Last Bender

5.2

So I moved back to the loft and soon the production was underway. All night long I struggled to sleep through Joseph’s composition of the musical score. He was also responsible for the sound, and had gone about the task of taping Ubistic storms at sea, cannonade, horse gallops etc., with great deliberation and no small rehearsing, at least until he and his bibulous comrades were too bombed to continue and took to slobbering on the floor.

However, I could see now that the cause had been good, at least it had manifested itself as an event and was not a delusion shared by all involved, although I am sure it was that too. The fevered pace of worry and creation implied as much. Lydia at first was not involved, except as an occasional scourge of satire and sarcasm. But she was slowly absorbed into the realm of UBU by the construction of puppets, which she did on the worktable, across from the wall along which she slept on a single futon with blue and white striped sheets and a boy scout sleeping bag. Spindles, shoe forms, cones and discs lay spread across the table and she would sit for hours painting a face on a spindle, or colors in shapes that changed as you spun them like a top. She made Pere Ubu yo yos, and Mere Ubu Russian dolls, red and yellow faces with long eyelashes, arms crossed like mummies.

She made galleries of puppets and dolls. Then she used papier-mâché and chicken wire to build Pa Ubu’s belly. This mighty protuberance lay face up on the table for weeks, receiving first its structure, then its form and finally, its gidouille.

When I told Simon of the project he made three stick puppets, Gaseous, Burrrus, and Nobodaddy. Gaseous and Burrrus were dressed in long, dusty smocks slit open in front and pleated to look like curtains, through which their skinny pink dicks poked in and out; Nobodaddy carried a physick stick. He beat them over the heads with it and twirled it around, stopping either in the upright, or the prone position. When in the prone, he prowled around suspiciously; when in the upright, he capered about with it between his legs, fisting the physick stick before bopping the heads of his comrades Gaseous and Burrrus.

Heads like giant cashews

With crude gashes

For eyes and mouth

 

And real teeth

And real lashes.

 

“De par ma chandelle verte! By my green candle!” we were likely to exclaim. “Hornstrumpet! Buggerlas and Bordure! Merdre!” And so on. Christopher throughout was livelier than I had ever seen him, though he hardly raised his voice, even when trying to; it seemed to be perpetually stuck in a quiet, nasal drone. He was gelid, like a sluggish, but not unpleasing body of water, thickened by creeping inertia as it approaches the freezing point.

We did not plan on having both families present; that was due entirely to a casual remark made by Sally at dinner at The Oyster Bar in Grand Central. And our presence there was the result of a compromise. The chiropractor was originally slated to come and had made a reservation at Keene’s Steak House. Sally, who preferred to eat fish, and only occasionally made forays into fowl, refused to eat the flesh of lamb or beef, and even went so far as to assert an ancestral aversion to pork! Meanwhile she could quite maerrily scarf down a plate of shrimp tempura or deftly disarticulate a boiled lobster without atavistic seizures of conscience. My mother, on the other end of the phone, cupped the mouthpiece in her hand and said, “They won’t go to Keene’s, Herb. She doesn’t eat meat.”

“Doesn’t eat what? Huh?”

“Meat dear. She doesn’t eat it.” There was some muffling.

“Is that you Alex,” the chiropractor asked in his slightly gruff, unhappy voice.

“Hello Herb. It’s what she said.”

“What. You mean the meat?”

“Yes.”

“I see no alternative to Keene’s. It’s our first of the month.”

“Herb, if you can’t make it.”

“They’ve got fish there. Excellent shrimp cocktail. Monsters, their tails, they hang over the rim of the cup. You get four to an order.”

“Ordure.”

“What?”

“Hors D’oevres. They’re only appetizers.”

“Did you hear me say monster? You might as well call them lobsters they’re so big. And if that’s not enough she can get the Dover Sole. I’ll set me back a session or two but hey we’re family.”

“She can’t eat at Keene’s, Herb. I’m sorry. For me, let’s go to The Oyster Bar. We haven’t been there in a long time.” A groan rose slowly up from his gut, full of aggravation. There were more muffled sounds. My mother got on the phone. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“You know how he is. But The Oyster Bar? Herb says it’s so seedy these days. Really run down.”

“We’ve eaten there. We haven’t gotten sick.”

“I know that but he just won’t give in.”

“And Keene’s isn’t seedy? Eating under all those pipes, the pipes of dead men, their dust drifting down onto your head?”

She sighed. “I’ll be there at eight o’clock, but I’m sure he won’t come.”

And so it was that we met my mother under the clock in Grand Central, an echoey cavern of marble and air and the human swarm. It was past rush hour and the crowds had thinned but there were still long lines at the gates and the trains were running every half hour. High above, the giant Kodak ad beamed its tranquil turquoise seas at us. My mother waved as we came into view and called out, “Alex honey, I’m over here.” She was smiling broadly and opened her arms to hug me as if we had not met in years. I was accustomed to her bosomy embraces of course, but I still squirmed in public when she gave them. She took Sally’s hand and kissed her on the cheek. “There you go darling, how are you? How’s my boy treating you?” We followed her downstairs to the lower level. It was like entering a crypt from a palace built by an emperor for his beloved. Now the tracks were numbered in the hundreds and the floors were pitched; the tiled ceilings, divided into arches and domes, were like the mosques of an infinite city.

We got to the restaurant and stood outside for a moment admiring the herringbone pattern of the ceiling tile and wondered how such a thing could ever be called seedy.

“I have no idea what goes through that man’s mind sometimes. But I will tell you I don’t need to eat here, no sir.”

A slight cloaqal odor barely disguised by the smell of bleach and detergent and old mop, hung in the air.

“Dad took me here last spring, for graduation.”

“That was very thoughtful of him to bring you to this place,” she said, glancing around and staring at an egregiously decrepit janitor, smoking a cigarette and pushing a broom down the hall.

“That was when he said that thing about Teddy.”

“You mean the one about the plane?” She chuckled, shut her eyes and shook her head.

We walked inside and there were very few customers. The uniformed waitresses looked old and tired, working the Oyster Bar counters as they had for decades. The waiters who served the tables were haggard and bald, their jackets hung off their shoulders, a size too big. There was a patch of businessmen here, one of tourists there. It was like Agamemnon’s tomb done in deco, but many of the lights strung on the ribs of the arches were out. To the right were the counters, built to a scale no longer required. The leather stools were frayed and smudged, with holes and missing tacks. The Formica countertop had eroded to a matte finish. They were playing to an empty house, night after night.

To the left was the vacant dining room full of tables with red and white checked tablecloths. An aged, palsied man took us to our table and we sat down and pored over the massive menu. I loved the list of fish. Lupe di Mare, mackerel, scrod, halibut, tautog, the price penciled in next to each of them. Then the hand written pages of oysters. My father would study these, looking for a name he knew, Blue Point, Wellfleet, Cape Breton. He knew all of the waiters: he was a twenty-five year man. They would stand at his side and shake the oysters in the their boiling braise of cream, stock and sherry. And as the steam rose into his face, he would smile slightly. This thing at least is good. Then he would put down his whiskey sour and tuck the napkin in his shirt and begin to slurp, slowly devouring the plump bivalves one by one, like a patient seabird.

“What was it he said again about the plane?” she asked, laying a pack of Winstons down on the table. She lit one up and looked at Sally, who became instantly alert, if not vigilant.

“I was asking him about the convention, and naturally we had to talk about the catastrophe!” I said the word the way he did, with a very slight wince. “Towards the end, when they were flying at night, Teddy, drunk out of his mind, would go lurching down the aisle of the plane, babbling incoherently to the press. And all he could think was, ‘My god, it’s history repeating itself as farce.’”

“Don Quixote in suspenders and a bow tie, that’s your father. Well, I guess we all have to land somewhere. But if you ask me, Fred Harris was the last one worth a damn. If I were younger I’d leave this country. I mean really. It’s a cause for despair.” She turned to Sally and asked, “What will you have dear? The chiropractor is paying, so knock yourself out. Waiter? Dry martini. Up, with three olives. Any gin will do, just make it bone dry. Thank you dear.”

The waiter’s wattles shook slightly as he scribbled a mark on the pad and looked at Sally with big dark eyes hidden in folds of grey. “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” she said.

“Er, a Becks beer,” I said. He nodded gravely and left to get our drinks. I watched the room. It was quite a show.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Sally said. “What is it about this place and your family? It seems to involve your father. The lawyer.”

I shook my head. “He’s not the lawyer. He’s, your father.”

“He certainly is,” my mother said. “It is true, the man is infuriating, but that has nothing to do with this place. And it’s a sad story why he came to eat here every night. You know he lived upstairs for several years?”

“Here?” Sally said.

“No dear, in the Commodore Hotel. And he kept an office in the Pan Am building.” I started to squirm. I had never told any of this to Sally. My mother paused, looked around the room. She was never more utterly at home than when sitting in a restaurant holding forth. “His world collapsed around him and the only safe place to be was within the confines of the few blocks surrounding him when it happened.”

“Why?” Sally asked.

“Well, dear, I believe it was despair, the kind of despair I was just talking about. Activism was his whole life. He worked with Dr. King in the fifties. He was in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They were friends. After they shot him, he allowed all of his hopes to be tied up in Robert Kennedy. When they shot him too, everything, everything we had worked for since the war was in shambles and Richard Nixon was going to be president.”

“Kennedy wasn’t even a liberal, never mind Leftist. Who do you think got us into Viet Nam? It’s all a myth.”

“That may be so. He was a complicated man. Both of them were. I never met JFK but I met Bobby plenty of times. And I know all about Joe McCarthy, believe me. Alex’s father used rant about it, and he was not going to go work for them. But in the end he did and he was loyal. He loved that man. The campaign was all consuming. They never let up till he was dead on the floor. And that was when he let go. You could see it on him in the funeral train. His glass wasn’t empty that day for five minutes.

“I watched the faces passing by in the windows, like everyone else. Suddenly it was true what you knew all along. There were men in uniform, standing at attention, waving flags. And others stopped in the middle of their Saturday afternoon barbecues to stare, spatula in hand, blow up toys bouncing around these little houses with chain link fences and the clouds, and the train going slowly along. Half the signs said, We loved you Bobby, and the other half, Who’s Next.

“For two years he ate in this restaurant every single night. I used to meet him sometimes, when I was in town, before going home to Larchmont. He was just, broken all to pieces. And that psychiatrist, who should have understood, he blamed me for not making him be a better father. But he couldn’t tie his own shoes. He had lost everything, or so he thought, so he was going to drink himself to death.” She shook her head and went, mm. They brought our drinks and she brightened up. “Well, tell me dear, how’s Shakespeare?”

“I’m thinking a lot about Jarry’s Shakespeare. Or rather, Shakespeare’s Jarry.” She chuckled, almost, but not quite, cynically. “I want to try to read Macbeth through Ubu Roi. I don’t think I can read Macbeth without feeling that Ubu Roi is the prior texte. So Macbeth is already parody before it’s tragedy. The textes behave like quarks. But I am also intrigued by the idea that Jarry references many of Shakespeare’s plays. I do have one problem.”

“What’s that dear?”

“I read a paper recently that claims Jarry never read Shakespeare, he had only seen popular operas and puppet theater performances. So he’s not likely to have known Shakespeare at all, except by hearsay.”

“I wouldn’t let a little thing like that get in the way,” my mother said, with a sort of half smile and Sally took a sip of her gin and tonic.

“What do they know?” I said. “He nails Macbeth. And he was very well read in English. He translated The Ancient Mariner.”

“Rhyme of,” Sally said.

“I think Ubu outraged them so much because he reminded them of Napoleon, satirized as an Uboid, obese tyrant.”

My mother called the waiter over. “We’re ready. How many oysters should I get?”

I scratched my ear and wondered why I had said any of what I had just said and said, “I’m good for a half dozen.” She nodded her approval and looked at Sally.

“No, I’ll take six too. A half-dozen. A dozen, his and mine together.”

“We’ll just make that six Bluepoint, six Wellfleet and six Pt. Judith. Then I want a pan roast. Make that Thousand Island on the dressing, and please, can you bring me four of those cherry tomatoes instead of two? I’ll pay.” He brushed it away and she blinked.

“I can’t decide between the bluefish and the tuna,” Sally said.

“The tuna will be dry. Get the bluefish,” I said.

“Yes, but they are filthy.”

“You mean from the water they swim in.”

“No, I mean their morals.” She gazed at my eyes and licked her lips.

“Go on,” I said.

 “One day last summer a surfcaster gave Joseph this bluefish. It was a monster, maybe a meter long. Maybe more. When he put it down on the kitchen counter it slid around in this bloody slime, which started to coat everything, and it smelled a little nasty. Lou said to just cut it open. They were drunk I think. And they were afraid of the fish and afraid of the knife. Christopher of all people finally said, ‘All you have to do is cut it open to clean it.’ He had dissected things in bio class and figured it couldn’t be any different from a frog or a worm. So he took up the blade and unseamed it from its navel to its chops. And when the guts bulged out, the room filled up with the stench of human shit.”

My mother looked quite appalled for a moment and grabbed Sally’s arm and said, “I hope you cooked that fish and didn’t eat it raw ’cause you thought it was fresh!”

“Cook it? I wouldn’t even touch it without gloves on.”

My mother released her arm and Sally looked at it as if it were a little sore. “Then you’d best go ahead and order the tuna, I wouldn’t want you to ingest fecal matter.”

“The tuna then, rare, with fries, and Italian on the salad,” Sally said to the waiter who had aged visibly during his term in office with us.

“I’ll take the bouillabaisse.”

“Bouilabaise moi,” Sally mumbled.

“Er, and something besides this beer. Chardonnay. A glass of that please.”

“Let’s just get a bottle,” my mother said. She scanned the wine list. “This one here. The Sancerre.”

“In Sancerre,” mumbled Sally, then she shook her face a little and smiled.

Half way through the oysters Sally asked, “So were you on the funeral train too Alex?”

“Yeah, it was a very sad day,” I said, that being my standard answer. “We had just moved to Larchmont.”

“No,” my mother said. “We moved right after.”

“No, it was before. We lived there before moving our stuff in. The psychiatrist had that moldy smelling cloth sleeping bag from his Valther von der Vogelveide days,” I said.

“Remember those old wooden skis with the leather straps?” My mother put her hand on her mouth and laughed.

“He said he could ski on them.”

“And fell on his ass,” she said.

“That’s where he pulled the sleeping bag out from, the basement. It was cut into bedrock, you could see the holes they had drilled to set the dynamite in.”

“That is not by any means the most primitive cellar I have been in, far from it, but it is the most Gothic. I always thought those dynamite holes would hold torches, and the Frankenstein monster, and Igor with his broken neck, are down there. All you needed was a lime pit. At least there were no critters to speak of.”

“Well, there were raccoons.”

“Yes but Jacques trapped those and released them in Pound Ridge.”

“And the rats,” I said, counting them off with my fingers.

“But Alex,” she said, flustered now, “we were right there down by the water. That’s just where the rats live! In Louisiana you know we eat them.”

Sally gulped. I said, with a little haste, “Nutrias, not rats.”

“You call ‘em what you want dear.” She addressed Sally directly, her face suddenly serious and sober. “The only difference between a nutria and a rat is size. The nutria is big enough to eat and when you’re hungry, it tastes just like chicken. But honey, if you ain’t hungry it tastes just like what it is. A giant, greasy, nasty old rat that lives in the swamp and grows three feet long.” She spread her arms out till her hands were a yard apart.

There was a lull after that. One waiter brought the oysters another the bottle of wine while a third came up behind him wheeling a tin ice bucket like an IV. My mother read the label and nodded; he pulled the cork and presented it to her. Then he poured a splash of wine in her glass, which she dutifully swirled and swilled, smiling wickedly for him. “You don’t happen to know Izzy Ploomis?” she asked.

It took him a moment to realize she was actually speaking to him, then his eyes sparked a little and he thought. “Mister Ploomis, certainly,” he said in a soft and ancient Manhattan accent. “He was in the other night.” He looked at me a moment and then at Sally, who made him smile, though she was really quite frozen and thoughtless, petrified that the waiter might start talking to her, and turned back to my mother. “And that boy’s his son. I’ve seen you grow up. How come you never come in?”

My mouth was dry. “Money,” I managed to say.

He laughed and folded his hands in front. “You think I can afford this place? Even after thirty years. That’s how long I’ve been here.” He turned and walked away.

“Well, wasn’t he a nice man,” my mother said. “When we used to come here, if I ordered the wine, they brought it to your father.” She laughed. “He didn’t know grape juice from vinegar.”

“Maybe if Alex had been older they would have given it to him.”

“The psychiatrist knew his wines,” she said, buttering a roll.

“And so did Roy,” I said.

My mother blushed and bit her lower lip. “Oh my God, when he went down there looking for that Bordeaux of his and Roy had drunk it all up with Hen. Oh, that was so funny.”

After another brief but grave-like silence my mother asked Sally what she was doing that summer. Sally said, “Well, after the play in June I’m not sure. I could work as a research assistant for Professor Blum, or I could spend part of the time out on the Island and the rest here.”

“What play is that dear?”

“Didn’t Alex tell you–”

I said, “No, I didn’t see any point. It’s not exactly real yet.”

“But they’ve got puppets and music and the space.”

“Joseph, her brother, and Christopher, an old friend I guess, are producing Ubu Roi.”

“At an anarchist theater,” Sally added.

“An antichrist theater,” my mother said.

“Anarchist.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “Where is the theater?”

“1st Street. Between First and Second.”

My mother nodded and lit up a cigarette. “Oh sure. And let me ask, whoever will play Mere Ubu?”

I suddenly was nervous that she herself wanted to do it. I said, “They’ve asked Sally.”

“But I can’t remember lines.”

“Well, there’s nothing to it really. And that’s a marvelous play. I saw it in the early fifties, down in the village, at the Cherry Lane. It was The Living Theater production. And I played it earlier than that, when I was first in town. Anyway, I think you ought to try it dear. You’re certainly quite verbal.”

“Thank you.”

She waved it off, exhaled and said, “Well you must tell me when the performance is and I’ll come. I’ve been going to avant-garde theater for longer than that man has been waiting on tables.”

“Well, it’s in three weeks. Hence the trouble about remembering the lines.”

“Oh, but it’s not long and it’s mostly idiotic.”

I braced my back and searched for the waiters. Where was the food? The waiter appeared in the distance, walking very precisely across the floor with a giant tray full of plates balanced next to his head on his hand. It was an alarming level of suspense for a simple meal. How could he stand that for thirty years?

“I wouldn’t call it idiotic,” Sally said.

“Look,” I said. “Our dinner.”

“Never-the-less, you may be right. I’ll try to memorize some tonight. My,” she gasped a little, looking at the hunk of tuna on her plate, and French fries.

Then came the hot pan and he poured the oyster roast into it sending a cloud of steam my mother’s way. She nodded her approval and stubbed out the cigarette. “Let’s eat.”