David Gates - Jernigan

It was the three of us, in bathing suits, with a lifeguard’s tower in the background. Me standing between my mother and father, holding their hands. I looked to be about three or four, short enough so that to reach their hands my arms were raised like a strongman’s. My mother’s face was the face in the painting, all right. I avoided looking at the breasts. Across the years, her eyes met yours.

“Where was this?” I said.

“Florida.”

“I vaguely remember,” I said. “There was a big cockroach or something where we were staying.” I looked again: all three of us. “So who took this picture?” I said.

“Ah, that’s what makes it so special,” he said. “Jack Solomon.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “He was there with the three of us?”

“Sure. Him and Margaret. Poor old Margaret. You think I look like shit. You ought to see her these days. As I remember, we only dug out these bathing suits for the picture so we wouldn’t scandalize ’em back at the drugstore. Most of the time we were running around buck naked. You remember he used to walk out into the water with you on his shoulders?”

I shook my head. “I hope I shit all over his hairy back,” I said.

“Nah, you and he were big buddies,” he said. “Hell, he and I were big buddies.”

“This was before anything was going on? Or don’t you know?”

“During,” he said. “In the middle of. As nearly as I can tell. Six months, a year into it. I suppose I didn’t figure it out because it was so obvious. The Purloined Letter. I can remember just like that”— he made an artist’s half-frame with a right angle of thumb and forefinger—“when this picture was taken. Him standing there naked pointing that big old box camera and his dick hanging down.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Taken me all these years to see that I could just go ahead and use the image and not worry about, oh, narrative or anything. I guess I decided nobody gave a shit anymore. Including me.”

“Well,” I said, “it made you a hell of a picture. Hell of a series.”

“And only a part of my long legacy of joy and light.” He opened the door. “What do you say we go in and get pissed? I already gave myself the day off tomorrow to watch the playoffs. That’s what kind of Emerson we got up here. Emerson tv.” He seemed to have forgotten he’d made this joke before.

“Suits me,” I said. “Judith took Danny with her up to her mother’s, so I’m not expected. I can go back down in the morning, if you’ve got a bed for me to pass out on.”

“Couple of ’em,” he said. “So how come that old cow gets to see her grandson and I don’t?” He filled his glass, then topped off mine.

“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I said. (He’s lying. Joe Isuzu.) “He likes going up there because they’ve got this big music store around the corner from her house. What do you have around the corner that can compete with that?”

“Cows,” he said. “Four-footed ones. And a damn sight better to look at. And a lot more useful to the human race. And not a whole lot stupider.”

“What can I say,” I said. “Next time.”

Which turned out to be his funeral. Not the heart attack for which I’d been preparing myself, but a fire that burned the whole place to the foundation. First the studio, then the rest of the house. The oil and the turpentine and the woodstove and him probably in there drunk. At any rate they found a bottle, shattered by the heat apparently.

2

Whatever money Trina could have gotten him for the new work probably wouldn’t have helped much.

The day after his memorial she invited me for a drink. It turned out there wasn’t much business to wrap up. She had a few small pieces she hadn’t been able to get rid of; he’d owed her a few thousand dollars for a few years. My father had distrusted Trina on principle, though she’d been his dealer since his first show, in 1949. I’d always assumed she’d done what she could. It wasn’t her fault the stuff from the early ’50s kept going up every time it got sold again, and she genuinely seemed to admire the post-’65 stuff: she gave a muted wail when I described the paintings destroyed in the fire. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. Her eyes darted around the tabletop: finally she tapped her cigarette ash into her empty glass. “Ah well,” she said. “At some point they simply weren’t tracking him anymore, and of course what can one say?”

“He never should’ve stopped with the squiggles,” I said.

“That couldn’t have lasted forever, either, darling. What you’ve told me — I can’t even think about it. And that stunning old house. Though at least you’ll have the insurance. Is that crass of me to say?” She lit another cigarette and raised her hand; when the waiter looked over, she scribbled on a phantom credit card slip with a phantom pen.

His lawyer called the following day. How much had I known about, ah, “the situation”? I said I hadn’t known there was one. Hmm, he said, how shall I begin? Seemed my father had been days away from being turned out of the stunning old house. He’d taken out a second mortgage to get the henhouse converted and, apparently, to get money to live on and to keep up the payments on the original mortgage. When the money he’d borrowed was gone, of course, he was left with even higher monthly expenses he couldn’t meet. After the insurance company cancelled his homeowner’s policy — they’d been dunning him for three months — the bank had been forced to step in.

Judith took the news like a champ.

“It’s a relief, sort of,” she said. “Isn’t it? I would never have known how long a face to pull while we were going through the money, you know?” She laughed. “God, listen to me. The money. There never was any money, right? Isn’t that the gist?”

“If not the gist,” I said, “certainly the bottom line.”

“Well,” she said, “we can still be happy.” This was 1982. “Probably more happy, don’t you think? In the long run?”

“Quién sabe?” I said. “And on the other hand, que será será.”

“Kissez moi,” she said. One of our better days.

3

When I got around to telling Martha the story — it wasn’t until we’d been together for a couple of months — she was angry that my father hadn’t, as she put it, provided for me.

“Christ,” I said, “he provided for eighteen years. Fuck was he supposed to do? Plus four years of college. I mean, at some point, you know?” The rest of the thought was something like, Sons have to take responsibility for themselves. Not exactly the way I felt, as a son, but the way you ought to feel. As a father, on the other hand, I was all for sons getting their shit happening at their earliest convenience. All for it some of the time.

She picked up something in my tone. I was learning that you had to watch yourself around Martha. Assuming you had stuff you didn’t want picked up. Though really, how intuitive did you have to be to pick up something in somebody’s tone when he starts yelling at you?

“I didn’t mean to touch a sore spot,” she said. “It’s just that all that money could’ve changed your life. I hate to see money that could really, really help somebody just go up—”

“In smoke?” I suggested.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“What nobody seems to understand,” I said (meaning her: Judith had understood), “is that this money never fucking existed . I mean, he was Francis Jernigan and everything, but all the real money got made off of stuff he’d let go for a couple of thousand dollars in like 1952. My mother split in ’56, he boozed from then until ’64 or ’65…. You know, what can I say? By which time it was all Andy Warhol or something, or whatever it was after Andy Warhol. Believe me. There was … no … money.”