Hum: Stories Read online

  “A shame,” my mother said to the teacher. “Her grandfather, of course, was known as The Great Amphibian.”

  Eventually I did learn to swim, but not by choice. It was at Girls in Action camp the summer before my sixth grade year. One afternoon two coconut-smelling counselors, one fat, one thin, picked me up by the arms and legs, carried me down to the end of the pier, and threw me in the water.

  “Swim for Jesus,” the thin girl yelled.

  “He died on the cross for you,” the fat girl said. “Can’t you at least swim for him?”

  I sputtered and dog paddled and gasped for air. I felt that I was dying. But eventually I did swim, not for Jesus but for Jordan Lamar, a member of the Royal Ambassadors who was watching from the desolate brown beach. Eventually I made it to shore. That was my first and last experience with swimming.

  Sitting alone by Spreckels Lake in the quiet of the evening, watching the sleeping man float, I remembered a Girls in Action pamphlet entitled, “You too can be a hero.” The pamphlet featured drawings of peach-skinned blonde girls committing heroic acts such as rescuing injured birds, helping old ladies cross the street, and witnessing to people who might otherwise go to hell. I had never done any of these things, and had ended my three years of Girls in Action without a single Hero Badge on my uniform. On the day of my Girls in Action commencement, my mother didn’t even bring a camera. She cried throughout the ceremony while other women’s daughters received accolades and gave speeches. In the car on the way home, she said, by way of subtle accusation, “Your grandfather, remember, was known as The Great Amphibian.”

  “Not everyone can be great.”

  I said this to provoke her, thinking that she would lecture me about how I could be great if only I weren’t so lazy. Instead, she gave me a look that was painfully devoid of anger or confrontation and said, “I guess you’re right. What say we go to Dairy Queen?” By that point my father had already gone AWOL, and my mother often plied me with unhealthy snacks in order to make up for his absence. At Dairy Queen I had a Peanut Butter Parfait. The crumbled peanuts were stale and the plastic spoon wouldn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the cup. On that day I became resigned to a life of mediocrity, and over time I realized that mediocrity suited me well. I have a decent career. I live in a decent house. For a while, I was married to a decent man. Perhaps my parents had been wrong all along, and greatness was not, after all, genetic.

  That night at the lake, it was not greatness I strove for. I did what I did out of fear—fear of leaving the floating man on the lake to go for help, only to come back and find him drowned and dead, fear of living with the consequences of my act of desertion. While I could abide old ladies crossing the street alone, injured birds dying in the woods, even the great unsaved masses going to hell, I could not abide the thought of that nice man from the model yacht club dying alone in the lake, abandoned by everyone.

  I cannot say for sure why noble conviction struck me on this particular day, when I had lived my entire life without it. Perhaps some part of me did not want my unborn son to witness his mother in an act of cowardice. Whatever the reason, I took off my jacket and shoes, walked to the water’s edge, sat down on the cool cement, and lowered myself into the lake.

  The water was cold and slippery. A fine green film coated my feet, my calves, my thighs. The moment my stomach touched the water, my baby began to kick.

  “I hear something,” the floating man called. His voice was fearful, startled from sleep. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” I shouted. “I’m coming to get you.”

  “Oh, thank heavens,” he said. “I’m so cold.”

  “How did you sleep?” I asked, trying to take his mind off his situation.

  “Oh, I didn’t really sleep. I just dozed. That was a fine story you told about your grandfather. How ever did it end? Did you find him?”

  “I’ll tell you another day.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had already revealed the ending, and that he had slept right through it. Nor did I want to tell him that The Great Amphibian had never materialized, that after living three decades in the shadow of his greatness I had yet to meet him.

  My feet touched the slimy cement bottom. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid, but it was a manageable fear. I decided to just put one foot in front of the other, as my grandfather had done for so many years, and see what happened. The water reached my chest, my shoulders, my neck. I could feel the baby beneath my ribs, could feel the strength of his tiny hands and feet. An elbow—or was it a knee?—traveled slowly across my stomach. At that moment I believed that he would be a fine baby, a good son, and the blood of The Great Amphibian would flow through his veins.

  The water touched my chin, my mouth, my nose. I kept walking. I felt the water closing over the top of my head. Slowly, my lungs began to tighten, and in the tightness there was a kind of clarity, a vanishing of fear. I saw then that it was not so very far out to the middle of the lake. In the liquid darkness I could just make out the shape of the floating man—his legs, his arms, his gloved hands—sprawled and waiting.

  HERO

  I’ve been having these egg-headed thoughts about non-linear time and a parallel universe. I’ve been having these thoughts for twenty years, and lately they’ve been coming between me and my wife. My wife believes in one world, one time, one perfect moment. My wife believes in making the decision, because, she says, looking up from the PBS documentary Life of Baby, “right now is all we’ve got.” I’m standing on the fire escape of our one-bedroom sublet at 85th and Columbus, working the grill, conversing with her through the open window. She’s rubbing her belly in a wistful manner. There’s this baby on the TV screen, newly delivered, a tiny glistening bundle, and my wife is looking at this baby like it’s just about the most beautiful thing on the planet.

  My wife defends murderers for a living, and she means it when she says that stuff about right now. One minute you’re buying beaded purses from a vendor on 34th Street, and the next, poof, you’re dead on the stairwell, skirt hiked above your knees, neck twisted in an unnatural way, a black cord around your throat, some guy’s wet dream. Sometimes at night she brings her work home, spreads photographs of the victims across the kitchen table and studies them, trying to figure out why, given the evidence, her guy can’t be connected beyond a shadow of a doubt to this particular body. Sometimes, out of grotesque curiosity, a fascination with the horror that is my wife’s bread and butter, I glance at the photos, which more often than not make my stomach turn, and I wonder what kind of bastard could do that. Then I’ll look at my wife looking at the photographs, lost in thought, her long brown hair trailing the table, her quick fingers tracing the shape of a corpse, and I’ll think, this is my wife, who believes there are no absolutes.

  “Just look,” she says now, pointing at the newborn, which has somehow been transformed and is swaddled up like the baby Jesus, all clean and pink, resting in its mother’s arms. While the camera was covering the lower regions, somebody thought to put orange lipstick on the mother, who now lies there, staring alternately at the baby and the camera, making kissy faces. Then the camera pans to the husband, who is also making kissy faces, and my wife looks at me as if I’d just strangled a kitten or been caught with a hooker.

  Before I can defend myself from her unspoken accusation, she’s crying, and to top it off she’s trying to hide it. The only thing worse than my wife crying is my wife trying to pretend she isn’t crying, or maybe, come to think of it, Mrs. Shevardnadze, our upstairs neighbor, leaning out her window and shouting, “I’m going to call the fire department on you!” which is exactly what she’s doing right now.

  Then my wife stops pretending she isn’t crying, she just lets it all go, so I shut the lid on the grill and climb through the window and sit on the couch beside her and put my arms around her and say, “Baby, I’m just not ready.”

  “What’s there to be ready for?” she says. “You and that dialectic philosophy.
”

  She says “dialectic” like it’s a dirty word, half whisper, half curse. She’s good at bandying the term about, but she doesn’t buy it—the connection between dialectic philosophy and my fear of procreation. She likes to say I flunked out of the Study of Either-Or, and I like to remind her that I didn’t flunk out—I dropped out—and there’s a big difference. One year away from a Ph.D. at what is often referred to as a venerable institution, something happened. I didn’t lose interest, exactly. I didn’t lose faith. I just couldn’t bring myself to open another scholarly journal. When I sat down at my computer to work on my dissertation, more often than not I ended up playing solitaire, or opening the “outdated correspondence” file on my hard drive, reading old letters I wrote years ago to girlfriends whose faces I couldn’t exactly remember.

  “I can’t do this,” I said ten years ago, looking at pages and pages of small text scattered across my desk, the floor, the kitchen table. The truth was I had outdone myself. The more complex my argument became, the less I understood. I began to feel I was losing my grasp of the subject. All the threads were coming apart.

  “So don’t,” she said.

  Case closed. We got married in the Hamptons, where her parents had a place, and I became a high school teacher. My wife became, over time, a high-powered defense attorney. She gets people off the hook for crimes they may or may not have committed.

  “But what if he’s guilty?” I sometimes ask, standing over her at the kitchen table while she reads through stacks of legal documents. “What’s guilty?” she says. “Aren’t we all guilty? Is anyone really guilty? Guilt is a matter of perspective, just varying shades of gray.”

  Which is where we diverge whole-heartedly. I believe in black and white. Guilty or innocent. You love someone or hate her. I’m not ashamed to confess that I swallowed all that stuff hook, line, and sinker back in college—how the universe is made up of polar opposites battling against each other, how this constant conflict between good and evil, light and dark, fuels the whole world. My belief in that system never wavered, and this is at the root of my problem with babies.

  A man can be either a good father or a bad one. I had a bad one. My wife had a good one. And if I were forced to choose dialectically my own fatherly potential—whether I’d be good or bad—I can’t say how I’d vote. I’ve tried to explain that to my wife—how, until I can know with one hundred percent certainty that I would make a good father, I can’t bring myself to be one. This, to me, seems fair.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “You’re building a trap. You can’t know until you try. But you won’t try until you know. Just admit it. You don’t really like kids.”

  “Not true,” I say. “If I didn’t like kids, would I be a teacher?”

  She goes into the bedroom and slams the door. I can smell the steaks burning on the fire escape. Mrs. Shevardnadze is stomping around upstairs. Some kids are rapping on the street below. The M-11 rattles by. It’s May, so the alley below our window smells like dog piss.

  ***

  I teach at a prep school for boys out on the island. For years I’ve been lobbying the Curriculum Development Committee for a class in dialectic philosophy, but each year they refuse, labeling such modes of thinking outdated and irrelevant. So I teach American History, European Wars, and Intro to Philosophy, on top of coaching water polo, because what is more relevant in this day and fucking age than water polo? Every now and then the headmaster railroads me into moderating the chess team, even though I can’t remember the last time I won a game of chess. I feel ill at ease with the other teachers, who all have advanced degrees in education—and who seem to believe that teaching is a calling, rather than an accidental vocation. My own aborted Ph.D. in philosophy feels somehow inadequate. Sometimes in the teachers’ lounge the other faculty talk about pedagogical theory, or about the spiritual rewards of teaching, and I just dig into my burrito and look down at a stack of papers, pretending to prepare for class.

  But one day a year, things are different. One day a year I get to teach dialectic philosophy, and that’s when I really come into my own. This year, my big day happens to fall in the same week as the baby argument.

  So it’s the morning after the big fight, 6:30, and I’m driving to work. I want to get there early. Usually I make the trip in a zombie state, but today, I’m totally awake. I’m feeling good, really confident, thinking about how I’m going to explain dialectic philosophy to my students, how I’m going to shake them out of their indifference. Usually this drive just kills me, because Queens Boulevard goes on forever. You might as well be driving across Europe or Asia, the boulevard’s so diverse. One minute you feel like you’re in China, the next you’re in the Middle East, at some point you hit the good old U.S. of A. The girls walking to school in their miniskirts and platform shoes look like they know a great deal more at sixteen than you’ll ever know in a lifetime. Today I’m cruising through every light, one green signal after another, and I’m not even surprised, because this is the day I hit my stride, my one day a year, and you better believe the universe is working in my favor.

  As I’m coming up to 42nd the green clicks over to yellow, and half a second later it’s red, and I’m sitting here, slightly perturbed at this unexpected intrusion on my perfect morning, but still feeling good, because it’s just one light and it’ll be over with before the optimistic guy on the radio finishes predicting sunshine. It’s 6:45 in the morning but the taxis are already out in full force, the newspaper stands are open, all along the boulevard people are stepping out of shops and apartment buildings with paper and briefcase in one hand, coffee in the other. It’s noisy as hell, like it always is on Queens Boulevard, but today I don’t so much mind the noise because it’s just background music for the lecture I’m playing in my head. There are four lanes on this boulevard, all going one direction, my direction, and I’m in the fourth lane from the morgue, which is what I call this massive rectangular building made of pocked gray cement that spans the length of an entire block. The building has not a single window. The subway cars run on top of it. Where Queens Boulevard intersects 42nd, a bridge arches over the street, and below the bridge is a tunnel.

  So I’m sitting at the light, and I’m watching the E train go by on my left, passing over the morgue, across the bridge, and onward. It’s moving along at a pretty good pace, but I can still see the sad sleepy faces of the people going to work. And that’s when I hear the screeching. You know the arc of a screech, how it begins at a high pitch, becomes even louder and higher, then somehow winds down as the moving vehicle slows, then comes to a halt. So I’ve got my ears tuned in and I’m listening for the wind-down, but it doesn’t come; the screeching just suddenly stops, and I know something’s wrong. Just then I see something coming out of the tunnel—not just anything but a Jeep, and it is literally flying, four feet off the road and wheels to the sky, and it’s not headed in just any direction, it’s headed straight for me.

  But what is more alarming, perhaps, than the aborted screech and the upside-down flying Jeep and the horrified faces of the people on the street is the speed at which all this is happening. The Jeep isn’t flying so much as it is hovering. The whole thing is happening in slow motion. The Jeep, the E train, the pedestrians on every side of me, are moving at a fraction of their regular speed, but, for some reason I cannot explain, I happen to be switched into mental fifth gear. While the rest of the world goes freeze-frame, my brain is clicking along faster than it ever has before. As the Jeep gets closer I’m planning my next move, which is to get out of my own car, which I do, and the Jeep’s still coming, and it’s only about six feet from me now—the Jeep drops out of the air, skids another few feet on its roof, and stops inches from my car. The wind from the falling Jeep actually blows my hair back. And I’m thinking about how I’ve never been prepared in my life, not once, and as I’m moving toward the Jeep, I’m wishing I could just get back in my car.

  So I’m jogging over to the Jeep, sort of a fake jog becau
se what I’d really like is for someone else to take over. But no one else is moving. In addition to the screech there was, at the moment the Jeep landed, a sickening crunch, and now everyone is looking alternately at me, and at the Jeep, and waiting for something to happen. I experience what I can only describe as a moment of clarity. For the first time in my life I have in front of me a purpose with which I cannot argue, a clear course of action.

  Suddenly my nose is pressed against the back window of the Jeep, and someone is looking at me. It is a girl of about five, maybe six. This girl is hanging upside down, suspended in the Jeep’s interior, her small bright body held fast in a car seat. Quite clearly she is surprised, and she is waiting for something. No, she isn’t just waiting for something, she’s waiting specifically for me, and because my mind is working at about ten times its normal speed while the rest of the world inches forward like an ice floe, I know she is waiting to be rescued. I open the door, which opens more easily than one would expect, and I say, “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Very carefully I unbuckle the car seat with one hand while supporting the child with the other—I can do this because she is very light. I am struck, in fact, by how light a five-year-old girl can be—she is not much heavier than the blue-gray cat I reluctantly share with my wife. I take her out of the car and stand her upright, and she says, “Where is my lunch box? I lost my Peoples of the World lunch box.” I look inside for the lunch box, wondering what this world is coming to, that a child can no longer have a simple Holly Hobby lunchbox, or a Dora the Explorer lunchbox—no, her lunchbox must be a statement about the general civility and progressiveness of her parents. A woman in the front seat—no doubt progressive, no doubt civil, but at this moment somewhat disheveled and stunned looking—turns and says to me, “Oh my God.” And then, as if remembering her manners, as all well-bred persons eventually do in the face of shocking events, “Good morning.”