Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (11 page)

My housecleaning role model was a woman named Lena Payne, who worked for my family in the late 1960s. I used to come home from school and watch with great interest as she tackled the kitchen floor. “Use a mop,” my mother would say, “that’s what I do,” and Lena would lower her head in pity. She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can’t have both. Whether it was ironing or deciding how to punish a child, Lena knew best, and so she became indispensable. Like her, I wanted to control households and make people feel lazy and spoiled without ever coming out and saying so. “Didn’t you have potato chips yesterday?” she’d ask, frowning at the can as big as a kettledrum my sisters and I parked in front of the TV. Suggesting that potato chips were an overindulged luxury caused them to lose their taste and meant there’d be fewer crumbs to vacuum at the end of the day. She was smart, and very good at her job. I worshipped her.

Standing in Martin’s living room, the sweat dripping off my face, I wondered how Lena might have reacted had one of us peeled off our pants and proceeded to masturbate to a movie called Fort Dicks. We didn’t have video back then, but if we did, I imagine she’d have said exactly what I had, “I don’t have a VCR.” It would have stopped me, but this guy was obviously wired differently.

Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack. Martin’s forearm batted against a newspaper lying at his side, and I turned on the vacuum in order to cover the noise. There was no way I was going to acknowledge either him or the TV, and so I kept my head down, reworking the same spot until my shoulder started to ache and I switched arms. Just pretend it isn’t happening, I told myself, but this was unlike ignoring a subway car musician or a crazy stranger seated next to you at a restaurant counter. Like the cough of a sick person, Martin’s efforts broadcast germs, a debilitating shame bug that traveled across the room in search of a new host. How terrible it is to be wrong, to go out on a limb and make an advance that isn’t reciprocated. I thought of the topless stay-at-home wife, opening the door to the gay UPS driver, of all those articles suggesting you surprise that certain someone by serving dessert in the nude or offering up an unexpected striptease. They never tell you what to do should that someone walk out of the room or look at you with that mix of disgust and pity that ten, twenty, fifty years later will still cause you to burn every time you think about it. I’ve had some experience in this department, and Martin’s depressing, wrongheaded display brought it all flooding back. I thought of the time . . . And of the time . . .

Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack.

It had now become the kind of masturbation that’s an exercise in determination rather than pleasure. You’d give up but, godammit, you’re the kind of person who carries a job through to the end, whether it’s making a fool of yourself in front of a stranger or vacuuming somebody’s living room. I will finish this, you think. I will finish this. And he did, eventually, climaxing with a bleak, long-winded moan. The paper at his elbow ceased its rattling, the video was turned off, and after pulling up his pants, he scooted into the bedroom. I didn’t expect him to come back out and was surprised when he returned moments later with a stack of cash.

“You can stop vacuuming now,” he said.

“But I’m not finished.”

“I think you are,” he said. Then he stepped closer and started handing me money. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty ...” He counted softly, and with a different voice than he’d been using for the past two hours. This one was higher and passive, shaded with the kind of relief that follows a prolonged impersonation. “A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty ...” He counted to two hundred, which was over six times what I normally would have made. “Is that right?” he asked, and before I could answer, he topped the stack with a thirty-dollar tip.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

In recounting the rest of the story, it would be the next part that I could never get quite right, in part because it was so implausible but mainly because, between the blood taking and the five blankets, it was just too much. I assumed that Martin had learned about me from the New York Times, and he had. He’d read the article, written my name on a piece of paper, and looked me up in the phone book. He had also, it seemed, taken down the number of an erotic housecleaning service he’d found in the back of a porno magazine. The names and numbers had gotten confused, and he had phoned thinking that I was the sexpot. Such things happen, I guess, but you’d think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake. I’ve never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills. Something tells me they only surface clean.

I’d wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me. In his growing impatience, it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted, but that would have required a different temperament, a straightforwardness that neither of us was capable of. In the phrase book of the indirect, “FIRE ISLAND” means “Let us masturbate together,” while “Who does your mother love more?” translates to “I prefer to clean the kitchen in private, please.” “I don’t have a VCR” equals “Your behavior troubles me,” and “You can always . . . you know” means “I think you should probably take your clothes off now.” “What do you say we test your blood sugar” — that was just craziness talking.

After I’d collected my bag, Martin saw me to the door. “We’ll have to do this again sometime,” he said, meaning that we would never see each other again.

“That would be nice,” I told him.

He offered his warm, gooey hand, and in a spirit of brotherhood, I accepted it.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The End of the Affair

O N A SUMMER EVENING in Paris, Hugh and I went to see The End of the Affair, a Neil Jordan adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. I had trouble keeping my eyes open because I was tired and not completely engaged. Hugh had trouble keeping his eyes open because they were essentially swollen shut: he sobbed from beginning to end, and by the time we left the theater, he was completely dehydrated. I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious.

Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question “Why can’t our lives be like that?” It’s a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.

The End of the Affair made me look like an absolute toad. The movie’s voracious couple was played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, who did everything but eat each other. Their love was doomed and clandestine, and even when the bombs were falling, they looked radiant. The picture was fairly highbrow, so I was surprised when the director employed a device most often seen in TV movies of the week: everything’s going along just fine and then one of the characters either coughs or sneezes, meaning that within twenty minutes he or she will be dead. It might have been different had Julianne Moore suddenly started bleeding from the eyes, but coughing, in and of itself, is fairly pedestrian. When she did it, Hugh cried. When I did it, he punched me in the shoulder and told me to move. “I can’t wait until she dies,” I whispered. I don’t know if it was their good looks or their passion, but something about Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes put me on the defensive.

I’m not as unfeeling as Hugh accuses me of being, but things change once you’ve been together for more than ten years. They rarely make movies about long-term couples, and for good reason: our lives are boring. The courtship had its moments, but now we’ve become the predictable Part II no one in his right mind would ever pay to see. (“Look, they’re opening their electric bill!”) Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.

Call me unimaginative, but I still can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be with. On our worst days, I figure things will work themselves out. Otherwise, I really don’t give our problems much thought. Neither of us would ever publicly display affection; we’re just not that type. We can’t profess love without talking through hand puppets, and we’d never consciously sit down to discuss our relationship. These, to me, are good things. They were fine with Hugh as well, until he saw that damned movie and was reminded that he has other options.

The picture ended at about ten, and afterward we went for coffee at a little place across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens. I was ready to wipe the movie out of my mind, but Hugh was still under its spell. He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face. Our coffee arrived, and as he blew his nose into a napkin, I encouraged him to look on the bright side. “Listen,” I said, “we maybe don’t live in wartime London, but in terms of the occasional bomb scare, Paris is a pretty close second. We both love bacon and country music, what more could you possibly want?”

What more could he want? It was an incredibly stupid question and when he failed to answer, I was reminded of just how lucky I truly am. Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I wanted to say something to this effect, but my hand puppets were back home in their drawer. Instead, I pulled my chair a few inches closer, and we sat silently at our little table on the square, looking for all the world like two people in love.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Repeat After Me

A LTHOUGH WE’D DISCUSSED my upcoming visit to Winston-Salem, my sister and I didn’t make exact arrangements until the eve of my arrival, when I phoned from a hotel in Salt Lake City.

“I’ll be at work when you arrive,” she said, “so I’m thinking I’ll just leave the key under the hour ott near the ack toor.”

“The what?”

“Hour ott.”

I thought she had something in her mouth until I realized she was speaking in code.

“What are you, on a speakerphone at a methadone clinic? Why can’t you just tell me where you put the goddam house key?”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I just don’t know that I trust these things.”

“Are you on a cell phone?”

“Of course not,” she said. “This is just a regular cordless, but still, you have to be careful.”

When I suggested that actually she didn’t have to be careful, Lisa resumed her normal tone of voice, saying, “Really? But I heard ...”

My sister’s the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline. She remembers that applesauce can kill you but forgets that in order to die, you have to inject it directly into your bloodstream. Pronouncements that cellphone conversations may be picked up by strangers mix with the reported rise of both home burglaries and brain tumors, meaning that as far as she’s concerned, all telecommunication is potentially life-threatening. If she didn’t watch it on the news, she read it in Consumer Reports or heard it thirdhand from a friend of a friend of a friend whose ear caught fire while dialing her answering machine. Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it’s not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it’s certainly under investigation — so there.

“Okay,” I said, “but can you tell me which hour ott? The last time I was there you had quite a few of them.”

“It’s ed,” she told me. “Well. . . eddish.”

I arrived at Lisa’s house late the following afternoon, found the key beneath the flowerpot, and let myself in through the back door. A lengthy note on the coffee table explained how I might go about operating everything from the television to the waffle iron, each carefully detailed procedure ending with the line “Remember to turn off and unplug after use.” At the bottom of page three, a postscript informed me that if the appliance in question had no plug — the dishwasher, for instance — I should make sure it had completed its cycle and was cool to the touch before leaving the room. The note reflected a growing hysteria, its subtext shrieking, Oh-my-God-he’s-going-to-be-alone-in-my-house-for-close-to-an-hour. She left her work number, her husband’s work number, and the number of the next-door neighbor, adding that she didn’t know the woman very well, so I probably shouldn’t bother her unless it was an emergency. “P.P.S. She’s a Baptist, so don’t tell her you’re gay.”

The last time I was alone at my sister’s place she was living in a white-brick apartment complex occupied by widows and single, middle-aged working women. This was in the late seventies, when we were supposed to be living in dorms. College hadn’t quite worked out the way she’d expected, and after two years in Virginia she’d returned to Raleigh and taken a job at a wineshop. It was a normal-enough life for a twenty-one-year-old, but being a dropout was not what she had planned for herself. Worse than that, it had not been planned for her. As children we’d been assigned certain roles — leader, bum, troublemaker, slut — titles that effectively told us who we were. As the oldest, smartest, and bossiest, it was naturally assumed that Lisa would shoot to the top of her field, earning a master’s degree in manipulation and eventually taking over a medium-size country. We’d always known her as an authority figure, and while we took a certain joy in watching her fall, it was disorienting to see her with so little confidence. Suddenly she was relying on other people’s opinions, following their advice and withering at the slightest criticism.

Do you really think so? Really? She was putty.

My sister needed patience and understanding, but more often than not, I found myself wanting to shake her. If the oldest wasn’t who she was supposed to be, then what did it mean for the rest of us?

Lisa had been marked Most Likely to Succeed, and so it confused her to be ringing up gallon jugs of hearty burgundy. I had been branded as lazy and irresponsible, so it felt right when I, too, dropped out of college and wound up living back in Raleigh. After being thrown out of my parents’ house, I went to live with Lisa in her white-brick complex. It was a small studio apartment — the adult version of her childhood bedroom — and when I eventually left her with a broken stereo and an unpaid eighty-dollar phone bill, the general consensus was “Well, what did you expect?”

I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I’m still the one most likely to set your house on fire. While I accepted my lowered expectations, Lisa fought hard to regain her former title. The wineshop was just a temporary setback, and she left shortly after becoming the manager. Photography interested her, so she taught herself to use a camera, ultimately landing a job in the photo department of a large international drug company, where she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn’t that much of a stretch. Then she got married herself and quit the drug company in order to earn an English degree. When told there was very little call for thirty-page essays on Jane Austen, she got a real estate license. When told the housing market was down, she returned to school to study plants. Her husband, Bob, got a job in Winston-Salem, and so they moved, buying a new three-story house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. It was strange to think of my sister living in such a grown-up place, and I was relieved to find that neither she nor Bob particularly cared for it. The town was nice enough, but the house itself had a way of aging things. Stand outside and you looked, if not young, then at least relatively carefree. Step indoors and you automatically put on twenty years and a 401(k) plan.

My sister’s home didn’t really lend itself to snooping, and so I spent my hour in the kitchen, making small talk with Henry. It was the same conversation we’d had the last time I saw him, yet still I found it fascinating. He asked how I was doing, I said I was all right, and then, as if something might have drastically changed within the last few seconds, he asked again.

Of all the elements of my sister’s adult life — the house, the husband, the sudden interest in plants — the most unsettling is Henry. Technically he’s a blue-fronted Amazon, but to the average layman, he’s just a big parrot — the type you might see on the shoulder of a pirate.

“How you doing?” The third time he asked, it sounded as if he really cared. I approached his cage with a detailed answer, and when he lunged for the bars, I screamed like a girl and ran out of the room.

“Henry likes you,” my sister said a short while later. She’d just returned from her job at the plant nursery and was sitting at the table, unlacing her sneakers. “See the way he’s fanning his tail? He’d never do that for Bob. Would you, Henry?”

Bob had returned from work a few minutes earlier and immediately headed upstairs to spend time with his own bird, a balding green-cheeked conure named José. I’d thought the two pets might enjoy an occasional conversation, but it turns out they can’t stand each other.

“Don’t even mention José in front of Henry,” Lisa whispered. Bob’s bird squawked from the upstairs study, and the parrot responded with a series of high, piercing barks. It was a trick he’d picked up from Lisa’s border collie, Chessie, and what was disturbing was that he sounded exactly like a dog. Just as, when speaking English, he sounded exactly like Lisa. It was creepy to hear my sister’s voice coming from a beak, but I couldn’t say it didn’t please me.

“Who’s hungry?” she asked.

“Who’s hungry?” the voice repeated.

I raised my hand, and she offered Henry a peanut. Watching him take it in his claw, his belly sagging almost to the perch, I could understand what someone might see in a parrot. Here was this strange little fatso living in my sister’s kitchen, a sympathetic listener turning again and again to ask, “So, really, how are you?”

I’d asked her the same question and she’d said, “Oh, fine. You know.” She’s afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I’ll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line “You have to swear you will never repeat this.” I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word means nothing.

I’d come to Winston-Salem to address the students at a local college, and then again to break some news. Sometimes when you’re stoned it’s fun to sit around and think of who might play you in the movie version of your life. What makes it fun is that no one is actually going to make a movie of your life. Lisa and I no longer got stoned, so it was all the harder to announce that my book had been optioned, meaning that, in fact, someone was going to make a movie of our lives — not a student, but a real director people had actually heard of.

“A what?”

I explained that he was Chinese, and she asked if the movie would be in Chinese.

“No,” I said, “he lives in America. In California. He’s been here since he was a baby.”

“Then what does it matter if he’s Chinese?”

“Well,” I said, “he’s got . . . you know, a sensibility.”

“Oh brother,” she said.

I looked to Henry for support, and he growled at me.

“So now we have to be in a movie?” She picked her sneakers off the floor and tossed them into the laundry room. “Well,” she said, “I can tell you right now that you are not dragging my bird into this.” The movie was to be based on our pre-parrot years, but the moment she put her foot down I started wondering who we might get to play the role of Henry. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And the answer is no.”

Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic icemaker on her new refrigerator. “That’s what happens when they’re left alone,” she’d said. It was the most depressing bit of information I’d heard in quite a while, and it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature, born to mock its jungle neighbors, and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances. I repeated the story to Lisa, who told me that neglect had nothing to do with it. She then prepared a cappuccino, setting the stage for Henry’s pitch-perfect imitation of the milk steamer. “He can do the blender, too,” she said.

She opened the cage door, and as we sat down to our coffees, Henry glided down onto the table. “Who wants a kiss?” She stuck out her tongue, and he accepted the tip gingerly between his upper and lower beak. I’d never dream of doing such a thing, not because it’s across-the-board disgusting but because he would have bitten the shit out of me. Though Henry might occasionally fan his tail in my direction, it is understood that he is loyal to only one person, which, I think, is another reason my sister is so fond of him.

“Was that a good kiss?” she asked. “Did you like that?”

I expected a yes-or-no answer and was disappointed when he responded with the exact same question: “Did you like that?” Yes, parrots can talk, but unfortunately they have no idea what they’re actually saying. When she first got him, Henry spoke the Spanish he’d learned from his captors. Asked if he’d had a good night’s sleep, he’d say simply, “Hola,” or “Bueno.” He goes through phases, favoring an often repeated noise or sentence, and then moving on to something else. When our mother died, Henry learned how to cry. He and Lisa would set each other off, and the two of them would go on for hours. A few years later, in the midst of a brief academic setback, she trained him to act as her emotional cheerleader. I’d call and hear him in the background, screaming, “We love you, Lisa!” and “You can do it!” This was replaced, in time, with the far more practical “Where are my keys?”