The Color of Family (13 page)

“Yes, I do remember him. I thought he was just there to keep people from coming in there. Like a guard, you know.”

“Well, I suppose he does that too,” Mark said with a questionable laugh. “But if you had looked at the desk where he was sitting, you would have noticed that he has three joysticks with which he operates all three cameras. One man doing the work of three.”

“Robotic cameras, you say?” she said with a wide grin. “That's exactly what they reminded me of—robots.” Then her smile evaporated when she continued, “So, what happened to the other two cameramen?” Antonia asked. She couldn't even answer for herself why she had fixated so on those out-of-work cameramen.

Mark stared blankly at her for a second or two, then said, “I'm not quite sure what you mean, Mrs. Jackson.”

“The men who used to work the cameras by hand. What happened to them? Did they find other work?”

“Well, I guess so. I don't really know. The robotic cameras were being used when I joined the station, but if those guys were friends of yours or something, I can find out.”

“Oh no,” Antonia said in a panic. “I mean, I didn't know them. It's just that for some reason I wondered about them since computers seem to be taking over a lot of people's jobs these days.”

“Yes ma'am, I understand,” Mark said awkwardly, but with the politeness due to an albeit nonsensical senior woman. Then he switched the subject from the robot cameras. “So what are you doing in here and not in the studio?”

“Oh, well I decided to come out here and wait for Aaron in his office. It's not as exciting in there as I thought after all.”

“I see. Well, why don't I take you in to see the real brains of the operation around here.” And he turned to head into the glass-enclosed room. He checked over his shoulder as if to make certain she was following, and once inside the room said, “This room is the heart of the news operation, and that guy over there is the one that makes it all beat. This is Bill Watts. He's our assignment editor. He's the one who gets the calls when there's news and he's the one who decides which reporter gets which story. Bill, this is Mrs. Jackson, Aaron's mom.”

“It's a pleasure, Mrs. Jackson,” the man growled with a throat full of gravel, which was somewhat disconcerting since he was
rail thin with spindly hairless arms that swung awkwardly when he moved, and his face was gaunt. All of him came together in a way that would make someone expect a pip-squeak of a voice, not the voice of a man who sounded as if he'd just swallowed broken glass. He cleared his throat, but it didn't much matter as he went on to say, “You can have a seat over here, if you'd like. Things can get pretty crazy at any given moment, but right now things are calm, so I can tell you a little bit about what I do in here.”

Bill said, “Now what happens is that when calls come in about a story, I have to decide whether or not it's newsworthy and whether to send someone out to cover it. Most of the time it's news, but sometimes it's not.”

“How can you tell which is which?” Antonia asked as she leaned farther back in her chair away from Bill.

“Most of the time I can tell just by asking a few key questions to the person calling. Sometimes, though, I'm not sure, so I send someone out anyway, and if there's nothing there, the reporter will call back here and say that there's really no story. That doesn't happen too often, though.”

“Uh-huh,” was all Antonia said before she began staring off into her thoughts, trying to pick and choose and piece together the words for the question burning a trail through her mind. And only when it was formed completely, succinctly, did she say, “What happens if a story directly involves a reporter or an anchor?”

Bill looked at her with narrowed eyes and asked, “A reporter covering the story, or just another reporter at the station?”

“Either one.”

“Well, a reporter directly involved in the story would not be sent to cover it, I would guess. I mean, it's never happened. It's never happened, at least since I've been here, that any story we've covered directly involved a reporter or anchor at the station.” Then he studied her for several intense seconds before asking, “Mrs. Jackson, just out of curiosity, what makes you ask that question?”

Antonia looked past him at nothing particularly fascinating, except she saw the true answer to that question that was dancing and prancing and taunting her off in the distance of her musing.
But she could also imagine the look of complete and utter astonishment it would spawn from Bill. So she let her eyes slide back to his face and said, “It's just something I've often wondered about.” Then she clutched her purse to her and stood, pushing the chair toward Bill. “I've got to get going, now. Would you just tell my son that I had to get on home. I'll see him later.” And with that she was on her way, and torn. She was quite torn.

 

Aaron stepped onto his mother's front porch and brushed away the flakes of a newly fallen powdery snow that had collected against the black wool of his coat. The light of day was long gone, and the only brightness that shone on him was the dim glow of the porch lantern. He took out his key and stopped just before opening the storm door to identify the muffled sounds from beyond the windows. There was thumping, and sliding, and then a moan and sigh. So he then moaned and sighed, already wearied by only the thought of the task that lay ahead of him once inside.

Pushing open the door and stepping into the darkened hallway, Aaron slid his key from the lock and shut the door, then stood in the shadows of the faint light of the living room, dreading the command he knew was imminent. He slid into the room through the opening of one of the French doors as he peeled off his coat. “Hi, Ma. What're you doing?”

She looked at him with eyes that were not surprised at all to see him and said, “I'm doing interpretive dance,” she said good-naturedly, with a mock high-brow accent as she leaned forward onto the back of the chair she was pushing and stuck one playful leg out behind her. “What do you think I'm doing? I'm moving this furniture back the way your father wants it. He'll be home on Sunday, so I thought I'd get a jump on it. I've got a lot to do, so come on over here and help me.”

Aaron undid his tie and slid it off. He dropped it onto his coat, which he'd strewn across the sofa. He went to where his mother struggled with the awkwardness of the table lamp and took it from her. His face strained, revealing doubt, he then chuckled and said, “Geez, we've shuffled this furniture around the room so much, that I honestly forgot where this thing goes.”

“Oh, stop it,” Antonia said with a self-conscious smile. “We don't move this stuff around that often.”

“Every other month counts as a lot to me, Ma.”

“All right, all right. Just put it over there in between those two chairs. Then we'll move the sofa back into place. That's going to be the toughest,” she said with a round fist on one hip and a troubled face. Then, it seemed, out of nowhere and completely without context, she said, “Are you and Maggie having sexual problems?”

Aaron set the table lamp in place and straightened the chair that had been pushed astray in the move. Scarcely able to believe what he'd just heard, he couldn't think of anything more fitting to do than simply follow through with the only thing in the room that made perfectly good sense to him at that exact moment. There was nothing in his history with his mother that would have prepared him with words to respond to such an unprecedented question. And while he'd become accustomed, through the years, to his mother's non sequiturs, there was no telling how even she could have taken the leap from clandestine furniture moving to his sex life without stopping to breathe. Unless, he suddenly thought, she was trying to avoid what he believed she knew he was ultimately there to discuss, and he couldn't imagine a better way to evade the discomfort of
his
question than suggesting he discuss with his mother his sexual performance with Maggie.

He looked over at the sofa where his mother had stooped to get her grip on it for the haul back to its home just in front of the windows that faced the front porch. And he would have joined her, would have gotten to the other end of the sofa and hoisted it up, doing what he knew his mother thought he was there to do, except he could not find a way to move. So he shifted his weight to his other leg, just to make certain he could, then shoved his hands into his pockets in the manliest way before finding the calm to say, “Ma, I don't know what made you ask me such a question, and believe me, the last thing I want is for you to tell me, but rest assured that I'm not going to answer that even if there were a problem, which there isn't, but I still would not talk about something like that with you.”

“Well, that's fine. It's just that Maggie was talking to that fellow Josh, and she didn't know I was there. She said something about New Year's Eve being like bad sex the way you wait and wait for something to happen only to have nothing terribly special happen. I thought she was talking about you, that's all.”

Aaron nervously scratched his neck and looked up at the ceiling, where he pondered just what advice his mother might have given him in a universe where he would take her into his confidence over such a thing. Then he decided that the mere thought of that kind of talk with her crossed too far over the line of reason, so he said, “Yeah, well that's just Maggie talking her talk. Maggie might say anything. She's a lot like you in that way.” Then Aaron turned and sat in one of the chairs beside the table lamp, knowing he had to say what he'd come there to say. “Ma, can you come over here and sit for a minute? There's something I want to talk to you about.”

Antonia let go of the bottom edge of the sofa and stood straight up to look at her son. She smiled distantly at him, then went slowly to the chair on the other side of the table lamp and sat on the edge. Turning to face Aaron, she said, “I know what you're gonna say.”

“No, Ma, I don't think you do.” Aaron moved to the edge of his chair and leaned closer to his mother. He drew in a slow, deep breath then blew it out, wondering the whole time how a man confronts his mother about her lifelong obsession that had always stood between them, without the boy in him quaking with fear. So he just let it out. “Ma, today I experienced a feeling that I never thought I would have, and that was a fear of you. I was absolutely terrified of what you would do, and I can't live like that. Coming to my job like that with the tape of Agnes Cannon, Ma, was just going too far with this whole thing and it has to stop.”

“I know, darling, I know. And believe me, I knew it for sure after I got there. That's why I didn't stay around, because I was really ashamed. I could see that you were afraid that I might say something or do something to disturb the show and have my say about Agnes and Clayton and the whole mess, but please tell me that you know in your heart that I would never do something like that to hurt you.”

Aaron shifted and slouched back against the chair. He stared out the window at the falling snowflakes that were illumined by the lamplights lining the walkway as they carelessly made their descent. And there was something in their falling that took him deep inside himself to look for the spot where he might find that kind of faith in his mother; the faith that she would not place that
piano-playing interloper of her heart over him in all that she did and all that she thought. He searched, but to no avail, because for the whole of Aaron's life, Clayton had always come first. Aaron realized in that moment what he had always known was true—throughout his life, Clayton Cannon had been like the older brother who had been touched by the divine golden light that would let him do no wrong. The older brother who lettered in every sport and brought home straight As, and always said please and thank you, and yes ma'am and yes sir, and never ever sassed, and always got the girl, and then grew up to become a bright star of the world of classical music; except Clayton Cannon was worse than any older brother could have ever been because he wasn't Aaron's brother. Moreover, he wasn't even real, not in any practical sense. He wasn't a physical presence for Aaron, at least not in any significant way that should matter other than the fact that he was worshiped by the woman who should have been worshiping her only son. And that's exactly why Clayton mattered because in the world that Aaron's mind had created around the thought of Clayton Cannon, it was Clayton's physical absence that made him more of a threat than if he had actually challenged Aaron for the love of Antonia with brawn and free will.

So now, Aaron's mother waited for him to reassure her that his trust in her had not been shaken or weakened by one ill-conceived act. And actually he could assure her that his faith in her had not been compromised by only one misguided trek to the news station. What he couldn't tell her, though, was that his expectations of her had been lowered in random moments from the very first day, thirty-two years before, when he was just five and impressionable and already forming an interminable cognizant memory of Emeril and Clayton that had been ratcheted into his consciousness by Antonia. And since that was something he needed to tuck away for another time, on another day when there wasn't furniture to move and snow falling outside through which he'd have to make his way home soon, he kept as loyal to his belief in truth as he could when he said, “Yes Ma, I know you would never deliberately hurt me, and I'm not even saying that you hurt me today. It's just that today was the very first time I've thought in my gut that you had really gone way too far, over the top of what is acceptable and reasonable with this Clayton Cannon thing. Bringing that
tape recording to me at the station…I don't know, Ma. I don't know.” He wouldn't continue because if he did, he would have been forced to admit what he'd beaten down inside of him from the time he had the mind and heart to reason. Aaron would have to admit that with all things pointing to his mother's sound mind, it could all very well, most probably be true.