Jernigan (14 page)

I had lost the thread.

“I just want you to know,” I said, “that I would not be doing this if I didn’t think it was going to make life better for us.” (He’s lying. Joe Isuzu.)

Well, so take the worst case, all right? Danny was already sixteen; in two years he’d be eighteen and off to college someplace and out of whatever this turned into. Provided his grades got better. Provided there was any money left.

“It’s also been in the back of my mind,” I said, “that the money from that house might come in handy for your college.” I’d only thought of it that minute. “How you coming getting your grades up, by the way?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Well,” I said, and then just stopped. I didn’t have the energy for a whole thing on grades just now.

“Your pizza’s getting cold,” he said, the crafty little fuck. Or thought he was. I picked it up and took a bite.

“Good,” I said. “You want the rest of it? Looks like you got outside of yours pretty fast.” He shook his head no. I took another bite. It either was or wasn’t good.

As we walked to the car, I put a fatherly arm around his shoulder. He let me. He stared at his feet. Cold as a bitch out.

“So you think you’re going to be okay about this, bud?”

“Sure, I guess so,” he said. “I like Mrs. Peretsky and everything. So it’s not going to be all that different, right?”

“That’s it,” I said. “It really won’t be. Good God, would you look at that.” I pointed.

Big scary orange moon, low in the sky.

6

“Glad you got back,” said Martha when we came in. “Weatherman just said we could have a really big-time frost tonight. Can you believe it? Anyhow, we’ve got to get all the rest of those tomatoes in or we’re going to have tomato paste in the morning.”

“Shit,” I said. “Can’t just cover ’em up?”

“I really don’t want to risk it,” she said. “They said it was supposed to get down to twenty in the northern suburbs.”

“This is a northern suburb?”

She sighed.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “There any coffee?”

“Isn’t it going to keep you awake?”

“That was the idea,” I said. “I mean after.”

“Little joke,” I said.

She lit a burner and clanked a saucepan of cold coffee down on it. “Anything else out there perishable?” I said. Now I was being oh so helpful.

“Not very,” she said. “I guess I’ll throw some plastic over the herbs and hope for the best. Danny, would you go get Clarissa, please? If we all help out, maybe we can get this done.”

He trudged off down the hall.

“How’d it go?” she said.

“Okay,” I said. Christ, I sounded like Danny. “I mean, he
says
it’s fine with him. I don’t think he’s really focussing on—I don’t know. Maybe he’s got the right idea. You talk to Clarissa?”

“Clarissa and I made up our minds a long time ago,” she said. “Don’t know what took you
fellas
so long.”

Nice lighthearted thing to say. Now be lighthearted back.

“It just took us a while to believe our good fortune,” I said. “Beauty
and utility we could have believed, but beauty and economy …” Was this lighthearted? Or labored and obscure?

“Well, I’m glad you’ve both come to your senses,” she said, “however belatedly.” And kissed my neck. Feigned biting.

“Speaking of belated,” I said, getting a coffee mug out of the dish drainer, “where
are
those lazy little shits?”

She drew in her breath in mock horror. “Your own childring,” she said in her comic hoity-toity voice. “Hey Clarissa?” she called. “Let’s move it, okay? We’ll be out in the garden.”

She put on the suit jacket I’d left hanging scarecrow-style on a chair at the kitchen table—I’d been fired in that jacket this morning—and grabbed the flashlight and a bunch of plastic grocery bags with paper bags inside them. I poured a little milk into the mug, then filled it with coffee. I drank while pawing left-handed through the closet for a warm coat and followed her outside.

The moon had risen, paled and shrunk: now it was just your normal white moon in a dark sky, except the sky was never really dark here. Pink everywhere, though pinker off in the direction of Newark and New York.

“Yow,” I said. “It’s really getting down there.”

“Weathermen,” she said. “The only men who never lie to you.”

“That’s because they know you’re going to find out anyway.”

“That would never stop a
real
man,” she said. “Here. Why don’t
you
hold the light,
and
the bag, and I’ll pick.”

“Outstanding,” I said. “Outstanding in his field. And that’s where we found him. Out standing in his field.”

“Oh
God
. My father used to say that all the time when I was a little girl,” she said. “I used to think it was an absolute
howl
. Hold the light steady, please?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Listen, you don’t suppose the kids are going to fuck the dog on this?”

“I don’t?”

“They’re not down here in about one minute,” I said, “I’m gonna by Jesus go in there kick some
ass.”

“Let’s just get this done,” she said. “While we’re asserting our authority we’ll be losing our tomatoes.”

“Lapidarily put,” I said. Thinking of the postlapsarian
lapins
again, probably. “But if by the time we’re done …”

By the time we were done, the light was off in Clarissa’s room.

We managed to catch the end of
Star Trek
—it was the one where Kirk splits into his good and evil selves and finds that without the evil part he dithers too much to command the Enterprise—and went to bed. Martha fell asleep, an arm across my chest. I lifted the arm away and lay there, thoughts racing. From the God damn coffee, plus of course everything else. What I was going to do about money, what a failure I was as a father, whether or not I should extricate myself from this whole deal with Martha.

Finally I got up, put on shirt and trousers and went into the living room to read. Noticed on my way down the hall that the light was back on in the kids’ room, the music faintly going. I began again—how many times had I read it?—the long and winding story of Psmith passing himself off as the poet Ralston McTodd, and everyone trying to steal Lady Constance’s necklace and Lord Emsworth wanting only to be left alone among his flowers. Maybe if I drank a little more gin, I thought, I might get drowsier faster. So I got out the bottle from under the kitchen sink, thinking about the residuum of puritanism that had led Martha to put it away with the Mr. Clean and the Brillo pads. Maybe it was a Southern thing, something she got from her father.

The bottle was still about half full: ought to more than do me. I set it down next to the Morris chair, tucked my feet under me to sit sidesaddle and began reading again and sipping right from the bottle. A much more generous feeling than doling it out to yourself by the mingy glassful. I was satisfactorily drowsy, if drowsy is really the word, by the time I got to the part where Freddie Threepwood finds Psmith’s ad in the newspaper (
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
). But now I didn’t want to stop reading. So I went back to the kitchen, drank off the inch or so of coffee left in the saucepan (not bothering with milk this time), then filled the pan with water and made a fresh pot. Not to drink all of it myself; it would be a nice surprise for Martha to wake up and find coffee already made that all she would have to do was heat up. Those old husbandly nice surprises. Oh what a feeling, Toyota, not to have to work tomorrow, and to be able to stay
up and do whatever the fuck you felt like doing as late as you felt like doing it.

So I sat curled up in the Morris chair, reading again the familiar deceptions and revelations, taking now a sip of gin, now a sip of coffee. At some point I looked up and saw branchy webs of frost on the windowpanes. I tried to remember how Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” went, or at least what the fuck it had been about besides frost at midnight, but all I could remember was the title—and this was one of the seminal poems of the Romantic period! Unless I was getting it mixed up with the “Dejection” ode. The old
In our life alone does nature live
. Then it began to turn gray outside, and most of the coffee was gone, and most of the gin.

So: My Big Wild Night, by Jernigan. Now, probably at the same time I was up reading P. G. Wodehouse in the Morris chair, some rock-and-roll star in New York was speedballing coke and heroin and getting sucked off, as flunkies stuck needles into both arms, by a groupie in a leather skirt. Okay. But who’s to say I wasn’t as close to my edge as he to his?

The gray gave way to full daylight, but I didn’t turn the light off: I liked the yellow glow off the page, giving the illusion that darkness still surrounded. Martha appeared in her robe and said, “Hi, you been up all night?” Not even judgmentally. And nonjudgmentally, she put the tablecloth back over the tv.

I picked up my coffee mug and raised it as if to toast. Meaning, I suppose, Here’s what kept me awake and here’s
to
it. She whittled her index finger at me and said, “You want some breakfast?”

I shook my head.

“Listen,” she said, “were you going to speak to the kids about last night? Because if you’re not up to it, I’ll be glad to say something.”

I stared at her. “Be assured,” I said, “that Jernigan is up to it.”

She looked doubtful. “Well, I guess that settles that.” She picked up the gin bottle and raised it to eye level. “Whew,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

“I would like some toast,” I said with great dignity. “And I will come to the table.”

She put down the gin bottle and saluted, then went into the kitchen. I listened to the breakfast sounds: burners lighting snat snat snat snat,
pans clanging, cupboard doors squeaking open, refrigerator door thumping shut. Two soft pings—slices of bread being dropped into the toaster!—then the springy snap of the toaster’s lever being pushed home. I got up then and went into the kitchen myself, so I wouldn’t have to hear my name called. And there I sat as she bustled.

“Are you all right?” she said.

I nodded.

“Maybe you can get some sleep once the kids get off to school,” she said. She sat down to wait for the toast.

“I’ll think about that,” I said. And I did. Then I got to thinking about some other thing, and the next thing. My mind not really racing anymore, just going. And her mind, I thought, must be going too. We sat there with our minds going.

The toast sprang up and Danny and Clarissa came in, still buttoning their shirts.

“Hey, Mrs. Peretsky?” Danny said. “We’re running real late. You have anything we could just grab?”

Martha looked at me.

“Not so fast, you two,” I said. “I want the both of you to sit down and have a decent breakfast”—that’s right, folks, Peter Jernigan saying
Not so fast
and talking about decent breakfasts—“and we’ll have a little family conference.”

“Dad, we’re gonna miss the bus,” said Danny. He picked up a tiny green tomato from the windowsill, examined it, put it back.

“Right you are,” I said. Danny and Clarissa looked at each other. “Fortunately, old Dad happens to have some time on his hands this morning, and will be available to
drive
you to school. And I should warn our affiliates that we’re going to be going a few minutes over this morning.”

Clarissa’s brow knit; Danny’s head cocked. Not quick on the uptake, these kids.

“But. Old Dad will be happy to go into school with you and placate whoever needs to be placated.”

What a way to talk. I didn’t blame them for feeling contempt, assuming that’s what those sullen expressions meant. In fact, I thought, that in itself might be a topic worth addressing.

“If you grow up and have kids of your own,” I said, “I mean,
when
you grow up and
if
you have kids, and not necessarily even the two of you having kids with each
other”
—I was getting lost in all this—“if you ever have kids of your own, then you’ll know what the hell I’m talking about,” I said.
“And
you’ll know what it is to behave in ways that are
contemptible
, and to read that contempt right there in the faces of your own children. And enough said about
that
aspect of things.”

I was trying to talk about authority.

“Dad, are you okay?” said Danny.

“I am trying,” I said, “to talk about authority.”

Nobody said anything. Danny looked at Martha.

“Now I agree,” I said, “that authority is probably arbitrary, okay? Ultimately probably arbitrary. That’s not what we’re talking about. But okay, let’s even assume it
is
arbitrary. Simply contractual, okay? Not divinely fucking
ordained
. A simple agreement that I will play this role and you will play that role, for our mutual benefit and exploitation. Okay? Say that’s the deal. The point I’m getting to is, that some of us in this room haven’t been living up to the terms of that contract.”

Clarissa was staring at the tabletop. She didn’t seem to be aware that one leg was bouncing madly.

“Dad, I’m sorry we didn’t help out last night,” said Danny, probably thinking he was cutting right to the heart of the matter. “When I went to get Clarissa she was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her up, and then I sort of fell asleep.”

“Whatever,” I said, graciously.

“Do you want more coffee?” said Martha. A pathetically transparent stratagem, and I came about
that close
to telling her so.

“Let’s
all
have some coffee,” I said. Mr. Genial. “You kids, now, you have some cereal or whatever, nice breakfast, and let’s see if we can’t agree on what the nature of our contract actually is.”

I was about to begin asking Socratic questions.

Clarissa’s leg had stopped bouncing. Now she was looking at her mother, lower lip trembling. “Mom?” she said, and couldn’t go on. My heart went out to her: here was this horrible man in her house.

“It’s all right, sweetie,” she said, putting a hand on Clarissa’s arm. “May I talk?” she said to me. “You’re not making very much sense.”