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Thomas E. Kennedy Cast Upon the Day |
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Flood nods lightly a few times, glances across the
table at the other two managers visible to him: a dark-haired angular woman
whose small, close eyes resemble the black paste eyes of a teddy bear; a
pelican-nosed man wearing an expensive denim shirt. Their eyes are on the CEO.
The black paste eyes turn toward Flood for a moment. He looks away. Someone’s
stomach rumbles. The pelican-nosed man straightens his posture. Guilty! The CEO asks whether they have more to discuss. Flood’s
heart lifts. The elegantly simple white wall clock says nine-forty. Sometimes
they go as long as His eyes sweep toward the window, a dark winter tree
visible against the metal blue sky. In the crook of the trunk sits an orange
cat, paws crossed, eyes shut. The sun has moved. The CEO’s
shadow on the table now slants to his right, blurring. Half the CEO’s craggy face is now visible, the other half in
shadow. Rather, Flood thinks, the world has moved, not the
sun. The sun is stationary. That was proven hundreds of years ago by someone.
Who? Gallileo? Who went to prison for his discovery
that the sun, not the earth, is at the center of
the planetary system. Yet we still talk about the sun rising. The sun, he
remembers having read, suffers unendingly and owes us nothing. Flood owes
things. He owes money to his ex-wife that must be paid every month for the
rest of his life unless she remarries. He owes love and attention to his son
who has chosen to live with him after the divorce. The latter debt is one he
is grateful for. His son is a junior in high school. He has always
seemed much more mature than Flood himself was at that age. When Flood was a
junior he had a secret plan for the summer that he would go down to the harbor and find a job as a cabin boy on a ship sailing to
Flood’s son has always seemed more mature than that.
He is studious on weeknights and on weekends sees his friends. He often stays
out with his friends all night. Flood hears him come in very late (very early
rather) stumble into his bedroom in the apartment they share. This is all
right with Flood. As long as he keeps up with his studies, as long as he is
not on drugs, which a parent can discern, he has read, by changes in behavior, swings in mood, a failure to honor commitments, appointments, slovenliness.
Flood’s son is regular and even-tempered, clean-cut. He even polishes his
shoes occasionally and changes his clothes daily,
donning the clean underwear and shirts Flood washes for him on the weekends. The woman beside him is still enumerating the points
she wishes to air. As nearly as Flood can determine she is still on point
one, and he can see out of the corner of his eye at least eight lines
sketched in very fine black script on the yellow pad between her hands
resting on the tabletop. Thick wrists, pale flesh, groomed nails, a red
birthstone ring. The wallclock now says nine-fifty.
The orange cat no longer sits in the crook of the black tree, and the CEO’s shadow is now grey rather than the rich black of
earlier. Flood finds himself thinking uncharitable thoughts
about the woman beside him who sets a tick with her silver Cross pen
alongside the first point on her yellow pad and begins to address the next
point. To avoid these thoughts he pictures his son as a boy, the lovely years
of his childhood. Such a fine lad he was. Respectful. Kind. A quick
mind. In his whole life, Flood has never loved any other human being as
intensely as he loves his son. Perhaps he loved his mother and father with an
equal intensity. In the years before…before what? Before he stopped loving
them intensely. He puzzles that thought a moment, but as the woman
beside him moves into the third point on her list, the CEO cracks a joke, and
everyone laughs. The woman across the table with the black paste eyes
laughs by opening her mouth wide so he can see all her teeth and her tongue,
the end of her tongue, a small red bulb wobbling in the dark vault beneath
her palate. Flood does not
understand the joke, but he laughs, too. He wonders if all the others
understand the joke, whether he is the only one who does not get it. He
wonders what would happen if he said, I
don’t get it. The woman with the black paste eyes looks at him as
though inviting him to share a moment of mutual personal understanding of the
humor being experienced in the management group. He
nods and grins as if to say, The CEO is
some card, hey? For many years he has felt sexual desire for the woman
with the black paste eyes, even now when she is no longer a spring chicken,
he still occasionally desires her. What excites him about her is the thought of how her
face might unfold in an intimate situation, how the flat black surface of
those paste eyes might crack, emit a dazzling light. He imagines looking down
into her eyes as they mount to orgasm, saying something to her that would
make her inhale sharply through an open mouth. He feels that he could please
her sexually, could surrender to a profound desire if she were open to it. If
she were not open to it, however, the whole experience might be rather
regrettable. Imagine failed love with a fellow manager. Imagine
sitting here at the teak table next day knowing suddenly so much about one
another, knowing a failed touch. Could be the opposite, of course. Eyes meeting as
their pulse mounted unbearably: You! Yes! What then next day across
the table? Shared secrets? Plots? Assignations? Meetings in the motel? Cocktails,
cigarettes afterwards, nakedness, the raw language that excites,
his face between her slender thighs and her wild joyous groans. The woman to his left ticks off point three on her
yellow pad and clears her grainy voice to go on. I could kill you, Flood thinks. The sound of a rumbling stomach between words. Stomachs
already thinking of lunch. The thought of lunch is painful to him for reasons
he does not wish to think of. He tries to concentrate on the word being conveyed
on the grainy voice of the woman to his left, but he can not stop thinking
about how he hates these meetings. People are always saying,
It is important that we talk, that we communicate. A month ago, his secretary
of ten years left him for a job with another company, and at her farewell
reception, Flood held a speech in her honor. In the speech he praised her work,
her efficiency, the invaluable assistance she gave him for an entire decade. He
did not mention the fact that she had become a sharp pain in the neck for the
past several years, that she had become obsessive over unimportant details,
insubordinate in a manner that was difficult to deal with for she would
pretend to take note of his instructions and then privately select which of
them she would implement and which not. When he attempted to discuss this with her she would
very quickly agree with what he said and begin speaking very quickly about
some other aspect of the work to avoid having to listen to his criticism. They had reached a dead end together which saddened
him because for the first five years they had been an effective, dynamic
team, had enjoyed working together, been loyal and mutually supportive. As
she got better at her job, she was able to take over details which had
previously made it impossible for him to develop other more important areas. He
found he was able to sketch out formulas through which she could take on a
number of his responsibilities. But soon he realized that she resented the
fact that they were still his
responsibilities, still his
formulas. He tried to discuss this with her, told her that he
hoped if she ever felt dissatisfied with their work together, she would feel
free to talk to him about it, but she began quickly to speak very quickly
about other matters, and after a time, he began to realize that she had come
to despise him in the manner that he had, over his decades of work, come to
despise some of his own superiors, men who seemed inferior to him in
intelligence or ability yet whose wishes he was bound to heed. He mentioned none of these things in the speech he
held in honor of his secretary at her farewell
reception. He spoke only of the good things, the good years, of how quickly
she had learned and how much she had contributed. Then he raised his glass of
wine and looked into her eyes and thanked her for these many good years. He
did not say ten good years because that would have been a lie, because he
could not very well have said six good years, two annoying ones, and two that
nearly drove him mad. He could not very well say thank you so very very much for finding another job before both our lives became
living hell. So he thanked her for these many good years, and he
drank to her future without saying that he hoped her future would not include
even a single moment’s more association with him. After they drank to one another in front of the
assembled personnel of the association, there was applause. He saw one of the
other secretaries daub the corner of her eye with a knuckle, saw several
beaming faces, saw the CEO smiling at him in the way the CEO always smiled—ungaugeably. Then his secretary of ten years struck the bell of
her wine glass with the tines of a fondue fork and said that she would like
to say a few words. She said that in her ten years with the association, she
had seen a few things and known a few people, and she said that she had decided
not to leave without giving a piece of honest advice about what she had
learned in her years here. Remember to talk to each other, she said. Do not
forget to communicate. Remember to sit down together over a cup of coffee or
a glass of wine and to talk to each other. Flood felt an irresistible urge to say, Yes, to talk
and to listen, too, but he resisted the urge. He said nothing. He smiled and
led the applause for the advice that had been given by his secretary of ten
years who was impossible to talk to. It seemed to him that people here were always
talking, always meeting, always communicating over a
cup of coffee or a bottle of sparkling water or a glass of wine. Every day,
at least once, sometimes twice, even three times. And in between the meetings,
people dropped by one another’s offices to chat. He noticed that when people
came in to chat, most of them said the same thing three times: once when they
came into the office, once while they were there,
and once again to signal that they were about to leave. Flood had many such visitors because he was
considered a good listener because he didn’t speak much. He didn’t speak much
because he had found that if you also spoke instead of only listening, the
chats were twice as long. If you remained silent and only listened, it was
finished in half the time, and then he had peace to try to do some work. But when he was finally alone after all that
chatting and listening, all he usually wanted to do was gaze out his window
or contemplate the quality of the light on his cream-colored walls. He was beginning to wonder if anybody did anything
at all in the association. They must have, though, because some things did
get done. Even his own work got done despite all the meetings and talking and
communication and chats. The quality of his work was even occasionally
complimented by a higher level manager, although he could never quite
remember having actually done the work or what it might mean in the long run.
This was known as “good solid routine”—no questions, you just do it so often
and so thoroughly that it is registered in your spine. There were few things in his life that greatly
pleased him, so Flood tried to devise alternative amusements for himself. He enjoyed sitting in the park at lunchtime pretending
that he had a blind twin brother to whom he described things, pebbles, the
grass, pigeons, the sky, the light, a drinking fountain, a squirrel, the
shoes and cuffs of passers by, children. To do this, he head to look very
carefully at everything, observing each detail and attempting to form a
picture of how they all fitted together into a whole. He realized in this way
that language is very much less efficient than vision. On the other hand,
putting something into words could increase the depth of vision sometimes; at
other times, however, it rendered ridiculous the simplest of objects by
forcing them to be sketched in lengthy awkward groups of words and sentences. Once when Flood was travelling in The words he did not know, which were practically
all of them, he made up translations for. He had a good time translating the
bible for himself from German. Sometimes he thought that in fact he had
written a brilliant work in this way, except that he did not write it down
and could not remember it. The only thing he could remember was Amen amen, I say
unto you unless a man don the mask of a pig he shall never learn of the mud
of the land or the gruntings emitted therefrom. He thought that was pretty hot stuff for a while,
but in time he forgot it, for it had no relevance to his work which no longer
had any relevance to him. The only work he cared about anymore, truth be told,
was making his son’s lunch in the morning, and the thought of that caused an
aching, dizzying pain in the hollow pit of his stomach. Each morning he rose at six-thirty and woke his son
who would ask to be allowed to sleep for another fifteen minutes. Flood would
go into the kitchen and light the oven. Then he would pee and wash his hands,
rinse his mouth, return to the kitchen and halve two sesame sandwich rolls
and put them on a pan beneath the now orange-glowing grill. He would shred and wash crisp leaves of iceburg lettuce, cut thin slices of ecological tomatoes. He
would remove the rolls from the oven one at a time, juggling them from hand
to hand not to burn his fingers, and lay them open on the cutting board,
butter them, top and bottom, all the way to the edge as his ex-wife had
taught him, apply Swiss cheese, thinly sliced lunch meats, lettuce, tomato,
cucumber. He would press the top of the sesame roll down onto
the sandwich and wrap it tightly in cellophane paper, place the two tight
thick cellophane-wrapped sandwiches into a plastic bag with a sheet of
kitchen towell, a tiny envelope of salt and pepper,
a quarter dill pickle also wrapped in plastic, and a mini candy bar—Milky
Way, Three Musketeer, Mounds—which he purchased in large bags from the Grand
Union. He would tie off the mouth of the bag with a strip of paperized wire. Then he would go in once again to wake his son who
would ask for another fifteen minutes. Flood would use that fifteen minutes
to wash and shave and dress, then wake his son again, and they would sit at
the dining table by the window over freshly squeezed orange-grapefruit juice
and a thermos can of freshly brewed ecological
Brazilian coffee. Flood would shake a multivitamin and C-vitamin from
the two jars which always stood at the end of the table and lay them
alongside his son’s juice glass, watch with pleasure as the boy dashed the
pills into his mouth, swallowed them with the high quality juice, sighed with
pleasure at the taste. Sometimes Flood got him to eat a banana as well, or
half a grapefruit, a few slices of canteloupe or
honeydew. Then the boy would pour coffee from the thermos pot, lace it with
milk and sugar, and light a cigarette that he would slip out of his breast
pocket straight from the pack. Flood regretted this profoundly. He himself had
smoked at that age and for nearly twenty years hence, but quit the day his
son was born. He feared the boy would think smoking was desirable and
acceptable if he saw his father doing it. So Flood took the cure, got fat,
but never again lit up. Two years before, Flood caught the boy in the mall
with a Lucky Strike nonfilter wobbling between his
lips. Flood begged him to stop. The boy explained that he didn’t really
smoke, only bummed an occasional butt from a friend to feel like one of the
guys. Then Flood caught him again, twice, and then began to smell it on his
clothes that he washed on the weekends and began to find crumpled empty Lucky
Strike nonfilter packs in the garbage bag beneath
the kitchen sink. Flood was very sad about this. He said to his boy,
What can I give you to make you quit? You name it. The boy shrugged. Flood said, Let me give you
a piece of advice: You could kick it now, right away, easy as pie. If you don’t,
within a very few years, or less, you’ll be hooked, addicted, and
it could ruin your health, your lungs. You’ll huff and puff like an old man. His son stared at him for a long moment. Then he
said, Fuck you, Dad. Keep your advice to yourself. I’m not interested in your
advice. Flood’s eyes filled with water. He could not believe
what he was hearing. He remembered his own father had given him permission to
smoke when he was fourteen, had even given him permission to help himself to
the cigarettes in the carton in the pantry. People didn’t know in those days
how dangerous it was. But tobacco hardly seemed the issue now. He could
not believe his son had spoken those words to him. With a quiet smoldering anger, the boy had addressed him with those
words. I only want to help you, Flood said. I don’t want your help, his son said. Later in the day the boy apologized. Flood allowed
that he understood how he felt. He too had smoked. Slowly they accommodated
each other. The boy asked permission to light up once or twice a day for a
few weeks, and then it became a part of their life, and now he lit a
cigarette each morning over their coffee. In truth, Flood had to admit that the memory of that
moment when his son said fuck you to him was fascinating, even cherished. He
could remember practically every detail of it, the way the boy’s eyes had
suddenly narrowed, the way the mask of his face had seemed to decompose, the
force of emotion remolding it as his lips formed
the words that flew with a fine spray of spittle on his breath. He felt very
close to his son at that moment, felt as though they were sharing something
of great power, even if it was tinged with brutality. Once he dreamed that the boy was Jesus Christ and
tore asunder his breast to reveal a heart of crowned thorns on which were
emblazoned the words Fuck you, Dad. Sometimes over breakfast he and his son shared their
dreams with one another, although Flood never managed to find the way to
share that one with the boy. When they shared their dreams, breakfast was a cozy time. They chatted, drank coffee, looked
out the window, told about the odd conglomerations of detail that clustered
in their sleeping brains the night before. His son once dreamt of a white man
with a white beard on a white bench. Flood once dreamt of meeting his father
on a strange street and being amazed to find him alive again. At some point over breakfast his son always
remembered to notice the clear plastic bag on the table with the two
sandwiches and napkin and pickle and mini candybar.
In the evening, too, he would always remember to tell Flood, Thanks for
lunch, dad. Was it okay? Flood would ask. Perfect, delish, the boy would say, and Flood felt
blessed, delivered from the sadness that his marriage had failed. Flood had
so many happy memories of his boy’s childhood. He wished so that his life had
more meaning so that he could share that meaning with the boy, but how could
he explain to him that the only real meaning life had for him was that his
work enabled him to provide the boy with food and shelter and clothes and an education,
though he did not know for sure where these provisions would lead the boy to,
what kind of life. Everything seemed all broken into pieces, dead
grandparents, divorced siblings, divorced self, divorced cousins, emptiness,
fragmentation. Perhaps Flood was the only one who felt life was
empty, the work life. Perhaps to his son, it would be meaningful in the way
that his own life caring for his son was meaningful to Flood. He certainly
hoped so, and it pleased him immensely to see the boy swallow his vitamins,
his freshly squeezed juice. It pleased him to see the boy go through the
motions of pouring milk into his coffee, spooning in sugar, stirring. These
were positive things, the actions of someone with an appetite for something,
pleasure of the day. Flood would then watch his son pick up the lunch
Flood had prepared for him and put it into the knapsack in which he carried
his books as he bicycled to school. The thought of that now was like an electric current
moving upward from the hollow pit of his stomach as he tried to concentrate
on the grainy voice of the woman to his left as she aired the fifth point on
her list. But it was not possible for him to refrain from
running the whole thing through his mind once again to see if he might come
to some edge of an entry to understanding of it. Two evenings before he had gone into his son’s room
to gather the laundry for his weekend wash. From the floor, beneath the bed,
beside the dresser, he gathered socks, pajamas, tee
shirts, underwear. He checked beneath the bed again, then
glanced into the closet. Behind a carton in the closet, he noticed something
curious, a kind of duffel bag standing on its base but bent at the center to reveal a glimpse of its contents through a
slight pucker in the open, elastic top. Through that pucker he saw something
green and brown wrapped in plastic, looked closer and saw it was lettuce on
bread, closer still and saw it was one of the lunches he had made for his
son. Stooping, he stepped deeper into the closet and reached
for the duffel, saw both sandwiches were there. He lifted the bag from behind
the carton and pulled open the elastic top, and the stench of rot touched his
nose, buckled his knees, and he gagged. The grainy voice of the woman to his left moves on
to the last point on her list as her silver cross pen ticks off the one she
just finished airing. The CEO says something light again, and the other
managers chuckle. Flood smiles, glances at the woman with paste eyes whose
smile seems less hearty this time. Flood realizes he would not ever likely
fall in actual love with her even as he admires the comely line of her
throat. The sun has now moved long past the edge of the
window—or rather the edge of the window has turned away from the sun, the
whole building has turned and the land on which it stands. The CEO’s face is now free of shadow, and he is smiling in
his usual ungaugeable manner as he waits for the
grainy voiced woman to sum up her last point, and the stomach of the
pelican-nosed man across the table from Flood emits a three-noted mournful
rumble even as the man’s palm leaps to his midsection as if to acknowledge
guilt and administer reprieve. But all Flood can see is the duffel bag full of
clear plastic bags, each containing two cellophane wrapped sesame sandwich
rolls with lettuce, tomato and a variety of sandwich meats, a quarter dill
pickle, a sheet of kitchen towell. May I ask why, he said to
his boy, you didn’t just tell me you
didn’t want the sandwiches? The boy looked blankly at him. Then, I don’t know, he said from behind that
blank expression. Every day I asked you
how was lunch and everyday you said delish, thanks
dad. And you weren’t even eating it. Sometimes I did. Sometimes
I ate it. But a lot of times I just wasn’t hungry. Did you think you were
doing me a favor? Letting me make sandwiches for
you? He asked this sincerely, without rancor or
accusation, he so wanted to know, to understand. No, the boy
said. Then why? I guess I just didn’t
want to rock the boat. Why didn’t you just throw
them out? Why did you keep them like that? In your closet? Well you never liked us
to throw out food. In the course of summing up her last point, the
woman with the grainy voice says something which Flood believes to be
incorrect, and he is about to say so, but then he remembers how very many
times he thinks he knows something that he actually does not know, and for
this reason he does not allow himself to be cocksure certain about things,
even things that he knows he knows, for even these things, perhaps especially
these things, he sometimes now discovers he was wrong about. On occasion he has even convinced others that what
they think is not so, and later has learned that they were actually right
and he was wrong. It amazes him how few people on such occasions have played
I told you so with him. Perhaps they are embarrassed at having acquiesced. Or
perhaps they never discover the truth. Or perhaps they simply do not care. He always tries to make a point of quietly informing
the person in question that he learned that, in fact, they were right,
although usually they don’t even seem to remember what he is talking about. The woman with the grainy voice sets a tick
alongside the final item on her list and falls silent. The wallclock says that it is Well then, he says. Nothing else? If not, shall we
go out and cast ourselves upon the day? Fuck you, Dad, Flood remembers his son saying to
him, and as he rises, ponders the meaning of that statement, the open door
through which it came. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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