Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Carla pretends that he has softened in recent years, paled like his pearl-gray eyes. But I say once a bully, always a bully. She wrote me to describe his long afternoon walks, his enthusiasm for azaleas, the swaying of his liver-spotted hands over reference books as he composed another crossword puzzle.

“He’s not as ashamed of retirement as I thought he’d be. True, they’ve kept him on some sort of oracular retainer….”

No doubt. This is the man who finessed the Hotel Armonk case and quashed a governorship. Carla, gently wishful, veils the record of the past with her azaleas. But I remember the cruel mimic, the arm-twister, the scary drunk who grew more silent and impermeable as the level in the bottle fell, the unending smallness of this man who had his monogram faced in brick above the fireplace and once threw a close friend’s toupee over a yacht railing in order to resolve a cribbage argument.

“I’m certain he’s ready to reconcile,” Carla went on. “If only you’ll make the first move.”

Dear, dimly available sister, it’s already done. We are as reconciled as two sums in an accounting ledger.

I was living in L.A. the last time we spoke. Violet and I were separated but not yet divorced, and I was brimming over with aimless nostalgia. It was Easter Sunday and the Long Lines were overloaded with ritual calling.

“What’s up, Dad? Are you dyeing eggs?”

“No.”

“It’s eighty degrees here and I can see palm trees from my window.”

“Eggs, trees. I suppose you’ve got a couple of canaries with you.”

The gaseous hush of vodka was in his voice.

“Just me, Dad. Me, myself, and I.”

“Fine, fine. And what are you doing for money?”

“That’s not why I called.”

“All right then, surprise me.”

I could see him looking at his watch, at his dull reflection in the black surface of the hall table.

“Actually, I was trying to remember which cheek your ski-pole scar is on. It’s been that long.”

“The Alps, my God. Now there’s one sight I go right on seeing. Nothing on your horizon, is there? Movieland. All that stucco. Marquees and fruit juice stands instead of peaks.”

“And not a crumb of snow.”

“So then. You’re still with that whatsername of yours?”

“Not right now.”

He filled the space for judgmental militance with a slow question. “Shall I send a check?”

“That’s not why I—”

“Yes, fair enough. You don’t have to shout.”

No, I really didn’t have to. Finally.

“Your sister has invited me for holiday dinner,” he went on blandly. “The wine will be corrosive and the lamb will be underdone. Some little barefoot friend of hers will ask me to dance.”

“Give Carla my love.”

We exchanged bad jokes, promised to send postcards, and that was it.

DEFINITIVE TECHNIQUE. PRECISE SCRUTINY. A conviction that nothing is missed. Certain group vanities are encouraged among the staff here, keeping foremost in mind that we register only as units in a system. A system, elementary in its perfection, to surround and contain a precise whole. And each movement within the system a refinement, a distillation. They want us comfortable in such beliefs, like mice in a warm winter burrow.

Do I contradict? I typify. Another nibbling mouse, a 2T five-year man sent down to this edit room dismal as a Bulgarian subway, on an errand that demonstrates the system’s reach, the ability of its agents in the field to surround and contain. Their booty is now before me, racks and racks: the random tape inventory of a small independent station in west Texas, now, along with its owner, defunct. It had offered the sort of programming favored in trailer parks and residential hotels, old reruns and cut-rate movies, a world of black-and-white. It had offered a removal in time, an undoing of age and failure, something to still the guts. Cramped, retching feed clerks, the manicurists and windmill mechanics, muttering, smoking, sniffling, conjuring dust shapes from out of the furniture, were soothed by Petticoat Junction and Mr. Ed. In sepia Mexican melodramas, they found a past more favorable than their own. And now, under my hands, all would enter into the system, a minute flicker of refinement.

The tepid denouement of Bachelor Father unspools before me, a commercial extolling the spreadability of a peanut butter named for J. M. Barrie’s androgyne. I reach for cold coffee and a fresh log sheet, am riven by a voice.

“Rich in emulsifiers,” my mother says.

The last television appearance of her paltry career, a cosmetics spot. Immaculate, she moves dreamily at the edge of a formal garden.

“Treat yourself like royalty,” my mother says.

On her pilgrimages into Manhattan, she usually had lunch with Sonia Brooks. They had both sung in the choir at Temple University, had both seen their young ambitions wither in the perpetual shade of a city too tall. Sonia would never get a seat on the stock exchange and my mother wasn’t going to star in a prize-winning revival of Anna Lucasta, so they foraged for ethnic restaurants and obscure museums, drank in hotel bars and flirted hazardlessly with waiters.

Soma’s husband, a Scottish homosexual, ran an advertising agency named after himself. His client list included a hotel in the Poconos, a commuter airline, textile mills and medical supply houses, the tourist bureau of a blighted Caribbean island, and a brand-new product called Dewbeads.

“Made from goat placentas or something.” Sonia tied a knot in her cocktail straw. “And this TV ad they’re planning — I’ve seen the storyboard and all — it’s perfect for you. Mature but handsome, a vision from the tennis court, like—”

“Too bad I don’t work anymore,” my mother said.

“Damn you.” Sonia hissed like a sub-code steam line with drunken belligerence, her tipped Punt E Mes bleeding into the tablecloth. “Damn your reticence. Ian has an awful case of amoebic dysentery and he’ll do anything I say. Do you want the thing or don’t you?”

Rising at 4 a.m., breakfasting on vodka and grape juice, my mother was limousined to the location, an estate in Lyme, Connecticut, that had recently come under the aegis of the National Historic Trust.

The company man was distressed. “It’s a fucking castle. It’s intimidating,” he said. “Okay, the look is nice, but we’ve got to move product.”

“Exteriors only,” said the director, a graduate of the Austrian State Film School. “No castle.”

In the garden, union men in green jumpsuits sprayed blossoms with glycerin water while my mother circled a marble fountain and tried to remember her lines.

“You must be calm but underneath in flames,” the director told her. “You await your lover here. You are wet between the legs in anticipation. In every movement of your body, we must read this sad history.”

On the first take, she trembled so badly that the company man asked if she was on drugs. She took it too fast, too slow, missed marks. A light stand fell, a plane passed overhead. On the sixteenth take, she tripped on a flagstone and soiled her white dress.

“Better pull yourself together,” the wardrobe lady cautioned. “They’re really frantic out there.”

My mother sobbed on a cot inside the little airless trailer. She considered making a break, heading off into the trees, but imagined them tracking her with dogs.

“Just pretend everyone else is like out on bail,” said the wardrobe lady. “That’s how I do it.”

Outside, the sun was high, seemed to pulse. Unhappy with lighting conditions, the director worked himself into a tantrum, struck at a mike boom and ripped open his hand. The company man fled to phone New York.