grade school, and we’ll walk around the campus of the university he attended after he and my mother were divorced, we’ll find whatever remains of the life he used to have when he was my age, younger.
His father still lives in that city, so I can meet my other grandfather, too. “And after that, ” he’s said, “we’ll drive to my mother’s.
You’ll meet both your grandparents. You’ll see where you came from the other half of you. ” The shingles are not gone when I leave, but there have been no more blisters for a week, and most of the old ones are now scabs. I can turn my head a little, and although my right arm is too weak to lift my backpack, I can use the fingers of that hand for short periods. “Long enough to write a postcard, ” I say to my mother, wiggling them. At the airport we say good-bye with the stiff formal kiss we always use. I feel the dry brush of her lips on my forehead, smell the faint gust of Guerlain. “Why don’t you ride with Dad? ” my father says to me. We’ve done all the things he said we would, and now we’ve come to meet his father after work. In the parking lot outside my grandfather’s office, I remember three things my father has told me about his father, First, that he was so handsome in his youth, so sexually magnetic, that women he didn’t know followed him down the street. Tagging along and watching the women watch his father, my father once ran into a parking meter and knocked himself out. Second, that years ago his father shot a man in his yard a Peeping Tom who was looking at his wife. And, third, that his father was now slowly dying of prostate cancer because he has refused radiation, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, and the last-ditch removal of his testicles. So this is the way my father understands his father, and thus his own manhood, mythic sexual appeal, violent sexual jealousy, fatal sexual vanity. If only this was how I understood it at the time, but to me the stories seem quaintly exotic, their danger like that of a great white hunter who long ago put his rifle away, they seem as if they have nothing to do with me. My grandfather, in fact, comes across as docile and friendly.
He lacks the loud, large bluster of my father, but then, he is much older, his hair completely white, his walk stiff. In his car, away from the notice of my father, his hand strays past the gearshift and onto my thigh. “Oh, oh, oh, ” he says. “You make me wish I was thirty years younger. If I was, you’d be in trouble. ” I don’t dare look at him, nor pointedly away, so I stare forward out the windshield. The next time he has to change gears, he takes his hand off my leg. My grandfather’s house is small, the sidewalk before the gate cracked into big slabs heaved up by the roots of old trees. Inside is his ex-wife his fourth exwife, or his third, I never get it straight.
Apparently, two of the four or five marriages were to my father’s mother. The ex-wife is a blowsy woman in her sixties, “mutton dressed as lamb” is how my grandmother would describe her, with her hair piled up in high curls and her wide hips packed into a tight black skirt. She still shares my grandfather’s home with him, and she carries a tray of iced tea into the backyard, where my grandfather takes us on a tour of his greenhouse, devoted to the cultivation of orchids. The small glass structure is filled with color, as if every hue in this dry, gray city has been drawn into the vibrant box. In it, my grandfather is a magician, and his smile tells me he knows this. As I walk behind him and watch his hands gently turn a beautiful bloom toward my notice, do I remember the linguistic connection between orchids and male genitalia?
Do I say the word silently to myself, or chidectomy, and define it as a surgical term for the removal of the testicles? I think, actually, that I do. “Did you like him? ” my father asks in the car on the way back to our motel. “I liked the flowers, ” I
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