Stone Arabia (20 page)

Nik didn’t hear me come in. He was sitting on a stool. He hunched over a paperback book he had pinned to the bartop with a splayed hand. He held a cigarette with the other hand. I stood and looked at him for a second, my big brother. His hair fell down in his eyes. He frowned a little and took a drag. He stamped out the cigarette in an ashtray, flipped the book cover-side up (Hermann Hesse’s
The Glass Bead Game
), and made circle motions with his shoulders as he moved his head from side to side. At last he saw me.

“Hey!” I said. He waved me over.

“Hiya,” he said, and I leaned over the bar and gave him a kiss. I could smell cigarettes, of course, and a citrus oversmell that must have been his shampoo or hair gel. No bourbon this time. Neither he nor I would mention our last fight. Mostly because our fights consisted of me freaking out over something and him placating me until it blew over. It was just the way it went with us, the way it always was. He took out a bottle of the amber beer I usually have when I come in. I nodded. Every gesture of his seemed at least darkly meaningful if not downright cryptic.

“I’m glad to see you. It’s been dead and I’m falling asleep here.” He turned to the stereo and punched up a new song. It
was some ultrafamiliar sixties rhythm and blues, but much more rhythm than blues. The kind of music that made you want to move against your will, as if it plugged in to some preconscious and involuntary need for beat and repetition. It did not mirror the moment for me.

“Can you turn that down? A little?”

Nik shrugged and turned it down.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling. I looked in his eyes. He betrayed nothing. “How are you feeling? How’s your foot?”

“I’m okay, actually pretty good,” he said. Nik smiled. He had, considering our haphazard visits to the dentist as children and his lifetime devotion to smoking, these straight white teeth, and his smile still made him look almost boyish. I have decent teeth, but I have a narrow and strictly horizontal smile that makes my lips turn knife-blade thin and my eyelids pooch into little pillows of flesh. I often used to wonder what it would be like to go through life with a flashy Nik-type smile. “What?” he said.

“I was thinking something, I have this idea,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you could … I think I need some help with my mortgage,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, I need to get a roommate,” I said.

“A roommate? Really? What about Thomas Kinkade?” Nik said, smirking now.

I shook my head. “Jay and I are not about to live together. No! I just met him, c’mon,” I said. I took a swig of beer. No way would he go for this, or make this easy, but I had to try
it and see. “I was thinking you have had difficulty paying your rent. You could move in to my place. You could have the guest room, and you could turn the garage into your studio.” There, I had offered it. It was possible—I did have a guest room, which I used hardly ever.

Nik shook his head and smiled again, but this time it was one of his brow-furrowed wincing smiles with a sigh blown through it, clearly meaning
are you bat-shit out of your mind?
I looked around the room. Nobody else was in the bar. It was early. He waved a hand at me.

“What?” I said.

“Jesus, I don’t want to live with you, are you fucking kidding? You really are so funny. You don’t want to live with me either, trust me.” Which was totally true, I did not want him to smoke in my house or to be there when I got home. I did not want him to play music all the time and I didn’t want to find out how much he really drank. I hadn’t lived with Nik since I was seventeen. I had no idea what he was really like, his toothpaste and his coffee and his dirty laundry. But.

“Well, I could use the company and the help. So consider it. For my sake.” He patted me on the head like I was an imbecile. He held up another bottle of beer and waved it at me. I shook my head no. I sat and picked at the label of my nearly empty beer bottle. I couldn’t leave yet. He thought I was lonely, that that was what this was about, and I could tell he felt sorry for me even though he said nothing. He smiled at me, and it had his special reluctant sister-pity in it. He hadn’t guessed my motives, not yet.

“Ada’s coming back to town soon?”

“Ada is coming this weekend,” I said.

“So I guess Ada’s making me a movie star,” he said.

“Yes, yes. Good. It is all happening. How do you feel about it?”

He shrugged. “It’s fine with me. It’s not like I’m gonna say no.” He took a sip from a beer bottle he kept down below and out of sight; he must have kept it in the liquor speed rack. “She won’t actually finish it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Ada is very determined. I wouldn’t underestimate her. She raised enough money to get this far.” Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t going to do what I feared. Maybe I had it all wrong. He was thinking about the future, wasn’t he? The movie was a good thing. I realized then I should have been pushing the movie, not resisting it. “You never know, Nik, documentaries are big now. She could get HBO to back it. You could get discovered at fifty. At the very least you could get a label interested in releasing your music.”

“C’mon. It won’t really be about the music. It will be about ‘my freaky uncle.’ That’s how it will go.”

I shook my head. He took another swig off his beer bottle.

“That’s all right. I don’t mind. Don’t get me wrong. I like the attention. I’ll take what I can get at this point. Hell, I’ll be the next Henry Darger. Do you remember how that movie ended? The outsider artist dies and the whole world discovers he was secretly a genius. Can you imagine how much his estate must be worth now?”

Now it was my turn to do my
are you crazy
head shake at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m just shooting my mouth off. You know me.”

I did know him, didn’t I?

I know Ada did her last interview with Nik this day. I haven’t seen the interview yet. It wasn’t strictly part of his Chronicles because it was about the Chronicles, and the Chronicles don’t exist in the Chronicles, of course. So Ada’s movie fits into
my
chronicles, the fact-based ones. I will have to, at some point very soon, watch it, and I will have to include it to give a full accounting.

May 23; we were getting very close.

After Ada interviewed Nik, both of them came over, and we all drove to my mother’s apartment. Nik’s second visit with her in a week. My mother greeted us with a huge grin. I brought food for dinner, and we all sat around the table and ate.

“This chicken is delicious,” my mother said. Nik didn’t eat, but sipped at a beer.

“Yes, it’s great,” he said. He watched her as she ate. I felt relief that she seemed to be her old self today. As if I needed her to put on a good show for Nik. He looked intently at our mother while I looked intently at him.

“How did the filming go?” I asked.

“Excellent. We may have to do some more. But with the first interview, it was a good start. Right?” Ada said. When she was
serious, she looked like me. The worried eyebrows and the way her fingers rubbed at her lips.

“Yes, it was fun,” Nik said.

“What’s next?” I said.

“
The Ontology of Worth: Volume 1,
release party. It will be released on Nik’s birthday next week. We will film the party. Nik will perform for the first time in thirty years. Then maybe we need to schedule one more interview.”

“Really?” I said.

“A short acoustic set, that’s all.”

“Nik will be fifty. My word,” my mother said. We all turned to her.

“Why, yes, absolutely he will be fifty,” I said. How did she remember that? One day she is paranoid and erratic, the next day she is fine. I did, however, find a melted pint of ice cream in the cupboard. I grabbed it and quickly threw it away. I discreetly scoured the refrigerator for anything moldy that could make her sick.

“Did Leslie come by this morning?” I said.

“Yes, she did. I have to tell you, though,” she said. Her eyes darkened and she pursed her lips. The lipstick was a little smeared, I noticed that now.

“What?” I said.

“She’s stealing from me,” she said. I shook my head. “She is. I had twenty dollars in my bag, and after she left, I couldn’t find it.”

“Ma, Leslie didn’t take it, I promise you. You misplaced it.” I caught Nik and Ada exchanging a look.

“It wasn’t the first time, I didn’t want to upset you, but she
steals and she’s terrible.” My mother looked suddenly like a child, pouting and miserable. Of course it felt true to her.

“Mama, it is just your diabetes meds are making you paranoid. Leslie’s good.” I squeezed my mother’s hand. I had to blame everything on the diabetes. That didn’t sound as scary to either of us, and maybe it would make her less willing to try and sneak sweets. Her hand squeezed mine. I put my other hand on top of hers and stroked it lightly. She seemed to relax slightly. I held her hand, and she didn’t pull back. It made sense. We started out with all this body intimacy when I was a baby and then a child. After that there were years when we hardly touched. We would give a hug or a kiss on the cheek, but it would be perfunctory. We would already be pulling away as we did it. It was just how adults behave. And now we were hugging, holding hands. I helped her at the doctor, I did her nails for her, I knew all about her body. It made sense—we retreated from the mind. The body remained. We lost the memories, and so the past collapsed and disappeared. We were back to the intimacy of our two bodies. And I realized the intimacy was never gone, not completely. It hummed just below our surfaces, held down by our array of vanities and privacies. It felt very simple, and very comforting, that our bodies get returned to each other in the end. It was almost as if the mind has to disappear to get us back to the elemental. To our pure mother-daughter love. It felt better when I thought of it like this, when I felt how good my touch made her feel. How it eased her fears.

When I think of my family, I think that our history really lives in our bodies. The mind distorts and fails, but the body endures until it doesn’t, and up until that moment it held it
all. I knew that when she died, it would be her body I would remember, her physical presence, and to recall any part of her body—her smell, her hair—would make me weep and grieve for her.

My father, from time to time, used to play piano in nightclubs and lounges. Nik remembers sitting under a grand piano while my father played. It was at some corny piano bar. I don’t remember any of that. I don’t even remember a single conversation I had with my father. I do remember, however, walking behind him on the street. He reached his hand back and opened it, then closed it and opened it without looking around for me. I ran up and pressed my palm into his palm. He closed his hand gently over mine, squeezed it. I remember how large his hand was, and how warm and heavy it felt.

I still have a photo of my father in my bedroom. It is his high school graduation picture. It is a black-and-white photo that has been painted with color, which is what they used to do to formal portraits. So it looks almost like a painting, or like a ghost. He looks young and handsome, a heavier version of Nik. But it doesn’t remind me of him, really.

Occasionally—maybe three times it has happened—I get a sense of my father from other men. When I walk behind a certain kind of man in the street. It happened to me in New York City once. I was in a crowd and a man moved right in front of me. He brushed past me. He was wearing an overcoat. And because of his height, or maybe the way he carried himself, the way he walked, or the way his hair met the back of his collar. Or how his hand looked as he held his briefcase—something brought back my father. A deep, intimate body memory came
over me; I could see him—somewhat—but I could feel him, or recall feeling him, completely. I glimpsed this stranger through the crowd and I startled. A flood of recognition and longing. I hurried after him, even tried to catch up. And then he turned slightly and I saw his face. I felt, ridiculously, real disappointment when I realized he was not my father. He did not look at all like my father. The incident didn’t make me sad, though, it made me remember my father in ways a picture never could. I felt the memory of my father on my body, the way you feel a breeze or the heat of the sun. He did not feel—and so was not—entirely lost to me. Inside, beyond my recall of events and dates and talk, there was this hot-wired memory of his body. I know now how much all of us live in these body places. Your experiences, the hard-felt ones, don’t fade. They are written forever in your flesh, your nerves, your fingertips.

Nik turned fifty. We met at Nik’s apartment to celebrate. Ada brought her cameraman. I brought a cake and an envelope with a thousand dollars in it (borrowed at 18 percent interest). Ada had wanted a record release party and a concert, but Nik finally refused. It was just Ada and her cameraman, Nik, and me. I took this as an encouraging sign—no dramatic farewells. Nik handed us each a copy of
The Ontology of Worth: Volume 1.

Ada held it up for the camera. I looked at the cardboard double CD case. I handed it back to Nik.

“What?” he said.

“Autograph, of course.”

Nik smiled and took a marker to the inside of the gatefold. “That will be worth big money someday,” he said with a wink. “The worth of Worth.”

“Sounds like your next album title,” I said. He put his finger to his nose to indicate
right on the nose
and smiled at me. Ada filmed us and we pretended she wasn’t.

“Do you want to sing a couple of songs from the CD?” Ada said.

Nik picked up his guitar. “No, that would be kind of difficult. But since it is my birthday, I will perform something for you.
One song. An oldie.” He sat on the edge of his couch. He started a slow, acoustic rendition of his teenage “hit” “Versions of Me.” He closed his eyes, and he stretched the song, pulled it down low until his boy anthem of alienation turned into something else. It turned serious, slow, the declarations made wise and ironic; a reprise that made his age suit him for a moment.