Sex and Death in the American Novel (8 page)

“The funny thing is that the thought of listening to music just makes me feel empty, like I know it won't work anymore. Nothing is going to feel the same after this.”

A car door slammed. Hushed voices drifted toward me. I wiped my eyes. The thought of my silent apartment, so far removed from all of this, gave me something to look forward to. He put his arm around me and stroked my arm.

We sat and listened to the heels clicking and keys jangling as people made their way to the church, then we walked together back inside. Just like Tristan would have done, Eric sat between my mother and me, with one arm around me, and let my mother hold his hand.

Leah did play “Fade to Black,” and my mother kept her lips tightly closed through the entire beautiful performance. Leah was also the first person to speak and the only one I listened to. “I was so impressed by how much he knew, how much he never said that he did know.” She took a look around. “He never bragged about the things he'd done, or where he came from.” She let her eyes rest on my mother then moved them to me before facing the audience again. “I don't think any of us could have imagined this for him.” She stopped and took a breath and looked around the room, smiling and giving a short wave to a guy in leather who sat three rows back from my mother and me. “When I first met Tristan Post, I knew there would never be anyone as smart, talented and dedicated as he was. He was first a poet, then a musician. You could talk to Tristan and he would listen. He was the first person in my life who really listened to me.”

Leah stepped down from the podium, her body language summing up what I'd been feeling since this nightmare began.

My mother made a strangled sound and put one hand to her mouth and reached across Eric to grip one of mine with the other. Her hand felt cool, papery and dry. Pews creaked and people adjusted their clothing. There was a cough.

Neither my mother nor I could say anything on Tristan's behalf. Every time I tried to read to myself what I'd written, my throat would close up and my voice would crack—or worse, I would be gripped with an insane urge to laugh. Instead we printed the elegies up on pretty green paper and put them out at the reception along with an assortment of pictures.

It was amazing to see how many people turned out for someone who had spent so much of the last years of his life almost entirely alone.

The day after the service, Mom and I drove out to Montana where we scattered the almost weightless baggie of ashes from the top of Holland Lake Falls. We hiked up to the top, once in a while pointing out the ever-expanding view of the blue lake between the whispering Douglas fir and proud Ponderosa, until we reached the top. When it was final, his ashes blew toward all points on the horizon and over the falls. Disturbingly, some drifted into piles at our feet until I scooped it up, along with some dirt, and
tossed it over the embankment. As he wanted, as he had said not long ago, he was now a part of the mountain.

I sat alone in his room when we got back, unable to do anything else. I thought I was ready to clear the rest of it out but found myself unable to move further. I felt so silly, like I was being overdramatic, wondering if someone was watching me. Then, out the window, I caught sight of my mother's feet and branches hitting the ground every so often around her.

I wrapped myself in the smelly sheets and let the images come; the walk up the trail, in the early hours of the morning, the mist still clinging to the trees, the view of the mountaintops beyond the lake. He would pull the shotgun out of the case that came with it, open it up, cracking it almost in half until the empty barrels gaped, waiting for the shells he would have ready, red and gold, clinking in place, then closing it all up with a click: solid. How long would he sit there, knowing what he was going to do? Would the birds be chirping, was the sun shining when he finally lifted the cold barrel to the delicate, vulnerable place at the hollow under his chin?

I sat on Tristan's bed for a long time, imagining him as he would have looked beneath the sun, then a memory, him sitting near me, hunched down like he did sometimes, one knee higher than the other, hair hanging over his shoulders and down his back. I squeezed my eyes shut when I remembered how Mom had phoned the sheriff hours after he left, insisted on seeing my brother's body. From my spot at the end of the table, I could hear the sheriff's voice: “Ms. Post, please…you do not want to remember your son this way.”

She slammed the phone down and glared at me, as if it was my fault, and said, “How dare he dictate to me. I know what I can handle and what I cannot…” and then she directed her eyes to a place near the front door, as if the man himself were still there, or maybe she was thinking of something else. Her eyes got red and her nostrils flared. She wouldn't let me come near her, only waved me away when I tried.

When the light outside began to fade, I crawled under the blankets and fell asleep.

I woke sometime in the night with my mother sitting beside me, tracing the lines of my face, gently pulling on my hair, combing it though her fingers.

“This isn't healthy, Vivianna,” she said.

“I don't care.” I hated the way she closed her eyes when I said this, like she was preparing herself to watch another one of her children crash and burn. Did I look that bad? “I'm not going to fall apart, Ma.”

She smiled at the way I called her Ma. We only used that term when we were being silly, prodding her. She got in with me, wrinkling her nose at the
smell, and laughing as she did this. I had never felt so close to my mother as I did then.

I remade the bed the next morning, leaving the dirty sheets. I wasn't planning on sleeping there again but wasn't able to change anything either. I wanted the next time that I came down here to look as it would if he were still alive. Before I left, I messed up the bed again.

I spent a month on the island with my mother. I quit my job at the coffee shop. Once I went home, I would be able to finally write full-time—Tristan left his trust fund, including the income from half of my father's royalties, to me. I felt a smug satisfaction at that. My father thought Tristan was the strong one, the competent one. Just because he was a boy.

My mother and I grew close again, like when I was a girl. We drove around the island, attending farmer's markets, festivals, and having lunch in familiar restaurants. I spent hours with her working in the yard. Sometimes we stayed up too late drinking, and then slept late the next day. It was different to know my mother in this way. We leaned on each other. I slept in her bed with her as I'd done right after Dad left. She needed me then; this time I knew how much I needed her.

“Did you ever think about letting Dad take Tristan?”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Why would he do that? Your father had no time for him or anyone else. Can you imagine what Tristan would have been like if he'd gone with your father?”

I could imagine it well. I remembered one Christmas he came back early from a visit. He never told me what happened.

“There would have been no way I would have let him take Tristan. Ever since he arrived in my life, at six years old, so full of curiosity and life, I knew I would always be there for him.”

“I don't think I could take care of someone else's child like that.”

“Tristan was my son when your father left as much as he was your father's.” She paused and watched me. “I can't lose you too, baby,” she said stroking my head.

“You won't,” I said, reassuring her. “Remember when Tristan tried to build that tree house in the back of the yard and that homeless guy kept camping out there?”

She laughed softly. “I was terrified. I thought he was going to get violent.”

“You didn't know Tristan was bringing him food from the house.”

We both laughed. “He had no idea what he was getting into,” Mother said.

“Remember when he was only reading German, and announced he was going to go to Germany, until he met that French girl,” I said, then Mom interrupted.

“Renee, wasn't it?” she said. The sour smell of the wine on her breath also reminded me of the time after my father left. My head swam, my body felt heavy, and I only wanted to think about the good things.

“He met her down at the beach, and then came home and announced he was going to read everything by Proust.”

We discussed his brief athletic periods, swimming, basketball. Mom told me about having to talk to the principal about the articles he was publishing in the school paper. “Condom dispensers in every restroom! Cigarette machines for those who'd turned eighteen. Legalize drugs. My word,” she said.

“Always took things to such extremes,” I said, then regretted it.

“He did.”

Chapter 4

When I finally went home to my apartment, the rooms were too bright and cold compared to the warmth and emotion that hung over everything at the house on the island. Coming back to my apartment was like stepping into another person's life. In my bedroom stood the neatly made bed, red comforter, and shimmery gold pillowcases that matched the drapes. Then there was the fuzzy white rug on the floor. Tristan got that one for me, he said it went with the décor, and I kept it so I wouldn't hurt his feelings.

There was the dining room where I'd cooked for him when he helped me move in. I squeezed my eyes shut until they hurt, forcing the images out of my mind, though the heaviness was already settling in. Fatigue hung on me like I hadn't slept in weeks, even though that was all I had been doing lately. I wondered if it was alright to be this tired after only a ride over on the ferry and a short drive back into the city. Maybe I had cancer, not that it mattered.

I went to bed, and for the next week I slept, watched TV, and wandered the rooms too tired to imagine doing anything else.

One morning I woke early, and after several minutes of irritable staring at the ceiling, I got up. I stared at the TV but was tired of the numbing effects of hour after hour of
Criminal Minds
reruns. I padded into my study and felt the impact of why I'd been avoiding this room. I hadn't known that was what I was doing until then.

My books—new and old, read, and unread—were arranged so beautifully there on my bookcases by hands that were no longer in existence. There were all the classics I'd collected but mostly not read, sent to me over the years by my father, given to me by my mother or Tristan. Then there were those
arranged by subject, whatever had taken my interest over the years, and my “smut books” as both Tristan and I had called them. He had looked through each one enough to tell what type of work it was—lesbian erotica, gay romance, S&M—and had arranged these books by subject. I fixed my eyes on the spines of each book, my throat tightened into a hard core and I stood in the middle of the room letting the tears roll out, stinging my cheeks, pooling at the corners of my mouth.

I sat in front of the books, placing my hands against the spines, hoping to soak up some of his essence, and I caught sight of a yellow sticky note poking out of
2009 Best Gay Erotica
. I flipped the page open and there was a section circled, and the note said, “You write like this.” I couldn't get any air in my lungs, no matter how far I opened my mouth. I left the note where it was, closed the book and scanned the shelves for more.

They were everywhere. After he helped me move in I found a few of these, but somehow through the rush of deadlines, work schedules, and my nightlife, I had missed most of them.

Inside one he put, “I hope you aren't planning on trying this,” and in another, “Is this even possible?” Some of the notes were playful, some serious, as in the encouraging ones he left inside the classics Mom made us read when we were younger: “You could be like this,” he wrote on a note stuck inside
Jane Eyre
, and “Your characters could be this vivid,” inside
Great Expectations
.

I decided not to look for any more notes. In a panic, I worried that I'd used up the last of them, then when I looked to the back of one shelf, I saw a yellow tab poking out. I would leave that one.

Wiping my eyes, I went back to the living room, needing to be somewhere else, only I didn't know what to do in there. I went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and stared inside. Everything looked wrong, too old, and eating or drinking was pointless. Back in the living room I sat staring out over the wet lawn. I thought of all the stupid errands I could have been doing. My stomach dropped at the thought of how pointless everything was, as if I'd just become aware of this information and needed to act quickly. I felt a painful sense of urgency and dread at once, a solid block in my chest.

I must have spent an hour on the couch looking out the window, feeling hollow, feeling full of something heavy, feeling both at once, before I went back to the study. I didn't want to be there. I didn't know where to be, or how to be anywhere. I looked around the room, then sat down in my desk chair, and stared some more. The feeling that nothing I decided to do would be right weighed me down. I hadn't been into my email for over a month. I opened the laptop and started it up.

My inbox was indeed crowded. Much sympathy on the death of my brother. I made a folder in my email program and moved all of these in there.

Eric sent me a dozen links to articles about what was going on around town, as well as links to a few songs he thought would cheer me up. This was what I needed—diversion. I finished sorting the emails and closed everything down. I called Eric and he came over an hour later.

I drank and fucked my way through the next year. I was so tired of dragging Tristan's memory around with me, but I couldn't let him go either. I continued to write, caffeine- and nicotine-fueled sessions inspired by my nighttime antics. Of all the men from that year, not one can I say was especially memorable. In the end, neither sex, nor alcohol, nor even dancing pulled me out of the depths of my grief, or wiped away the hateful thoughts, the anxious dread, the knowledge that it was a matter of time before I also self-destructed. No man was big enough, or cocky enough, or mean enough to totally distract me from the voices in my head.