Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 12

  My mother grinned. “This is one of my favorites too. I look at it as a life lesson: Always Busy, Going Nowhere.”

  In front of Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey, my mother shook her head. “This one upsets me. The monkey’s eyebrows are less noticeable than hers.”

  As we moved on to Arshile Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, my mother ignored his masterwork and smiled at a guard who smiled back at her. When we were out of earshot, she said, “It’s not artists who suffer for art but museum guards. Look at the one standing over there.”

  I gazed at the man she indicated. His face looked as if he’d been stifling a yawn for an eight-hour shift.

  “Imagine spending forty years staring at these walls,” she said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t burned the place down.”

  I laughed and she did also. “You’re right!” I said. “A truly sensitive person could never enjoy an art museum. The plight of the guards would be too upsetting.”

  “It’s better than assembling windshield wipers.”

  She was referring to my Uncle Joe’s job, but didn’t feel the need to explain herself.

  “Let’s get a coffee,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the museum cafe.

  “Sure.”

  I felt nervous conversing with her, having to pretend she was someone I was meeting for the first time. It’s not like I hadn’t lied to my mother before, but the novelty was that I was pretending not to be her son instead of pretending I wasn’t straight, sober, or interested in what she had to say. I briefly fantasized that perhaps my mother would be revealed as completely different from the woman I knew, but felt I knew her too well for that to happen.

  “What made you join the museum?”

  “It’s peaceful and quiet. Except when they do that video art. I don’t like art that talks. I come here to get away from people talking. I don’t want to have to tell art to shut up.”

  We were seated at a table, and the hostess handed a menu to each of us.

  “I’m not up on art like you guys, but I like it. Even the stuff that’s wacky. And boy, do we need art in Buffalo. When you see your breath for six months a year, you can’t forget life is short and winters are long.”

  I couldn’t remember if my father ever came to the art museum, and I asked her if he did.

  “I brought him here once. He hated it. He kept saying, ‘I could do that!’ About those . . . paintings . . .” She couldn’t remember the term and gestured broadly, splashing the air with her hands.

  “Abstract Expressionists?”

  She nodded. “That’s it. Well, I told him if you can do that, then do it! The kids could use the money. That shut him up, until we left, then he told me he never wanted to go there again.” My mother shrugged. “You can’t change people.” This observation was another one of her signature philosophical beliefs. It sounded like an expression of hard-bitten cynicism but was actually a proclamation of her tolerance and acceptance of the myriad likes and dislikes of her family and friends. Whether it was my refusal to eat raw onions and celery, or my attraction toward men, or my father’s love of working on cars and his animosity toward de Kooning and Pollock, she accepted her gay, vegetable-bigot son and her autophile, philistine husband. She shrugged. “You make your own fun!” This was her other bedrock principle on how to live. I’d heard her say it many times and knew she meant that you shouldn’t be afraid to entertain yourself by reading a book, or pursuing a hobby or interest that others might not share. I’d made my sister laugh when I told her I regarded it as being supportive of masturbation and solitary drinking.

  I was naturally curious to hear what my mother really thought about me and also wanted to enjoy the irresistible opportunity to shamelessly talk about myself under the guise of expressing an interest in someone else.

  “You must be proud of John for moving to New York and doing well.”

  “I am.” Her smile seemed constrained.

  “You don’t think he’s doing well?”

  “I just want him to get ahead,” she said.

  “He is. He’s close to starting his own business.”

  “I thought he wanted to draw comic books, not sell them. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

  Her concern was touching and I tried to reassure her that he was making the right decision.

  “He’s afraid he’s not talented enough,” I explained.

  “Well, did he try? He might be happier as a failed artist than working as uh . . . almost anything. Men who hate their jobs hate their lives. Then we learn to hate them because they’re either dull or mean. You should do what you want because you can’t predict how your life will turn out. No matter how smart you are. And he’s smart. All my kids are smart. I’m not.” There was a pause, and I was about to tell her that she was smarter than I was—not as book smart maybe—but she was more emotionally intelligent: a better judge of character and better at dealing with adversity. “But I’m not stupid, either.” She smiled and took a sip of her coffee. “Can you really make a living selling comic books?” she asked.

  “You won’t get rich, but you can do all right.”

  She pushed her lips around, as she was trying to prevent them from frowning.

  “You should see people’s faces when I tell them he wants to draw comic books. ‘Comic books?’ They say it almost as if he’s simple.” Her face dimpled with resignation. “And I haven’t even told them he’s . . . I expect plenty of smirks about that.”

  She would learn to pronounce the word “gay,” eventually telling friends, neighbors, and relatives, proving that while you can’t change people, people do change. My mother would change for the better.

  “It took guts for John to move to New York,” I said. “He has lots of friends. People really like and respect him.”

  I wanted my mother to be proud of me, but my praise only seemed to darken her mood.

  “No offense to you, but selling comic books? It’s barely a step up from being a newspaper boy, and he did that at fourteen.”

  I was hurt. She made it sound as if loving something as an adult that you had loved as a child was a form of pedophilia.

  “I make a decent living doing something I love.”

  My mother appeared to regret her last comment.

  “I’m sorry. I was rude. If he’s happy . . .”

  I didn’t respond immediately. I was angry. My mother had never told me she thought my job was juvenile to the point of being shameful. It felt as if she’d been lying to me for twenty years. I couldn’t remember if we had ever talked about it—but if we had I’d probably snapped, “I’ve made up my mind” and dismissed her advice.

  She asked, “Would you hand me the melk?” pronouncing the word “milk” with her strong Buffalo accent.

  “Are you in, uh, a relationship?” she asked. Relationship was a new term for my mother, and she was still getting used to saying the word.

  I sighed. “I am.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it.”

  I confessed that I was going to break up with him.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is it all right to ask what’s wrong?”

  I explained that there were several things but mostly it was because he became a conservative Republican.

  “Do you argue about anything else other than politics?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Sounds perfect to me.”

  “We disagree about the president.”

  “He’ll be gone in two years. At least that fight will end. Some fights last forever.”

  I didn’t want to discuss my breakup with Taylor. I didn’t want to give her any more reasons to think I was a loser. The waiter brought us our order, a plate of restaurant-produced “homemade” cookies. The chocolate chips looked artfully placed by the curator of cookies.

  “I didn’t like John’s last boyfriend,” she admitted. “He always wore these ridiculously pointy-toed dress shoes. You can’t
trust a man who wants his feet to be the center of attention; it makes you suspect him of trying to distract you from closely observing his lying face.”

  She was talking about Matteo. I knew she didn’t care for him, but had never heard her express her distaste so directly. She was right about him. He was a liar who once tried to tell me a hickey on his neck had been caused by walking into a stop sign.

  I flagged down the waiter to ask for our bill. I wanted to get out of there and insisted on paying, which I knew would endear me to my mother since we both liked having someone else pick up the check. She strolled alongside me as I scanned the galleries looking for Junior and Taylor. I found them standing in front of Andy Warhol’s 100 Cans but didn’t say anything and just stared off into space.

  “Are you all right?” Junior asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t want to him to lose confidence when he was just starting out on his new career and also have him become angry and resentful about our mother.

  “Nothing.”

  Junior’s face snarled. “Just tell me.”

  I snapped back, “Mom thinks we’re losers for loving comic books!”

  Junior looked toward our mother, who’d stopped to examine a new acquisition. “Not so loud,” he said.

  He asked me what she said and I told him. Then he asked me, “Has she ever said anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then she clearly never told you because she knows it would hurt your feelings. She never wanted to ruin our dream.”

  He was right. She never undermined our confidence even though she disapproved of our career choice. I had many friends whose parents crushed their dreams before they had a chance to fail. She walked up beside me. I had to stop thinking of her as Mom, because I felt I’d accidentally say it at some point.

  “Did you enjoy the museum?” she asked Taylor. “Sometimes I don’t like the art, but I love seeing the people.”

  Taylor praised the museum as I’d expected. I was usually the one who suggested seeing an art exhibit, but he usually enjoyed them, often noticing things only a scientist would see. In Oslo he had been fascinated by the theory that the red sky in Edvard Munch’s The Scream was inspired by the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. He spent a weekend researching volcanic meteorology when we returned home. I’d made Taylor laugh when I told him, “Leave it to a scientist to find a way to talk about the weather through great art.”

  The weather in Buffalo had changed since we entered the museum. Dark clouds had rolled in off the lake and the wind had picked up. It had the feel of a thunderstorm: Mother Nature breathing down your neck. On the drive home, we discussed whether we would go out on the boat. My mother announced that she didn’t care one way or the other; she was just glad to have Junior home.

  We pulled up to the house and found my father playing lawn darts in the backyard with a friend whose back was to us. He was balding with gray hair and was dressed in a red short-sleeved shirt, chinos, and cowboy boots. He easily tossed his dart, which cleanly arced through the air and landed within the plastic hoop on the ground. Then I noticed a black satchel sitting on the ground. The man turned around, and Cheney chuckled triumphantly. I panicked and considered letting my mother out and stepping on the gas. But what if he did something to them? He appeared to be unarmed, not counting the lawn dart in his hand. I wasn’t going back to my time until after Junior and I spoke to Carol, but I did want to know what the fuck he wanted with my parents.

  “You’ll never beat me,” bragged Cheney. “Every time I toss, I just imagine a liberal in the hoop—then bull’s-eye!”

  My father grinned politely as he picked up his bottle of Genny Cream Ale and took a swig, and then Cheney did the same. It was inconceivable that my father was chummy with Dick Cheney. Somehow it would have been less disconcerting to see him playing lawn darts with Genghis Khan.

  “Who the hell is that?” my mother whispered. She intensely disliked anyone infringing on time spent with her family. She tolerated her children bringing home visitors, because she thought entertaining their friends encouraged her children to visit. But her husband wasn’t going anywhere and she wasn’t obligated to entertain his friends.

  “It’s him,” Taylor said emphatically. “The guy who came to see me.”

  “Humpty Dumpty over there is Dick Cheney?” Junior asked. “He looks like he should be chasing us in a golf cart.”

  “He’s more dragon’s egg than Humpty Dumpty,” I warned. “Don’t underestimate him. He’s one of the most cunning and vicious politicians in American history.”

  My mother had been listening. “You know him?”

  I nodded. “We know him from New York.”

  “Why is he here?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her. Branding him as a war criminal would be hard to convey in the thirty seconds we had before we’d be standing next to him.

  “Do you like him?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s not nice,” I said. My comment sounded like faint disparagement, but I knew that whenever my mother used that phrase, it was always damning.

  “Politicians,” my mother snarled. “Sometimes I think we need freedom from speeches.”

  Junior and Taylor looked to me for some guidance as we walked into the backyard.

  “Let’s just see what he has to say,” I said, visibly patting my backpack for Junior and Taylor’s sake. I had one of my loaded Glocks inside.

  “He better not ask him to go out on the boat,” my mother warned.

  “There wouldn’t be room for all of us,” Junior observed.

  My mother cheered up. “You’re right!”

  I looked over at Taylor and widened my eyes to signal that we’d have to improvise, as we walked to where the vice president and my father were standing. I overheard my father asking, “Why is a congressman from Wyoming looking me up in Buffalo?”

  “Well, I’m working. Next year’s the fortieth anniversary of the Roswell crash and I’m trying to get Congress to open a full-scale reinvestigation. And I heard you’re pretty knowledgeable.”

  Until that moment I never would have believed my father was susceptible to flattery, but his face glowed like a UFO. Then his smile vanished as his innate skepticism returned. (A person could be both a true believer and a knee-jerk skeptic, as my father proved repeatedly.)

  “How do I know you’re not just trying to use me for a new disinformation campaign?”

  “You don’t know,” Cheney said. “And I don’t know if I’m being lied to by my contacts in the administration. They could be using me. But isn’t that one of the greatest things about being an American? We’re free to believe our government is lying to us and will never reveal the truth about anything.”

  My father nodded in agreement. Cheney proved once again that the most easily gulled patsies in America are white men who don’t trust anyone.

  “So what do you think?” my father asked. “Was it an alien spacecraft? Were alien bodies recovered? Have you been briefed on the crash?”

  “Well, if I’d been briefed, I’m sure it was probably classified and I’d not be allowed to talk about it.”

  My father’s face crash landed. Cheney’s lips jumped, but it would be an exaggeration to say he smiled.

  “I can tell you this. In July 1947, there were newspaper reports of a flying saucer crashing in Roswell, New Mexico, and in November 1947, the most important invention of the twentieth century, the transistor, the first semiconductor, was ‘invented.’ You do the math.”

  “I knew it!” my father said as he glanced at Cheney’s empty beer bottle. “We need to get you a refill.” Then my father remembered his manners. “This is my son, John, and his friends Taylor and Kurt and my wife, Sue.” At the sound of her name, my mother offered a put-on grin that looked as if she had found the missing half of Cheney’s smile. “This is Dick Ch
eney. He’s a congressman from Wyoming.”

  “The congressman from Wyoming,” Cheney corrected. “We only have one.”

  Taylor stepped forward and shook Cheney’s hand. The vice president looked him in the eye. “Glad to meet someone here who’s registered Republican.” Taylor’s jaw dropped as Junior and I burned with outrage. Cheney stood there with the same stingy smile, leaving his face half-cocked for nasty. Taylor had always claimed that he was registered as an independent, and now Cheney had forced him out of the voting booth.

  “You are?” I asked.

  Taylor’s cheeks flushed. “I signed up on an impulse in ’84. But I registered as an independent last year.”