DOMINOES by John Sokol

Dominoes
by John Sokol

I can't recall that my father ever told me he was sorry. I've heard him tell my mother he was sorry and I've heard him say it to his friends. Naturally, I've heard him use the words I'm sorry, but never to me. Well, to be more precise, once he dropped a stone chisel on my foot and he said, "I'm sorry." And, once, he spilled a plate of food onto my new blouse as he was reaching across the table and he said, "I'm sorry." Things like that. But those kinds of sorry fall more into the category of excuse me than anything else. The reason he never told me he was sorry is because he never did anything, or wronged me in any way, that would have made it necessary. What I'm saying, is: he's always been a near-perfect father, and I've always adored him. * Before he was ever my father, Clay Bell returned from Vietnam in the late sixties and went to college in Ohio under the GI bill. He took full loads and overloads, went to school through each summer, and, in less than five years received a Masters degree in sculpture. During that time he met and married the woman who is now my mother. Eve. My mother is white and my father is black. As their daughter of nineteen years, I often dwell on that combination of genes as it is manifest in the color of my own skin. My father does not exude good looks, but the peculiar ambiguity of gender and race that dances around in his kind and angular face makes him irresistible. My mother is blond, stalwart and beautiful, five years my father's junior, and, coincidentally, the daughter of the general my father served under in Vietnam. * Shortly after graduate school my father took a university job, teaching sculpture. After all these years at the same university, he has made and kept many friends, but treasures just two, "as many as a person should ever expect to have at any one time," as he is fond of saying. Peter Calvin and Ivan Weales are the only two people, besides my mother and me, that my father would trust with his life. Last summer, Peter, my parents and Ivan saw one another, or, some combination of one another, nearly every day. On Sunday mornings, Ivan and his wife, Emily, walked to our house. Peter drove over in his Jeep and we would all have breakfast in our backyard. Bloody Marys to start, followed by cream cheese and strawberry jam on toasted bagels. Fresh espresso and my father's killer omelets. I listened to my parents and their friends talk about painting and sculpture and the problems and talents of their students. Then, my mother and I would pick flowers from the garden and put them in big vases on the table. Sometimes, other artists would drop by, as well as some of the dancers from my mothers troupe. Occasionally, my grandfather (Mom's dad), to whom I refer as "the general," came over on Sunday mornings, as well. He made everyone uncomfortable until he left, which was, thank goodness, right after eating. He asked Peter and Ivan stupid, leading and facetious questions about their paintings, and he made snide remarks to my father about his "meager" job. He let it be known that he never fully approved of his daughter's marriage to a black artist. I saw Peter Calvin nearly every day this past summer because he stopped by in the mid-mornings in his Jeep and took my mother to teach her dance class. Hours before, my father would have already left, to teach a class, or, to carve stone, at his studio. My mother likes Peter's company. He's witty and entertaining, and easy to be around. I think this has to do with his vulnerable nature. Unlike most men, he seems comfortable with not always being right, not having his life in total control and not always being on top of things. I also think Peter behaves in a completely different way around women than he does around men. Sometimes, when my father works late at his studio, he calls home and suggests that Mom and Peter and I go to a movie together on campus or go out to dinner. If I'm out with my boyfriend, Peter and my mother will go out somewhere, then meet my father afterwards at a cafe in town. * On Christmas Eve, my parents had a party for all their friends. About fifty people showed up, mostly artists and mother's dancer friends. There were a few people from the music and philosophy departments and I invited two of my friends. Ivan's wife, Emily, wasn't feeling well that night, so after most of the guests arrived, Peter and Ivan came to the party in Peter's Jeep. While Peter was still exchanging greetings with my parents in the living room, Ivan came into the kitchen where I was mixing drinks. "Judy, dear, can I get scotch and sodas for Peter and me? Make Peters' a double. He's had a hard semester." I told Ivan I'd be glad to as soon as I took some drinks out to other guests. When I returned to the kitchen, Ivan had already started making the drinks. He had put scotch and ice into the glasses first. One glass held a moderate amount of scotch, and, the other glass, enough to choke a horse. When Ivan saw me staring at the two glasses, he quickly poured soda to fill them. As Ivan turned, drinks in hand, toward the living room, Peter turned the corner, greeted me with a kiss and a hug, and, then, asked Ivan if one of those drinks was for him. Ivan handed Peter the quadruple scotch. Peter sipped it. "Jesus, Ivan," he said, "that's stiff. That'll hold me the rest of the night." Ivan put his arm around Peter and guided him into the other room. "Hey, it's Christmas, man," I heard him say. Before too long, I stopped serving drinks and let everyone make their own so I could join my mother, John Galway and Myung Kim on the floor in the living room. Later, I went into the kitchen to fix my mother and me a drink. A line of people waited behind the bottles and Ivan led the slow march, mixing five-finger scotch-and-sodas. As he turned toward the other room I intercepted him and asked him who the other scotch was for. "Peter. Why?" "I-van," I said. He looked at me glassy-eyed. "Oh, Judy, come on. It's Christmas, for God's sake." He then shrugged me off and walked into the other room. I watched Ivan repeat this three times in two hours. He later opened the wine he had brought to the party and sat beside Peter in the dining room, where he remained diligent about keeping Peter's glass full. Throughout the evening I watched Peter get progressively more drunk. I had seen him drunk on other occasions and had seen him make an utter fool of himself: the maudlin, silly drunk who opens his heart too much and blubbers a diatribe of self-pitying, self-serving confessions. Indeed, at one o'clock in the morning Peter stood up and slurred a loud toast to my mother. "To the sexiest woman here. This toast is to Eve, the woman of my dreams, our gracious hostess." Silence descended. People grimaced with embarrassment or smiled judgmental smiles, but everyone accommodated Peter's wish, held their glasses high, and, not in unison, but, sporadically, made their toast - "TO EVE!" Peter already had the reputation of "having a drinking problem," and if the evening had ended there it would have been bad enough. But Peter seemed intent upon supplying everyone with enough gossip to make his name immortal. He walked over to my mother, held his glass high in the air and stared at her for thirty seconds while everyone waited for him to break the silence. My mother gave him a look of disappointment and pity. "Peter, come here," she said softly. "Sit down beside me before you fall down." Peter stared down at her while everyone looked at everyone else with questioning eyes. Peter staggered and then looked straight at the ceiling. He shouted this time. "A toast! A toast, I say, TO EVE!" Everyone laughed and cheered and stomped their feet and clapped their hands to cover their embarrassment for Peter. "To Eve!" they shouted. Peter smiled widely with their endorsement. He then turned, tripped, and fell down on top of Myung Kim. Myung held him lovingly in her arms and whispered something in his ear for a long time, a ruse to keep him from getting up and embarrassing himself again. Then my father walked over and helped Peter up to his feet. My father was laughing and kind about it. "Come on Peter, let's go out back for some fresh air." "I don't need any resh fair," Peter blurted. "Yes you do," my father said. "Come on. I'll go with you." He took Peter by the arm. Peter pulled his arm away and took a sloppy swing at my father. Dad ducked, stepped forward, bent Peter in half at the waist and started for the back door with Peter over his shoulder. Murray Johnson, a potter, went with them and so did Ivan. As he left the living room, Ivan said, "Everyone -- keep partying. Peter'll be all right. He's just had too much to drink." No kidding, Ivan. You asshole, I thought to myself. When he looked at me across the room before going out the back door, I gave him an angry, disgusted look. After a few minutes, I went to the back door and looked out on the four men as they cut a path through the snow in a nearly perfect circle around the apple tree. A full moon struck the tree, the snow and the path with a light that created long, crisp shadows and made four fools look like they were caught forever in a play by Samuel Beckett. Ten minutes later, the good Samaritans brought Peter inside. They hadn't walked him enough, though, because he passed out when he came indoors. He was carried upstairs and put to bed. Later, when my father rejoined the party, someone called out, "Hey, Clay, why don't you show Dominoes?" "Yeah Clay," others yelled, "show Dominoes!" Dominoes is my father's special home movie that he brings out and shows at parties, but only on request. This odd genre movie, in the context of these parties, represents his ad hoc contribution to conceptual art. It is a home movie taken by his parents, but he shows it at parties for the laughter and amusement of his friends. A film of my father when he is seventeen, it begins with a close-up of him talking to a reporter. It pans slowly over thousands of standing dominoes that my father had spent a week arranging in a Rube Goldberg configuration across the floor of his high school gymnasium. The upright dominoes form pinwheels and words, buildings, faces, numbers and mazes all across the floor; it is a tour de force of ingenuity, ambition and patience. Whenever I see the film, it reminds me of the very people who are watching it, or, maybe, it reminds me of people, in general. My father's parents had shot a few minutes of film each day during the week that he had spent carefully arranging the dominoes across the gymnasium floor for the expressed purpose of ultimately pushing one at the end to cause a very extended chain reaction. Of course, thirteen camera crews are there to get this feat on film. But there's a flaw in the action of the film. After announcements by the mayor and some preliminary rigmarole, seventeen-year-old Clay Bell walks toward the point at which he intends to push the first domino. Meanwhile, a cameraman leans into a corner of the frame. He bends over to look more closely at the dominoes and his press card falls out of his shirt pocket and hits a domino, thus instigating an unintended kinesis of the blocks. Seeing this, my father rushes to knock over the domino at the configuration's intended beginning. The falling dominoes sound like someone dragging a stick across an endless picket fence. The false start causes some of the words to fall backwards and some of the intricate catapult devices to implode. Even so, it seems a long time passes before the last domino falls. Truly amazing to watch, the film has always given me the sensation of falling down a deep canyon in a dream and waking before I hit bottom. Suspended animation. Whenever my father shows this film, the falling dominoes prompt a rush of expressions, comments and reactions, oohs and ahs, laughter, shouting and clapping. Sometimes, people shudder. There's something kind of sexual about it.

* About two o'clock on Christmas day I answer a phone call. "Hi, Judy. It's Peter. Can I speak to your father?" I give the phone to my dad. He listens for a couple of minutes to what I presume is Peter's apology. "Well, Peter," I hear Dad say, "if you can't hold your liquor, I'd just as soon you not come to our parties . . . . Yes, yes, I know you are . . . . Well, no real harm was done . . . . No, no, don't worry about it. O.K., you too. I'll see you next semester." When he hangs up the phone, I say, "Dad, you know, Ivan was a lot to blame for last night. He kept feeding Peter real stiff drinks, one after another. And it's not like he doesn't know that Peter has a problem with it." "Judy, Peter has a free will, he's an adult, he knows how to say "no." Don't blame it on Ivan." The next time I saw Peter, he was mortified by his behavior and apologized to my mother and asked her to talk to my father on his behalf. He beseeched a forgiveness that I thought had already been given him. At first I thought this only a part of Peter's usual inferiority complex, his paranoia and insecurity, but over the next few months, I noticed my father acting considerably colder toward Peter. During February and March Peter had some financial problems and an inordinate amount of trouble with his Jeep: dead battery, bad starter and ignition switch, breakdowns on the road, and a collision that permanently closed the door on his driver's side. My mother loaned Peter the old MG that Dad had bought for her a few years before. She felt sorry for Peter during his streak of bad luck. One day I went to my father's office at the university and asked his advice about a course I wanted to audit in the art department. Ivan came in, greeted me, and then, without skipping a beat, he said, "Clay, did Eve give Peter her MG or something? I keep seeing him driving it around campus. I just now saw the two of them over on Manley Road." "Mom's been loaning her car to Peter," I offered, half to my father, half to Ivan. "He's been having problems with his Jeep. Peter was probably dropping Mom off at her dance class." My father wrinkled his brow. "I didn't know that. How long has this been?" * Later that Spring, Peter came up for tenure. My father, Ivan and three other tenured members of the faculty served as committee. After all the meetings, evaluations and interviews, Peter failed to gain tenure. This meant Peter had to find another job for the next year. Well, he didn't have to; they would have kept him on as untenured faculty for a while, but Peter felt he had to go. The committee's decision shocked my mother and me as much as it did many others in the art community. Peter's reputation as a good teacher and a fine painter had never been in doubt. Mom and I asked Dad one evening at dinner why Peter had not been given tenure. He refused to talk about the matter except to say that everyone knew that Peter was irresponsible and a drunk. The committee's decision had been unanimous. "But Peter's private life has never affected his teaching or his painting," my mother countered. "I've heard the greatest praise for his teaching from his students innumerable times. He's certainly a better painter than Ivan! I think I know what the problem is. He's just not a very good ass-kisser. What, is it that he prefers to drink while he paints instead of with the club?" My father frowned across the table. "Eve, you don't know anything about it, so let's just drop it." "But Clay, Peter is supposed to be your friend. Can't you do anything? Or don't you want to do anything? I think some people down there are jealous of Peter because he's the best artist in that damn place. If you don't believe me, ask his students what they think. You're putting him down because of his weaknesses -- his private life, no less -- things that have nothing to do with his abilities at that university. I think he would have had a better chance of getting tenure without some of you people as friends." There were tears in her eyes as she got up, left the table and ran outside.

* Not long after this, my father moved out of the bedroom he had always shared with my mother and into the guest room downstairs. There was no warning that this might happen. No longer did I hear their laughter and whispers. The absence of their closeness with one another was for me the single most-devastating factor in my realization of their dissolve. How this fault line could have erupted between them over such a minuscule shift in the pattern of their lives was incomprehensible to me. I tried to talk to my father about it, to Mom, and to the two of them together. My father responded with indifference and arrogant silence. My mother, on the other hand, talked at length and made herself vulnerable to the least suspicion. She did not so much discuss the matter with me as foist a soliloquy of cross-examination upon herself. I felt like her mirror as she looked to me for some clue as to the origin of her recent blemishes. We continued to eat our meals together in the evening, but silence remained at the table, shameless, like an embarrassing guest, and when we spoke to one another, we did so in the most perfunctory way. My mother always seemed on the verge of screaming, "What did I do?" and my father, "Why did you do it?" In less than a month, after arguments, tears, and things said that could never be retracted, my father moved out of our house and into his studio. One day, mother and I helped him load his car and tie a mattress to its roof, then we drove in the MG, and met him at his studio, to help him unload. Mother made a fine, but sad joke about how ironic it was that we were going to meet Dad in the MG, the vehicle of their separation. She behaved courageously that day, but occasionally I saw tears in her eyes. All that day I felt as if someone had stuffed a sock down my throat. * When Spring Semester ended, Peter started working for a furniture-maker in town. He arranged for the job only two weeks after learning that he hadn't received tenure at the university. Something in him hardened after that blow from his colleagues. He decided he would spend a few years away from teaching. He worked harder than ever on his paintings and said that not teaching kept his head clear for his work. His students from the past still kept in touch and he sometimes invited them over for beer and conversation. Peter refrained from showing his bitterness about the university or about his ex-colleagues. He had become admirably good at turning the other cheek. He acted friendly as always toward Dad, but my father clearly avoided him. Peter continued to drink heavily, but an amazing thing happened. He started painting the most absolutely incredible paintings, even better than before. It was as though his long-standing nemesis had become a beneficent fuel. During the Spring there was a moratorium on the friendship between Peter and Mom, as though she, and Peter too, for that matter, wanted to prove to my father that his accusations of infidelity were wrong and based solely on conjecture and the innuendoes of others. Those inferred accusations eventually became the catalyst that sent my mother to Peter's bed during the summer. Mother began spending a lot of time with Peter. More often than not she stayed at Peter's house during the night. A few times Peter stayed at our house. They did nothing to hide their relationship.

* My father taught two classes during the summer session, but he had stopped, by his own admission, working on his sculptures. The gossip was that he could be found most nights of the week, bar-hopping. One night, I went downtown, with my boyfriend, to see a new band, and saw my father dancing with a coed that must surely have gotten into the bar with a fake ID. I had always known that many women had dreamed of jumping into bed with my father. During that summer, they each took their turn. I tried to visit him at his studio as much as possible. I tried my best not to blame or judge him. But every time I visited him, some woman was there, always a different one. Except once. I had arranged early one week to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. When I arrived, I knocked, but he didn't answer. The door was open so I went in and found him passed out on the floor in his underwear, an empty bottle at his side. He had passed out, face down, in his own vodka vomit. I cleaned him up, helped him into a cold shower, then put him to bed on his mattress on the floor. I left him as he lay on his back; my father, whom I had always adored, weeping, his hands on his face like a witness from some horrible war. "Judy, I'm sorry. Please, please forgive me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." That was the only time I ever heard him really say it and maybe the only time I've ever known what it really meant and certainly the first time I ever saw how hard a man has to fall and how many people he has to take with him before he's able to spit it out.

(originally appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Vol. 3, # 3, Summer, 1993)

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