Disillusionment Theme

I am forty-five today and looking for my son. I’ve been looking for ten minutes and am beginning to get really worried. The last place I saw him was on the fourth floor in the Dinosaur Wing—Teddy had wanted to see the Really Big dinosaurs, and it is one of my favorite exhibits, as well. What man—what human being for that matter—ever really stops getting a kick out of the Really Big dinosaurs? They are colossal, enormous, powerful even in their yellowy, calcified remains. Teddy likes the one with the long neck, the Brontosaurus, I think, while I prefer the triceratops. The triceratops just about breaks my heart every time.

But Teddy is most definitely not among the Saurischian Dinosaurs at present—nor hiding behind any of the Orinthischians’ skeletons, and I can’t find him in the Primitive Mammal section. The great thing about looking for a kid in a place full of skeletons is that it’s relatively easy to look through the actual exhibits- i.e. the dinosaurs- to place him; unfortunately, the museum’s crowded for a Tuesday afternoon, like every teacher in Manhattan has decided to take her class and at least twelve Holden Caulfield’s to the fourth floor today. I guess because it’s February, and it’s still cold as hell outside. I almost had a pretty little spill out on Eighty-First Street, to tell you the truth. Damn near broke my hip—I’m getting that old—but Teddy grabbed my hand and managed to keep me up. He’s only nine years old, too. Kept his old man up.

It’s been twelve minutes. Teddy doesn’t like it when I hold his hand. Says he’s too old for me to hold his hand anymore. I tell him that I’ll hold his hand till he’s ten, because then he’ll have at least two digits, and some sort of legitimacy to his age, and to be honest, he’s been rather a sport about it today. Let’s me hold his hand on my birthday, like he knows that’s a present, too. It is. It is a present for me, to feel his four damp, squishy little fingers in my big dry hand, and to rub his thumb with my thumb. When I hold his hand I could pull his whole little arm out of his socket, I could pull him out of the way of a taxi or a bus in a split second, I could swing him right into my chest and hold him till he cried and I heard ribs crack. I’m not a big man, you don’t need to be in the twenty-first century, but I lift these weights that I keep in our apartment, and I can lift an 80 pound kid, no problem. If he was drowning in the tub, like I sometimes imagine he is, I could break down the door, no sweat. But I don’t allow locked doors in the apartment, except for the front door, which has three. Or if he were trapped under something heavy, like if Polly’s old armoire fell on top of him, or there was an earthquake or some freak thing, I could probably get him out.

Once when we were ice skating at Rockefeller he fell really hard and some girl ran over the tip of the baby finger on his right hand; sawed it right off with her skate. He was seven, and he cried like a seven year old does, but there was nothing we could do about the finger. We couldn’t sew it back on because we couldn’t find the fingertip on the ice after that. The girl was horrified, of course, she was probably only about twelve years old herself (which didn’t stop me from wanting to tear her pigtails out, naturally), and there was an awful lot of blood on the ice for one baby finger. Like a little fountain. Everyone got off the ice and the E.T.s all rushed out into the rink in snow boots with flashlights looking for the little pink nub, but they couldn’t find it anywhere. Meanwhile, Teddy stopped crying pretty quick once one of the ambulance guys packed his hand with ice (the driver told me I should’ve just put his hand down on the rink, but I thought that he might get an infection that way).

Anyway, I couldn’t sleep for three days after that, and finally I had to get sleeping pills like I did after Polly died, because I was becoming an insomniac, and that made me crazy during the day. Like, Teddy’s favorite thing to eat—I’m not kidding you—are sea shell pastas. He likes them with butter and salt, but nothing else, and if they’re not the sea shell kind he won’t eat them. Well every time I made pasta for him after the skating incident I swear I would spot his missing fingertip in the sea shell pastas. I’d say, wait honey, wait a minute, and I’d take his fork and start poking around in his bowl, but the fingertip would always get jumbled in with the rest of the sea shells at the bottom, and disappear. It spooked me a bit, even if it didn’t spook him, because he’s just a kid, but I realized that I couldn’t be an effective parent if I wasn’t getting any sleep, so I went back on the pills, but only for a while.

So now when he does let me hold his hand, it’s always got to be his left hand. I don’t know if he does this or I do it, but that’s the way we always end up. It could be he doesn’t trust me with his hands anymore—I wasn’t holding his hand at the skating rink that day (something I’ll never forgive myself for) so maybe my punishment is a kid who’ll never let me hold his hand. Or maybe I always subconsciously go for the left hand, or just like his entire left side a little better, even, because it’s the right that reminds me of what a screw-up I am. Or was for that day as a father. I can barely stand the guilt, sometimes.

And now I’ve lost him at the Museum Natural History for fifteen minutes and I’m wracking my brain to think where he could’ve possibly gone— and god-damning myself for letting go of his hand so I could get a better look at the triceratops, which I’ve seen probably about two hundred times anyway. It’s dead- it doesn’t move.

Teddy and I go to the museum about 2 or three times a month. We both like the dinosaurs, of course, and I like the planetarium a lot. I once took Tommy to an IMAX there, but it made him nauseas and so we didn’t finish it. Teddy finds most of the tribal people pretty boring, except for the Indian women who have their breasts out for the world to see, and I agree with him pretty much. He’s a fan of the African mammals on the second floor, but I’m not so keen on those. They’re too real and alive for me, like stuck in some taxodermal limbo; about to breathe and pounce and hunt and excrete, until you remember they’ve just got glass eyes, and not even a single hair is trembling on their still bodies behind the glass. I don’t mind the people because they don’t really look like people, or even if they do you can still know logically that they never were breathing, pouncing, hunting, excreting things. Nah, I can’t stand those mammals, which are different completely from the dinosaurs, because the dinosaurs haven’t any flesh—they’re made out of the same stuff as our teeth, and there’s nothing awfully poetic or spooky about that.

Before Polly’s tongue cancer we hardly ever went to the museum, but I liked it even before she died. Polly liked the art museums better; she had majored in art history at Barnard, and she liked to get up really close to the paintings so that she could make out the individual hairs of the paintbrush leaving their tiny trails of paint. Like Seurat. Polly was a nut about Seurat. Sometimes she got so close to paintings that the museum docents would come up to her, pretty politely, and say, Miss, excuse me, Miss, but you’ll have to back up, human breath ruins the painting. And so Polly would back up, like she didn’t mind at all, because she didn’t, because then she’d just back way the hell up and look up at the painting and see the big picture of what before was only teeny tiny trails of paint on canvas and I swear to god, sometimes she’d even get teary looking up the those huge canvasses and she’d say, oh George, painting’s just like us, isn’t it? And I think she might’ve meant that we’re made up of atoms and quarks and DNA, and yet we’re also people, not just defined by our atoms and quarks and DNA, but with our mind and our souls, too. Or she might’ve meant that maybe we get so used to looking at little things, and worrying about the itty bitty brush strokes in our lives that we forget to look at our life in a bigger, more meaningful way; as a whole entity. She always used to call everything an “entity,” Polly did. Everything existed for her.

Teddy was five when Polly was diagnosed and six when she died. Polly smoked quite a bit, a habit which I knew was bad, and I should’ve stopped her from doing it so much, not only for her but for Teddy, too. But Polly was pretty good about not smoking around Teddy, and she never smoked when she was pregnant, but even so, if Teddy ever found her Camels laying around the house he’d tear them up and sprinkle them all over the carpet. Once he heard me call them “death sticks,” but was too young to be able to pronounce the “Th” sound, so he called them “dead sticks” from then on. Mommy got killed by the dead sticks, he said when she died. That’s right, the dead sticks killed her but they won’t get you or me.

In her last months Polly was too weak to move, and her mouth too sore to talk. When she died, I hadn’t felt her tongue with mine for four months.

If he’s not with the dinosaurs, then he’s with the African mammals, unless there’s some great new exhibit on the fourth floor that caught his eye. I don’t know what to do—I want to go check out the mammals, but they’re on the second floor, and what if I’ve just missed him on the fourth floor, and he’s wandering around looking for me? Oh god, what if he’s alone, scared, can’t find me; what have I always told him? I’ve always told him that if he’s lost he needs to stay in one spot until I find him. What if he’s been in one spot all along and I keep missing him? What is he wearing? Oh Christ, I can’t remember what my son is wearing today on my forty-fifth birthday, when he jumped into bed with me at seven o’clock in the morning because he knew he wouldn’t have to go to school and handed me my birthday present. A keychain he’d made in art class. Well, he won’t be wearing his school uniform, that much I know. That hardly helps. Should I tell someone? I should tell someone.

I go up to buxom black security guard standing by the tyrannosaurus Rex. Excuse me, I say, and I’m attacked as usual by my self-conscious Jewishness, how I’m always so worried that people will be able to see it right away and make all kinds of assumptions about me: hypochondriac, miserly, anxious. I’m not too small, or anything, but definitely Semitic-looking. This black woman’s looking at me with eyes that say she’s guessed my type, and my organs crumble down like paper bags, the feeling I always get with strangers or acquaintances or Teddy’s teachers and a lot of Polly’s friends. Polly was the only person who didn’t think of me as the awkward Jew. I even think Teddy looks at me that way sometimes.

My son is lost, has been lost for about twenty minutes, I tell her, and I smell the sweat under my armpits. The only time I ever notice my own body-sweat is when I’m scared.

How old is he, she asks.

Nine. He’s nine years old. It’s my birthday today.

She looks at me disapprovingly. I don’t why I told her that, maybe to defend myself for his not being in school, if that’s what she was thinking. Maybe to get her to see how this is not at all what I wanted to happen, to lose my son on my forty-fifth birthday.

What’s he wearing, sir?

I… I can’t remember what he’s wearing?

His name?

Teddy. Theodore Walpole, we call him Teddy. She promises to phone the front desk and get security guards and docents to keep their eyes peeled for a little kid wandering around by himself. He look like you, she asks?

You mean Jewish?

She raises her eyebrows. Sir, I just meant does he look like you.

No. Not me. Someone else. He’s got light brown hair, it’s getting pretty long…

She leaves me to go look around the fourth floor, and I decide I should make my way down to the African mammals. I don’t take the elevator, because I don’t want to miss the chance of spotting him on the way. So it’s through the Milstein Hall of Advanced Animals, and down the stairs to the third floor, down another flight of stairs to the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, which is full as a fair ground with harassed looking teachers and children who are poking the glass as if the dead animals could move or respond. My head’s spinning around like a schizophrenic periscope, but I don’t see him. I let go of his hand— he’s in a forest, a jungle, a fairground, a parking lot, he’s out on the street in the middle of traffic, he’s about to fall through the ice, he’s hurtling through space… I am not a father, I am not a father…

I make my way to the balcony and look down at the planetarium. The planetarium is my favorite. I like it better than the dinosaurs, although the dinosaurs are what Teddy and I have in common here. I met Polly when I was twenty-nine and she was twenty-two in the planetarium. She was there because she was auditing an astronomy class at Barnard, and I was there because it’s the only way to see constellations in the city. We sat close to each other, quite by chance, and I know this sounds corny as hell but I just couldn’t stop smelling her hair. It smelled exactly the way you’d want stars to smell if you could smell them; something powerful and clean, like jasmine and something else, too. When I leaned back in my seat to look up at the constellations, I’d lean a little to the right and get a good old whiff of her hair, and think I was smelling the stars, and that I wasn’t in the city at all, and that I’d never left this one and only tent I ever pitched in Nevada when my family went to see the Grand Canyon and we walked out under the stars, and since I’d grown up in Brooklyn I’d never seen anything like them. And even though I didn’t know it, my old man could name just about every goddamn constellation above us, and he told me all these wild stories that I’ve since looked up and told to Teddy just about every night for ten years, and how the only brave thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I whispered in his mother’s ear the story of little old Cassiopeia while I smelled her starry hair, and when I was done she wasn’t scared like I thought she might be, but smiling. And she sort of hooked her forefinger around my little finger and we sat until the show was over, and then we went and got something to eat, or something. I forget exactly what.

I’m looking down at the planetarium from the balcony, when suddenly all the anxious worry in me is replaced by another feeling—it’s shock, it’s a strange sort of fear, it’s pure adrenaline, like an animal running for its life, and I’m like an animal racing down the stairs and even forgetting about my poor lost son because I know for a minute I saw her walking by the planetarium. I saw her white ballet flats and her pink skirt whip ever so quick around the far side of the dome, and her hair was just like it was before it started falling out in flowery clumps, long and brown and tied back in a ponytail.

But down at the planetarium it’s just another carnival, and the dome is a circus tent with fifty people waiting in line to go in, so I don’t get in line, although I’m sure she’s gone in, she’s gone in to the dark, dark planetarium with the constellations and if I don’t get her quick then somebody else is going to go in there and sit next to her and smell her starry hair, and he will tell her stories about the constellations and she will smile, smile, and she will go off with him and he will love her and take care of her and Teddy will never exist, never have existed, he will never be made or have been made, he will disappear and I will be all alone, all alone with no proof because she’s in the dark now, with nothing but the stars and her hair for light, so she won’t be able to see that the man whispering in her ear isn’t me, and she won’t recognize me, not in the dark, and she won’t recognize the forty-five year old man when she comes out into the light, because I’ve changed too much, I’ve got too many lines on my face, and she didn’t know me like that, she never knew me like that, so changed.

Polly, I yell, Polly! And I’m racing around the dome in these crazy long strides and people are starting to look at me, I can even tell, but I’m used to people looking at me and making assumptions about my personality and my faults and my mannerisms so today it just doesn’t even matter so long as I can get to Polly. Polly!

They’re letting people out of the planetarium, now; I guess the show has just finished, and other people are starting to go in. I run over to the door to check the faces of all of the people going out. If she comes out on some man’s arm, if her finger is hooked around his… All kinds of happy kids and women and handsome looking guys are coming out of the dome, but I can’t recognize her face, and I’m starting to get desperate because I know only so many people can fit inside the dome, but already so many people have come out. Like clowns in a car, I think, they’ll keep coming and coming until she comes, and then I start thinking of clowns walking out of the planetarium, like maybe that’s where they all sleep for this carnival that’s going on and maybe everyone is standing in line to see them throw pies at each other on the inside, and maybe it’s not a planetarium at all. This is funny, this is so funny, and so I laugh. I’ve never taken Teddy to see a circus before, even though I took him to Coney Island once, it’s not the same thing. Once Polly comes out we’ll all go to see a real circus, and all the animals will be real, and move and growl and jump through flaming hoops, and Teddy will hold me with his right hand and Polly’s with his left and laugh with me at the clowns and the bicycling bears.

But Polly never comes out. Instead, I see Teddy step out into the brightness of the first floor, blinking because his eyes are adjusting to the light, and then he sees me and he waves, like he’s happy to see me because it’s my birthday. He runs up but stops right in front of me and says, hi Dad, and looks at me like he’s expecting me to say something. And then I remember that there is no circus, that I’m forty-five years old, that I met Polly when she was auditing astronomy at Barnard, and that she’s dead. I look at my watch and realize that Teddy’s been lost for thirty minutes, and that there are people with badges and hats walking around with their eyes peeled for him. I realize that he’s wearing a blue turtleneck, something I told him to wear because I thought he’d be cold, and I remember checking our coats at the door. I turn back to the planetarium, but the door has been closed, and the new audience is filing in. I realized that I didn’t miss her, that she just wasn’t there, like the decapitated fingertip.

Dad are you okay? Says Teddy, because he’s so smart, so astute for a nine year old, and just as sensitive as he is smart. He lets me hold his hands on special occasions.

I’m fine, I assure him. I assure him often. Kids need assurance. I ruffle his head. You weren’t crying? He asks me. And I say, no. and then I say yes. Because I don’t want him to think that it’s wrong for men, or for anybody for that matter, to cry sometimes. And he doesn’t ask why, because he’s so smart, but says that he’s hungry instead, and I ask him where’d you like to eat? He says not the café at the museum because it’s so expensive, and I say well how about a hotdog from the street, and he says okay. And as we go out the door I don’t hold his hand, because he doesn’t like it when I am too overprotective of him, but I look at his mouth when he talks, and the color of his hair, and his nose which isn’t running at all. After we get our coats, we step out into the February snow, and he starts talking about Camelopardalis, some giraffe he just saw in the planetarium, and Casseiopeia, which is one that I’ve seen before, too.

(2008)