Love, Dad

“Spencer cuts his toenails once a week,” Matthew said. “How often do you cut your toenails?”

“Whenever they get long,” Lissie said.

“Big muscular Swede,” Matthew said, raising his arms and flexing his muscles. “Built like a marble statue. Spencer Larsson, where’d a Swede get a name like Spencer? Cuts his toenails every week. Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning. I didn’t even know I had toenails till I began rooming with him. Well, that’s not exactly true. Did you used to chew on your toenails when you were a kid?”

“No.”

“I did.”

“How’d you get your feet in your mouth?”

“I mean the parings. After your mother cut your nails. Didn’t your mother used to cut your nails?”

“Sure.”

“After your bath, right?”

“Right.”

“So? The parings. Nice clean parings. Toenail soup,” he said. “How’d you like the movie?”

“It was good.”

“Do you know what it was about?”

“Sure. I mean I think so.”

“It was about witnessing the primal scene.”

“What’s that?”

“The primal scene? It’s your mother and your father fucking.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember the part in the film where he’s enlarging the pictures he took in the park?”

“Yes. My father’s a photographer, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Of the couple hugging and kissing in the park, do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s trying to dope out what happened? By blowing up the pictures, remember? That’s where the title came from, Blow-Up.”

“Well, it was also a play on words.”

“Oh, sure. But the key scene in the movie is the enlarging of those black-and-white pictures. What’s your father’s name?”

“James Croft.”

“Never heard of him. I thought he might be Steichen or somebody.”

“No.”

“Does that bother you? That I never heard of him?”

“Me? No. It might bother him, though.”

“When I meet him, I’ll tell him how much I admire his work, how’s that?” Matthew said.

Lissie said nothing.

“Anyway, the photographer keeps blowing up all the pictures, bigger and bigger, trying to find out just what the hell those two people were doing there in the park. Because he’s a kid trying to dope out the primal scene he’s just witnessed, you understand? And finally, after all the enlargements, he zeroes in on a big blowup of a pistol.”

“Ah,” Lissie said. “Yes.”

“You know what a pistol stands for, don’t you?”

“Sure, a cock.”

“Right, a penis. So there you are.”

“Well, I think that’s an interesting way of looking at it,” Lissie said, “but I’m not sure that’s what the movie was really about.”

“Did you ever witness the primal scene?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“No lech for your daddy, huh?”

“None at all.”

“What does your mother do? You said your father...”

“She’s a speech pathologist.” Lissie paused. “They’re divorced. My father got married again two months ago.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Your father remarried?”

“No, my mother. And not two months ago. Two years ago.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“About what? The divorce? The remarriage? I don’t think about it anymore.”

“But when you did think about it.”

“I hated them at first. Both of them. My mother and my father both. I tried everything I could think of to get them together again. That’s because I was afraid I’d try fucking my mother now that the competition was out of the way.”

“Come on,” Lissie said.

“I’m serious. Listen, Freud knew what he was talking about. I never even liked my father, I mean there wasn’t the slightest bit of communication between us ever. But all of a sudden my mother was leaving him for this tennis player...”

“Tennis player?”

“Yeah, a pro on the over-forties circuit. Actually, he’s not a bad guy. The point is, my mother was leaving my father, and all of a sudden I was desperate to keep the marriage together. I practically got down on my hands and knees, begging her to give up this adolescent fling of hers.” Matthew shrugged. “I used to be a ninety-seven-pound weakling. The minute my parents separated, I started eating like a pig. You know how much I weigh now? A hundred and eighty-four pounds. That’s a lot. I’m only five eight, did I tell you that?”