Shelter in Place (28 page)

That night we ate and drank and said nothing of import. No rousing speeches were made. But now we had an immediate and certain future before us. No ambiguity. No wondering what was to come. And I think it was that feeling of certainty and resignation that drew us from the night's outrage and gloom into something brighter, into something nearly joyful.

I'
m afraid that I have made some fundamental error.

I worry that I did not look at Tess correctly. Have not. Through all the years together, and then from here, too, from afar, in all these increments of recollection.

What is the nature of this error?

I'm not certain.

Is it something to do with the way that I observed her? Something to do with
beauty
, with the effect her body had on me. To do, even, with the words themselves.

Beautiful,
for one.

Think of the way I saw her in the bathroom that sad afternoon. The light on her breasts. The slope of her back, her thighs, her calves, her narrow ankles. All the rest I've described to you. The power she had. Not she, but her body. You see in those descriptions that there are no scars. No blemishes, no hairs trapped beneath her skin. All that body and so little mind. Oh, but that's not true either. More than anything she exists in me as a force, a heat deep in my spine, a turning in my chest. It is not her physical shape that stirs me most or first. And it never was, not even from the start. It is everything else: will, fire, fury, lust, intelligence, vision, heart, humor, conviction.

I am doomed to this litany, to confusion, to clichés, to dead words.

And yet, and still, the way she appears here to me now so clearly, I see no imperfection. And is that not a kind of tyranny? Haven't I imprisoned her? Us?

She becomes material so easily—whole and in parts. Her skin, her eyes, her breasts, her shoulders, her mouth, her thighs. I do not mean to do it. But there she is assembling and disassembling.

Here I close my eyes.

The falling line of her throat.

Her feet, which she did not like for their size and flatness.

“Too big,” she said. “So ugly.”

But no, there was nothing ugly.

And I
do
remember scars.

One thin curve soaring from her hip bone. Left.

A lopsided diamond at her ankle. Left.

The start of a spiral on the meat of her shoulder. Right.

Coming home from somewhere in winter, her eyes red from the cold, nose running, hair a tangle, lips dry and flaking. Or the relentless pimples, which appeared on her chin late into her thirties. The lines at her eyes, and across her forehead. The flecks of grey in her hair.

It was all the same.

Her beauty deepened. I cannot change this, and I cannot avoid the word. For so long, I have tried to make her ugly in body and mind. But there is nothing to be done.

Through all the years we are expected to stop looking at one another, I looked. When abruptly we were no longer young. Through the panic of age, and accelerating time, and deteriorating bodies, through the shock of, the rebellion against, and, at last, the resignation to those things, I watched her. I could not stop and I wonder if there was an error there. A failing somehow. I wonder if through all that watching, I was doing her harm. If to see her always bathed in these golden lights was itself an act of violence. Was it the violence of worship? Have I, all these years, made her something impossible? Inhuman?

But then I remember my frustration, how often I hated her, how often we fought, her stubbornness, her selfishness, her disappearances, physical and otherwise, her cruelty and blindness.

I have not forgotten how anger flowed between us for so many years. That's all there too and because it is, I believe I have loved her in spite of those things.

I believe I have loved her fairly.

M
y father had constructed a life without us. At the meetinghouse he'd become friends with a tall, sturdy man in his seventies who had the face and demeanor of a character actor. He might once have played a noble cowboy, a wise cop, and now, while still handsome, was in fast decline. My father and Hank Fletcher, who was an easy six inches taller, walked together on the beach in the mornings. You might have confused the two for brothers. Hank, limping, hands clasped behind his back, cigarette in his mouth, and my father at his side, carrying that red Thermos full of coffee.

As far as I knew, my father had never had friends of his own. In the first Seattle days, good and old, my parents would, from time to time, have dinner with other couples, but I never once knew him to go out alone with anyone other than me, or Claire, or my mother. There was a time when he played center field in a Sunday softball league, but even then, after those games it was family picnics and barbeques, not men together in bars. His solitude, his reluctance, or incapacity, to make friends never occurred to me, not until my mother took a hammer to Dustin Strauss's skull and we all found ourselves shipwrecked in White Pine.

Reverberating loudly enough through those years, intensely enough to reach me even through my self-absorption, my righteousness and debilitating love for Tess, was the knowledge that my father was an isolated and lonely man. Even if he would never cop to the accuracy of such descriptions. Never. Because they could be construed as weaknesses, as flaws, and he could not acknowledge such things, or even their possibilities. Not to me. Not beyond the general, the safe concession that, yes, we are all flawed, none of us is finished improving, et cetera. No more specific than that, no more damning than the broad damning of human beings of every kind, and everywhere.

To convey to you the nature of those years in White Pine, there can be no separating these three fundamental and confluent facts:

1. My mother's incarceration and subsequent change of demeanor and, of course, what brought her there.

2. My gradual understanding that my father was, save for his son and imprisoned wife, friendless and lonely in the world.

And 3. My love (measly word) for Tess.

Which is all to say that it was a surprise to witness my father's renaissance: first the meetinghouse, and now Hank Fletcher.

I would like to tell you that it was entirely pleasant. I would like to say I was big enough of heart by then that to see my father walking side by side with his handsome new friend provoked in me feelings only of happiness and warmth, but I am humiliated to tell you that this is not the case.

My displeasure, my suspicion and petty irritation was, in part, to do with the Quakers. Perhaps I was protective of my father, whom I imagined to be weakened and vulnerable. And I could not distinguish Hank from the church, even if I had no reason to be suspicious of either.

More than his newfound Quakerism was that I was resentful and suspicious of his willingness to continue his life, to live without us, to do what was foreign, and therefore become foreign.

But what do I know? Have I not proven time and again, how little I know of myself, how foolish I am, and, most important, most simply, how often I am
wrong
? Well, I am ready now, in the way I believe my father was ready then, to give myself over to the intelligences of other people, other institutions, mysteries greater, and more interesting, than the self.

I am prepared to surrender.

How many times have we read some version of it? We must abandon our rule, our dominance, our control, our charge. It is the only way to peace, et cetera.

Anyway, for the time being, now there they are, the two of them walking south along the beach. A pretty day, not too much wind, warm enough for both of them to go without hats or gloves, sun coming and going, red Thermos in hand, cigarette between Hank's fingers. And me, I'm sitting up on the promenade with the love of my life. We're eating fried clams from red baskets and the seagulls are at us, flapping their wings and screaming to one another.

In a few weeks we'll all have dinner together. Tess and I, Hank Fletcher and my dad, and Seymour. A new iteration of an old family. Another version in such a long series of years, and families.

I say to Tess, I say with my mouth full, “Ah, Dad's new friend.”

Or maybe I say something worse, something vicious, or in a crueler tone, and Tess, she tells me I'm an asshole. She explains to me once again that I should be kind to my father, and then she says, offhanded, not as some great pronouncement, “Sometimes I think he is braver than any of us.”

And I ask, “Braver even than my mother?”

“Yes, Joe.”

I look at her then, the side of her face, grease glossing her lips. I don't know Tess to dismiss my mother ever, not in any way. She gets up and brushes her hands on her jeans. Slap slap slap. Back, forward, back. Universal pattern, universal rhythm.

She walks out to the metal railing and calls to them, “Richard, Hank.” Three syllables. Another unit.

The two men turn and look up, and when they see her there, smile and shine and wave. I watch her disappear down the steps to the sand, vanishing in segments—feet, legs, waist, shoulders, neck, head. Gone.

M
y mother in prison, a dying animal. Some essential thing leaching out of her. My father shifting. The muscles around his eyes softening, relaxing, providing his face a new peace. In those days, in memory, he is so often in the distance. In the meetinghouse. On the beach with Hank. Crossing the yard, walking to the front door of his house. There is always a separating space—parking lot, sand, promenade, lawn.

Meanwhile across town: Tess pacing her cell. She is seething. She is losing weight.

Seymour is biding his time. He smokes. He gulps his whiskey down. He sweats. He eats little. Yet I have the impression he is never as drunk as we are. Always on the lookout, he is the careful one. He watches us. We make him nervous.

We are a single sick body. We are legion. Hot, sweating, trembling, hungry.

We were drinking too much. Those late nights at the bar, those afternoons on our off days, took on the mood of a lunatic militia's operational meetings. No matter the time, the location, there was always some version of the same staging, the same blocking. Seymour and I stayed seated. Tess began in some elevated position—bar top, chair back, windowsill—and progressed, eventually, inevitably to standing. This is the sensation of that time, the visual tone: Tess high, us low. Tess in motion, us still. Leader and led.

What have I not told you? What have I not remembered?

Other rapes in other frat houses. No one's surprised, of course. This we learned first from Marcy, and then from the
White Pine Witness
, proud pursuer of truth, rectitude and gun rights. I cannot remember the order of events. What we knew when, and all that. What difference does it make?

Whatever the case, this is what we came to know in those weeks before we fled White Pine for Seattle: No one had been arrested. Investigation ongoing. One rape was perpetrated by a group. A single witness had lost sleep and so came to the police. Or to the administration. The fundamental facts matter. And they are always the same. They compose the same stories, and are repeated year after year after year after year. The same violence, the same failures, the same impunity, the same verbs, the same nouns.

I am exhausted by them now.

I am defeated.

We have lost, I am sorry to say.

I am nostalgic for my old rage, my old fury, for the time when we believed we might destroy some rotten thing, some fundamental structure.

But I have given up.

The nights we drank and drank and drank. Nights we wanted to burn the houses down. Fraternity and sorority. Hell and heaven and the road between. Set them on fire. In the nights of our wild tears, our benders, we talked of pouring gasoline into bottles, stuffing them with rags.

But in the end, it wasn't fire she wanted.

W
e cleaned up for dinner. Somehow got it together. Took it easy on the whiskey. Prepared ourselves. It was a mild afternoon. No rain. Tess held onto my arm. Kept herself tight to me. I loved this always, but in particular then—for the surprise of it, for the pressure of her body against mine, the illusion of power it provided me. The illusion that I might protect her.

I think of us many years later, all of this long over, walking through Pioneer Square toward Elliott Bay, Tess holding onto me in just the same way—her fingers on my bicep, keeping me close. I remember pulling the door open for her, pressing my palm against the small of her back, guiding her over the threshold into that crowded haven of squeaking floors and crammed shelves.

What of these days? These brief moments of tradition and chivalry? Only that I liked them, and that they were not standard. I suppose that's all. That I liked when she inclined her head and pressed her cheek against my shoulder. That there were moments when we moved through the world as that kind of pair. Of tradition. Man and woman. Protector and protected. That I loved her in this way too.

That over time we were many different things.

Anyway, this day in White Pine, we were descending the hill, Tess holding onto my right arm, and Seymour to my left. All of us sober. Or mostly sober.

We cross out of shade, out of the trees where the road flattens and the promenade becomes clear. We are stepping into sunlight and it is one of those moments impossible to extricate from the season itself and all its banalities of hope and rebirth. What can I do? Spring had sprung, buds were green, we were happy, and as my father would say, must have said, Put your hand out the window, you can feel it, the warm current of summer.

Out on the promenade we met him and Hank and then all five of us went down to the beach and walked it to the far rocks. Walked it to the meetinghouse. We sat in silence and contemplation while the sunlight cut through the glass and the waves rolled in.

There were no great revelations, I'm afraid. None beyond the simple pleasure of sitting with those four people. Tess's thigh against mine, Seymour's great shoulder bumping me, my father down the pew and, beyond, Hank's white hair in and out of view.