In fact, we had several drinks, at an ill-lit NYU student hangout with framed portraits of art-film stars on the walls and peanut shells all over the floor. We got sort of drunk. This is not something I had done with someone else for a long time, and it reminded me of college, and long, dazed walks back to my dorm in the dark. In retrospect these walks seemed like the best moments of my life: unhurried, mildly challenging, directly preceding sound sleep. I was so lost in the memory of them that when we spilled out onto the sidewalk afterward I was shocked by the bright diffuse light of an overcast summer day in New York. I smelled pretzels. We traced the smell to Washington Square Park, and sat eating in a little island of grass bordered by orange snow fences, where some kind of water-line maintenance was going on.
“I can’t go home,” I said. “I’m drunk.”
“The Museum’s still open,” Susan mumbled, studying her watch. “Let’s go there.”
But we never made it. Our cabdriver didn’t yet know how to get there. He feigned professional indignation, as if the Museum were in the South Bronx, surrounded by crack-happy street gangs, before letting us off, for free and apparently at random, outside a movie theater, which we found ourselves staggering into like twin Mr. Magoos through an open manhole. The movie playing was a revival: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It was three hours long.
It took us most of that time to find one another in the dark. The star-studded cast was scampering blithely around the base of the big “W” where the money was buried when I finally turned my head blearily toward hers and found her looking blearily up at me, and our lips blearily met. And then our arms were around each other and we were kissing, kissing, and it felt very, very strange. The air conditioning was too cool and I touched the nubbly bumps on the skin of her arms. On the screen Jonathan Winters’s childlike voice was rising out of the din, and he said something that, in my alcohol-and-hormone-induced delirium, sounded like “You’re making out!”
Making out! I hadn’t heard anyone say that since about 1980, and I turned my head to the screen. But all that was going on there was digging, and back in our seats Susan was kissing my neck. And so I turned back to her, and the credits rolled.
But in the street, nothing. We had gone to the rest rooms to unrumple, but something must have happened there—perhaps the sight of ourselves, just beginning our fourth decades, wan and haggard in the unflattering fluorescent light—to pluck us out of our respective spells. We simpered, embarrassed, at one another. The sun had finally come out, just in time to start setting. I had homework to do.
Still, we walked all the way downtown, saying little, not touching. It was a good walk, a necessary walk, as the last remnants of alcohol rose to my skin and evaporated into the city air. When we got to the Caddy we stood facing each other, smiling politely and not looking each other directly in the eyes. The day had lost almost all its light.
“So,” I said.
“So,” she said.
I began to lean forward, just a little, and she did too. Then someone down the street yelled and we turned our heads to see, but there was nothing. And then my hand was on the door handle and Susan was a step farther away, and so that would be all.
“So call me,” she said, then corrected herself: “I’ll call you. Whenever I know something. About the conference.”
“And Ray Burn.”
“Yeah, sure.” She smiled, I smiled.
“Thanks,” I said. “I had a great day.” Though I wasn’t sure if that was true. Great? Different. Unexpected.
“Yeah?”
“Sure,” I said.
Her face darkened, just a little. Had I not sounded convincing enough? I was embarrassed and looked away.
“Well, until then,” she said.
“Okay, great.” I opened the car door and got in. She walked off. And I was suddenly saying, “Susan?”
“Yes?”
She half-turned, her face full of something: hope, fear, humiliation? It was red, anyway. No matter what I said, it would be wrong. I said, “Thanks again.”
A moment of silence. Then, “No problem,” and she was gone.
All the way home, I half-listened to talk radio, and thought incessantly of her breast’s gentle pressure against the crook of my arm.
* * *
Pierce was asleep, but the kitchen counter had been cleared entirely of dishes and food residue and wiped clean. And sitting in the middle of it, like a surprise birthday gift or suicide note, was the safe-deposit box key. No explanation, though none was needed. Tomorrow he would go, I supposed, to the Pines, and I would be going to the bank.
* * *
There were three banks in Riverbank—that is, Mixville—and only two of them were open Saturday mornings. Of the open ones, I remembered having a childhood passbook savings account at Riverbank First National, and knew that Riverbank National Bank and Trust was closer, right out on Main Street. I went to RNBT first. Downtown was uncrowded, save for a small, just-awakened crowd milling around the bakery. I stopped there myself and bought a scone, perfectly serviceable and still warm.
RNBT was in the process of becoming MNBT. They had had a vinyl sign printed up with the new town name on it, and this hung from ropes over the illuminated sign; the lettering on the door had already been changed. I was impressed and abashed.
When I showed the safety deposit teller the key, she assured me that it was indeed one of theirs, and passed me a stack of forms. I had to sign in, as usual, but there were some other hoops, relating to my father’s death, that had to be jumped through.
“I’m not actually in charge of his money,” I said. “I don’t have power of attorney or anything.”
“Where did you get this key?” she said.
“It was left to my brother Pierce.”
She winced, as if she had some dire connection to Pierce I didn’t, and couldn’t, understand. “And why isn’t he here himself?”
“He doesn’t want to be the one to look.”
“Can’t you bring him in here with you? Then he could stand outside.”
I looked down at the half-eaten scone in my hand. “He doesn’t…like banks,” I said.
“Hmm.” She asked me for my driver’s license and social security card. She asked me what my father’s mother’s maiden name was and made me verify his address. Then I signed the forms and she opened the gate. “But keep that out of here,” she said, pointing at the scone. I set it in front of a closed teller station and followed her in.
She made me wait outside the vault while she pulled the box from it, then led me to a cramped booth containing a small desk, a pen on a chain and a reading lamp with a green glass shade. She set the box on the desk. “Let me know when you’re through,” she said, and clickety-clacked back to her window.
It was a long, narrow box, gray with sharp corners. The lid came up with a feeble creak. Inside was a small sheaf of papers and an envelope. I looked at the papers first: titles to the property and car, dental X-rays, birth certificates of Dad, Bitty and Pierce. Some low-denomination savings bonds, never cashed in and possibly forgotten.
I put these things aside and gingerly tore open the envelope. The paper was bright white, not aged in the slightest. Inside there was only another key, this one to a door lock or padlock. There was nothing else. I pulled the key out. It had the number 134 etched into one side, and on the other was a yellow sticker, half of which was rubbed mostly away by a succession of rough fingers. Only a few words were visible:
orage
lphia, PA
I looked again into the envelope: surely something else was in there. But there was no explanation, no note. I rifled through the papers, nothing. I pocketed the key, crumpled the envelope up and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then I closed the box and left the room.
“I’m done,” I told the teller. She gave me a look indicating that she was pleased to hear it. She disappeared into the vault with the box and returned with the key. Meanwhile I discovered that my scone had been disposed of. There were still a couple of crumbs there, standing out pale against the black marble counter where it had been sitting.
* * *
My assignment for the weekend was to come up with twenty-five strip-worthy gags. These would form the basis of my work for the next month and a half. During the last two weeks of my tutelage we would prepare the six dailies and one Sunday that would constitute my submission to Burn Features Syndicate, would decide my fate as a rich and goofy pop artist or pretentious loser living with his brother. I wasn’t sure, considering the two, which suited me better. By that evening I was forced to confront the fact that neither was particularly suitable, and that despite my doubts I had no other conceivable options. I wanted to sit around and discuss this with somebody, but I couldn’t see calling Susan so late at night, and incidentally making a fool of myself. So I sat quietly, fighting off sleep, and worked on the gags.
I had decided on a system while returning from the bank, and stopped in the mini-mart for a stack of 3x5 note cards, the kind without lines. I had this idea that lines would make the jokes seem less funny, a task they would likely need no help accomplishing. At home, I dug from the hall closet an old typewriter, a black war-era Smith-Corona in a battered black case that my father had used briefly in his stint as a newspaperman, and hauled it onto the kitchen counter. I sat on a wooden bar stool and rolled in card after card, tapping out every stupid gag I could think up. I didn’t worry too much about their quality, only the redundant mechanics of their production: off the stack, into the machine, think up the joke, type it out, out of the machine, onto the stack. By the time I gave up I had about forty, most of them worthless. Under the gray fluorescent kitchen light, the only one burning in the house, I thumbed through the pile. Calendar says Jan 1, Lindy says to Bitty Time to make your New Year’s revolution. Dog curled on Dot’s lap, Timmy saying It’s Mommy’s laptop! Mailman coming up walk, Bobby looking out window says If he was a girl would he be a femailman?
And those were the best of the lot. I set the finished stack next to the empty stack, pushed the typewriter back and lay my head on my arms.
For a short time around my sixth Christmas, my father went on “vacation” and “I” “took over” the strip for him. That is, my father went nowhere, and the cartoon Timmy became the in-name-only author of the strip. At first I was horrified. The drawings were artificially childlike, with arms and legs rendered as sticks, and trees and shrubs as thick brambles of scribble. But they were clearly the work of an adult: all the subtler rules of motion, of bodily line were fully articulated, and the images were laid out on the page with clarity and grace.
The gags themselves were all about my parents—child’s-eye views of the sober complexities of adult life. There was an arrogance about this I was already old enough to resent. I was not stupid, as people generally believe children to be, and already deeply suspicious of anything either of my parents did. I would never have made the kind of “cute” assumptions this series of strips—about a week’s worth—attributed to me. For example: of my father, laboring over some papers, I was to have said: Daddy has to pay his bills to Santa. As if my family would ever have bothered with the Santa Claus deception. Elsewhere, “I” drew Dad shoveling the car out of a snowbank. The caption read: Daddy loves playing in the snow.
All the same, I ended up welcoming the week’s worth of attention these strips brought me. People stopped on the street to tell me what a good little cartoonist I was, how I’d be sure to have my own strip someday. Father Loomis gave me a gift: a pen, which eventually found its way out of my room and into my father’s studio, where it was forever lost. I felt a little like a superstar, and people wrote letters to me from all over the country. Rose hated me; so did Bobby. I played exclusively with Pierce the first two weeks of January, building things out of Christmas Tinkertoys and watching television.
Until now, I hadn’t thought of that week of strips as prescient. But the connection felt all too clear: an attention-grubbing fake taking credit for something that wasn’t his own, something that itself was not worth the paper it was printed on. There was no doubt anymore; my father was a failure, and so was I. However accomplished his cartoons, his gags remained second-, even third-rate. His story, like mine, was one of squandered potential.
I slid off the stool, dragged myself to the light switch and turned it off. I was as lonely as I’d been in months.
* * *
During the night, I woke to a noise from somewhere in the house. It manifested itself in the sex dream I was having as my murky lover’s rough moans; what it really was, I understood once I had fully awoke, was the kitchen stool being pulled out from under the counter. Pierce? I thought. There was some shuffling, a click, then giggling: a pause, a giggle, a pause, a giggle. I listened to this for a minute or more, the still air screaming in my ears, until one of the giggles became a full laugh, and then I knew it wasn’t Pierce. I looked around the bedroom for something to crack him over the head with, and found only my bedside lamp, a ceramic travesty in the shape of a woman’s head bearing a fruit-filled basket. I yanked the plug from the wall and crept out into the hallway.
No light issued from the kitchen. The giggler was in the dark. I padded as quietly as possible, the lamp heavy in my hand, raised as high above my head as I could reach. Its plug dangled down behind me and knocked against my heels.
I peeked into the kitchen to find a tiny flashlight beam illuminating a small hand and my gag cards. The hand was picking through the cards, its owner chuckling at each one before embedding it back in the pile with a delicate turn of the wrist. I knew who it was before I switched on the light.
“Ken Dorn,” I said.
“Oh, these are priceless, Timmy. Really wonderful stuff.” He flipped off the penlight and dropped it into the pocket of a leather jacket. On his head, slumped like a baked eggplant, was the kind of cap worn exclusively by robbers in cartoons. “‘If one of them’s a panty hose, why aren’t the two of them panty hoses?’ That is rich, rich!”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Your brother’s house, Timmy.” He turned, grinning at me with pinprick eyes. “You got the strip, remember? You live in the Family Funnies now.”
“Ha, ha.” I calculated distances. The telephone was closer to him than me.
He followed my eyes to the phone, then picked it up and handed it to me. “How are you going to dial with that lamp in your hand?”
I was shaking, unnerved by my residual fear and infuriated by Dorn’s presence. He showed no sign of leaving. I put the lamp on the floor and picked up the receiver.
“All right, Timmy, all right,” he said, sliding off the stool, and I didn’t dial, a failure that I regret to this day, much as I regret not punching the high school English teacher who dragged me up in front of the classroom and gave me a humiliating and painful wedgie. “Don’t get all bent out of shape. You left your door unlocked, if you want to know.”
“That doesn’t mean you can just walk through it,” I said.
“The truth is,” he said, tapping the pile of note cards straight, “you don’t like me around because I represent your greatest fear, right?”
“Which is what?”
“That you can’t even do this strip right, even when it’s been dropped in your lap. Even though you didn’t have to work for it at all.”
I had no response. I suppose this was a fear of mine, but it was a cornflake next to the grain silo of fears I was shadowed by.
“So,” Dorn went on. “I suppose that chippie of yours has told you I’m in line for the job?”
“She found out by chance,” I said.
Dorn laughed again, the same nefarious snigger that had chilled me in the dark. “Come on, Timmy. She just didn’t want to hurt your feelings. She knew.”
He zipped up his jacket and ran his hand over his head. I said, “Get out, Dorn.”
“You got it, Timmy.” He backed up to the sliding doors and pushed one silently open. His eyes wheeled, taking in the house once more. “It turns me on just being in this place.”
And then he was gone.
* * *
I sat in bed, the fruit lady lamp plugged in and burning, and read over my cards again and again. Tomorrow I would try to do just as many. Maybe even illustrate a few in pencil, to give me something to discuss with Wurster.
Much later, as I lay still, letting my anxiety amplify every faint sound from outdoors, I let my real fears take on their full sagging shape: that, in fact, I would be good enough to do the strip, but would let myself think it was the best I could do. That Dorn had been right about Susan, that she’d lied to me to save my feelings, that our embrace in the movies was an open expression of desperation and I had been making a fool of myself on all fronts and still was. And would be, over and over, knowing all along it was what I had chosen and what I would continue to choose, despite all the available alternatives, because it was the easiest thing to do.