The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (31 page)

“What are you doing?”

“Calling Madeleine Henry. She was my best friend in high school. She died senior year. I want to see. I have to see.” Her eyes begged him to understand the lunacy of what she was doing. The phone must have rung twenty times on the other side before she gave up and put it down. She looked at him again. “This is our house. It’s exactly the way it was when we lived here. Absolutely exactly. What did you mean when you said it was remembering?”

He thought for a moment—had he said that? Yes, he guessed he had. “I don’t know. Maybe you came in here with your brother and, seeing you, it remembered. It wants to show you it remembers.”

She did not contradict him; only looked at him as if he understood something very important that she didn’t. “That’s not possible.”

“I know, but look what’s happening. This isn’t my house. I’ve lived here five years but none of these things are mine. These stuffed animals, the furniture, the Chipmunks record.”

She looked at him, then at the floor. “I was happier here than any place else in my life. The whole family was. It’s only a dumpy little house, but everything was great for us here. Dad was a manager at the aircraft plant, Mom taught at the elementary school, Conor hadn’t gotten weird yet.” She was talking to herself now, or maybe to herself and the house. By her tone, he knew he wasn’t part of it. “I guess there’s a time in life when everyone is your friend and is rooting for you. It’s never been the same for any of us since we left. I don’t even know why we left. Why did we have to go?” She looked at him as if he would know.

He walked across the room to the girl’s desk and picked up a framed photo there. It was a picture of her family standing in front of this house. Mom and Dad stood in back with their arms around each other, smiling at the camera. The girl and her brother were in front, Conor squeezing the top of her head like it was a bowling ball. She was laughing. There was so much warmth and rightness beaming from the picture that it was almost tangible. How happy this family was; how happy to be together.

He kept looking at it when he spoke. “Maybe the house missed you and is telling you that. It’s been waiting all this time for you to come back so it could. Your mother made great meals and your father helped you with your homework, didn’t he?” He looked up and saw she was nodding, her mouth slightly open. “Your brother was a pain, but was also really funny and made you all laugh a lot.”

She was still nodding but he was looking at the picture again and didn’t see it. He knew now no one had ever loved this house so much, no one had ever loved so much in this house. Of course it missed her and her family.

He was about to ask why she had come back a second time, but heard something that stopped both of them and made them look at each other.

It could have been the wind. A big gust of wind moving in and through the house, across the cheap wood that made up most of the building. Wind through wood can make a house sound for an instant like it’s groaning. Or moaning, crying—something human and very sad, sadder than an old man’s heart.

It could have been the wind but both people knew it was not. Both knew it was the house itself crying over its history. Groaning for the sadness it had known, the uncaring, dimwitted people who had lived here and hated each other and spread that hatred or stupidity throughout the house like disease. Or what about the sadness of people who had lived here with no dreams and few hopes? The weight the house had known of children’s anger at their parents, parents’ disappointment with their children. Fights, lies, raised voices and tears that resulted in nothing more than more tears.

The man knew he had added his weight to the house too. That his grey life was very much a part of that unhappiness, both when his wife was here and when he was alone.

For years this small house had hosted family after family of losers, creeps, cheque-bouncers and wife-slappers who hadn’t paid their bills, loved their children, cared for anything other than their own thin skin.

Then one day a family moved in and suddenly everything was different. These people loved each other, their lives, the house. It was almost all good. There was new paint, the beautiful children sang at the breakfast table, the parents rested their hands on the kids’ heads when they all watched television together. All this and so much more.

It took a while, but the house began to recover. The family painted the outside and furnished the insides with nice furniture, good knives, beautiful smells. So, like a dog that’s been beaten but then is adopted into a loving family, this exhausted house began to raise its head and would have slowly wagged its tail if it had had one. These people were nice, caring, fun. Their life was quality and that quality spread out across everything around them, even into the soul of their house. The house gave back whatever it could to show its appreciation. It kept its windows from breaking in a storm, when the roof leaked into the parents’ bedroom, the house kept the leak from falling on the bed and ruining the patchwork quilt that had been in the family a hundred years. It did what it could because it loved them all and appreciated them so.

But then father got a better job or mother wanted a bigger house. Whatever, one day they sold the house and left. Which meant another pack of losers bought it and turned it back into what it had always been—a roof and four walls over sorrow, smallness, defeat and worse.

No wonder it wept now. No wonder the man and the beautiful woman were silent. He because he knew he was part of why the place wept, she because she knew her life would never ever be as good again as it had been here.

O
NE OF THE THINGS
I loved about Michael Billa from the very beginning was his stories. There are some people who have the glorious ability to take the smallest, most forgettable events and transform them in the telling into adventures, a slice across the heart—or, at the very least, a good healthy laugh that dusts off the old boring shelves of our days.

“I had a telephone number once that was only one digit different from a city employment office. People were constantly calling and asking for a Mr Posamenti, Director of Municipal Employment. I’d be very nice and say sorry, wrong number. But after about the fiftieth time, my eyes crossed and I started seeing red.

“Another thing that drove me nuts was how stupid some of these callers were. Half of them sounded like they’d had trouble figuring out how to dial the phone! And hearing they’d made a mistake, I could tell some were really
suspicious
and thought I was trying to fool them ... This was the right number, but I was just a nasty little creep trying to trick ’em!

“One morning the phone rang when I was in a pissy mood. When the guy said ‘I’d like to speak with Mr Posamenti’, I stopped a moment, looked at the phone, and said ‘This is he.’

“ ‘Well, my name is Rickie Otto and I’d like to have a job with the city.’

“ ‘What are your qualifications, Mr Otto?’

“ ‘Waddya mean?’

“ ‘What kind of work have you done previously to deserve a job with the city?’

“ ‘I’m a Veteran and I’ve driven a truck. I’ll take a job driving a truck for the city.’

“ ‘That sounds good enough. Why don’t we make an appointment right now?’

“ ‘Okay by me.’

“ ‘Good, Mr Otto. Then I’d like you to come down to the Municipal Building next Tuesday morning, office number 32, dressed as an owl. Will that be convenient?’

“ ‘Dressed as a
what
? What’d you say?’

“ ‘Dressed as an owl, Mr Otto.’ ”

Michael also smokes wonderfully. He knows how to take the most dramatic drag on a cigarette and time it so that, while he’s inhaling, whatever he’s just said is sinking down inside you so it hits bottom and explodes just as he’s about to speak again.

He smiled and shrugged, blew smoke towards the ceiling. “Otto didn’t say anything for the
longest
time, then just hung up. Click.”

We met in a mysterious, romantic way.

Glenn, the man I had been living with, was killed in that terrible earthquake that did such damage to Los Angeles recently. We were very much in love and had remained true to each other. We considered ourselves two of the lucky ones in these Plague Days of
AIDS
, when so many of our other gay friends had either died of the disease or were waiting for their blood test results with little hope. Glenn had often bitterly joked that gays had gone from being social to physical pariahs in less than one generation. But the two of us had somehow come out of it all right: we had our love, we had our health, we both had jobs many people envied.

Then one evening when Glenn was out on the patio, the earthquake struck. Our house was literally split in half by the force of the quake and came down in giant pieces on top of my friend.

I was driving home from the radio station. Miraculously the only thing I felt was a cartoonishly strong buckling and rolling on the freeway, a scene straight out of a Mickey Mouse dream. I remember the grey and black pavement undulating like an eel, flipping cars and trucks in the air as if they were weightless. All the hours it took to get home afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about how afraid of earthquakes Glenn was; how often he’d said we had to move out of the state before the big one came. Smiling, I’d say, “How can you move out of California when you’re so successful?”

He’d say, “Because you can’t be successful when you’re dead, Ingram.”

That’s what I thought about while crossing the split and groaning face of Los Angeles that night of loss. Although it is very beautiful in the winter in LA, it gets dark fast. By the time I got to our house, it was around eight and black. Almost all of the lights were off everywhere, no cars moved on the badly broken street, the only sounds the sharp close crackle and hiss of fires, sirens, helicopters whopping low in the air every few minutes.

When I realised I was standing in front of where I’d lived that morning, I flung myself onto what was left and began to dig.

There’s a whole other story there, but it isn’t what I started out to talk about. Besides, I am not as good a storyteller as Michael, so all you would get from me on this are more tears and pleas to the dead and the living to understand why I wasn’t able to save the life of the man I loved.

We found Glenn before he died. Yes, somehow found him in that stink of stone and smoke. Working with our next-door neighbour, I pulled what was left of him out of the pile. Only to watch him let go of my hand, try to smile, die.

After he was buried (remember all the new cemeteries that sprang up after that, with places like Forest Lawn in such chaos? Real estate prices once again soared in California, only this time for space below, rather than above, ground), I wrote my sister Maris a letter about it. Two surprising things resulted: I received her reply very quickly, which, considering the state of things in California postquake, was remarkable. Secondly, in her letter she told me to call a man named Michael Billa. Her husband suggested I get in touch with Billa because he knew the two of us would “get along”. Only that.

I’d met my sister’s husband a few times and although I liked him, I was put off by his presumptuousness here: how could he begin to
think
he knew the kind of person I’d “get along” with?

But loneliness takes no prisoners; it either kills you or leaves you alone. It almost killed me. After sifting the rubble of the earthquake and my life, I found I wanted to save so little. A handful of things (besides memories) to brush off, have repaired,
keep ...

Shortly after that, there was a time when I browsed at the windows of gun stores, and made lists of doctors I knew who might be willing to write me strange prescriptions.

That passed, but a feeling of sad weightlessness didn’t. Death has various courses on its menu besides the old solid-line stop of brain waves, or the heart’s reliable thump.

In fact it was Michael who said death was like a bartender who can whip up any number of exotic drinks, besides the standard beer-and-a-shot, or double vodka.

“Think of the varieties of death, Ingram. I grew up in a town full of old Sicilian women. Many of their husbands had been dead since they were very young, but when that happened,
sixty
years ago, these dames put on black mourning clothes and
pffft
! Whatever sexy or alive stuff they had in them just gave up the ghost along with the husbands. And remember, these women were eighteen when it happened, eighty when I knew them!

“Or in school I knew this guy who didn’t get into Yale ... Something died in the son of a bitch the moment that happened! I’m telling you, to this day he’s never stopped talking about how he got fucked by the Yale Admission Committee. This is a man who has been very successful in life! Whatever it was—his high school ego, an assurance he had until the day that letter came from Yale—RIP, Rest In Peace.

“Small deaths. Deaths we can afford because we have so much else that goes on living in us. A drink analogy works there too—some people drink and drink, knowing they’re getting looped. But usually they can afford to ‘lose’ some qualities, let them die for the day, because of the situation. I’m not driving tonight? Then I don’t have to see so straight. We’re with friends? Then I can be an ass.”

“You think wearing a lampshade on your head is a kind of death?”

“Sure, the death of good sense. Dangerous stuff, if the wrong people find out. You know that. Look at the weirdos on your show.”

I’m a radio talk-show host. For the past five years I have run a hot potato called
Off the Wall
which welcomes full-blown kooks to come in, have a seat, and get whatever they want off their quivering chests. The show is strange, popular, and more often than one’d suppose, startling. The people who come on are creative as well as (usually) crazy. Doing the show reminds me of Mark Twain’s line about wanting to go to Hell, rather than Heaven, because that’s where all the interesting people are. Whatever one thinks about
Off the Wall,
it’s an interesting hour in your ear.