Mating (26 page)

Nelson idly started a bottle collection, or more precisely a tinted water collection. He took empty bottles from his father’s bottle dump, soaked the labels off, filled them with colored water of different hues created by soaking crepe paper in different permutations, and then corked them. All this industry was carried out in the depths of the property, not secretly, he said, but privately. At first it was desultory, but he began to work more concentratedly when he saw what the next phase of his project was going to be. These were not only liquor bottles, but any bottle with a mouth he could fit a cork into, such as fruit juice or soft drink bottles. It was a calumny that the bottle structure he made was composed entirely of liquor bottles, and one he would resent forever.

First there was simply an assemblage of bottles of colored water, an array he obscurely liked to look at. Then he began organizing them according to size and tint, variously. Then enter some stocks or samples of industrial resin made nugatory by his father’s reascending yet again into advertising. Definitely here was something else that shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. What should be done with them, then? One thing several of the resins could do was bond glass solidly to glass. Out of this discovery came the objet d’art, a construction of bottles like a wedding cake, in tiers. It was open at the back in such a manner that you could install a sparkler or candles or a flashlight, or ultimately a Coleman lantern, into the heart of it, and sit back and enjoy the coruscations or whatever the ineffable effects were of lighting the thing up from inside. Nelson was even thinking ahead and considering introducing a phonograph turntable so that light sources could be made to revolve, producing even more formidable effects. This would be the ultimate. He was already saving his allowance to buy extension cords, of which many would be required. But the ultimate phase of his project was never to be.

I wish I knew why I keep worrying the question of Nelson’s innocence in this. Partly it may be a kind of mental body language against his having to go through what finally transpired. I considered it a Götterdämmerung for him, even if he didn’t. In a way I would have preferred his project to have been a conscious assault on his injurious parents. That would at least have made it slightly more bearable to relive. So I fixated on data like Nelson’s mentioning that one thing he had disliked about his father from an early age was the man being a precisian about which libations go into which kinds of glasses, id est champagne only into champagne flutes, brandy into snifters, and so on, which had led to the necessity of maintaining what seemed like an infinite repertory of drinkware, in which one glass was only minutely different from the next but which when one type of glass ran out through breakage or mislaying would produce violent complaints and blaming scenes involving his mother. I established that this was something he had feelings on long before he created his, as he called them, bottlements. He admitted these were painful scenes. He admitted that, in retrospect, possibly there was some disparity in having a collection of wineglasses appropriate for a marquis and a family car whose running board trailed in the road and gave off sparks. But his father had no interest in cars, was all. The bottle project was a disjunct thing. It was the art impulse, the automatic elaboration of available objects into more and more complex and recognizably aesthetic structures tout court. I asked him what it had been like when he broke wineglasses from time to time, as he must have, doing the dishes. Terrible, he said, until he got expert at handling them and it ceased to happen.

So out in a clear space in a madrone thicket sat his concretion. I think his brother was at select times permitted to visit this holy of older brother holies. His father’s bottle dump was much closer to the house, in an arroyo. Nelson’s site is safe, he assumes, because both his parents are so demonstrably indoor-oriented. If his mother goes out, it’s out the front door to shop or go to church or to the doctor. Nelson’s father has a den and uses it.

It’s early evening. Nelson has evolved the custom of going out and lighting up his bottle structure and looking at it for a while before dinner. He has latitude, because dinner is usually late because his father has important things to do in his den before dinner—id est drinking, in fact—which usually enormously protracts things. Nelson accepts but hates dinner being late, because he and his brother have to do the dishes, which he had no objection to except that there was never a fixed time he
could look forward to when he would be free, done. Sometimes dinner is even brought to his father at his desk.

I wanted to know what his father had been doing, ostensibly, in his solitude. There were two things. One was keeping up with his important reading, meaning in those days the Socialist Call, which he subscribed to, and the Militant and the Weekly People, which he brought home with him and all of which he gave Nelson in a bundle once a week to burn for him. He also got somewhere the Despatcher, a publication of the longshoremen’s union, which was then an organization terribly feared by the powers that were. In those days, Nelson said, this is how left San Francisco was: you could get the Militant and the Weekly People on newsstands the same as you got the Chronicle or the vicious Examiner. Nelson saw his father as a fan of the left, generically. His father belonged to nothing, did nothing left—either of which might have been dangerous. Nelson’s explanation for his father’s having become a passive admirer of the left had to do with his heart’s having been broken when something called the End Poverty in California Campaign had been defeated through chicanery and vile propaganda tricks orchestrated by the movie industry, this in the thirties. Also he hated Stalin for what he had done to the good part of the left. When he could finally have adult discussions about socialism with his father, it emerged that the idea of joining anything openly had been impossible because he had a wife and children. Nelson believed him. The other thing he was doing was working on charts supposed to predict when the next depression would come. This entailed heavy use of an adding machine, whose noise, I pointed out, would also serve to remind the family that serious business was taking place.

In any case here is Nelson squatting down in the gloaming contemplating his creation. The dimensions of the object were considerable, with a bottom tier about five feet across and the pinnacle reaching four feet. The one not purely aesthetic impulse he conceded might have gotten admixed into his project was what he called cathedralism, the impression osmosing to him from his church-mad mother that the most significant human creation of all time is the cathedral.

Nelson hears someone coming furtively up.

It’s his father, drunk, and, as he gets close enough to really discern the thing Nelson has built, incredulous, and then affronted, and then enraged by it.

Clearly he instantly categorizes this thing as a mockery of his drinking:
all his hidden fifths have been retrieved and refilled and lit up for all the world to see. Nelson cringes, but his father turns on his heel and strides back into the darkness toward the house. But this is not the end. Nelson knows it and stays there, frozen. No words have been spoken.

Nelson’s father returns, this time carrying a Stillson wrench and a pickax. Nelson’s heart clenches. He has never been physically afraid of his father. In fact his father has always been principled against corporal punishment, and Nelson has seen his mother reprimanded by him over her lapses in this regard.

Denoon’s father was on the small side, faircomplected, with a blond toothbrush mustache, not threatening. Nelson had his mother’s dark complexion, although she was rather slightly built, so where Nelson’s bearlike form came from is unclear. She had a dead brother Nelson was supposed to be the image of.

Nelson hears the word cocksucker for the first time in his life.

His father slings the wrench at the bottlements.

Some damage is done, but the wrench has been badly aimed. The flashlight or candle is still burning, so there is still this illuminated statement.

Nelson was given no chance to explain his structure.

In any case the wrench has smashed through the bottles in the outer part of the lowest tier, but the heart of the insult is still glowing.

So now comes the time to wield the second weapon, the pickax.

Nelson is in agony, dancing around the perimeter but being careful to be ready to dodge when pater monster lets fly for the second time.

He said something to try to get his father to stop, but he has no memory of what it was. His father begins to swing the pickax around in the air.

All I could think the first time I heard this story was If you marry you will regret it, If you fail to marry you will regret it. This was one of the few things I was able to bring to Denoon’s already topheavy intellectual armamentarium. He had somehow missed reading the great
Either/Or
of Kierkegaard, which is an ordeal except for the one small section whose name I forget that contains that gem. And what I was thinking, of course, was if you have a father you will regret it, If you have no father you will regret it: I was thinking of myself. This became one of Nelson’s favorite quotes, somewhat to my chagrin as to what it meant vis-à-vis being with me. But if we had I would have gotten an agreement out of him not to use it in public when I was around. He always used the aphorism in the
most general or comic sense as a way of saying nothing ever works out, but still it stung me slightly. There was a period when we were in effect married, by most criteria.

Did you scream or cry? I asked him. How did you feel seeing he was about to destroy this thing without showing even for an instant that he knew it was remarkable?

What adds to the pathos of this is that Nelson knew stories about his father’s deprived early life—he was fostered to a farm family, for example, where he was told he had to drink the water for the animals as opposed to the water that was for the family—and that once he knew these stories a consuming fantasy of his was to go back in time and appear at his father’s side, as a buddy, and to fight the injustices he was enduring, get him out of things.

Did you beg, did you plead? I asked him. He had protested, but he couldn’t say how exactly.

Did he show any sign he appreciated even just the industriousness behind your creation, which is exactly the kind of creative thing you presumably want your children to do, if only to keep out of mischief? He was drunk, Nelson said.

His father whirls the pickax awkwardly around his head like someone tossing the caber but he is in fact so drunk that when he lets go, the pickax flies off, missing the bottlements altogether, through the madrones, down a slope into long grass where it is lost.

The detail is horrible.

Get me it, Nelson’s father says or screams, meaning the lost pickax. Clearly this would be so he can have another try. And clearly he knows he is too wobbly with drink to go and find the thing himself.

Couldn’t you have gone to get your mother? was my question. This is what we’re for, I said. But he claimed it never occurred to him, which makes me suspect that his father’s praxis toward Nelson’s mother was cruel enough, whatever Nelson says, to make him want to leave her out of this, that it might be dangerous for her.

Nelson refuses to retrieve the pickax.

All right, his father says, then I’ll do it with the wrench. At which his father begins reeling toward the partly shattered structure to pluck the wrench out of the shards it’s lying in.

What drenches Nelson’s consciousness is that his father could stumble and be hurt or killed, impaled on the spires of broken bottles—and he, Nelson, will have been responsible for it as the builder of the injuring structure.

He sees his only choice as being to go and find the pickax rapidly and give it to his father to use in the final destruction of his creation, which is in fact the outcome.

God leads him directly to the pickax in the blackness.

He furnishes the pickax to his father, who smashes the bottle sculpture into nothingness, drenching himself and wrecking a good suit in the process.

Never could I really convince him that his retrospective fatalism about this incident was false somehow and worth pursuing. Why is it, I asked him more than once, that when I hear this story I feel worse than you do? He once went so far as to say that it might have been worse: his father might have made him demolish the structure himself. So it goes among the males.

I don’t know how many different ways I told him This is not just one incident among others in your life as a boy—this is formative. I might get a Maybe so out of him. Although once he did say, rather passionately before changing the subject, How many times can you imagine that it would happen that someone who is still basically a child could be in the position of saving his father from serious injury or death? I think this is when I gave up on the subject.

  TSAU

The prospect of rescue undoes you.