Jernigan (33 page)

3

Being in this place, among all these drunks, hearing their family histories, always the same family history pretty much, it just makes you think, No escape for old Danny. I mean, not just me and Judith, but going way the hell back. My father. Judith’s father, who’d died the year before I met her. (Sixty-two years old, heart attack, heavy smoker, heavy drinker.) Judith’s
grandfather
, for Christ’s sake, her father’s father. (I forget anymore what the story was with her mother’s father.) I saw the grandfather once. We were on the way to Boston for Rick’s graduation—which the family had agreed just not to tell Gramp about—and stopped off at his bungalow in Westerly. An empty Four Roses bottle lay among empty Broadcast Corned Beef Hash cans in the grocery bag he used for garbage; another Four Roses bottle, half full, stood beside his recliner chair. He just sat there, not reclining, a tartan blanket over his knees. Unshaven, cheekbones sticking out to here, false teeth in a peanut butter jar on the end table. Watching a western on a snowy black-and-white tv. Said he was sorry the place stunk so bad: the government was putting something in the water to make him piss his pants. This is not a moral failing, I told myself, but an affliction.

To keep transmitting such an affliction, though: was
that
not a moral failing? I used to wonder—I still wonder, Danny or no Danny—if Judith ought not to have had an abortion and just let the God damn thing end right there. But at the time—bear in mind how young we were—there seemed something mystical in the way this child was coming to us past diaphragm and spermicide, as if determined to win through to life. Although now I’m talking about him as if he’d come shooting out of my dick, a Danny-shaped homunculus, and become implanted in her, which is wrong.

He was born in 1971. August 14. Which is V-J Day, I found out. No particular meaning to that, just a thing to remember. Judith and
I were living in the rent-controlled apartment I’d grown up in. My father had moved to his place in Connecticut for good, and had given us the keys to Barrow Street and a box of checks and deposit slips from his New York bank. We tore each month’s rent check out of a different checkbook, on the off chance the landlord, who’d wanted to get him out for years, might be keeping track of the check numbers. And we just let the faucets drip, afraid the super would tell the landlord a young couple had moved into the old man’s apartment.

I remember it had rained all morning. Then, around noon, the clouds broke apart, fled to the horizons, and out from behind one old gray-black brute burst the sun. I was watching it all from a bench by the fountain in Washington Square Park, sitting on a
New York Times
to keep the seat of my pants dry, drinking from a can of Bud in a paper bag. “I’m in a vile mood,” Judith had said. (I’d noticed.) “You’d be doing yourself a favor and me a favor if you just went out for a walk or something.”

“Me a favor,” I said. “Is that like Mia Farrow?” I was twenty-three years old.

“I am going to scream,” she said.

As I was going out the door she said, “I understand that you mean well.”

I finished the beer and got up to walk back to Barrow Street. The pretty girls had begun to come out, and I decided to go home in part because I was ashamed to be looking at them instead of keeping my mind on my poor pregnant cow of a wife. At this time I had never been unfaithful—we’d been married what, all of a year?—and neither, I’m sure, had Judith. It was so hot walking back I unbuttoned my shirt. Hotter than Tophet, Grandpa Jernigan used to say. I used to imagine Tophet as something hot, wet and sticky: taffy, I guess I was thinking of. Christ I hated the city that day. Every day. The puddles already gray and stinking. Filthy, dying men with their palms out God-blessing you. One thing for sure: I would never raise a child in this. Never be able to afford to anyway. Even if the landlord never found us out, a safe private school that might actually educate a kid was going to bleed us white. I had never meant to end up with a kid, but now that it was happening I was by God going to do it right.

When I came back in, Judith’s face looked softer. “My thing broke,”
she said. I thought she was talking about the string of African trade beads her brother Rick had given her as consolation for feeling fat and hideous. “Can we go?” she said. “We better go, I think. Am I going to need a jacket?”

“A jacket?” I said, not as nicely as I might have. “It’s ninety
degrees
out there.” I suppose I was terrified. Though I was also just being a prick because now I wouldn’t even get to sit for a second in front of the God damn fan.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You find out you just don’t know anything.”

The rest I remember only in patches. The point is, we got to St. Vincent’s okay and our son, Daniel, was born at about eleven-thirty that night. In the waiting room—that was how long ago this was—I tried to concentrate on making sense of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” figuring I might as well use the time intelligently. That was how young I was. I kept staring at this one line—“The ruses that were shattered by the large”—and wondering how personally I should take it.

They brought me in when it was all over and Judith was lying exhausted and at peace. Stoned, the nurse told me later, on Demerol and whatever else. The baby bundled at her side.

“Oh Peter,” she said. “Isn’t it amazing? But I really really thought I was going to die.”

I sat down on the tight sheets and put a hand over her hand.

“They told me you had a tough time of it,” I said.

“You have no conception,” she said. “Little joke.”

“I love your little jokes,” I said, relieved that she was still Judith.

“You better, pal,” she said. “You’re stuck with this one for life. You want to hold him?”

“Can I?”

“Can
you?” she said, and laughed. “He’s
yours
, Peter. Sure you know how?”

“You just be careful, right? Support the head and everything?”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said. “God, listen to me. I sound like the Voice of Motherhood. I don’t know anything either, you know?”

I picked up my son and looked, for the first time, into his tiny face. I recognized neither Judith nor myself: just generic human. Branching
blue veins under the red, delicate skin. He was sleeping, lips parted. Tiny tiny lips.

“Cat got your tongue?” Judith said. I don’t know how long I’d been staring.

“Yeah,” I said. “We just have to be so careful with this little guy.” Already I thought I could see my eyebrows and her upper lip, with its wide philtrum. And then something else, which wasn’t either of us: first intimation of Danny, himself.

“You’re going to be one of the all-time great fathers,” she said. “You can teach him all about baseball and Chekhov.”

“Enemy wessel approaching, sir,” I said. She laughed. “Oops,” I said. “Guess you meant the
Cherry Orchard
one.”

“All of the above,” she said. “He has to have everything in the world.” She was talking very drifty.

“You want to go back to sleep, babe? I’ll hold him for a while and then give him back to the nurse if you want.”

She shook her head, but slowly, and with her eyes already closed. “Don’t want to miss any of it,” she whispered. Then her eyes flew open. “Peter don’t let them put him in the wrong thing. You know people end up getting different babies.”

I was confused for a second about why that would be so terrible at a stage when our baby was so undifferentiated from all others. Then I remembered that wasn’t the way it worked.

“Easy,” I said. Carefully I leaned over, still holding the baby, and kissed Judith a soft kiss on the cheekbone below her staring eye. When I opened my eyes after the kiss, her eyes were closed. “You sleep tight,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.”

And I did, in however half-assed a way.

Until now.

4

I sat at the kitchen table, still in my coat, and listened to Danny trudging back upstairs. I refreshed myself (little joke) with a good big burning suck on the gin bottle and, when my eyes stopped watering, another one. And now heigh-ho for some coffee. Need that coffee, boy, if you’re seriously shooting for New Hampshire tonight. So I got up and ran some hot water, dumped I don’t know how much instant coffee into a glass, filled the glass with water and stirred the mess with a spoon until the lumps went away, leaving a dingy foam on top. Then I quaffed the son of a bitch like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And sat down again to wait and see if I could feel it take hold. Drank a little more gin while I was waiting. Now what the
hell
, I wondered, was a gun doing on the kitchen table? Then I remembered. I stuck it in my pocket and went down to the basement.

I got down on hands and knees and dragged my suitcase out from under the ping-pong table, little brass tits scratching across the cement floor. When I raised my head I was looking into the single pink eye of a white rabbit. You saw only one of a rabbit’s eyes at a time. As with the jacks of clubs and spades, I think it is. What kind of a world must a rabbit reconstruct, with each eye pointing at opposite sides of things? Peter Jernigan, say, superimposed on the wrong wall of the basement, as if in a cheesy process shot. Like Cary Grant drunk-driving in
North by Northwest
.

I carried the empty suitcase back upstairs, made a quick stop-off at the gin bottle, then went on up to the bedroom. Danny and Clarissa’s door was shut. Voices behind it: council of war, obviously. What there was to pack didn’t take long. I folded the one suit and laid it flat in the bottom of the suitcase. On top of that, the four shirts, one white, three sport. Old sporting Jernigan. On top of them, the pair of blue jeans, the pair of chinos, the long-sleeve crew-neck sweater, the V-neck sweater-vest, socks, briefs. Put the other pair of shoes on
top, soles up. Wasn’t there a sweatshirt? Gray sweatshirt? Probably in the dirty clothes. And that was it. The rest had been left at Heritage Circle, a whole closet-and-dresserful, now at a thrift store perhaps, waiting perhaps for some frugal Martha-type to come scanning the racks for a bargain to please a thankless man.

I carried the suitcase down and set it by the kitchen door, then went into the bathroom and pocketed the Pamprin. A handful of these would blur me out enough to sleep when I arrived. If I arrived. I took a couple more angry-tasting swallows of gin and stuck the bottle in my shoulderbag. Which I shouldered. And headed up the stairs for the last time, telling myself to look at everything and let it burn in. Drunk and sentimental. You’d have thought this place had been dear to me.

They were still talking in there, but my knocking put a stop to that. Martha opened the door and tried to stare me down. Ooh: stern mother. Clarissa got around behind her. I started to giggle. Old Martha looked like she was right out of Farmer Gray, boy, some kind of barnyard thing where the mother hen’s so mad her feathers get all big. Yes, yes, I know the word
bristled
, but I’d rather have something that’s blunt. At any rate, old Martha seemed to swell up big and protective and I was laughing and laughing and she was staring down at my dick. I thought she was giving old Dr. Johnson the evil eye, trying to wither him or something, until I looked down and saw that I’d pissed myself, the whole front of the pants and down the left leg. (I dressed left.) And now that I thought about it a minute, fuck if it didn’t feel wet down there.

“You are really falling to shit, Peter,” she said. And I guess it actually must’ve looked that way, especially since the pissed pants had only got me laughing more.

So I made an effort and got it together a little bit. Not that hard to do, really. It was like climbing up one level, up out of the laughter level and onto something else. It wasn’t that hard, but it wasn’t that easy. I don’t know how to say it was.

“Hey, I’m off,” I said. “Wish me luck.” Keeping it jaunty. I honestly don’t think I would have pissed myself if I hadn’t had that whole thing of coffee on top of everything else.

“What do you mean you’re
off
?” said Martha.

“I told you,” I said. “Going to New Hampshire. Ayup.”

“After midnight and you’re starting out for New Hampshire,” she said. “In a blizzard, drunk out of your mind.”

“Mrs. Peretsky, don’t let him do it.” That was Danny. I think.

“Another county heard from,” I said. This was an expression. I think it comes from politics. County: it would make sense. Like election returns. “What everybody seems to be forgetting is that I—ta da!”—and I pulled it out of my coat pocket—“have
the gun.”
I gripped the thing with both hands, bent my knees—you’ve seen this on television, the arrest pose or whatever it’s called—and aimed at Danny’s big guitar amplifier. They had the tv sitting on it. I was just more or less fucking around; the amplifier was in the corner away from everybody. You want to be very careful if you’re going to fuck around this way with guns. They all stood there cow-eyed.

Well, this got me hacked off. Absolutely the worst thing they could’ve done.

“Lighten
up
, for Christ’s sake,” I said. Although naturally with a gun being waved around (not that I was really waving it
per se)
you couldn’t expect them to get into the spirit of anything.

“Pyew-pyew!” I went, and then I really did pull the trigger, and the gun gave a little pop, just a nasty little snapping pop. And bing, there was a tiny hole in the grille that covered the front of the amplifier. I was in the kind of head where you just think of a thing and do it. Thank God the bullet apparently just lodged someplace and didn’t go ricocheting around the room.

“Bones?” I said to Danny. “Do what you can.” I moved catlike into the room toward the amplifier. They all edged away from me. That gave me a feeling I liked. “Hey,” I said. “Now I like
this.”

I laid my hand on the amplifier, as if taking its temperature or something. I turned to Danny again and said, “He’s dead, Jim.” Not a laugh, nothing. Then Clarissa burst into tears. Martha put an arm around her. “Hey now,” I said, motioning with the pistol. “Away from the door, okay?”