The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Like a fucking prince,” he said.

  My mother at the stove. “Language.”

  “Oops. I don’t like swearing but it comes out. Before I know it. Actually, I do like swearing. Never really did it much before. I can see the appeal. You see the appeal, son?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But it’s strange hearing you swear.”

  “The doctors say some of it is from the drugs,” my mother said, lifting the kettle.

  My father paused, considered, and then turned to me. “You want to do some trig?”

  “I’m kind of tired,” I said. “Maybe in the morning.”

  “Calculus?”

  “Nah. I need to get to bed.”

  He sighed. “This house is a morgue. I’m bored out of my skull. And that’s saying something, because there’s a lot going on inside my skull.”

  “Maybe tomorrow we can use the telescope,” I said.

  the least luminous star known is rg 0050 2722 in sculptor

  “Stars are history,” he said.

  My mother placed our tea on the table.

  “I’m going upstairs,” she said. “You boys lock up.” I felt suddenly deserted. I didn’t know what to say, what he might do. He stared down at his aching feet.

  “How’s the institute?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  the size of a black hole will depend upon the mass of the collapsed star

  “Good. Next year is college. The big time.” I nodded and he looked around the kitchen, carefully, like a man inspecting real estate. Then he said, “You know how some brains only have two speeds—sleep and insight? That’s quite good. Anyway, Isaac Newton was obsessed with equations. One night he gave a dinner party and left the guests while he ventured down to his wine cellar. They found him there an hour later etching formulas into the dust on the casks. I’ve wondered lately if maybe he wasn’t a half-savant. He died a virgin. I must tell my theory to Gillman. How is he?”

  “He told me to send his best wishes.”

  “It’ll take more than good wishes to crack this one. How’s Mother Teresa?”

  I hesitated. “She’s good. Why did you call her that?”

  “What?”

  “Mother Teresa?”

  “She saves people, doesn’t she? Look, she saved me. Called a spade a spade. Told you I had a little apple cooking in the broiler. And here we are.”

  “Didn’t you want to know?”

  He shifted in his chair. “Maybe I did, but I don’t think your mother did. She would have preferred a couple months of my swearing and then for me to drop off at breakfast one morning without warning. She’s good in adversity, but after the fact.”

  I looked out the darkened windows and made out the suggestion of the orchard.

  “Sorry, sorry. I say things. Go to bed. I can’t sleep now,” he said, waving a hand in the air.

  “What will you do down here?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t play with matches. It’s not like Alzheimer’s. I’ll do some trig on some graph paper, just like old times. I’ll get bored with my inability to concentrate and come upstairs in a few minutes. Good night. I’m glad you’re home and don’t mess with the thermostat. You could roast a turkey in here but my bones need the warmth. Whit will come by in the morning. We’ll make him an astronaut’s breakfast. Little pancake moons.”

  I stood up from my chair. I wanted to hug my father, to shield him from his own firing neurons, but he never looked up from his tea. He wanted me to go away. I went upstairs to my bedroom. My mother had made my bed with my boyhood Superman sheets. There were posters of dinosaurs and ice-age chronology, a chemistry set, a mobile of the solar system—artifacts from the era of hope.

  I turned off the light and lay in the darkness, listening to the sounds of our house. The furnace rattled in the basement. I could hear the wind under the eaves and the windows resisting the weather outside. I closed my eyes and heard my father in the kitchen. I pictured the tumor, marbled and knotted. Sometimes I saw corresponding images that went along with the ailments that Teresa diagnosed, the lumps and contusions, the ulcers and the pinched blood vessels. Throat cancer was an old man in a trench coat, his tongue gray, like a parrot’s; aneurysm was a neurotic, middle-aged woman, secretive, like a pickpocket. What was brain tumor? I let the words eddy and still in my mind: it was somebody greedy and unapologetic—a fat man at a buffet, a look of doomed pride sweeping across his face as he makes a dozen trips through the food line.

  BEFORE WHIT ARRIVED FOR BREAKFAST the next morning, I spoke to Teresa on the phone. After a brief stay in Chicago she was back at the institute.

  “Everyone says hi,” she said.

  “No, they don’t. Cal and Dick don’t say hi even when I’m there.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I’m trying to be nice. How’s your dad feeling?”

  “He’s not acting like himself. Last night he said fuck.”

  “People change near the end.”

  There was a long silence. All I could hear was her breathing. “Who says he’s going to die?”

  She said, “I just mean people change when they’re sick.”

  “My mother thinks the medications make him act weird.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “The shadow side comes out. When are you going to come back to the institute? I’ve got no one to drink with.”

  There was something trite in her voice. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. I was at a loss for words and she waited out the silence, perhaps afraid of saying the wrong thing. The institute seemed like another world away.

  “I’ll call you again,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Keep in touch.”

  Whit arrived for breakfast and filled our house with his presence. He was our mascot now, our shrine against morbid wallowing. We each clung to him: my mother doting on him with chocolate chip pancakes; my father asking his advice about financial matters, about lawyers and wills; and me privately engaging him in conversation about women he’d slept with. After my halfhearted conversation with Teresa, I needed the distraction.

  “During wow-time I like to play the numbers, cover the bases,” he said.

  “What about talking during sex?” I asked.

  “You mean the odd remark or sustained discourse?”

  “A remark or two.”

  “Sure. I like to say ‘hi’ to the crowd.”

  Whit talked about sex the way he spoke about sports and space, with the reverent vibrato of a fan, a believer. These subjects, in Whit’s mind, were all related; they implied one another. Sex could not be discussed without reference and simile to baseball, and nobody could invoke space without conjuring sex, the wash of the unknown. As he talked I wondered how long it would be before I experienced sex. Virginity seemed like yet another form of mediocrity, even if Isaac Newton had died with his intact.

  After breakfast my mother did the dishes and Whit, my father, and I took a walk. My mother bundled my father in a wool cap and a coat. We walked out into the orchard. A storm had dusted the branches of the apple trees with some out-of-season snow. As we came over the small hill at the edge of our property, Whit spoke to my father about his lawyer’s credentials. “Joe’s a good man. Looked after me in that divorce business. She got house, car. I got stocks, bonds, and space money.”

  “Space money?” I asked.

  “NASA pension.”

  “I’ll call him,” my father said.

  My father cinched his coat tighter and pulled up his collar. “I’m going to die of cold out here. Whose idea was this? Son, was this your idea of a joke?”

  “We can head back,” I said.

  “I can give you a piggyback,” Whit said to my father.

  “I am not getting on your back for all the Darjeeling in my wife’s pantry.”

  We headed back to the orchard and I watched my father as we walked. His face looked
on the verge of nausea. He told me the medicine he took tasted the way he imagined mercury would. Now he stopped and leaned against a gnarled apple tree, jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat. He looked around him, nodding, agreeing with the ruined appearance of the orchard, and then looked at me. I felt, for a moment, he was going to talk openly and clearly to me, to tell me what he was thinking, what he feared, to galvanize that single moment that would somehow allow his passage from the living. Instead he looked off into the distance and said, “I’ve had the strongest craving for fried chicken. Your mother refuses to make it. I have a tumor the size of a grapefruit and she won’t deep-fry chicken wings. She feels it’s uncivilized…” His words trailed off.

  “We can smuggle you some,” Whit offered.

  “Oh no, she’d smell it. She knows if a mouse farts in that house.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “We can take you out for fried chicken,” I said. “There’s a place on the edge of town.”

  “It needs to be spicy. What I’m saying at this point is that the last supper takes place at a wing joint.”

  WHAT MY FATHER IMPLIED ABOUT my mother’s cooking was true: she refused to make anything she considered pedestrian or gratuitous. She would make meat loaf but not hamburgers, roasted chicken but not fried chicken. As my father’s illness got worse, she spent little time with Levart and her cooking turned from exotic to early American. It was New England comfort food: boiled meats, bread puddings, chowders, baked cod, casseroles. These were the puritan meals of a people who didn’t want to offend God with anything lavish or decadent. Every meal came with white linen napkins and a dried-flower arrangement in the middle of the table. The formality taxed my father. I think, at times, he pictured himself in a dusty one-room apartment with John Coltrane playing and a row of soup cans on the windowsill. Perhaps in that vision he felt like he was preparing for death more earnestly, more honestly. There was denial and atonement in my mother’s cooking, as if she were trying to cook her way back to a simpler time.

  One day, at the risk of causing a rift with my mother, Whit and I smuggled my father out of the house for fried chicken. We planned to be back in time for a homecoming dinner my mother had planned for me. We drove across town at lunchtime, Whit at the wheel. It was a neighborhood none of us knew: a working-class area wedged between the old northern highway and the railroad that once carried freight from Duluth. Convenience stores and small taverns lined the sidewalks; an enclave of taxidermists stood surrounded by vacant lots. An old warehouse lay in ruins, its windows boarded and its walls covered in graffiti.

  “We’re going to get food poisoning,” my father said excitedly. By now I had become accustomed to his bluntness and occasional acrimony.

  Whit said, “There’s an inverse relationship between how good fried chicken is and the appearance of the place that serves it.”

  My father smiled. “Ah, yes, Newton’s least-known physical law.”

  The diner was a weatherboard box painted bright orange. It had a broken neon sign that read BB’S CHICKEN AND RIBS AND BAR. I directed Whit to pull over and we parked beside a host of white Chevy and Ford pickups. We went inside and waited to be seated. The place was packed: construction workers and the grounds crew from the college, local factory workers and taxi drivers. Adjacent to the dining room was a bar with a narrow stretch of counter and wooden stools, a pool table, a jukebox, and a stuffed bass mounted on the wall. I asked my father where he wanted to sit. He pointed to the smoke-filled bar and said, “Where the action is.”

  We walked into the bar. I certainly didn’t look twenty-one, but no one seemed to mind. The bartender, a blunt-faced man, shot us a glance as we took a table by the jukebox.

  We looked at our menus.

  “No need to ask what Samuel is getting,” Whit said. “I think I’ll get wings, too. How about you, Nathan?”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  The bartender wiped our table then, as if it were an afterthought, took our orders. As he walked away my father called out.

  “And, sir, bring us three beers.”

  The man paused, looked at me, and then looked at my father. “Is he twenty-one?”

  “As of today,” my father said. “It’s his birthday.” I’d never known my father to lie or think quickly on his feet.

  The man looked at me again, and then turned to my father. “Bud or Miller?”

  My father looked at Whit. These were men who ordered home-brewing catalogs and spent months perfecting amber ales in the basement.

  Whit, grimacing, said, “Make it Bud.”

  When the food and beer arrived we ate and drank in silence for some time. My father ordered a second round and it occurred to me that he wanted to get us drunk. His cheeks glowed and he scowled at the jukebox. A heavy-metal song rushed at us. You were just a small-town girl with a head on fire…swallow me whole, baby…

  My father winced at the electric guitar solo. “You like this kind of music, Nathan? Is this the, what, the music of the moment? The anthem of the times?” His mouth was wet in the corners.

  “Not really.”

  “What do they call this?” Whit asked.

  “Heavy metal,” I said.

  “Lead, gold, that kind of thing,” my father said, laughing. “Are we listening to the cutting edge? What would quantum theory be if you set it to music?”

  “Opera,” said Whit.

  “Rap,” I said.

  “Both wrong. The sound track to quantum theory is a kazoo out in a forest.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said, surprised.

  My father craned his head to the jukebox, waiting for the note that would crown the distorted guitar solo. He raised his index finger. “There it is. The ejaculation,” he said. His hand shot to his mouth, then touched the top of his head.

  “Hold steady,” Whit said.

  “Son, who’s the Thelonious Monk of heavy metal?”

  I drank from my beer. “I don’t think they have a Monk.”

  “I see,” he said, dipping a wing bone into some barbecue sauce. He brought it to his mouth, leaving a trail of sauce across his chest. “I’m hit,” my father said, clutching the red stain.

  The room came alive with our laughter. I could hear the pool table. The solid, wooden plink, the balls conspiring with the pockets.

  “From all vantage points it seems I’m drunk,” my father said. He raised his beer in the air. “A home brewer should have better tolerance than this.”

  Whit began the prelaunch sequence for a Budweiser bottle, his hands resting against the brown glass. “T minus five, four, three, two, one, ignition and liftoff…” He arced the bottle toward us. “Little things you don’t even think about become important up there. The perfect parabola of peeing outside, that’s something you give up. When I was still with Nancy I used to sneak out and pee in her antique rosebushes. Not out of malevolence, you understand, but—”

  “Man’s great desire to piss outside,” my father said, cutting him off and turning to me. “Whit, here, is a Neanderthal in a space suit. Tell me, Whit, did you masturbate a lot up there?” My father let out a sharp, raspy laugh. Who knew what was going on in his brain? Some kind of chemical reaction involving his medication and beer hops? It could probably be written out and graphed, no different than photosynthesis. A paper trail that would explain his behavior. To see him suddenly have a bawdy sense of humor, to engage in banter, made me miss the father I’d never had. Sitting across from me was the man who might have taught me how to throw a baseball, made lewd comments about pretty girls crossing the street, defended me against my mother’s puritan ways—For crying out loud, Cynthia, give the kid some elbow room.

  Whit pushed a chicken bone around in some dipping sauce and smiled. It seemed important to him not to get caught out by my father. “There’s a certain physics involved—what with the absence of gravity and so on—but suffice to say the lunar emptiness can make a man lonesome,” Whit said.

  My father’s face became drawn; he lo
oked down at the place mat in front of him, which depicted a chicken running from a wielded meat cleaver.

  “I need another drink,” my father said. He gestured to the bartender with a complicated hand flourish. The man hauled over to us with three more Budweisers and placed them on the table.

  “Tell me,” my father said to the bartender, “do you offer discounts for the terminally ill?” The word ill was steel-colored.

  The blunt-faced man wiped the table, nonplussed. “Only senior discounts. Anybody over sixty-five?”

  My father blew air between his lips. “I understand.” The man took our plates and returned to watching a football game on the wall-mounted television.

  “Maybe you’ve had sufficient,” Whit said to my father.

  My father took a sip from his beer bottle. “There’s one thing I want to do before I die. Nobody owes me anything, so this would be a favor.”

  “Shoot,” said Whit.

  number of cortical layers in the brain: 6

  “What is it?” I asked. Again I fell into the trap of imagining my father a normal man, that his terminal wish would involve the Concord or scuba diving on the Barrier Reef. He leaned forward and said: “Stanford Linear Accelerator. I want to see the switchyard one more time. Maybe even try to find the ghost particle. A new bump. This thing is waiting for me, I know it.”

  “Would they let you?” Whit asked. “You’re not a member of the collaboration project anymore.”

  “We’ll pull some strings. People will understand. A road trip to California, just the three of us. I’m picturing moderately priced hotels…”

  “Continental breakfasts,” Whit said, warming to the theme. Whit would captain the Oldsmobile and I would take shifts driving; my father would sleep in back as we traversed the Midwest. There was no possibility that my mother would agree to it, but I saw the earnestness in my father’s face. Unknown particles were the closest thing he could imagine to the hand of God.

  We sat and finished our beers and then Whit insisted on paying the bill. My father stumbled several times as he got up from his chair. He went over to the bartender and delivered a high-performance thank-you. He shook the man’s hand. I had known my father to stand agape at a man’s extended hand, as if he were a tribesman who found this gesture shameful, but here he was pumping the bartender’s hand, saying, “A nice little business you have. Excuse my state. I’m not long for the road, you understand. My name is Samuel Nelson.”