American Estrangement Read online

  The admissions coordinator greets me at the entrance. His name is Mickey Poindexter, and he’s got a gut and a name tag and he smells like cigarettes. I think that I know him from somewhere, that we may have gone to the same high school, where he may have been one of those upperclassmen lunchtime assholes. But of this I can’t be sure.

  In any case, he’s not an asshole anymore. “Welcome,” he says. He grasps my hand warmly. “Right this way.” He’s concerned without being maudlin; he’s comforting without being Pollyanna-ish. We all know why you’re here, buddy, is the subtext. Let’s do what we can to maintain our dignity.

  We ride the elevator in respectful silence to the second floor, which can be accessed only by the turn of a key on Mickey’s key chain. Entry and exit are obviously not at the discretion of the tenants. In other words, the tenants are not really tenants and this is not an apartment building. The elevator doors open onto six elderly people in wheelchairs watching a game show with their chins on their chests. An attendant sits nearby, her eyes glued to the screen, waiting for something exciting to happen. This is not the way to make a good first impression. There’s a sign on the wall listing the weekly activities: chair exercises on Monday, etc. The carpeting, as anticipated, is worn and of a purple-green pattern that belongs to a different era, as does the wood paneling. Someone, I think, has soiled himself or herself recently, because the air is heavy with Febreze.

  Mickey’s office needs Febreze, too: it reeks of cigarette smoke. This makes me wonder if he sits in here chain-smoking all day, and, if so, what other rules does he flout? Football paraphernalia covers the walls, floor-to-ceiling, the yellow stripes and blue stars of past teams, going so far back in time that there’s even a framed pair of socks from when the team was blue stripes and yellow stars. We break the ice by talking about the upcoming season, which happens to begin tonight, with the first, meaningless preseason game. Mickey is full of facts and figures. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I gave up on the team years ago, because one can endure only so much defeat before it begins to feel like a manifestation of one’s own character. The last time I went to a game I was sixteen, standing outside the stadium for hours with three of my friends, hoping to get autographs. The team had lost again, and the players, when they finally emerged from the tunnel, were gloomy. Still, they signed. Thirty years, and there hadn’t been a championship. Thirty years, and they hadn’t even come close. But each year was a new beginning, each year was the year it was finally going to happen. “Why not us?” was the slogan one season, plastered on billboards and the sides of buses. It was a good question with no good answer.

  But according to Mickey things are now lining up perfectly. Apparently we’ve made the right trades, and we’ve signed the right free agents, we’ve cut the right washed-up players. This is our year, he says. This is supposed to be our year. He’s adamant. He’s passionate. He’s in love. I want to remind him that every year is supposed to be our year, and every year ends up being someone else’s year, but he speaks with such optimism and insight that his conviction is infectious. He may make a believer of me again, which isn’t hard, since deep down we all want to be believers. “Start watching them tonight,” he says with confidence. Meanwhile, I ooh and aah over the memorabilia he’s accumulated throughout the years. No memorabilia too obscure. Case in point: he has a single silver cleat, the size of a tooth, that broke off from one of the players’ shoes during a game.

  “I bought it for three hundred and fifty dollars,” Mickey tells me proudly. It seems a fair price.

  Speaking of fair price, the room for my mother will cost four thousand a month, not including laundry service. I’m wondering if our rapport over football will earn me some kind of break.

  “Will she need her clothes laundered?” Mickey wants to know. His voice is concerned and comforting.

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, she will.”

  That’s an additional forty-five dollars.

  We take the elevator to the third floor by way of Mickey’s key chain. Above the third floor is the fourth floor. Above the fourth floor is the fifth floor. The fifth floor is where tenants go when they lose their minds. There is no sixth floor.

  “This is our nicest floor,” Mickey assures me, referring to the floor we are walking on.

  I don’t know what makes this the nicest floor, but I’m beginning to suspect that Mickey might be the best salesman I’ve ever met. The thought makes me suspicious. It also makes me susceptible. The hallway is long and has the same purple-green carpeting as the second floor, but here it seems more vibrant—stylish, even. We turn and turn again. We pass a nurses’ station, where two nurses are standing hip to hip, as if on an assembly line, divvying up the day’s doses. Apart from the four of us, there is no indication that there are any actual living people on this floor. Hanging on the doors are signs that say things like WE LOVE YOU, GRANDPA, but these feel as if they were messages written long ago. I wonder if I will make a sign for my mother’s door. I wonder if I will come and play Scrabble with her. I wonder how long her stay here will be, and I do some quick math in my head in multiples of four thousand.

  Room 303, our final destination, is not accessed by way of a key. The door is open and the Febreze is evident. How long has this room been vacant, and what is the Febreze intended to disguise? Three-oh-three seems like a number that has, or should have, some symbolic significance in my mother’s life, but I can draw no connection.

  Mickey stands to the side, as any good Realtor knows to do, allowing me to take in the surroundings as if I had walked in on my own. It’s a small, quiet, square room with a kitchenette and a window that faces the courtyard, where a tree is in full bloom. I make a big deal about the tree, the leaves, the branches, and this pleases Mickey, as if he had planted it himself. I hope that my mother, the librarian, will be satisfied with the tranquility. I hope she will say that I did a good job of finding this, her final home. I hope that she will not resent me.

  “Here’s the walk-in closet,” Mickey says proudly.

  There’s no need whatsoever for a walk-in closet. My mother will come with barely enough to fill a dresser. I want to tell Mickey to seal up the walk-in closet and knock five hundred dollars off the rent. Close off the kitchenette, too. Just keep the two nurses in the nurses’ station—everything else is superfluous and ostentatious. Even the window that faces the courtyard can go. Even the tree.

  That evening I make a serious error in judgment and take my mother to see Life of Pi. In 3-D, no less. It’s playing at the Royal Cineplex at the absurd price of three dollars and fifty cents, which makes me feel as if my decision were that much more sound.

  “Why so cheap?” I ask the ticket-taker.

  “We aim to please,” he says. He’s about nineteen, and he’s showing off for my mother. When she walks past, he looks at her butt.

  The ticket price harks back to an earlier era, an era that predates me, an era in which my mother and father would have flourished, all uncomplicated technology, clear rules, understandable roles. I thought Life of Pi would reflect that era as well, simpleminded storytelling with a happy ending, but within thirty minutes there’s a young man floating alone on a boat in the ocean with wild animals trying to kill him. The metaphor is robust and immediate. We’ve got two hours to go, my mother and I, with plastic glasses stuck to our faces. Violence, desperation, desolation fill the screen. Violence is one thing, but desolation is another. And desolation in 3-D is another still. The sea, where our hero must somehow make peace with the animals, floats off the screen toward me. I feel as if I’m about to drown beneath this false water.

  Yet my mother appears captivated by what’s unfolding. She leans forward in her seat, elbows on her knees, lights flashing off her glasses.

  “Isn’t this so boring?” I ask, as if it couldn’t be anything but.

  My mother shrugs. She’s amenable to anything. Perhaps when you don’t have much time left equanimity sets in and you spell “or” and you leave in the middle
of movies, no questions asked. We exit the way we came, tossing our half-used glasses in the cardboard box. The ticket-taker gets one last chance to check out my mother.

  On the way home we stop at the all-night diner by my house for a cup of coffee and “maybe a bite to eat.” There are six televisions above the counter, all tuned to the same channel: the preseason football game. The sound is off, but the mood in the diner is pure excitement. Two dozen fools sit jabbering, staring upward, watching the silent commentators analyze and extrapolate.

  My mother wants broccoli cake, or some approximation of it, but the diner doesn’t sell that, of course.

  “We don’t got any of that, hon,” the waitress says. My mother flinches at the grammar.

  In lieu of broccoli cake I order her a side of steamed broccoli, a slice of red-velvet cake, and some ice cream, because why not? The lights in the diner are bright, unflatteringly so, but still my mother looks young and beautiful. She’ll always look young and beautiful. Even on her final day at Ellsworth Daybreak Vista her eyes will be blue and striking, her hair will be lush. She won’t fall apart. She’ll make sure of it.

  I can see the televisions from where we’re sitting, and on the first play of the game the wayward rookie, the one that everybody had been dubious about, takes the ball and races eighty yards into the end zone. “Look at that, Mom!” I say. The diner goes crazy, and my mother turns around to see what the fuss is about. And then, just a few plays later, our team scores again, and the patrons are screaming even louder, and now my mother is smiling and clapping, and so am I. And before that first quarter is over we’ve scored four more times. Everyone is standing and shouting, everyone including the waitress, including my mother, the diner full of fire and zeal, as if this lone preseason game had any bearing on what’s to come.

  A, S, D, F

  By the time six o’clock is about to roll around, I’m beginning to wonder if working in an art gallery is taking some sort of a toll on my psyche. Part of the problem is that I haven’t done anything all day since there hasn’t been anything to do, and the other part of the problem is something I can’t quite name yet. This is the moment when the owner emerges from his back office—three minutes before six—holding two pages of a handwritten letter that he needs me to type right now, because there’s a collector on the West Coast who might be interested in Untitled X.

  “One more thing before you go,” he says, as if the list of today’s tasks has been long.

  “Sure thing,” I tell him. I’m full of good cheer and work ethic. I was hired a month ago and I want the owner to think of me as a team player—but the truth is I don’t get paid for overtime.

  The truth is I’ve spent today the way I’ve spent most days, sitting behind the front desk for nine hours, less one hour for lunch, engulfed in a sea of silence and serenity, waiting for something to happen, while I gaze into the middle distance of white walls hung with abstract expressionism. This is the art of seventy years ago, the art of art, the art of ideas, the art of Rorschach, lines, shapes, splashes, repudiating verisimilitude and easy answers, 60 x 60, and selling for five figures if the owner’s lucky. No, we don’t have Pollocks or de Koonings, we have the ones no one’s heard of, the ones that don’t go for seven figures, and that don’t hang in the Denver Art Museum where I worked in the café, before getting my act together to send out art-related résumés across the state of Colorado. “Executed optimal operations during peak hours,” I wrote in my cover letter, poached business-speak off the Internet, but accurate nonetheless.

  Today, the only visitor has been the mailman at noon, who put his big blue bag on my Formica front desk and spent a few minutes making small talk about sports and the weather, which was cloudless and cool, because in Aspen it’s always cloudless and cool. A month ago I was living in Denver where it was also cloudless and cool. The mailman spoke too loudly for what’s generally acceptable in an upscale art gallery with a librarylike atmosphere—“CLOUDLESS AND COOL”—but no one was here to hear him. Before he left, I tried to get him to stay, saying plaintively, “I can give you a personal tour if you like.” I was talking about the abstract expressionism on the walls, but he thought I was talking about Aspen. “I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said.

  Now it’s six hours later, twelve past six to be exact, and I’m doing my best, while suffering from workplace lassitude, to type out two pages of a handwritten letter. What I’m actually engaged in is a white-collar high-wire act without a safety net where each typo means I have to start over with fresh stationery. If I was allowed to use the state-of-the-art computer that’s been staring at me all day in sleep mode, I’d have finished ten minutes ago. Instead, I’m hammering away on the manual typewriter, olive-green and Smith Corona, circa the 1950s, which also happens to be when the artwork on the walls is from. In other words, the obsolete past.

  “Dear _________:” the letter begins. “I believe I have something in which you might be interested . . .”

  The owner prefers a colon in the salutation, he prefers the day of the month spelled out, “twenty-eighth,” he prefers a carbon copy filed alphabetically in the bottom drawer, the original “cc” in red wax. He describes the painting’s provenance, its importance to modern art, its five-figure price, which he wants spelled out. He’s hovering by my desk as I type, dressed in his three-piece suit and denim smock, the embodiment of where art meets commerce, although as far as I can tell it’s been more art than commerce of late. His presence is causing me consternation, but if he’s noticed that I’m on my third piece of letterhead, he seems not to care. He’s a good guy; he hired me, after all. “I like your background,” he’d told me during my job interview. He was referring to two years in the Denver Art Museum, never mind that it was food service. What he really liked was that I came recommended by the father of a friend of a friend, speaking of nepotism. I’m four removed from power, meaning that I’ve been given an entry-level position as a front-desk receptionist without having done much to earn it. As for the owner, he’s been in this business thirty years, starting from nothing except an innate ability to “see art,” and he’s worked his way up to where he is today.

  “ ‘Seeing’ is not the same as ‘looking,’ ” he’d said. I pretended I understood the distinction.

  When I’m done typing the letter it’s six-thirty, but time doesn’t matter to the owner. He reads the final copy twice, handling the paper carefully, admiring his turns of phrase, and then he does what he always does, measures the top and bottom margins with the ruler he carries in his denim smock. He’s used to dealing in tenths of centimeters and percentages of UV. Sometimes my margins are askew, but today they’re flawless, and this makes him pleased, and this seems to be a good time to recommend, gently, that if I was able to type his correspondence with the two-thousand-dollar computer sitting on the front desk in sleep mode we wouldn’t ever have to worry about things like imperfect margins again.

  “It’s done automatically,” I tell him, like, Isn’t that neat.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t want automatic,” he says. Of course, he doesn’t. He wants debossed type. He wants pigment on the page. He wants art from the past.

  Then he signs his name in big looping script, full of hope, sealing it up for the mailman tomorrow at noon.

  “Thank you,” the owner says to me, and he retreats to his back office, and I file the carbon copy in the bottom drawer next to the petty cash, where I take out fifteen dollars for myself, because I don’t get paid for overtime.

  It’s six forty-five and it’s cloudless and cool. Whatever you’ve heard about the beauty of Aspen is all true: snowcapped mountains with golden light, etc. The streets are mostly empty but every person I pass shares the same healthy sheen that comes from having twenty-four-hour access to fresh air, pure water, unlimited optimism. No one knows me, but they smile anyway. In Denver, the streets were more crowded and the people smiled less. “You’re going to love it in Aspen,” one of the museum guards told me on my last day
at the café. He was dressed in his wash-and-wear suit. He was fifty removed from power. He’d never been out of Denver, so what he said was theory. “I know I will,” I said, but I’d never been out of Denver, either.

  Now I’m strolling through town trying to love it, trying to shake off the last nine-plus hours inside the art gallery, less one hour for lunch. I’ve been staring at abstract expressionism for so long that when I close my eyes, I don’t see an afterimage of the snowcapped mountains with golden light, I see how the artists would have depicted those snowcapped mountains: white, yellow, angle, triangle, yellow, white. Then they’d title it Mountain, hang it on the wall, and let the viewer ponder. Not mountain, but un-mountain. Not mountain, but essence of mountain. Suddenly I’m seeing everything through the prism of the abstract expressionist’s paintbrush, the stores, the streets, the signs, each object disassembled to its component parts of color and form, even the smiling faces of the strangers who pass by me, white, white, white, and underneath it all is the soundtrack of the continuous clacking of the typewriter keys. This is what I mean when I say that I’m beginning to wonder if working in an art gallery is taking some sort of toll on my psyche.

  On the corner of such-and-such street, between a locally owned bakery and a family-owned florist, is an independently owned bookstore, big bay window filled with books, sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk that eschews the tongue-in-cheek message for the no-nonsense, OPEN, but which I read as o, p, e, n. I’ve passed this bookstore before and I’ve always thought of going in. There’s a young woman about my age exiting the store, she’s wearing a skirt and heels, presumably for her office job, and carrying under her arm half a bagful of books, cash flow concerns not a problem. In the entranceway we have one of those socially awkward interchanges where we’re both trying to sidestep each other, left, right, left, right. Her face is sunburned from days of cloudless skies. Or maybe she’s just embarrassed. She stops and stares at me with her dark eyes, a brooding, penetrating stare, and for some reason the gallery owner’s maxim comes back to me full force, “Seeing is not the same as looking.”