Safe Suicide

Subversions

12 safe suicide Subversions My nephew, John Friedericy, a painter and sculptor, attempted a correspondence with me as his uncle, the writer, in the late 1970’s. “I have just realized that you and I are in the same business,” he wrote, “making art.” Among the color slides he sent of his paintings was a self-portrait with my father, John Henry, his “grampa,” for whom he was named. My mother and father had flown from Philadelphia to Los Angeles several times over the years to visit my older sister, Judy, and her family and my father had reveled in his grandfather role. John’s portrayal of my father suggests partly my sister’s view of my father as a recovering alcoholic and as a candy manufacturer and partly John’s conscious difference, in terms of parallel male identities, as an artist and as a homosexual. At the viewer’s right, my father sits in a throne-like wingback upholstered chair reminiscent of one from home. He is sixty-eight and obese, mostly bald, but with a thin, white crown of hair. He sits slope-shouldered, his belly rising as a flaccid gut, piled upon itself, hanging over his lap; his arms droop and hang like paws, with long-fingered, claw-like hands. He wears a collarless button sweater over a white button shirt and cowboy string tie. The right side of his face is in shadow, the right eye piercing and stern, mouth tight, cheek tense, while the left side, like a quarter moon, is brightly lit, relaxed and oddly wondering and innocent. He is the father that my sister called “the old monster”; he is also the predatory capitalist, his claw-like nails suggesting cartoon portrayals of robber barons. His weight seems the curse and prize of his very corruption, a self-burdening appetite. And above all, he sits impotent and fatigued. John, at eighteen, sits beside him in the center of the painting, carefully imitating my father’s posture, but sitting sideways on a spindle-backed chair, muscularly vibrant with youth, arm braced, rather than drooping, on his thigh. John is lean and long-necked, hair close-cropped and brown; his left eye is vigilant and wary, his right melancholy. The lines and rhythms of the 12 two figures oddly cast the viewer’s eye to the left third of the painting, where there is only empty space. I did not know of John’s homosexuality when I first saw this painting (he would die of AIDS at the age of thirty-four), but having struggled imaginatively with the figure of my father and my own relations with him throughout my life, I felt oddly jealous and usurped. R I overheard no fights, ever, between my mother and father, though there were many teenage sulks, tantrums, and shouting matches between Judy, especially, and Dad, and Mom, and the rest of us (I was no angel); nor was there any sense of Dad and Mom ever sleeping together, sexually, at our St. David’s house—of physical affection between them. My mother later denied this, but it was my perception then. They had separate single beds, twins, the master bedroom, and Mom complained that Dad’s snoring was so loud that she had to move into the guest room to sleep. And his snoring was loud. We could hear it rooms away or when he was sleeping elsewhere, on the sun porch, or on the living room couch, or even nodding in his chair: it was as stentorian as his voice bellowing in righteous rage; his mouth would hang open slackly and he would breathe through his mouth; there was that rasping snort of intake, then wheeze out, the sound building through a series of breaths to a crescendo that we thought surely would wake him and maybe did a little, but then the snoring would subside back to its lowest pitch, only to build up again. If at first Mom moved “just to sleep,” later the move proved permanent, with the guest room bathroom her bathroom, filled with all her feminine things—powders, bottles, lotions—and then the guest room closet and dresser holding most of her clothes. R I am eleven, perhaps, when Mom asks me to rub BenGay on her back, which aches. She lies face down on the guest room’s twin bed nearest the door, loosens her belt, blouse, waist of her skirt, baring the midsection of her back, and tells me to...