Key Grip Page 7

  He frowned at his surroundings, as if they constituted another man’s space, then shook his head and turned back toward the door. When he failed to check the thermostat or even glance at the pile of gallery announcements, I understood that it was over for him—the performance of art. His life’s occupation (he’d never had an ordinary job) no longer stood between him and the end of life itself. My heart sank, looking at him.

  “It’s okay,” he said, on our slow walk toward the house. “Don’t you think it’s okay?”

  “It’s up to you. The studio’s not going anywhere.”

  “Who’s going to win the World Series?”

  “Cleveland’s my guess,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Atlanta’s got that pitcher, Tom Gla-vine.”

  Leslie took over the following morning, and I returned to my house in Connecticut. My second marriage was unraveling. We had no children together, my wife and I, and our work was taking us in different directions. She was away, and so, alone, I supervised the final week of roof shingling. I put the vegetable and flower gardens to bed for the winter, painted the south side of the garage, raked up the last of the leaves, and winterized the pickup truck, the tractor, and the riding mower. Then I packed a couple of bags and moved into our apartment in New York City, by myself.

  A few days later, I visited my father and found Leslie reading to him from Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. “The painful bardo of dying falls between the moment we contract a terminal illness or condition that will end in death, and the ceasing of the ‘inner respiration.’” In deference to my arrival, she closed the book, patted my father’s hand, and left the room to help Hilda, the housekeeper, make some lunch.

  “How about that!” my father said. “I’m in the bardo of dying!”

  I pulled up a chair beside his bed. He seemed as feisty as ever, though noticeably thinner in the face. We entered into the obligatory ritual of small talk. He asked about the weather in Connecticut, and I inquired about the status of their house and grounds. Did the storm windows need washing? Had anyone cleaned the roof gutters? Were any Brussels sprouts left in the garden? I knew, of course, that I was talking to a man for whom these concerns were no longer pressing, but I didn’t know how else to converse with him. As we bantered back and forth about the fine art of window caulking, it dawned on me that I too was now a man for whom these topics of male domesticity were of no concern. I’d left all that behind. Then, by some unspoken agreement, we dropped the subject. A silence ensued. I stared past my father, out the window at the reservoir bed across the road. This normally large body of water had been drained months earlier to facilitate repairs to the dam, four miles away. Brown swamp grass waved in the breeze where once the water had been.

  I turned to the small oil painting hanging over the bed. Three yellowish green Bartlett pears lay on an orange-pink cloth, set against a dove gray background. The pear on the right sat squarely on its bottom, which perfectly resembled a woman’s buttocks. The fat pear on the left tilted a little—on one cheek, as it were. A tall skinny pear stood in the middle, favoring its right cheek. You could feel the texture of the pears and sense the softness within, at the points where the skin dimpled and turned brown. It was not a still life so much as a dance.

  “All three pears have stems,” I said.

  My father gave me a puzzled look.

  “How long did it take you to paint that?”

  “Days,” he said.

  “Why three?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say it took three days,” he said.

  “I mean pears—why three pears? The Trinity comes to mind, no?” I smiled.

  My father frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Again, I studied the painting. “Seriously,” I said. “Why not four pears? Or five? Why Bartlett and not Bosc?”

  “Because,” he said, “that’s what was lying around.”

  “But why did you paint them?”

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe the pears are your kids,” I suggested.

  Again he shrugged, this time with a flash of annoyance in his eyes. I noticed him looking at my left hand, at the lack of a wedding band.

  “Like it or not,” I said, “art has a kind of iconography—produced by the artist, or perceived by the viewer.”

  He nodded, guarded and suspicious.

  “So those pears could be anything. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . or your own children . . . or the third season of life . . .”

  “Or just pears,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “not just pears. We bring something else to the experience of looking at pears, don’t we?”

  Silence. My father appeared as annoyed with me then as he’d ever been, and I, in turn, as frustrated.

  “Listen, I know what those pears mean to me,” I said. “But why did you paint them—instead of turning on a ball game or taking a walk or having a martini?”

  I felt like a wolf circling a weakened sheep. I couldn’t control myself.

  Hilda, my parents’ Ecuadoran housekeeper, came through the swinging door, holding a tray with four bowls of chicken soup. My sister followed with a plate of toasted English muffins. My mother passed out cloth napkins, and we sat in dining room chairs around the bed, while Hilda served my father and then put bowls on our laps.

  “Gracias, Hilda,” I said. “Es la mejor sopa de polio en todo el mundo. La propia vida de mi padre. Gracias.”

  Hilda looked at my father and put her arm around my shoulders. “He speak such good Spanish!”

  My father ignored her compliment.

  I visited twice more that week, and then again on what turned out to be the day before he died. The night I arrived, November 1, I found him dancing in the living room with Hilda. My mother sat on the sofa, laughing gaily at the scene. I stood in the vestibule, looking in, listening: Mozart’s Violin Sonata no. 6 in G Major. My brother and sister watched from the shadows at the far end of the living room. As a young man, my father had looked a bit like Fred Astaire and shared a similar lightness of step. He moved stiffly now, with pain, but the allegro dance momentarily unveiled his youthful self—just long enough to evoke and emphasize the kind of spirit that was about to pass.

  The next morning, after making me bacon, eggs, and pancakes, Hilda told me that my father didn’t want breakfast. This was a first. I went to his bedside.

  “You don’t want to eat?”

  He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.

  “Eat,” I said.

  Again he shook his head. I touched his forehead with the palm of my hand and felt the rude hardness of his skull. He didn’t have a fever.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “How about a little walk to work up an appetite?”

  He eased himself out of bed. I tied his red sweatpants and helped him put on his socks and sneakers. I wrapped a blue scarf around his neck and got him into a green nylon jacket and a purple wool cap. Then I walked him out through the kitchen and onto the back patio. The morning sun was bright and warm.

  “Let’s sit,” he said, stopping beside one of the steel patio chairs.

  I sat next to him. We shared a view of the backyard and the pasture beyond it. The maples and oaks and honey locusts were bare, and the leaves on the ground had turned a uniform brown. A tall, dead pine tree rose in the middle of the pasture, its straggly crown of limbs a perch for raptors.

  “So, Dusty,” he said, “how do you think I’ve done?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He indicated the property, the house, the barn, my mother’s studio across the driveway. “All this, and you kids. Did I do okay?”

  “You did great,” I said.

  “You know, when I got out of college, I had an offer to study with Hans Hofmann, in Provincetown. Uncle Harold gave me the money.”

  “And?” I said. I’d heard this story before.

  “I met your mother. All it took was one look. We used that money for
our honeymoon in Europe.”

  “How might things have worked out if you’d studied with Hofmann?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Your paintings might be more abstract.”

  “Never cared for abstract,” he said. And then he asked, “Did I do the right thing?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I have no regrets,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you did,” I said. “Ambition and family are a hard mix.”

  “I never expected to be famous. We’ve had sixty wonderful years together, your mother and I.”

  It wasn’t lost on me that none of us kids had been able to sustain our first marriage—or me, now, my second.

  “It’s different for everyone,” said my father, as if he had read my mind. “The timing, and how it all turns out. We can’t really know. We have an idea, but we can’t really know.”

  A small squadron of crows landed on the lawn and began making a huge racket. My father frowned at the intrusion. “Thieves!” he said.

  I watched the large black birds strutting about, pecking at autumn remains.

  “Five crows,” I said.

  “Look at that over there.” My father pulled himself forward in his seat. “What is that bush? I prune it every spring. It’s always the last bit of color every year—always in November.”

  The bush, a small euonymus, or spindle tree, stood in a little clearing just beyond my mother’s studio.

  “Let’s go see it,” he said, trying to stand up. I took hold of his arm and walked him slowly across the driveway.

  We stood next to the spindle tree, staring at its flame-shaped crimson leaves. He reached out a shaky hand and pointed his index finger—not at a colorful leaf but at one of the branches. Round, and covered with a light gray bark, the branch had four sharp ridges running the length of it. The branch in cross section looked like a circle with four equally spaced spikes on its circumference, suggesting the corners of an imaginary square. Suddenly, I remembered reading that in medieval alchemy, the attainment of true knowledge requires learning how to “square the circle.” The problem of squaring the circle—constructing a square equal in area to a given circle—is famously resistant to a purely geometric solution. Which is why the alchemists (those who would transform lead into gold) chose the metaphor to describe the nearly impossible task of bringing together, and holding as one, the worldly domain and the domain of the spirit. For the artist or writer, I now thought, that would mean the task of combining the literal and figurative elements of imagery. It would require being able to see the symbolic as real, and the real as symbolic—all at once, but quietly. I touched the branch my father pointed to, then closed my hand around it, pressing its four sharp ridges into my palm. Our eyes met.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’d never noticed this before.”

  “Think nothing of it,” he answered.

  I took a long walk before lunch, and when I returned, my brother, sister, and mother were sitting at the kitchen table, eating soup with Hilda. They spoke in hushed tones. A place was set for me.

  “Dad’s not hungry,” Lochlin told me.

  “I just read to him about the essences,” whispered Leslie. She was talking about Sogyal Rinpoche’s “seven thought states resulting from ignorance and delusion” that are brought to an end at the moment of death.

  “Your reading seems to be helping him,” I said, sitting down.

  But as I started to eat with my family, I imagined my father lying alone in his bed in the next room, and then I imagined him imagining us. Without saying anything, I stood up and took my soup into the dining room, letting the swinging door shut behind me. My father was reclining at a forty-five-degree angle, staring at the ceiling. I pulled up a chair and sat at the foot of his bed. I dunked my English muffin in the soup and took a bite. He looked at me. I offered him a taste. He neither nodded nor shook his head, but stared straight at me. For just a moment, I felt I had made a terrible mistake. My brother and sister, after all, had remained respectfully in the kitchen. Here I sat, demonstrating my appetite for life. It must have seemed to my father that I was rubbing it in—that I could eat and he could not, that I was going on with life and he was not. A look of pained betrayal overtook his face. It was all I could do to swallow. But I kept staring at him and slurping my soup, until finally, after about a minute, he turned to gaze out the window at the bare-limbed maples. Shards of sunlight struck his face. He shut his eyes and began to nap.

  Hilda’s urging brought us together at the end. “Mira,” she said. “Es importante. The time is close.” At six o’clock, we converged in the dining room and took up positions around the bed. In spite of sharp back pain, my father had refused morphine all day.

  “It makes me feel fuzzy,” he said.

  My brother cranked the bed up, slowly, so Dad could see us all clearly.

  “Well, Winnie,” he said to my mother, “this is it.” He took her hand and kissed it.

  Then he turned to me. “Is it okay to go now?” He was smiling.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you sure? You’ll all be okay?”

  We said that we would, and we each touched him, in our turn.

  He signaled us to lower the bed. Then he closed his eyes, and within the hour, died.

  3. Meeting at the Water’s Edge

  I MUST HAVE BEEN expecting the beast for years. How else, I ask myself now, could I have known with such certainty, and at one hundred yards, that the slate-gray creature clawing its way across my lawn was a snapping turtle? At that distance it would have been hard to distinguish a kettle from a skillet. But when I saw the thing, I bolted out of my lawn chair like a man who’d sat on a tack. It was moving from the pasture toward the pond as irrevocably as an M-60 tank, which accounts perhaps for the odd sensation it produced in me: that I was watching something both hopelessly inevitable and utterly intolerable.

  When I was a boy, snapping turtles were spoken of with the kind of awe usually reserved for legendary bank robbers. Poking around the edges of the reservoir, near where I grew up, my friend Lewis and I regularly reinforced the awesome reputation of the snapper.

  “It’ll chomp on your big toe while you’re skinny-dipping at night!” he’d say.

  “Yeah, and you’re lucky if it’s only your toe!” I’d say.

  “Once it bites you, it never lets go, not even if you cut off its head!”

  On our rounds, we would occasionally glimpse one of those ominous armor-plated shells nosing like a submarine into the sun-streaked depths near the shoreline. Did we ever actually meet a snapper, face to face? No.

  But when I finally encountered one in 1992, on the expansive lawn of the country house my second wife and I owned in northeast Connecticut, I was hurling obscenities at it: “You motherfucker, you sonofabitch.” I threw down my New York Times and stepped into my open-toed sandals. “Don’t you dare go in my pond, you prick!”

  The turtle, unable to decipher my command, continued to advance. I figured I could hold it at bay, prevent it from reaching the pond, where my neighbors’ kids swam on weekends. But I needed help—someone to fetch my hard-toed boots, my work gloves, a weapon of some kind, or a cardboard box. My wife was working in the city. The nearest neighbor lived a quarter-mile down the road. There wasn’t any help.

  A long-handled edging tool protruded from a nearby peony bed, its crescent-shaped steel blade rusted from disuse. Grabbing it, I started across the lawn, closing on the turtle at an angle. If it saw me coming, it didn’t let on, acting instead as if it owned the place—and worse yet, as if it was accustomed to walking this way. “Hey, you!” I yelled, breaking into a run, clutching the edger in my fist, the way an aborigine might clutch a spear, but with none of the confidence. Already my heart was pounding. Already I knew my reluctance to hunt.

  Once, at age nine, I lay prone on my family’s lawn and trained the sight of my new hair-trigger air rifle on a rabbit that had wandered from the safety of
a forsythia bush. I followed its movements, holding my breath as I’d been taught, but my trigger finger froze, and the rabbit bounded out of view. Perhaps in compensation for this early weakness, while working on a Nevada ranch at age seventeen I shot so many jackrabbits (my job for the day) that their carcasses outnumbered the beer cans in the pickup bed. But that killing spree was an aberration, really. In my early thirties, I purchased a hunting rifle and took it on a camping trip. I fired it twice at a tree, then ditched it under a log. In Texas, before I turned forty, I bought a holstered .357 Magnum from a broke Mexican. Strapping it on my hip, I practiced quick-draw in front of the hotel room mirror, but I never did work up the gumption to buy ammunition for it—unwilling, as it turned out, to cross the line that separates fantasy from reality. More recently, however, I’d taken a broom and swatted the daylights out of a bat I’d judged to be rabid.

  When I intersected the turtle’s projected path, I stopped and waited, my mouth dry, my gut tensing. The pond sat twenty feet behind me, like an untended goal.

  “Get back, you!” I demanded.

  The snapper, oblivious, kept moving. Fifty feet . . . thirty feet . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . This thing was big, eighteen inches across at least, and clearly of another era—definitely not New Age. Not a trace of subtlety or sophistication in its four-legged gait. At ten feet, my open-toed sandals began a kind of involuntary shuffle. I raised the edger, as if fully prepared to strike.