Just Kids [27]
Senator Kennedy was dead.
“Daddy, Daddy,” I sobbed, burying my face in his shoulder.
My father put his arm around me. He didn’t say a thing. I guess he had already seen it all. But it seemed to me that the world outside was unraveling, and, increasingly, my own world as well.
I came home and there were cutouts of statues, the torsos and buttocks of the Greeks, the Slaves of Michelangelo, images of sailors, tattoos, and stars. To keep up with him, I read Robert passages from Miracle of the Rose, but he was always a step ahead. While I was reading Genet, it was as if he was becoming Genet.
He discarded his sheepskin vest and beads and found a sailor’s uniform. He had no love of the sea. In his sailor dress and cap, he resonated a Cocteau drawing or the world of Genet’s Robert Querelle. He had no interest in war, but the relics and rituals of war attracted him. He admired the stoic beauty of the Japanese kamikaze pilots who laid out their clothing—meticulously folded shirt, a white silk scarf—to be donned before battle.
I liked to participate in his fascinations. I found him a peacoat and a pilot’s silk scarf, though for me, my perception of World War II was filtered through the Bomb and The Diary of Anne Frank. I acknowledged his world as he willingly entered mine. At times, however, I felt mystified and even upset by a sudden transformation. When he covered the walls and medallion ceiling of our bedroom with Mylar, I felt shut out because it seemed more for him than me. He had hopes it would be stimulating but in my eyes it had the distorted effect of a funhouse mirror. I mourned the dismantling of the romantic chapel in which we slept.
He was disappointed I didn’t like it. “What were you thinking?” I asked him.
“I don’t think,” he insisted. “I feel.”
Robert was good to me, yet I could tell he was somewhere else. I was accustomed to him being quiet, but not silently brooding. Something was bothering him, something that was not about money. He never ceased to be affectionate to me, but he just seemed troubled.
He slept through the day and worked through the night. I would awake to find him staring at the bodies chiseled by Michelangelo tacked in a row on the wall. I would have preferred an argument to silence but it wasn’t his way. I could no longer decipher his moods.
I noticed that at night there was no music. He withdrew from me and paced about, unfocused, not fully realizing his work. Half-finished montages of freaks, saints, and sailors littered the floor. It was unlike him to leave his work in that state. It was something that he had always admonished me for. I felt powerless to penetrate the stoic darkness surrounding him.
His agitation mounted as he became increasingly unsatisfied with his work. “The old imagery doesn’t work for me,” he would say. One Sunday afternoon he took a soldering iron to the groin of a Madonna. After he was done, he just shrugged it off. “It was a moment of insanity,” he said.
There came a time when Robert’s aesthetic became so consuming that I felt it was no longer our world, but his. I believed in him, but he had transformed our home into a theater of his own design. The velvet backdrop of our fable had been replaced with metallic shades and black satin. The white mulberry tree was draped in heavy net. I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.
Our wordless nights made me restless. Something in the change of the weather marked a change in myself as well. I felt a longing, a