a lace petticoat from one of your theater productions that you hung over the window to give us some privacy when we made love on the window seat.” Slater is grateful to Beth that she does not say something like “Yeah, back before you were impotent.” He smells bleach in the sheets on their bed, and a hint of musky cologne wafting from Beth’s bosom. He feels nostalgic and wonders for a second if they might find time for a bike ride this morning, or maybe a quick swim at the lake. He looks closely at his wife. Yes, he remembers the young Beth of the Houston Street days, but the woman in bed beside him might as well be a mail order bride from Russia, someone he ordered up from the Internet; he has no flaming concept of who she really is. There is no point in mentioning the Kingdom Hall sighting. She is too far gone. Or he is.
“It’s odd that you would bring up the place on Houston just now,” Beth says. Slater looks at her: why? “I’m moving out, Dave. I’ve found a condo over on Magnolia, and I’ve put a down payment on it.”
At first Slater doesn’t get it. They already own this house and hardly need a condo. But then her words sink in: I’m moving out. Now she adds, “And I’m not really going to the doctor today, I’m seeing a lawyer.”
For a moment he weighs his options: talk things out, have a confrontation, kiss her, kick her rear end. But what happens instead is that inwardly he says, Oh, well. Or maybe he even says it out loud. They lie on the daisy-dotted sheets in silence.
Slater is aware that once you start going back to the films from your youth instead of watching the new releases, you have entered your eldership. When he was a teen, he noted that his parents stopped going to film festivals and art cinemas. When they occasionally went to the movies on a Saturday night, they came back complaining that all the films now were too vulgar or too depressing. Slater had been embarrassed for them when they went to repertory theaters to see Casablanca again, or glued themselves to the Admiral in the living room when Our Town with William Holden came on TV. Slater had sworn he would never become the sort of loser who wanted to live in the past. But here he is, sitting in the TV room of his home with a stack of DVDs on the end table, none of the films made after 1969. Beth is still in residence but has gone to her yoga class—the classes that should have been a clue months ago. He has observed that once a woman starts going to yoga classes, she tends to leave her husband before long. In that regard the classes seem to have replaced the “consciousness-raising groups” of the 1970s. Or maybe there never were any yoga classes. Maybe, like Dr. Jane, she’s seeing some young stud, or maybe she is “worshipping” or “witnessing” or whatever it is she is doing behind his back.
Slater has spent the past two-plus hours with La Dolce Vita, always his favorite Fellini. Later this week he’ll be viewing some Bergman and watching Butch Cassidy again. Mastroianni is on pause, as Slater needed a bathroom break and also stopped by the kitchen for another Sam Adams and a refill of his popcorn bowl. The all-night party scene in the film has gone on for almost as long as an actual all-night party, and he knows the ending is coming soon. When he presses Play, sure enough, Marcello and his fellow attractive degenerates are running in their formal attire at dawn from the party mansion to the beach, calling out, “What’s that?” as they spot something at the shoreline.
Washed up at the water’s edge is something massive, swollen and formless. There is conjecture among the partiers about what the thing is, and guesses as to whether it is alive or dead. Marcello, tottering with dark bags under his eyes, smirks at the face of the creature and sways above it on his shaky legs. Slater too is having trouble identifying the beast. Is it a ray, or a gargantuan distorted flounder? It almost seems to be a figmental being rather than an actual denizen of the sea—some Old Testament leviathan. The jaded playboy portrayed by Mastroianni stares at the one visible eye of the sea monster, their gazes locked like a nightclub hypnotist and his subject.
While Slater stares at Marcello as Marcello stares at the eye, another such orbit materializes in the foreground of his mind. He feels like he is looking into a mirror at a man looking into a mirror. There is a squid in Slater’s past, a creature he knows was nothing as monstrous as the dead, bloated ray on the Italian beach, but when he was a kid, the squid he saw seemed every bit as horrific. He no longer recalls how old he was at the time, but he knows the event was at least a couple of years after the Mr. Peanut episode. By that time Mom had given birth to his first sister, who was a toddler then, so Poppy took David alone to Rhode Island one weekend that May for a squid-fishing trip. They had driven to the bridge to Goat Island, not far from Newport. It was dark by the time they arrived, but that was as things should be, because squid fishing was done at night. Slater had napped in the car on the way so he would be able to stay up so late. He had been excited, envisioning hauling in a sea creature like the grinning cartoon octopus in the illustrations for “The Little Mermaid” in the family’s volume of Hans Christian Andersen tales. He had wondered if the squid would blow heart-shaped bubbles like the creature in the book and then smile up at him when it was lifted from the water, if it might have a gold crown on its head like the octopus in the storybook. He had helped Poppy carry their gear from the car: two rods, a Coleman lantern, a dip net, and their bait box and ice chest.
The view as they approached is one Slater will always remember. One side of the bridge was packed solid with fishermen, their glowing lanterns like oversized fireflies over the water. The scene was festive as a carnival, and Slater’s heart thumped with the thrill of the spectacle, which at the moment seemed even more exciting than being at Coney Island. Men and boys whooped around them, shouting congratulations to each other as squids were raised in dip nets.
But as is always the case when fishing, the wait for a catch became tedious before long, and Slater grew bored and sleepy, up hours past his usual bedtime. His father told him more than once during the evening to stop whining, but finally Poppy got a hit, yelled, “Whoa, Nellie!” and began straining against his line. After what to Slater was an interminable amount of time, his father finally flipped the squid into the net and began hauling it up. Slater leaned over the side of the bridge, moving the lantern closer to get a good look at the creature. He could hear the caught squid thrashing in the net, and just as his father pulled it over the railing, black stuff gushed from the rim, alarming Slater. “He’s inking us,” his father said, laughing.
Not only did the squid not wear a crown like the octopus in the book, but its entire head was grotesque. The creature was gigantic and slimy looking, its face indistinct and repugnant. As Poppy hefted it into the ice chest, he said to his son, “The bugger weighs at least twenty-five pounds.” Slater had hung back, frightened by the monster but not wanting his father to know. Poppy grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the chest, telling him to have a look. Urine leaked down Slater’s legs and he prayed his father would not notice. Looking up at Slater was a huge, disturbing eye, not a blue eye with curly eyelashes like the one in the book, but a black, inky carrion eye, staring him down.
On the screen, Marcello observes bitterly that the creature is glowering at him. Slater presses Pause again and contemplates the screen, as immobile as the beached animal. The monster’s eye stares even in death.