J. Lennon - The Funnies

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It was nearly midnight when the unfolding spectacle of Midnight Angel came into full bloom, like a poisonous species of daisy. “Is this on?” asked the singer without irony. She gave her tambourine a tentative shake. She had the long blotchy nose of a border collie and cheeks sunken enough to eat soup out of. Her partner, camped out behind the synthesizers, had his shaggy head tipped back and was squeezing a bottle of eye drops several inches above his face. He turned to the crowd and blinked dramatically, his mouth hanging wide open.

I was groping for the car keys when Sybil grabbed my hand and dragged me from the bar. “Igotta showya somethin’,” she said. She was drunk, but seemed not to have lost her manual dexterity. We hopped into an elevator and she pushed the button for the fifth floor. I couldn’t remember the hotel being so tall. As we rode, she stared at me with a detached intensity that made me feel like I was about to be dissected. I watched my reflection in the polished steel doors.

Of course I knew what was going on: a blunt, clumsy seduction. I didn’t want to be a party to it, but still I followed, stumbling puppily behind her. We went to her room. She used a little magnetic credit card to open the door, then told me to follow her to the bathroom, where she began running hot water into the tub.

I thought of Lowell’s question: did I think she was good-looking? Now, watching her watch me in the bathroom mirror, I thought, Yeah, Lowell, sure she is. But she was the wrong woman. Her pocket was still full of black pens. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t.” And I fled.

It was nearly quarter to one when I pulled into the driveway at Bobby’s house. The device he had given me to open the garage door was bulky and crude, considering the general level of immaculate newness in the house. It had three large green buttons on it, each the size and shape of dominoes, and looked like something the Army would use to detonate explosives in the desert. I pressed each of the three buttons and nothing happened. I pressed harder. A light blinked on and a sound issued from the garage like a piece of heavy road machinery; the door rumbled slowly up on metal tracks.

Inside the house, no lights burned. Moonlight guided me to a guest bedroom, where I assumed I would be staying. Nancy (or someone) had put fresh white sheets on the bed and stacked several salmon-colored bath towels at its foot, along with matching hand towels and washcloths. The walls were covered with beige carpeting.

There was a nightstand next to the bed. I flopped myself across the comforter, making a tremendous squeak and upsetting the stack of towels, and pulled open the drawer: nothing. I was mildly surprised, having half-expected a Gideon’s Bible and a little pile of hotel stationery. It was the latter that I wanted.

I crept back into the hall. Bedsprings creaked behind a door: Bobby and Nancy? Sam? In the kitchen, I opened and closed drawers, looking for paper and a pen in the light of the digital microwave oven timer. I found both under the telephone, and a small safety envelope. Back in the guest room I undressed and got into the bed. The sheets had been tucked tightly under the mattress, and I left them that way, letting myself be sandwiched between them. It felt like I was lying at the bottom of a shallow sea. I propped my head up on the pillows and examined my implements: the pen was a black ballpoint with UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT stamped on it and the pad, perhaps a bit small for my needs, had the punchline from a lightbulb joke printed at the bottom of each page. I looked for the joke setups but didn’t find any.

Dear Susan,

I’m sorry, although I don’t really know what I’m apologizing for. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I’ve let you down somehow, because I have the feeling I did, I just am not sure how. If I seemed funny after the movie last week, maybe it was because I was a little drunk & tired and wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. But I know I don’t like this not talking, business-relationship thing, and I’m guessing you don’t either, so one way or another we should see a little more of each other.

So far so good. I went to gnaw on the pen when I noticed it had been heavily gnawed on already. It took some serious biting to make those kind of marks in hard plastic, I knew from experience. Were they Bobby’s? Nancy’s? Sam’s? It was hard to tell, in this house, where one of them ended and the next began, so uniform was the overall effect. I imagined they would all be embarrassed to know that I was using their Federal Government pen and gag paper.

I wish I could describe the way I’m feeling lately. Something like going to church when you’re Jewish. Or eating dog food. Things don’t seem to fit. There are things I feel I ought to be doing instead of this, but I don’t know what they are. Maybe I’m a little old to be having this problem. Whatever, I keep doing it, because it’s new and different, even though I’m kind of repulsed.

That was all wrong, “repulsed.” Might she think I was talking about her? I paused a moment and realized that I might as well have been, though she didn’t repulse me, not in the vernacular sense, anyway, the sick-to-one’s-stomach sense. It was more like an empirical repulsion, the repulsion of two magnets aligned with like poles facing. Maybe all that was necessary to make the magnets do what they were supposed to was flip one around. Me. But I couldn’t. Did I want her in that way? Did I want a new girlfriend? I suppose I did. Those people who said they didn’t want a relationship right now because they had just come off a bad one were lying. They wanted one even more than before.

I gnawed on the pen after all: we were family. Here I was thinking about Susan, about us. It all seemed too much to expect, love, success. Happiness. I had none of them right now and would gladly settle for just one. The bottom of the page read: Two. One to change the lightbulb and the other to change it back .

“Hi.”

It was Samantha, standing in my doorway, wearing pajamas with pieces of watermelon printed on them. “Hi,” I said, whispered actually, to avoid waking Bobby and Nancy. “Did I wake you up when I came back?”

“No.” She stepped in, carefully, as if into a flower bed, and shut the door behind her. “I never sleep.”

“Never?”

“Almost never.” She pointed to the end of the bed. “Can I sit there?”

“Sure,” I said, curling my legs up under me. She climbed on and sat cross-legged next to the fallen towels. I thought she had some piece to speak, but she didn’t speak it, so I said, “What do you do? When you’re awake?”

She shrugged. “Think. Make up people. Sometimes I read books. Grandpa gave me a little flashlight. Before he died.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Sort of.” She looked up suddenly. “He’s your daddy.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sad?”

“Sure.”

She looked away, toward the blank black window, and sighed. “What are you doing?”

“Writing a letter.”

She leaned forward. “Can I see?”

“No. It’s private.”

“To your girlfriend,” she told me flatly, obviously bored with the idea already.

“Not exactly.” I twirled the pen in my hand for a few seconds. “Samantha, how are things around here? Is your dad okay? Your mom?”

“They’re okay. I’m getting a sister.”

I hadn’t known they knew the sex. “What is her name going to be?”

“I’m going to call her Mariette.”

“Ah.” As with Bobby, I was running out of conversation topics. What do you say to a six-year-old? I began to get anxious that Bobby would find her here, and read something sinister or perverted into our meeting.