Executors Of Important Energies

The phone rang late, my stepmother again.

“Do you ever think about all the ones who you didn’t let them have you? I wish I could take a do-over on all of them, even the nastiest. Even the worst. Are you there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m just not sure what you want me to do with this information.”

“Oh, forget it,” she said. “I just don’t feel very desirable is all.”

I told her plenty of people desired her. “Well, nobody desires me to my face,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Not bad. Like three here. So it’s two there. I figured you’d be up.”

“I’m not up, Lucy. It’s four here. Nobody’s up right now.”

“I am,” she said. “And so is your dad. Down here, there’s plenty of signs of life.”

“I need to sleep,” I said. “Go upstairs. Go to bed. I’ll be in the shop tomorrow. Call me if you want.”

“I’m staying right here,” she said, and then came the smoggy burble of her water pipe. “It’s pretty up-and-down with Roger. He’s called the cops on me every night this week. So I just walk and walk until he goes to sleep. I’ve been walking so much, my ass is changing into a completely different thing.”

“You should have told me,” I said.

“I’m telling you now,” she said. “Send you a picture if you like.”

My father’s troubles had started ten years or so ago when his memory started to erode. He lost wallets and sets of keys in increasingly quick succession. He lost his job, after repeatedly stranding his clients alone at the defense table while he wandered the streets, trying to recall which car was his. He’d more or less forgotten me two years ago, and then last month, he woke up from a two-day nap and couldn’t recognize my stepmother. He called the police. She’d had to show two forms of ID not to get arrested for trespassing in her own house.

Nobody had a clear answer for what to do. We had looked into assisted-living places, but it was a ten-year waiting list if you weren’t looking for a shrieking bedlam multiply indicted for filth and abuse. Other than putting up with my father, Lucy didn’t work. She survived on his savings. My father was only sixty years old and otherwise in good health. He could go on absorbing cash and worry for another twenty-five years at least.

The sound of women screaming came in through my window. This was Thursday, and dance night at the lesbian bar up the block. Afterward, it was a regular thing for the women to stop by and use the west wall of my building to beat each other up against. They broke each other’s hearts on schedule, alwaysin the same indigo half hour of the morning. Sometimes, I’d look out the window and do them the favor of calling to them, so they could unite against me, a common enemy. But I cranked the pane shut and got back into bed.

“So look,” Lucy was saying, “I’m thinking I’ll bring him up there on the twentieth. The doctor said it might do him good to look at New York and to see you, too. Maybe jog some stuff loose for him.”

I heard the scrabbling of rats’ nails in the tin ceiling above my bed. “Please don’t come, Lucy. I’ve got a thing to go to. And anyway, he doesn’t even remember my name.”

“Sure he does,” she said. “He’s been asking about you.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It is. He was. Just yesterday. He drank a beer too fast, and then you should have heard him going, Burrrt, Burrrt, Burrrt.”

She didn’t laugh and neither did I.

“Please don’t fucking bring him here,” I said. “It’s not a good idea.”

“Be gentle,” Lucy said, and got off the phone.

I was ten when my father married Lucy. He was forty-six. She was twenty-one, a secretary at his law firm, a job she’d planned to quit once her acting career took off. Her looks were good enough for it. She had the kind of hungry, large-eyed prettiness around which Japanese cartoonists have established whole religions of lechery. When I was young, before there was hair on my lip, I’d had a hard crush on her, and in some dim way, I was sure that my father was only with her temporarily, that he planned to turn her over to me someday. The particulars weren’t absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.

They had about three years of kindness with each other. Then Lucy met a man her age who wrote music for television commercials and went with him to Quebec. My father felt astonished in his grief — pushing fifty, the silver tufts bursting from his ears, to find his heart broken for the first time in his life. That was the one time he tried hard to be my friend. He had me over on weekends. He’d tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years. He’d bare his heart to me for an hour or two, and then he’d make me play chess with him, twenty, thirty games a weekend, and I’d lose every time.

Only once did I come close to beating him. He’d had some cocktails, and he blundered, moving his queen into the path of my knight. I sacked the piece, and he slapped me on the mouth. I ran into the bathroom and punched myself several times to ensure a lasting bruise. When I emerged, he didn’t apologize, not exactly. But he said he’d give me anything I wanted not to tell my mother about it. I said I’d take a computer and a CO2 BB gun. My father drew up a contract on his firm’s letterhead, and I signed. We bought the gun that day. I used it to shoot a pretty lemon-colored warbler, which I stroked, then buried in my mother’s lawn. Then I shot a dove and a chickadee, and gave the gun to the kid who lived next door.

After four months in Canada, Lucy came home. My father took her back without forgiving her, then went on to betray her many times, believing it was something he owed them both. He installed Lucy in an echoing faux-Tudor keep where all the sunlight in the place would not have been enough to run a solar calculator. Lucy grew depressed. She blamed her body, and punished it with starvation diets and triathlons. At the height of her regime, she was a new kind of creature, a lemur’s head stuck to the body of a springbok. When a late bloom of acne speckled her cheeks, she convinced her therapist to write her a prescription for some drastic tablets, under threat of suicide. The pills took care of her seven pimples but crazed her face, chin to hairline, with little crimson fissures. She’d had to lather up with so many creams and unguents it looked like she was sweating lithium grease. Somewhere in there, I stopped dreaming of Lucy, the fastback, and the back rooms, the alleys and the trusty woods.

I was in my twenties when my father’s mind began to go. At first, I thought his failure to remember where I was living, or that I’d finished school, was just a deepening of the aggressive indifference with which he’d always treated me, but it turned out to be something that a dozen good neurologists couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s or any of the known dementias. His store of recollections just sprang a rapidly widening leak, starting with the short-term memories and then draining the older vaults. Within three years of the first symptoms, he couldn’t recall what you’d told him an hour before. Couldn’t work, couldn’t find his own way home from the grocery store where he’d been shopping all his life. But he hadn’t lost all capacity for deep, or at least medium, retrieval. My father was already forgetting my name when I mentioned to my mother, a few years back, the time he’d slapped me over the chessboard. Yet a few weeks after that, I received in the mail a copy of our old contract, along with a bill for $1,200 — reimbursement for the computer and the BB gun, for which my father had kept receipts.

Part Two

In college, I studied physics, engineering, and industrial design. I thought I would make airplanes, but after graduation I took a job drafting clock radio housings for the Emerson Corporation. Emerson put a great emphasis on anonymous roundness and dull curves, as though the idea was to slip our clocks unnoticed past the consumers’ vision, like well-greased pills for your eye. After six years of that, I went out on my own. You could say I’d had one real success, a machine that melted down your spare plastic grocery bags and poured the rendered plastic into interchangeable molds ( golf tee, pocket comb, bicycle tire lever, etc.). The device ranked high on a “Great Green Gifts” list in a major magazine, and since then the in-flight catalogs and shopping channels had picked it up. I wasn’t getting rich off of it, but it was keeping me afloat. I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot waste shape of crannies and recesses left over when the rest of the building had been sectioned into proper places to live.

The day my father and Lucy were due to arrive, I’d booked myself a booth at the Service and Hospitality Expo in Westport, Connecticut. I went there to flog a device I was calling the Icepresto. It was basically a commercial coffee cistern with a copper heat-transfer coil in the base so you could brew a fresh pot of tea and pour it right away into a glass without melting your ice. I was hoping I could sell the patent for a hundred thousand or so and then hurry to the Gulf Coast to cram a pontoon boat and a big-titted stranger into the hollow places in my heart. But all day, I brewed and poured iced Earl Grey into Dixie cups for men in pleated slacks. They kept one hand in their pockets so I couldn’t snap my card into their palms.

At the reception afterward, I tried to earn back my booth fee at the open bar. I went on the dance floor and got close to a young woman.

“Let’s go have a look at the moon,” I said.

“It’s three o’clock,” she said.

I walked back toward the train. The first hard snap of autumn was in the air. I felt the ache of it, rumbling toward the city with my cistern in my lap.

I got a message from Lucy telling me to meet them in Washington Square Park, where my father was watching chess. I rode the subway to Astor Place and walked west under a load of mounting dread. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen months. I imagined him perched on a railing, with dusk coming on, craning at the Rollerbladers, drug merchants, and guitarists, like Rip Van Winkle come down from the hills, his hair a mess, a diaper smell coming off him, possibly.

But I found my father sitting at a table, looking fine, especially compared with his company, an obese chess hustler whose face was the gray-green hue of roofing slate. My father’s hair was trimmed and combed in a tidy swale across his high forehead. He wore a clean white shirt and a crimson tie beneath an overcoat I’d never seen before: knee-length, clam-tone suede with a collar of black fur, a coat for the czar of the Wild West. I didn’t go right to him. I stood ten feet away and watched him play. From that distance, you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with him, though his position was a losing one, his king on the back rank, pinned down by two bishops and a knight. Then my father threw up his hands and said something to the hustler. They laughed loud and long, like old friends, and I was glad. A love of strangers, a fearlessness with them, had always been one of my father’s gifts. A connoisseur of the chance encounter, he would have tried to speak the language of cockatoos if one touched down beside him. He shook the man’s hand, and they began setting up the pieces once more. I went to him before the game got under way. “Dad,” I said, and wished instantly that I’d let him be. The pleasure left his face, and his eyes went vague with suspicion. He cowered slightly, seeming to recognize me not as son but as some unremembered person come back from his past to pelt him with something.

“Dad, it’s Burt,” I told him.

He touched his finger to his ear. “Can’t hear,” he said.

“It’s Burt,” I said. “It’s your son.”

The news sent him into his familiar tic, a trembling reverse yawn that seized him in moments of perplexity. The movement of his jaw behind his closed lips lent an illusion that he lacked a full set of teeth.

“Right, right, nice to see you,” he said. He reached out and brushed his fingers against my abdomen, as though to be sure I wasn’t a ghost. Then he cast a nervous eye at the hustler, as though, above all things, my father didn’t want to let the stranger in on the secret of his deteriorating mind.

“Burt, Wade,” my father said gruffly, gesturing at the large man, who was scratching the thatch on his neck with a dirty nail.

“Dwayne,” the man said. I shook his hand, which, despite the cool weather, gave off a feverish warmth. He smiled. His front tooth was broken at an angle, a tiny gray guillotine.

“Wade is a murderer on the chessboard,” my father said. “A lethal tactician. But you watch, Burt. I’ll return from this slaughter and prevail.”

“You’re the shark here, Roger,” said Dwayne. “I’m just a little fish, trying to get a nibble where I can.”

My father glared at the board. The black pieces were before him. “Now hold on here, I’m white.”

“Uh-uh, Rog. You were white last game. Don’t think I forgot. I got a mind like a steel trap.”

“Have it your way. Hit the clock.”

Overhead, a large blue violence of storm clouds had begun to swell, but my father took no notice. He hunched to the game, giving me his broad sueded back.

Part Three

I spotted my stepmother by the dry fountain, where she was watching some young people make a film. I left my cistern at my father’s feet and jogged to her. Since I’d seen her last, Lucy had reached a new status of tiredness and age. Looking at her, “lady” is what I thought, a word that summed up her sparse, dry hair, her mottled cheeks, her many clattering bracelets and her lipstick, an alarming coral shade leaking into fresh hairline rills around her mouth. Her right eye was bloodshot and brimming with brine. We embraced. All she wore against the chill was a lamé shawl over a flimsy black top, so thin I could feel the gooseflesh on her hard arms.

“How long’s he kept you out here?” I asked her.

“Three hours. I think him and that fat person are about ready to go off somewhere and have a civil union.”

“We’re going. I’ll grab him.”

“It’s all right. I’m only cold on my body. He’s happy. Let him play.”

I pointed at her eye. “Are you high, Luce? Half high?”

“Big Iranian bitch on my volleyball team. Stuck her finger down my eye. Seeing double now.”

I said I was sorry to hear it. She shrugged. “Beer helps,” she said.

Lucy’s gaze drifted back to the little film crew doing their shoot. The movie revolved around a single special effect: a narrow youth with a vest of birdseed glued to his nude chest to provoke a pigeon attack. Cameras were poised but the pigeons were not cooperating. Too much free seed was falling off of him, and so no birds were bothering to peck him on the skin.

A girl in ratty hair and paint-speckled jeans walked over. She’d written “Producer” in Magic Marker on her shirt. “You’re in our shot. Would you mind getting out of the way?” the girl said, looking at Lucy as though offended by her makeup and glinting shawl.

“Yeah, kind of,” Lucy said.

“Excuse me?” the girl said.

She and the girl might have had words had not my father’s shouting voice come to us from the chess tables, so loud and urgent I thought he’d been attacked.

We ran to him, but there was no emergency. He’d won a game was all. He was still in a gloater’s ecstasy when we reached him. “Oh, God, yes,” he was saying. “Oh, man alive, does that feel good.”

“You sure put me in trouble, Roger,” Dwayne said. “One more, now? For tens?”

But my father wasn’t ready to leave aside the glory of the moment. “To hell with orgasms,” he mused, leaning into the table. “I’ll take a clean rook-ending any day. I mean, Jesus, Wade, what is it? What is it that makes it such a joy to beat a man at chess?”

“Music,” the hustler said. “Artistry and shit. Now, tens?”

The storm wind rose, and my father cocked his head to watch a flock of sycamore leaves swirling down. His fur collar stirred against his jaw.

“You like this coat?” Lucy asked me. “He saw it in the window at Barney’s. Eighteen hundred bucks.”

My father glanced at us with a halfway scowl and turned back Dwayne.

“Fischer said, ‘Chess is life,’ ” announced my father.

Dwayne ran his tongue under his lip. “Fischer said all sorts of stuff,” he replied. “He said there were tiny Jews living in his teeth.”

“It’s better than life. In the world, there’s no such thing as a clean escape, if you follow me,” my father said. “I mean, you could keep cleaning my clock all night, but at the end of the day, you’ve still got a broken tooth and a snot booger on your collar and a head full of garbage that keeps you up at night, but–”

“Hey, motherfucker, be nice,” said Dwayne.

The rain began, a soft silver sound in the high dry leaves. The loose crowd of spectators dispersed. The other hustlers turned peevish faces toward the sky, then rolled up their boards and folded them into long zippered cases.

“Italian,” my father said. “That’s what I could go for now.”

“We do have a tab, here, Roger,” said Dwayne.

My father’s losses came to forty dollars, but Dwayne did not look pleased, even as he pocketed the bills. Dwayne held out his hand to the rain, and the drops made dark spots on his dry hand. He shook his head. “Rain is a heavenly thing,” he said. “And it comes to us from a heavenly direction, but it does make for one unheavenly motherfucker of an evening out here on this boulevard.”

My father turned to Dwayne and fixed him with a stern, paternal look.

“You look like a veal man to me,” my father said. “When’s the last time somebody set you up with a nice hot plate of veal?”

“I can’t recall,” said Dwayne.

“You come with me,” my father said. “We’ll get you squared away.”

“Roger–” Lucy started.

“Uh-oh,” said my father gravely. He was staring down at his right shoe. The laces had come undone, and he squinted up at Lucy and me, uncertain and overwhelmed by this new problem whose scope he seemed unable to gauge. Without hesitating, Lucy knelt and tied his shoe. Then she set off toward MacDougal Street. “There’s a jolly person,” said my father, watching Lucy’s rump swinging in her jeans. “Does she go to your school?”

Part Four

The restaurant Lucy chose was an old-style place of dark wood where large men in collared shirts stood at the bar and roared at one another over a calming frenzy of piped-in mandolins.

“Does this look all right to you, Rog?” Lucy asked my father.

My father turned to Dwayne and clapped a hand to his meaty upper arm. “What say, there, Wade? How’s your appetite, buddy? Ready to hit a lick on some veal?”

“Let it happen,” said Dwayne.

The host appraised us — Dwayne, my father in his haute Western upholstery, Lucy and her weeping eye — and led us to a dark rear room. The only other diners there were a well-dressed elderly black couple who had the enclosed, penitent air of people who had just finished an argument.

“Piña colada, please,” Dwayne told the host before we sat.

“Your server will be here in just a moment,” he said.

“Piña colada! Make it two. One for him, one for me,” my father said.

“Beer,” said Lucy. “Whatever’s coldest. Vodka back.”

The host departed in a smolder. My father looked down at my tea cistern, which stood between our chairs.

“What the hell is that thing?” he asked.

I explained it to him.

“You’re in the beverage trade?” he asked.

“I’m an industrial designer. An inventor. You know that, Dad.”

He grunted. “Go to law school. Make a difference.”

“I do make a difference,” I said. He looked at me. I sputtered on about what a grand business it was, to be a foot soldier in mankind’s never-ending struggle for convenience, and how the small, unobserved technologies — remote key fobs, ballpoint pens, Q-tips — shaped our lives in more significant ways than music, books, or film. “People who do what I do, Dad, we’re the executors of important energies, the same stuff that builds nations, the conviction that–”

The waiter arrived, and my father lunged for his piña colada. Then he sucked at it as though it were an oxygen mask.

“You have to help me here,” said Lucy quietly.

“With what?” I asked.

“Don’t let him get a second drink,” she said. “It’s the meds, I guess. He can’t handle it anymore. He had three wines at the Angus Barn a few weeks back. He was eating stew with his hands. Ow, fuck.”

Lucy reached a hand under her shirt to attend to a stiff thread poking her ribs. Dwayne watched her with a goatish look.

“Can I help you?” Lucy asked him.

“Undoubtedly,” he said. “You’re helping me right now.”

Lucy looked to my father, who had turned sideways in his chair, watching the black couple’s table, where the waiter was demonstrating a bottle of white wine.

“Look at that,” he said. “We got here first, and they’re being served already.”

“No,” I said. “They got here first. We’ve been served already.”

But he seemed not to hear. The spectacle of the waiter pouring a tasting portion into our neighbor’s glass captivated him. The man sipped and gave a curt nod. “Look, they poured out the wine for that black man to taste,” my father said, leering in wonderment at the man’s precocity, as though he were watching a squirrel wash a cracker. “Isn’t that something?”

This stunned me. My father had been in many ways a rough, unpleasant man, though dislike of one race or another had never been one of his pet brutalities. During his legal career, he’d prided himself on being a fierce egalitarian and a stalwart for unpopular causes, though it seemed to me he tussled less for righteousness than the pleasure of the fight. In his pro bono work, he liked representing doers of sensational evil and generally got good results for them in court. Dungeon keepers. Home invaders with a taste for elder flesh. A boy, now famous in death for his botched ride in the electric chair, who killed a woman with a brake shoe and left her infant crawling the shoulder of a rural route. He found much pleasure in recounting for my mother and me the stories of his “guys,” the details of their cases, the last expressions of the murdered, etc., to confirm himself as the captain of all knowledge, ugly and good. Before I’d finished second grade, my father was imparting axioms like “Burt, fight to the death before you let somebody put you in his car. Either way, you’re probably dead, and believe me, it’s better to check out before they get creative on you.”

But he also went after quieter cases, too: housing and hiring discrimination, worker’s compensation. Though I’d always sensed something cheap and spiteful in my father’s righteousness — an easy way for him to put himself above the rest of us — he did win a lot of money for people who needed it. It’s probably true that my father did more good for other people in his work than I ever will in my career. The merry bigot before me now depressed
me as deeply as anything I’d seen in his decline.

Back at the couple’s table, the asperity I’d noticed when we first walked in seemed to have recongealed. “It wasn’t Villainy, Judith,” the man snapped at his companion. “It was Villandry. That was the place we rode the bikes along the river and the hotel leaked and you ate that pork loin cooked in pâté and you got a stomachache. Villandry. Whoever heard of a town called Villainy?”

My father shook his head, frowning in mock-rueful satisfaction. “They can dress up, can’t they?” he said. “But they still act the same.”

Then he stood, and I was afraid he was going to go to the couple’s table and bait them in some way, but he made for the restroom.

“Is he okay in there by himself?” I asked Lucy.

“He can still recognize a toilet, thank God.”

Dwayne took a roll from the bread basket, tore it in half, and pressed it flat into the olive oil dish. He had his eyes on Lucy while he chewed.

“I know a man you need to meet,” he said.

“Oh, good,” said Lucy.

“You ever hear of Aristedes Fontenot?” Dwayne said. “Top sculptor in New York. Friend of mine. I know he will want to make a statue of your face.”

Lucy took a breath to say something, but instead she hailed the waiter for another vodka.

“He’s your husband,” Dwayne said, jerking his head toward the bathroom.

“Yeah,” said Lucy.

“He doesn’t act like it,” Dwayne said.

“I don’t see how that’s your business,” Lucy said.

“Just let me say this,” Dwayne said with a cockeyed grin. “If I had someone nice-looking like you, I’d act like it till there wasn’t none left.”

Lucy closed her eyes and laughed and Dwayne laughed, too. “I like you, Dwayne,” she said. “Come on, let’s go out back.” She smacked the table with her hand. “You think they got an ‘out back’ at this joint?”

“Lucy, please stop,” I said. My father had emerged from the restroom and was walking toward us.

She covered half her face with her hand and looked at Dwayne with her injured eye. “Why?” she said. “He looks pretty good like this.”

“Talk to me, Dwayne,” said Lucy, when all the bread had been eaten and the conversation flagged and the feeling at the table was of strangers on a cruise, seated together by happenstance. “You make your living that way? Hustling chess in the park?”

“I suppose, if you can call it a living.”

“What do you call it, Dwayne?” she asked him.

“Well, the game is a lucrative addiction. In my soul, I am a musician.”

I asked Dwayne what he played, and before he could answer, my father sat forward in his seat and began to clear his throat at full volume, an angry, engine-revving sound. “So, Wade,” my father said gruffly.

“Yes, Roger?”

My father didn’t answer. His lips moved silently, and I realized he had nothing to say. He only wished to keep Lucy and me from getting a word in with Dwayne, whom he apparently considered a special friend he didn’t want to share. My father’s long-standing fondness for strangers aside, it baffled me that he’d taken such a passionate liking to the hustler. But then, perhaps it was this: perhaps he knew he was slipping away from Lucy and me. He felt the terrible humiliation of it, and could be at ease only in the company of someone with whom he had no past to forget.

We watched my father, his mouth opening and closing, his shoulders hunched, his eyes cast down.

“Paul Morphy,” he said at last. “Opera Game. Black takes the Philidor Defense, am I right?”

“My friend, I could not say,” said Dwayne.

My father pursed his lips, dismayed. “Waiter,” he called out, rattling the ice in his glass. “Drought conditions over here.”

“How about let’s hold off there, Pops,” I said.

“How about you kiss my ass?”

“In answer to your question, Burt, I am a horn player,” Dwayne said, miming a flurry of saxophone riffs. The fingerings looked fairly professional. “I sing as well. Are you familiar with the recording artist Kenny Loggins?”

“You played with Kenny Loggins?” Lucy said.

“I did blow for Kenny on the European tour. My wife and me, we also blessed his outfit with some very beautiful backing vocals. Saw all the top destinations, stayed in fine hotels, rode all the major airlines, Qantas, Virgin Atlantic. I’m glad you brought it up. That was a happy time of life.”

“You still married, Dwayne?” she asked.

“Enough about me,” Dwayne said. “I’m getting depressed.”

“You used to sing, Roger,” said Lucy. “I’d forgotten that about you.”

“I did?” my father said.

“Yeah, you did,” said Lucy. “Mornings. You sang a lot in the mornings.”

My father grasped the saltshaker with both hands and ran his thumbnail pensively along the grid of rumpled glass. “What’d I sing?” he asked without looking up.

“Sam Cooke. Elvis. Some Leonard Cohen. You did a pretty good Velvet Fog.”

He looked at her, and I could see the muscles around his eyes tense for a moment and then relax. “You’ve got your facts screwed up.”

Lucy watched my father for a moment and then turned to Dwayne. “How about you, Dwayne. Why don’t you sing something? Sing for me.”

“Right here?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “Sing for me right here.”

So Dwayne started to hum a little overture, and even that hum was a thing of real quality, a practiced, dusky baritone, and he knew how to make it swell from the deep place in his chest. The couple at the next table looked over at him, ready to get mad, but they held off, looking unsure of themselves, wondering perhaps if Dwayne might be a famous man caught in a late-career spell of bad luck. Then the singing started, some old song I’d never heard before. Whatever it was, Dwayne sang it in a wondrous way. The melody unraveled in a barreling curve that only hovered near the song’s true line, corkscrewing up out of the tune. He sang in many voices at once, a roisterous calliope. At the front, a slick, showy tenor; behind that, a lumbering, tuneful goon chiming in on the bass; and a manic soprano wandering in and out of the line.

Lucy’s pleasure in the moment was wonderful to see. She let her head loll on her shoulder, showing the handsome vein in her neck. Her face went young with joy and shyness. Sand filled my throat, and I saw my father’s wife as I’d wanted her many years ago.

Only my father didn’t share in the gladness of the room. He stretched his jaw in the usual tic. He gripped his butter knife hard enough to pale his knuckles, and I was afraid he was going to smash his plate with it. But then Dwayne wound to his final flourish. Lucy led the applause. Dwayne’s small reptilian eyes swiveled in his head. “Usually, for that type of performance, five dollars is the standard contribution.”

Lucy laughed. “I’ll give you five bucks, but first you have to sing me one more song.”

Dwayne shrugged. “You’re fucking with a man’s price structure, but all right. Let’s see.”

“No more,” my father barked. He was scanning the tablecloth irritably, as though something he’d misplaced was there, hiding in plain sight. “No more songs. This is a restaurant, for Christ’s sake, and speaking of, can somebody tell me where the hell is that veal?”

“Just shut up,” Lucy told my father. “Would you please shut up, Roger? Just this one time?”

My father’s nostrils flared, and his features distended in sneering contempt. Cupping a hand to his mouth, he turned to Dwayne. “Now, I don’t know who this woman is,” he said in a voice loud enough for the room to hear, “and I don’t know why she’s in my house with me. But I’ll be honest with you. I think I’d like to try and fuck her.”

Dwayne burst into braying laughter, and so did the barroom men and so did the boy in the clip-on tie lingering in the door. Lucy’s face was blank. With perfect calmness, she reached across the table and took a cigarette from the pack of Newports at Dwayne’s elbow. We all watched her stand and yank the coat from the back of my father’s chair. He pitched forward slightly. His fork hit the bell of his empty wineglass, striking a high, clean note that went on ringing until his wife was out the door.

Part Five

I bolted down my gnocchi so quickly that it formed a baseball in my throat, while my father and Dwayne sucked and panted over their scaloppine. I was rigid with anger, at the farce of the dinner, at having wasted an evening that at this time tomorrow my father surely wouldn’t recall. As soon as Lucy returned to the beef cheeks congealing on her plate, I planned to excuse myself and go home.

But ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed and Lucy didn’t reappear. I rose. I couldn’t find her in the bar, and she wasn’t out smoking on the sidewalk. The uncivil waitress I enlisted couldn’t find her in the ladies’ room.

“She’s gone, incidentally,” I told my father.

He frowned and grunted, as though I’d just read him a distressing headline on a subject he didn’t entirely understand. I tried Lucy’s phone. It rang in my father’s pants.

We loitered for another twenty minutes over coffee. By then the place was filling up and the waiter, unbidden, delivered our check. My father gazed down at the little folio but didn’t open it. His eyes were tired and dull with colada rheum. “A hundred and fifty-seven bucks, Dad,” I said, reading the bill. “Thank you, by the way.”

“I can’t pay,” my father said.

“Why not?”

“Wallet’s in my coat,” my father said. I sighed and slipped my credit card into the plastic flap.

Out on the sidewalk, rain had stopped, but the autumn chill had solidified into a true and bitter cold. My father, in his shirtsleeves, wrapped his arms about himself and shrank into his collar.

“I’m putting you in a cab,” I said. “What’s your hotel?”

“Not sure,” he said.

“Son of a bitch,” I cried. “You don’t know?” I grabbed my father and turned his pockets out, looking for a room key or a card. He submitted to the search without protest, looking at me with fearful eyes.

“That’s cold,” clucked Dwayne, who for reasons that weren’t clear had not yet bid us adieu. “Shaking your old man down like that.”

“Stay out of it,” I snapped. “We’ve got to find her. She’s walking. I guess I’ll just spend a fucking fortune on a cab and see if we can find her on the street.”

“If I may,” said Dwayne, “I do have a vehicle at my disposal. It would be my pleasure to drive you boys around.”

“You’ve got a car, Dwayne?” I said.

“I do indeed,” he said. “Just around the corner. I’ll go get it. One small difficulty. Where I have it stowed, I need a dub to get it out.”

“What’s he want?” my father asked.

“He wants twenty dollars,” I said.

“Okay. So give it to him.”

“I don’t think I will.”

“Quit dicking around,” my father said. “It’s late and I’m tired. Give him that money.”

I gave Dwayne the bill, and he sauntered off down the street. My father clutched himself while the traffic bleated and the crowds brushed past and the wind made a frowsy ruin of his thin gray hair. “It sure will be nice to get into that car,” he said.

“There isn’t any car,” I said. “He isn’t coming back. That was another twenty dollars of mine you just threw away.”

My father rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet and looked off in the direction Dwayne had gone.

“Tell me you’re sorry,” I told him.

He squinted against the wind, his face like a fist. “For what? For the money? For the bill?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s start there. The twenty. Say you’re sorry for that.”

He gazed down the sidewalk, where a pigeon was pecking at a cocktail sword. It got the blade in its beak and waddled proudly down the street and vanished, turning right on Minetta Lane. At last, my father sighed and said something in a quiet, remorseful voice.

“What?” I said. “Say that again, so I can hear.”

He grimaced, hunching slightly as though a sudden pain had gripped his stomach. “Bishop,” he said, and turned away.

“Bishop,” I repeated.

“Bishop to G-5 pins Black’s knight against the queen.”

Seconds later, an aged white Mercedes pulled up, Dwayne’s wide greenish face leering at us from behind the wheel. Dwayne reached over and let the passenger door swing wide. “You came back,” I said.

“True,” said Dwayne.

The backseat was full of newspapers and bedding. A grim reek of urine and old laundry was close in the car. My father and I shouldered in together on the bench seat. Wind was blowing through the passenger’s-side window, and when I reached across my father to work the crank, a crumbling horizon of glass rose in the pane and spilled into my father’s lap.

“Yeah. Some asshole broke that out,” said Dwayne.

My father said nothing. His teeth were chattering, and his lips hung slack and wet. He looked hopelessly old, and his eyes were large and vacant. A sorrow hit me then, and I might have embraced him or taken his hand, but Dwayne hit the gas, and the Mercedes leaped across Houston Street. We struck a pothole with a heavy thud. The impact sent swaying the load of junk and bangles hanging from Dwayne’s rearview — Mardi Gras beads, feathered gewgaws, sports medallions — and my father watched the swinging mess with all the fascination of an infant watching the mobile over his crib. He reached out and caught hold of a miniature New Mexico license plate. He frowned at the embossed letters reading “Land of Enchantment.”

“What is this?” he asked.

“It’s just some bullshit I picked up on the road,” said Dwayne.

“No, this word here, ‘enchantment.’ What’s that mean, again?”

“Shit,” said Dwayne. “You know what charm is, Roger?”

“Of course,” my father said.

“It’s like that, like charm.”

My father leaned against me, studying the orange Braille.

“Land of Charm,” he said.