First Attempts at Second Person

Another one from the vaults and while I remembered this more fondly in memory, it seems clearly mishapen here: too much lead in, not enough of the juicy stuff at the end. Ain't that life, though? So, here's an essay from at least 1987.

VICTORIAN DEMURE

Yes, you. The details matter, as a way around all that must be said. It was Dad and his wife Louise, and my sister Linda and Richard, and I. Driving up country in Dad’s land-boat Chrysler New Yorker (ten years old, twelve miles per gallon, thirty-four thousand miles), after food as an excuse to be together. I must admit these things have grown easier since both Dad and I have learned to place no demands. So we balance dichotomies: the left to right of the political spectrum, the highway between the university and the machine shop. Our eyes glint as we discuss how to turn my learning into money. Louise, ever eager to interpret, tells me what my dad means. It’s her way in, I can’t resent it. “It’s not that your father is against the government helping the poor. It’s just that you have to remember where he came from, how he got what he got.”

We get our meals, here at the Culinary Institute of America. A nation’s future chefs toil for us, over-salting here, under-cooking there. We complain politely among ourselves, mimicking our obviously foreign waiter clearly much happier whipping up a soufflé than waiting tables. But the regimen of the place rotates everyone through each job, so here he is smiling broadly, repeating everything he says, as well as asking us twice, for each order, as if his accent infects even his ears. I eat too much. I always do at this kind of thing, happy to devour on someone else’s plastic. What the family has become--a series of over-eatings.

After food we continue a few miles up the Hudson. The goal is the Vanderbilt mansion, as Richard is somewhat of a Vanderbilt buff. A guy who bums around the country selling ugly metal-etched paintings that shift shade with a room’s light, a guy who lives with his married sister until living with my sister, unmarried, he has an obsession with the Gilded Age. Which means day trips to Vanderbilt mansions, which means weekend excursions to Newport. Richard even reads up on the histories, can spout figures, names, dates. Sometimes we escape our own lives by becoming tour guides to others’. Part of me knows this isn’t the place for a full stomach: the gaudy opulence of style upon style, indiscriminate, like cotton candy with Salisbury steak with sweetbreads, washed down with Courvoisier, Cutty Sark, and Kool-Aid.

The day itself is East Coast oppressive. The sky washed out to gray, not threatening rain but just as much not threatening sun. And me uncomfortable, be-suited, my tie dangling from my Adam’s apple, the armpits of my white shirt darkening. Below, the river rolls on imperceptible, except for knowing how it works on maps. It rolls past this place where the rich once lived, past Hyde Park and Roosevelt’s ghost, past Bear Mountain and its tenuous bridge, past Indian Point and its ominous bald-headed dome, past New York City itself. But here, the river gives no hint of the future, merely mulls along, attesting to the Ice Age, allowing New England to begin, looking beautiful, of little use.

This mansion actually has fewer rooms than the largest Vanderbilt estate, the Biltmore in North Carolina, has bathrooms. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man who amassed the original fortune in shipping, played it smart and wise by not divvying up the wealth in his will. The bulk of the fortune went to one son, who doubled it, via railroad, before he died eight years later. Other Vanderbilts were granted “nominal” sums, as was the case with grandson Frederick, the owner of this particular estate. After two years and $660,000 (in 1896 dollars), the mansion was complete--a little get-away place up the Hudson. Our tour guide tells us this, so does Richard. Linda buys our tour tickets, goads Richard along. None of us belongs here, even after the sumptuous meal, even with our finer clothes, awkward among t-shirted, camera-toting tourists. No one could fill such a place, like some map where the scale never works and the towns seem lost in the landscape, foundering out of each others’ sight. Every room seems like a church, awe-inspiring, silencing, somber. Full of old wood, tapestry-hung, absorbing light, aging in any hint of day. The skylight, high above the marble-tiled main hall, admits as little light as possible, eased under the burden of the summer haze.

I suffer museum fatigue almost immediately. My senses overload too easily, as I try to add up the Medici tapestry and the Brussels tapestry and the Venetian lanterns and all the mythological figures that dance and prance and hunt humans for love. History gets compressed into one house, a truer library, a cache of pop-up books, each announcing its epoch and style.
American royalty makes no sense, of course, but what else could be the desire here? Forget democracy or the eternal betterment of man or inalienable rights. But most importantly, forget time. If we can own 16th century and 18th century and 14th century, then we are those centuries, en masse. The time line collapsed and jumbled and lived in. All centuries are home. I bumble from room to room, the linen, the brocade, the marble a blur, not meaning much more than dollars, but perversely fascinating. They owned this, just as Richard owns his facts. All that matters is the held.

Of course, this is the public show, the fanfare meant to stun. Upstairs awaits, the place where people slept and bathed and made love, did their living and bode their time. The tour troops up the stairs, duly warned of the ascent. Again set on our own, I wander separate from the couples who always hover near the other of their pair. I see the only American-made furnishing, Frederick Vanderbilt’s desk, and it’s the only piece I’d want as my own. Too huge, yes, big as a coffin, but well-worked oak. If I worked behind it, I would turn it around, face it away from the door and towards the windows. This position is far less powerful, but I would be willing to bare my back to the world to have the Hudson before me, and beyond the Catskills--nature at its simplest and most silent and most casual. Awesome by being ordinary. Vanderbilt let it be his background, the power leading to him. I’m sure no one could look him in the eyes for what was behind him.

He and his wife had separate rooms. The kind of thing the Hays Office and motion pictures prepared us for later, several generations of virgin birth celluloid children, as mom and dad, however much conjugally a couple, could never share the same bed, just as kissing on the horizontal was forbidden, just as every wrong-doer had his day. But the Vanderbilts lived before movie morality sorted our world, and they clearly had the money and power to do as they wished. Separate bedrooms. The house itself was social, a desire to mingle with neighbors the Rodgerses and the Roosevelts and the Millses and the Astors, an issue beyond money. Money meant style, and style meant silence, and silence meant sexlessness.

So there is her bed, huge and canopied and billowed, velvet red like a peony field in full bloom, yet cut and held at that point of color at the bursting. This room is as much bed as Frederick’s is desk. And around the bed, solid around the bed, a railing, just like the ones churches removed with Vatican II. There is a small gate, for display now closed. Then I notice the bed is raised slightly, above the floor a few inches, just enough to make the geography familiar and distinct. This bed could hold no mere woman. Someone above and apart, in sight but not near, really. The guard explained, claiming the model for the room was a queen’s bedroom circa Louis XV. It turns out the royal lady would accept merchants in the morning, beyond her rail, offering their wares. She’d conduct business from the bed, perhaps with ladies a-waiting inside her circle. Wordless, she’d merely motion and any man’s knee would greet the heavily napped rug, itself weighing two tons.

It turns out it has nothing at all do to with this, but the private times, when the unobtrusive door from her husband’s bedroom swings open, and maybe she drowses a little, or maybe not. She may wait, unsure how to be on her side of the rail, left there like heaven. This isn’t a time or an age for vaulting over the rail with silly nothings amidst a quick removal of clothes. But forward Frederick comes, unsure too what he and his money and being a Vanderbilt has done. How can the pose ever end? So he kneels. She comes forward. It’s as odd as Latin, when the stone gate swings and they swoon together, sacramental. It’s body, yes. The Hudson at the back of the house knows not, cannot touch this. Maybe here they get closest to what the whole house means, the denial it fights. Time no more. Long sought, this peace, which maybe the house brought them to. When his wife dies, Frederick moves to the third floor for twelve years. The house is passed on to a cherished niece; there are no children.

And you, you weren’t there and didn’t know and couldn’t see, and anyway, it was a difficult time, love trouble. That time, that distance apart brought us together. I did some thinking without knowing, with my family, again, feeling those strange pulls that tell you where you’ve been, who you are, what it is that you hate. Maybe why you love. You, yes.

(20 of 31 in the drive to 2500)

Bonnie Tyler Can't Touch This

I'm a bit panicked on the 2500 by 9/15 project, to tell the truth, and I always do, dear readers. You just have to hear it right. So here's another one from the vaults, an essay from early 1988, so it's currently old enough to drink. If nothing else, maybe it will get a bunch of you to rent The Band Wagon.

HEARTH ACHE

Like too many others, I would guess, I’ve spent too much of my time fancying I’m Fred Astaire. Not as a dancer, of course, although the non-verbal eloquence would be something dear. (Oh to make love without words.) Rather, it’s the implacable cool I’ve savored, his aloofness; he wears loneliness as sportingly as his tux and tails.

This one particular evening of dreaming, it was New Year’s Eve, and the whole house was asleep. LuAnn, my oldest sister, a nurse, would be off to work at Morristown Memorial early in the morning. Linda, my other sister, and Richard, her apartment-mate, waited each other out long enough that they fell asleep where they sat, as another holiday escaped them without event. Oddly, my mom held out the longest, as if the early evening liquor could only pick her up; yet, by eleven-thirty she, too, ended up the way she ends up every night--head slumped left, legs recliner elevated, eyes shut tight.

I was still working hard to get along. Every trip back to East Hanover, to a place called “home,” tends to disintegrate, as if my family’s bodies fall away and we have only teeth and bone left, rubbing each other raw. To keep this night something like bearable, I went out of my way to find family entertainment that even I would like, so I grabbed The Band Wagon at the video store.

No one else made it past the opening credits. Earlier, we had played a game of Trivial Pursuit, and as always, the game ended before anyone had won. In a burst of silliness, I tried to turn it into a drinking game, in which a wrong answer meant a healthy swig. Me, I never even played such games as an undergrad, couldn’t understand the need to beat around the drinking bush. But at home, games seemed necessary as a way to fill the time. Talking itself was too difficult--our tongues, too, were gone in the family of teeth and bone. All we could talk about was food we had eaten or would eat, or about the weather, or the latest in a string of inconveniences, as the world worked hard to muck up whatever a Yatchisin had planned. But my usual drink-talk was out, the banter that’s carved an entire language of my life in bars: pop philosophy, film, poetry, lust, and a slathering of pomposity--like a healthy head of beer--you don’t really want it, but it’s there just the same.

It seems the only thing we can do as a family is drink, slowly putting ourselves to sleep. After the game (and I, of course, got cranky, outraged by questions about comic strips in the literature category), true sleep came to everyone else as I plunked in the movie.

The Band Wagon is a sneaky musical. It opens with Fred Astaire on the train to New York, overhearing people claim his character is washed-up as a star. When recalling the film, most first remember its first large number, “Got a Shine on My Shoes,” in which Astaire turns pinball in a candy-colored arcade, setting the whole “machine” ablaze with his fits, taps, and turns. But
there’s a smaller number that precedes this one, an auto-love ballad, as it were. Astaire gets to watch another, still sterling star get mobbed as she leaves the Twentieth Century; he lags behind the crowd, waiting for Grand Central’s red carpet to clear. And then, he sings, and walks, both so much like the other--sweet and fragile, a cat on the clouds. It must be the exact voice he hears in his head; it’s easy to wonder why his lips must move for such a sound. It’s a voice of beauty without pretty, just as the walk is agile without bounce. The song is “(I’ll Go My Way) By Myself.”

I lay on the couch wanting to run these three minutes over and over as some sort of welcome to the New Year. I lay, alone, suckered by the song, the grace it makes of lonely peace. And then memory, of an earlier New Year’s, returned to me, as if I were in a film and the emulsion went edgy, and time did its zoom in and out trick, so I was then, there. I had plunged to a few days before that soon-to-be New Year, when I was too absorbed in something, puzzled by the now-forgotten. It was the person I was with who sensed something was up, so she headed out to the balcony, despite the December Baltimore cold. The street beneath the Hopkins House, my apartment building, always struck me as Emergency Highway: any siren anywhere in earshot would eventually wail its way down 39th Street. But that evening, something more was up.Between the Broadway Apartments and the other tallish buildings rising up the slight hill to the east, a pink glow licked at the low sky, almost like an intense dance of mercury lamps pointed at the clouds. The trucks were stopping there; we could just tell. Of course we went out.

An old apartment building, where I once lived, was nearly already gutted. The Buckingham Arms, where I sublet one summer, my first totally alone. A summer of wicked wind that left Charles Street a road so lost in broken branches it seemed a road lost in tree; a summer of my first, and very much eighteen-year-old, stab at playwriting, a soaper about old folks losing love, finding death; a summer of love (is every summer?), in which every lunch hour was precious, for my girlfriend lived that summer in her parented, suburban home. Everything came back at this death; it was like watching Industrial Light and Magic pour forth its ghosts at a film’s horrible end. I had never seen my past so vividly smoked clean.

The Red Cross was already there, putting blankets over shoulders. The old folks who had emptied from the building looked tearless and lost, as if the water at the scene could only blast from fire trucks’ hoses. No one ran about panicked. I never knew something like a fire could lack passion, could only stun. No one screamed, but the fire, setting time free.

We watched till we were too cold to watch. It didn’t take long. Even such a blaze could do little against all of December. It grew boring, too, the way any slow death does. It’s like watching a fireplace, waiting for the log, red-hot, to at last pop-crack; you can never wait out the moment. Then, suddenly, your ears wheel your eyes around, and you can never be sure of the second between seeing and imagining. Wishful thinking makes so much so.

If Tom Waits can be believed, and we are all innocent when we dream, every jury ends up hung. There might be hope after all, and not just hope for. Just hope, solid as flesh. Then again, there’s also the night the fire trucks ringed Hopkins House itself. It was one of those mid-summer, spotty blackouts when you can still see the line of buildings where the lights still work. Our building, however, was black. We had the candles lit, enough still kids to get a kick out of humans periling themselves, if just slightly, by their own technology. Twelve floors up, no electricity leaves you airborne, nearly.

But the fire trucks alarmed everyone. The scene was like the Titanic: Everyone sure of safety, a handful cracking dire black jokes, chipping ice for gin and tonics, a few others, glimpsing, miles off, the S.S. California, and its lights that would never come. All was too quiet, even the trucks, oddly unmanned, as if people couldn’t be bothered until disaster struck. We decided there was only one thing to do--head to the lobby. Resting between boredom and fear, we wore looks deer wear when startled from nibbling and deciding to run.

At first we thought twelve flights of stairs would be an easy trot down. But the descent was perilous, for at irregular intervals, flights lacked emergency lighting. The stairs, one concrete shaft, windowless and comfortless, were clearly meant to be unused. Nothing happened, we made it to the lobby fine, but I could only think of the panic a real disaster might have caused. With smoke curling up as the people piled down, the darkened stairs could easily have turned into human smokestacks.

Luckily, nothing was wrong, the power failure merely tripped some switch to the fire department. We even got to take the elevator back to the twelfth floor, that’s how quickly order was restored. The next day, some tenant I didn’t know heatedly explained to the building manager about the faulty emergency lighting. The manager, Selma Podgur (or, as an ex-roommate named her, Mrs. Thomas English Muffins--her face had nooks and crannies), chewed the man out: “Why didn’t you just stay in your apartment? Nothing was wrong. Why couldn’t you have stayed put? Who told you to use the stairway anyway? You could have hurt yourself for nothing.” It was a fiery display of the indignant anger of the wrong, a definition of chutzpah. The guy walked away, unable to say anything. I almost wanted to defend him, but didn’t, just got my mail and returned to my room. In a way, Mrs. Podgur wasn’t wrong at all.

Forty minutes into the movie, my mom stirs, checks the time. “Put the Ball on.”

I want to argue, but can’t, I see. I could care less about precise midnight; besides, Cyd Charisse has yet to wrap her lovely legs about Astaire, making him more insignificant than ever, as if he wished to be even more alone. Such a moment of love is worth holding to hard: the lovely resistance of other.

I stop the film, switch back to television, using the remote. It’s Christie Brinkley, of all people, her smile as bright as Times Square’s lights. I run up to the kitchen to get the champagne and renew drinking. Linda and Richard slowly stir. I hold the cork steady, begin to rotate the bottle.

Christie (we have all seen enough of her to call her this) begins the count. “20--19--18--17-” An inset clock beside her says 11:59:11. She corrects herself. “49--48--47.” Brightly alerts us to the screaming hordes we easily see behind her. Counts, “30--29--28-” The inset clock says 11:59:45. She corrects herself again. It’s midnight. 1988. I pop my cork.

We all drink some and kiss and wish, but lightly, all three. Nobody feels any different. Right before leaving, Richard says, “Christie Brinkley just made more in ten minutes than I’ll make in all of 1988.” My mom drifts back off in her chair.

So it’s just Fred and I again. I resist the urge to begin all over, resist the urge to watch “(I’ll Go My Way) By Myself” a dozen times through. There’s so much more to the movie: The silly joy of “Triplets,” the one-line Shakespeare synopses in “That’s Entertainment,” Oscar Levant at his caustic best, the Mickey Spillane send-up of “Girl Hunt.” And there’s also the quick ending, none of the mush watchers of Singin’ in the Rain have to slog through. Charisse expresses her love, but indirectly. Astaire accepts. We see no grand kiss, no embrace to rock the ages.

It’s like my family, maybe. Each one of us waiting for the fire to call us home. But that home is so huge we’re all left separate, knowing those dark steps await, that emergency cries out for the black plunge. We can only wait for the smoke that never comes, for each day dawns clear, and cold to the bitter bone.

(14 of 31 in the drive to 2500)