The Fiddleback

fiction by Ivy Goodman

 

Surely he couldn’t recall the wateriness and confinement of the womb, but unconscious memories must have added to his joy when he floated in the mildest of waves, or heightened his recurring, claustrophobic nightmare of being sealed up to drown while the water level rose.

He awoke gasping, in his own bed.

*

He was an intelligent middle-aged man who’d been consoled by falsehoods as a small boy: “You are not going to die, and neither are Daddy and I, not for a long, long time.”

*

His extraordinary father lived to be almost a centenarian and died at home, after swimming laps. His extraordinary mother, in her late eighties, was still alive. For just that reason, he anguished over his parents’ disapproval long after most adults his age.

*

In their retirement, his mother had maintained the gracious, slightly condescending air of a small town doctor’s wife. His father, undeterred, had read the latest medical journals with a 5x magnifying glass. Every day he swam and then climbed from the pool at the staircase end, holding both railings with his large, venous, liver-spotted hands. Below his ribs, loose skin fell in folds, like a patient’s drape. His wet, antiquated bathing trunks coiled about his thighs. His nose and cheekbones had the sheen of skin tautened over bone, like the knuckles in a fist. On the deck at the pool’s edge, his father hunched toward his walker, his mouth opening in pain.

*

He knew he would never be his parents’ peer, and he never expected to live as long.

*

Among his friends, the so-called survivors of dire illness sometimes taunted the seemingly healthy, like himself, with their questionable advantage: “Well, at least I know how I’m going to die.” But he could only guess at what courtship, betrothal, or fatal misalliance awaited him, or was already, secretly, in progress.

*

He never married.

*

He was a contributing editor who specialized in long-form journalism, but lately, these past five years, when he’d moved onto mastheads, the magazines had failed. People had become unfairly superstitious of his name. He wasn’t famous, but neither was he entirely unknown. He was someone—someone—and yet ordinary people had no idea who he was.

*

He had abundant wiry white hair that he brushed down determinedly along a side part. By age 56, the white was no longer especially premature. His earnest broad face and broad head must have hurt his mother when he was born, her second child and only son. Was that what drew them close? The year he was three, she got started in her volunteer work for the regional hospital, a moment of unacknowledged Eros in his life. His older sister was at school, the babysitter had just arrived, and he was playing on the kitchen floor with his toy men and trucks. When his mother knelt to say goodbye before she left for her meeting, her full skirt spread about them both. She smelled of bath powder, face powder, and that sweet astringent, her perfume. She put her arms around him and hugged him tight. In adulthood, he would sometimes pull the sheets over his and his lover’s heads, but soon enough, he would need to kick them off.

*

When he was a small boy, his mother had abandoned him for her fund-raising and run out the door. In the middle of her life, when she yearned for him, he grew up and went away into the world. They had broken each other’s hearts, all in the natural order of things and entirely out of sync, at different times possessive and rejecting, inconsolable and unrelenting. His father had disapproved of their Sturm and Drang. But she loved him, he never doubted that.

*

He was not unusual in dating younger women, though he’d preferred older women when he was young. The average age of his lovers was consistently thirty-five. As some women compulsively desire abusive men, he chose kind and agreeable women whom he couldn’t love.

*

Contrary to what his parents thought, he had really tried, he hadn’t purposely failed in science, and he had dreaded that phone call home, his sophomore year in college, to announce that he was dropping pre-med. But with his grades, where could he have trained? In Guadalajara or Grenada, with the hope, or the frightening prospect, of joining his father as an incompetent younger partner? Perhaps his father was relieved. Besides, his older sister was finishing med school then and on her way to a distinguished career.

*

In her job, his sister used instruments like drinking straws with cameras at the probing end and forced her way into orifices that normally opened out. She hurt people for their own good. When they were children, water had poured down his chin from the cup she’d jammed against his mouth after he’d announced that he’d playacted baby for the last time. She was six years older than he, she skipped two grades in the local schools, and when she was fifteen and he was nine, she went away to college and never returned to live at home. She was outspoken, self-important, and very bright, but she’d also worked very, very hard, and yes, sexism most certainly prevailed. Look at their parents’ error in favoring him, but that was an obsession of hers with which he disagreed. Even though she was a doctor, she was nothing like their dad.

*

Despite his years of practice, their father had resisted the cynicism of routine. His patients had placed their bodies passively in his care while they went on self-destructing, working at exhausting jobs, smoking, drinking to excess, eating wrong. In that small manufacturing town, family names recirculated through the generations, from the headstones back to the phonebook. They called him “Doc.” Sometimes they could be chastened. At home, he gave his children only slightly longer consultations than he gave these patients. But that was how he was accustomed to sharing time. In the office, he was blunt, often humorous, and detached. At home, he expected his admonishments to take effect.

*

His parents had met during the second world war, in the city hospital where his father trained as a resident and his mother as a student nurse. The war had been serious beyond measure—when he was a boy, they had told him—and yet, in the old black and white photographs, his parents looked joyful and reckless, arm and arm with the strangers who had been their friends. On rainy days, he would open the shoe box with the dented lid and crouch down to spread the photos on the rough attic floor. He traced the spear points of the wrought iron fence, the long curved roof and rounded hood of the old gray car. His mother’s mouth, pursed as if to whistle, was saying what? Her lips, all the women’s lips, were almost black. A hat brim cast a sinister shadow on his father’s cheek, but his father was laughing, far happier than he had ever seen him in life. He stared at his parents, and they stared back from another time and place, but not exactly at him and not exactly as themselves.

*

He had a passion for that era, just before and just beyond, the 30s, 40s, 50s, the early 60s, not an inventory of Manhattan streets, or the decades of adult life, but the twentieth century at its heart. Perhaps his rearward outlook was genetic or environmental, like a breach birth, although he’d had a normal birth. And he wasn’t just nostalgic. He researched endlessly, choosing actual newspapers over digital versions when he could, handling huge bound volumes with curator’s gloves, under muted library light. But the pages still had the rustling weight of those daily sections that his parents had never folded up as tidily after they were through reading them, pages on which his mother repotted plants, on which all their galoshes dripped melting snow, pages spattered with paint, ringed from coffee cups, crumpled for kindling in the fireplace or simply, thoughtlessly, thrown away. He went back in time and found people his parents’ age whom he hoped to interview in the present if he was lucky enough to find them still alive. His best work profiled the once-prominent, now elderly, forgotten, and alone. Every day more old men died, and no one could pursue them into eternity or out among earth’s acres and acres of graves. He made appointments to meet people—usually him and him, seldom her—at a current address, at a near-future date, for the purposes of going into the past. He entered sanctums that smelled faintly alimentary, or not so faintly, with the added mustiness of camphor and talcum. His hosts pushed along their walkers, breathed oxygen through cannulas, and showed off yellowed memorabilia they could no longer read. Often these were the last published accounts on which obituaries would draw, and though he would never admit to the hubris and sentimentality of doing a form of his father’s work, in his own way, he saved lives.

*

And yet no one in the family, not even his mother, understood his career. They thought he asked questions and took notes while the people he interviewed offered revelations and unknowingly bared their souls. All he had to do then was write it up. Easy work, compared to medicine. Anyone could do his job. Anyone could be like him. But only he bore the burden of being no one else.

*

Early on, right after journalism school, he had gone on winning minor accolades and promotions. He found a permanent residence in the city, an apartment that was small and dark but perfectly fine for him. On Sunday mornings, the last of the coffee evaporated to syrup at the bottom of the pot. The sofa cushions were dented and paunchy, marking his place, and newspaper sections lay scattered on the table and the rug. Perhaps he was seeing someone out, saying goodbye. He remembered particular women, of course he did, and yet as he got older, his experience of love, if he called it that, had diffused, like a lifetime’s reading or travel. In association with a certain proper name, he usually remembered certain idiosyncratic bits that came to stand for the whole, just as a few recurring recollections come to represent a single visit to a foreign city. There were also patterns, essential conversations and pained expressions that were not unique. He would touch her shoulder gently. He would let her cry in his arms. He always knew better, he wanted to warn her not to tell, but still he would ask, “What’s wrong?”

If she had good sense, she would say it was nothing, or else she would acquiesce. “You don’t love me, and you never will.”

“Listen, I never said….”

“Yes, I know.”

“The problem is, I work so goddamn hard.”

“Let’s not weigh the relative importance of our jobs!”

But often these women remained his friends, and he would join in the celebrations at their weddings when they married better men.

*

He liked being alone. He was always relieved when the door closed. In recent years, as his career began to falter, he noticed that younger women were less and less interested, perhaps because he offered less and less and then absolutely nothing to exploit. Was his mood low? Sure, everybody’s was. The groundwater was awash in more psychotropics than could possibly be absorbed. But thanks to the side effects of medication, his libido hardly bothered him at all.

*

He’d overheard younger colleagues—now former colleagues—savaging some of his work as the product of a lesser mind. Okay, let them call him a lesser mind or at least fellow traveler. But he didn’t think he was “as dull as conscience,” although the villainy he reported was often more ingenious than he. He also knew he had a weakness for excess. But he disagreed that his worst pieces swelled with a “subterfuge of detail,” as if he were intentionally trying to lose his readers, in order to escape first. Understandably, the new editor would want to bring in her own people. He remembered when, long ago, he’d been brought along as one of X’s people, and later one of Y’s and Z’s, though now X and Y were dead and Z was retired. He belonged to no one, but he would find work. Already he’d been offered a one-year lectureship, to train the young for nonexistent jobs, and—here he exaggerated—he was busy on his own because he had a book to put to bed.

*

Late at night, he had a last drink, turned down the thermostat, switched off lights, brushed his teeth, and even though he was exhausted, he would joke to himself that he still had to put the book to bed. Sometimes it was a cartoon book with a smile on its cover, rubber arms, and white animated gloves that pulled the blankets up. Other times he tucked in a volume that was leather bound, gilded, deckled, and yet strangely hard and light in his grasp. Because it wasn’t a book at all. It was an empty shellacked wooden box. The real imaginary book lay in his closet, in stacks of journals that recorded the activity of his brain more accurately than an EEG. Inside their cardboard covers, the journals were smudged from the sweep of his writing hand, delicately warped from the weight of graphite and ink, from the humidity of his apartment and his own breath. Or maybe he would leave them all for someone else to throw away.

*

His few old friends were concerned for him and yet they couldn’t resist a subtle form of blame. Logic said there had to be a reason why some people suffered more from the randomness of fate, and he almost felt deserving. His father wouldn’t have understood how a professional could be fired like a common working man, but his father was dead. He didn’t tell his mother and so deprived himself of both her sympathy and praise, for sparing her the added worry. Did his sister know he’d lost his job? She was unlikely to follow those online squibs where his departure had made an infinitesimal bit of news, and he withheld the information on his own because his misfortunes always gladdened her heart.

*

She and her husband split the burden of family visits strictly on family lines, and he hadn’t seen his brother-in-law, a pulmonologist, in decades. Thirty years ago, as a new uncle, he’d been teased for being more concerned for his sports jacket than his twin infant nephews who were liable to spit up. Once he’d babysat for the boys, during several exhausting hours of preschoolers’ highly apocalyptic make believe. At holidays when they were ten, eleven, twelve, they would perform childishly cruel impressions of older relatives—not only of him—while his proud sister laughed. Eventually they matured into young men, tall and thin like their father, with their father’s long, thin nose, and as unbelievable as it seemed, they, too, became doctors. He hoped they understood that he only wished them well. As they grew up, his nephews must have realized that an essential bias and loyalty of theirs was at odds with his. But his sister was their mother, and neither he nor they could help that.

*

To him, her name evoked her dismissive snarl, her chin raised, her shoulders thrust back. He wondered at the turnover rate among her staff. And yet he didn’t doubt that her career and her family life were worthy and good—exclusive, rarified, complete—but inaccessible to him, like a party in a guarded, brilliantly illuminated house. In equal measure, she kept him out and he stayed away. They were childhood acquaintances who seldom met and only talked when they had to. Most recently, she’d demanded that Mom move back north from Florida, live nearby, have her environment and medications controlled, be locked up, for all he knew. She contended that he was wilfully blind to their mother’s state of health. He summed up his philosophy once again: They couldn’t stop Mom from dying, so for now they should just let her go ahead and live. Enraged, his sister slammed down the phone.

*

His mother was lovely still. Her hair was tinted the color of champagne. Her cheek felt creamy, nearly confectionary against his lips. And yet she was so frail in his embrace, ever shorter, and slightly bowed. On his last visit, he hadn’t warned her he was coming. He’d driven straight from the airport in the rental car. When she was summoned from yoga class and saw him in the hall, she began to cry—out of happiness, she said. Even he felt an excitement, a popularity he hadn’t known in years, as elderly ladies who were his mother’s friends gathered round to say hello to her “handsome boy.” She favored loose bright trousers with a matching jersey all the time now, he learned, not just for “seated yoga.” In the retirement community where she lived, she was active in a book club, a chorale, a social action group. She and her friends went by the busload to more live performances than many working critics. Giving him a tour, she was larky and festive on that first day, as if she weren’t old herself but in disguise. But as the week went on, he saw how everything seemed to take her longer: standing up, turning around, making sense of what she might have heard him say. There were moments of distraction, too, as if she were eavesdropping on someone else while he was talking to her. To be clear in the first instance was usually impossible; often he had to repeat himself more than once. What did they talk about? Nothing important, nothing much at all. Hypnotically, at that slow, slow tempo with which she seemed to prolong finite time, they both fell asleep in separate lounge chairs every afternoon. But this was what he had wanted, simply to be with her. Tiny lizards darted under the patio door, and when he blinked, he wasn’t sure if he’d seen them or not or how much later it was. He stroked her arm, thin and freckled, on the armrest next to his. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “I’m really going to miss you.” Her brows were raised in her familiar moony expression of farewell, and yet she was relaxed. It was an easy moment in her tremendous futile effort to conserve herself. “Mom, why don’t you come with me? Come back north.” Smiling, she feigned a shiver and then settled more deeply into her chair, embraced by the thick, moist Florida heat. She used to shut her eyes with the same voluptuary joy when his father stood behind her, helping her into her long mink coat. “Too cold. Tell your sister I’m staying here.”

*

Was that his last visit or the last but one? Until further notice, every visit counted as the last. Leave-taking was so painful that he had to pry loose and hurry. Even worse, he might not have a chance to say goodbye at all.

*

In his last dream, that nightmare, a wall of water toppled him, flooding his lungs. When he awoke he was lost until he placed himself amidst the familiar shadows of his room, in the streetlight glow that always seeped around the edges of his window shade. He didn’t understand why he still couldn’t breathe, why he couldn’t fling off that watery weight, though his chest kept pounding at it from within. Strangely, he wasn’t frightened, despite the urging chaos of his heartbeat. He didn’t feel the desperation he would have felt, trying save somebody else’s life. But he tried. Reaching for the telephone, he collapsed on the floor, pulling the covers along as far as they would go, leaving a tidal pattern of ridges on the bed.

*

The photo that accompanied his obituary had once appeared, in miniature, on the contributors’ page of a now-defunct magazine. He was seated by himself toward the rear of a church sanctuary, right of the center aisle. The stone walls held in the chill on that rainy day, or else he simply hadn’t had a chance to take off his raincoat. With his arm outstretched along the ridge of the pew, he was turned sideways, peering toward the back, in readiness for the procession coming in. Was he awaiting the coffin or the bride? It seemed to be a sad event, though perhaps not. Looking at his face, you could never tell.