High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (12 page)

I decided I would march through the house first thing in the morning, and tear every drape and shade from the windows, open every window wide. I wanted to light every bulb and start sweeping. I would wake the man up with a busy morning commotion, fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen. He’d come shouting from the bathroom, blocking the sunlight from his eyes, and see me in the hallway working a broom. The front door open, trash bags piled on the porch. And then he’d say, Thank you, Junior, thank you. He’d say, This is just what I needed, good light in here! Just can’t get enough light! Then we’d go for a walk in the sun, me holding his hand, a giant hand, and my father a giant beside me. I drank. But part of me, I have to say, was also jealous of the man, of how he looked at the thing, unflinching. And yet a small part of me also disliked him for being so goddamn gullible about it all. Life is here. Now. God doesn’t need your company. Leave Heaven be. I would save him after all.

I went back to the kitchen and foraged for more wine. I opened the refrigerator, dumbly, knowing there was no more left. I went through the cabinets, mostly empty; some were filled. One was lovingly stacked with newspapers, and another with pens and pencils bound by rubber bands. Another was stacked with empty wine bottles. One fell, I caught it in my hands, and this gave me hope.

The pantry.

It was a deep closet pantry with louvered doors. I’d hidden inside as a kid when my mother did the dishes, and also when she searched the rooms with a belt in her hands, anxious to give me a strapping for any disobedience. I don’t like to remember this side of her. Plus that sort of thing only happened occasionally, and when I was very young. I saw a worn-down broom leaned against shelves stacked with dusty canned goods, and a stack of cardboard boxes. One had been opened, flaps nicely folded. Inside it, I saw two lamps messily wrapped in bubble packing, the same lamp I’d seen in both the dining room and the living room. Behind, there was a box with four bottles of red wine, screw-topped.

I chose a tall glass from the sink and rinsed it, dried it clean on my shirt.

Back outside, shouting came from a dimly lit basement window next door. Maybe Korean. The night sky in Queens had no stars, and the moon was somewhere up there dozing. It was a nonstop sky of dark blue and nothing. I thought, My mother is here, she’s right here, and also she’s not here at all. She’s out there and nothing at all. And all of her was here when she was still here, even the yelling for my father, saying there’s a spider in the bathroom, and the prayers before meals with a supplicant’s napkin on her head whenever Dad was out of town, even the vein in her neck like the string on her red balloon face when she got angry. I let that memory go when it came. All of her was here when she was here, and nowhere else. I never thought of her name anymore. My father’s name is Gill. I wanted to say his name out loud.

“Gill Laudermilk.”

My glass raised, I said it louder. And I had a terrible feeling that there was more dead space between sons and fathers than all of the night air around me. Which version of Dad did I love? I loved mostly an invention, the best version of him I could think of.

“I am Gill Laudermilk’s son!”

The moon peeked over the roofs, and I was tired. The lightning bugs were blinking, and I thought of the brief electric marks they make when getting snuffed.

I carefully closed the back door and took the wine bottle into the living room. And like rats after hours in a restaurant, the cats came out from the corners. They rubbed against my legs, flirting and following me with caution. I shook the sheet on the couch clean, shut off the lamp, and leaned back easy on the couch. Where was my bag? I pulled the phone from my pocket and tried to relax. The room was dark, very dark, and I set the phone green-lit and open on the table. I smelled the garbage in the hallway, but it was fainter. I was getting used to it. I deeply inhaled, filled my senses like I would in a Christmas kitchen. I drank in the stink and everything was going to be fine. The phone shined weakly and the numbers read “9:21.” Things would be better tomorrow.

The white cat rubbed at my ankles.

I patted my lap: Come up here. Stroked her back. I wanted to ask her about the bathroom, what it looked like inside the red-lit room, and how it felt to be such a good kitty, to be trusted to see what was going on inside there, to be such a perfect fucking kitty. I stood up and, picking her up with both hands, I let her hang. Dangling there from my grip, the softly hissed. I let go one hand and lifted her higher, stretching my arm as far is it could go. She scratched at my forearms with her back feet. Was this the same vicious thing that had scratched my arm before? An itchy red line puffed up on my wrist. I took a gulp from my glass as the cat fought back. I squeezed my hand slightly, and actually moved the cat’s ribs. I felt the shape of her rib cage, her interior, her tiny pink heart shaking there and sweating the closing rib walls between my fingers. The cage was closing in my grip. I put down my glass.

I pressed my fingers against one of the pink pads of her right front paw, and a single claw came curling like a sharp thin pinky finger. I kept pressure on the pad, keeping the claw extended, and I pressed a thumb against the claw. It poked against my skin and broke the skin of my finger but I pushed back more against the claw, bending it backward. She cried out, fighting my grip. I was afraid my father might hear. I squeezed hard on her ribs and reminded her that I actually had two hands. I pushed back on her claw and she cried and she fought.

She whimpered.

She stopped fighting, and let herself hang. I thought of wishbones, totally ashamed. I sat and placed the cat in my lap. She didn’t run. She hopped off and just walked away, but not without stopping at the doorway and giving me a look of absolute disgust before leaving the room. The phone light had gone out. I closed the phone, opened it again, and left it there on the table, green-lit and glowing. I poured another glass and drank it down fast. It had been such a long first day. What would I find in the light of morning? I closed my eyes and the cats were slowly climbing up the couch, up my legs. They came out like shadows and covered me. I closed my eyes and prayed again. Again! I asked if I could please dream of Sarah, and I lay there for what seemed like only seconds before I fell into a deep heavy sleep, before falling into a long and semilucid dream.

WEST

2

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It was a Sunday morning when Sarah first called to talk about Dad. I remember because I was standing on the treadmill she gave me. The TV was on, one of the news channels, and sometimes I looked at it, but mostly I just stood there staring at the dead odometer. I was fully dressed for the day, and sipping coffee. A glance here and there at the morning show. The power button on the treadmill totally untouched, no red numbers telling me how much time I had left. It should’ve been our eighth anniversary. A year already since the divorce, and things weren’t getting any better. They
were
getting better, in that I no longer wanted to throw myself into the Pacific (in those fantasies, Sarah always came bounding down the beach, bikini clad, just in time…), but everything else was turning to shit. I still couldn’t believe Mom was gone and all the world around me hardly noticed. This was
Mom
. We did talk, Sarah and I, occasionally, but not much. I felt like a stranger in my own life. The sound of her voice used to be mine, and now it was his. Nikos, the infamous Grecian usurper. I wanted to hate the man, but more I wanted to avoid what I really knew in my heart, the basic truth that she went with him because she was lonely, and because somewhere along the line, her loving husband had become an asshole. I’ll say this: the phone call was unexpected. I took my cell from the holder on my belt.

Sarah 8:55.

“Well, hello, stranger,” I said.

She said, “I can’t really talk, not now.”

“So talk.”

“Okay. There is something up with Dad. Your dad. Something unkosher, I mean definitely. But I can’t really talk right now. So call him.”

“So nice to hear from you, too,” I said.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I’m coming,” she said to someone else.

“What, is he sick? He told you he’s sick? And who are you talking to?” I did not yet know about Nikos.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s something else. There’s a quiver in his voice, a kind of manic thing. It’s depressing and a little bit scary. I can’t talk.”

“And yet here we are talking,” I said.

“I’m coming,” she said again to someone else. “Go see him. Just go see him.”

“We should have dinner tonight.”

Sarah and Dad had already been phoning each other for years, and this way before any talk of unhappiness, or separation, back when we were still giddy as pink pigs rolling in cool summer shit, and falling on each other every chance we got. Good God, I loved that woman. I should say actually it was Dad who phoned Sarah, and hardly the other way around. The man felt responsible for her soul.

“You should see him,” she said. “Go visit him.”

“Okay, stop. Dad and I are fine,” I said.

“He tells me.”

“And if he’s sick, he hasn’t said anything to me.”

“Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise,” she said. “The man is talking to me about his dreams again, about your mother, and I’m not sure these are good dreams. Sadder than I’ve ever heard him before.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “I have to go. Maybe dinner tomorrow.”

She hung up. I put the phone back on my belt.

“And happy anniversary,” I said, because hey, you know what, who knows, maybe a post-anniversary dinner with Sarah. Some white wine, polite conversation. I’d been going through such a long and predictably depressing phase, typical divorce stuff. I’d been angry, and lethargic, then just sad, and generally unmotivated, afternoon bourbons poured to the brim of a water glass. But as of this morning, I decided, it was over, finished, finito. We were beyond the cliché of the broken warring couple. We were adults.

Beside the TV, on the far wall, there was an old picture of Sarah and me at the beach. Two silhouettes, the blaze of a setting sun. We’d lived there in the condo by the water for seven long years. I always liked beaches, but I never really liked the ocean. Too damn big. And that treadmill was tremendous, took three men to bring it up the stairs. She had given it to me the year before. Said it was her goodbye gift and, frankly, despite the fact that I did come to love the convenience, jogging a few mornings here and there, I was tired of seeing it every waking morning of my life. I wasn’t exactly a runner when we met. Running for what? Toward what? I tried asking her this once. On our very first run. We’d been dating for a few weeks. I guess it was dating, but I also feel like I’ve never dated in my life. I feel like I meet a woman, or girl—this habit goes a long way back—and I completely surrender, all the way, I’m in love. Like it or not, it’s all over. Maybe
they
were dating. But I certainly wasn’t. We went on a run, Sarah and I, which was probably a date for her, but for me was an expression of unbounded and obvious loving devotion.

This was not an easy run, especially for a beginner. Bogging down in the sand, I couldn’t keep up. We went for a mile, maybe less, probably a lot less, before I was wondering how it was I’d never run on my own beach.
Baywatch
was popular at the time, and so I’d seen how beautiful running on the beach could be. It seemed to me I’d done something immoral, this not running. Sarah was ahead of me, her red-shorted bottom bouncing back and forth like a heart, upside down, buoyant, and persuasive. Keep running. But I was slowing, my heavy and also a little bit wet camouflage shorts weighing me down (I’d already tripped and stumbled into the water), and she was getting farther and farther away from me. I stopped running, and watched her go small, smaller and smaller, and then suddenly I started to panic. I felt like I had to prove myself; I was worthy. The last thing I wanted was for her to turn and see me just standing there, like I’d totally given up. So I bolted. I ran like I never had before, or ever have since. My calves on fire, the torn hems of my camo shorts chafing just above the knees. I ran for her, my tiny love getting small in the distance. No matter what, she would not turn and see me standing still or far behind. I willed it so. And so I ran. But then Sarah was getting bigger. Bigger and bigger with every passing second, because she had turned! I was powerless, and she had seen me for what I was, and she was getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer. Effortless for her, as far as I could tell. Then she was right there and slowing down and then she walked up to me, and said, hardly out of breath, “Hey, slowpoke.”

She was careful to wipe her face of sweat with her forearms, and not her hands, I remember this, so she could take my face in her hands and kiss me. How do you describe a kiss without making it sound sentimental or different from any other kiss? I don’t know. There was this—a piece of sand from her mouth went into my mouth, and that single grain tasted like salt and her sweat and the whole Pacific Ocean. I didn’t spit it out when she was finished with me. I lightly bit it between my teeth, and I could not stop smiling.

She said, “I like it when you smile. You should smile more.” She took my hand and we walked in the direction she’d been running. She said, “I don’t like running alone anymore.…”

I stepped away from the treadmill, and told myself to stop being sappy, and looked at the clock, nine a.m.

Already thirty minutes late for work.

But I also happened to be the boss, which came in handy since work was seeming less and less a priority with each passing day. Until today. This day.

I shut off the TV.

We ran a few more times together after, but never for very long. I slowed her down, and I couldn’t go very far, anyway. Eventually I started running at the gym, by myself, and then on the treadmill at home. We took long walks together instead. She teased me once and said my occasional morning jogs did not exactly make me a “runner,” not yet. At least not according to her, who was a runner practically monkish in her devotion. Plus Sarah, with her claustrophobia—and God forbid we call it that, because she refused to admit she had a problem, “I just don’t like low ceilings”—she never ran inside. She preferred the freedom of a forest trail, the wide beach path, the airy and open outdoors. At some point I really should take my mileage outside, she’d said. She apparently believed a treadmill in the bedroom by the window was supposed to help get me there. Eventually. And she thought it would help with the whole ugly common process of divorce, that it would clear my head. On the other hand, I was convinced our problems were not at all common. I bridled at the thought of being common. She often said, “But running can save your life, Josie.”