Gone with the Mind

Part III

Q&A (MARK gets down from the table. He notices that both his shoes are untied [they’re brand-new shoes his mother bought him especially for the reading, and they’ve got those slippery, waxy laces that tend to unknot themselves], and he bends down to tie them. And when he stands upright again and looks around, his mom is gone. Gone. He reconnoiters the entirety of the food court, his eyes panning rapidly back and forth as he weaves around the tables and banquettes, and paces several times around the circumference of fast-food franchises — past the Popeyes, Hawaiian Grill, Taste of India, Burger King, Taco Bell, Johnny Rockets, Red Mango, Subway… But she’s nowhere to be found. The PANDA EXPRESS and SBARRO workers have also vanished. The disappearance of his mother immediately triggers a state of acute panic. His pulse thrumming in his ears, a flood of gruesome thoughts and premonitions fills his head.He embarks upon a frantic, redundant search of the adjoining areas of the empty mall, descending the motionless escalator, striding past the You Are Here directory, past the lobby of the AMC multiplex, past the Limited, Clarks, f.y.e., Vans, Macy’s, Foot Locker, Kohl’s, Sears, JC Penney, Sunglass Hut, Bath & Body Works, Sephora, past a threading station, and an electronic-cigarette and tongue-ring kiosk, and then bounding back up the inert escalator several steps at a time, reprising the search of the food court, and then back down the escalator and past the very same stores and the very same kiosks yet again…like those looping, wraparound backgrounds in early video games…until finally, through a corridor of gumball machines, he reaches the restrooms, which somehow he’d failed to notice the first time around.Trembling, his heart pounding in his chest, he knocks on the door to the ladies’ room.There’s no response.He knocks again, harder, more insistently.)

Q. Mom, are you in here?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you okay?

A. Yes.

Q. Mom, I’ve been looking all over for you! I was so worried…I was going crazy.

A. Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. You really need to come in here. I have to show you something. (He stretches his neck, which is clenched tight with tension, takes a deep breath, and lets out a long, long exhalation of relief.)

Q. Show me what, Mom?

A. Just come in. (MARK enters the ladies’ room.)

Q. Where are you?

A. I’m in here. (He walks over to a closed stall.)

Q. Hey, uh…I think I’m gonna wait outside for you, okay?

A. No, come in here. I have to show you something! (He slowly opens the door to the stall. His mother is on her hands and knees in front of the toilet staring down at something on the floor with the intense absorption of a…a myrmecologist examining an anthill.)

A. Look at that.

Q. What? (She points to a web of cracks in the tile.)

A. This face, right here. It’s him! (He squeezes in next to his mother, gets down on his hands and knees, and scrutinizes the craquelure.)

Q. Where do you see a face?

A. Right here. I think that might be the Imaginary Intern!

Q. I don’t see a face.

A. Here, sweetheart, here…these are the eyes, here’s the nose…it’s in sort of semi-profile.

Q. That’s not the Imaginary Intern.

A. It’s not? Are you sure?

Q. I’m sure.

A. I was so excited. I was sitting here and I looked down and I thought, Oh my goodness!

Q. Mom, how would you even know what the Imaginary Intern looks like? You’ve never even seen the Imaginary Intern.

A. I just had a very clear picture in my mind of what he looks like from everything you said about him. (MARK cants his head to the side and, squinting his eyes, gives this particular configuration of cracks another appraisal.)

Q. The Imaginary Intern has a…a fuller face. More boyish. Not so gaunt, y’know? That sort of looks like…like…who’s that guy, that actor with the big nose?

A. Karl Malden?

Q. (Laughing.) No, Mom, today! He was in, uh…he was in that movie The Pianist…and, um…what is that, uh…Summer of Sam. He was in a beer commercial…I think it was a Stella Artois commercial. God, I can picture him perfectly, and I just cannot think of his name…

A. You know something funny? I’ve just never liked beer. It looks so good on a hot day…But I just never liked it.

Q. Oh, that Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris…he was in that…He played Salvador Dalí…Adrien Brody!

A. I love that movie!

Q. Did you ever see Un Chien Andalou? It’s better. (He sighs.)

Q. You know, you really scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know what happened to you.

A. That’s so silly of you. I just had to pee.

Q. You remember that poor little boy, James Bulger…that, that toddler who was kidnapped from the mall in England, and he was subsequently murdered, and the whole abduction was caught on CCTV cameras? I thought for a minute that — I don’t know — I thought that…that something like that might have happened to you…but sort of inside out, y’know? Here, the mom is kidnapped and the little boy is left in the mall frantically searching for her. I even thought for a minute that those guys might have taken you.

A. What guys?

Q. The Panda Express and the Sbarro guys.

A. I’m not such a pushover, you know. I wouldn’t let two guys just abscond with me like that.

Q. I was freaking, seriously. I was getting the tintinnabulation, the tinea versicolor, the pruritus ani…it was, like, textbook. (MARK’S MOM is examining another pattern of cracks on the floor.)

Q. Mom, why did you stop me before? It seemed like you stopped me just as I started talking about how magnificent and loving Mercedes was when she took care of me.

A. (Without looking up from the craquelure.) I just didn’t want to hear any more.

Q. About Mercedes?

A. No, no, no…About you being sick, and about you being in so much discomfort and feeling so…so undignified. I just couldn’t…I just couldn’t stand it. (She looks at him.)

A. You know, when you were diagnosed, when you told me…I was terror-stricken…so that I forced myself, I suppose, not really to think about it deeply. But it changed my whole life. It changed the things I thought about before I went to sleep certainly…every single bloody night. And I…I faced the knowledge that something awful might happen by not facing the knowledge, if that makes any sense at all. By knowing it and trying very hard to set it back one level, so that I could keep going and not show you that I was frightened. And I kept thinking this thing that might make no kind of sense, as we’re talking about this — I kept thinking that if there were only some way I could make it be me and not you…Because parents should die and not their children. And I still feel the same way. I want to be the first to go…and leave everybody happy, healthy, and in wonderful shape. I’d also like to leave all of you rich if I could, but I haven’t figured that one out yet. (Returning her attention to the floor, she continues.)

A. Is this video game you were talking about…is it like a suicide?

Q. No, no…it’s like the story of a son umbilicated to his mother, a son moored in port. The “death” should be read figuratively — it’s a heaving up of the anchor. Freud talked about how the human body longs to return to the indeterminacy of the inorganic…about an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. That’s sort of what I was trying to get at, I guess.

A. It almost seems like overkill to me.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Well, there’s a mall shooter, there’s a flood, there’s going back into a mother’s womb and unraveling the father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote…

Q. A couple of years ago, I read an article about a woman named Cecilia Chang, a dean and a fund-raiser at St. John’s University, who was involved in this, this huge fraud and corruption scandal. And toward the end of her trial, less than twenty-four hours after testifying, convinced that she was going to be convicted, she committed suicide at her home in, uh…in Queens. She started a fire in her bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. She went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. She slit her wrists. And then she hanged herself with stereo speaker wire from a lowered attic ladder. And I remember thinking, Fuck, this woman was not leaving anything to chance! So, I think that was probably the inspiration for that…y’know, that redundancy in the game.

A. Did you really ask the surgeon to look in my brain and see why I talk so much?

Q. I have to think there’s a correlation between hyperemesis gravidarum and projectile logorrhea. And I really do believe that there’s a genetic link between a mother’s pathologically excessive talkativeness and a son’s persistent fantasy of gesticulating from a balcony and haranguing a crowd in a piazza. Don’t you?

A. Well, as long as you brought up Freud…I think we need to ask two psychoanalytical questions here: What does the form of this autobiography displace, repress, or disavow? And what is striking in its absence here? What is being occluded? Because, doesn’t the real story always consist of the very content that’s being occluded?

Q. Look, all I know is that everyone, at one point in his or her life, has had to suck some microcephalic moron’s dick for cab fare, figuratively speaking, of course…But it just seems to be getting harder and harder for me as I get older. (She reaches up behind her, tears off a few sheets of toilet paper, and wipes some grime off another pattern on the tile.)

A. What time is Mussolini picking you up?

Q. Very funny.

A. You said it was like a flight-simulation game, right?

Q. Yeah.

A. Well, when you play, where can you go? Where can you go in the flying balcony?

Q. Well initially you just sort of fly around here…so I was thinking, like, y’know, Paramus, Mahwah, Ramsey, Wayne, uh…Hackensack.

A. That doesn’t seem like such a great a game to me.

Q. Well, Mom, that would just be like the first level. And also, you’ve got to keep in mind that you’re…well, you’re not “dead” exactly, but the psychophysical aggregate that was “you” has disaggregated.

A. You know something that occurred to me when you were talking before? I think you’re too hard on yourself about your father.

Q. No, I’m too impatient with him. I’m an impatient person. There’s a blind guy who works out at my gym, and the other day he passed gas. And it was pretty loud. And, my immediate reaction was like, Eww, dude, gross…but then I thought that the farting is probably some kind of echolocation technique that the guy is using so he can navigate around the gym…which would be really cool, y’know? But my first reaction, my sort of default response was just this kind of impatient judgment without taking the time to try and understand what was going on… (MARK’S MOM points to another indeterminate visage on the floor.)

A. You know who that looks like a little bit?

Q. I think that looks a little like Julianne Moore…if Julianne Moore had cystic acne or something.

A. Where are you looking?

Q. Over here.

A. No, Mark — here, here. Tell me who that looks like to you. You see where I’m talking about? Here — there’s a head and the neck…

Q. Are you talking about that guy who does the show on the Food Network? You think it looks like that guy?

A. What guy?

Q. The guy who hosts that show where they give you the different foods and you have to combine them somehow into a meal…like Arctic char, goji berries, mascarpone cheese, and cotton candy…Chopped. The host of Chopped. You think that looks like the host of Chopped?

A. No, no, no. It looks like that lovely Italian anesthesiologist I was talking about before, remember? The one that made a pass at me when I was pregnant with you.

Q. Mom, how could I possibly recognize someone who made a pass at you when you were pregnant with me? What did I have, like intrauterine X-ray vision or something? You wanna know who that actually looks like to me now? Remember I took you to that incredibly brutal, gory Korean movie? Uh, what was that called? Uh…I Saw the Devil. Remember that? And you walked out.

A. Oh God, yes! Why did you take me to something like that?

Q. Mom, when I suggested it, you told me you’d read about it in the Times and wanted to go see it with me.

A. I must have gotten it mixed up with something else.

Q. Well, anyway — it sort of looks like the guy who played the serial killer…uh…Choi Min-sik. (She shrugs.)

A. You know I wanted to ask you something — you mentioned a couple of times what if someone asked you to give advice to young writers, but you never really gave a straight answer. Do you actually have any advice you’d give?

Q. Well, you know what?…Seriously…this is a straight answer…and I think this is true for everyone, and so logically it must be true for young writers: never eat candy out of those, those open bins they have in the lobbies of movie theaters. I went to this multiplex once to see, uh…I don’t remember what I was seeing…but, I was in the men’s room before the movie started, and I watched this guy come out of a…a stall, and not wash his hands, and he heads straight for those candy bins in the lobby, and he sticks his gross, unwashed, E. coli hand in this bin of sour gummy worms or whatever it was and rummages the fuck around in there. I mean, that’s like direct ass-to-mouth candy. (That’s a…a porn expression. You probably don’t know that one…)

A. That’s absolutely revolting.

Q. Well, y’know, aphids drink leaf sap and then excrete droplets of this sugary liquid from their rear ends, and that’s the stuff that ants drink, so…I mean, it does happen in nature. (He shrugs, changing the subject.)

Q. What would you say if someone said to me, “I don’t think there was any reading. I don’t think there’s any autobiography. I don’t think there’s any fucking, uh…any fucking video game. I think you and your mom just came to a mall, came to a food court, sat down, and had something to eat. And I think you just stood up on a table and started talking like some fucking nutjob. Or did some kind of loony reenactment of your internal psychodramas or you and your mother’s weird-ass folie à deux, or some reenactment of your little…your weird little lunches together at the Bird Cage at Lord & Taylor a million years ago. And that’s all this whole thing is.” What would you say to that?

A. You know what I’d say? I’d say, that’s the great thing about literature. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own interpretation. That’s what I’d say to that.

Q. Well, all I know is — I’m “real.” I’m bringing “realness.” I’m singing all the parts. And if the flying balcony with Mussolini at the helm turns out to be a bathroom stall with my mom, then so be it. If being on my hands and my knees, wedged in this stall forever with my mom, if that turns out to be my version of that cell, that birdcage in King Lear, and if this sort of, this sort of…of contrapuntal chirping is what we end up doing forever, sort of gently batting our minds’ eyeballs back and forth and back and forth like, like feathered shuttlecocks…if we’re just these two incessantly twittering birds, these two little winged larynxes flying around each other in a birdcage…like those motorcyclists, those stunt riders who race around each other in those mesh spheres, in those “globes of death” at circuses, at carnivals, like, uh…like, uh, Ryan Gosling in that movie The Place Beyond the Pines. If it turns out that’s all this whole thing is…then so be it. You know? (MARK’S MOM recognizes someone new in yet another configuration of cracks on the floor.)

A. Well, for God’s sake!

Q. What?

A. When we moved to West Orange, I guess I was looking for a store where I could have a…a personal sort of relationship, the way I did in Jersey City…and, um, there was this place called Rolli’s or Rolli’s Market that had been recommended to me possibly, probably by Judy Leiberman, or by other people in the neighborhood who said that their butcher shop was very, very good, and that’s how I started to use them. And that—right over there — that looks to me, that looks uncannily to me like Joe Rolli. Joe’s brother — whose name I’m trying to remember as I’m speaking to you — his older brother was the butcher. And the quality of the meat he carried and his ability to cut the meat, to prepare it properly, was wonderful, and they delivered as well. So sometimes I would just call in to them and order a roast and, uh…they’d deliver, and sometimes as I developed the habit, as I became used to driving in the neighborhood more, of driving down the hill and stopping there en route to wherever I was going, I’d get a grocery order as well. And the younger brother — a sort of ruddy-cheeked, round-faced nice guy — was Joe…that was the…he was in charge of the grocery department. And they were, uh, very, very, very nice to me and always had time to talk, and, if anything turned out to be not perfect, they would see to it…they would give me another one, a better one. And they’d ask after the family, and it just became this very warm and comfortable and comforting kind of arrangement, which doesn’t mean certainly that I didn’t go to Kings Market, because I did, constantly, but rather than use the meat department at Kings, I, uh…I used Rolli’s as long as I lived in West Orange. There were other places too, and you know I’m a champion food buyer, so if we wanted to have a certain kind of thing, I would go to that kind of place…like, if we wanted fried chicken, barbecued chicken, or one of the other specialties, I’d go to the place called the Chicken Nest and shop there, um…now the original Chicken Nest was…all right, now I’m going to forget the names of some of the streets? The street that runs parallel to, uh, Wyoming…to Gregory…um…below it…where, when we moved to Maplewood, Chase’s school was on that street…

Q. Valley?

A. Valley, yes. So you’d drive down to Valley, and then you’d make a turn one block further south down the hill, and there was the little tiny parking lot and, um, the Chicken Nest. And they came to know me…they’d say, “Hello, Mrs. Leyner!” and, uh…you went to summer camp with one of their children, one of the owner’s children…

Q. Oh, that’s right. I remember…I remember him.

A. And you could get all kinds of poultry there, and you could get chicken soups, and their potato salad was great, and on holidays, and maybe other times too, they had, um…yams. Do you remember the yams from there? Your sister adored them. They were mashed yams and they were wonderful, and they also had, uh…people in those days used as side dishes, things like a cranberry mold or a, uh, uh…there was one mold that looked like green Jell-O.

Q. Oh yeah. What was in that green Jell-O mold?

A. They must have put either cottage cheese or, uh, cream cheese, and then pulverized it, so it was that lovely sort of lime-green color. It was a lime mold and it had, I think, some pineapple in it as well…And they also barbecued chickens and barbecued ducks…you could get ducks quartered. And I used to take those, those ducks, and cook them again with a sauce like a…like a cherry sauce or an orange Grand Marnier sauce for entertaining…because then they were nice and tender on the inside and extra-crispy on the outside, but I didn’t have to put up with all the fat from cooking duck from the beginning. So there were lots of specialty stores — Jewish delicatessens where you could get lox and bagels — and I used all of them…but my go-to people if I was either in a hurry or somebody wasn’t feeling well and we couldn’t go out or just because it was comfortable and warm, I would use the Rolli brothers. And when I moved away from West Orange, and then even when I sold the house in Maplewood and moved away, I would get an occasional call…in the beginning it was fairly frequent, and after a while sometimes it would be like even once a year…and it would be Joe. And he’d say, “I was thinking about you. I was thinking about your great smile. I was thinking about…”—it was funny because he’d say “your beautiful blue eyes.” Well, he might have liked them, but they’re not blue. They’re green, and they’re still green. Nevertheless, I thought it was very funny and very cute…I learned a little bit about his family…I think I learned more about his family after the fact, y’know, when he used to make these calls. It turned out that one of his children, one of his daughters, married the man who became governor for a while in New Jersey…um, took over the governorship…I’m not even sure…was that when McGreevey had to leave or resign?

Q. Oh, this was recent?

A. Yeah…But I know…I can’t remember his name…but he’s still in government, Joe’s son-in-law. So…they both had nice families, they were nice men…the place was as clean as could be…and, uh, it’s the kind of shopping, the kind of transaction that I used to watch, I now realize, my mother make all the time…She’d walk on Jackson Avenue in Jersey City and go to her greengrocer and go to her butcher and stop and pass the time of day with all the other people. They knew her well, she knew them. They knew all about our family, we knew, a little less I would think, about their families…but enough to ask how their son was doing in medical school, and so on and so forth…and it was that very human contact, I think, that I learned from my mom, and that, without realizing it at the time, was so important to me and, in fact, is still important to me. I guess in my dealings with markets, I’ll find one that has good-quality things but also gives that feeling…that if I really needed something on a dark and snowy night, they’d bring it over. Just as the nice young man over at Palisade Bagel…when it first opened…a Korean mother and son…for all I know they own lots of other things too…but I could see how hard they were working and it wasn’t busy in the beginning, at all…all the people in the high-rise buildings, I’m sure they raised an eyebrow and said, sort of, Show me that you know what this stuff is, what do you know about this? And I went in and saw this woman who rarely smiles…who gives this very minimal little smile…and I watched her interaction with her son, who is very American and is as nice a boy as you could meet…and if the subject ever came up or if it was possible for me to say to people, Y’know I was just across the street at the market — I would say as I was coming up from the downstairs hallway, or in the elevator — and the things they have are really excellent, their bagels are really good bagels and the tuna salad is the best tuna salad, and your sister calls me from Weehawken about buying tuna salad and bringing it over to her — that’s how good it is. My fussy, fussy daughter. I mean, I’m not claiming that I made their success — that would be rather self-aggrandizing and I don’t mean that…but I think that they understood, and I think they understood very early on…and the son in particular…I could see that when I got home, that there was an extra bagel thrown in, or if they were covering everything up and closing up…I always used to forget that they closed at four thirty…that he would wait and unlock the door for me and say, “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Leyner, it’s no problem at all.” And it’s really lovely, it’s really nice to have that, and, uh…I’ve called once or twice…I called when I had the flu a couple of years ago, I called when I had the bursitis in my hip and I wasn’t supposed to move around…and I would say who I was and ask if it would be possible for someone to bring something over…and they’d say, “Of course!” And maybe they do that for everybody, but it’s the feeling I like and the feeling I have with them…and it’s very nice. So, I think I automatically end up trying to re-create that kind of thing for myself. You remember…I don’t know if you do…that we had what they called a chicken-and-egg man who used to deliver to us in Jersey City. From Lakewood. He used to come in his little truck.

Q. Where’s Lakewood?

A. Lakewood is near the seashore. And at this point in time it has, I think, an enormous, very, very orthodox Jewish community. There are many, many very orthodox young families…a young woman who looks like she can’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-eight years old with about five or six children and pregnant again…But it was always known as a rural, farming area, where, uh, eggs, butter…I used to buy sweet butter from him, fresh eggs and chicken. And one day your dog, Shadow, almost ate him alive.

Q. What happened?

A. I had Shadow on the leash…on Westminster Lane…when I had walked out the front door just as his little panel truck pulled up, and he asked what I wanted and I told him, and we talked about one thing or another — I don’t remember what it was — and he started to explain something to me and he went like this, in explanation, he sort of put his arm out, “Well, you know, you know how that is”…as he did that, the dog, being as overly protective as he was, he threw his body through the hedge that was in front of the house, rammed right through the hedge, snapping his teeth and growling, and this poor young man just about got into the truck and slid the panel closed before he had something bitten off. But, yeah…he used to come a couple of times a week, and that was terrific. And I probably learned about him through my mom, who was the world’s champion at all of this kind of thing.

Q. Did you know that bats’ laryngeal muscles can contract up to two hundred times per second?

A. No, I didn’t know that.

Q. Y’know, you did such an incredible job reading that MMPI report, that, uh…that Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory report, that we probably should have just planned on letting you do the whole reading. I probably should have just stayed away altogether.

A. Oh, that’s ridiculous, Mark.

Q. No, seriously, I should have. It reminds me a little of that story about the conceptual artist…Do you know that story?

A. I don’t think so.

Q. There was this conceptual artist, this very brilliant, very enigmatic, intransigent, reclusive artist. And he was doing this, this astonishing project…it was called something like, uh, Outside-In…and it involved putting everything outside of the Whitney into the Whitney (this was the new Whitney down in Meatpacking). And by everything, I mean everything and everyone—the Pacific Ocean, the Alps, the Burj Khalifa, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Pittsburgh Penguins, every single can of corned-beef hash and SpaghettiOs, every Depeche Mode CD, every Pole, Turk, and Inuit, every chicken, bear, water moccasin, tomahawk missile, Uber car, umbrella, iPhone, and flushable wipe, every canister of nerve gas and bottle of beer — every single thing and every single person on earth (including every other piece of art in the world too, of course, as well as a scale model of the museum and all its contents). It was without a doubt the most challenging installation the Whitney had ever mounted, costing, like, trillions upon trillions of dollars for insurance and shipping, with crews working seven days a week in eleven-hour shifts. And so…finally…this remarkable show opens. And everything and everyone in the world is in the Whitney Museum…Or so we think. Until a small child, a small, chubby naive child, looks up at his dad, tugging at his pants leg, and asks, “Where’s the artist?” Well…the artist — the great artist — out of shyness or modesty or perhaps out of a sense of superiority, an aristocratic de haut en bas disdain, has apparently refused to attend his own opening, fatally undermining the conceptual integrity of the entire project. And everything is removed and everyone sullenly files out, muttering to themselves, until the museum is completely empty…and the everything-and-everyone-in-the-world that was once inside the Whitney is now outside the Whitney.

A. That sounds like one of those folktales I used to read to you while you were eating. (MARK is gazing at his MOM, who’s gazing down at the floor again.)

Q. There’s a beautiful cliff behind the Walgreen’s on River Road in North Bergen…I was hoping maybe we’d get our picture taken there. The bush clover is splendid this time of year. (For a moment, they both seem lost in their own reveries.)

Q. I want to take a picture of us, okay? (He tries to stand so he can reach into his pants pocket and get his phone.)

Q. We’re kind of wedged in here…

A. Do you want me to…

Q. I think I can reach it without having to get up…

A. Should I…

Q. Got it. (He holds the phone out in front of them, having to extend his arm out over the threshold of the stall in order to fit them both in the frame.)

Q. Ready?

A. Not really.

Q. Smile… (We hear the cell-phone shutter click.)

A. I must look like a gargoyle.

Q. You look beautiful, Mom. Do you remember that story in the news about that North Korean general, Hyon Yong-chol…the one Kim Jong-un supposedly ordered executed by antiaircraft gun? I tweeted something like, uh…Being executed with an antiaircraft gun doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go. Beats becoming one of those “Fifteen Celebs Who Are Aging Horribly.” Well…you’re aging remarkably, miraculously…You know, I realized something tonight that I never ever realized before…I think we have a — what would you call it? — a shared expressivity, a shared expressivity both in terms of its sheer volume and its style…There’s like a…an isomorphism between the way you express yourself and the way I do…And, honestly, that’s something I don’t think ever occurred to me before tonight.

A. That’s such a wonderful, unexpected thing for you to say.

Q. Who are your favorite mother/son duos? Like in mythology or literature and history? (MARK’S MOM is surveying the craquelure, trying to discern one last face.)

A. Oh, I don’t know, sweetheart. Who are yours?

Q. I guess Jocasta and Oedipus, and Ma and “Doc” Barker and, uh…maybe Cher and Chaz Bono.

A. Okay…I might be going completely crazy here…but tell me that’s not Elston Howard.

Q. Elston Howard?

A. Yes…the catcher for the Yankees back in the, in the sixties.

Q. Where do you see Elston Howard?

A. Right over here…God, I used to love watching him. I love watching catchers anyway. And even before I really understood — I was young and it didn’t even occur to me very much — but the pain that they must be in virtually all the time, oh my Lord! To be in that position…It’s got to be devastating to your knees and hips.

Q. The position we’re in right now couldn’t be that great for our knees and hips…

A. He lived in Teaneck, y’know — Elston Howard. That’s another thing I’ve learned in my age now, now that I live in Bergen County…so many of the players, even now, live in Bergen County. The great CC lives close by…CC Sabathia lives close by, and his wife, Amber, is in lots and lots of charity events and things…

Q. They live in Fort Lee?

A. They might live in Tenafly…they live in one of the…obviously enough, in a gorgeous home, in a gorgeous place…it could even be Alpine or Demarest, but it’s one of the Bergen County places…My father, Raymond, by the way, liked baseball very much, of course, but he loved tennis, and he was quite a good tennis player, you know. Of course, anything you did, especially if you did it well — and you did most things well — he was just so proud of you that his chest, which stuck way out anyway, almost broke off from glee… (Water is beginning to seep into the bathroom and pool on the floor. The lights begin to flicker and dim.)

A. The image I have in my mind when I think of you and my dad is always the one of him taking you for a walk when you were very little, and you’re holding on to, I think, one of his fingers, and he’s walking with his chest way, way out. He’s so thrilled with “his boy.” You were his first boy. And what a boy… (And finally the lights go out.)