I married Kelly Seaver, much to her father’s dismay, eleven years ago.  We’ve split since then but still keep up marital appearances so he doesn’t go to his grave smugly knowing he was right after all.  His objections to our union back then were my lack of a decent job and Jewish heritage.  When he asked me to convert to his born-again Christian wackiness I was, as an atheist, between a rock and a hard place.  Should I declare myself an unbeliever and alienate his Gibraltar-like faith or profess being a specious devotee of Yahweh and the chosen people thus allowing his anti-Semitism to further blossom? 

I might have been able to pull some compromise rabbit out of a hat, but he got hold of an article I’d written entitled “Christian Porn.”   At the time I was editing a literary journal, Pequod, largely devoted to my own high creative pursuits.  Kelly decided to prove to her dad that I wasn’t as big a loser as he thought.  She suggested that he Google my name and, along with some top notch poems and short stories, up came reference to an anti-war piece in the New Republic about the evangelical right imposing their view of democracy missionary style (innuendo intended) on the world as if it were a religion.  There were some sexual allusions and unflattering aspersions cast upon those in high office, but, basically, it was a witty political statement more than anything.  That settled the matter.  Kelly was forbidden to see me which immediately led to riotous Las Vegas sex at the Mirage Hotel and our nuptials at the All’s Well That Ends Well chapel just off the strip.

Every year Kelly gets cards addressed in her maiden name at our Manhattan apartment.  She went home a few years ago for her aunt’s funeral.  There was some fence mending to the degree she was offered, once again, a nice chunk of change if she’d divorce me.  Since we don’t always share the same bed it was to her credit that she didn’t take the bait.  We know he won’t live forever and, as the only heir (unless he goes totally bonkers), she ends up with properties in Boothbay Harbor, Maine; Taos, New Mexico and the family estate just outside Lenox in Western Massachusetts which she long ago promised to share with me even if we do decide to divorce.  One might also suspect that the profits from his car dealerships have been soundly invested and are there for our taking as well. 

We have no children.  It became mutually obvious after a year that we were not kindred spirits.  We held out for another five before deciding that separation was for the best.  Kelly opened up a SoHo boutique with a college mate.  That friend became her significant lesbian other.  When we do have to appear as a married couple for the sake of borrowing more money for Kelly’s steadily floundering shop or attending my family functions, it’s not a big deal.  Even sleeping together now and then isn’t an issue.  In fact Kelly claims that sex with me now is more relaxing than with Alise.  According to Kelly, Alise is too romantic--candles, incense, diaphanous sleepwear, mood-altering Hermes scarves spread over the lampshades and a great wine to enhance the moment.  Sexually Kelly and I are more Budweiser out of a bottle types.  She claims to miss that part of our checkered past.   Neither of us is out to impress the other. We are both too absorbed in our own pleasure to care much about each others’ climax.  There’s something to be said for selfishness.    

I’m pushing thirty-five.  I have our original four room apartment on West 20 th Street which has slowly become a decent neighborhood.  Kelly moved in with Alise on the Upper East Side .  I tend to become involved for a year at best with small breasted, highly athletic research assistants ten years younger.  My current profession is ghost writing “headline” books.  If it makes Fox News three days in a row, The Star magazine or Larry King does a segment on the trial, I usually get a call to put together 80,000 words on either the victim or victimizer, sometimes both.  In a month a polished manuscript is in the publisher’s hands and a week later it hits the stands before the proletariat has had a chance to forget.  I get ten cents a word.  In my best year I cranked out seven books; the Scott Peterson trial and Terry Schiavo starvation countdown being personal goldmines.  After overpaying my nubile research staff of two plus any free-lance photo expenses, I do okay.  I don’t know what became of the poet and political activist Kelly married. 

                                                    *****   

“My father’s dying and wants to see us.”

I had just returned from a nice five mile run with the twenty-something Kim Weathers, and we were enjoying our après workout shower to the fullest.  I took Kelly off the speaker phone.  “I don’t get the ‘us’ reference.”

“That’s what he wants.  He’s had a stroke, is paralyzed, can still speak and is as lucid as ever.”

“Is this an emergency?’

“The doctor says he’s got bad diabetes and his kidneys and liver are failing.  He’s got maybe a month at best.”

“If I go with you and he starts in with the same shit he dished out when we were dating, I’ll personally pull the plug right there.”

“Maybe he’s come to his senses, seen the divine light as it were and wants to apologize.”

“Have you ever known him to say he’s sorry or been wrong?”

“Are you going with me or not?”

                                         ****

Sam Seaver, the Western Massachusetts car king for over forty years, the creator of “we shoot from the hip not the lip,” was in the Lenox Rehab Center .  He’d spent two weeks in Pittsfield Memorial hospital.  Lenox’s job was to get him ready to spend the rest of his life in a nursing home.  He’d been in poor health but the stroke had been a mild one.  He’d passed out in the car lot surrounded by his recently beloved Ford F150 trucks and broken both hips, a collarbone and cracked some vertebrae.  At eighty he’d never walk again. 

I trailed Kelly into his private room like a gun bearer following the native guide stalking a wounded cape buffalo.  On the drive up from Manhattan she begged me to stop for a stiff drink, but at nine in the morning nothing was open.  She then popped a few pills while giving me the “so what’s your problem” stare.

I hadn’t seen Sam the Man, another car dealer sobriquet, for a good ten years.  What little hair he had was in an angelic white horseshoe around his head.  He looked tiny under the sheets.   His face had shrunk leaving his nose a great hooked beak.  The irony wasn’t lost on me that he looked like Shylock.  There were the usual tubes and wires connected to various bottles and alarms. 

He was alert and nodded to us both as we stood by the end of his bed. 

“Still no grandkids?”  His voice had a strep throat rasp to it.

Kelly got right to the point.  The pills had given her Dutch courage  “Why did you want us?”

“If you two had had kids I wouldn’t have to lie here thinking about selling to Jake Marcoux over in Holyoke , that Frenchie bastard.  My lots will be a strip mall in two months.”

Kelly turned to me and was in a “let’s get out of here” mode before he spoke again. 

“I want a favor.” 

Kelly reached across me, scraped a bright orange chair over my foot and sat.  “What?  If it’s the cash-for-divorce thing, we’re gone.”

“I’ve been following your career.”

It took me a minute to recognize that he was talking to me.  “My career?”

“You write those celebrity books, don’t you?”

“Among other things.”  The truth was that for ten years that was all I wrote.  My dream of having a poem in the New Yorker had long since passed.

“What about writing something on Michael Jackson; there’s a strange one?”

“Some ideas have been kicked around but they’ll be other subjects; I’m not in any hurry.”

“They’re all guilty you know, Robert Blake, Jackson, Enron--the whole lot of them.”

I didn’t know what to say so I’d said nothing.  He’d become slightly agitated and moved part of his sheet revealing from my angle a swollen and blood bruised penis that was rigid from the catheter.  I reached down and covered him.  He nodded his appreciation for the act.

“I liked the Peterson book.  Terry Schiavo was so so.”

“Time is always the enemy.  Every publisher wants it yesterday.”

“I want you to write a book about me.” 

Kelly nearly fell off her chair, but recovered quickly enough to stand up next to me.

“Daddy, you always treated him like shit.  If he knew half of what you called him, every anti-Jewish slur there is, he’d walk right out of here. Now you want him to write your life story.”

“I don’t have any grandkids, my business is gone.  You two hate me, but I was important.  Go to up to Pittsfield , down to Great Barrington or over to Lee.  Say the name Sam Seaver and you’ll see.  If doctors can say they delivered all the babies in their town, well, I put most of this part of the state and a good part of New York south of Albany into a great running car for a great price.  And I gave back to my god and community.  Little League, recreation areas and my church—I’m a good Christian; I want that known.  I asked around and your husband’s one of the best.  I don’t like it, but he is.  Like when the Kia came on the market; I hated that shitbox, but I wasn’t so blind to see it wasn’t a good product.”

I was now slumped on Kelly’s chair.  She gave me an icy stare for usurping it and went across the room for a pea soup green model. 

“I have a lawyer;” he continued, “everything is set up.  I know I don’t have much time.  If we can get the book done for my funeral; that’s what I’m aiming for.  I want everyone who comes to get one.  If I go before it’s done then my lawyer will review it to see it’s not some bag job.  If it’s the way I want, you both get all I have—the properties, the investments, the business to do with as you please--everything I have.  You’ll never have to lift a finger again if you don’t want to.  You can stand by my coffin and shed a few tears for propriety’s sake if you want to but that’s not part of the bargain.  It’s the book I want.  It will be the icing on the cake.  My funeral will be right on the car lot.  It will be a celebration.  Clowns, face-painting, high school bands, drawings for real prizes, deep discounts like the world has never seen—can you beat that for salesmanship!  Even from the grave I’ll outsell Chicopee and Springfield Ford for the entire year.  And to top it all off, they get a copy of my life story—signed if I can get my arm to work and live long enough.”

My literary future flashed in front of me.  Could I summon the muses of my idealistic youth once again?  Would I be able to own and edit a literary review devoted to the best American prose and poetry?  I even imagined myself living in this part of Massachusetts .  Edith Wharton’s “The Mount” and Melville’s “Arrowhead” as my neighbors and in the summers Tanglewood and Jacobs Pillow.  I looked at Kelly.  She shrugged.  The pills she’d taken to face the day were wearing off, and she looked droopy-eyed.  It was just past eleven.

“My laptop’s in the car.  I’ll need some basics from you now.  Tomorrow I’ll be back with two assistants.  They’ll go out to check on the facts you give me as well as do interviews and take photos.  If you’re up to it we can be done in ten days to two weeks.  It would be quicker to have it published by a private press.  They’ll work on the cover design, font style, formatting, etc.”

Kelly added her two cents.  “Before he writes anything we’ll need the lawyer’s name and written assurances.”

Sam the Man Seaver had closed his eyes and was resting.  Beneath that huge honker of his a slight smile was forming.  No doubt he was daydreaming about the big day to come on earth as it is in heaven.