Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh
of Ted Williams and John Coltrane, then offer a few toasts to Alec’s father as the sun went down, never mind they lacked a minyan.
Alec lay with his palms flat, his rough cheek against the cool floor of the pizza shop. The girls called out to him, asking if he’d been hurt. People came out from the kitchen, streamed around the counter, Alec wrongly becoming the focus of their attention. Had he been hurt? they kept asking. He struggled to sit up. He was weeping; he couldn’t answer them.
Later he came to think it was the earthquake that had broken him, that in that moment the abyss had opened and he glimpsed the moment of his own death. He had been terrified. He saw that he lacked a certain structural integrity. He thought of himself as morally scrupulous—Gina called it rigid. Alec had always been more strict with himself than he was with other flawed and more primitive beings, a group that included his wife and children. The rules with women were more fluid, he felt. Women were hard on one another, yet made allowances. They were more elemental, less high-minded, which is why Alec had been able to forgive Gina for her crimes against him.
He raised his palms, which were bruised from the panic with which he suddenly hit the floor. He was shaking his head to try to say it: my father is a few days dead; I don’t know where my family is. He was a man who never wept, who hadn’t cried at his father’s funeral. How many days now since he’d eaten. How long since he’d slept. Alec was hardly recognizable to himself. He needed something to eat, needed also to sit quietly for another minute to adjust to this world, the new and vaulted emptiness in which no father stood above him.
4
Closure
In architecture, this term refers to the property of perception which causes the tendency for an open or incomplete figure to be seen as a closed or complete and stable form.
FRANCIS D . K . CHING, A Visual Dictionary of Architecture
WHAT THEN WAS Alec guilty of—that he was a less-thanperfect husband? That once, in the long distant long ago, he made his wife Gina suffer a specific cruelty for which she then very amply repaid him? That the last time he saw his father Alec had gone out of his way to fight with him?
Stuart Baxter, once a man of sophisticated political opinions, seemed in old age to become more and more simplistic. In the last few years of his life, Alec’s father began to rigidly divide the world into what was Good for the Jews and Bad for Them. Stuart began to loudly admire the Hasidim, to go on and on about their purity. The Hasids of Brooklyn were notoriously wealthy as diamond merchants, and were often robbed, yet they walked to shul on Shabbat without carrying money, not even a fake wallet to give up in case they were hit again.
“Which,” Alec mentioned to his father on his last trip to Queens, “might be viewed as being a simpleton.”
“Now Alec,” his mother said.
“It causes war, Pop,” he told his father. “Remember war?” he asked. “W-A-R? And that it’s usually the religious fundamentalist who’s happy to kick it off.” He felt like he was talking to a four-year-old.
When had his father become like this strict Jew off a TV sitcom? The house where Alec grew up on 219th had aluminum siding. Why? Because, as Stuart said, paint costs money! And their interior decoration ran severely now toward the Oi, Gottenyu!—with everything done along the lines of his parents’ cultural allegiances : brushstroke prints of kitschy Chagall-like brides flying upside down, or the made-by-kibbutzim crap his parents got in the airport shops in Tel Aviv. Oi, Jesus! the jumble of occasional tables for which there was no occasion. Hadn’t their parents once been more aesthetically interesting than this? he asked his sister Betsy. Now their reading was of the most pious kind. The silver-bound Israeli Hagaddah sat out conspicuously alongside their book club books, nearly every one of them written by a conspicuously Jewish author and very often on Jewish themes.
For the rest of that visit his father was polite if cool. First Alec insulted the Jews, then he criticized Stuart’s driving. It was Betsy who asked her brother to speak to their father—their father stopped listening to Betsy when he turned into what she called the Jewish Mr. Magoo. When he got lost or confused, Stuart now impulsively braked to a stop, never mind that he was on the turnpike. Their mother, who did not drive, encouraged and colluded. “You can go now, Stu,” Vivian chirped. “The coast is clear,” she said. Stuart yanked the wheel, making an abrupt left in front of three lanes of oncoming traffic.
“The coast is not clear!” Alec bellowed from the backseat. “Pop! What’s going on here? Are you trying to get us killed?”
“Will you look at that?” his mother asked as Stu pulled ahead and blandly kept turning. Brakes squealed, horns blasted, curses were hurled at him. “See?” she sniffed. “They won’t give an inch!”
Alec and his father quarreled in July; Stuart Baxter died of a heart attack on a Saturday morning in October, no angina, no prior history. Alec flew out on the next plane east feeling only mildly startled. Their father died while praying, Betsy said. Stuart was wearing his white and ivory prayer shawl, his wrist and hand were wrapped in phylacteries. Could this be literally true, Alec wondered, or was his father really somehow alive and still manipulating, going into disguise as a thoroughly pious man in order to become the stuff of family legend?
Alec got off the plane to discover that the sunlight and all colors had gone watery, that the whole of Long Island seemed bent and drenched and held underwater by the enormity of this news. His father had really died and so was really dead. Grief twisted him, might have broken him, had he had no give. The look of the world changed; objects seemed to float just as Alec too now did. He took a cab in, went right to the funeral home, bent to kiss his father’s face. Stuart lay in a plain pine box, his beautiful head wrapped in the same silk shawl he’d had since he was a bar mitzvah boy on Oak Street in New Haven. The skin was cold to the touch of Alec’s lips, his father’s features so pure and still.
“Oh, Pop,” he said. “How I loved you. I am so sorry I was rude to you.”
Alec flew home, staring out the window of the plane, went right back to work in order to forget himself, to forget the ways in which he didn’t live by the other nine of the Ten Commandments. Then just as everything began to settle back and coalesce into the ordinary, Alec’s whole bright world again began to shift and buckle, as if without the rules given by God to Moses, the earth would never again be stabilized. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, the strata thundered. This quake measured 7.1, lasted a full fifteen seconds.
Earthquake time is like all other kinds of time that lie within a frame of violence. A second goes on and on, trails away as far as one can see into the future. One reasons that the moment now must end but it doesn’t end and even when it then does end, the event is never really over with, as both history and the future are bent at that point, and all of time is therefore altered by what has just transpired. This is known in physics as the Frozen Accident.
It is chaos, Fran Bloom told him—if the quantum works for anything, it’s to prove there is no cause and effect, no way the world reflects the inner state except that we view it intrapsychically. The cause and effect of guilt was a human construct, a mathematical calculation, she reminded him. It happened in the one-andone-equals-two of the realm of the superego, which—in Alec’s case—was becoming strangely harsh and punishing. Fran Bloom was a psychoanalyst, one of the old-fashioned Freudian, lying-onthe-couch school. She did the talking cure, left off with the pharmaceuticals. Alec admired that, admired the fact that Fran Bloom still used both names to identify herself when she called the house though he’d known her for years. The name Fran Bloom, he thought, was as comforting as the lub-dub, lub-dub of heartbeat.
He sometimes wished he had married a woman who possessed such wisdom, such certainty. Alec had begun to go up the street in the evenings to visit with the Blooms because he needed now to actively obsess and they were older and would listen patiently. Alec had to go over and over the various events to find his place in them. He went back mentally, a bit forward, then back again, all the way