“Give credence to anything God honors with light,” she said, almost sharply, and then, “Which cusp?”
“The Aquarian side.”
“Oh my. Oh my.” She seemed overjoyed, pressing her hands to her cheeks. She hugged me a second time. “Water, water everywhere.”
“And not a spot to dive,” said Mal, still sitting at the kitchen table. But Lucinda and I ignored him, saying another round of good-byes. This woman, I thought as I walked downstairs, turning to wave when I could feel her gaze still sheltering me, this woman might become my
adversary?
Wasn’t that the word Mal had used?
MY LUNATIC MOMENTUM
dwindles as I leave the sooty northern reaches of Glasgow. Signs tell me that I am approaching Loch Lomond and the many smaller serpentine lakes which fill the glacial gullies of central Scotland. I glide to a halt in the middle of a stone bridge over a stream and open the glovebox to look for a map. The glovebox holds an ice scraper, a scatter of petrol receipts, the business card of a mechanic, and a jaundiced white handkerchief, neatly folded, which must have been my father’s. No maps.
I stand on the bridge beside the car and watch the trickling water below me, wondering how many lakes it will join before it reaches the coast. Only then is my destination clear. Like a homing pigeon, I turn back south and, every turn correct as if by instinct, head to Ardrossan. There, I drive without a wait onto the ferry. It casts off within five minutes.
I have not been back to Arran since the brief excursion I took with Mal the first time he came to Tealing. Seen from the bow of the low-slung ferry, it rises like the archetypal island of dreams, green with spring grass all the way to its camelback ridge, its shores salted with patches of humid evening mist. There are more houses on its slopes than I remember, but that is probably an illusion born of my relentlessly romantic expectations.
The inn where Mal and I stayed for a night was part of a working farm near Goat Fell, the island’s summit. My father recommended it because a travel writer at the
Yeoman
had just discovered the place, though he had yet to write it up and make it fashionably inaccessible. Half of Mum’s malignant lung had been removed two days before, and she told me she was tired of seeing my hangdog face arrive so dutifully at the very first minute of every visiting period. “Go! Take that American bloke to Sweetheart Abbey, somewhere picturesque and mobbed with tourists! Make him listen to bagpipes! I’d rather see you when I’m home, where I can put you to good use instead of watching you simper at the foot of my bed. You’re so obviously wondering if I could die right here, right now. So go, and leave your good-boy guilt behind.” She said this with her typically brusque cheerfulness, forcing her voice till she was breathless and the nurse had to scold her and make her put on an oxygen mask. (My mother was never soft-spoken, soft of step or opinion. This made her a determined patient but not a good one.)
The road up the hills from Brodick is clear, and the early evening sun shines, still warmly, on fields of grazing sheep. When Mal and I took this road, it was drizzling, and we became mired in a massive flock. A farmer was herding them home with the help of a small avid collie (purchased, for all I knew, as a puppy from my mother). The sides of these roads are closely walled, so there’s rarely a way to pass such bucolic comings and goings, and the farmers make no apology. Cars may back up by the dozen and they wouldn’t spare you a glance; the best pace a flock of sheep can do is a tortoiselike hurry.
Like a grimy cloudmass, the animals undulated before us. With the windows down, the smell of wet wool was strong. “Charming,” said Mal, “for the simple reason we don’t have a curtain to make.” As I inched the car forward, keeping a respectful distance, there were long silences in which we could hear only the bleating complaint of the sheep and the clack of our windscreen wipers. The rhythm of the wipers began to seem vaguely sexual to me—as an absurd variety of things did over that fortnight away from New York—and I lapsed into thinking of Tony. Whenever I wasn’t with my mother, or talking to Dad or Mal or David or Dennis, I was thinking obsessively about Tony, about his body, its hard, soft, and callused places, summoning up the pale brown hair whorled like tiny nests around his nipples, the single barely audible gasp he uttered when he came, and his voice: flirtatious yet dry, camouflaging too well whatever he felt. (Living inside my tumultuous desire, I would forget that I kept my own emotions concealed.)
Mal startled me when he laughed. “Imagine being in the midst of a terrible love spat when you round a corner and find yourself stuck in this livestock jam. You’ve been needling and needling away at your lover, and now he’s just confessed he’s having a passionate affair and is planning to leave you. You’re calling him every name in the book, a fucking whore, a faithless traitor, an asswipe, a cunt, you always
knew
his heart was nothing but compost . . . but physically, you have to move by agonizing inches, with nowhere to go, forward or back, while these poor dim-witted creatures make their sad little noises. . . .”
Uneasy, I said nothing.
“You aren’t amused.”
“I don’t think I’d be so articulate. I suppose I’d get out and walk back down to the village.”
Mal eyed me coolly. “Sometimes you are so constipatedly humorless.”
As it happened, the sheep turned in at the farm where we’d be staying; this farmer’s wife was our hostess. The place was a good step up from your average bed-and-breakfast, however, because the family lived in a separate, modern cottage apart from the farmhouse, a place of ingenuous charm.
Now, turning off the road, I see a glossier sign than the one which hung here eight years back. The inn looks freshly whitewashed, its walls bolstered with portly bushes of flowering broom. The roof is lush with new thatch, and there’s a pebbled car park off to one side, so that guests no longer pull up by the tractors at the barn. I have a sudden memory of the wonderful porridge (served with good strawberries, cream, and maple syrup imported from my second homeland) and wonder if I’ll be laughed out the door for thinking I can book a room on the spot.
In the parlor, two tweedy older couples are sitting on the sofas, sipping sherry and exchanging stories about their day. Where I remember garish paisley carpet, the plank floors have been bared and sanded and laid with tasteful imitations of Persian rugs. I recognize the city hand of a hired designer and feel a little sad; Mal and I both loved the formerly tidy, earnest bad taste of this place, down to the violet tartan lino on the floor of Mal’s bedroom (“My kitchen would die and go to heaven!” he cried).
The farmer’s wife strides out from a back room and shakes my hand. She’s plumper and grayer but, like her establishment, more nattily dressed. “Cheerio, you’re a lucky lad tonight! We’ve a cancellation, and there’s even a plate of lamb I could hot you up if you’re peckish.”
In fact, I am famished, having had (how many lifetimes ago?) a bowl of soup at the Globe with Véronique and then missed my tea altogether. In memory of Mal’s mother—though I know, from Christmas cards and charity drives, that she is alive and well—I give a little credence to the stars, accept a cup of tea, hand over my credit card, and take a newspaper into the parlor to wait for my lamb. The two couples nod a civil greeting but do not (thank you again, stars) try to include me.
After supper, Mrs. Munn leads me upstairs, carrying my whisky on a tray. The perfect hostess, she does not say how odd she must find it that I have no bags. Because of the last-minute cancellation, I have one of the biggest rooms, at the front of the house on the second floor. I have a queen-size four-poster tarted up in blue-tulip chintz (Ralph should be here), two matching slipper chairs, my own bathroom, and a southern view of the island as it tumbles to the Firth of Clyde. The water, normally a dowager gray, mirrors the rose-colored sky. I’m a lucky lad indeed, but a lad who’s perversely sorry not to have one of the two tiny rooms on the top floor, little more than cupboards under the eaves sharing a common bath and looking up toward the summit of the fell.
I should go out and walk under the beautiful sky, for—again—I will be here only one night. But it’s time to read Lil’s letter, before I collapse into sleep, and I couldn’t do it while sitting on some cold rock already damp with dew. I am no longer a country boy, not even a boy of the suburbs.
My vital organs shrink in unison at the sight of Lil’s handwriting: a torrent of it, covering both sides of three pale green pages. At a glance, her soul poured onto paper. What did I expect, a telegram?
PLEASE AID PROCREATION STOP DAVEY SAYS OK IF CHILD TURNS OUT POOFTY STOP PLEASE GO FORTH AND LIVE LIFE AS NORMAL STOP.
But won’t that be the essence? All right then:
Dear Fenno,
Believe me, believe me, neither of us (you or I; David or I) could ever have imagined ourselves in this situation six months ago (or even, really, six days ago!). You should know right up front that it’s a situation of my making, not so much David’s, and any response you have at all I will accept fully, so long as it doesn’t harm your family in any way. Whether you say yes or no or you’ll think it over, whether you are flattered or insulted or flat-out embarrassed, that is essential to me.
I am picturing you reading this letter in your old room (which will always be yours when you come to visit), and as I know Véronique or Dennis will have explained, David and I plan to stay elsewhere tonight, because I know you need time and space for a bombshell like this. I wish I could have waited to write to you in New York after your return, but for obvious reasons, that just isn’t practical.
You will be asking a hundred questions, and I want to answer some of them here, before we face each other and talk. First, about Véronique: I hope you don’t think me a coward, but there is no earthly way David could have approached you, simply because of who he is, and I knew that I would just become a teary mess. All the tension and disappointment and misery I’ve felt these past few years would break the dam, and there you’d have been, in a doubly awful position for having to console me as well as hear this outlandish proposal. So I hope you understand that part.
Second, David. I will tell you that when I came up with this idea, he looked at me as if I’d gone daft. You know your brother well enough that my telling you this can’t hurt. You think of him as conservative, conventional, and you’re right, to the extent that’s how the world will always see him. Inside himself, and with me, he has other dimensions, both wilder and more tender. That’s why we’ve lasted through this hell together while all our friends make their families, while Dennis and Véronique seem to pop out their wee ones like loaves of bread from an oven (she says they won’t have another, and she may believe that but I don’t).
Because of how rigid he can be, David would not consider adoption. He gives an enormous amount to Oxfam every Christmas, and free care for the pets at that home for autistic children in Kircudbright, but he will not compromise on his own flesh and blood. Sometimes I think it’s the influence of your mother, all that breeding and pedigree talk you grew up with, all that control over bloodlines. (The suggestion of some anonymous donor, which I would never have made but the doctor did, appalls him even more.) When we got news of your father’s death last week, one of the first things David said was that he’d never live to see the grandchildren we’d be giving him. I knew then that he was living in absolute delusion. I realized that he’d have us try forever, giving up when I was far too old, and I knew, too, that the doctor was about to tell us he didn’t consider it ethical to continue helping us
—
so I had him tell David face to face. But it was before then
—
it was the day after we heard about your dad
—
that I told him this idea. At first he said no, flat-out no (he said it would be unfair to you, and you would never consider it for a minute, and I told him I had a hunch that wasn’t quite so).
If I go on too long about us, it’s because I want you to have the whole picture. I have been thinking incessantly about you, too, trying to imagine how something like this would change your life forever in ways that I can’t influence or prevent. I’m assuming, for instance, that you’ve never wanted children for yourself; perhaps that’s narrow-minded, and if so, forgive me. The legality of it all I couldn’t care less about
—
obviously we wouldn’t expect you to sign anything
—
but there are these cold awkward health matters we’d have to deal with, and I promise to make it all as easy as possible.
I’m not going to say David agreed to this easily. But he told me that he does love you unquestioningly, that he doesn’t care about your being gay, that he thinks you’re the cleverest of the three of you and that you’ve made the right life for yourself. I say this because I think, from our awful conversation on the way back from church, that you think he doesn’t like or respect you. Far from it. If anything, I think you intimidate him and you are blind to that. That’s why I was so cross with you; I’m sorry. I just saw this horrid gaping gulf between what I hoped I could achieve and what I had to do to achieve it. Because in the end, this is about my wishes, and I won’t pretend I’m not being selfish. David would be disappointed not to have children, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world for him (and no, to be honest, of course it wouldn’t be for me, at least not literally). His work still consumes him with a sense of concrete daily accomplishment, and though I’m a happy apostle to that accomplishment, it doesn’t complete me the way it does David. . . .
Lil goes on for another page, mostly about those “cold awkward health matters.” Her cringing desperation, which she makes no effort to contain, makes me resent her at first. It surprises me, though it shouldn’t, as do her momentary lapses of logic (who would excuse an aversion to adopting with free castration for kittens?).
But haven’t I often envied those who are unflinchingly honest? (Wasn’t Lil’s dancing, which flickered repeatedly in my mind as I drove north this evening, enchanting because of its aggressive physical candor?) And I know I will forgive her the benevolent lie—that she thought first of me, not of Dennis. (How my eavesdropping led me wrong there!)