“What family matters?” I said. “What would stop
you
from pursuing any ambition?” At this backhanded insult, or so I assumed, Mal set his jaw and looked stubbornly out the window.
But then he told me, still gazing off into the symphony of artificial color about us, that when he was seventeen he made the finals of the first competition that would take him to New York. The week before he was to go (accompanied by his cheerleading family), his little brother was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease.
“I turned down Juilliard and went to the University of Vermont. It seemed callous, even to me, to leave home right after a virtual tornado had ripped away everything but the foundation. But you know, why I stayed hardly matters, does it? Maybe I didn’t have enough hunger for that life. Maybe I was secretly relieved. The little cellist we saw tonight? Voracious as the dickens.”
After another silence, I asked if he still played. He said, “Only in a state of thorough inebriation, a state I am now forbidden to visit.”
As we were getting out of the cab, I remembered to ask about his brother. “Oh cured, cured,” he said idly, as if this part of his story was a trivial postscript. “And grew up to be a royal pain in the ass leading a rather lackluster life. But who am I to judge.”
For a few minutes, we talked on the pavement outside his door. He told me (after I asked) that his father was now the senior state senator and majority leader in godforsaken Montpelier, his mother a social worker who counseled teenage mothers. “My mother would gladly be mother to the planet,” he said. “Last year she started a group called Mother The Mothers! The name’s printed in fuchsia, with a big fat red exclamation point, the bottom of which is a heart. I have bumper stickers with the toll-free number I’m supposed to be distributing to friends.” He smiled sheepishly.
Mal had an older sister who had married, produced the requisite grandchildren, and settled less than two hours from Mom and Dad—which left Mal with no patience for the younger brother, who still refused to come out (his excuse, that one gay son was “heartbreak enough”).
“I can’t tell you how many faux fiancées I’ve made nice with over turkey and stuffing. I hope you’ve never inflicted that indignity on your clan.”
I laughed. “No, not that one.” Then we parted, so that he could write his review. At home alone, thinking about what he’d revealed, I remembered that there was not a single photograph displayed in his flat, family or otherwise. I thought about the box of Armand in the bathroom and wondered whether Mal simply felt that photographs of any kind would vulgarize the beauty of his surroundings. This was, certainly, the first time I’d heard him acknowledge blood ties at all (except for the remark he’d made about leaving Felicity to his mother the day I’d agreed to take her).
Late that spring, I began to see Mal as ill, not just frail and tired. He came for dinner as often as ever, but sometimes he would not touch the food he cooked; he might not even serve himself a plate. If he wore a short-sleeved or open-necked shirt, I could see from the bones at his wrist and beneath his throat that he was becoming gaunt.
One night in July, he did not show up. (That he was in the city at all that month was a sign of illness as much as anything else. It had been his habit, I knew, to go to Europe for the midsummer festivals and then, in August, to pack up Felicity and lease a house on Fire Island.) As Mal was always punctual, I phoned him after half an hour had passed. I got his machine—even though, standing in my living room holding the phone, I could see that his lights were on.
It took me ten minutes to get up the courage to cross the street. I rang the bell and waited. Eventually, he buzzed me up. As on the night I took him my tuxedo, I found his door ajar. He called to me, and I followed wet footprints back to the bathroom.
Mal was crouched in a steaming bath. Never having seen him naked, I was shocked to see how thin he really was. To call him gaunt was tactful. But in that moment I noticed, too, that his torso was perfectly smooth in a way that had once been beautiful, his nipples strikingly dark, large and smooth as antique coins.
He was smiling. “You see me in the tatters of my God-given splendor.”
“Can I do anything?” I said, unable to hide my terror.
He asked me, evenly though he was shivering, to bring the phone from his bedroom. When I brought it, he asked me to punch in the number of one of his doctors, a number he knew by heart. I handed him the phone and left to give him privacy (this conversation I had no desire to overhear). In a few minutes he called me back and handed me the phone.
“She’ll call back,” he said calmly. Then he winced and leaned forward, hugging his knees. A dark plume spread through the water behind him; the florid odor of diarrhea filled the room.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Will you please close the door behind you and answer the phone if it rings?”
I sat on the green velvet chaise in Mal’s living room and pretended to look at a large, flamboyant book on the architect Gaudi. His buildings looked to me, at that moment, as buffoonish as cartoons. Listening to water draining, water running, to muffled scrubbings and rinsings, I began to shiver, too.
What should I ask? What could I offer? Wasn’t this exactly the sort of nightmare I had made myself a snail to avoid living, to avoid even seeing? As if to mock me, there in full view sat Mal’s collection of conch shells, displayed on a table by a window to reflect the daylight in their fleshy veneer.
Mal appeared quietly and suddenly. He wore a thick white robe and had combed his wet hair. He sat on a sofa that faced mine from the opposite side of the room. He just looked at me, as if looking would be the best way to know what I was thinking.
“She hasn’t called. Your doctor.”
Mal pulled his feet up, enfolding his shins in the robe. “This is the last place you’d like to be, isn’t it.” His voice seemed drained of its habitual irony, as if that, too, had been expelled by his body into the bath and rinsed down into the sewers beneath us.
“I’m awfully cold,” he added. “Would you throw me that throw, the one you’re leaning against?”
I blurted out, “Shouldn’t you have one of those helpers from the GMHC? Those . . . buddies?” The word itself must have sounded as ridiculous to Mal as it did to me, because he laughed.
“Oh, you mean a human golden retriever? Someone who’ll come when I call, fetch my meds, and never soil my rug with indifference or fear?”
“Well shouldn’t you . . .” I paused, trapped.
“Shouldn’t I . . .?” he echoed.
“Shouldn’t you have someone, someone to . . .”
“Someone to watch over me?” Mal hummed Gershwin’s notes.
“Doesn’t your family . . .” Everything I said trailed off, because all of it was disingenuous. None of these questions was the one I ought to be asking.
Mal leaned toward me and said, “Do you mean: proposition one, I tuck tail and head to Vermont, to die beneath my childhood blankie, or proposition two, some member of my family drops his or her entire life and comes down here to mop my brow till it’s cold enough to be embalmed?” Abruptly, Mal launched into a raging litany of his personal medical statistics: T-cells, white blood cells, liver this, kidney that. “I am living my life! I am far from dead!” he concluded, and the color his rage had brought to his face supported him.
On the table between us, the phone rang. Mal seized it. “Susan, hello, yes me. You are too dependable,” he sighed, almost amorously. He carried the phone back into his bedroom and closed the door. I sat, paralyzed, Gaudi crushing my thighs.
Every beloved object in that room, from the Tibetan thangka to the Guatemalan birthing chair, pointed a finger at me. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Yellow, yellow, yellow. Blind, blind, blind. Each had a different, equally justifiable accusation.
The problem was, something had reentered my life—or, in truth, had entered my life for the very first time, though I refused to see how unfamiliar it was. It was sexual longing, both fulfilled and unfulfillable, the kind of sustained tensile lust which accelerates until it will not be contained or diverted. Let loose to have its way, it can build a palace or sink an aircraft carrier.
Back in May, every morning for most of a week, I had gone through the sham of acting as photographic lackey to Tony Best, the odd midwestern man in the odd carbuncular house. He was businesslike and ironic about our arrangement. He was shooting reflected self-portraits in antique porcelain, in wrinkled windowpanes, in large iridescent bubbles blown with a child’s plastic ring (I did the blowing). Not until the fourth day, when it was drizzling, did he invite me into the house.
I was surprised to see how literally Victorian the furnishings were. They seemed to have nothing to do with this coyly relaxed character. In the tiny kitchen, lace curtains hung at the crooked window and a collection of matronly teacups lined a shelf above the sink. I wedged myself into a chair at a dainty table while Tony toasted bagels in the oven and reheated a pot of coffee, which I was still pretending to like.
“So tell me
your
story,” he said, as if I knew so much as a chapter of his.
Because I had spoken so little in the few mornings we’d spent together, I began by half-stammering my affiliation with the shop.
Tony, smiling with those flashy American teeth, interrupted me. “Still think I’m a psycho, don’t you, waiting for just the right moment to fit you, piecemeal, into a freezer.”
I laughed feebly. “Well, do you always pick up strangers this way?” I blushed, because so far he had given no indication that there was anything sexual in his intentions. I did not want him to know that I wished desperately there were.
“I meet different people in different ways, don’t you?” As he wedged himself in at the table, his knees touched mine and then pulled back.
“Not in this way,” I said.
“Well you just have. Haven’t you?”
From the next room, an old clock with a pendulum creaked. I wanted to flee, but my fear was only of this man’s teasing intensity.
“I’ve been walking this route most mornings for more than a year,” I said, “and I’ve never seen you before.”
Tony shrugged and smiled. “Here I am now.”
“Here you are now,” I echoed stupidly.
He asked abruptly, “Do you want a tour?”
He showed me only the ground floor: four miniature rooms crammed with dark, silk-upholstered furniture. Worn Persian rugs overlapped on every floor save the speckled lino of the kitchen. No two lintels hung at the same angle. He walked me through almost without a word, as if he’d been hired for the job.
In the living room, as I inspected a painted pastoral scene on the face of the old clock, I felt his body enfold me from behind. He said nothing as his long chilly hands slipped under my shirt and across my chest. “Oh God,” I heard myself whisper. In reply, I felt his mouth on the back of my neck. He had unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it down to my elbows, briefly pinning my arms, pausing to keep me passive, before he pulled the shirt away from my body and turned me around.
He did not look me in the eye, not once. He slid to his knees after swiftly releasing my belt. Protest after protest filled my head but made it nowhere near my lips, which were parted and gasping. I must have sounded and looked like a sea creature yanked from the water, and I was exactly that: snatched from my monastic element as rudely as a trout fooled by a fly. “Oh God,” I heard myself utter inanely again and again, like some over-the-hill virgin, but Tony was stealth made flesh. In the end, I was the only one entirely naked, slouched horizontal at the foot of the clock, its antique groans palpable all along my spine. But for the fact that my cheek lay against a Persian carpet, not piss-rinsed macadam, this was a position as far from upright as I could have dreamed of achieving.
I lay there, stunned and immobile, as Tony slipped into the kitchen. I could hear him at the cooker, the thump and whoosh of a burner ignited. By the time I had pulled myself up and reassembled my clothes, he came back in and sat on the couch. “I’ll bet you really prefer tea,” he said through a one-sided smile.
“I do,” I said, grateful for an easy question. I looked with panic at the clock that had witnessed my undoing. I was relieved and dismayed to see that only an hour had passed since I had entered the house. I did not need to open the shop for another two.
We had tea, both of us. Tony told me about an upcoming show he had at a gallery on Avenue A. His relaxation was infectious, and I took up where I had been interrupted in the kitchen, telling him about the shop. When I left, we made no plans. Halfway back to Bank Street, letting the timid rain soak me by inches, I recalled, and thought it strange, that not a single picture of Tony’s—not one photograph of any kind—hung on the walls of his house.
I vowed not to return the next morning, and I kept this promise, cleaving to the river instead and walking the edge of the island all the way through Battery Park. But the morning after, I was back at Charles and Greenwich; by the end of the summer, I was meeting Tony three or four times a week and, rain or shine, going through the same animal rites over and over, predictable as marital intimacy (though who am I to compare?). I did not try to take our meetings to another setting, nor did he. I probably believed that they were safely contained by that arcane parlor, dark and crimson as a beating heart. Nothing which happened in there should count as real. The rest of my days and weeks progressed as usual, though I would sometimes fall asleep an hour or two earlier than I had. No one remarked on any difference in me—no one but Felicity. When I returned from my liaisons, she flew at me more eagerly than usual, even roughly, as if to repossess me. An animal behaviorist would probably say that this possessiveness was just the instinctive response of her biological clock, so much more keenly tuned in animals, to my longer-than-normal absence on these mornings. But when she beaked my ear and murmured her odd little “Didn’t I say so, sweet?” the question, now a warning, seemed more than coincidental.
EIGHT
W
HEN I AWAKE
for the second time today, it is still light. My head throbs and my consciousness is as sodden as the pillow on which I’ve drunkenly drooled after (apparently) passing out on my bed. One of the flower arrangements from lunch sits on the bedside table: white peonies, the metaphorical antonym of my psyche at this moment. I do not remember coming upstairs after the guests’ departure and am seized by the mortifying thought that my brothers may have lugged me up here like a sack of horse feed.
But then I see the envelope on the floor, next to a glass of water.
The help did most of the tidying up; my one task, the reverse of my morning assignment, was to dismantle the bar. As I ferried bottles back into the house, I thought of little other than the envelope in the desk upstairs, the envelope addressed to me. With the panicky obsession conferred by booze, I could not imagine postponing that investigation. The last tumbler replaced on its shelf, I dashed straight up the front stairs. I could hear my family gathering in the kitchen, to rest their feet and gossip about the afternoon.
My watch tells me it’s half seven. I sit up and listen. Outside, the burn trickles carelessly along; inside, nothing.
I reach down and lift the envelope. It remains sealed. (So I did pass out.) Because my drunken impatience has now been eclipsed by sober hesitation, I lay the envelope on the bed and decide to leave my lair. After literally pissing away the day’s anxieties, I stand in the hall and listen again. This time I hear music, just barely, from the kitchen. I return to the loo and rinse my face, comb my hair.
But the kitchen is deserted. On the table, my mother’s serving dishes lie cleaned and draining on tea towels, face down as if in penance. Dennis’s boom box sits beside the sink, tuned to a classical station. This mystifies me until I see that David’s old collie, Cal, has had his bed restored to a corner of the scullery. He does not stir when I enter, and I wonder if he’s going deaf. Seeing him reminds me that I have not called Ralph to check on my own animals. They will be fine (Rodgie, nostalgic for his virility, avidly courting Mavis), but I feel negligent nonetheless.
The music pauses, and I am acknowledged with a reminder that this is “Aria Afternoon” (never mind that it’s evening) and that listeners like myself shouldn’t be shy about calling in requests. Maria Callas, I am told, will now sing Violetta in Act Three of
Traviata
.
I say, “Not in this house she won’t,” and change the station. My voice does wake Cal. He looks up at me, briefly concerned, then lays his chin back on his paws. Oh, just you.
As I fine-tune a station playing soft pop (for Cal, not me), I see a note under the boom box.
Sleeping Beauty: We’ve gone to that pub across from the petrol pumps
.
Join us if you’re roused from the spell.
(“. . . if you’re kissed by a prince,” he was probably itching to write; the cretinous medical scrawl is David’s.)
Relieved and disgruntled, I step out the back door. The sun is still surprisingly high; birds are still busy in nearby branches. The tables and chairs have been carted away, and the only sign of the luncheon is the hectically trampled grass, like the footprint of a Hollywood spaceship. This time tomorrow, that too will have vanished.
In the refrigerator, I find a pot of leftover vichysoisse. Reaching for the nearest receptacle, I use a teacup as a ladle and gluttonously drink it down. The aftertaste is pleasingly earthen. I rinse the teacup under the tap and fill it with water again and again, drinking until my belly feels taut. Pointedly, I leave the cup in the sink without washing it and then, as if I’ve been given another task, return to my room.
I shake the contents of the envelope onto my bed. There isn’t much (again, I feel both relieved and disgruntled). A schoolchild’s composition book, used but untitled. A birth certificate (mine). A letter typed on two sheets of that gauzy blue paper used for air letters. A pencil drawing. A lipstick.
I pick up the lipstick. I pull off the top. Though the simple mechanism resists at first, I deploy its delicate missile—a festive red, unused—until it stands fully erect. It smells old, like cheap stage makeup, and when I touch it, a small fragment flakes off the shaft onto my trousers. I twist the lipstick closed and feel my pulse quicken, as if I’ve defaced an heirloom.
The lipstick is French, embossed with the emblem of a perfume house whose prices my mother would never have paid. So then . . . my father had a mistress? This is the only other explanation I can find for such a souvenir. But why save it for me?
The composition book, filled with Mum’s round girlish handwriting,
is
hers. Now I remember: her kennel book. Here, she kept careful track of her dogs’ lineage, of stud fees paid, of performance at trials, of heat cycles for her bitches. One of the last entries is Rodgie, my dog; out of Cora, by Buck (a national champion), he was the most promising pup from her next-to-last litter.
Avid temperament, unusually eager to please. C’s keen white nose, B’s square hindquarters (built for speed!) Testicles late to descend, but Dr. B says sterility unlikely.
Rodgie, my thoroughly citified collie, has of course been (in petspeak) “neutered”; I can hear my mother scolding me: a line of champion herding dogs nipped in the bud!
I close the book and hold it to my chest, glad to have it.
This leaves the drawing and the letter.
The drawing shows a tree with intricate branches. When I turn it over to look for an inscription or signature, I find instead a watercolor sketch of a mother and child (the mother’s face a little smudged). The artist’s line is practiced and fluid: beyond the work of a student but short of masterly. I lay it on the bed next to the lipstick. Two artifacts of enigma.
The letter is dated 4 July 1989.
Dear Fenno,
I may or may not send you this letter. If I do, it will betray a certain weakness. If I do not, blame it on another. I have a goodly share.
I am back from Greece, still painfully sunburnt, molting like a snake, and in my cups. (The pain is my excuse.) This house has been empty before, but never so thoroughly as it is tonight. Your mother’s absence has many meanings. I confess that it is now not entirely unwelcome.
Today, I have realized upon dating this letter, is your newly embraced Independence Day. Independent you certainly are. In that and other respects, I thought of you often while I was away. I thought of your perfectly reasonable impertinence last winter (though quite unlike you), and I thought childishly of ways to give you a taste of the responsibilities you assume I should continue to shoulder. I thought of how I ought to visit you over there but of how I might prefer not to see your life up close. My particular cowardice: yet another weakness. Still, I should like to see your shop. I am half envious, you know. And admiring. I must not leave that out.
The last six months have been filled with irrational acts, beginning with a petty theft, ending with a petty betrayal. (I am constantly told that erratic or inexplicable behavior is “normal” in the wake of a “loss.”) At the Lockerbie air crash site, I stole a small object: a lipstick. Can I say that it is “insignificant”? (Might it not carry the trace of a signature explosive brew?) In the months since, I have fetishized this object, carrying it with me in a pocket or standing it up on my dressing table, like a work of art. Perhaps it gives me a pathetically dim taste of criminal thrill. Perhaps it speaks to me of death, personally, as your mother’s death should have but could not.
Another fixation I have developed is an appetite for the same unvarying dinner at the same unvarying pub, one I had never been to but discovered in Lochmaben on a return trip from a funeral. (I go to so many these days.) I drive there three or four nights a week and order the trout and peas. Plain, but cooked well. I like knowing no one, though the barman has become too familiar and tries to chat me up. I dread what he will expect by way of conversation upon seeing my sunburnt self after a three-week hiatus. I am not in a mood to be teased.
Greece was like the most irrestistible of women: a beauty and a trial. The tour itself was a mistake. That was a large part of the trial. I befriended a young man your age, or so I believed, yet when I returned here, I used my connections to terminate his employment. I dislike how satisfying this unkind deed continues to feel.
I am selling the paper. I will be parceling out some of my profits to the three of you in the coming year, for obvious tax benefits. You will hear more from me on this matter (when I am sober).
Thank you for taking Rodgie. I hope he is faring as well as can be reasonably expected with such a change of setting. The dogs that remain
—
Gem,
Jasper, Bat
—
I am sending to the farm at Conkers, for good, though I have heard the farm may soon be split up and sold. The businessman who bought Conkers has no agricultural bent. He liked the idea of a tenant farm but, in practice, cannot abide the stench of manure that wafts his way each evening to taint the rapture of sunset. (This is all extrapolation from rumors exchanged at the petrol pumps.) Nevertheless, the foreman assures me that the dogs will have a good place regardless of land dealings. He would take them to an excellent farm up near Kilmarnock. This way, they will be worked. They need to be worked. (You may have trouble from Rodgie on this front, but perhaps he is young enough to adapt to indolence
—
not yours but that of the city dog!)
Before you call me a traitor, let me say that the dogs would be neglected as I undertake a new project in my latter life. I have always wanted to know one thing well (as your mother did, and here by the way is the closest thing she kept to a journal, which I believe you might treasure more than your brothers would). As a journalist, I have studied many things, but not one of them well and with the circumspection of prolonged study. So I have decided to know one place, a new place. Next month I plan to return to Greece, to Naxos, an island I have seen but on which I have not set foot. From what I have read, I believe it will suit me. I will look for a house, something simple. You may conclude I have gone slightly daft. I could hardly prove you wrong!
Please be in touch with your brothers. As a favor to me if necessary, please compensate for the geographical distance you have chosen by, at the very least, wholeheartedly observing the right occasions. (Am I sounding too much the “Brit” you have called me out for in the past?) On the subject of occasions, have you received word from Dennis about his wedding? A French bride! I shall have to bury my prejudice from the war, and I am too old-fashioned not to be unsettled that I have yet to meet the girl, but about Dennis I have always had the feeling that some cosmic force protects him from all the foolish and illogical things he’s chosen to do. So if the girl is dross, then gold she will become. But that sounds cruel. What I mean to say is
There the letter ends, as if he wrote himself over a cliff.
What prevented Dad from finishing the letter and sending it? I can see nothing earthshaking about his confessions, yet they would have touched me. Or would they, back then? I try to remember where, as they say, my head was at that summer, and I do recall that I was still cross at my father for little more than acting like himself—always composed, rarely tearful, impersonally giving—through the dark hole of time surrounding Mum’s death.
I put the letter down, alongside the rest of my booty, and I push my face into the peonies beside my bed. They are still regal and fresh, but to my hungover nose, they smell faintly like mold. When I recoil, my thoughts veer elsewhere: Why hadn’t David given me this package? Had he pawed through it himself and been jealous? I imagine confronting him—until I realize that I am just as much the offender here, having poached the package from his desk. More likely, he hasn’t gone through the drawers containing Dad’s things. It’s been, remarkably, less than a week since there would be reason to do so.
I replace my bequests in their envelope. Twilight has drifted, sneaky as a tide, over my view of the meadow. I reach for the lamp chain but stop short. I am tired, and if I make myself fully awake, I will work up a miserly sulk.
In my boyhood bed, I sleep the sleep of the overindulged, waking twice but briefly: once, to Véronique’s melodiously autocratic voice—
“Regardez l’heure, enfants, au lit!”
—and then to David and Lil’s murmurings beyond our common wall. Their voices are soft, their words a blur, yet I have the fleeting impression that it is far too late at night for a married couple to be discussing anything but matters dismal or thorny.
TONY GREW UP IN MILWAUKEE.
His mother still lives there. She is blind and always has been. His father died a few years ago.
Tony was sent to a military academy at age sixteen after burning down his parents’ garage on purpose.
The summer his peers were in Woodstock and Berkeley, he drove a combine for a Mormon farmer in Missouri. He slept in the hayloft, where the strong smell of silage masked the fumes from the quantities of dope with which he smoked away most of his wages.
He started taking pictures after working, the following summer, in a commercial darkroom in Seattle and despising everything that passed through his hands.
He never finished college. He lived in France for a few years but never really learned the language. (He is too vain, it’s clear, to run the requisite risk of making an ass of himself.)
These were the raw, disjointed facts I gleaned about Tony’s life that long, exhausting, duplicitous summer. Why do I say duplicitous? I was never, after all, deceiving anyone . . . except, as it turned out, myself. At some level I must have known this, because I felt heavy with secrets whose secrecy had no rational justification.
It was, as I said before, not a good summer for Mal. If I happened to spend a morning with Tony and then the same evening with Mal, I would sleep ten or more hours that night, dragging myself out of bed only minutes before I was due to open the shop. I would sleep through Felicity’s celebration of dawn and her greetings to the birds in the trees out front. She would scold me as I slammed my way through a breakneck version of my routine (tongue-scalding tea, untoasted bread, a one-handed mirrorless shave while filling Felicity’s cups with seeds and fruit).