David Gates - Jernigan

“So I guess the presents can wait until tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot to take the presents . He’s going to think I’m terrible.”

“Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,” I said, “He’ll always say, ‘I forgive.’ You want anything to drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well that makes one of us,” I said, and went into the kitchen. “How about to eat?” I called, pouring out a good big glassful of gin. No answer. I’d finished up that bottle of Absolut — waste not, want not — but it didn’t touch the heart the way the old gin-ereeno did.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She’d worn her denim skirt tonight, probably as a message to Tim that in her heart the 1970s would never be over. She had the buttons undone to mid-thigh. The front of the skirt covered her knees as she hugged them; the back fell away, revealing white thigh down to the underpants. So I had finally gotten there: no desire at all.

She looked up and saw me looking. “You have my permission to get as fucked up as you want,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What, me worry?” I said. I considered following this up with a hugh-hugh-hugh goofy moron laugh. But that would have taken things to too crazy a place.

You could hear stuff snapping in the woodstove.

“In case you’re feeling guilty, Peter,” she said, “this actually is not the worst Christmas I ever had. Or in case you’re flattering yourself.” She got to her feet and started for the bedroom.

“I thought you wanted to get warm,” I said.

“I won’t say the obvious,” she said. I got her drift, but how, exactly, would she have phrased it?

I heard the bedroom door close. Just close, not slam. Which made me think about how everything went in circles, just like the Beatles used to say. You started out closing the door, then things got so bad you were slamming the door, and then things got really really bad and all you did was just close the fucking door. Why the Beatles, though? Probably thinking of that song. The one that goes Of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning .

1

Me waking up, Martha gone, same old beginning again. What was different was, I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to bed. I mean, it was obvious how I’d gotten to bed: leaning on Danny’s strong young shoulder, right? (Little joke.) But I couldn’t remember actually stumbling to the bedroom. Yet here I was. The old res ipsa loquitur . Odd that loquor should be a passive verb. Though in Latin, stuff like active/passive or masculine/feminine didn’t really mean anything. Bully for Latin. Take agricola , famous example. According to Danny — who wasn’t one of them — a few kids in his school wanted to take Latin, probably because they thought it would help them get into better colleges, but there wasn’t anybody left in the school system who could teach it. One more way you could have made yourself useful if back years ago you’d done everything differently. Funny shit to end up thinking about first thing on Christmas morning. If it was in fact morning. Though what the appropriate thoughts might have been I still can’t imagine. What, you’re supposed to lie there wondering why the Word had to be made flesh?

Clearly nobody in the house, whatever time it was. You could tell by the feel of things, not that I really believe in the feel of things. (And if things did have a feel, who less apt to feel that feel than Jernigan?) I mean, for all I know the kids were up in their room lying spent after the noisy fuck that I hadn’t realized was what had awakened me. Cold as hell in here, maybe that’s what I meant by the feel of things. Rick’s card still unopened on the night table. What could he possibly have written that I’d want to read? (How about a ream of typed pages — some in prose paragraphs, some in verse, like Jack Nicholson’s opus magnum in The Shining —saying over and over again I forgive you I forgive you I forgive you?) Most likely all it said was what last year’s said: Thinking of you . Fuck a bunch of being thought of. I took it with me down to the kitchen and threw it in the garbage, still unopened. Let the good wishes go biodegrade themselves.

On the kitchen table I found a note, on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, with ragged perforations along one side.

Peter and kids ,

I went over to Tim’s to pick up our presents. If you wake up, there’s o. j. all made in the fridge and some English muffins and REAL BUTTER!!! Merry Xmas .

— M

The clock said like twenty-five of one. Wasn’t she afraid of interrupting Tim and the girlfriend as they lolled? Though I was forgetting the girlfriend had a child to get back to, there’s something I remembered, so no lolling probably for old Tim this Christmas morning. Wasn’t there a pitcher named Tim Lollar?

I polished off the last little bit of gin in the old quart — must’ve been a hell of a rest of the night, boy — and opened a new one. More economical to buy half gallons, I know, but that was too alcoholic. (It was also alcoholic to worry about whether things were too alcoholic.) So I’d kept buying quarts, but two at a time so as not to have to go back so often. And another day began. I reminded myself to look out the window. Out of touch with nature: hell, that was probably, what, a good two percent of the problem right there. Bright outside. Sun seemed to have melted most of the snow — now there was another thing I remembered, snowstorm last night — except for what lay in the shadows of the tree trunks. I thought Hey, white shadows, how about that.

Well, so now we knew where Martha was, but what about the kids? What the hell kind of kids, more to the point, would absent themselves on Christmas morning? True, they couldn’t have had high hopes, but. Maybe everybody’d simply gotten tired of waiting for old Dad to roll out, and decided to go ahead and have their Christmas just the three of them. I went into the living room and looked: all the shit was still under the tree. So. Big mystery. And of course so very interesting to think about.

I seemed to have burned up everything in the woodbox last night, so the first thing to do was put on shoes and a coat and go out and get some logs in. Et cetera. Upstairs I heard the tv go on. Maybe they’d just been waiting to hear me moving around so they wouldn’t disturb my sleep. (Little joke.) It was probably more like, We know you’re up now so this is just to let you know we’re in here and you can go fuck yourself. Maybe old Martha had the right idea, sit in the car and run the heater — one more thing I remembered from last night. (Shit, it was all going to come back if I just relaxed and didn’t think about it. The old Zen archery.) So I went and got dressed, put on overcoat and gloves, jammed the big new gin bottle into the big side pocket and went out to the car. Took another good belt and slipped the bottle under the seat, figuring fuck all this soda-can bullshit: if you can’t even tell whether there’s a cop car around or not, you’re not in any shape to be driving anyway.

So I cruised around town for a while with the heater blowing, that and the gin warming me up nicely. The sky was already starting to cloud over again. And I just didn’t want to go back to that God damn house. So I ended up driving all the way up to Paterson, and then east to the GW and down into Manhattan. Got off the West Side Highway at 96th Street and drove up to 102nd. I double-parked and looked up at Uncle Fred’s windows. Nothing to see. Then down to 72nd and Broadway, to Gray’s Papaya. It was illogical — fuck, it was hypocritical —to find it depressing that Gray’s Papaya was open on Christmas. Had a hot dog and a piña colada, which I fucked up by dumping a bunch of gin in it. Cleaned out the car while I was parked there, got rid of all the Diet Coke cans and McDonald’s bags and shit in a trash basket. That fucking cowboy jacket too. Laying it on top where some shivering derelict might see it. So that was about all she wrote for the world’s greatest city.