It Takes a Worried Man

Bliss

Frederick Becker had lived near Griffith Park in a grimy, sparsely furnished apartment for three weeks now, with only a week to go. He had a rocking chair and a lamp. He had a stove — an evil-looking thing, sheathed in hard, black grease, smelling of gas, waiting to explode in the corner, he was sure. He hated going near it. For eight years, Ruth had fixed his meals. He’d never learned to do more than set an oven, pull up a seat, and watch a frozen turkey sweat until he could eat it.

Roaches, tough as old toenails, scooted across his sticky orange carpets. The damn bugs here were big enough to nudge the books from his shelves. He imagined them laughing, wildly wringing their antennae, at the meager fare he fed his mind with these days. Mickey Spillane. Perry Mason. Just this morning he’d sold his broken-spined Wittgenstein (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) to a half-price bookstore down the street.

Philosophy was too thick a tongue just now; these days, whenever he opened his mouth, it was all he could do not to scream.

An old freezer, a recliner missing half its stuffing, a palm-sized transistor radio, and several unstretched canvases rounded out the apartment’s decor.

This evening, after eating his instant rice and Birds Eye peas, he switched on the radio. Kennedy again — the man was getting tiresome — warning Khrushchev out of Cuba. “I promise you, the Commies won’t bite,” Frederick said aloud to his dying yellow ivy plant. “Our missiles are bigger than theirs.” The ivy dropped a leaf. He lit a Chesterfield, unstuck a window. Houston slipped, volatile and dolorous, into the room, a faint scent on its breath of freshly mown grass, cow shit (the rodeo was in town), and car exhaust.

Hoffmann, Frederick’s tortoiseshell cat, rubbed his matted fur on the telephone receiver. Frederick dialed Ruth’s number, wondering if he should have mixed himself a drink first.

Of course, she was angry when she answered.

“Rough day?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.

“What do you want?”

“I was hoping to say goodnight to Robbie before the Sandman comes to visit.

“I sent him to bed early. He was a little monster all night. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sit still for his bath.”

Hoffmann chased a fire ant through the kitchen. Frederick rubbed his sleepless eyes. The whisper of a headache — sparklers, spitting hotly — sprinkled his vision. “Ruthie, is he still awake? Can I speak to him?” He tried to grasp the Dewar’s, just out of reach on a counter, without pulling the phone cord out of the wall. His throat, his brain, winced with need.

“No. I don’t hear anything now,” Ruth said. “Maybe he’s down finally.”

“That’s no way to treat him, Ruth.”

“His routine’s disturbed,” she said. Scolding, like a nun. “He keeps expecting Daddy to walk through the door.”

“All right, all right, I’ll come by tomorrow and he and I can rip the heels of your shoes off together. Something happy like that.” Always, in uncomfortable conversations, Frederick tried to make a distancing joke. He knew this about himself and attempted to relax more with people, especially those he loved. But Ruth … Ruth was so damned hard.

From his window he could see the park, the sculpture garden with its bright green benches, its steel birds and beasts, ceramic animals. Beyond the park’s brittle willows was the hospital Ruth had rushed him to one night when he’d accidentally cut his arm with an X-Acto knife. “What about Hoffmann? Please?”

“Hoffmann’s your problem. I hate that cat. You found him, you keep him.”

“I can’t take him to Manhattan, Ruth. He was born for this humidity.”

“Well, you should’ve planned your exit a little better.”

Now Hoffmann was batting the wilted ant around a stack of Frederick’s papers: sketches, letters, the rough draft of the catalog preface for his buddy, Mark Jarvis — Frederick’s last official business as a citizen of Houston.

“I didn’t plan any of this, honey, you know that — ” He didn’t finish the thought; he’d only make a mess, much worse than the one Hoffmann had just made of his work. Besides, he was lying, and he knew Ruth knew it.

“Whatever,” she answered bitterly.

She hadn’t responded to his little slip. The word “honey” had startled him, filling his mouth, as surprising as his memories, attaching now to meals they’d shared together in the old days. She’d always made the most wonderful Italian sauces, Frederick recalled, with bacon or prosciutto. Now, as they talked, he tasted her pasta carbonara.

They agreed on a time for his visit tomorrow with Robbie. The moment he hung up, he went for the Scotch. This was the last bottle he’d buy. Ever. As soon as he got to New York, he’d flush his system, disappear into his paintings and Bliss, the new art journal he’d recently been hired to edit.

The booze steadied his hands. The glimmers in his eyes subsided. He considered unplugging the phone. His number was one digit different from a suicide-prevention hotline’s. Each night he was assaulted by misery, as sharp and immovable as Mark’s statues in the park, but he left the damn thing alone. Robbie might wake, sick, in the middle of the night. Or Ruth’s heart, wrapped in rancor as tight as tinfoil, might warm up a little. If not, he figured he could live with the agonizing wrong numbers another week.

Marlon Brando yelled from down the block. Next to the corner superette where Frederick bought his snacks, a second-run theater was screening Elia Kazan movies all month. The ushers left the back doors open in the city’s summer broil; the actors’ voices soared above the ratcheting sounds of crickets, just gearing up in the park.

It didn’t matter if people snuck into the building, the theater manager told Frederick One night as On the Waterfront’s final credits rolled. The place was losing money anyway, like all the rest of the neighborhood. Charlie’s Drugstore had closed after twenty-five years; the junior high couldn’t replace its busted windows. The city council simply ignored this part of town. That’s why Mark Jarvis, who loved the south side, had volunteered to provide, free of charge, a series of playful sculptures for the Griffith Park Renovation Project, an attempt by local residents to rejuvenate the neighborhood. He lived nearby in an old auto-repair garage that doubled as his studio. Its walls were covered with nailed-up 2×4s, sheets of rusty metal — fodder for his sculptures — and maps of Paraguay, where he hoped to visit his favorite former lover someday.

He’d found this apartment for Frederick when the marriage with Ruth gave way. In return, Frederick agreed to write a catalog piece for Mark’s upcoming show at the Contemporary Arts Museum.

Yellow fog — mosquito spray released by big white city trucks — hung now in the park’s thick trees, settled on the backs of Mark’s glorious stone butterflies, his bow-tied lizards. Follies, Mark had called them, “useless and fanciful,” defining his own work for Frederick’s preface. “Someday,” he’d added, when Frederick pressed for details, “I want to make something so perfect, so light and airy, it can’t be sullied by language.” Frederick planned a breakfast picnic over there tomorrow morning, to inspect the sculptures in more detail.

He poured himself another drink — only half a glass this time. The phone rang. “There’s no reason,” the caller, a young woman by the sound of her, said. “No reason at all.”

“Excuse me — ”

“I swear, if I don’t get some help, my wrists’ll be ribbons. You hear me? I’ve got the knife right here. I’m not kidding around — ”

“Excuse me. I’m sorry,” Frederick said. “But you’ve got the wrong number.”

“What?”

The Scotch soured his mouth. He swallowed awkwardly. “This isn’t the hotline.”

She shouted, “Is this MU8-7385?”

“Eight four,” Frederick said softly.

“Oh. Well, then. Sorry. Thank you.”

“Sure,” Frederick said. “Good luck.” He didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

Often at night, on his walks back home from the corner superette, Frederick stopped in Griffith Park, near the medical center, and watched the rain of roses, lilies, daisies drift to the ground from the hospital’s narrow ninth floor.

He’d learned of this odd display one afternoon in the park from a doctor, who’d told him, “The schizophrenics are on nine.” The man had been taking a break, a quick smoke in the sculpture garden. Frederick was strolling, worrying about his family, his upcoming move. Surrounded by exquisite winged tigers, mermaids, griffins, the men passed a few minutes talking.

“Schizophrenia,” Frederick said. The word, stilted and ugly, unsettled him. “It’s probably more common than we think, right? I mean, I can’t even go shopping without developing a split personality.” He laughed nervously. “Do I want the frozen carrots today or the frozen corn? I can never make up my mind.”

“Schizophrenia’s a breakdown between emotions, thoughts, and actions,” said the doctor, a young man with a slightly pinched resemblance to Buddy Holly. He politely agreed that warring impulses fueled the disease, but insisted it was far more complicated than split personality. “It’s frequently accompanied by hallucinations and delusions.” He ground his cigarette on the concrete head of a waist-high beast. Willow limbs trembled above the park’s stiff grass.

Frederick felt ashamed of his feeble joke. He didn’t say anything.

The doctor stretched his arms. “Well, I hate to miss this sunshine, but I’ve got to get back now and check on Sal,” he said.

“Who?” Frederick said.

“Hm?”

“Sal?”

“Oh, sorry. Patient of mine. Interesting case.” The doctor wiped his glasses on the light-green tail of his medical smock. “I’m not really supposed to talk about this.” But he went on, laughing, when Frederick nodded his interest. “Sal’s a former salesman — Bibles or something, religious icons. Charismatic, quite forceful. He’s certain he’s an angel.”

Frederick smiled, wondering now if the doctor was joking with him.

“The others in the ward have followed Sal’s lead. They get bouquets, you know, from their families. Each night they toss petals through the bars of their open windows. Somehow, Sal’s convinced them they’re sowing blessings on the earth.” He was serious, Frederick saw. The doctor sighed, a weary mixture of frustration and amusement. “I’m not quite sure what to do with them all. Well. Can’t put it off. Heaven’s waiting.” He moved in the direction of the hospital. “See you later.”

“Nice chatting with you,” Frederick said.

Most evenings since, he’d found a bench among the sculptures, a seat near the elves. He clutched his grocery sacks bulging with heat ‘n’ serve snacks and waited for a blessing.

Tonight the rain came at dusk: pink, violet, purple blossoms swaying on the breeze, the thin mosquito mist, nesting, finally, in the park’s managed thickets. Frederick squinted up at the ninth-floor windows, glimpsed, now and then, pale, slender hands. He recalled the fleeting, bemused figures flying through the paintings of Chagall.

“Stell-a!” Marlon screamed from down the street. Faint laughter and applause from the theater audience.

Dizzy from staring — seraphim-struck — Frederick ambled back to his apartment. He unpacked his food. True to the vow he’d made himself, he hadn’t bought more booze, though the Dewar’s was nearly gone. He switched on his radio. Saber-rattling over Cuba. He turned it off, blotted the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Ungodly heat swarmed the apartment. Even Hoffmann, usually alert for critters scrabbling across the kitchen floor, had sunk in front of the lone portable fan by the bed.

A mighty, mighty thirst. No, Frederick thought. When you finish this bottle, that’s it. Save it till the end of the week.

He picked up Perry Mason. The phone rang. He groaned. Pills? Gas? Gun? Lord, he couldn’t face another human extinction. Not tonight.

Besides, he thought, smiling now, rousing himself from his chair, Mark will offer me something to drink.

Sure enough, Mark was deep into a bottle of bourbon. His garage, thick with blazing light, pale, swirling bugs, was a sweat lodge. He was hammering on some kind of claw foot in a vise on his workbench when Frederick walked in, calling, “Knock-knock.”

“Hey, man! What’s up?”

“World War Three.”

“Tell me about it. Grab a glass from the shelf over there. Let me introduce you to an owlamander.” He held up a pudgy piece of steel, fashioned to evoke part bird, part reptile. “This’ll go in the museum show.”

Frederick appraised his friend’s progress. An aviary, a menagerie, all shaped from the city’s detritus: belt buckles (fishes’ open mouths), garden spades (the long snouts of dogs), rusted forks (feathered plumes). The cars Mark repaired to pay his bills were parked outside: crumpled Chevies, sun-blistered Fords.

Frederick poured himself some whiskey; calm now, he watched his friend putter. Mark was short, shaped like a pear. With gentle pressure from his fingers, with screws and nails and fire, he populated his little corner of the planet with a witty, whimsical brood. Sometimes, one of them bit. “Godfrey Daniel!” he cried now, swaddling his left thumb in the crotch of his shorts. He’d nicked himself with the hammer.

Frederick offered him the bottle. “Doctor’s orders,” he said. “Need some ice? A cold cloth?”

“Naw. It’ll be okay.” He sat on a stool. “It’s just a three-minute throb, I can tell.”

One night, a year or so ago, Mark’d been nailing a pair of golf cleats — fangs — into a tin oval shaped like the mouth of a snake. Frederick was drinking with him that evening too, watching Mark work, relaxing in the pure, dumb wordlessness of someone else’s concentration. The tin warped under pressure; the snake struck. A cleat fired upwards like a bullet, hitting Mark in the left temple, knocking him cold to the floor. Panicked, Frederick had carried him, limp, beneath the willows, all the way through Griffith Park to the medical center.

He hadn’t prayed since childhood, forced to kneel on cold chapel floors by his Jesuit teachers. Now, his pleas to God for Mark’s recovery sounded to him thin and insupportable.

For three days after regaining consciousness, Mark could answer only “Paraguay” to any question put to him. Frederick explained to the doctors that maps of Paraguay lined Mark’s studio. “He has an old lover from there.”

“Do you know who you are?”

“Paraguay.”

“Where do you live?”

“Paraguay.”

“Does this hurt?”

“Para … Paraguay.”

The whole time, an insane smile, almost angelic, fixed his face. “Brain trauma” was all the doctors said. On the fourth day Mark recovered full speech. He had no memory of the accident. “I feel fine,” he insisted; tests proved him fit.

Later, to Frederick, he confided a mild depression. “At first I was frustrated when I couldn’t speak,” he said. “But then … it was like the world fell away without any words to glue it in place.”

“What do you mean?”

“No Pay the following amount, no Reserved Parking. I don’t know … I was free, unencumbered except for that sound. Paraguay. Like living in a bell, in the ringing of that word. No worries. No deadlines. I tell you, man, it was bliss. The perfection I’m always chasing in my work. I miss it.”

Ever since, his already prodigious drinking had increased, and Frederick joined him most nights, searching for the beauty of “brain trauma,” the bleaching out of the harsh, heavy world. Ex-wives. Dying neighborhoods. Bills. But drunkenness didn’t deliver Frederick from worry, from the evils of a lonely apartment, a time-bomb stove. “Still,” Mark said, clattering and banging through junk — his way of thinking out loud — “it’s what we have.”

Now, Mark strained a painful smile, gripped his hammered thumb. “So. Painting?” he said.

Frederick shook his head. “I’ve already shipped most of my materials to New York. Just trying to wrap things up here — and finish your preface.”

“I really appreciate it, man. I’m going to miss you.”

“Me too.” He raised his glass. “Better now?”

“Some. How’s Robbie?”

“I’ll see him tomorrow.”

“Ruthie’s still —?”

“Stone.”

“Hey, you gotta do what’s best for the work,” Mark said.

Frederick nodded. Above the bench, Mark’s largest, most colorful map of Paraguay curled in the heat. Moths ticked against the great, wide plains, the sand-like spires of Asunción. “How’s your friend?” Frederick asked.

“Saucy as ever. Called me last night.”

He’d met Serena a couple of years ago, in a bar, when she was visiting a cousin here in the States. “Another saucy señorita,” Mark had said at the time. “I’m telling you, they know how to package the goods down south.” Now he said, “If I sell some pieces at the show, maybe I can afford to go see her. Frolics and bliss, man, the moon and the stars. Fellow can’t labor all the time. Remember that when you get to the Apple.”

On a silver hook in the wall, Mark’s tin snake coiled around a radiator cap. He’d finished the piece last year, soon after leaving the hospital. The old altar boy in Frederick, long dormant, revived whenever he saw it. It reminded him of Bible illustrations he’d seen as a kid of the serpent of temptation, locked around the limb of a tree.

Its body was a garden hose painted silver. Slowly, Frederick edged away from it. “Need a cat?” he asked.

“Hoffmann? Sure. Leave that tiger with me,” Mark said.

“I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the move.”

“You’re joking.”

“No.”

Mark picked up the screwdriver. “Freddie, you just told me you’d shipped your stuff. The magazine’s waiting for you, right? The editors?”

“Yep.”

“Ballsiest thing you ever did, man, flying out there. I couldn’t believe it. Ruth thought you were — what — zipping up to Dallas that week?”

“To meet a gallery owner who’d liked my work.” Actually, he’d seen an ad in Art-News, phoned, and arranged an interview in the Village with the magazine’s founding editors. “She was very excited for me. Always supportive.”

“It’s not her support you need.”

In the last year, she’d had no idea how completely he’d left her already. Desire in me — ambition — is stronger than self-sacrifice, Frederick thought. He felt clammy.

“All the art world’s there. It’s your chance, man. No choice.” Mark licked his ravaged thumb. “Freddie, you’re too good to wither away here in Texas. Houstonians, they don’t know Picasso from Pecos Bill.”

“The sin of pride.”

“Hm?”

“A biggie back in Catholic school. A real land mine. Did I ever tell you, the Jesuits — ”

“Oh Christ, man, let it go. You’ve found steady work in the only city that matters for a painter. You won’t get another shot like this, I guarantee it. It’s your career, man.”

“I’m abandoning my kid.”

“He’s a kid. Right. That’s the point. I’ve told you this. He’ll adjust. Nothing’s fixed in his world. He’ll grow up not knowing any better.”

“Schizophrenia,” Frederick said.

“Are you still in love with Ruth?”

“Yes. No.”

Mark lifted the bottle. The snake hung, ready to spring. “I’ll be waiting for that cat,” he said.

Kennedy claimed that the entire southern quarter of the United States, including Texas, could be vaporized by nuclear attack if the Russians got a foothold in Cuba.

Robbie watched the jumpy television screen. His eyes wouldn’t leave the president’s face, even while Frederick knelt beside him on the living-room floor, tugging a T-shirt over his pale little arms. Kennedy’s eyes looked puffy, Frederick thought. He wondered how much Robbie understood. To Robbie, the Leader of the Free World was probably just another cartoon; after all, the man’s charming good looks, the huge white house he lived in, were larger than life. Even Frederick found them hard to believe.

Now Khrushchev was Wile E. Coyote, scheming to capture the world’s freedoms. A furry finger on a button. Beep beep.

“It’s too small,” Ruth said from the doorway into the kitchen. She leaned against the jamb in a yellow cotton dress that stirred companionable feelings in Frederick. He guessed she’d worn it one night to a wonderful dinner, or prior to making love, back in the days before their own awful fallout.

Finger on a button, indeed.

It hadn’t taken much gentle stroking to set her off, when she was just a blushing young bride. Frederick remembered simmering nights with the shades up and the sheets in a desperate bedside tussle.

Now, she wouldn’t hold his gaze.

He checked the shirt’s torn package. “How can it be too small?” he said. “This is the same size I bought him before.”

“That was six months ago. He’s changed a lot since then, in case you haven’t noticed.” She smoothed her thin brown hair.

He stood unsteadily. “I’ve noticed everything, Ruth.”

“Good,” she said, folding her arms so they lifted her breasts, just slightly. “Because it’s all going to change, and you won’t be here to see it.” A sob caught her final word, like a trap folding in on a mouse, and she turned away, into the kitchen.

Robbie remained fascinated by the beautiful man talking doom, so Frederick left him in front of the screen.

“Ruth,” he whispered, placing his palms on her shoulders from behind. She wobbled, and they listed against the kitchen table. It moved an inch or two across the floor. Its wooden legs barked on the freshly waxed red tiles.

“Your fucking future,” she said through her hands.

He tried to laugh. “Don’t you want me to have one?”

“Not without us.”

“Then come with me. I offered.” But his offer hadn’t been real, and she’d known that.

Or more accurately: he’d meant it, but she knew already, from her life with him here — how could he deny it? the long nights in the studio, the brooding (Wittgenstein, Mickey Spillane, it didn’t matter), the drinking with Mark — she’d always be an afterthought to his burgeoning career.

New York was the place, by God, to burgeon! Mark was right about the art world. And Ruthie loved Houston. Frederick knew that. Her mother and father were here, in a nursing home now, needing her weekly visits. For a hundred reasons, she’d never leave.

“I’m sorry, Ruth.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Honey. What can I say?”

“Say it all.”

Free, unencumbered, without any words. He noticed their reflection in a mirror by the back door, the awkward distance between them like a bad dance step. “I have said it all. You knew, when we married, how vital painting was to me — ”

“I know. Go. Just get out. Have him back by seven.” She turned to a foggy pot on her stove. It smelled of cinnamon, all-spice — their earliest meals together, Frederick thought. Freshness and warmth and brimming contentment.

“I really will miss you,” he told her now, sincerely. Still, he couldn’t wait to soar into the clouds, toward Bliss.

His head spun. Did this split in his earthly desires mean he was crazy, or was he, perhaps, an angel? Pulled in all directions by the irrefutable beauty of each option?

He looked up, at the low, plastered ceiling.

“Seven,” Ruth said. “Or I’ll hunt you down like a dog.”

Robbie patted the bird’s steel wings. His crying jag had passed. He’d wanted to see the rodeo — his mother had described for him the stocky steer, the sleek, pretty horses steaming in the sun — but the thought of real animals frightened Frederick today. He wasn’t sure why. “The world is too much with us.” Wordsworth? Tennyson? With Ruth’s sad face — the collapse of her slight, lovely face — in his mind, he needed escape into folly.

So he walked his son through Griffith Park, pausing by each frozen shape to explain how Daddy’s friend had made them all. “This is a serving fork, see, but the way he’s twisted it here — ”

“Feathers! On a big bird’s head!”

“A cockatoo. Do you like it?”

“Yes!” Robbie ran among the beasts, releasing tiny bursts of rainwater left in the ground from an early-morning shower. He was bigger now, Frederick saw (Ruth had changed Robbie’s shirt), too big for a six-year-old. Ruth spoiled him. Overfed him. Well. This slow and creaky crisis pained them all.

In spite of his pudginess, Robbie seemed to float on a pillow of accumulated delight in the world, Frederick noticed, the way Mark’s statues appeared to violate gravity despite their weighty skins. When did disappointment — real awareness of the planet — set in? Eight? Twelve? Twenty?

When did roadrunners turn into red-blooded American patriots? Someday, as if from a witless winter sleep, Robbie would open his eyes and snap back at Frederick for the betrayal his father was about to commit.

But for now, the creatures were harmless, and so was his son.

“What’s this one, Daddy?”

“A mermaid.”

“And this?”

“What’s it look like?”

“A lion!”

He watched his son’s hands slide like starfish over the finely molded shapes, and wondered if the boy had artistry in his fingers.

Would any loving father wish the curse of talent on his child? Better, perhaps, to live a sane and simple life.

He remembered lunching last month with Mark and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. The director was a teetotaler; he watched uneasily as Frederick and Mark ordered glass after glass of glistering wine. Finally, he said, “Tell me, why do so many artists drink so much?”

Mark laughed, as if the question were predictable and silly. “Paraguay,” he said.

Frederick answered, “White.”

“I don’t understand,” said the director.

“All that white, waiting to be filled.” Frederick waved his glass at the waitress. “No matter how many canvases I cover, there’s always another one waiting. Another blank. Another void. All that goddamned, terrifying white.” He blushed then — you knucklehead, he thought. Showing off like a child. Pretentious and puerile. Clumps of heat spread like roots across his cheeks. Mark saved him, and the moment, by toasting the tablecloth. “Look!” he slurred. “See how terrifyingly white it is!” And they laughed.

Around a bench, now, Robbie chased a butterfly, a real one (its movement, its actuality, startled Frederick, surrounded here by so much stillness, and his thoughts). Yes. Sane and simple. Happy in the garden. “Daddy, I’m thirsty!”

“All right, we’ll stop somewhere and get you some lemonade.” He was parched too. The old adage, There’s no such thing as a large whiskey, drifted through his mind as he tottered after his child. Redbirds chittered in the trees.

Machinery yearning to breathe. Ponderous objects longing for the weightlessness of whimsy.

He was still searching for the perfect phrase, the right image, to capture Mark’s art for the catalog.

An army of metal rag mops.

A rusty, peaceable kingdom.

Sharpened toss-offs, born of our city’s inconsolable trash: a fair description of memory, if not Mark’s work, Frederick thought, glancing up now at the hospital Ruth had brought him to, years ago, here at the edge of the park.

“This one, Daddy?”

“A lamb.”

The shrapnel of time.

He’d been roughing out a geometric design one night after dinner, using blue construction paper, a possible study for a painting. He cut a delicate square with his X-Acto knife. Ruth, washing dishes at the kitchen sink, turned and said something to him; distracted, he dropped the point into the meat of his forearm. He protested that he wasn’t badly hurt, but he was bleeding wildly all over his favorite cotton shirt, so she insisted on driving him to the emergency room.

Staring at Robbie now, skipping beside him on the grass, he tried to recover what Ruth had said to him that evening, in a wreath of steam from the sink, and he believed — could this be true? — he recalled her announcing, “I’m pregnant.”

Surely not. Her most hurtful recent comment — the poison she’d slipped into his heart for him to carry to New York — was, “You never wanted a child, did you? You’re sorry he was ever born.” She’d been stitching a sweater when she’d said it, aiming her needle straight at him.

He tightened his grip on Robbie’s hand. Needles and knives. Too much symmetry. She must have said something else while he sliced his thick paper. He didn’t trust his memory on this; no, not at all.

She’d helped him out of the car in the hospital parking lot, right over there, just beyond those trees — touching him more gently that night than at any other moment in their life together.

Throwaways. Tender provisions. Refuse of a sad and patchwork existence.

Laughter. He turned. Buddy Holly and the angels on an afternoon constitutional.

The doctor approached him, wiping his thick black glasses on his smock. “Hello,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

Frederick introduced him to Robbie. The three of them sat on a bench and watched the patients stroll, stretch, wave their hands at the clouds. “I bring them out in small groups once a week for about thirty minutes of exercise,” Porter, the doctor, explained. “There’s not much room on the ward.”

Frederick tried to locate correspondences between the men’s mannerisms and his own. Defensive jokes. Fidgeting fists. Is this me? “So … all these men are schizophrenics?” he asked.

“Not all. I treat a variety of mental disorders. Human frailties, it seems, are ubiquitous.” Porter laughed sadly. “For some of these fellows, the biggest problem is loneliness. Their families have tossed them off. We — whoops, excuse me.” He rose and walked swiftly to a knot of bony men scuffling in the grass.

“What’s … schizophrenics?” Robbie asked his father, twisting his mouth around the hard, skittery word.

“Double-minded men,” Frederick said.

“What do you mean?”

Sand from a nearby playbox blew into his eyes. He blinked. “Well, let’s say you’re in a store and you need two different things, right?”

“What things?”

“Oh … a cabbage-sized pearl or a pair of paper shorts.”

Robbie laughed.

“But you don’t have enough money. You have to choose just one, though living without the other is really going to hurt you. So you stand there and you stand there and you can’t make up your mind?”

“Uh-huh,” Robbie said slowly.

“That’s what I mean. But that’s not it, exactly.” He scratched the back of his head. He rubbed his eyes.

“I’d take the pearl. Paper shorts would itch.”

“I don’t know what I want, exactly. I mean, I don’t know what I mean.” Frederick felt annoyed. He couldn’t explain. “Wait a minute.” His breath quickened. “Stay here,” he said.

He’d glimpsed the Head Angel, the man he guessed was Sal, from Porter’s description. Tall. Fair. Sal wore a faded orange blanket over a white pajama gown. He was humming “Amazing Grace,” stepping regally around the grounds. Frederick approached him carefully, from the side. “Hello,” he said.

Sal beamed at him. His blond hair, thin over a flat, shiny pate, curled in the breeze.

“I admire your … effulgence.” Frederick laughed, touching the blanket with just the tip of his thumb: a gentle, probing joke.

Sal hummed. At his feet, a ceramic tortoise; brassy doorknob legs.

“I’ve seen your blessings at night,” Frederick said.

The angel continued to smile, the hollowest expression Frederick had ever seen, except for Mark’s when he was lying in the hospital, snakebit and babbling.

Was illness a state of grace? Or vice-versa? Could a blessing be a wound?

Why do so many artists drink so much?

“Maybe you have …” Frederick felt silly now. “A special blessing? Just for me?”

Porter called, “All right, guys, time to pack it in.” Sal looked bewildered for a moment, then wandered off, still grinning, nearly tripping on the tortoise.

Frederick felt his face grow hot. He nearly sagged to the ground, shocked at himself. He hadn’t experienced such crushing disappointment since his first church confession as a kid, when admitting his sins — cigarettes, lustful thoughts, excessive pleasure in the fleshy smell of paint (surely a distraction from God’s glories) — changed nothing.

Holy fools.

What did you expect, he grilled himself now, watching Porter gather his patients. He’d known they weren’t really angels, these poor, stricken men.

Still, he’d been so enchanted by the evening displays, the fragments of flowers fluttering down in the dark. The reckless, unreasoning part of him that always found beauty in paint, romance in a casual smile on the street, democracy in the latest election, had hoped for a miracle, a benediction, thick as pancake batter, to smother his transgressions.

“They’re a little too energetic today. Gotta cut it short,” Porter said. He called goodbye. Sal’s blanket dragged the ground, leaving a muddy trail, spiraling, strange, as if from a curious mammal rarely glimpsed.

“Those men were funny,” Robbie said. “Their heads were too big.”

Frederick knelt, shaking, by the bench near his son. He rubbed his sandy eyes until he saw only white. “Robbie? Listen, honey, we don’t have much time together. There’s something — ”

What? What did he have to say? The perfect phrase? What was it? Would it change anything?

“I’m thirsty, Daddy! You said lemonade.”

“Right. Yes. In a minute, I promise. But first there’s something I want you to know. Are you listening?”

Robbie puffed his bottom lip.

“You understand, we’ll have to tell each other goodbye pretty soon,” Frederick said.

“Like those men? Goodbye, goodbye!”

“I mean bigger than that.” Frederick’s knees hurt. “Just because Daddy’s moving, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. You know that, don’t you, son?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me.”

“What?” Robbie squinched his eyes.

“I want you to forgive me.”

“Okay.”

An automatic, unknowing response. But it was better than nothing. Better than the void. “Let’s get that lemonade now.”

On his last day in town, he walked to the half-price bookstore, sold his mystery novels, rebought Wittgenstein, added Hegel on the cycles of history, and an early Kant: airplane reading, companions for his first few days in Manhattan while he unpacked everything else. No more escape fare. Time to be rigorous.

That meant the whiskey too. Out it went, savoring one last drop before the toss into the trash; the booze sizzled in his gullet; the toss, he thought, was heroic.

He’d written Kenneth Koch, Walker Percy, Maurice Natanson, Joseph Lyons, soliciting articles for Bliss. Though the editors referred to it as an art journal, they’d told Frederick they wanted to cover contemporary politics, literature, philosophy as well. They’d been impressed by Frederick’s knowledge of these matters — impressed that anyone from Texas knew such things.

“Self-taught,” he’d said (not entirely true — his father, an architect, stern as any priest, had insisted Frederick breathe the Modern growing up).

He’d hit it out of the park, the interview. He was delighted even more when the editors accepted his title for the magazine.

Bliss. Thy name is New York.

One more box of peas. The freezer was empty. He’d tidied up nicely. The remains of his ivy were gone.

James Dean’s laughter rose above the willows, from the theater. Tonight, East of Eden was on. Frederick had seen it last Sunday — frenetic direction, cut-rate histrionics. Well. The cut-rate had its charms, Frederick thought, trying to empty his mind of Ruth’s tears. At least it was easy to take.

In their (purposeful) clumsiness, their ordinariness, Mark Jarvis’s follies achieve a rare elegance: the sanctity of the everyday, the much-handled, the overlooked. In other words, they’re eerily like us. Treasure them, as you’d treasure your family —

The phone. “Help me,” a woman said softly.

“I’m sorry — ”

“Please help me.”

The voice sounded vaguely … “Who is this?”

“You know who it is.”

“Ruth?” he said. All evening, he’d expected her call. A last goodbye, a final chat with Robbie before space and the wall of many days came between them. “Ruthie, is that you?”

“Help me. Oh God.”

A soft ringing filled his ears, ever since he’d torn himself from his Dewar’s. “Are you at home?”

A roach the size of his nose scurried across the gritty kitchen floor, by the stove where Hoffmann used to wait. His faithful cat, no longer here.

His gentle wife, no longer here.

What have I done?

I’ve done the right thing. “Ruthie?”

“Love me … all I want — ”

“I do, Ruth. Honey, I do.”

“Yes?”

“Of course I do. But you know I can’t stay.” Say it all. “I’m not … I can’t — ”

“Please.”

“Ruth, honey, believe me — ”

“Ruth? Who the fuck is Ruth?”

Frederick’s fingers tingled. Oh Lord. “I’m sorry, I — ”

“Answer me!”

Of course not. How could he have thought it was her? “This is awful. I think we’ve made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got the wrong number,” he said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry. This isn’t the hotline.”

“Asshole.” The phone went dead.

The stove reared on its greasy hind legs. The oven door popped open. Fangs curled from the top of the broiler. A river of gas, then blue and yellow flames. The mighty appliance burst through the wall of Frederick’s apartment, spewing fire across the park. It grew and grew, and wobbled as it grew, its burners all aglow, disintegrating, finally, in the smoke of an ashy mushroom, black on the eastern horizon —

The following morning on the plane, still groggy from his nightmares, Frederick buckled his seatbelt. He dropped his book in his lap.

“Scuse me,” someone said. An elderly man. “I b’lieve that window seat is mine.”

Frederick unfastened himself, half-stood so the fellow could pass. A stewardess in a crisp blue uniform sauntered by, offering magazines. The hem of her jacket brushed the tops of her hips. This pleased Frederick immensely.

Saucy, he thought.

His companion took a Life. “Sure is somethin’ ‘bout Cuber, ain’t it?”

Annoyed — my god, he needed stillness now (Time to grieve? he wondered. For his family? For himself?) — Frederick flipped the pages of his book, and tried to focus his vision. “All this futile grasping after nonsense — ”

By “nonsense,” Wittgenstein meant, apparently, metaphysical concerns, questions of right or wrong, ethics. Spiritual bounty, like the Jesuits used to teach.

Let them go, Frederick thought, recalling Mark’s advice. Those silly old schoolboy lessons — sail them out on the wind.

What did the Jesuits know about the art world? Or marriage?

“You s’pose them Kennedys know what the hell they’re doin’?” the old man next to him said. “Sittin’ up there with their hoity-toity wives. Hell, Havana’s a mite too close to Houston for my taste, eh?”

Frederick closed his eyes. Glimmers.

Robbie, crying, crouched beneath the rusty steel wings of an angel, the sky all red above him: an image from last night’s dreams. Ruth came running through the garden. “Too small!” she yelled. “He won’t be safe there! For God’s sakes, can’t you see he’s grown?” The sky bubbled, a burning crimson canvas.

“Miss?” It hurt to open his eyes.

“Yes, sir?”

“Can I get a Scotch, please?”

“As soon as we’re off the ground, sir.”

“I’m tellin’ you, we get JFK here in Texas, out of his sweet-smellin’ ol’ rose garden, he’ll learn a thing or two about life in the real world. Where’d you say you’re goin’, friend?”

The plane began to hustle down the runway. The tilt. The disconcerting lift. Frederick listened to the bell in his ears. He felt, for a moment, weightless, bathed in solid white from the window. The man beside him was waiting for an answer. On the fellow’s face, a blissful grin.

Frederick gripped the seat. His forearm turned a shallow red. It was scarred, from the night he’d dropped his knife, but not too badly, he noticed, not too badly. Thank you, Ruth. Dear Ruth. He turned to the man. “Paraguay,” he said.