A couple of days
later, I am packing up the penthouse and deciding what to do with it all: the stainless steel pots and pans and the down linens and the expensive silk shirts and leather shoes and closets full of things with tags still on them. I remember buying these things, coveting them and using them to prove I was better than what I’d come from, using my money as insulation. I lean on the steel refrigerator and think about calling Ma.
I can hear the Dallas traffic below me, humming and rushing, so different from the sounds and hills of Georgia, the crickets and gushing of breezes, everything so quiet and green. I find my old briefcase on the kitchen table and throw it in the trash can. I remember the paperwork that still needs taken care of for Pa, life insurance and deeds and financials; it all seems insignificant. I think about the word
son
, and it still feels bittersweet in my mouth.
There’s a knock at the door, and before I answer, I know who it is. She’s followed me for years like a stray puppy, waiting for me to drop her a crumb, a used bone with no meat; I’ve led her astray for so long.
When I open the door, there she stands with the same look on her face she had in my room in Eton a few days ago, innocent and hurt and pointed; she’s always had her own agenda too. For the first time, I see that she’s just a girl.
“Melanie. Listen…” My words drop to the floor. I don’t know where to start or if I should begin to explain something I don’t yet fully understand. I am not positive I can even form real words. I’ve sat alone for days now.
I try again. We both knew she didn’t have the power to hold me, that there wasn’t enough space for her anywhere here.
“I’m going to stay in Georgia for good,” I say, surprised that I’ve said it aloud, my decision finally making itself known.
“Yes, Carmine, I know. It’s that girl, isn’t it?” Her back is to me; I think of reaching for her again. I sit down on my bed we have had sex in at least a hundred times over the past ten years. She sits down on the other side, her back still toward me, the curves of her body so tender and seductive, I want to dominate her like I always have, maybe even fall in love with her. The impulses seem to come out of nowhere. I watch them. The blinds are up and the afternoon sun stretches across the bed in shaded lines. It’s the sun of endings, the sun of growth and change, the sun of hurt—it’s all the same energy.
“I always thought you cared about me. I knew it wasn’t a lot, but I thought it would turn into more… eventually.” She doesn’t cry, it’s not her way, but she opens and closes her legs and bends her head toward me as she talks.
“That morning, when I realized how you felt about that woman, when I saw it in your eyes, I suddenly knew the difference between what you’d given me and the things you felt for her. Was it respect? Was it love? I don’t know. But it was a breaking point for me, Carmine. An epiphany even. And I felt so ridiculous for coming to Eton, for hunting you down like a piece of meat, because even before I got on that plane, I knew you didn’t want me.”
She continues speaking, and her voice sounds slippery and wet. “That’s part of the reason I’m here today. These things I’m picking up, they’re only fragments of a picture I was trying to paint, the way I wanted things to be for us, for myself. I just always felt that if somehow I could get you to love me, I’d be complete, I’d be valuable.” She gets up and walks toward the bathroom.
“I feel like a fool, Carmine, for loving you at all, because you don’t know how to love anyone.” She slams the bathroom door behind her.
I walk to the bathroom door and rest my hand on the doorknob. I remember being here before, last year sometime, this same look on my face. This same time of day. She’d come over for those same earrings and toothbrush, this time for good, she’d said.
“Mel, can you come out of there?” I sit down on the side of the bed and wait for her. I feel like I owe her something. I feel like I need to prove something to myself, to the world, to some power larger than myself.
“I need to know that you loved me in your own way. I need to know that the last ten years of my life weren’t wasted. I never asked you for anything, but…” She stops and stares at me.
“Yes, Melanie, I have loved you. I never said it, but I did. It’s true. And I’m sorry.” I take her hands in mine and pull her close to me, place my arms around her legs. We stay there for a few minutes before she pulls away and I watch her gather her things.
“I guess this is finally good-bye,” she says and smiles, the look on her face open and resolute, her shoes in her hand. I hear her feet shuffle through the apartment; the door closes softly behind her.
I sit with the understanding that most men both love and hate and like them, I will spend a lifetime trying to weigh the balance in the love direction, trying to see what is real, not just the truth of my hurts or the hope of my desires.
I hadn’t imagined that my Pa had anything on the other side of his hate or his righteousness but I believe, probably, too, it was easier for me to believe this. Hate is cold but it is comfortable. If my life and my father’s death has taught me anything, it is that it is by far the hardest human endeavor to just sit still and be loved, to be open and willing to believe in it, to hold it as yours, and to accept the inevitability of the human smudge that sometimes covers that basic love in us all. My father was rotten in many ways and he left marks on my skin and in my heart and twisted and turned my mother, too, in ways that she’ll never fully recover from, but he loved us. I can’t go back and move things around, like furniture in an old room, I’ve just got to accept the way things are. In time, they may change in my mind, but they may not.
* * *
The drive back to Georgia is a long one. I stare out the window to the road for hours at a time and watch the landscapes of the country pass me by: the hues of white, brown, a series of reds in leaves in fields, on flowers, and in people. There are so many colors everywhere. I stop at filling stations in West Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas. I see faces in all different shades of brown, think of Z.
In my rearview mirror, I see the contents of my past in the backseat: two big leather suitcases full of clothes and a few mementos from the high life, my old Bible, some shoes, a box full of old greeting cards from Ma. I’ve lived nearly fifteen years of life in the sky, and the only things with meaning can be stuffed inside two leather squares.
Outside my window I count the rows of green plants and hum songs in my head. Sometimes my right knee begins to shake, but I take another cup of coffee and let it pass. I don’t want to drink at every corner, at every sign of trouble anymore. I want to know I can be and live deeper than that.
The hum of the engine satisfies my mind mostly, but I still pick up my cell phone to call her many times, only to put it down again. I don’t know what to say or if I can fight for her, or if there is space in the middle where we can meet.
I run into rainstorms at the border of Georgia. The luminous mountains ahead of me, the gray pavement below, my wipers try to keep up with the work. My ankle feels numb from the hours of push, but I am ready to go over the edge and into another land, so different from the past, one without my pa, one without the guilt of a kid who was just doing what he was taught.
I stop at a gas station to fill up, pick up my phone to try her again. I look at my watch, imagine she’s in Atlanta back on that tattered stage again, giving herself away. I cringe, spot the pay phone across the street.
She doesn’t know it’s me right away, doesn’t recognize the number on her phone. I speak, my breathing heavy and weighted. I shiver, my face still so wet from the rain, dripping almost; large raindrops hang from the tip of my nose, my eyelashes, even my chin.
“Zaire.
“Listen.
“The thought of you being gone from my life makes me feel like my chest’s going to give in. It’s that simple.
“Tell me you don’t feel anything, and I’ll leave you alone forever.” I listen, bright-eyed; the rest of my life waits in the wings.
“We made no promises, and that’s all we’ve got. Nothing!” Her voice is so weighted when she says it, I can hear her heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“But I should have promised you, Zaire. You’re all there is. I am tired of living in a shadow with open-ended questions.”
My T-shirt sticks to my chest and I shiver.
“I was the child who rescued raccoons and nursed them back to health. I’ve been mad for years; all I know is that this anger must be something good that’s iced up.” I am not sure if she’s there, but I can still hear the club’s music far in the background.
“See the problem with the St. Clairs is that we handle ourselves too well. You’ll never catch us unsteady on our feet. From the time I learned to crawl, we’d tiptoe past each other. Then we’d curl miserably under our sheets, me sobbing, not from what we’d said, but from things we didn’t say. No goodnight kisses, no hugs, just thick air that you could cut with a chain saw.
I’m speaking not for her anymore, but for me. The years of therapy never scheduled, the boyhood angst never articulated, the male insecurities never made whole.
“Everywhere I look, I hear people hurt from this so-called love. But I finally know it doesn’t have to be that way. Promise me you’ll stay with me? I promise you, the past is finally past.”
I wipe the rain from my face and hold the phone tight. I can hear her breathing again.
“I want to believe that, Carmine, I really do.”
She hangs up, and I hold onto the phone for a while before walking back to the car. A few hours later, I am back in my old bed, my belly full, the past finally off my chest.
* * *
I show up in Atlanta at her house the next morning with an umbrella. When she opens the door, she just stands there for a long time looking at me. At first, her eyes hold anger in them, simmering just behind the pupils, but she then softens, her shoulders falling; she shifts her weight from foot to foot. She stands there for a long time like this, not letting me in, not moving, staring at something behind me.
“Baby, I’m glad you’re back,” she finally tells me and walks me into her apartment. We hold hands for a long time on the sofa before I begin to talk. I tell her how I had to learn to forgive my pa, to understand that he was imperfect, that I’m imperfect, to learn to accept that he loved me, too, so that I can somehow become whole myself, so that I can learn to believe in love, to trust it. She tells me of her own struggles with her own father and mother, how her father was so perfect in her eyes, but that after his death, she’d realized, too, that he was just a man, with sins and indecision, and that understanding had helped her be just a girl, too, sometimes soft, sometimes hard, but always acceptable.
She stops speaking rather suddenly. Her head is resting on my shoulder and I think maybe she’s fallen asleep or something, but then I hear her breathe in very deeply, as though filling a balloon.
“Carmine. I’m pregnant. We are pregnant.” She’s leaning up now, looking at me, at my unshaven face and misty eyes, and we stay that way for a long time. It takes awhile for what she’s just said to sink in, but when it does, I want to scream.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” I want to say more about how wonderful our life will be, how great a father I’ll become, how I’ll never mess up, but words aren’t much use most of the time, I’ve got to show her.
For the rest of the afternoon, we talk about the things that have brought us here, the things we’ve shared, how Rumi was right about finding that space out where right and wrong don’t exist. I don’t know how I’ve been forgiven, I don’t know why I’ve been given so many second chances, but I’m finally gonna do this thing right.
We never really consciously
decided to get married. We never had the talk and we never went ring shopping and we never lay awake into the dark of night talking about it. These things, we agreed, seemed superficial. Either it was or it wasn’t—we didn’t need to prove it on the outside and we didn’t need a ceremony to say it was so.
But one morning, I decide I need to make it official, for tradition’s sake, to give us a day to talk about forever, to give her a story.
We’ve just woken up. It is just after eight and I am headed to the shop. We’ve grown into a familiar routine. She wakes up at six, for her run, coffee at the window; I stagger into the kitchen sometime later for coffee, breakfast right away, and the morning news. It has been six months, but every single morning I get up, I want to run to that kitchen because I know she’ll be there. Waiting. I never grow tired of looking at that skin, wishing it were over mine, touching those lips, wishing I could climb inside, and listening to her talk.
I never had those boyhood fantasies of proposals, no recollections of those in chick flicks or on corny sitcoms; I had nothing to go on but the truth of the matter.
We’re standing there in the kitchen. She’s chewing on a pear. I’m grabbing the half-and-half out of the fridge.
“Z, I think we should get married.” I pause, just long enough for her to see the uncertainty in my eyes. I still wonder if she’ll say yes, still can’t take any of it for granted, for fear that I’ll wake up with it all gone.
It came together just as simply; she was right there with me, like always, her gaze on something bigger than us both. “I think so, too.”
In the kitchen, the fridge still hanging open, we hug each other. The early morning sun reaches in and touches both of our shoulders. I sit her up on the kitchen island of our new house, and she holds me between her legs. We stay that way for as long as we can stand it.
* * *
We plan the wedding, our official union, quite casually, and laugh about it, the logistics of what needs to be done and how and when.
When her mother calls on the phone to ask how the plans are coming along, I feel foolish because I don’t have much to tell her. I try to imagine her face through the line, round and strong, the braids in her hair, graying at the edge of her forehead. I only met her briefly at dinner a couple of months ago when she passed through Atlanta. I feel like I need to explain my love for her each and every time we speak, like I’m back in Dallas giving a presentation to a big group of bigwigs again, this time for someone important.
“I’ll get Z for you,” I say into the phone after a few niceties. I’d rehearsed each and every possible conversation with her, yet I am still never quite ready when I hear her voice on the other end of the phone.
“Let’s get married at the Baptist church in Eton,” she says one night while we’re falling asleep to the
Tonight
Show
. It seems smart; it was the same one Pa preached at, where her father’s death had been mourned, where Pa was left to rest, where we’d first united on those stairs, where Ma prayed each week, where it seemed like most things began and ended in Eton, the center of it all. As a boy I could wander around the town, climb into trees, rest in dark alleys, roll in dirt, look out my bedroom window, and see that church steeple high above it all, in the distance, its arms crossed, waiting and watching. Somehow I always knew I’d make my way back to it because it was the only way to go, the only way I really knew.
“Yes, let’s do it. It makes perfect sense, baby. Why not? Now go to sleep,” I tell her, spooning her from behind.
Neither of us expected to end up back in Eton, it’s true. There were so many reasons to go astray again: its heat and its dark dividing lines and the shadows of pasts that had created us, roots of pain, then sanguinity, the acidity of them both. But then there was its light, purple flowers on long green stems on the outskirts of town, the soft twist of the southern drawl of the locals, the mild temperatures and the dirt roads and the fresh air and the history, both the highs and the lows. It was our history. We’d thought of Myrtle Beach and the Bahamas or eloping in Vegas or traveling Europe, but we’d fallen in love with the idea of simplicity and the rest just faded into the background.
* * *
She stands before me in a simple white gown, strapless, and I am overcome by her, the curves of her shoulders, the swell of her stomach, the way two humans can come together and let everything between them fall to the ground. The ceremony is simple and quick; these walls have seen so much of my life, the rise and fall of it, birth and death and everything in between. We only invite a handful of people, our witnesses, and want the rest to ourselves.
Ma sits in the front row and she never takes her eyes off of us. I’ve never seen her look happier. She wears a long white dress, and her pantyhose make her look like she’s just come from the beach. When the ceremony is over, she comes over and hugs us both at the same time.
“It was meant to be,” she says. “Finally, something worked just like it was supposed to.” She pulls her purse over her shoulder then and tells us she’s going out for a smoke.
We can’t wait to get back to our life together, waking up and going to sleep and eating and breathing, music on in the background, the stove always warm, our bellies full of laughter. It’s what we’ve managed to create. We have money and we have choices and opportunities and places we want to go, but there was so much regular living that neither of us had ever done: we want it desperately.
After the ceremony, we eat a meal at the corner restaurant in town, an old antebellum mansion turned into something else, a big gathering place with linen tablecloths and the smell of catfish and peach cobbler, the glass chandeliers blowing in the wind so slightly, the open windows without screens and the lightning bugs entering the room and then leaving. To my right, my new wife; to my left, my mother. A new life growing; life was about to begin, and I can’t remember anything else before this.
“To us, my love,” she says, raising her pineapple juice.
“To us,” I say, raising my glass higher, both of us swallowing the whole glass of juice.
* * *
I finally open that studio Pa always wanted; and soon for intrepid southerners, for whom tradition, comfort, and pride were foremost, the House of SinClair is the only way to go—comfy sofas covered in velvet, walnut consoles, and anything made of wood left au naturel, all carved and blessed by a hardworking man’s hands, pieces that begin a heritage, befitting for parents to pass on to their children. Pa knew very little about bergères or marquises, yet many of his customers swore his pieces could be in any drawing room in Paris or Rome—rich hand-carved pieces with padded linen or leather upholstery, comfy sofas with floral fabrics, red velvet fabric chairs.
During my summers I worked alongside Pa, and I’d picked up more than I’d realized. Pa’s tools called me daily.
Before he got sick, Pa was finishing a large order from the church, a dozen pieces, celebrant chairs, pulpit chairs, Christian crosses, high-back chairs, piano casters and credence tables. On the pastor’s insistence, he had ordered heavenly red oak from up north. From the lumber to the kilns used in crafting the pieces, Pa took exceptional care to ensure everything was perfect. He worked on the pieces night and day; all there was left to do were the finishing touches.
I put the pieces in the showroom during the grand opening prior to shipping them off, along with other crisply carved pieces upholstered in satin and swish silk fabrics that Pa had named after Confederate generals; the Lee, the Stonewall, and the Mosby represented the virtues of southern nobility. Whether it was kitchen cupboard or sturdy mahogany tables for serving roasted pheasant or mantels for mounting wild boar and other game, Pa promised southern charm and delivered. There was so much more to that man than I realized.
In many ways, I had become him. I rose by five o’clock and worked till my body gave up. I was completely engrossed. Every now and then I’d be visited by Z in the workshop; I’d take a break, talk, laugh, caress my unborn, and go back to work.
There were days that we fell asleep on the old couch in my workshop watching the old fifties’ TV. I’d place my head on Z’s belly and feel our baby move over to where my hands were. I’d been praying for a son, and with the way Z’s belly hung low, everyone swore my prayers had been answered.
* * *
“Life is funny, Carmine, ain’t it?” Ma fills my cup up with coffee, and we sit together at the same old Formica table. I stare at the old knife lines in it, follow them as though I’m reading my own palm, predicting the future, seeing how and when and if one line will lead to another.
“I think life is simpler than we realize.” I smile at her from across the table, reach for her hand.
“Yes, son, that’s how it should be. I always used to tell your pa that, and I think he believed it in his own way. I think he just felt kinda like he needed to get things just so before they could be easy. Kinda backwards, don’t you think?” She laughs, sits up straight. She’s doing better than ever these days; she’s got more life left in her than most. She’s gained a little weight and cut her long hair short, and the kitchen smells like fried chicken again most days. She hangs laundry on the line. She even got herself a pair of new tennis shoes for taking walks at the park. I have never seen her this energetic.
“I never thought I’d get you back, Carmine; I thought I’d lost you forever. And now I got a grandbaby coming…” She puts her face in her hands and starts to cry softly. I get up from the table and hug her from behind.
“Yeah, it’s like part two for us St. Clairs, isn’t it? I think Pa would’ve liked sharing it with us.”
“I know he would have. I know it.”
* * *
Pastor Stanley walks into the room wearing a mustache and his same old broad smile.
“Haven’t see you in a while, son. What’s the occasion? Did someone die?” He laughs, pulls up a chair beside me.
“Not that I know of.” I laugh and reach out to shake his hand. We sit down in our usual spots, as though no time has passed. He pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and pushes a cup toward me.
“I just wanted to tell you how much you’ve helped me, pastor. I mean, how you’ve helped me see how a person can cross the bridge between one big thing to another and get the whole picture.”
“It’s easier than you thought it would be, isn’t it?” He crosses one leg over the other.
“I don’t know why I fought it so long. The light, I mean. I don’t know why I chose the path I did for so long. I mean, when I think about all the time I’ve wasted…”
“Stop there. Don’t waste any of your time on that sort of thinking either, son. It doesn’t pay. Not in any currency.”
“I met this woman, this incredible woman, see? And we’re going to have a baby…” I am talking so fast that I lose my breath.
“We’re married now and my ma is better than I’ve ever seen her, and I realize how it all adds up to this now and I just want to feel worthy of it, you know, to trust it. I’m so worried that I’ll mess up, that I’ll mess this up.”
“See? That’s the thing right there. Where’s your heart? What do you believe? If you only believe in the one thing—in the love, the life, the man you’ve become—you’ll be okay. You don’t believe in the other stuff anymore, right?”
I shake my head back and forth, look out the window and see the trees shake a few leaves off.
“Well, then, that’s all that matters. Stay focused on the prize, Carmine, and you’ll be all right. But remember that life has its own twists and turns, out of our control, and we have to go with them; we have to keep believing and creating and accepting.” He smiles, drinks the last of his coffee, and stands up.
“I hate to cut our meeting short, but I’ve got some family business of my own to preserve. Come back and see me, though, whenever you’d like. Ya hear?”
I stand up and shake his hand, watch as he leaves the room, look out at the tree again. When I leave the room, I put my hand on my heart and smile.