J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Not even a little bit?”

He placed a club onto the pile slowly, his hand shaking. He straightened but didn’t look at me. “It’s just the title. Or something.”

“Or something?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t go back to his game, either. He just sat there, staring at the closet doors as if into a deep darkness, where the ominous outlines of things were barely visible. After a while I looked down at the money in my hand and felt like a thief. Not long after, I left.

* * *

I was running out of certain supplies, so I decided to go to the art store. Nobody was around now that FunnyFest was over with, and the streets were empty of cars. Shopkeepers propped their doors open, letting in the cool summer air. A woman sat cross-legged on the floor of a clothing boutique, painting her fingernails.

The art store was in a small converted town house just off Main Street that was also home to a music studio. I’d often gone there with Dad, and while I poked through the dusty rows of art supplies I could hear the muffled sound of scales artlessly played on a variety of instruments. Occasionally an instructor would grow bored with one of her students and begin playing something beautiful, and I would stand transfixed, listening.

When I got there I found that little had changed. The proprietor, a barrel-shaped man in his sixties, was standing on a ladder, repainting the hanging sign that had read “Riverbank Art Supply.” He had finished the first few letters of “Mixville.” When I approached he looked down and called to me. “Timmy Mix!”

“Hi,” I said.

“You remember me? I used to sell your daddy his pens and paper.”

“Sure do,” I said. “I’m here for the same stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah!” he said. “Hear you’re taking over!”

“Looks that way.” I pointed to the sign. “How’s it going?”

He shook his head. “No offense,” he said. “But I’m not voting for that Francobolli next time around. This here’s a pain in my ass. I gotta send out change of address cards, for Chrissake. All of a sudden I’m living in a different town.”

Inside, I noticed one other customer. He looked familiar to me — a fiftyish man, thin hair, wearing khaki shorts and a blue chambray shirt — but I couldn’t place him. We passed in an aisle and he smiled at me in a comradely way. I gathered a few items — pens and pencils, fresh paper, all from the list my father had included with his letter, which I kept in my wallet. Overhead, something that sounded like a cello grunted through something that sounded like Bach. I went to the counter, where the familiar-looking man was already waiting for the proprietor. “Hello, Tim,” he said.

We shook hands. “Hey, uh…”

“It’s Father Loomis,” he said. “You didn’t recognize me.”

“Oh! No, you know, your clothes…”

“Not very priestly.”

“Uh-uh, no.” I smiled at him. There was the ecumenical collar, tucked discreetly under the work shirt. He looked weirdly like his Family Funnies counterpart, who almost invariably was depicted at a great distance: behind his pulpit, in the background of one or another whispered misunderstanding over matters ecclesiastic. I’d been having a lot of trouble drawing him. He had spread out his purchases on the counter: red sable brushes, cadmium red and cerulean blue oil paint, turpentine. I said, “You paint?”

He blushed. “Oh, yes, a little bit here and there…”

“What sort of thing?”

“Landscapes, mostly. You know, glory of God and all that.” He said this with more than a little irony. I liked him. “So,” he said, “I hear you’re in the driver’s seat now.”

“That’s the rumor.”

“How’s it going?”

I told him briefly about my lessons, how easy it all seemed at first, and how hard it turned out to be. “I have new respect for my father,” I managed to say, “as an artist.”

He nodded expansively. “Your dad was a strange man, Tim.” His face froze a little at this; he thought he had gone too far. “I mean, he was complex, very complex. A troubled man. There was more to him than people know.”

“I’ve guessed that.”

“Pardon me, I’ve said too much.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m very interested. He seemed so…covert, I guess.”

Father Loomis wagged his finger in the air, and nodded faster now. This had obviously been on his mind. “Yes, yes! At our last confession…” But then he stopped himself. “Well, he had a lot of guilt, Tim, a lot of pain. He made his mistakes, you know, but…” He reached out and touched my shoulder. “He was a good man. I truly believe that. He was a friend. I think there will be a place for him in God’s Kingdom.”

“Great!” I said moronically.

The proprietor appeared, red-faced and paint-spattered, and rung us both up. When I went outside with my purchases, Father Loomis was standing on the sidewalk, gazing up into the sky. “Yes,” he said. “A lovely day indeed,” as if this had been the subject of our conversation.

“It was good to see you,” I said.

“Oh! You too! It would be nice to see you a little more often. Sunday mornings, perhaps.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well…”

He waved his hand in the space between us. “No, no guilt please. I have to make my pitch, though. There was nothing wrong with your father a little extra prayer wouldn’t have fixed.” He raised his eyebrows. “And maybe a little therapy.”

“Maybe a lot.”

We had a quick laugh together. Something of the previous day’s rush of happiness had stuck with me, and the new, cool air tasted like lemonade. Father Loomis and I said our goodbyes. And then — I guess it was something in the way he had spoken that made me think of it — I said, “By the way, when was the last time you saw him? For confession, I mean.”

We were standing half-turned from one another, gazing up at separate patches of sky. Father Loomis shrugged. “A few weeks, I guess.”

“A few weeks?”

“Well, yes.”

“He was coming to you up until he died?”

I realized I was making him uncomfortable. “Yes, Tim, he was.”

“Wow,” I said. “Sorry. I just didn’t know.”

“Well. You never know everything, I suppose.”

“I guess not.” Father Loomis was shifting from foot to foot, and I decided to let him off the hook. I raised my hand, bid him a good day, and left.

* * *

That night I drove to Philly and got my stuff. There wasn’t much. A few records, some clothes. I left all the furniture and dragged the remains of my art studio out onto the sidewalk. Most of it went into the wet, reeking dumpster out back, where it landed with a deadened clang on the bottom. It didn’t look out of place there at all. The trash can that had been part of my work-in-progress I left on the curb, next to the one it was modeled on, and the two stood there, identically scratched and dented, like a frowzy set of twins waiting for the school bus.

Before I left, I opened and closed each of Amanda’s drawers, looking at the clothes there. I set the box of things from her car on the bedroom floor. Maybe I cried a little. Mostly I felt the bulky and annoying weight of things, which massed to ruin the otherwise modest pleasure of clearing out of the place forever. I shut the door on the apartment’s dim double in my mind, which though closed would always be there, taking up space. Then I dropped my key on the coffee table and closed the door on the real apartment. I went home and slept badly.

One morning that week, when I got to Wurster’s house, I found him sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the cool, shade-ruined yard. He was drinking a glass of iced tea and squinting. “Good morning,” he said. It wasn’t something I’d ever heard him say before.