“Still a little slippy. That dehumidifier isn’t worth a toot.”
So it isn’t to show me the new, dry racquetball court that my father has come to get me. It’s something, his expression tells me, more significant. Leaning to one side (the exercise hasn’t helped his back any), he leads me up to the third floor, then up another, smaller stairway that I haven’t noticed before. This one leads straight to the roof. When we get to the top, I see that there’s another building up here. It’s pretty big, like a bunker, but with windows all around.
“You didn’t know about this, did you?” my father says. “This is the penthouse. Your mother and I are going to move in up here soon as it’s ready.”
The penthouse has a red front door and a welcome mat. It sits in the middle of the tarred roof, which extends in every direction. From up here, all the neighboring buildings disappear, leaving only sky and ocean. Beside the penthouse, my father has set up a small hibachi. “We can have a cookout tonight,” he says.
Inside, my mother is cleaning the windows. She wears the same yellow rubber gloves as when she used to clean the windows of our house back in the Detroit suburbs. Only two rooms in the penthouse are habitable at present. The third has been used as a storeroom and still contains a puzzle of chairs and tables stacked on top of one another. In the main room, a telephone has been installed beside a green vinyl chair. One of the warehouse paintings has been hung on the wall, a still life with seashells and coral.
The sun sets. We have our cookout, sitting in folding chairs on the roof.
“This is going to be nice up here,” my mother says. “It’s like being right in the middle of the sky.”
“What I like,” my father says, “is you can’t see anybody. Private ocean view, right on the premises. A house this big on the water’d cost you an arm and a leg.
“Soon as we get this place paid off,” he continues, “this penthouse will be ours. We can keep it in the family, down through the generations. Whenever you want to come and stay in your very own Florida penthouse, you can.”
“Great,” I say, and mean it. For the first time, the motel exerts an attraction for me. The unexpected liberation of the roof, the salty decay of the oceanfront, the pleasant absurdity of America, all come together so that I can imagine myself bringing friends and women up to this roof in years to come.
When it’s finally dark, we go inside. My parents aren’t sleeping up here yet but we don’t want to leave. My mother turns on the lamps.
I go over to her and put my hands on her shoulders.
“What did you dream last night?” I ask.
She looks at me, into my eyes. While she does this, she’s not so much my mother as just a fellow human being, with troubles and a sense of humor. “You don’t want to know,” she says.
I go into the bedroom to check it out. The furniture has that motel look but, on the bureau, my mother has set up a photograph of me and my brothers. There’s a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, which is open. In the mirror, I see my father. He’s urinating. Or trying to. He’s standing in front of the toilet, staring down with a blank look. He’s concentrating on some problem I’ve never had to concentrate on, something I know is coming my way, but I can’t imagine what it is. He raises his hand in the air and makes a fist. Then, as though he’s been doing it for years, he begins to pound on his stomach, over where his bladder is. He doesn’t see me watching. He keeps pounding, his hand making a dull thud. Finally, as though he’s heard a signal, he stops. There’s a moment of silence before his stream hits the water.
My mother is still in the living room when I come out. Over her head, the seashell painting is crooked, I notice. I think about fixing it, then think the hell with it. I go out onto the roof. It’s dark now, but I can hear the ocean. I look down the beach, at the other high-rises lit up, the Hilton, the Ramada. When I go to the roof’s edge, I can see the motel next door. Red lights glow in the tropical grass-hut bar. Beneath me, and to the side, though, the windows of our own motel are black. I squint down at the patio but can’t see anything. The roof still has puddles from last night’s storm and, when I step, I feel water gush up my shoe. The hole is getting bigger. I don’t stay out long, just long enough to feel the world. When I turn back, I see that my father has come out into the living room again. He’s on the phone, arguing with someone, or laughing, and working on my inheritance.
1997
FIND THE BAD GUY
We’ve owned this house for—what—twelve years now, I reckon. Bought it from an elderly couple, the De Rougemonts, whose aroma you can still detect around the place, in the master especially, and in the home office, where the old buzzard napped on summer days, and a little bit in the kitchen, still.
I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each family smelled had to do with bodily functions deep inside their bodies? The whole thing sort of turned your stomach, the more you thought about it.
Now I live in an old house that probably smells funny to outsiders.
Or used to live. At the present time, I’m in my front yard, hiding out between the stucco wall and the traveler palms.
There’s a light burning up in Meg’s room. She’s my sugar pie. She’s thirteen. From my vantage point I can’t make out Lucas’s bedroom, but as a rule Lucas prefers to do his homework downstairs, in the great room. If I were to sidle up to the house, I’d more than likely spy Lucas in his school V-neck and necktie, armed for success: graphing calculator (check), St. Boniface iPad (check), Latin Quizlet (check), bowl of Goldfish (check). But I can’t go up there now on account of it would violate the restraining order.
I’m not supposed to come any closer than fifty feet to my lovely wife, Johanna. It’s an emergency TRO (meaning temporary), issued at night, with a judge presiding. My lawyer, Mike Peekskill, is in the process of having it revoked. In the meantime, guess what? Yours truly, Charlie D., still has the landscape architect’s plans from when Johanna and I were thinking of replacing these palms with something less jungly and prone to pests. So I happen to know for certain that the distance from the house to the stucco wall is sixty-three feet. Right now, I reckon I’m about sixty or sixty-one, here in the vegetation. And, anyway, nobody can see me, because it’s February and already dark in these parts.