The Full Cleveland (15 page)

Mickey said, “It's like, wearing makeup?”

It's true. The fish was that glamorous. She had an electric blue body, rounds of rouge for cheeks, and, arching outrageously over the eyes and down the back, two streaks of shocking yellow, which it wore in a kind of flip, like it was hair. Her eyes were wide and open, rimmed in black, and her
mouth.
Her mouth was almost an insult of irony, a joke of duplicity, because her lips were shaped and sensual, puckered into a full-blown, deep-pink, drop-dead kiss.

The General deftly took it off the hook, placed it on the deck, and we all knelt down, more than admiring it.

From the moment it had made its dramatic entrance onto the boat it was obvious to all of us that we were dealing with something superior. Unlike her predecessors, she did not appear hysterical. She flapped only serenely, primly even, as if she were still swimming, or expected to be soon. If she knew she was going to die, she was far too dignified to let on. Instead she projected a certain noble patience, perhaps with human nature, as if she had been in death traps before, and knew from experience that no man had the heart to go through with it.

“It put up a good fight,” The General said. “For such a small fish.”

“What is she, Dad?”

“Some kind of an angelfish, I'd guess, shallow water, but I'll have to look her up.” And he dashed below to get his fish book and dashed back up again.

“It's too small to eat,” Mickey said, doting over my fish, adoring it, trying to cup it in her hands.

“My one fish, and we have to throw it back,” I said, nervously looking at The General to make sure.

“You could keep this one and have it mounted,” The General said, paging fast through his fish book. “It's legal. Or about.” He must have already mentally measured my fish. “It would look awfully good on your dad's library wall.”

“But is it big enough to kill?” I asked.

But it was too late, I had already thought of my father. The fact is, I could keep this fish. I could just break the law. I could have it stuffed like The General's fish, and bring it home to my father for what didn't happen on the sailboat that day. Except would my father ever remember the fish he never caught? Would he have any recollection of how I had hoped for him the time we sat in the cockpit together? He'd probably just look it over with great interest like any other present and say, “Ah.”

“She's not a yellow angel,” The General said, removing his Ray·Bans to study my fish, and then putting them on again to study his fish book. “Too much blue.”

He kept looking back and forth from my fish to his fish book. Mickey looked with him, and it was just me and the fish for the moment, and I touched the fish with my hands. A decision had to be made. Time was running out. I had to think fast.

•   •   •

Too much blue. It could be a fish on the wall, and once on the wall, it would have too much blue for all time. It would be beautiful forever. It would never give birth, raise schools of fish, run the risk of losing them, aging all alone. And people, a higher intelligence, would admire it, its beauty would always explain it. But to throw it back, then no one would know. If you thought of it that way, you'd almost be doing the fish a favor, to keep it and mount it and put it up on the wall.

“Sir? How long can it live out of water?”

“Not long. Take your time.”

I tried to think of what everyone I knew would do with such a fish. There were only two choices, keep it or throw it back, but there would be many more choices of why. My father, he would throw it back on philosophical, maybe humanitarian grounds.

The General would keep it for scientific reasons. He was farther along the food chain than the fish was and that fact would assure him of his right to nail it to his wall.

Mother would throw it back on moral grounds, not unmixed with sentimental ones. Plus, like Pontius Pilate, she would not want the blood of this fish on her hands.

Clarine would say, “That's a fine fish, now put it back in the water where it belongs.” She would likely go by instinct, and hers was reliably accurate and strong.

So far, no one was wrong.

Then I thought of Mary Parker. She alone could put the fish in context of all things we can know, including philosophy, poetry, science, and myth, and how the fish would fit into that universe. Then I remembered how she'd told me knowledge she could give me, but wisdom I'd have to get on my own. Even Mary Parker couldn't throw the fish back for me.

“What are you
doing?
Do you want it to
die?”

•   •   •

My head was splitting from sun and from thinking, so I closed my eyes, and from now on, I didn't think, I just saw. I saw the fish swimming again, uncertainly at first, after the scare here on the boat. I saw her start to swim, uncertainly, then more surely, then surely, then strongly. Maybe she would get by on her looks, maybe on her luck. Maybe her looks were her luck. Maybe some charming fish would come and mate with her someday. Maybe she would be protected, because she was beautiful. But mostly, she would be alone in the water. And that was what I could spare her now. But then I saw further, and even alone, she would still have her swimming. That would be the one thing, through all her life, she could count on. So when I saw her swimming, through all the seas of the world, accumulating her own kind of knowledge, and finally dying of natural causes in a cove not far from home here in Florida, I knew what I had to do. It wasn't philosophy or science or instinct or even wisdom and knowledge that made me decide. If I had to pick any one reason, I couldn't, but however it got there, the answer came through my eyes.

When I finally opened mine, The General had my fish in his hands, and I'll never know for sure, but he was probably on the way to the bin with her. I stood up and commanded, “Now, cut that out, sir.”

He looked a little at a loss, a little like a little boy who just got caught, maybe stealing a fish. “What's that?” he asked, at once slightly innocent and slightly ashamed.

I pointed out to the vast ocean, to the whole world, to the entire universe, through all knowledge and all time, to eternity. “She has to go.”

So, like a good soldier under strict orders, he took my fish and threw it. She hit the water with a shock of color, recovered herself in a streaming dive, and disappeared beneath the surface.

•   •   •

While The General went to repack the rods, Mickey and I stood astern, gazing into the spot in the water where we had last seen the fish.

“That was the prettiest fish I've ever seen,” Mickey said thoughtfully. “She was unbelievable.”

Knowing I was making a huge assertion without any hope of ever backing it up, I said with some confidence, “It wasn't only a fish.”

“It wasn't only a fish?” For once, Mickey Knight seemed unsure. She dipped her sunglasses, and looked over the rim out to the water.

Then slowly, like a nice slow wave coming on, Mickey Knight smiled. She seemed to like the idea, that it wasn't only a fish. As if she had been secretly hoping all along that it wasn't only a fish.

“Pure logical thinking can't yield us any knowledge of the empirical world,” I said, out of the blue. It was the thing I often said now out of the blue. I wasn't even sure what it meant, but always, when I said it, just for a moment, just for a glimmering moment, it explained things for me.

That fall seemed
to come earlier at our house than at anyone else's. I know that seems unlikely, but I spent the ten days at home after the McMansion and before boarding school looking out various windows from various angles to make sure.

The tops of the Knights' trees, off in the distance, were still green as could be. Rey McDowell's backyard oaks, which you could see if you pressed your face sideways against the glass, also still green.

But our foliage was beginning to change. It had drawn a faint outline for itself in orange, which appeared to encase only our yard and our house. Out back, the reflection pool was drained of water, its bottom already covered in fallen leaves. The Little-Boy Statue, so stalwart in summer, looked naked and cold.

The best possible spin on the situation was that we had precocious trees. I told myself it was insignificant. You tend to tell yourself they're just trees.

It was the second last day before the beginning of all-girls boarding school. Clarine had helped me pack, and we even had fun complaining how I was leaving and all, but then she had other things to do, which left me with nothing real left to be done except paint my toenails.

It was the one skill I'd learned for sure in Florida at the McMansion. Mickey Knight had taught me, and she was very good. Very professional. You start by stuffing cotton in between each toe and then you take it from there, and if you do it right, you can make it take several hours.

So I took the things to do it and went to the library, because Dad wasn't there. The library had big curved leaded windows, which gave a nice panoramic view of the back lawn. This way I could paint, and while the polish dried between coats, I could look out and check on the trees.

Outside was ideal for touch football, sunny and cool. My brothers and their friends were out there, and this provided some moderate entertainment in between toes. It was not unlike watching TV while you're painting your toenails, when you didn't really care what was on. So I'd paint a toenail and look up to see who threw the ball, and paint another toenail and look up to see who caught it, and so on, for ten toes and three coats.

Luke threw a pass, which sailed all the way down the yard beyond Matt toward the Little-Boy Statue in the reflection pool. I half expected the statue to turn, reach up, and catch it like he was part of the team. But the ball hit its head, and plopped into the leaves in the pool. Matt and his cute friend jumped on top of each other and fell in after the ball.

I waited to see that Matt's cute friend wasn't injured or anything, and resumed painting toes. I decided after they dried a little, maybe I would go out and throw one spiral and one lateral, and call it that and everything, and then say something casual and professional like, “Hey Luke, go out for a long one.” You know, just because I could and I was a girl.

I was really planning to do it, even with the cotton stuck between my toes, but then I thought I'd first call some friends, because that's another option you have while you're drying your nails. Besides, I had to tell someone about the letter Andrew John had brought that day in the mail. It was from my new roommates at boarding school, and it was signed Dotti and Ditto. Twins. They had included a photograph of themselves, sitting at the ends of their beds in the dorm. They had thick, ruffled hair and wore fat, black-rimmed glasses. The most disturbing part of the picture, though, was the third bed, in the middle. It was stripped of its sheets and had an old, ticking-striped mattress. The Twins had drawn an arrow with a dark marker. No question, this meant this was to be my bed, between them.

On the back of the picture, The Twins had noted painstakingly and pointlessly that they had taken the photo themselves, using a time-release device on a camera with a tripod, with 35-millimeter ASA 400 film. All that told me was that they couldn't find anyone who would stick around long enough to take their picture. I will say, however they accomplished it, it did capture their worried look, so expectant and sad.

The letter was not so much an introduction as a long, agonized apology-in-ad vanee. The Twins said they were sorry, but they had a peculiar way of lulling themselves to sleep at night, and although it had driven former roommates to other dorms, even schools, they hoped Td understand and stay. Since they'd been small children, see, they'd made themselves sleepy by sitting bolt upright in bed, and then hurling their heads backward against their headboards until they were unconscious. Since they both did it, they felt it could be due to some gene.

Anyway, you get a letter like that, and you have to call someone. My only question was who to call. Not Mary Parker. She'd already phoned and said she couldn't come to my going-away party the next night. But she didn't tell me why she couldn't come, and then she said she had to go now and she got off the phone. She did promise to write to me almost every day, though, and she said she'd sent me a going-away present in the mail, which I should get at school. So that made me feel a little better. I could call Mickey Knight. But something told me she wouldn't be too tolerant of The Twins and that letter. Besides, she'd probably hotwire her father's MG so she could come see the photograph, and I really didn't think it was a good idea for her to see it. So I settled on Jo. She could be very sensitive. She could help me analyze this situation for hours.

So I got up and walked on my heels to Dad's desk and picked up the phone to call Jo. But there was no dial tone. Naturally, I said, “Hello?”

Mother's voice said, “Hello?”

And then a third voice said, “Hello?”

Strange silence. Then the third voice again: “Hello. Thank you for calling the
New York Times
.”

Then, Mother's voice, in an urgent whisper, very
Sorry, Wrong Number
, like if she didn't keep it down she would die: “Could you give me the religion department, please?”

“Ma'am?”

Then Mother, like she could now see the shadow of the killer coming up the stairs: “May I have the real estate section, please?”

I quickly pressed the off button and stared at the phone. Had Mother said “religion” or “real estate”? And why was she saying it to the
New York Times?

I slipped the receiver back onto its cradle. I didn't bother to take the cotton out, I hurriedly left the library and hopped on my heels up the back stairs to The Tower.

It wasn't really the old Tower anymore. For one thing, Cabot had declared that canopy beds were not only juvenile, but sexist.

“How can a bed be sexist?” Matt had ridiculed when that happened.

“You're not that smart, for a pig,” Cabot had retorted.

“Stop this kind of talk immediately,” Mother had ordered, under the impression they were talking about actual sex.

Anyway, now Cabot's canopy bed was in Lucy's room, and Cabot had a kind of austere-looking single with a flat mattress, which for all I knew was stuffed with hay. A bed a monk would be proud of. Which is how Cabot liked it, because she was an artist.

I guess I didn't really knock, which is what you're supposed to do. But I had never really knocked before. Cabot swung around to scowl at the intrusion from the new hotshot swivel high chair she had, also because she was an artist. “Why are you here?”

“Why is Mother calling the
New York Times?”

She looked at my toes, and they annoyed her no end, you could tell. I wasn't about to tell her Mickey Knight had taught me. That I even felt indebted to her for it. I just started for the bed. She watched me walk. “What's wrong with your feet?”

“They're still wet.”

“Do men paint their toenails?”

“I am not a man.”

“That's no excuse.”

“Perhaps I am a man. I think I'm one inside.”

“I really don't have time for this.”

“You don't have time to hear your sister's a man? That is like no time.”

You wouldn't believe how annoyed she was now. The toenails, plus me being a man and all. But I really wanted to talk to her, before I went away and everything, and I wasn't going to be too picky about the subject matter. I decided to try to keep us talking, even if it was all about me being a man inside. I'd have to filibuster her. “If you notice, I rarely cry. All those years all my friends were crying over boys? They came to me. And when we were little and all went to the doctor? I always took the shot first, to show you guys how not to cry. And now that I have to go away? Do you see tears? Look in my eyes.”

She deliberately swiveled back to her drawing board. “News flash. Guys cry.”

“Not this guy.”

“Good luck with it at the all-girls boarding school.”

She wasn't in the best of moods, for sure. I sighed and sat on her torture rack of a bed. Then I told her what I'd overheard from the library phone. “I can't decide if she said ‘religion' or ‘real estate.'”

“Real estate. She's probably looking for a place in New York for when she dumps Dad.”

I hopped right up to go see her face. To see if it was a joke and all. She just swiveled more though. “What was that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever.”

I tried to take a look at her drawing, but the minute she saw me doing it, she hid it under her arm. “Whatever?”

“They fight all the time”

“What about?”

“Beats me. They don't do it out loud.”

“Then how do they do it?”

“Cold air.”

She kind of laughed. But it wasn't a good laugh. She was in a really awful mood. So I had to be careful and not act like it was all just her artistic imagination, working overtime, like when she said Dad “lost” a Buick.

“Do you think Dad had an affair?”

“Yeah, with a bottle of Scotch.”

“Really? Have you ever seen him drunk?”

“Not exactly.”

Exactly. Everything she'd said, I had already written off to her being a teenager, an artist, and in a really rank mood. One unreliable combination. “So you think Mother said ‘real estate,' then?” Personally, I was betting on “religion.” But maybe I was just wired to hear it, where Mother was concerned.

“Can't you see I can't talk now?”

I peered over her shoulder to see she was drawing tormented people, like before I'd left for Florida. It was so predictable, it kind of ticked me off.

“Stop looking.”

“Great. I'm leaving home, and you won't even talk to me.”

She mumbled, “I'll talk to you at your party.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Sorry, sis. I've got drawing class.”

It softened me up, the way she said “sis,” and that she had drawing class. I looked back at the picture, and she didn't dive on top of it this time. There was a woman with a tormented triangle for a head who was sitting in a lawn chair, and a guy in a kind of black-and-white Dalmatian suit, who appeared to be starting up a barbecue, supposedly so he could roast a marshmallow he had on the end of a warrior's spear. So I might have been exaggerating a little when I said, “Gee, I sure wish I was an artist.”

Snootily, she peered at my feet. “You can paint your toenails.”

I took off, and started hopping around the house looking for Lucy, always a safe bet for a pleasant conversation. Besides, I'd gotten a wild idea about Mother and religion and the
New York Times.
Since Lucy was the only kid who was Catholic left in the family, she'd be the one to interrogate.

I found her in the basement, in the cold, uncomfortable room where Dad had once put all the TVs, thinking that would take care of it. But apparently the rules were now worse than lax. Lucy was in there watching a boxing match.

“Jesus, Lucy.”

She jumped and turned around on the couch, her green eyes as big as winter apples. “You scared me!”

“Sorry, but you're watching a boxing match?”

“It's for the title,” she apologized. Then she added, “You swore.”

“But Mother would crucify you if she knew you were watching a boxing match.” She had no fewer than four TVs on, all tuned to the same channel.