Below the Surface

The next day, I visit Uncle Buddy at the yacht club. There are no boats and only two slips, but it’s a club none-the-less with a thatched-roof bar and a pool they share with the hotel. My uncle is happy I live where I do. He says it makes for a real treat when I come home, and begins to tell me how much has changed, how he barely recognizes the town. It’s the construction he says, the cars and the roads that keep widening.

“Tar’s going to eat it all up before you know it.”

The bar agrees and nods and smokes and drinks. I want to join them with “Damn right” or “Awful shame.” I want to feel this constant low-grade anger. But I can’t, it all looks the same to me, and Buddy says that’s the point. “Can’t tell one corner from the next.”

Buddy wishes he were young. He wishes he were skinny and limber. “Loose like a goose,” he says. He wishes for a lot of things, and when the lottery reaches twenty million, he buys fifty dollars worth of tickets and holds them in his left hand like a fan of cards as he compares them to the winning numbers in the newspaper and says, “Immigrant will win, I know it.”

He lives three blocks away from the club, and I think of how many consecutive days he’s sat under this thatched-roof waiting for some reason to head home and eat tuna salad over toast, a slice of cheddar, maybe some ketchup, and watch TV. His limp is more noticeable this time, and when he offers a smile under wet and tired eyes, I want to ask if he’s all right. But as if he’s sensed the concern, he slaps me on the back and buys me a drink — a soda I say — and welcomes me home again.

“Buddy’s legs are a mess,” Dad told me when I was little, “Got caught in an open field with a machine gunner. He used to run.”

Sitting next to Buddy, I listen to his times, the fifty-second splits, the five-minute miles, sets of 200-hundreds under 40, under 35, 33, and do my best to picture him, my uncle with the cane, striding out, pumping his arms, his skin red with blood. But I can’t see him on the track kicking up clay and throwing elbows for position.

“I was a middle-distance man,” he says, and I have to take his word for it.

It’s a quarter to two, and by four Buddy will grow quiet, maybe reading a chapter in a book, something by Ludlum. He’ll drink dark rum and ginger beer and stack the clear plastic empties to the right of his ashtray.

It’s a “Dark-n-Stormy,” he says.

This is a drink he came across in the Keys “where the fags live,” and he offers me a sip. I agree that it’s good and think of ordering one myself, maybe two because they barely taste like something that will hurt. I could share the sunset with him. My uncle would like that. I would like that, and he offers to pay. I consider, but leave before I have to call a cab or drive home because Buddy’s friend, a woman in heels and pleated linen pants, will arrive later, taking the stool he’s been saving all day for her and settle into a pair of Beefeater and tonics.

“You saw your uncle today?” Dad asks, leaning against the kitchen counter-top eating cheese and crackers.

“Yeah, stopped by this afternoon. Were you there?” I ask, looking away, opening the refrigerator.

“A few minutes after you left,” he says between Saltines. He’s shirtless again.

“When’s Mom coming home?”

“She said she’d be late tonight.”

I wonder if he’s familiar with this echo of my youth, if he’s uncomfortable without her presence too.

“Thought we’d order in,” Dad says flicking crumbs off his chest into the sink. “How’s Chinese sound? Or maybe that Italian place up the road, that chain?”

“Either one’s fine with me,” I say, opening the fridge.

“There’s a bottle of white wine in the garage ice box. Let me get it.”

Dad returns and uncorks, then pours a glass and looks at me.

“I’m fine, water’s good.”

“You sure, I could put some ice in it for you.”

“No one drinks wine with ice.”

“So no ice then?”

Dad gives a half-smile that says he knows what I do on Friday nights in Manhattan, the occasional joint, the sunrises I’ve seen through my window as I climb into bed. He wants to tell me he’s been there, that the shots, and the time between bars escapes his memory too. I rarely remember how I get home. The rocking lullaby of a cab heading down First Avenue erases me, and the credit card receipts I find in my pockets are a trail of where I’ve been. I edit these events from our conversations, cross them out for Mom and replace them with “I’m just like my friends,” and for some reason, this sounds good to her.

I return to the refrigerator saying something about kidney stones and how I don’t get enough water in my system. This annoys Dad, my not drinking at home, as he’s left to do it alone, something he thinks only alcoholics do.

“I pissed mine out,” he says.

We sit at the patio table spinning pasta into mouthfuls, tearing bread, wiping our chins while, through the glass doors, we watch the news on TV with the volume turned off.

“We’ve got the closed-caption now,” Dad says dipping bread into a chum of marinara. “You can read it.”

I wonder when this began, his need for silence.

“They’re too loud, anyway,” I add.

“It’s cooler out here.”

“Have you talked to Mom?”

“Need to go to the bank first. I figure we’ll tell her when you start working again. No fuss that way.”

“Okay.”

He lifts his second glass of wine and mocks me with a toast. “Here’s to New York.” He’s alert when he says this, and as I laugh with him, because it’s the right thing to do and because it feels good, I focus on his jaw and the way it works his food and wait for that sluggish, buzzed moment when all he can say is “God is good.”

I ask him when he started drinking wine.

“Why?”

I shrug.

“No reason.”

“Your mother has a glass every now and then.”

This is a lie.

“She likes it.” He pauses, “And it’s easier on the stomach.”

This is new, the wine, in winter, in the comfortable months of South Florida when the small beach towns on the Gulf Coast bustle with wealthy Midwest snow birds and sunburned Canadians. Dad usually chooses scotch, over everything. Dewars, Johnny Walker Red, Grant’s, sometimes a single-malt.

“Scotch,” I say to myself, my teeth biting down on the word as if it were one of those cardboard bits used by dentists to take pictures in my mouth.

I remember sliding from room to room in my socks at two in the morning on a Junior High Friday night. The Spanish tiles bumped under my feet until I stood in front of the liquor cabinet’s deep oak finish and broken lock. “Scotch,” and I’d make the swallow run laps inside the glass I’d only sniff at. It was hard, I thought, not easy to drink this.

“Scotch.” My father held his glass like he earned it, like he could take a punch, the tumbler’s thick bottom disappearing in his hand. He’s like this sometimes, tough, street-wise, and solid as a sidewalk. Tonight, though, he’s tired and soft like his big belly, like the last hour before he goes to bed, like he is now, nodding in and out in front of the TV while I wash the dishes.

Mother’s headlights blind the house as she pulls in under the carport. The engine cuts off and begins to tick. She walks in and says hello, and I raise my hand and nod to Dad. She glances at his sagging face and mouths to me, “Good.” This is new too, the word “good,” and when she goes to her bedroom, I see the change in their habits.

There used to be leftovers in the oven and nights ended early in bed with a book. The door would be left open so that when Dad fumbled through the kitchen, Mom could yell through the house without looking at him. The weekends were the trade off, and he spent this time in a constant crouch, picking up pinecones and sticks in the yard so she could run the Sears rider mower without damaging the blades.

“Everything okay?” she whispers in her white and yellow robe.

I stick up my thumb and nod. “The dishes are almost done.”

Her whisper sharpens. “How’d the night go?”

I shrug again.

“No problem?”

“None, ” I answer. “He’s been out for a while now, couldn’t make it through Law & Order.”

Mother begins to straighten up.

“I’ve got it.”

She waves her arm in the air as if I’m a mosquito and smiles and grabs a towel. I rinse, she dries, and our elbows touch when we turn at the waist.

“He misses you, you know,” Mom says.

“I miss you guys too, Mom.”

“Wish you could stay a few more days.

“I had to beg to get these days off. It’s been pretty busy at work lately,” and I unfold the fiction I memorized on the plane ride down, the ten-hour days, the deadlines, the demanding Managing Editor and his bad breath, all the responsibility I have.

Every Saturday night the phone rings just before dinner. Mom’s in the living room that exists only to collect dust and she speaks softly. “Right, of course, yes.” Then she laughs, speaks softly again and my father says, “it’s your Uncle James. He wants more money.” Mother is the only one who speaks to him. The rest of us just nod and say, “Yes, we accept the charges.”

Dad hates James and becomes edgy when he calls. He’s brief with his words and pretends to look through the sliding glass doors and off into the distance. But he’s really only waiting for her to get off the phone, for me to notice that this bothers him. Dad is jealous of James, how he makes Mom feel, how he makes her laugh despite his misery.

Dad once told me, “when you were away at school, Uncle James didn’t answer his phone for four or five days.”

Mom sent him to Miami where James was living at the time, and Dad found him passed out drunk, lying in his own piss next to plastic vodka bottles. Dad was a little snockered himself when he said this, a little upset at the memory when he told me how he just stood over James thinking he could “end all this shit.”

“Snuff him out,” he snapped his fingers. “A pillow over the face,” and spit jumped from his tongue like a spark, landed on my left cheek.