Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (3 page)

I thanked him and began talking about subject-verb agreement. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept peeking at the orange Cheetos bag and feeling dreadful gratitude. “Someone tell me the subject in this sentence,” I said, writing on the board. “
The trees of Florida hold on to their leaves
.”

Terrie Inal raised her hand. “You crying, Mr. Moxley?” she asked.

“No, Terrie,” I said. “I'm allergic to things.”

“Looks like you're crying,” she said. “You need a moment?”

The word
moment
did it. I let go. I wept in front of the class while they looked on horrified, bored, amused, sympathetic. “It's just, that was so
nice
,” I explained.

Late in the week, my father called and I told him I was almost done with one of his stories. “Good so far,” I said. Carrie suggested I quit writing for a while, unaware that I already had. I got drunk and broke my glasses. Someone wrote
Roach
with indelible marker on the hood of my car.

O
ne day, I visited Harry Hodgett in his office. I walked to campus with a bagged bottle of Chivas Regal, his favorite, practicing what I'd say. Hodgett was an intimidating figure. He enjoyed playing games with you.

His door was open, but the only sign of him was an empty mug next to a student story. I leaned over to see
SBNI
written in the margin in Hodgett's telltale blue pen—it stood for
Sad But Not Interesting
—then I sat down. The office had the warm, stale smell of old books. Framed pictures of Hodgett and various well-known degenerates hung on the wall.

“This ain't the petting zoo,” Hodgett said on his way in. He was wearing sweatpants and an Everlast T-shirt with frayed cut-off sleeves. “Who are you?”

Hodgett was playing one of his games. He knew exactly who I was. “It's me,” I said, playing along. “Moxley.”

He sat down with a grunt. He looked beat-up, baffled, winded, which meant he was in the early days of one of his sober sprees. “Oh yeah, Moxley, sure. Didn't recognize you without the . . . you know.”

“Hat,” I tried.

He coughed for a while, then lifted his trash can and expectorated into it. “So what are you pretending to be today?” he asked, which was Hodgett code for “So how are you doing?”

I hesitated, then answered, “Bamboo,” a nice inscrutable thing to pretend to be. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back to reveal the livid scar under his chin, which was Hodgett code for “Please proceed.” I told him all about my father. Knowing Hodgett's predilections, I exaggerated some things, made my father sound more abusive. Hodgett's eyes were shut, but I could tell he was listening by the way his face tic'ed and scowled. “He sends the stories out under my name,” I said. “I haven't written a word in over a month.”

To my surprise, Hodgett opened his eyes, looked at me as if he'd just awoken, and said, “My old man once tried to staple-gun a dead songbird to my scrotum.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Just facts, not looking for pity.”

I remembered reading this exact sentence—
staple-gun, songbird, scrotum
—then I realized where. “That happened to Moser,” I said, “at the end of your novel
The Hard Road
. His dad wants to teach him a lesson about deprivation.”

“That wasn't a novel, chief. That was first-person
life
.” He huffed hoarsely. “All this business about literary journals and phone calls and hurt feelings, it's just not compelling. A story needs to sing like a wound. I mean, put your father and son in the same room together. Leave some weapons lying around.”

“It isn't a story,” I said. “I'm living it.”

“I'm paid to teach students like you how to spoil paper. Look at me, man—I can barely put my head together.” His face went through a series of contortions, like a ghoul in a mirror. “You want my advice,” he said. “Go talk to the old man. Life ain't an opera. It's more like a series of commercials for things we have no intention of buying.”

He narrowed his eyes, studying me. His eyes drooped; his mouth had white film at the corners. His nose was netted with burst capillaries.

“What happened to the young woman, anyway?” Hodgett asked. “The one with the nasty allure.”

“You mean Carrie? My girlfriend?”

“Carrie, yeah. I used to have girlfriends like Carrie. They're fun.”

He closed his eyes and with his right hand began casually kneading his crotch. “She did that story about the burn ward.”

“Carrie doesn't write anymore,” I said, trying to break the spell.

“Shame,” Hodgett said. “Well, I guess that's how it goes. Talent realizes its limitations and gives up, while incompetence keeps plugging away until it has a book. I'd take incompetence over talent in a street fight any day of the week.”

I picked up the Chivas Regal bottle and stood to leave. I studied the old man's big noisy battered redneck face. He was still fondling himself. I wanted to say something ruthless to him. I wanted my words to clatter around in his head all day, like his words did in mine. “Thanks,” I said.

He nodded, pointed to the bottle. “You can leave that anywhere,” he said.

A
nother memory: my mother, father, and me in our living room. I am eight years old. In the corner is the Christmas tree, on the wall are three stockings, on the kitchen table is a Styrofoam-ball snowman. We're about to open presents. My father likes to systematically inspect his to figure out what's inside. He picks up a flat parcel wrapped in silver paper, shakes it, turns it over, holds it to his ear, and says, “A book.” He sets it on his lap and closes his eyes. “A . . . autobiography.”

He's right every time.

My mother wears a yellow bathrobe and sits under a blanket.

She's cold again. She's sick but I don't know this yet. She opens her presents distractedly, saying
wow
and
how nice
and neatly folding the wrapping paper in half, then in quarters, while I tear into my gifts one after another. I say thanks without looking up.

That year, she and I picked out a new diver's watch for my father, which we wait until all the presents have been opened to give him. We've wrapped it in a small box and then wrapped that box inside a much larger one.

I set it in front of him. He looks at me, then her. He lifts the box. “Awfully light.” He shakes it, knocks on each of the box's six sides. “Things are not what they seem.”

My mother begins coughing, softly at first—my father pauses, sets his hands flat atop the box—then uncontrollably, in big hacking gusts. I bring her water, which she drinks, still coughing. My father helps her to the bathroom and I can hear her in there, gagging and hacking. For some reason, I'm holding the remote control to the television.

The box sits unopened in the living room for the rest of the day. At night, with Mom in bed and me brushing my teeth, he picks it up, says, “Diver's watch, waterproof up to a hundred meters,” then opens it.

C
arrie and I drove to Vero Beach the day before Christmas Eve. There seemed to be a surplus of abandoned cars and dead animals on the side of the road and, between this and the gray sky and the homemade signs marking off the fallow farms—
PREPARE FOR THE RAPTURE, PRAISE HIM—
I began to daydream about the apocalypse. I was hoping it would arrive just like this, quietly, without much warning or fanfare.

“I know it's fiction,” Carrie was saying, referring to my father's most recent story, “but it's hard not to read it as fact. Did you actually tape pictures of your mom to the front door when Lara came over the first time?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I don't really remember.”

I taped the pictures in a circle, like the face of a clock. I waited at the top of the stairs for the doorbell to ring.

Carrie pointed to a billboard featuring the likeness of a recently killed NASCAR driver's car, flanked by white angel wings. “I hope they haven't started letting race cars into heaven,” she said.

I
finally talked to my father about his writing while we were in the garage looking for the Styrofoam-ball snowman. We were searching through boxes, coming across yearbooks, macramé owls, clothes, and my oboe, snug in purple velvet. I always forgot how fit and reasonable-looking my father was until I saw him in person. His hair was now fully gray and his silver-rimmed reading glasses sat low on his nose.

“I didn't know we went to the dump to hunt for those dolls,” I said. It sounded more reproachful than I meant it to.

He looked up from the box, still squinting, as if he'd been searching dark, cramped quarters. “You mean the story?”

“ ‘Blue Angels,' ” I said. “I read it. I read all of them, actually.”

“That's surprising,” he said, folding the flaps of the box in front of him. “Best not to make too much out of what happens in stories, right?”

“But you were looking for those dolls.”

“I didn't expect to find them. I wanted to see where they ended up.” He shook his head. “It's hard to explain. After your mom died—I'd be making breakfast and my mind would wander to Annie and I'd start to lose it. The only time I relaxed was when I slept. That's why I started studying dreams. I found that if I did a few exercises before falling asleep, I could dictate what I dreamed about. I could remember. I could pause and fast-forward and rewind. You're giving me a ‘how pitiful' look.”

“It's just strange,” I said. “The dreams, the stories, it feels like I haven't been paying attention. I had no idea you were being all quietly desperate while I was waiting for my toast.”

“It wasn't all the time.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me. “You should try writing about her, if you haven't already. You find yourself unearthing all sorts of things. Stories are just like dreams.”

Something about his advice irritated me. It brought to mind his casually boastful author's note,
This is his first published story
. “Stories aren't dreams,” I said.

“They're not? What are they, then?”

I didn't know. All I knew was that if he thought they were dreams, then they had to be something else. “They're jars,” I said. “Full of bees. You unscrew the lid and out come the bees.”

“All right,” he said, moving the box out of his way. “But I still think you should try writing about her. Even if it means the bees coming out.”

We searched until I found the snowman resting facedown in a box of embroidered tablecloths. A rat or weasel had eaten half of his head, but he still smiled his black-beaded smile.

“I remember when you made that,” my father said.

I did, too. That is, I remembered
when
I made it, without remembering the actual making of it. I made it with my mom when I was three. Every year it appeared in the center of the kitchen table and every year she would say, “You and I made that. It was raining outside and you kept saying, ‘Let's go stand in the soup.' ” Maybe she thought that if she reminded me enough, I'd never forget the day we made it, and maybe I didn't, for a while.

I brought the snowman into the house and showed it to Carrie, who was sitting in the living room with Lara. “Monstrous,” Carrie said.

Lara was looking at me significantly. An unfinished popcorn string dangled from her lap. “Carrie was sharing her thoughts on your dad's stories,” she said. “Do you want to add anything?” My father walked into the living room holding two mismatched candlesticks.

“They,” I said slowly, looking at Carrie, waiting for her to mouth the words . . . “were” . . . she really was lovely, not just lovely-looking, but lovely . . . “good.” I breathed and said, “They were good.”

Carrie applauded. “He means it, too,” she said. “That slightly nauseous look on his face, that's sincerity.” Then to me: “Now that wasn't so hard. Don't you feel light now, the weight lifted?”

I felt as if I'd swallowed a stone. I felt it settling and the moss starting to cover it.

“Frederick here's the real writer,” my father said. “I'm just dabbling.”

How humble, right? How wise and fatherly and kind. But I know what he meant: Frederick here's the fraud. He's the hack ventriloquist. I'm just dabbing at his wounds.

W
hat more should be said about our visit? I want to come to my father's Mexico story without too much flourish. I hear Hodgett's voice: Never end your story with a character realizing something. Characters shouldn't realize things: readers should. But what if the character is also a reader?

We decorated the tree. We strung lights around the sago palms in the front yard. We ate breakfast in an old sugar mill and, from the pier, saw a pod of dolphins rising and rolling at dawn. I watched my father, tried to resist the urge to catalog him. His default expression was benign curiosity. He and Lara still held hands. They finished each other's sentences. They seemed happy. Watching my father watch the dolphins, I felt like we were at an auction, bidding on the same item. It was an ugly, miserly feeling.

I couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve. Carrie and I shared my old bedroom, which now held a pair of single beds separated by my old tricolor nightstand. All the old anxieties were coming back, the deadness of a dark room, the stone-on-stone sound of a crypt top sliding closed as soon as I began drifting to sleep.

I heard Carrie stir during the night. “I can't sleep,” I said.

“Keep practicing,” she said groggily. “Practice makes practice.”

“I was wondering why you quit writing. You had more talent than all of us. You always made it look so easy.”

She exhaled through her nose and moved to face me. I could just barely see her eyes in the dark. “Let's pretend,” she said.