David Gates - Jernigan

“Well, see, there’s the money from the house,” I said. “But a lot of that is for Danny’s college, and the rest of it, if I just stick it in a checking account or something, it’s going to get eaten up in taxes.”

“So where do you have it now?”

“Well, right now it is in checking, but—”

“I’m beginning to lose my stolid patience,” he said.

“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t blame you. It’s not a very edifying spectacle.”

“And don’t glamorize this crash-and-burn shit,” he said. “Not that I don’t know the temptation, but this is your life here.”

“No, you’re absolutely right,” I said. I drank the rest of my Bloody Mary and reached for the vodka. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” he said. “In fact, you are my guest. I might add, though, since we’re—”

“Let’s not even get started on that,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “To tell you the absolute truth, I may actually not have all that much of a right to preach to you on that score.” He waited for me to mix mine, then poured enough vodka into his to raise the level an inch. “Boys will be boys, right?”

“To boys being boys,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I stared at the row of Christmas cards on the mantel. “No tree?” I said, to let him know that his marriage wasn’t so fucking perfect.

“You know it’s funny,” he said. “We actually went to the Koreans’ on Broadway and looked at their trees, and we both got really depressed because they shape the God damn things with hedge clippers or something. They’re all like that.” He drew an isosceles triangle in air with his two forefingers. “They look like they came out of a fucking barbershop . Next year maybe we’ll have time to drive up somewhere and get a tree looks like a fucking tree.”

“We got a tree,” I said.

Uncle Fred looked at me. “You’re really in piss-poor shape, aren’t you?”

I raised my glass and drank to that.

“Peter,” he said. “If you need to get away and think about things, you’re welcome to come here. You and Danny both. I know Penny will second me on this. Of course, we’re talking floor space here, but it is at your disposal. Any time. Middle of the night, makes no difference.”

“Shit,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Or listen,” he said. “Another idea. If you want to be someplace and not have us underfoot, think about the camp. Since you’re starting to get that mountain man look anyhow.” He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Looks good on you, actually. At any rate, my neighbor up there tells me they got a foot of snow already, but if you didn’t mind braving the cold a little, that stove heats up the whole trailer in nothing flat, and there must be two three cords of wood sitting there. Unless somebody made off with it. Now, I drained the pipes last time I went up, but I can tell you how to get the water going again. Hell, you could cart your stuff up there and move in if you felt like it. The place just sits.”

“Sounds like a good fit,” I said. “You know, I mean I probably won’t end up doing anything that extreme, but I do appreciate it.”

“Listen, you’d be doing me a favor by making it look like somebody lived there,” he said. “They’ve broken in five or six times now. You know, local thug kids. One time they stole all the light bulbs out of the lamps. Everything but the God damn books: those they don’t touch. You know when I went up there last time, to close the place up? I found a rubber stuck to the floor. Had to take it up with a putty knife.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll know I’m not operating purely out of the goodness of my heart. We never go up there in the winter because we neither of us ski or any of that shit. And now it’s getting so we have less and less time in the summer. Or inclination, I guess. The drive eats up half your weekend right there, and then there’s all the stuff you feel like you have to do or it’s all going to fall down around your ears. Did I tell you Penny and I were talking for a while about actually building up there? Not down where the trailer is, but like halfway up the hill there’s this outrageous spot where you can see off for like miles. But — by the way, Penny does not know about finding the rubber.”

“We reach,” I said, and made a diamond with thumbtips and fingertips.

“Good God,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a Trekkie on top of everything else.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just watch.”

“So anyway,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. I have all these great memories, you know, going up there with my dad. But the place just seems violated. And the winters are really for shit.” He drank off a little more Bloody Mary, poured in more vodka and stirred with his index finger, which he sucked clean and wiped on his pants. So okay, there was always that about Uncle Fred and me, deep down. I mean, what’s male bonding ultimately about? On the other hand, what wasn’t vile, deep down? Although you didn’t want to think of that as vile but simply as another way of being. The thing was not to look deep down.

4

I woke up on a couch. In Uncle Fred’s apartment. Almost dark in here. Right: I could remember asking if he minded if I just lay down for a few minutes. All that stuff still cluttering the table, glasses and plates and food every which way, and that bottle sticking up like a lighthouse above a stormy sea. I was alone in here and you could see the room darkening by the second, although that probably wasn’t true. From where I lay you could raise your head and look down the hall all the way to their bedroom door. Closed. Except my head hurt when I raised the son of a bitch. I listened for sounds of fucking. The hand hurt too; I had accepted that it was just going to hurt from now on. I kept listening. I heard a car horn down in the street.

I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. Apparently I hadn’t taken my shoes off; hoped I hadn’t put dirty shoe bottoms on the nice cushions. Bathroom door was open, but the bedroom door was definitely closed, not just almost. So either fucking or napping. Or first one then the other. I shut the bathroom door to piss. It turned the whole water yellow, so I’d have to flush: if it made noise it made noise. But first I went through the medicine cabinet. Penny had a thing of Pamprin in there, so I popped that open and took four. Washed them down with cupped handfuls of water, drinking like a frontiersman.

I went back and lay down on the couch again to wait for my head to stop hurting. It was as silent as before. Christ, what if they were in there like what’s-his-name? If they’d put on this show of being oh so happy and had actually chosen today to carry out their suicide pact. And my fingerprints all over. Oh, I wasn’t serious. Just one more thought; it doesn’t pay off anyplace later in the story. I got up again and went to the table and had a good old belt of that Absolut right out of the bottle. Then I went back to the sofa and picked up a copy of Vogue lying there on the floor. That’s what there was to read, unless I wanted to get up again and get one of the pieces of the Times . In the “Mind Health” section I found an item headed INSPIRED BY PLEASURE.

The creative muse is a surly mistress, demanding a hefty fee in anguish before she grants an artist’s plea for inspiration. Well, here’s some good news: Alice M. Isen, Ph.D., Kimberly Daubman, and Gary Nowicki of the University of Maryland find that what creativity really requires is … feeling good .