The Full Cleveland (7 page)

“Oh, I think they bought the dumb Buicks themselves.”

It was kind of Cabot's job to worry about money. I got everything else. And if she didn't worry with me, I'd do my best to shame her into it.

“Dad named our horses after alcohol,” I told her one night. I was trying to sit still, modeling for her. When she didn't even stop drawing for one second when I told her what Dad had done, I said, “Cabot. Heads up. Your horse is an alcoholic.”

She frowned and kept drawing. Except eventually she said, “That's not a very nice thing to say about my horse.”

“Cutty Sark and Chivas Regal. That's Scotch. Jimmy Beam is bourbon.” Jimmybeam was an extra horse. Mother sometimes rode him. “He got his inspiration from the liquor cabinet.”

But she was in that denial, I guess. She got rather stubborn about it. “You're so wrong. Their names are just ‘Cutty' and ‘Chivas.'”

“No, they have last names too. Cutty's last name is Sark, and Chivas's is Regal. Go downstairs and look it up.”

“Then what's Jimmybeam's last name?”

“
Beam.
In the cabinet. On the bottle.”

“Oh. But just because they might be named that, that doesn't mean they're alcoholics.”

“Well, don't you think it's sad Dad names every horse after drinking?”

She sighed. “I wish he'd talk about it.” She held up the finished sketch.

Frankly, I couldn't see the resemblance. “That's supposed to be me?”

“You kept moving around.”

“I was moving so much I looked like I was wearing that big maroon hat?” We had a portrait of an Elizabethan scholar with a big maroon hat just like it in the library.

Cabot sighed. “I can't draw pictures of real people. I can only draw pictures of
pictures
of real people.”

Actually, Cabot was usually very good. But like any kid, the minute you start showing them off, they do something awful. One of her pictures, of a man in yet another big maroon hat, once won a prize in a show at the Cleveland Museum school. When the show was over, Dad hung the picture in the library next to the original man in the big maroon hat. He claimed if he were a collector, he would have chosen Cabot's. Then Cabot said maybe he should pay her like fifty thousand dollars for it. She claimed it wasn't the money, it was the principle. “Did you ever get the money from Dad?”

“Is he rich?”

I think we got pretty repetitive.

One thing that concerned Cabot was Dad's profession: advertising. “Could he really be any good at that? If you don't, like, talk, how can you, like, advertise?”

But we found Dad had found a way. We once went to his library and unlocked his desk and looked through his old portfolio. On each left-hand page was a picture of the ad Dad made up, and on each facing page, a picture of the award he won for it. Cabot went through it, studying the advertisements, and I waited for her to say if they were any good, seeing as she was the artist and all.

It took her forever to finish. Finally I said, “Well? Is he smart, or crazy?”

“Uh, more like smart and lazy.”

She turned back to the first ad in the portfolio. “See. This is like, Every picture tells a story.”

The ad was for a microchip company. It had the company name in small letters at the bottom. Cabot said that a microchip is a tiny, nondescript little computer that performs a very complicated function once it's placed inside a larger computer. Cabot said Dad's design problem was to make the image of this tiny microchip convey the message that it was performing very high-level computations, therefore replacing some of the best human brains in industry.

She studied the picture and nodded affirmative. “This is smart.”

“It's just another gun.” I wasn't so thrilled with guns, even pictures of them, I suppose.

“But it's not a gun. It's a gray metal, L-shaped microchip. He had the photo people blow it up so big to make it look like a gun.”

Under the gun/microchip, the caption read, “Who killed the boss?”

“Oh, I get it.”

She said, “See?”

Then Cabot turned the pages. “Every picture tells a story is a cliché. That's pretty lazy. But he seems to have taken it for all it's worth. Which is pretty smart.”

I saw what was happening. As we turned the pages of the portfolio, the more beautiful and original the pictures became, the less willing Dad seemed to use words to explain them. He went from the four-word ad, to the three-word ad, to the two and just the one: the name of the product. And finally, he made a spectacular attempt to eliminate words altogether.

The last picture in the portfolio showed an expressionless man in an impeccable suit sitting at a highly polished mahogany desk floating on top of the Pacific Ocean. Not that we'd ever actually seen it before, but we still recognized this one immediately. After he had returned from the six-week trip to the Coast to work on it, Dad had spontaneously confided at dinner that the whole “shoot” had been a “real nightmare.” Mother encouraged him to elaborate. Dad said, Shooting the picture. Making the desk and the model seem as if they were sitting on water. Dragging a float out into the Pacific Ocean. Sinking the float with weights so it wouldn't show in the photograph, but still making it buoyant enough to support the desk, the man, and the chair. Lowering the male model from the helicopter without getting his suit all soaked. And then: waiting for the perfect sunset.

But the finished ad was almost blindingly beautiful. There in the middle of a calm Pacific Ocean, under a hill-size red sunset, sat a dignified man in a perfect suit at an empty, high-gloss desk. The sky was gleaming gold, orange, and yellow. The water was as smooth as a blue mirror. It was a seductive scene, Cabot called it “subliminal beyond belief,” and she assured me that anyone who saw the ad was probably dying to buy anything in the picture. That is, if Dad had just bothered to mention what was up for sale. But at the last minute, I guess he refused to mar his masterpiece with words. There was no mention of any product. Not even a logo.

Cabot shook her head. “He went too far. This is
only
a picture tells a story.” But, she told me, the client must have calmed down, seeing as Dad won an award for the ad anyway. There was a photograph of him accepting it on the last page in the portfolio.

After that, Dad got promoted to senior senior executive vice president or something, maybe the one sure way to get him to stop creating concepts and driving the clients crazy. Now he could afford to express himself in the purest sense, in utter artistic silence.

•   •   •

The Tower was over the kitchen, and I could hear Clarine banging pots and pans around downstairs. I could hear Dad too. Laughing. He loved Clarine. They got along well together. I took my crutch and went back to my room and my chair.

But the minute I got there and got started trying to remember how to make everyone rich, just as Grandfather already knew, another car comes screeching up the driveway. I dragged myself to the window. Far below, in the circular part of the driveway, was the beautiful Mickey Knight in her father's hot-wired antique red MG convertible.

It was truly shocking. She was only fourteen, but no matter how hard her father, the brain surgeon, tried to lock up that car, if she really wanted it, she got to it anyway. I watched her jump out and run to our door.

I heard the doorbell peal. I heard Clarine, who preferred Mickey Joslyn to Mickey Knight and didn't make the slightest effort to conceal it, answer the door. I was still at the window, still amazed about the MG, when she burst in my bedroom. And just stood there, blankly looking around. As if she'd never been there before. “Mickey,” I said sternly, “you stole your father's car.”

She put up her hand. It was wavering weirdly. “Don't even.” Her lower lip was quivering.

“I came to make you over!”

She threw herself on the bed, plunged her face in the pillows, and burst into tears.

I got my crutch and hurried over. “Mickey, what happened?!”

“L-L-L-L …”

“What? What? Are you saying ‘love'?”

She picked up her face and looked at me angrily. “L-L-L …! L-L-L …!”

“Love!”

Her head rose and fell limply up and down.

“But who, Mickey? Which one?”

“T-t-t-t…,” she sobbed.

“Not Thomas.”

Her shoulders heaved in assent.

I sat in my armchair and sighed, “But you didn't love him last week.”

“I d-d-did so.”

No. She didn't. Last week she loved Charles. We'd been at the club, and she'd spent the entire day in the locker room avoiding Thomas, and trying to track Charles down on the phone.

In bits and pieces, which I must say took almost as long as my entire meditation on world hunger, I got the story out of her. She knew
now
that she loved Thomas, but she had found out too late. Just moments ago, he had told her she was self-centered, self-absorbed, self-serving, and selfish. He'd called her “almost a man.”

“But, Mickey,” I said gently, “maybe you only think you love Thomas because he doesn't love you.”

It was the right idea but the wrong way to put it. She went from shallow hysteria into deep hysteria, charting whole new waters in the expression of devastation and grief. Her face turned pink with clover-shaped patches, her neck turned blue, and her hands blanched from red to white. I debated whether to call her father. Maybe he had some kind of miracle drug that could restore his daughter to her lovable, selfish self. As it stood, Mickey Knight was totally humbled, and I didn't think it was good for her health.

Clarine knocked on the door and opened it. “That's enough,” she said, staring with distaste at the broken-down spectacle that once was the perfectly self-possessed Mickey Knight.

I took my crutch and led Clarine out of the room. “Clarine, what should we do, she's
heartbroken.”

“Gotta have one to bust one,” Clarine said, chuckling at her own little joke.

“
Clarine”
I loved Clarine, but I hated the way she loved to hate Mickey Knight.

“Well, which one is it anyway? Matt's friend Charles, Christopher Bridges, or the
nice
boy,
Thomas?”

Mickey wailed from the bedroom.

“Clarine!” I cried. “Hush up!”

“Your knee is not so hurt I can't wash your mouth out anymore.”

I remembered that old tough love routine of hers, and apologized.

“Well, she doesn't look so good,” said Clarine, sulking a little. “I've a mind to call her family.”

“You do that and things will start to die!” That was Mickey Knight, from the bedroom.

I hopped back in and closed the door. “Mickey? Are you okay?”

She was sitting up in bed, brushing her hair. She looked beautiful again, like one of those movie stars who sits up in bed, brushing her hair. “I'm fine. But I don't understand why your mother doesn't deep-six that maid.”

“
Mickey”
I loved Mickey, but I hated the way she loved to hate Clarine.

Then I got the whole story out of her. Thomas had told her he was now in love with someone else, a beautiful, sweet girl who was all woman. When the girl turned sixteen he was going to fuck her and marry her, but not in that order.

“Did he really say that, Mickey? Did he use that word?”

“Oh, Boyce, don't be so naive. Of course not. He's a gentleman.” A little leftover sob escaped from her after that.

Mickey had pressed Thomas for the name of the girl. Though at first he refused to disclose it, in the end he blurted it out. Naturally, it was Jo, the other Mickey.

“Does Jo know about this?” I was thinking, you know. Canadian tennis. How that wretched game was going to ruin the neighborhood.

“Yeah. She's home, thinking about it. But I didn't kill Jo. It's him I want to die.”

I didn't blame her for not killing Jo.

“But you know what?” she said, putting the finishing touches on her hair. “I'm going to get him back?”

She would, too. Every boy dumped Mickey for Jo. Just not for long.

“I mean, fear not.”

After Mickey's amazing recovery from her alarming emotional breakdown, she said maybe she should rest before trying to make me over. So we sat around talking, for hours.

By late afternoon, assorted Buicks and visiting cars were doing their standard Saturday comings and goings up and down the driveway. Dusk fell. Down past the long front lawn, the lights came up with the low lamps, cozily leading the way to the house. Mother and Dad ducked their heads in to say good-bye, on their way to a party. Matt came by and said “Hi.” He took one trip around my room, with one eye on Mickey Knight the whole time, and left. Clarine came, and, as if she were feeding something evil in a cage, cautiously slid a tray of sandwiches in along the floor, then quickly closed the door. Lucy, then Luke, came to dutifully kiss me good night. The only one who didn't stop by was Cabot.