Work Text:
This is the book he writes:
A few pages, not more than one hundred and fifty. I spent a long time thinking about the binding, about the glue, about the stitches. I should come up with a metaphor, some kind of significance, but that part of me burned away a while ago. It ran across the pages. It billowed in the paragraphs. I reached for the words, I tried. They are not there anymore.
This is the book he writes:
Slim. Blue cover. It's not quite the right blue, but it'll do for the hard cover. I'm sitting here with the thing in my lap for a while, just testing its weight on my knees, across my thighs. It isn't as heavy as a baby. It isn't as heavy as his head was, one night, lights off. The air full of ozone and thunder. He had tried all that night, tried to be stitched up and keep it together, button up his shirt against grief, cinch his tie tight. At the end of it all it took was my hand on his arm. His skin was cold through the shirt. He sat down on the floor and didn't smile when I pointed out that there were still chairs available in the apartment. He sat down on the floor by my feet and he put his head in my lap. I remember my hand hovered over his head for a second, a moment. There was some kind of product in his hair and I didn't want to muss it. But eventually I rested my hand on his head and tried to be still. He sighed out in time with the thunder, so it sounded like God sighing. Despairing.
This is the book he writes:
He would say that there is no plot. Because he cared about that kind of thing. He actually read novels. I find that I can't read anything except poetry and Beckett. And I suppose that tells you everything you need to know.
This is the book he writes:
The blurbs on the back cover were given by Cynthia Ozick and Michael Cunningham. And other people I've never heard of, because I don't read novels. The cover shines in the sunlight and the blue is light enough that if I turn it directly into a stream of light and focus the sun onto the shiny cover, it obliterates my name, the title, the promise, the effort. I have sat in the sun, at my table by the window, listening to Brooklyn, and aiming sunlight at my life's work. It seems fairer somehow. The blurbs are contained within little white boxes, black print on white, no mayo. They never disappear. But the names are wrong. A name is missing.
This is the book he writes:
The dedication is what you really want to hear about, right? The dedication. Because you never saw me write a love letter before, and maybe you find that amusing, and maybe you find it sad, or maybe you're just curious. That's okay. It's okay to be curious. Ordinarily, I would encourage it.
Well, you can read it yourself. It says what it says. It's not even in Latin. Or Yiddish.
I did not understand the impulse that some writers have to write endearments on a public document. My endearments have historically been written on paper napkins and Post-It notes stuck inside briefing books. Postcards. Fridge magnets. Interior places and secret things. But I wrote one in public this time.
Really it's a commentary on loss; it isn't about love at all but only selfishness -- the crack down the center of the sidewalk, the darkness of the chasm within; me, myself. My losses, my loss. My love.
There, you see? I did it again.
This is the book he writes:
He asked me to write it. Not in so many words, but he did. He'd leave the New Yorker out on the kitchen table, open to the first short story. He knew I didn't read them. He smiled. He gave my a new dictionary, for my birthday. An incredibly thick one, bound in leather, of course, and therefore too heavy to actually pick up and use. My battered Funk & Wagnalls is still on my desk. He knew that too.
But one day I needed a dictionary and he had taken mine (I forget where, possibly just the Capitol but possibly to Yokohama where there was important business that required the stealing of his lover's dictionary) so I picked the thing up. I sprained my wrists and my knees started to buckle soon as I started walking away from the bookcase. I barely made it to the desk in time. I leafed through it. I was just browsing through the English language, window-shopping; no money for serious spending then. I was only battling the crossword. And I'm turning through, in the As, wondering if the pages will dissolve in the acid from my fingers because they seem so thin, diaphanous, almost inconsequential, which for pages of a dictionary is kind of a revelation for me, and I'm getting to the end -- atavism, atrophy, augur. And I realize that this page has been turned before. There are no fingerprints but I can see them anyway, in the little pencil line he has drawn underneath the word 'author'.
At the time I was surprised that there was no smiley face beside it.
This is the book he writes:
I wrote it because he wanted me to. I wrote it because he died, and he wanted this from me. I wrote it because he died and he wanted it and the dying all happened over the course of two hours. No preparation, no illness. Just a strikethrough, a bullet hole, a tangle of metal on a road. Thunderclap -- all over. I know that I saw his body but I do not remember it. I remember the cold of the room. Passing my hand through the crackles of my own breath in the air. It must have looked like I was trying to hold the image off, push it away. Maybe I was. I don't remember.
The book is an act of grief. The book is the tear I have made in my sleeve.
This is the book he writes:
My daughter comes to see me. This helps me because she doesn't care too much about books, about the tarantella of the black lines on the white page, about the kicks the letters make, about the light the thoughts fall into, at the end of each line. She cares, apparently, about me. Molly is more like her mother than she is like me and so from her comfort is rather red and bitter, taking the form of jibes and jokes that are actually funny. She's into hard truths and long battles, and when she was a teenager she fought with me more than she ever did with her mother.
I read it, she says, quietly, but as though it's nothing, as though it's the latest item to be crossed off her reading list. She looks at me from around one side of her sheet of hair. She's dyed it again. It went blond first, then blue, then pink. It's red now -- a deep, biological red, like the inside of a mouth.
Uh huh, I say, again as if it's nothing. I raise an eyebrow for punctuation.
You miss him very much, huh? she says, with a little smile that crinkles at her eyes. She's apologizing, I think. For what I'm not sure. She and Sam got on well, frighteningly so; it was Huck who was jealous and held on too tight to my hand. She loved Sam. And maybe that's it, and this is the only way to say it.
Yeah, I say.
Dad?
What?
Did you love him?
Or perhaps a straightforward question that goes right into my belly like an Ali punch is what I should have expected from my daughter. She's thrown her head back, looking at me down the bridge of her nose. So she's not as calm as she seems. And so I am in there somewhere, genetics as present as instinct: the instinct that wants to stick in the knife.
What answer would make you happiest, Mol? is what I can't help saying.
The honest one.
I smile, at least I think I do. Probably doesn't come out that way.
You read the book, I say, didn't you?
This is the book he writes:
Molly stays, for a while. When I offer her the bed she gives me an astoundingly sarcastic look that holds within in all the subtext and secrets we have accumulated between us all the years of her life, so she sleeps on the couch. She sleeps in an over-sized band tee shirt that she bought in London for her then-boyfriend but ended up withholding from him to the benefit of her own, likewise over-sized, wardrobe. It is black, with logos in pink and yellow. I watch her, from the doorway of my bedroom, at the thin end of the night when the air is cold, and think that it does not suit her. She is beautiful, this girl in whom I can never see myself, but the black cleans out the color in her face and the absence of color brings up the sadness; asleep she looks sad, around the eyes and mouth. My eyes, my mouth.
I leave the doorway, slowly. I walk over to her and kneel, carefully, by the couch. I don't touch her or rearrange the covers. My breath is all that reaches her, and she doesn't hear me say:
I'm sorry, Mol.
She doesn't wake, which is just as well, just shifts a little and this movement lets fall a few strands of her hair, unlodged from their sticking place between her brow and the cushion. It started straight, this hair of hers, and though it is straight now it is only so through the application of medieval torture instruments disguised as equipment for the maintenance of beauty. And as she sleeps the curls come back, the kinks, the inheritances she smoothes away in the daytime.
I breathe out once more, then get up, and measure my steps back to my bedroom door squeezing down the temptation to look back. In the air her own breathing hangs, making everything heavy.
Once the door is shut I go to the little desk beside my bed and bring out the book, slim, blue cover, the current justification for my job title. I try to read it as she might have done, with the self-consciousness of a child confronting a parent's love for someone else, and the desire between two people so unlike the child in age and experience and temperament. But to my daughter, bisexuality is a simple concept -- so simple that it defies explanation; it needs no explanation. She wanted to know whether I loved him, not why. She wanted to be sure of my heart. Whether it was beating.
This is the book he writes:
Did they ever ...
What?
At school. Did anybody ever --
She smiles, as though it's funny. Did anybody hassle us?
Yeah.
Because of you.
Yeah.
You and Sam.
Yes.
They bugged Huck a little. But that was kinda predictable.
Mmm.
Brent Jankowski was convinced that he'd caught it from you. Viral homosexuality. Or, I guess genetic. He wasn't real interested in the biology of the thing.
And you didn't feel you could learn a lot from judicious questioning?
Not really, daddy, no. You don't feed the trolls, you know?
Not really, no.
She grins.
My son is gay. I would use 'too' as a modifier here, but that would be dishonest. Huck has loved his sister and his mother and a few close female friends, but he has a heart which will never thrill to femininity or the promise of soft bodies; he falls in love with men whom I am not blind enough not to have noticed resemble me. So possibly Brent Jankowski wasn't so wrong. My ex-wife, when we used to talk about this kind of thing, would accuse me of solipsism when my logic pressed this kind of conclusion on me, and maybe she was right too. But I'd be failing in my duty as her ex-husband if I let her win them all.
Huck is my tender child, Molly my steely one. They are less twins than halves of each other; I worry about them less when they are together. I suspect the reverse is true when they worry about me.
This is the book he writes:
I take her to the launch party for the book, or to one of them. It isn't her first. In fact she is the only one of her family of four who has not published -- her mother a memoir of her time in Congress which talked more about every other female member of the House than it did her; her brother a book of poetry; her father one textbook and one novel and a half claim on a volume of collected speeches, brought out in memoriam. Molly is drawn to the more transitory arts: dancing, and the application of a logical argument; she wants to be a dancer, she trained to be a lawyer.
She wears a satin dress in blue and silver, and a wrap thrown around her neck instead of her shoulders because the New York literary scene likes to make the most of the winter, and because my daughter likes to look different from everyone else.
She takes my arm as we walk in, and I realize that I'm smiling, and that it does not feel as strange to do so as I would have expected.
This is the book he writes:
When I began the book I did not cry; I couldn't. Nothing welled in me except words, and after the words only emptiness. Every day, waking up cold whether it was cold outside my apartment or not; waking up with a full head and marshaling sentences in the shower, over the pot of coffee, reading each newspaper twice because nothing held in my head the first time through, because I could only care for one story then.
And I wrote for the same reason that anyone writes -- to attempt the perfection of a hurt; to catalog and then to undermine it; to get back the world the way it was before it fucked me. I poured words into the gap, threw them at my problem, used them to say what my tongue would not let me say, and what I should have said, in life.
I didn't cry. The words meant I didn't have to. I had drafted a memo on my own grief, and leaked it to the world.
When Molly and I get home from the launch, I start to feel tired, to my bones. Parties, and the attendant mess of pointless chat and large quantities of alcohol, each aggravating the other, usually leave me feeling that way, particularly if I haven't been allowed to be rude to anyone, so that is all I think it is -- just people, and my inability to tolerate them.
But when she is in my bathroom, brushing her teeth, I find myself walking over to the kitchen sink and bracing my arms over it. I need to stand, suddenly, because my chest feels as though it is filling up with something heavier than plain air, even plain Brooklyn air with all its added extras. I suck in shallow breaths, one after another, sounding like the emphysemic whir of my own air-conditioning unit, but it doesn't help. Something has come undone somewhere, an untethering.
I don't realize I'm sobbing until it's halfway done. It is silent except for the heaves of inward breaths, and the heavy sound of the tears dropping into my sink.
Of course, she is there when I turn around, with my fists up to my eyes, rubbing away this act of emotion because I am ashamed of it. Whether because of some no doubt ridiculously old-fashioned concept of masculinity and fatherhood, or whether just because the only acceptable on-show emotion in this family is anger, I don't want my daughter to see me cry.
But it's Molly; I should have known.
She doesn't say anything, doesn't try to smile that smile that means 'it'll be all right, sometime soon'. She just walks over to me and takes my hand and squeezes it, then presses her head against my chest.
"I thought it was beautiful, dad," she says, not looking at me. "I don't think anyone else could have written it."
I nod. No words.
"I'm glad you wrote it. I think he would have been too."
*
This is the book he writes:
Toby Ziegler
For Sam, and what was left unsaid.
It begins in February, as the snow begins to fail. It never really stops ...