Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (52 page)

Ellickson had been sober for forty-three and a half days, but he still had the shakes. Just filling the coffeepot required maximum concentration. If his concentration lapsed, the coffee grounds sprayed themselves all over the kitchen floor and had to be cleaned up with a whisk broom and a dustpan. Everything, even the drinking of tap water, called for discipline and tenacity.

All day Ellickson endured. The sun rattled violently in the sky. After the passing hours had presented their trials by fire and ice, he would go to bed feeling that his skin was layered with sandpaper. The post-alcohol world contained no welcoming surfaces, and the interiors of things did not bear much looking into, either. Although God might have supplied a solution, He was in a permanent sulk. A determined Christian, Ellickson had put his faith in the Almighty to get him through this episode
and through the rest of his life, but God had declined the honor so far and was keeping up a chilly silence.

The world was glass, and Ellickson felt himself skittering over its surface.

Ellickson, drunk, had lashed out at his family one night and done something unforgivable. Nightfall had always brought his devils out. His wife had therefore taken the two kids, Alex and Barbara, and had driven 150 miles to her mother’s. His family hated him now for good reason, and although he could live with his wife’s hatred—he was sort of used to it—he couldn’t bear the idea that he had become a monster to his children. Ellickson’s shame felt so intense that when he contemplated his actions, he groaned aloud.

Patiently and without hope, he went to the twelve-step meetings.

He had maintained the drinking for years in a careful program of adjustments and stealth. His job as a supervisor of hospital cleaning personnel had been so undemanding that he could work steadily under the influence and no one ever noticed. Drunk before breakfast, his mind regulated by alcohol, he’d been as steady as a bronze statue. The vodka had kept his breath clean and his hands strong. Now that he was sober, no one seemed to like him anymore, and his judgment flew away from him in little clouds. The real Ellickson, without the gleaming varnish of the booze, seemed to constitute an offense.

Desperate, unable to move, faced with the frightfulness and tedium of Saturday afternoon, he called his friend Lester, the ex-doctor.

“Lester,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”

“Hey, buddy. What sort of help d’you need? How’s the day so far?” Lester asked, blithely. The man’s usual speech was somewhat formal, but Lester was all right. He would cross a minefield without hesitation if you needed him to.

“I’m barely hanging on,” Ellickson said. “The sky’s falling again.”

“It does that. Yes?” He waited. “Go on.”

Ellickson tried to speak. But even speech seemed difficult. “It’s all creeping up, every bit of it. Do you know the word ‘heartsick’?” Ellickson waited for his next thought, and, on the other end of the line, Lester waited, too. “Boy, is that a good word. I’m glad we have that word. So,
here’s the thing. I can’t do it anymore.” Ellickson knew that he did not have to define “it” to Lester. “I’m sitting in a chair and I can’t do it.”

“I can come over.” Lester had once been a surgeon—until drinking had led him ungently out of medicine. He couldn’t go back. Now he volunteered at a science museum, explaining the fossils to children. “Tell me what to do now. I can be over there in ten minutes. Say the word.”

“Maybe. No. It actually isn’t that. I just can’t live this way anymore.”

“No. That’s wrong, my friend. You can live any old way,” Lester said, “except drunk. We all can. Remember this will pass. Everything passes.” Then he said some of the usual admonitory phrases, complete with elaboration into belief and faith. They sounded correct but feeble at two thirty-six in the afternoon. “You can be proud of yourself. This is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. We’re in this together, pal. People love you. Never doubt it.”

“Right, right. People. Ha.
What
people? The stars hate me. The moon hates me. The entire creation is opposed to my existence. What I need is a drink.”

“No, that’s what you
don’t
need. Ease up. What about the bus cure?”

The bus cure involved getting on a city bus and riding around until the urge to have a drink had passed. It only worked, however, if Ellickson took the number 13 route, which did not go down the streets where the bars were located. Also, he had to take a book or a newspaper along with him for the bus cure to work.

“I feel all the time as if …” Ellickson feared boring his friend and did not complete his sentence. “By the way. I haven’t told you: a murderer moved in next door.”

“What are you talking about?” Lester asked. “He’s murdering people now?” Lester laughed. Murder was easy compared to sobriety.

“No, no, he’s paroled or something. A lady up the street told me. I haven’t introduced myself to this guy yet.”

“Well, you should go do that.” Lester waited. “It’s Saturday afternoon. Go right over there. Tell the guy that you’re an alcoholic. Be up front about it. Provide a basis for friendship. He’s a murderer, and you’re a drunk. This friendship needs a basis to keep it solid, and you have one.”

“So okay. Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” Lester said firmly. “Definitely. Introduce yourself to the murderer.” He laughed at how upbeat the conversation had become. A
murderer next door was good luck and great news. “Think of him,” Lester said, “as the next stop for your welcome wagon.”

Other murderers were probably somewhere in the city, but they weren’t in close proximity, at least that he knew about. Ellickson didn’t much care whether the murderer had paid his debt to society, because once you had committed a murder, you would always be a murderer. You would never be anything else. Nevertheless, Ellickson managed to get off the sofa. He went to the bathroom and combed his hair, hoping to look convivial. Then he strolled over to the murderer’s back patio, where his neighbor was pruning a rosebush with a pair of clippers.

“I was wondering when you’d get over here,” the old man said, straightening up and adjusting his glasses to take a look at Ellickson. “You’re not alarmed by my yardwork?” He laughed heartily, and his mouth showed uneven gray teeth with a prominent gap near the back. He wore a floppy blue hat, and a stained red handkerchief stuck out of his back pocket. “These roses are blighted.”

“No, I can’t say that I’m alarmed,” Ellickson said. “No, I can’t say that. Sorry I haven’t come over to introduce myself. I’ve just been through a spell of difficulties, that’s all.”

“Well, then,” the murderer said, “we’ve got something in common.” He slid off his gardening glove and extended his right hand, wincing as if his shoulder hurt him. “Name’s Macfadden Eward,” he said, shaking Ellickson’s hand. It sounded like a made-up name. “Call me Mac.”

“Eric Ellickson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ellickson.”

“Oh, no. Make it Eric.”

“First names? Fine. You know, in Germany,” the old man said, hawking and then spitting to the side of his rosebush, “they spend a lot of time negotiating with each other about whether they’ll use their first names. Before that, it’s always ‘Herr Ellickson’ and ‘Herr Eward.’ They believe in the formalities. Did you know that?”

“No,” Ellickson said. “I can’t say that I did.”

“Interesting country, Germany,” he said, bending over to rub his knee. “They have themselves
quite
a history. Well, now, I’d invite you into my house except I gotta tell you that my place isn’t shipshape just yet. The boxes won’t unpack themselves, you know what I mean?” The
old man leaned back and roared with humorless laughter. All this laughing made Ellickson uneasy. Then Macfadden Eward’s laughter suddenly stopped, and he gazed solemnly at Ellickson as he pointed his pruning shears at him. “So you can’t come in.”

“Well,” said Ellickson, feeling somewhat off balance himself, “I wasn’t looking for an invite from you. In fact,” he said, realizing before the words came out of his mouth that he would now have to invite the murderer over to his house, “I wanted to see if you’d like some iced tea or a cool drink.”

“That I would, that I would,” Macfadden Eward said, “but not just this minute. It’s very kind of you to invite me, Mr. Ellickson. Maybe later. Tomorrow or the day after that.” He cut off another dead part of the bush with the clippers. “So I’ll just take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”

“I can’t offer you a drink,” Ellickson said quickly, remembering what Lester had told him to say. “I’m on the wagon, you know.” He tried to smile. “Can’t touch the stuff.”

“I didn’t know, but that’s fine,” the old man said, with a horsey smile, displaying his teeth again. “There’s some things I don’t do myself. I can drink, but I can see now that you can’t. But that particular discussion’ll have to wait until next time.” He smiled again and waved in the direction of his house. “One of these days, you can come down to my basement, and I’ll show you the spaceship I’m building down there.”

“A spaceship?”

“Shh.” The old man put his finger to his lips. “Mum’s the word.” Then he jabbed Ellickson in the ribs. “Maybe I’m kidding! Maybe there’s no spaceship!”

Ellickson returned to his house, uncertain about the nature of the conversation he had just had.

For his daughter, Barbara, Ellickson had been putting together a dollhouse, and now, for his son, Alex, he was writing a letter. He hadn’t been able to get past “My dear son” despite many attempts. It was as if his heart had suffered a blockage, and the language of feeling that other parents drew upon effortlessly had been denied him. He loved his son, but to say so in so many words seemed unthinkable. If you just put it like that, with the love right out on the table, the words would lack force.
They would sound fatuous. Nothing would stand behind such a statement, especially after a father’s drunken misbehavior, and besides, the kid might be spoiled if you said it flat-out like that.

Ellickson felt that he had had to earn every single bit of love that he himself had ever received, and that if he hadn’t tried to satisfy everyone’s expectations for him, he would have been promptly thrown out into the street to die in the gutter like a dog. He still might suffer that fate. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, staring out the window at his neighbor, who was now putting in a bed of petunias.

“Fourteen years ago,” Ellickson finally wrote to his son, “I met your mother at a rock concert. Maybe we told you this story. We were standing together in the aisle of this big converted bus terminal downtown that had been turned into a club, and then we both started to dance at almost the same time, and before long, we introduced ourselves.” The place had been thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of weed, and the band, Town Dump, had only an approximate sense of how they should be playing, but somehow, despite their ineptitude, or because of it, the musicians lit up the audience, and Ellickson had found himself dancing with this beautiful young woman who had appeared magically in front of him. “Your mother,” Ellickson wrote, “was wearing a speckled-green T-shirt with a little pin on it, and plain blue jeans, and she was the prettiest woman who had ever looked me in the eye and taken me by the hand.” This confession was not quite the appropriate history for him to be laying out for his son, he realized, but he couldn’t think of what else to write, or what other route to take toward an apology. “I started to fall in love with your mother right there,” Ellickson wrote. “We talked for hours that following week.”

Ellickson had had many girlfriends and one ex-wife by that time. He was ready for love to strike. On their first real date, when he had taken the girl he had met at the rock concert out for a spaghetti dinner and a movie, he knew this one, this Laura, would be serious. “And then what happened, what really did it for me, was that your mom took me over to where she lived and played the guitar for me and sang a song she had written herself.” She had had a sweet voice. The song was about how things pass and how you have to reach for the moment. Ellickson had always carried a torch for women who raised their voices in song.

“What I’m saying is that I’m not a bad person. My dad used to take me deer hunting in the woods up north,” Ellickson continued, in a new
paragraph, not wanting to write about how everything had gone wrong with Laura. The letter to his son was growing a bit disconnected, he knew, but this wasn’t an English composition, this was a soul statement. “When you’re older, I’ll take you deer hunting if you want to go up to the woods with me. I haven’t really done any hunting since you were born. I don’t know why that is. Maybe there hasn’t been time. I’m a pretty good shot, and I can teach you how to kill and dress a deer. We should go fishing, too, up north. Have you ever pulled in a fighting trout? It’s a great experience. I would love to do that with you.”

Ellickson watched his neighbor water his petunias. When he glanced at his watch, he saw that several hours had passed. A miracle. He had almost made it through another day. The phone rang.

“How’d it go?” Lester asked. “With the murderer? Did you talk to him?”

“It went pretty well,” Ellickson said. “He’s a little strange, though.”

“Well, he’s a murderer.”

“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not that. It’s like he’s a master of ceremonies of some TV show that no one’s watching. He told me he’s building a spaceship in his basement. Then he said maybe he was just kidding about the spaceship.”

“A spaceship, huh? I know the feeling,” Lester said. “Did you tell him you’re an alcoholic?”

“Yeah,” Ellickson said. “I did that.”

“Good,” Lester said. “Next time you’re over there, check out the spaceship and then report back to me.”

That night, Ellickson went to his sister’s house for dinner. She lived with her partner, a sizable Russian immigrant woman named Irena, in a ramshackle colonial on the better side of town. He continued to get invitations from them, he believed, because he performed small electrical and plumbing repairs whenever he visited and because he had offered to be the godfather if they ever had children. Also, his sister never asked him about how he was, so he never had to explain.