Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Said December to May

"Dad," said Jayne through her mouthful of tofu lasagna, "don't you see that you'll have Alzheimer's before she can sign up for AARP? Besides, I don't want a big sister who thinks she's my mother."

Jayne was glad that her father had found some version of love at this stage of his life, but she was also embarrassed for him because of the whispers behind hands when his friends talked about it. He said that they were envious but she feared that they really thought him an old fool.

"Twenty-five years isn't so much," Daniel said.

"Just my whole life." Jayne really wasn't trying to talk him out of it, she only wished Flora was more her father's contemporary so that when the chocolate wore off they might have something to talk about. Not that Flora would be adding much to the conversation. It was hard for Jayne to imagine what the girl was thinking. Certainly her father was an attractive man. His height gave him authority that he exercised in a kind and gentlemanly way. He was enjoying being the wise one, the sagacious older man. Flora obviously needed a daddy, Jayne thought, but so did she and the idea of a whole new round of sibling rivalry was aggravating her natural protectiveness. She wondered if flattery alone was enough to sustain a relationship? Her father often lingered in the mirror.

Daniel didn't have any money to speak of, so Jayne couldn't accuse Flora of being a gold-digger. Flora was somewhat awed by Daniel and this fed his artistic vanity. She was amazed that he could see an idea in his head and then paint it. He was amazed that he could still stir such excitement in a young woman, no matter how shallow and self-absorbed she was. She fancied herself his muse. He was simply amused. Jayne noticed them clinging to each other like bits of flotsam of equal bouyancy who wash up together on the shore and for a moment before the next wave, an oil-can and a beer bottle will think they are the same, perhaps even fall in love, before the next wave.

It was easy for Jayne to see what her father was getting out of the deal, young meat and admiration. It was harder for her to imagine what Flora derived from the relationship unless her ambition was to be a geriatric nurse.

"She makes me feel young, Jayne."

"I'm sure she does, Dad. What happens when you get tired of feeling young?"

"Before that happens, she will be feeling old."

"What do you care about her old age? By that time you'll be dead."

"But she worships me."

"She can worship you when you're dead, which will be soon. In the mean time what do you talk about? Justin Bieber's bangs?"

"She's older than you are, my dear. She has kids of her own. She knows what she wants."

"You mean someone who's next career move is to a funeral home? Aren't you afraid that she'll leave you for a younger man with many good earning years ahead of him?

"We understand each other. We've both suffered in the same ways."

"There is only one way to suffer, Daddy."

Jayne had to admit that Flora was a handsome woman who dressed well. Her children were manageable and Jayne could tell that her father enjoyed them in an avuncular way and in small doses. She was sure they would remember him as 'that nice old man mother knew.' Jayne never knew her father to attend support groups but Flora seemed like someone you might meet in one. Jayne found her to be overly attentive as many profoundly needy people are.

Jayne's dad had taught her that people were the most important parts of our lives because the most precious things in life are to know and to be known. She took another bite of lasagna and let her fork dangle beside her cheek as she thought about the people who really knew her. There were many who knew a little, what she chose to show them, how she advertised herself in her resume, glimpses of her heart spilled on late-night discussion boards. But this was not the real Jayne, not the complete Jayne. To know someone completely requires two things, time and trial. She thought of those few in her life who had witnessed it all, seen her day by day in joy and victory and utter defeat, watched her trip and regain herself. Courage and dignity can only be photographed by a slow camera. Time-exposures take time. When she heard her father declare that a woman who he has screwed a few times 'understood' him, it was even less satisfying than the tofu.

Jayne thought that her father was the smartest man in the world. Until she was about six. But even after that, she recognized his quiet intelligence and talent. Had he met Flora when he was in his prime, he would have given her no more than a passing glance. She was an attractive woman. Had they been equal in age, they still would not have been equal in intellectual depth or capacity. They had no common experiences except their 'suffering.' How could she know him? His Labrador knew him better but the Labrador died. Daniel cried as if he had lost 14 years of his own life. That dog knew him better than some of his wives; he felt like he had lost more than a decade of his own history. This is why we cry for our dead. It's not for them. We grieve at the loss of our own histories. When someone knows us, really knows us, Jayne thought as she watched her father plunge a boiled shrimp into the coctail sauce, they become precious to us because of all the inconsequential little moments of our lives that they carry within them, those that define us. They are witnesses to our existence and when they are gone, part of us is gone as well.

"The sex is great."

"Too much info, Dad. ANY sex is great at your age."

"Of course she's only fucking my reputation. I know that. She's a groupie at heart but she accepts that, like she accepts me. That's the most precious thing in life, my dear, to be known and accepted. It's all any of us want, really."

"I thought it was to know and to be known. Since when did you have to be 'accepted' too?"

"I think it was about the third time that your mother left me."

"Mother knew you and loved you, she still does, just can't stand to be around you."

Yes, she loved me and knew me but she never accepted me."

Jayne really didn't want to see her father as a silly old man, vain and fooled by his own imagination, his own tinted picture of himself that only ever existed in dreams. It does anyone good to be adored, she supposed, even if only for a moment until the rent is due and the children start crying. Already others in the family were rolling their eyes. They were used to Daniel's flights of fancy and his artistic eccentricities but Jayne wasn't the only one who was squeamish about him dating a woman young enough to be his daughter. They knew him and accepted him but there's no fool like an old fool. His professional friends were taking it as a signal of his dotage.

"Will she still accept you when she has had time to know you?" Jayne felt like a cheater for asking that question. "And what about her? Doesn't she deserve someone who can offer her a future instead of just a past?"

"Being accepted doesn't really count until the other person knows you, does it?" He dipped another shrimp into the sauce.

Jayne thought that her father was searching for words. He looked like he was about to say something, then he gave a little cough and a surprised look came over his face. He began pointing at his throat and gasping. Jayne leapt to her feet and yelled, "Somebody help! He's choking." Two tables down was full of lesbians and a muscular girl with a boy's hair-cut waded into the confusion. "I'm a paramedic, let me through!" She took Daniel from behind and under his arms. She gave him one huge crushing hug and a piece of shrimp sung by Jayne's ear and she saw the projectile hit a businessman four tables over in his Bluetooth. Dad was breathing again, he was shaken but breathing. There was a pain in his chest. He didn't know if it was a heart attack or if his rescuer had broken a rib. This led to a panic attack. Daniel started gasping again.

"Somebody call 911," said the paramedic.

As they were loading her dad into the ambulance, Jayne asked him, "Who should I call? Flora?"

"Call your mother," he said.

"Why? I thought she didn't accept you."

"But she knows me."

Good theme and prose.

You are wonderful at weaving words. Sometimes I wonder how you pull out characters like this from your imagination, very nice piece.

Real cute. Humorous, bitter, sardonic prose.

He's off to check the benefits on his AARP card. I think he get 30% off on hotel rooms. Works out well.

Reminds me of a crass joke a former friend used to tell all the time (key word "former"... I'm not much into crass jokes).... "What's the hardest thing about eating a vegetable? Getting her out of the wheelchair." I bet you got a laugh from that one, huh? Some people like that type of sick humor.

BTW, did you invent these characters? That's really clever if you did! Or... are you so lucky you've got yourself a beautiful young lady who's in love with you? Old men get those really cool breaks and have always gotten them throughout history. At what? 64 now? Is that your age? You could probably date a young woman in her 20s.

Women in their 20s often go for old men in their 60s, especially the wealthy ones like you.

Good story Clay. A very good read.

Reminded me of a scene from a Philip Roth novel a little.

Thanks for reading my little fable. I had fun with it. It's just a little sketch of the contemporary. As usual I'm trying to let the particular evoke the general. Either that or I'm watching too many Nora Ephron movies.

Old woman to old man: "Whay do you like young women?"
Old man to old woman: "Because their stories are short."

I saw it more as a father daughter story, a father and daughter with a strong honest loving relationship.

But you know I bring my own baggage too.

Speaking of prose style check this out

A different take on Strunk and E.B. White.

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for "vigour" and "toughness" in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the Cold War. A time before race riots, feminism, and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. As Lorin Stein, the new editor of the celebrated literary magazine the Paris Review, recently put it to me: "It's like a national superego." And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult, and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring.

The trouble with the book isn't the rules themselves, which the authors are sage enough to recognize "the best writers sometimes disregard," but the knock-on effect that their bias for plain statement has tended to have not only on expositional but literary prose. In this, admittedly, Strunk & White had a few assists, in particular Hemingway. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. The terse, declarative sentence in all its masculine hardness routed the passive involutions of a higher, denser style. (James, from "The Altar of the Dead": "He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure"; Hemingway, from "A Way You'll Never Be": "These were the new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets.") As a result, pared-down prose of the sort editor Gordon Lish would later encourage in Raymond Carver became our default "realism." This is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to "omit needless words" (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem.

http://www.slate.com/id/2282086