and Fletcher decides the only animal protein he’ll eat is seafood.”
“No prob—smells great!” Edison helped himself to a large nearby jar of peanuts and asked for a beer. I poured him a lager and followed him anxiously to the table. Fletcher had made the dining set, and the chairs all had finely curved arms—between which my brother was not going to fit.
“I’m sure you’re worn out after your trip,” I said hastily, “but you may not be—comfortable in these chairs.” I did a rapid inventory: the living room was furnished with Fletcher’s rigid normal-size-person creations. But one broken-down recliner in the master bedroom was leftover from the days I lived alone; I’d refused to part with an ugly chair so sumptuous for curling up to read. My husband’s confabulations of oak, cedar, and ash were more sensuous for the eye than the ass.
I tried to be offhand about it. Turning off the ratatouille, Fletcher was stoic, Cody eager to help. Once upstairs, my husband and I finally met each other’s eyes. Desperate to talk to him for hours, I could only shake my head in dismay.
“Mom,” Cody whispered as we knelt on one side of the recliner and Fletcher took the other. “What happened to Uncle Edison?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
“Is he sick?”
“According to the latest thinking on the subject”—we heaved to a stand—“yes.” Though I was personally unsure how labeling obesity an “illness” got anyone anywhere.
“Does he eat too much?”
“I think so.”
“Why doesn’t he stop?”
“That’s a good question.” We paused at the top of the stairs.
“He makes me sad,” said my stepdaughter.
“Me, too.” I kept my voice steady for her sake. “Very, very sad.”
I was determined not to make a big deal out of this project, but the recliner was heavy, and in order to get it around the turn at the landing we had to tilt the chair on its side. A certain amount of huffing and Fletcher’s barked directions must have leaked to the kitchen. When we lugged in the recliner, Edison was holding forth to Tanner while leaning on the prep island. I felt bad about making him stand so long, which he must have found tiring. The peanuts were finished.
“I’m not dissing Wynton Marsalis,” Edison was opining. “He’s brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I’m sayin’? Like it’s in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don’t turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. ’Cause it’s still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don’t appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying structure. But other Post-Bop cats out there are killing. Even some of Miles’s contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne …”
“Talk about ‘ass of the past,’” said Tanner, focused on his keyboard. “What’s with all the ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘dig’? That shit must have been pretty moldy by the time you were a kid.”
“Yo, every profession got its patois,” said Edison.
“It’s true, they really do talk like that,” I said, after we’d set the recliner down in the kitchen to rest. “I’ve visited your uncle several times in New York, and all the other jazz musicians talk the same way. Time warp. It’s hilarious.”
When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn’t allow smoking in the house.
“Jesus, it’s like he’s trying to sound like a jazz musician,” Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. “Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn’t wash in a biopic because it’s trite. You’re not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up speaking jive.”
“Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake,” I snapped. “You could be a little more gracious. Like, give us a hand, because I think we’re going to have to move the table.”
Lodging the chair at the head of the table was an operation, since the recliner wouldn’t fit in front of the step up to the living room without our moving the table a foot toward the patio door—which meant Tanner had to push his own chair right up against the glass. Reseated but cramped, he looked put out, doubly so when he had to get up again to let Edison inside. As my brother sank with obvious relief into the crazed leather cushion, I caught Fletcher appraising the room critically. He was house-proud. Now the room was off-center, and the dirty maroon eyesore hardly set off his dining table.
“Hey, Pando, I almost forgot,” said Tanner, typing with the very urgency I had dreaded. “Some photographer called while you were gone, about a re-sked of the Bloomberg Businessweek shoot. Wish you’d pick up your damn iPhone. Taking a handwritten message on a pad is like carving on the wall of a cave.”
“Oh, God, not another photo shoot,” I said before I realized how that sounded. “I hate them,” I continued, them making it worse, since the very plurality was the problem. “I can’t stand having to decide what to wear, and it doesn’t even matter since I always look hideous,” always continuing to dig my grave. Since it was true enough, in my haste to say something more self-deprecating still to cover for the embarrassing fact of the shoot itself, I almost added, but pulled up short just in time, that lately all I could think when I saw pictures of myself in the media was that I looked fat.
“They don’t always come out so bad,” said Tanner. “The New York magazine cover, where they added a pull-string on your back? That one was a kick.”
“Little cheesy, though,” Edison proclaimed from his new throne, and drained the last of his beer. “That rag’s gone to shit. One step from Entertainment Weekly.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realize that Edison might have regarded that cover as an invasion of sorts. New York was his patch.
“You ever been in New York magazine?” Tanner charged my brother.
“Nah. I’m more the Downbeat type.”
As I retrieved napkins at his side, Tanner muttered, “Look more like the beat down type to me.” I hoped Edison hadn’t heard him.
I should have been glad that Tanner stuck up for me, but I didn’t want the responsibility of being the one he looked up to. Baby Monotonous had come to me flukishly. I hadn’t planned the venture or even wanted it, much less worked hard for it until it landed in my lap. I believed I set a bad example.
“Well, we should all enjoy this making of hay while the sun shines,” I said, laying plates. “Baby Monotonous dolls are a fad. Fads don’t last. Like pet rocks—a perfectly ridiculous gift item that you kids are too young to remember. They lasted about five minutes. In that five minutes, someone made a bundle. But if he wasn’t smart, he’d have been left with whole warehouses full of stones in stupid little boxes. I’ve been very lucky, and you should all be prepared for that luck to run out. Orders are already starting to level off, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see those dolls start cropping up on eBay by the hundred.” Orders hadn’t leveled
