Bedside matters, p.5
Bedside Matters, page 5
Opinions, pet peeves, he reviews the aspect of his former self prone to trifling irritations. Now, like a classroom blackboard at day’s end, all the scribblings and urgent passages are being erased.
He encourages a blank slate, drapes drawn across his mind, and closes his eyes. I want it to end. It’s been enough. And so he knows he’s becoming ever more ready. I’ve made peace with myself. There is nothing more to do. And then he fingers a slim volume from the stack of Paula’s books she’s brought him. And he reaches for the pen and notebook nearby, jotting down pithy notions mostly to keep his hands from going stiff.
Bardo in Buddhism is the state of existence between death and rebirth. A transitional state.
Thank you very much. However not only can I not embrace your kind offer of reincarnation, but I feel my long life in this embodiment has been more than generous for one being. And why ever perpetrate me of all people? I’ve had multiple opportunities to become new and improved. I am who I am.
Sufi saying: Allah/God is a hidden treasure that wants to be known and created the world so it could be found.
Now that’s a nice idea. It absolves everyone from feeling awful, even him, for never having gotten it quite right. He was meant to give it his best shot even though the game was rigged against him in the first place, imperfect by design.
He pokes on through these funny little books. Homilies, haikus, more serious than himself.
Aspire to meaninglessness. To accept the purpose of The Secret is to tease the conscious mind to higher and lower levels of awareness and insight, which can never be fully achieved but enlighten along the way.
I can live with that, responds Walter. I can die with that, more to the point.
•
Morning, Walt! Hi, Walt. They all hustle in, on time, of course. He’s the boss. The senior marketing execs file in to join a half-dozen already placed around the big oval table, poring over notes. He has the table oval so everybody can make eye contact and forge a tighter group. No one left out, each person seen and heard.
After the brief intro by his right-hand man, Alex begins the discussion, the pros and cons of expanding beyond their mostly rural market for yard and garden goods into, for them, untapped cities and suburbs.
The battery-operated mower is perfect for amortizing our proven direct-response TV inquiry techniques into A and B counties, asserts Sylvia, a newly minted Harvard MBA. She’s too brilliant for his outfit, but hopefully her time to rule a roost will come.
It’s not of interest to our base of a million customers, our best bets for additional sales, snaps a veteran on the team. Put that dame in her place.
We’re all about innovation and selling direct without retail presence. The country is ready for this new tool, says another, eager to claim credit for his assertion rather than second Sylvia’s motion, which urged the same ideas.
And Walter sits, elbows on the table, preening like a mother hen. As per usual, he keeps his thoughts to himself. For example, those assumptions of sexism are simply his own; his colleagues seem to thoroughly enjoy spirited back and forth. In fact, mentally sticking up for Sylvia is sexist on his part, dated protector of the little woman. Sylvia is full of piss and vinegar, ready to take on the world. His company is all about participation of folks at every level. Even a janitor with a complaint or an idea can pipe up without fear of reprisal. There is no poison in the atmosphere under Walter’s roof where he knows the first name of all four hundred employees, addressing them in greeting without guile. He means it. He owns this baby, and is indebted to every single player, however lofty or not the slot that is filled. They are well paid, overpaid some advisers say. But Walter nurtures the profit month in, month out, like a newborn. Is he a slave to it? Frankly, yes, he says in raw appraisal a lifetime later. He is charming and courteous to everyone because, truth be told, the fortune he is amassing precludes all else. Good manners take no toll on him whatsoever.
We can have them built in China for a third the cost and result in a salable price at the local hardware store. Otherwise, manufactured here? No market.
Walter has already decided how to proceed. At the end of the hour meeting, each staffer has had his or her say and next step in place prior to a final resolution on this item. It is only a slice of what each is doing, it doesn’t really waste time, it sharpens wits, but bottom line, Walter affects an open process. He needs these people to run his business. Fully empowered, they never quite digest their part in a dictatorship. At least this is how Walter assesses himself near the start of his downward physical spiral, coming face to face with so much of his past. During the course of his career, it didn’t seem to him that he was nearly so cold and calculated. Valid at the time, but, in the big picture, it was a contrived configuration he had adapted for himself. Not a very nice guy, despite outward appearances. It just happened to last a lifetime.
So, what say you, Walt? says Alex. How would you sum this up?
All eyes turned. Dammit, Alex. Rather the boss than Sylvia having the last word.
•
“Ana, you said your granddaughter is taking piano lessons. How wonderful.” He can’t imagine how this is possible, given Ana’s daughter is a single mother of four working full-time as a chambermaid at the Holiday Inn.
Ana is startled to be addressed midway in her mopping, let alone on such a personal note. “Oh, Mr. Walt, she sings like an angel and won her class competition. As a prize the school has arranged for piano lessons in the nearby church basement. She’s dreamed about playing since she was a tot.” Ana leans against the mop, wipes misbehaving hair from her moist forehead.
“Didn’t you say you played a church piano yourself at Christmas?”
“Oh, just the carols. I memorized!”
“Look. Ana, you run yourself ragged cleaning up all my mess. What with Irma full-time and the visiting nurse Valerie now, I’ve got plenty of help.”
Ana comes to attention, clearly uncomfortable at this level of informality with Mr. Walt. She is stocky and dark-haired and plain, Walter hates to admit, like every Hispanic matron he’s ever met. Must he, in turn, for them appear identical to every other old white man in the world?
“Ana, I want you to take piano lessons, too. Like your granddaughter. Please. Do it for me.” And he fetches one of the several checkbooks on his stand. “The same teacher as for your girl. Or ask about another who might be available.”
She is blushing, about to stammer. “I work weekends, too, at the hospital cafeteria.”
“Then I’ll arrange it with Irma so you have one afternoon free each week. No change in your pay.”
She is shaking her head. Is she declining…have I upset her with such an intrusion…admit it, Walter, this is for your benefit more than hers…
•
Oh, my God, Gavin tried to burn down the house! is near shouted to him on the phone. Polly is stricken as never Walter has beheld her, him rushing home from the office and parking several yards away due to the pile-up of fire trucks and police cars.
Walter clenches his jaw, embraces Polly, gapes at the jets of water raining down on the southside of their earlier house with its roof of blackened herringboned slate. He cannot remember Paula in the picture until later, screaming incoherently at the total destruction of her pretty pink bedroom with its cherished posters, dresses, and dolls. Days later he and Polly with Gavin are sitting like ramrods with the counselor, soon after with the psychiatrist. At eleven Gavin did not have access to heavy drugs or even dope. He had soaked his bedroom from a gasoline can for the lawnmower. He is well beyond playing with matches. Gavin resumes his smiley, cute-boy demeanor. He offers virtually zero by way of explanation although by nine or ten years old it was obvious at least to Polly that Gavin had more than a surly streak. Speak when you are spoken to, Gavin, from Polly at the table when he was in junior high school, no longer normal to be tongue-tied. He glances up, all innocent. Befuddled? Not really, even to Walter. There is something recalcitrant in the kid’s basic makeup. Polly grows ever more anxious. Walter withdraws, not wanting to interfere in the tender business of childrearing. It will pass, he thinks. A preadolescent rebellion to his sugary-sweet sister. Whatever, Walter figures, dismissing it. I’m not a psychologist. My job, such as I have one in the domicile, is the odd round of ping-pong in the playroom, tossing the football after Sunday dinner, goes his train of thought those years ago. So he “ran away from home” at nine, is easily caught a few blocks away. Huckleberry Finn, Walter tries to make light for Polly’s benefit, at which she flattens her lips. So Gavin threatens to jump off the roof of their four-story mansion at the time, age ten. Wanting attention, Walter offers. Paula’s such a star, now on horseback. Polly disagrees.
And so they carry on as a foursome, their little family perhaps not so storybook perfect. But four independent characters, each forging their separate path, nothing out of the ordinary, really. Nothing over which to fret, far as Walter is concerned.
Until the fire…at age eleven…not even a hormonal, typically angry, obnoxious teen.
As years of havoc alternated with years of renewal and hope, Walter ever more immersed in his business, he could lose track of where things stood with his son. It was like his family was on a stage, anguished and then otherwise, while he gazed on from the audience, front row center, but oddly removed and immobile, with no lines of his own.
Chapter 5
Face to face with a lion,
I grow leonine.
His first orgasm is at the junior-high sock hop. Remember those, Walter? Orgasms, he needles himself, not sock hops. But one such teen romp was truly memorable. At its conclusion there was the Dead Bulb Dance where the couples could be pressed together and frankly explore. It was only allowed as the final number after interminable twirling and flailing like beheaded chickens doing the Lindy. The more serious couples with the girl wearing the boy’s Friendship Ring on a chain preside over the Dead Bulb Dance in the suddenly darkened gym. The wallflowers slink to the sides and dolefully watch the cooler kids. Walter, unpledged and considered a drudge even then, is madly in love with Mary Lou Strauss, but she was claimed by the tall, confident captain of the basketball team. He spots Gloria Berghof milling about near the wall and, astonishing himself, hustles to her side, seizes her hand, and leads her to the floor. Walter doesn’t know what loose implies at the time. He only knows that she has winked with a sly grin at him ever since they were ten and played Doctor and Nurse in her treehouse on the next block. He prodded her slit with a popsicle stick, and she measured his hairless prong—diving-board dick, the boys called it—as they wordlessly, solemnly conducted their reciprocal exams. Not that many years later here they are locked together at the Dead Bulb Dance, as Gloria grinds her pelvis into his, rotates round and round, the sides of their damp heads smack together as well so they can carry on without eye contact or inane conversation. The boys in the locker room urged wearing their newly issued jockstraps in case they were lucky enough to dance the last dance but avoid humiliation over their hard-ons. Walter is instantly transported to oblivion, letting Gloria take the lead, whereupon he suddenly near collapses from a geyser released between his legs, flooding his underpants, him thrust into both searing pleasure and utter embarrassment. Gloria continues to grind away, gripping him in a vise. Just before the familiar last notes of “Blue Moon” she arches back her equally sweaty head and sticks her tongue into his ear. Walter can barely stand, is near faint with confusion as they pull apart, the overhead fluorescent lights again flashing on with the glare of a police lineup. Guilty, every one of you. Gloria glances over her shoulder sashaying to the girls’ room and shoots him her devastating, rascally grin as he minces to the boys’, praying his wet pants don’t show.
•
Autumn is advancing without him, but he doesn’t mind. He’s preoccupied with Polly, as usual. The few but consequential women in his life dominated everything outside of his office. Fair enough. He was the principal there. But the women, Walter is thinking, command an arena far richer, and trickier, to negotiate. It’s probably why I don’t read novels, but more often biographies and histories and cautionary political tomes. They’re straightforward with language I can grasp. Fiction, when he’s dabbled, is fraught with meanings between the lines. Dialogue of characters who say one thing but may mean the very opposite. Poetry, forget it. This one of Rumi’s Paula left, for instance. He knows it’s supposed to entice one to sidestep literal images and allow resonating with deeper ramifications. Isn’t that the same process as confronting a business decision—to advance, recede, or stay put—and juggle, twist about, and finally conclude? It dawns on him that business acumen is as complicated as the psychology that is women’s forte. And doesn’t men’s logic of sequence to resolution serve the admirable goal of sanity? Things get done, human beings survive. But Walter has always felt crippled by feminine guile and their mastery of, to him, the somehow more essential, interpersonal arts.
One of his women reigns above all others: his mother, the first woman to whom every child must be slavishly devoted. After she was abruptly killed, intoxicated, in the car crash when Walter was six, his father, the little he was around and paid any attention, made of her a saint. She was mired in the slums, he claimed. Walter was her dream to gain what she and his father would never achieve. Her mission became his as a boy, all the more ironclad forged by two souls, not one. In death, the little he learned of her mushroomed into myth. Beyond a flawed human being, she embodied a tragic goddess enthroned high above. The devil on earth is drink, his father sermonized, before dashing off to the casino, leaving Walter to fend for himself. Dead drunk is also how her own parents had died, his father forever repeating the saga of the shanty Irish grandparents, as he cursed them, his sweet wife inheriting their weakness. Smoke inhalation from a cigarette tossed aside bellowed into a blaze and did them in.
Gavin attempting to burn the house down is not Walter’s first fire. He wonders if the fires perpetrated by his grandparents and his son are connected. He can feel like a pawn in a grand scheme of accidents, like explosions of gasses in the galaxy. A fire here, a fire there. Subterranean infernos just on this planet with no warning, wiping out Pompeii in seconds so that whole bodies are found cast in stone, dashing legs sculpted in flight. Catastrophe can erupt any moment, he muses. My roll of the dice was to be a foot soldier to guard against chaos, a control freak as it’s ridiculed by the free spirits. Somebody has to be. A fire scalded his psyche at the start, his father ranting about the dangers of booze that doomed his mother. Gavin torching their home, intentional as it appears, can also be seen as a fickle spasm of his eleven-year-old, still-developing brain. The year before, they were tossed helter-skelter into the January night in their pajamas, the cellar in flames. The kid was caught after the second, more serious fire, both occasions he being first to sound the alarm. It was a pathetic bid to be a hero, authorities later explained. Walter, daydreaming of all these disasters, now regards them as nothing out of the ordinary, it being ordinary to face and try to survive cyclones, earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes, or the fleeting fragments of a single soul like Gavin as a boy whose fuse suddenly blows and sparks an avalanche, engulfing others.
I’ve led a perfectly prosaic life, reasons Walter. My mother, her parents, my son, the human family of crazies, we’re all in this together. Like everyone, I’ve been dodging bullets for a lifetime. Here I sprawl with my creature comforts and damned lucky for that.
•
“You’re still so angry about Gavin,” says Irma. She’s pulled up a chair to chat, taking a break at Walter’s suggestion. “He’s on the mend, but toward him you’re not.”
“I keep thinking of the damage—to himself, his body, his life—and how it’s weighed on me for decades.”
“You stood by him, as best you could. But, as damaged goods. That’s how you label him, Walter, to this day. Perhaps his getting a handle is on the surface for you, but, basically…”
“I know!” he silences her. “I am groping for a new approach before it’s too late. I do appreciate your feedback, my dear Irma,” he adds, frustrated at being so curt. Exhale. “Paula is easier even though she can be a pain in the ass. But she doesn’t bug me like Gavin does.”
“Paula is your spitting image. You look at her, the business dynamo, and see yourself. Your narcissist streak!”
“Oh, Christ. This is too heavy,” moans Walter.
“You asked for my thoughts, Walter, now with both your children visiting more often. And don’t knock narcissism. It can play a healthy if minor part.”
“I know you’re well-read, Irma, but really.”
“Nothing those little books Paula brings don’t delve into. I’ve run through them myself. Your personal censor.”
He flexes his left wrist that is definitely becoming more rigid. “Paula and I are always direct with each other. Mostly it’s money. I keep wanting to ask her about herself, how she’s faring…watching me die. The last time with Gavin was, in a way, more intimate than it ever is with her.”
“Now there’s an interesting angle. With Gavin you’re more concerned with his material welfare. How he could better function in the world, with work and so forth. Not an issue for Paula. With her, you sense an opportunity to nudge her spiritually, reflectively, where she may be undernourished. Keep reading, Walter. I think you’re on a roll.”
Walter clenches his fists however much he is still able. “What do you know about children, parenting, Irma?” he fires off. “You’ve never…” Walter bolts upright, gasping at her. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, so sorry…”
•
Out the window is smeared a gray-umber morass. No inspiration there. Irma blamed the latest drug for his outburst, letting him off the hook, and he didn’t resist. He does fancy, in fact, these little books. He’s come to see Rumi’s poems are like swallowing flavored acid relief. Kind of a kick at first taste, but then you have no idea what’s released into the blood stream, buried in the marrow, trickling on to the simplest of cells hidden beyond recognition.
