The Funnies Page 5

  He was wearing a pair of white boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette and running his hand over his chest. “My skin feels fake. Everything feels fake,” he said. He looked up at me with real despair. “I can’t go. I feel like a fraud.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette of my own. Amanda didn’t smoke, so I didn’t either, usually, but here it felt right. With Pierce, trust was a precarious thing. “How’s it been lately?”

  He shrugged. “Not so bad. I’m on these pills.” He gestured in an indefinite direction, away, with his hand. “They get rid of the extra people, but I never feel like myself anymore. My skin is like, numb.”

  Pierce did not hear voices, per se, as many people with his illness apparently do, but he had always talked about getting out of the crowd or getting away from all the hubbub when there was almost nobody around. Once, I took the subway back from the Italian Market just as a Phillies game was letting out, and the crowd in my car was enormous and loud, and I immediately thought of Pierce. I figured that feeling was what he was talking about.

  “We really have to get moving,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “He isn’t going to leave me anything,” he said. “He’s going to yank it all out from under me, I can just feel it. The house is going to get sold and I’m going to be on the street.” He sucked on his cigarette with eerie calm, and the smoke seemed to invigorate him. “I’m not going to fucking Trenton for that.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He ignores me, man. We haven’t spoken in something like a year. I don’t even exist.”

  I took a moment to digest this. “You’ve been living together all this time, and you haven’t talked to him? In a year?”

  “Nope. Isn’t that nuts?”

  I agreed that it was very strange. Pierce said, “Oh, Jesus, this is just worthless. I don’t know why we’re even talking. You should get out of here, really. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  After a minute, I took the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it in the ashtray. Then I did the same with mine. I went to his closet and pulled out the cleanest jeans and T-shirt I could find. I tossed the shirt onto his chest. He just let it lie there. I bent over his feet and started pulling the jeans onto him. Finally, he said, “Oh, fer Chrissake,” swung his legs off the bed like they were a couple of prosthetics, and pulled the jeans on himself. When it looked like he’d gotten things more or less under way, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The mirror was so thickly stratified with dust that I could barely see myself. I cleared a hole in the grime, the way I would in a clean mirror steamed, and my hand came away greasy and gray.

  Pierce walked in yawning while I was washing my hands. He shut his mouth fast when he noticed the hole. He leaned forward until his nose was nearly touching the mirror, and stared at himself for a full minute. Then, having done nothing else, he turned and left the bathroom.

  * * *

  “You’re wearing that?” Bitty said from the passenger seat, apparently to both of us. I noticed that the clothes I had picked out for Pierce were almost identical to the ones I had earlier pulled from my own bag.

  “I wish people would stop asking me that,” I said, too quickly. Bitty was wearing a businesslike dress in sort of an unbleached flour color, and pearls. Mike Maas had a suit on, but no tie. He was about two inches shorter than Bitty.

  “Okay, whatever,” she said.

  Mike was the kind of bad driver who believes with all his heart that he is the only good driver on the road. This particular type of driver drives fast because he thinks he can do so safely, and does not use turn signals because they are irrelevant and inefficient. Those driving slowly are doing so because they don’t trust their own abilities, which are scant. I’d once had a roommate who explained all this to me. He too was this kind of driver.

  A gravel truck was traveling the speed limit in front of Mike and Bitty’s Toyota 4-Runner. Every couple of minutes a piece of gravel clicked off the windshield. After a while Mike had had enough. “This is bullshit,” he said, and moved to pass, accelerating violently, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead. Bitty glanced out the passenger window, presumably for a look at the man who had caused the delay. The man wasn’t looking back. Mike jerked the car over to the right lane, then leaned heavily into his seat like a monarch who has just ordered somebody beheaded.

  Trenton hummed dully beneath a hazy hot sun and some half-assed thunderheads that looked like invading UFOs from a cheap sci-fi movie. Mike seemed to know where the parking spaces were; he careened down a maze of one-way streets to a parking meter that might as well have had his name printed on it.

  “Got quarters?” he said to Bitty, and she dug into her purse. To my surprise, Pierce produced several quarters from his pocket and passed them to Mike, who stared at them briefly before lunging from the car and plugging them into the meter.

  We walked. “You know where we’re going?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Mike Maas. “It’s near my building.”

  “So you work in Trenton.”

  “Uh huh.”

  We walked several blocks in the heat. Pierce didn’t seem bothered by it; he was the only one of us whose forehead wasn’t brilliant with sweat. At an Art Deco building that looked uncannily like an enormous jukebox, Mike pulled open a heavy glass door and plunged inside. Bitty jumped forward and caught the door as it closed behind him, and she held it open for me and Pierce. I thanked her and she raised her eyebrows.

  We took an elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened into a wide carpeted hallway. Before us was an empty reception desk and a padded bench, each covered in the same carpet that was on the floor, a dusty sort of gray. I imagined that it hid dirt nicely. My mother was sitting alone on the bench.

  “Mommy!” said Bitty. She sprung from the elevator toward her and planted a noisy kiss on her cheek. My mother’s eyes flapped open and she shied away from Bitty, startled.

  “For the love of Christ!” she said.

  “Mommy, it’s me, Bitty.”

  Mother squinted. “Ah, Bitty,” she said, though it wasn’t clear if this was, finally, recognition, or simply a conversational habit she had adopted to avoid embarrassment.

  I went to her while Pierce and Mike loitered before us, their hands in their pockets. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “It’s Tim. Do you remember me?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “Okay. Are you doing all right?” I sat down on the bench opposite Bitty, who clutched Mother’s right hand as if it were a baby sparrow.

  “They came and got me out of bed,” she said.

  “Are you tired?”

  “I was, but now I’m pretty much awake.”

  “That’s good.”

  “So what brings you here?” Her voice was bright, the way it might be for a pleasant but unexpected guest.

  “I’m here to hear Dad’s will.”

  She frowned. “He was going to leave me that old breakfront. But you know he never did? That really burns me, even to this day. Julia got it, the little hussy.”

  Bitty leaned over her and gave me a look. “Why don’t we go in, Mommy?”

  “Well, all right,” she said, dragging herself to her feet. She shook us both off. “I’m not infirm, you know.”

  But of course she was. She teetered for a moment, like Wile E. Coyote suspended, by the power of his own ignorance, above a yawning chasm, then buckled. Bitty and I caught her by the arms. Her bones pulled against my fingers through her thin skin, and she said, “Ouch.”

  We pulled her gently up. “You’re okay?”

  “Had a little spell there,” she said. This is what she used to say when she got drunk and fell down from that. She was lighter now, it seemed by half. I looked up at Pierce, who was staring at her like she had just been dropped into the law office hallway from outer space. Mike Maas kept flinching toward us, as if to help.

  “Why don’t you go in, Mike,” said Bitty.

  “Oh, yeah.” He turn
ed and headed for the smoked-glass doors at the end of the hallway. We followed, with Pierce bringing up the rear. Mike held the doors open for us this time.

  * * *

  Rose and Bobby and Nancy were already there, along with Susan Caletti the editor, and a tall, pot-bellied man with jet-black hair. They all sat behind the burnished mahogany table that filled the room, my brother’s family and Rose around the tall man, Susan a few seats away.

  Rose blanched. “Jesus! Where’s her walker?”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said. My mother was scanning the room, scowling.

  “I put it behind the desk,” Rose said, exhaling loudly. She clomped past us into the hall and came back wielding the walker like a lion tamer with a wooden stool. She swept around us and placed it before Mom. “Here you go, Mom,” she said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So,” Rose said. She put her hands on her hips. “Is this everybody?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t cousins supposed to crawl out of the woodwork to claim their slice of the pie?”

  “What cousins?” Rose sounded angry, like the cousins were waiting in the lobby with six-shooters and burlap sacks with dollar signs printed on them. I looked past her to the tall man. Bobby was seated across from him, asking quiet questions.

  “Who’s that guy?” I asked quietly.

  “Ha, ha,” said Rose.

  “No, really,” I said. “Do I know him?”

  Bitty released Mom, who had taken hold of the walker. “You don’t remember Uncle Mal?” she said.

  At this, Uncle Mal met me with a grim smile. “Hello, Tim, Pierce,” he said. “Hello, Bee.”

  Bee was Uncle Mal’s name for Bitty. She loved it. When he came to the house, he used to bring her bee things: little plastic bees, stickers with bees on them, and once, a spiral notebook with a giant cartoon bee on the cover, pollinating a wide pink flower. For months she spent her weekend afternoons sitting at the kitchen table, writing stories in it about her and Uncle Mal. She let me read one once. It was about a killer robot that threatened them with violence; Uncle Mal talked the robot out of it, and the three of them went and had a picnic. It was a strange story, full of peculiar details. A crush of Bitty’s from the TV at the time had a fluffy, feathered haircut, and in the story Uncle Mal did too. It was an expressive head of hair, tossing and tousling in the air as the story ebbed and flowed.

  But now it was exceedingly thin, and dyed a deep, implausible black. He wore it clumped and spiky, like a wet Marine. And though he still had the same sunken chest, into which his necktie dipped like an old clothesline, Mal had developed a shocking paunch. It stuck out over his belt as if tied there with rope. He looked like a former basketball star who now managed apartment buildings for a living. I must have gaped.

  “I look a little different,” he said.

  “Well, it’s been a while.”

  Bitty left Mom’s side and tiptoed around the table to him, planting a kiss in the oily fuzz over his ear. “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  “Always good to see you, Bee. I’m so sorry about your dad.” He looked up at me. “You too, Tim.”

  “None of this seems real,” I said, and meant it.

  He nodded solemnly. “How are you doing, Pierce?”

  Pierce shrugged. “You know.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Why don’t you all have a seat?”

  Mal watched me as I helped Mom into a chair and walked around behind her to my own. I nodded to Susan as I sat down, and she nodded back. What was she doing here? Did she expect some inheritance from my father? Had they been close? Her face was such a rictus of discomfort that I could read nothing else into it, and her hands squirmed against each other in full view, leaving a damp shadow on the shiny tabletop.

  Mal had a thick manila envelope in front of him, his giant hands spread flat on either side. “Well,” he said. “We might as well get this under way.” He turned the envelope ninety degrees on the table, reached into it and pulled out three things: a few pieces of textured, watermarked white paper, a thin white business-size envelope, and another envelope, identical save for a slight bulge in the middle. Both of these envelopes were signed across the flap—I recognized the crabbed version of my father’s careful hand—and stamped and signed on the front.

  “It’s a very simple will,” Mal said. Bobby’s eyes widened. “The six of you, Rosalinde, Robert, Timothy, Pierce, Beatrice and Dorothy, are the only heirs.”

  I glanced over at Susan to see what her reaction was to this, but she was sitting perfectly still, her hands folded, watching Mal. He began to read the preliminaries: sound mind and body, and so on. The only other sound in the room was the air conditioner’s arctic hiss, and muffled traffic noise from outside.

  “To Dorothy, my wife, and my children Rosalinde, Robert and Beatrice, I leave my extant liquid assets. These are to be divided equally into funds which I have already established in their names. In addition, I have established for my wife, Dorothy, in her name, a fund for the maintenance of her care until her death, such fund as will be attended to by the executor of this will.” He looked up, smiling sadly at my mother, whose eyes were elsewhere.

  “To Pierce Mix, I leave the contents of the bank account already established jointly in our names, the house at 12 Old Dock Road, Riverbank, New Jersey, the attached garage, the 1984 Cadillac El Dorado, and the land surrounding the house and garage, save that land on which my cartoon studio stands. To Pierce I also leave this envelope, its contents, and all rights and claims attached to its contents.”

  Mal held up the bulging envelope and set it down again.

  “Save those items already mentioned, I leave my worldly possessions to my wife and all my children, to be divided as they see fit.”

  He paused a moment here. Had I not heard right, or had my name not been mentioned along with the liquid assets? Could it be that I would get no money at all? The thought crowded my head like a mouthful of stale bread. Nothing! I was getting nothing!

  “To my son Timothy,” Mal read, perhaps more slowly now. “I leave the Family Funnies comic strip, all merchandising, reprint, animation, book publishing, advertising and other rights as set forth in my name by Burn Features Syndicate, Incorporated, and the cartoon studio behind 12 Old Dock Road, Riverbank, New Jersey, the land it stands on and its full contents (and all rights to all drawings therein) under the following conditions: that he is able, three months from this date, to produce a week’s worth of daily Family Funnies strips of his own devising and execution, to the satisfaction of a board of Burn Features editors and directors set forth below.” Mal proceeded to read from a list of names, none of which I heard. A silence gathered in the room with guerrilla stealth. People were looking at me.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, my voice dying in the chill air.

  “He left you the comic strip,” Mal said. “To draw.”

  “That’s all?”

  “This too,” he said, and pushed the second envelope toward me. It had the approximate heft of three or four pieces of paper.

  I turned the envelope over in my hands. TIM, it read, in faint ballpoint ink. When I looked up I met Susan’s eyes. She was gazing at me expectantly, like a lover naked under a thin sheet.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and walked out.

  six

  I found a men’s room in the hallway, pushed the door open, and locked myself into a stall, where I sat down on the toilet and ripped open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter. It read:

  Tim—

  Well, I imagine you’re pretty pissed off right now, being as you didn’t get any money from me. Of course if you can pull this off you’ll get all the money you’ll ever need and then some. Not that money’s important to you. Or is it?

  We both know that what you’re doing is a lot of bullshit. I tried the genius painter thing when I was in college, and I wasn’t any better at it than you were. Actually, I was probably a little better. But that’s not the point. The point is that it isn�
��t right for you and never was, and you only did it to get away from your mom and me and that house. Can’t say I blame you for that. I was a real asshole sometimes, that’s for sure, and your mother was too. But now you’re thirty years old (maybe more, depending on how quickly I knock off) and it’s time to get your act together, like it or not. God knows what a pain in the ass that is, so here’s your chance to do it the easy way.

  Why me? you’re thinking. Of course you are. Look at your brothers and sisters, Tim. Bobby’s already got his little chunk of the pie, Lindy’s told us all to go to hell, Bitty is married (we’ll see how long that lasts), and Pierce, of course, is hopeless. It’s the same old song, Timmy, you’re not living up to your potential. You’re the only one who can still make yourself a decent life. You’re down in West Philly with that little girl of yours, but she’s not any good either, and besides, you don’t like her. Face facts! Say what you will about me, but I did whatever in hell I wanted, when I wanted, and I’m happy I did. Mostly, anyway.

  I’ve included a list of the supplies I use. If you’re going to do it, do it right. Finished cartoons go on 2-ply Strathmore plate; you stick a week’s worth in an envelope with cardboard and ship them to New York. Do your prelims in pencil on 16-lb layout bond. Sketch with a Wolff “B.” Finals with a Globe Bowl point and letter with a Speedball B-6 round. Brushes are MORALLY WRONG, got that? This isn’t art school, it’s the strips. The other stuff you need’s on the list, along with the product numbers for all the important things. Also, I’ve got you set up with Brad Wurster, out in New Brunswick. He’s a real genius, he gives lessons to all the young punks who can afford it. He’s the best there is. You’ll go to him five hours a day, five days a week. When you make your decision, call him at 224-8935. He’s always home. You think FF is a joke, but it sent you to art school, so you’ll keep it the way it is.

  I said I was mostly happy I did what I did. The only problem was your mother. We tore into each other like nobody’s business. Don’t do that, all right? That’s what’ll happen between that girl and you if you don’t watch it. Your lives will go on being boring until one day you’ll wake up and blame her for it, because you won’t want to admit it’s your own damn fault. And she’ll do the same thing. And there’ll be fights and drinking and all the stuff that ruined your mom and me. Now I’m sounding like a sap. But that woman was my one great failing. I bet she’d say the same about me. We screwed up and probably screwed all of you up too.