Shelter in Place (21 page)

Tess saying, “You can't know everything, Joey. There's something about being alone at night, outside, saying nothing, looking in, all that black space around me, watching from the dark. In the dark, alone on the street, it was me the threat, me the watcher.”

And I will tell you about Tess. And you will take me as an authority, as someone with real knowledge. As someone who
knows
her. But I do not. I have my memory, muted and warped, but that doesn't mean knowing.

It means nothing, really.

Tess is gone.

No matter how often or how hard I try, I am always fooled. It is like the eternal. I know it does not exist, and yet I keep falling for its illusion. Even now. Here within the lulling routine of days. This life will last forever, I think. No matter how many times I'm proven wrong.

In the wisdom of her early twenties, Tess said, “Love is not possession, Joe Joey Joseph.”

And that took a long time for me to learn. Long out of my own twenties and even now I struggle. I like ownership. I like control. I am, after all, my father's son.

I know the two things are connected. My faith in permanence and my desire to possess.

These are not instincts easy to break.

I worry that Tess remains nebulous. And that cannot be. You must see her for any of this to matter. It is not the story, it is
her.
It is Tess I'm trying to translate.

The story is vehicle and frame. To have and to hold.

But she must be palpable. Her courage, her intelligence, her independence, the force of her lust. Her rage. How all of it seemed alive in her body.

These are the facts you must understand.

These are the truths you must receive.

Listen: she moved as if nothing embarrassed her. She favored no angle, hid no part of herself. Her mother said, “Stand up straight, what are you trying to hide? What are you trying to protect? Nothing.” So, she stood up straight.

She didn't bite her fingernails or pick at her lip. She didn't twirl her hair or barricade herself behind folded arms.

But she was always in motion. Once I thought this was how she hid. Taking an ankle in her hand and pulling her heel to her ass. Bending at the waist. Interlacing her fingers and reaching above her head. But now I believe she was giving relief to a body that needed to move, to muscles that ached for something I'd never entirely understand and could not see.

“Harder,” she said when I rubbed her shoulders. “Dig your fingers in. Yes.”

“Push harder,” she said.

“Fuck me harder,” she said, her voice, the same low growl.

Tess, she wanted more of everything.

T
his morning I collected the telephones. We've had them since we moved in here. Cordless with their bases strewn about. Upstairs and down. In the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the guest room. At the time, all those years ago, we were seduced by their sleekness, by their power, their features, their capacity for megahertz.

If you could have seen Tess laughing that day about the megahertz of these phones. She loved the word. Look at all the
megahertz,
Joe
.

One of those things. You understand.

Anyway, it had taken three years to build the house and by the time we bought the telephones we were into the finishing touches. Everything just so. The end of so much motion, and change. The sale of our bars in Seattle, traveling back and forth between there and here. Building this place with all the usual problems and delays—materials arriving without workers, workers arriving without materials, disappearing electricians. So by the time we bought the cordless phones and plugged them in, we were in a state of relief and celebration. At last, everything as we wanted it to be. It was, I thought, what we had been working for all our lives. Or our lives together. Our life together. It was the realization of a fantasy. The proper culmination of things. A house in the country. The great domestic dream come to life. Apple trees, a garden, a deck, a clearing. Deer and elk. Foxes. The sound of the wind. Hawks and owls. Bright cardinals. A wide white bed. Cool air at night through the windows. So many places to sit, to read, to look out upon our land, our kingdom.

There were other things, of course. Other finishing touches, other details. Photographs. Paintings we'd bought over the years. Stones we'd kept from as far back as Cannon Beach. Other objects gathered through time. Even remnants of our lives before each other.

But today I'm telling you of the telephones because this morning I went around disconnecting their bases, removing their clear wires from our walls. Dropping each receiver, base and power cord into an old brown paper shopping bag.

How long had it been since that satisfying click? A feeling, a noise I've always loved—the sure connection between wire and wall.

No one calls the landline anyway.

Now people are devoted to cell phones, but I prefer the larger receiver in my hand, the fullness of sound, voices so close and pure and uninterrupted.

Or I did.

I've become tired of spoken language. Of the constant talking. No one shuts up. I can't stand it any longer. Not my own voice, not the voice of most anyone.

I've removed the satellite dish.

Now the phones are gone.

What's left?

The people in town.

And I don't mind them usually. Or the village small talk. I don't go in all that often anyway. Just for breakfast and the paper sometimes when I feel my mind begin to slide away from me. When it's pushing so hard against the bars I'm afraid they'll break. When the bird comes, when the tar is thickest in my veins. Then it soothes me to be there.

Except for when they play the wrong music. Then I have to leave immediately.

Maybe I've become a curmudgeon, but I don't think it's that. Not only. It's just the noise is too much. I look around and see the people nodding their heads, and reading their newspapers, and meanwhile my brain is burning and I have to leave.

The music.

Which is a language I wish I could speak. Or at least fully understand. I don't mean the incessant shit they play in the diner. I mean what I've been listening to here. The good radio. Our CDs. The records, which were once my parents'. I have sorted them all. Not so much the good from the bad, but the brutal from the rest. There are sounds now I can't endure. Just as with certain light. Fluorescent, flashing neon, the naked bulb.

It's to do with the holes in my system. There are cracks. There are gaps.

The modem.

Sending its invisible signal into the house. Its round blue light providing hope. Stamped into the plastic are three crescents widening from a single point and these are what I imagine pulsing through the air—delicate little half-moons passing through the walls, through my body. And maybe riding on one of those will come a message from the dark. Will come word. Maybe, but I think the modem is the next to go.

The computer.

It rests bulky and outmoded in our office defiling my father's redwood desk. Even in our most glorious days, I hated the thing. All its wires and plastic and heat. Ugly and threatening. I'll get rid of the thing today. Maybe I'll go to the garage and find my father's .45. Take it out to the clearing and murder that horrible machine. Maybe I'll take a hammer to it.

The mailbox.

White half-oval riding a sturdy wooden post. A red metal flag, which when there's mail the mailman continues to raise. How many men like that left in the world? Our little mailbox at the end of our little road. I go out once a day anyway. Flag up or down. Just in case he makes a mistake. Paul Thomas, the mailman, never makes a mistake. The box is always empty when the flag is lowered. I go anyway to make sure. We've never met, but we leave him a bottle of Jameson and a hundred bucks in the box every Christmas. And always before the New Year he replaces it with a whiskey cake wrapped in foil and red ribbon along with a card saying,
Thank You! Merry Christmas!
It's signed, Paul and Sally, who I take to be his wife, though I don't know for certain. Could be his nurse, his lover, his sister, or his daughter. Could very well be his dog.

I don't know which of them makes it, but the cake is invariably foul. Tess and I look forward to it. To learning how bad a cake can be. Just to evaluate the heights of its vileness, to see if it was possible to make a worse cake than the cake of Christmas past. Christmas Eve we slice two slivers. A sacrament we deliver to each other's mouths. I love that. The absolute wretchedness of something causing such joy. My theory is that Paul and Sally (human or canine) are teetotalers, that they are simply returning our whiskey to us in a different vessel—a dense disk of sugar and flour and fruit.

Tess, on the other hand, believes they hate us. That their delivery is an annual gesture of violence.

Whatever the case, each year, that single mouthful of cake, which we are honor-bound to swallow, makes Tess laugh with an uninhibited recklessness that I love as much as anything in my life. The wildness of her laughter. The spectacle of her falling sideways, laughing the air from her body.

It's obnoxious. Unoriginal too. A young couple from the city thrilling at the kindness and poor taste of their country neighbors. You see what your wild revolutionaries have become? Bourgeois snobs, insipid invaders.

What else is left?

The cell phone.

Speaking of hope. This I cannot give up. I leave it on the edge of the table where the signal is strongest. I keep it charged. I keep an eye on it.

People used to say, send word. Send word when you get there, send word when you land. Send word when there's time. Send word
 
when you're settled.

I love this phrase, and I will admit that what I hope more than anything is that. Tess sends hers through the mail. That I will walk up our long drive to see the red flag raised, and there on the cool floor of the metal box will lie a letter.

But Tess sends no word.

And instead I go on sending you mine.

S
omething about crawling around beneath his table today, about collecting the telephones, the weight of them in the shopping bag, made me think of my father.

My father who found calm within the Quaker meetinghouse out on the point at the end of the bay where he practiced
waiting worship
with a small congregation of Friends.

A democratic faith devoted to peace and without hierarchy.

My father listening to God in all the ways a body can listen.

“I'm just puttering around the house,” he'd say when I called.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Not much, Joe. Just puttering.”

Which could have meant gluing a chipped mug, or installing crown molding in the living room.

And then, as I do now, I would see him in White Pine. The same living room, the same kitchen, the same front door, same front yard. The pile of soil was gone, replaced by a crabapple tree. The whole place refreshed as if he owned it himself. Refaced cabinetry, new furniture, which he'd made over the years using the Arbus workshop. A new fence out front. Fresh paint.

The landlord couldn't believe her luck.

My father wanted nothing in return—not an option to buy, not a reduction in rent, no reimbursement for improvements made. He only wanted a home he could afford to stay in, to work on, to putter around, a home not far from his wife.

By then, Tess and I were in Seattle living in a shitty apartment down by the water in Belltown. A damp and grungy fourth-floor walk-up full of windows. We looked out on the bay, and the fishing boats coming and going, and the tankers out further, and beneath us a mad carnival of crime and general degradation. All that heroin, all those people rampaging below our windows at night. None of it bothered us then.

We'd just ridden into town from White Pine. We arrived believing we were cool to violence, immune somehow to its reach and power. We were not its victims, but its perpetrators.

We had done what we had done.

I was my mother's son.

We were made of violence, Tess and I. Formed and drawn and bound by it. Woven through our creation myth.

Tess and I. We. The single object I believed us to be.  

And were it not for my mother and her hammer, would Tess have ever followed me to White Pine? And was she following me at all? Was she not also following my father? My mother? All of us at once? We her surrogates.

And who was surrogate to whom? It wasn't one for one. Father for father. Mother for mother. It's not so simple with Tess.

And what was I? Proxy for whom?  

Well, whatever the answers, I think of Tess and me in our apartment above the bay, the two of us on the run from White Pine, pretending to be invincible and unscathed.

We came determined to start again. Two frightened and arrogant kids sailing into the big city from their fishingtowncollegetownprisontown.

“Sink or swim, Joey March,” Tess said when I stopped the truck in front of our new home. “Begin again. Round two. Shake it off. Nothing to regret. What's done is done. One, two, three, go.”

We were young, but we were so tired, so ground down.

Still, I knew we'd swim.

Now that it was out of our system.

But the truth is that
it
was never in mine. Not that. Not what Tess had in hers.

I tell you this as someone whose system is fractured. Is coursing with venom and pollution, a system of disconnected gears and failing filters.

Not only.

There are other things in me, yes, but still, I tell you this as someone who knows something about the dark. As someone with talons sunk in his lungs and cold tar in his veins.

But who also knows the blazing rise, the ecstatic clarity.

And each its respective violence.

But neither is what Tess had.

What Tess had was never in my system. I go on telling myself. 

Maybe I am not so much my mother's son.