The Candy House(8)

His parents? They would think someone had died.

He dialed his mother-in-law. Bix almost never initiated calls to her, and doubted she would pick up. He found himself willing her not to.

“Beresford,” she answered.

“Joan.”

She called everyone else “darling” and they called her “Joanie.” But Bix and his mother-in-law called each other by their real name.

“Everyone all right?” she asked in her laconic drawl.

“Oh, yes. All fine.”

There was a pause. “And yourself?”

“I’m… fine, too.”

“Don’t shit a shitter,” Joan said, and he heard her lighting a cigarette over sounds of lawn mowers. Apparently, they mowed their lawns at night in San Antonio. “What’s on your mind?” she said, exhaling.

“Nothing much,” he said. “Just wondering… what should happen next.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“I’m supposed to know,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“That’s a lot to ask.”

He stared at the colors moving and melting on the river. Joan’s cigarette crackled in his ear as she took a long drag.

“I hear worrying,” she said smokily. “That’s a worried silence.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do it again.”

It was the first time Bix had said these words, or any like them, to anyone. In the pause that followed, he recoiled from the confession.

“Horseshit,” Joan said, and he could almost feel the hot blast of cigarette smoke hitting his cheek. “You can and you will. I’ll bet you’re a lot closer than you think.”

Her words, spoken casually, brought a wave of unaccountable relief. It might have been her use of his given name, which he rarely heard, or the fact that she wasn’t generally the booster type. Maybe hearing anyone say You can and you will at that moment would have made it seem true.

“I’m going to give you a piece of advice, Beresford,” Joan said. “It comes from the love in my heart. Are you ready?”

He closed his eyes and felt wind on his eyelids. Tiny waves lapped the parapet below his feet. There was an ocean smell: birds, salt, fish, all of it mingled, incongruously, with Joan’s whistling breath.

“Ready,” he said.

“Go to bed. And give that crazy daughter of mine a kiss.”

He did.





Case Study: No One Got Hurt



1


Nobody, including Alfred Hollander himself, is certain of when he first began reacting violently—“allergically” is the word he uses—to the artifice of TV. It started with the news: those fake smiles. That hair! Were they robots? Were they bobbleheads? Were they animate dolls he’d seen in horror-movie posters? It became impossible to watch the news with Alfred. It became hard to watch Cheers with Alfred. It became preferable not to watch anything with Alfred, who was apt to holler from the couch, still with a slight lisp: “How much are they paying her?” or “Who does he think he’s kidding!” It broke the mood.

Turning off the TV wasn’t enough; by age nine, Alfred’s intolerance of fakery had jumped the life/art barrier and entered his everyday world. He’d looked behind the curtain and seen the ways people played themselves, or—more insidiously—versions of themselves they’d cribbed from TV: Harried Mom. Sheepish Dad. Stern Teacher. Encouraging Coach. Alfred would not—could not—tolerate these appropriations. “Stop pretending, and I’ll answer you,” he would inform his startled interlocutor, or, more bluntly, “That’s phony.” His family cat and dog, Vincent and Theo, went through their days without pretense. So did the squirrels and deer and gophers and fish that populated the lake-abundant region of Upstate New York where Alfred grew up and where his father, Ted Hollander, taught art history at a local college. Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

There was an obvious problem: Alfred was difficult—or “a fucking nightmare,” to quote several witnesses. And there was a deeper problem: He poisoned his world. Many of us, wrongly accused of, say, spying for the Department of Homeland Security, or stalking a famous person whom we haven’t actually identified, will respond with guilt, anxiety, and attempts to telegraph our innocence. We behave, in other words, exactly as a surveilling Homeland Security agent, or surreptitious stalker, would behave. Likewise, adults charged by Alfred to “stop using that fake voice” would strive to act more natural and wind up acting less so: Parents played parents; teachers played teachers; baseball coaches played baseball coaches. And they got away as quickly as they could.

Family life was the epicenter of Alfred’s discontent. At dinner, he felt “asphyxiated” by the quiet supremacy of Miles, his oldest brother, who was organized and accomplished, and by the studied vacancy of Ames, the middle brother, who came and went invisibly and whose real thoughts were always out of reach. In reply to his parents’ innocuous questions about his day at school, Alfred often would bark, “I can’t have this conversation,” upsetting his mother, Susan, who treasured family time.

At eleven, Alfred began wearing a brown paper bag with eyeholes over his head during holidays with extended family. He kept the bag on throughout the meal, tweezing forkfuls of turkey or pecan pie through a rectangular mouth slot. His goal was to create a disruption so extreme that it jolted genuine responses—albeit negative—from those around him.