When I got home, I went immediately to my office and pawed through the books. I’d felt embarrassed to be looking
through them at the bookstore, even though there was no one around. Something about Patty’s coming home early on CJ’s birthday had thrown me off guard—as if she could appear anywhere, at any time, to ask me what I was doing. I pictured her with the lavender panties hanging from her index finger. “Inner bitch, huh?” she would say. I felt much more comfortable at my desk, where I could bury the books in a drawer if she came home.
Literary Love Letters
turned out to be all but useless. Who knew these so-called great writers could write such pap? There was obviously a difference between writing to your sweetheart and writing for publication. But it was useful in reminding me that Lily’s letters didn’t have to be perfect. They didn’t have to flow like a well-organized software manual or business document. They had to overflow—with feeling. As far as lifting stuff from this book—no way. Most of it was antiquated, and belonged to lives other than Lily’s. Copying someone else’s love letter is like copying someone else’s grocery list.
For a book containing a phenomenally concentrated base of human knowledge on the subject of love,
The Greatest Love Poems of All Time
looked as cheap and tacky as a Kleenex-box cover. Clearly, it had been slapped together by an editor looking to make a cheap killing off texts that had long been in the public domain. It contained many powerful lines and ideas. But I couldn’t use them to seduce Raven. I realized, as I flipped past poem after poem by Virgil, Shakespeare, Petrarch, and others, that every one of these poems was meant to woo a woman. Who woos a man with poetry? Not Lily.
The
Seductress 101
book was full of practical tips, at least one of which I had already intuited in waiting four days to send my
most recent letter. Unfortunately, most of the tips involved actually seeing the intended love object from time to time, so my dream of a turnkey step-by-step approach proved illusory. But Ms. Natches did provide some useful advice. By way of example, the following passage from her “Is He Interested?” chapter: “Oftentimes men will feign indifference toward their love interests. The less you let this affect you, the better. This is something men need to do in order to feel like men. The best way to get them to betray their feelings is by introducing another man into the picture. If your man gets jealous, he’s interested.” As I have mentioned, they will not let me have any of my papers, so that is entirely from memory. But I’m quite sure it stands exactly as written.
Lily would have to seem as alive as me or you if I wanted to have any chance of pulling this off. Every decision along the way would require increasing attention to consistency. I couldn’t play at being Lily. The goal of a consistent Lily didn’t seem insurmountable, except in one respect. Appearance. Raven would ask for more photographs.
He would ask for more photographs, sexier photographs, indoor, outdoor, everywhere photographs. The only photo he’d gotten already had been a one-off. I hadn’t thought about having to replicate her over and over again. I can’t even recall the number of steps I went through to put that first image together. To replicate that face (without simply cutting and pasting it) would have been like trying to replicate a Jackson Pollock. I thought of the pictures on the Stocking mantle, how different Patty looked from picture to picture, and yet they were all pictures of her. How would I be able to tap into a method for creating
the appropriate amount of visual variety without making Lily seem like a dozen different people?
One evening, after I’d finished my day’s work and before Patty had begun hers, we sat down to dinner as usual. Patty fidgeted with her utensils, moved food around her plate between bites. She was agitated, or so it seemed to me. Because of our off-kilter schedules, dinner was typically when flare-ups occurred. Patty, perky and well-rested, would commence one of her criticisms, and I would be too exhausted from a long day to defend myself properly.
“You’ve been working hard,” Patty said.
“Hardly working,” I replied.
She shook her head. “Why do you do that?” She brought a forkful of food to her mouth. “You downplay yourself long enough, you’ll start to believe it.” She chewed and challenged me to disagree.
“My mouth and my brain aren’t that well connected.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think I can downplay myself as long as I want without believing it.”
“I’m trying to have a substantive conversation, here.”
“Me, too.”
“When I say that you’ve been working hard, what I mean is that you seem sort of distant right now.”
“Oh.”
“I want to know what’s going on inside your head.”
“I want to know what’s going on inside your head, too.”
“Asulcena was here all day yesterday and she said you never left your office.”
“I guess I was working.”
“That’s better.”
“Making subconscious progress on user documentation.”
Patty stood up to refill our drinks. “I don’t know about her.”
“Who?”
“Asulcena. She misplaces things. I wonder—and I feel bad saying this—but I wonder if she’s taking things, too.”
“What kind of things?”
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m thinking aloud.”
“Okay. Everyone does it. But you let the monkey out of the bag.”
“It’s just that I couldn’t find this pair of panties, and you know, they’re only panties. But they were expensive. And now they’ve disappeared.”
“Maybe they got folded into a shirt or something.”
“I hate to be so paranoid, you know.”
“Cautious, sweetheart,” I said, “you’re cautious. It’s understandable.”
Every future surprise party has its present misunderstandings, all of them to be resolved when the surprise arrives.
A few days later, Patty came home from work to find me packing a day bag. I told her that my aunt hadn’t been feeling well, and that she’d been asking me to come by for a while. When Patty saw me packing the laptop, she asked why I was bringing it along. That’s when I mentioned the research I wanted to do, into my family.
“I feel like it’s time I knew my roots a little clearer,” I said.
“You’re bringing the scanner, too?”
“Sure,” I said. “For old documents. Like family tree stuff.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” She planted on my face a passionless kiss.
Supportive Patty had turned into froward Patty. She didn’t want to have sprung on her, as a surprise, that I might not be at home or at the office. She’d gotten used to keeping me in my place, to knowing always where I would be. As a means of managing her worry. People who have lost a loved one in sudden and tragic circumstances often exhibit this type of controlling behavior.
“I know you don’t want me to go,” I said, “but this is something I have to do, for myself. I promise I will be careful. I promise I will be here before you leave for work tonight.”
“I would have liked advance notice on this one, Owen.”
“Growth is never painless. You’ve got to deal with spontaneity. I know it’s been hard, since CJ, to let go.”
“This has nothing whatsoever to do with CJ.”
“It’s a perfectly normal reaction.”
“This is not about CJ. Not everything is about CJ. This is about us. I just want to know ahead of time when you’re going off on a six-hour round trip to go see your family. Besides, if you’re so interested in your family tree, how come I haven’t heard anything about it?”
“I’ve been trying to process certain things from my childhood. And I think I’ve found the solution in genealogy. So I need to make a short research trip. Is that so strange?”
“Genealogy.”
“Yes.”
“It’s always something.”
“What?”
“You always find some way to avoid life. Some pet project that’s going to solve everything. But that’s not how it works, Owen. This is life. You can’t hide until it’s all over.”
“I couldn’t agree more, which is why I’m going where I’m going right now.”
“You also can’t get out of things just by agreeing, Owen.”
“I know,” I said. “Give me time.” I planted on her face a more passionate kiss, to which she acquiesced, and made my way out the door.
My aunt and uncle lived in a housing development, actually quite tasteful, as far as those things go. The variety of architectural styles and colors made it seem almost as if the neighborhood had sprung up organically, albeit with all the houses the same age. I was happy to see, upon my arrival, that neither of their cars was in front. My aunt kept the “two-car” garage packed full of boxes, with little pathways between the stacks. As a result, I could always tell who was or wasn’t home by which car was or wasn’t parked out front. Empty curb, no one home. I let myself in and set up my laptop in the den, next to the door that led into the garage.
I was raised by my aunt and uncle, and lived in the same house with them and my cousin Eileen starting at age eight. What happened was that my mother died when I was seven, and my father, with whom I am no longer in contact, was not capable of raising me. So my childhood was split in half. My father was interested in raising me himself and had every intention to do so. He was an honorable and loving man. Still is, probably. Overwhelmed with having to take care of a young boy and work at the same time, he had difficulty handling my mother’s death. She died of cancer. She had been fighting it for five years, the majority of my life. My entire life with her seemed like a long preparation for saying goodbye.
She would go to the hospital for treatments, things would start looking up, she would come home for a while, make meatloaf—I eagerly anticipated her homecomings with meatloaf in mind—and return for more treatments months or even weeks later.
My last memory of her was in her hospital gown, standing at the window next to her bed, hooked up to an IV. I stood next
to her. I had been looking out the window at the planes flying by—the hospital was near a small airport—and she had risen from her bed to stand next to me. I was afraid to look at her and did not turn around as she groaned with effort to leave her bed. Seeing my hands flat on the window, she put hers up next to mine.
“Never forget I loved you,” she said.
“I won’t,” I said.
She said she felt faint. My father helped her into bed. I pulled my hands away from the window and watched as her handprints faded away while mine, greasy from a meatloaf sandwich, remained.
After she was gone, my father did his best to try to keep things together for me, but it was just too much. I was a temperamental kid, and I was always wandering in all directions, getting lost, finding myself in trouble. Other family members, my aunt in particular, wondered aloud whether I wouldn’t be better off in a more stable environment. My father insisted on pressing forward, the two of us a family, “or bust.” But my mother’s death coincided with an increase in his workload, and I found myself alone for long stretches. Technically, he was home much of the time, but now that there were no more hospital visits, he dedicated more time to his inventions. His lab, which he’d set up in our garage, was strictly off-limits to me, containing as it did many dangerous chemicals. When he talked to me about his projects, he described the patents he hoped to receive, but in the end, he never invented anything worthy of a patent. I suppose he was something of a dreamer. My aunt, who had never wanted her sister to marry my father in the first place, took pleasure in describing his set-up as a drug lab, though I question the reliability of this view.
My mother’s death affected me in ways I could not comprehend, and after I was arrested for shoplifting—the police had found me camping in an abandoned lot, tucked into a stolen sleeping bag—I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. I spent the subsequent years, until college, at their house, in the company of my cousin Eileen, who initiated me when I was thirteen and she sixteen, as I explained earlier. My first love.
I should mention that the house I was visiting with the laptop and scanner was not the same house in which I had grown up. After Eileen died, my aunt and uncle sold that house and moved into this development, hours away from their old residence.
My aunt had moderate packrat tendencies coupled with a tremendous talent for organization. The garage was stuffed, but clean. She had taken Eileen’s life and packed it into boxes as a museum worker might, so that it could be unpacked and reassembled somewhere else for exhibition. While she was doing this, neither my uncle nor I were permitted to touch Eileen’s stuff or go into the garage. Once she was finished, we were again granted access to the garage, as long as we made sure to put everything back in its proper place. I was happy no one was home because I didn’t want to have to declare my intentions to my aunt and uncle. As I said earlier, they avoided talking about Eileen in general, and bringing her up unnecessarily would reopen old wounds.
In the garage, I made my way through a corridor between boxes until I found the section with Eileen’s things in it. Here was a life—a monument in dusty brown cardboard. I couldn’t see the writing on my aunt’s labels, so I pulled open the big garage door, flooding the space with light, with the sunny street,
the green lawns, the children riding past on bicycles. Another world, never mind.
Adjacent to the boxes with Eileen’s old books and art supplies I found what I was looking for. Two file boxes containing photo albums. Eileen and Friends. Eileen in Europe. Eileen ’87. My aunt and uncle kept some photos in the house, but they didn’t put them up on the mantel like the Stockings, and most photos ended up out here somewhere. I wanted later-Eileen photos, and those were in the albums she had compiled herself. I flipped through them, pulling out only those pictures with a large, clear image of Eileen’s face, post–high school, and scanning them before replacing them in the album. She had always looked older than she was.
I worked like this for several hours, until I had amassed a solid cache of Eileens on my hard drive, then I put my computer and scanner away in my car. I sat on the sofa in the living room and waited for my aunt and uncle to come home.