II: Fred Onda
Before Whitaker had found Fred wrapped in his own tubes, he was staggering from painting to painting drinking in the people he loved.
Everything made sense with paint. It was smooth, it was rough, it was loud, it was private. Love, sex, and pain were shapes and colors, not the sharpness of words or the raw nakedness of one imperfect body with another. Not linear moments with actions and reactions, but circular time, backwards time. Hair became a song or a journey, breasts a prayer, eyes and cheeks a manifesto.
Fred had painted past his own inadequacies as a husband, unable to respond to his bold wife’s lust for life. They seemed compatible at first, traveling extensively together for years. But she wanted direct involvement with her surroundings, interjection, action. Fred Onda wanted silent taste, touch, absorption.
They had never divorced, but saw each other as a relative, an anchor with a very long rope. Their marriage was marked with bi-yearly visits full of warm smiles and casual regret. She had many lovers over the years; Fred Onda had many less.
Still he loved his wife, he even loved her lovers, for she was a person who was capable of feeling physical joy, and who therefore deserved it. He painted her jaw stronger than it really was; her eyes more fiery. He imagined the jaw biting a younger and stronger version of himself, and he imagined he that he would thrust himself inside of her and their moans would shake the wall, spill onto the streets. In a painting their quiet lovemaking in Granada became a revolution, the conception of their son in Argentina a feral dance.
And there was the painting of his son on a Louisiana boat surrounded by gargantuan lilies. But the image of the lithe boy stood in sharp contrast to the man Fred’s son had become: burly, quick with the eye, pierced everywhere like Fred’s students. They saw each other during summers and holidays. These were quiet tender spells, but Fred knew his son wanted more softball games and rock concerts and inflamed political discussions. The boy had become a man and the man a near stranger, but the boy in the boat was his son forever.
So Fred Onda, a dying man, drank in his wife and his son. He drank in the images of friends and strangers whom he had painted over the years. He loved them, for he had rendered them tenderly, drawing out their incandescence and strangeness. There was a Viola slung over the bar with exaggerated hands and red pumps. There was Mike Picolli sporting his new toupee with a proud smile. And Melanie taunting with her skirts. There was the poor Egyptian boy whom Fred Onda paid extravagantly to give him a tour of Cairo even though he’d already seen every major site. Now the beggar child stands immortal near the Sphinx.
There was the staff woman from Holland at the tourist office who in Dutch directed Fred Onda to the files of posters. He didn’t understand a word she said until she turned away to answer the phone. She began to sob and Fred knew something tragic had happened. A stranger, he held her heaving into his chest until her friends arrived. In the painting she stares desperately out the window and the artist still wonders what is behind her tears.
Then there were the Featherstone paintings. Two of Whitaker had sold, one to The Battle Axe and one to a State Senator who had met the subject and was smitten by his bombasity. Another painting of Whitaker cheering at the Mummer’s parade was among the jumbled adornments in the Featherstone living room. In the Featherstone kitchen was the painting of Nicolas when he was twelve. His mouth is half open, there is a flush in his cheeks, a softness he has lost in his stubbly late teens, and a subtle sparkle in his eye that Fred Onda insists is not manufactured.
Finally there is the painting of Jackie that remained in Fred Onda’s house, she who would not sit for a painting nor give Fred a photo for one. Fred painted her from memory. He remembered a night late in the kitchen when Jackie unloosened her braid, always pulled so tight, and her hair swept over shoulders like a secret revealed. But she did not turn to him seductively like he imagined at the time. Instead as she began the dispatch of Nicolas’ pills, stepping deep into the rhythm of her private world, the one where she gathered the will to keep another person alive. Fred Onda knew then he never saw such fierce beauty. In the painting, her long wavy hair tumbles, her forehead wrinkles are bold, her eyes open wide and set off by crows-feet, which Fred always thought of as suns, and she is caught in the beginning of a laugh. He loved her rare laughs.
Fred Onda did not mention to Whitaker that it was not actually Melanie’s skirt he stared at while prostrate and tangled on the floor.
*
It should be noted that Fred Onda thanked the heavens when Whitaker came that night. Whether the heavens existed or not, Fred did not know. But he knew he could not find the will or strength to force himself up, to untangle himself, and he thought, this is it, in the end it is me and my paintings, no humans, no touch. A door separated even his cats; he longed to be grazed by them. And he could not sleep, could not surrender himself to the emptiness. Then when he heard Whitaker’s beautiful rambling and thought saved and slept.
*
As Whitaker expected, Fred Onda descended into longer stretches of sleep, drifting ever outwards. The tiny doors closed in succession and Whit could only hope to open them for moments, rushing door to door before each closed again, leading to a passageway of color and sound.
*
Outside of Fred Onda’s South Philadelphia rowhouse Whitaker Featherstone II shouted orders. “Dunslap, listen close! No airy-fairy medicinal cures. We’re done with that.”
“Picolli, prepare your most offensive dirty jokes with lots of tits and ass!”
“Pat, Viola and Melanie, kiss that sucker on full on the lips!”
When he got the crowd of dozens facing in more or less the right direction he gave the signal and three bagpipes swelled, the way they swelled at the Mummer’s parade. The sound was large and robust, generous and sad. As the bagpipes played, the crowd waited, noiselessly then noisefully, waiting for Fred Onda to wake up, and witness their serenade of him. But when he didn’t appear at the window, Whit shot upstairs, nudged him into a vague alertness, and propped him up, energetically explaining the sight and sound.
From the window above Whitaker Featherstone gave the signal. Then the Old Timers, bar stool pontificators, atheist church-goers -- including Jackie, a son and an estranged wife filed in. Fred Onda saw their faces mingle with his paintings.
It was hard to gage Fred Onda’s reaction seeing as he was so weak, but he excelled in snapping pictures without a camera, painting without a brush.
Onda snapped his son from New Orleans, on his arm a graceful Korean girl he’d met at Tufts, who was now his fiancé. He would not see the marriage nor know his grandchildren. Had he lived, they would play with his cats and he would hang them upside-down. New bottoms of his life fell at the realization.
Onda snapped the Old Timer’s. Many odes to their spirited riddling and grumbling and penchant for curly fries.
Onda found it hard to look at his wife, because he ached at the distance. So he painted the suns around Jackie’s eyes.
Laying in his hospice bed, surrounded by his paintings, with many a pint raised before him, Onda realized that a real face and a painted face were the same, if you loved them enough, if you left the door wide.
The bagpipes swelled. The guests ate epically. And Fred Onda waited for the crowds to leave so Whitaker could tuck him back into bed and he could sleep.
III. Jackie Featherstone
While Jackie prepared the pastries for Fred Onda’s serenade, six-foot Nicolas had a seizure in the kitchen. In a tremendous crash, he knocked over two metal trays overflowing with espresso-soaked lady fingers and cylindrical mini-cake rolls filled with marmalade. These oozed onto the painstakingly prepared advocacy papers challenging legislation that ceases services to young men like Nicolas upon turning eighteen, his current age. “Whitty!” Jackie called, as she held her son’s stiff body. But Whitaker had tiptoed into Fred Onda’s home to leave some of the pastries before the guests gathered in front of his door. Jackie thought, typical, shit. She held Nicolas until he stopped seizing, “Breath, there ya go, that’s my boy,” she said, and when he came to she gave him medicine.
Whitaker slammed through the door several minutes later. “Was he seizing?”
“Yeah, but the exorcism was successful. Maybe you could stay here with him a minute while I clean this mess up and try to throw something else together.” She hated Whitaker for a moment and didn’t know why.
Whitaker asked, “When will your sister get here so you can come to Onda’s?” Other than Fred, Jackie’s sister was the only outsider who knew how to deal with the seizures, which were common; it was a rare a week passed by without them.
She watched Whitaker clean up Nicolas, talk to him, though Nicolas registered no response to the words --- he never did --- only some relaxing of his muscles to the touch. She knew that many men wouldn’t have stayed. Nicolas’ care defined much of their lives and Jackie was forced to stay home and the lack of extra income, and the long hours, hurt. Whitaker in turn taught an overload of classes and never took a sick day for himself. He needed to allow for the inevitable visits to the emergency room.
Jackie knew Whitaker felt useless when Nicolas seized, for she was the first line of defense and did a better job of interpreting the signs. Furthermore, Jackie knew that Whitaker believed Nicolas should be in an institution, but after the most disastrous episodes, when he would gently bring it up, Jackie would summon all her strength, and become even more competent and focused on the care of her son. Overtaken by her power, Whitaker relented. He drank whiskey and ale, but never failed to return home loudly and boldly. And then, in an intense flash, she would love him.
“I know you don’t want to leave Nico,” said Whit, “but this is gonna be big.”
“I’ll drop by for an hour,” answered Jackie, and when her sister arrived she did.
*
Jackie marched up the stairs with the others. They were surrounded by the deep round sounds of bagpipes. She marched alongside Fred’s healthy son. She felt a maternal pull towards him; she wanted to stay up with him to the wee hours and discuss his accomplishments over tea. And she resented him. This was a young man with a salary who would have children and be a father. This was a young man who was once a child that tried to play with Nicolas, who tried and tried, but Nicolas wouldn’t respond.
Many people were there who had graced her kitchen, who showed up unannounced for ale. She was fond of them all, their jokes and peculiarities. But outside of her kitchen they felt like aliens, each with a different sense of self and time. While they were marching en masse she overheard Mitch Dunslap refer to his students as retarded ingrates. She chose to ignore this because she had come around to Whitaker’s way of thinking that it was just memetic activity doing its thing. She chose to ignore it because they all loved Fred Onda, and were there to cross the chasm.
Jackie walked past the paintings into the room where Whit sat with Fred who was propped up on pillows. She smiled at the two of them. Whitaker called out, “My magnetic wife!” And Fred Onda waved. In Fred she saw a man who knew her silence, who never tried to fill it. Sometimes his looks and smiles seeped into her skin as she bent over the stove or reached to a cupboard on tiptoe. When compared Whitaker Featherstone and Fred Onda, she didn’t know which quality was better -- sound or silence. Whit made a point to annunciate words and bellow over crowds. Fred spoke in a near whisper. Either way Jackie felt that words, drawn as they were from advanced cognition, were over-rated. She knew when Nicolas’ grunts, moans and groans meant hunger, discomfort, and pleasure. There were no adjectives and adverbs that would enhance their clarity. Sound was sound. Yet silence screamed mortality.
As she smiled at Fred Onda, she tried to take in the enormity that it might be the last time. She tried to fold each shared wink and joke into a cohesive memory or feeling. But the hallway of their memories was too long.
There were toasts and jokes. Whit encouraged the rowdiness. He wanted to keep Onda here. Jackie clapped along as Whit did a jig to the bagpipes.
But, as planned, Jackie returned home after an hour and relieved her sister so she could also toast their friend. Before she left, Jackie wanted to kiss Fred Onda's pale brow, let the tip of her nose dance on his, close his eyes gentley. But she didn't. She couldn't. Instead she waived and let her raised hand linger.
After a nap, Nicolas rebounded from his seizure. He paraded back and forth across the kitchen with unusual momentum, occasionally grabbing a leftover lady finger and stuffing it whole into his mouth. Jackie, found these purgings amusing, even though they sometimes resulted in a cataclysmic stomach episode. As always, she prepared tea and turned up the volume of the television. There was fucking Oprah giving makeovers, telling rooms of women to take time out for themselves, to have a “me” day. In the background, Jackie shuffled papers and clanged pots. But two blocks past her door the bagpipes still swelled. Their bold and melancholy sound drowned out Oprah, drowned out the clanging and shuffling, competed with the kitchen clutter, filled her chest. The sound was magnificent; it would swell and pause. Then Jackie heard a tapping that punctuated the bagpipes. It was Nicolas at the table with a spoon. Filling out the spaces. Tap tap tap.
