Some mornings I went down to the kitchen before even Mum was about. The pups’ mother came to trust me completely, hardly woke as I searched the small round bodies by hers for the markings unique to Quint, the puppy I thought of as mine. One morning I was so absorbed in my task that Mum’s voice jarred me. “Look at you, Fenno. You’re a born parent. The gals’ll fight each other off for you when it’s babies they start to dream of.”
I was brokenhearted (though I’d never have shown it) when Mum let that puppy go to a farmer up north. Not long after, I shipped off to school, and so many other concerns and preoccupations fell upon me—from all sides, like collapsing walls—that when I next returned home, the dogs seemed like distant old friends, friends whom you’ve never stopped loving but with whom you have surprisingly little to share. All my parental instincts, if that’s what they’d been, seemed to have washed away in the tide of puberty. I never stopped to wonder if it hurt my mother to see me gravitate toward other things—like me, she wouldn’t have shown it—but I suppose it must have. Even so, we were left, for the rest of her life, with an ease together that I’m not sure she shared with my brothers.
TEN
“H
ELLO THERE, MAY I HELP YOU?”
She reminded me of Lucinda, this woman—barefoot, wearing a loose tie-dyed dress that nearly touched the ground, wiry gray hair springing stubbornly out of a hair clip. She was cutting roses when I came to the gate.
“Tony. Is Tony about?” I said primly.
“Oh Tony? Tony’s gone home. We’ve just been back a few days.” She was smiling broadly at me, as if to assure me that any friend of Tony’s was a friend of hers.
When I continued to stand there, mute and clearly confused, she laughed. “Isn’t that just like Tony, not to let people know his plans. He left the place immaculate, but I imagine I’ll be getting his calls for weeks.” She asked me if I wanted to use the phone, to ring up Tony at his flat, but I declined. I was stunned, of course, having assumed all along that this was Tony’s home . . . but this would have been the assumption of a blind man. None of the trappings here—the fragile teacups, the misty Victorian pictures, all those gentle romantic belongings—had made a suitable backdrop for Tony.
I wandered slowly back to Bank Street, defeated by jet lag and the malodorous heat. When I had walked these streets in spring, they had smelled of new growth and fresh breezes, but now at this hour, at least until the pavements were hosed down, they smelled like an urban low tide.
In front of Ralph’s building, I stood about, uncertain, as if I were waiting for my own shop to open. While I was away, the neighbor’s rose of Sharon tree had bloomed and dropped its flowers. They lay about the pavement, furled and wilting, some of them flattened. They looked like small cigars, each one the turgid purple of a bruise. I decided to go up to my flat and take a second shower. Surely I was still half asleep, half dreaming.
An hour later, I unlocked the shop. In the phone book, there was one viable listing: a T.B. Best, way uptown. I punched the numbers, bucking my native hesitation. After four rings, I heard, “Hi! Theresa and Joey here. Talk to our beep!” I turned to the stacks of mail Ralph had arranged for me with little adhesive notes of superfluous explanation. I tried to see them as thoughtful.
Felicity sat on my shoulder. Still retaliating, she pecked at my earlobe every so often and made a low trilling sound halfway between a snarl and a purr. I had arrived back the evening before, and she hadn’t let me sleep more than four hours. Not that I’d have slept much anyway, thinking of Tony.
As I veered through the day, grateful for all the tasks I had to catch up on, I tried to maintain the odd relief I’d felt at hearing Theresa and Joey’s beep. Into what kind of insanity had I allowed myself to sink? But that evening, as I watered the flowers and cleaned out the birdbath which Ralph had allowed to film over with slime, my hands shook on the hose. I needed to call Mal, I reminded myself, ask how London had been. I needed to call all the authors scheduled to read in September, confirm the schedule before printing it out and making copies to set by the door and post at other shops. I needed to call my mother at one in the morning if I was still up, which I knew I would be. She would have been awake for an hour by then—to hell with recuperation—and I’d pretend I was calling to tell her I’d reached home safe and sound, let her make affectionate fun of me. Tony was the last thing I needed.
Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year’s pining, one long unfolding note. That first day back I recall in fuguelike detail, with perfect pitch, but as for the next few months, the autumn and early winter before my mother’s death, I remember only snatches of a superficial tune. Mal, just as his doctor had promised, rebounded with a new choreography of drugs—though he slept a great deal, often in the day, to keep himself alert for working at night. I did not visit him much in those months, but he came by the shop every few days. Mum’s doctor, on the other hand, proved wrong, even if his optimism was guarded, but I knew about her decline only from Dad. Mum sounded, despite the worsening cough she could not control, as energetic as ever when we spoke.
Ralph had reclaimed many of my evenings and treated me, with an occasional chiding allusion, like a child who had erred but returned to the fold. Against my will, there were times when I actively disliked him. Nevertheless, I found his company easy and distracting.
It was in January, after Mum died, after Mal accompanied me a second time, somehow willing to serve as my social foil, when time changed tempo again, when my life seemed to spin around, a car hitting an icy patch and whipping me in a vicious circle to face the same direction but with a fearful new perspective.
Our readings had hit their stride. We filled the bookshop to capac-ity every time, no matter how nasty the weather, for chapbook poets and mystery writers alike. I’d given in to Ralph on the T-shirts, and often now our customers would take off their coats to reveal the store’s logo:
Plume,
in archaically quilled script, above the
m
a wheeling owl. To this day, the sight of those T-shirts embarrasses me; I do not own or wear one.
That morning, it had snowed enough that I had to shovel the pavement. In the early afternoon, I telephoned my father for the first time since leaving Scotland. We exchanged stiff but agreeable small talk. Everything, everyone, was fine, just fine, as fine as could be expected. A waste of the telephone lines, but a dutiful waste. At my feet, under the desk, lay Rodgie, my newest companion. He had been one of my mother’s favorite young dogs, and I had, perhaps rashly, brought him back to New York. Felicity still expressed token offense at his existence every time we returned from a walk, but Rodgie was young enough to accept a large, loud bird as a dominant sibling. Mavis and Druid accepted him, too, on condition that he respect their rights to the shop’s one brief stretch of exposed baseboard heater.
That night, we expected to turn people away. It was 1989, and our reader had just published the first aggressively gay novel—a novel of mournful, mock-lyrical rage—to grasp the bottom rungs of the
New York Times
Bestseller List. Ralph cleared my desk to lay out twice the usual quantity of wine. I unfolded the hired chairs an hour earlier than usual; half an hour before the reading, they were spoken for.
Ralph liked greeting people at the door. He was a fixture in the “nabe,” as Mal had put it, and loved making strangers feel welcome as well. I preferred playing stagehand, laboring to maximize floor space, fit as many chairs in as I could, move a few freestanding shelves. Not until I stood at the podium to introduce the author did I scan the assembled faces and see how many looked stricken. I saw men much younger than I with dark spots on their faces, thinning hair, canes propped between brittle legs. But everyone looked happily expectant, and the applause which greeted the author (also stricken, also much younger than I) included hardy, militant cheers.
Once the reading began, I moved back among the shelves, but even there listeners had crowded in, sitting on the floor or leaning against the walls of books that blocked any view of the reader, many with their eyes closed. I pushed slowly toward the rear, making whispered apologies, until I could slip into the garden. On a more pleasant evening, I’d have found a few guests out here, gossiping over the free wine, but tonight it was bitterly cold and beginning once again to snow.
The hard white ground reminded me of the churchyard ceremony two weeks before. The earth was frozen solid, so there would be no burying Mum before a thaw. But there we all were, so Dad had her coffin placed on the plot where she would go, and the vicar performed the rites. There had been a large hymn-singing service in the church, but at the grave there was only immediate family; on my mother’s side, only a cousin whom my brothers and I had hardly known. Mum had had no siblings, a father who’d died when she was young, and a mother I could barely remember. So we were six: my father, my brothers and I, Lil, and the cousin. The air was so cold, it stung our faces like broken glass.
At the vicar’s bidding, we read, all together, the Twenty-third Psalm. Then he gave a brief homily, attempting light humor by remarking how my mother, of all his parishioners, would approve most heartily of the Lord as a shepherd, particularly if His collies’ bloodlines came from Tealing. My father did not smile. I don’t think he had the energy. He read a poem called “Dog,” by Harold Monro. It’s about an idle dog, not a working dog, but Mum had loved the lines “Beauty is smell upon primitive smell to you: To you, as to us, it is distant and rarely found.” (Dad was the one who discovered the poem, and copied it out for Mum, before I was born. She’d kept it in the kennel, tacked up beside our checklist.) Finally, we spoke the Lord’s Prayer. When we returned to the church, to warm our hands and feet before driving home for the reception, I went in last, turning for another look. There was Mum’s coffin, defiantly still above ground. In a way, how like her to die before the rest of us, as if to scout the terrain we would all have to cross—and yet, I thought with my last backward glance, how absolutely unlike her ever to be left behind.
I faced the magnolia tree, its branches sparkling with ice, and thought of my mother’s body, in cold storage somewhere until spring. The subject of a headstone had never been raised, at least in front of me. Perhaps that was entirely Dad’s business. Already I had given him opinions I ought to have kept to myself. Today, I had meant to apologize to him for acting so indignant about the possible sale of the house—as if I were still a child, still lived anywhere even near there. But when we spoke, I hadn’t had the courage.
From the shop, I heard occasional rounds of laughter at the gallows wit of the book being read; briefly, the laughter expanded as someone opened the door to the garden. I turned to look as it closed, muffling the laughter again.
It was Tony. He was smiling blandly, the same smile with which he had greeted me nearly every morning the summer before. The anger I felt at that smile joined forces with my grief; I turned away at the onset of tears.
“Well I can’t exactly blame you if you’re miffed, now can I? But to be fair, your little disappearance surprised me. Isn’t that what the French call to ‘parteer ah long glaze’?” said Tony, as usual mocking everything beyond his personal culture. “Or should I say, ah la Scotteesh?”
I wiped my eyes and faced him. “No. That means to depart without saying good-bye, without a thank-you or a note or even an apology. I left you a note. My mother was ill and I went to see her. She’s just died, in fact. If there was a vanishing act, it was yours.”
Tony’s smile never faltered. He stepped too close to me, and I stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t help being elusive. I was also gone for a while. I was in Paris. But I might have called, right? Not like I had to hire a detective to find you.”
“You didn’t even live there,” I said. “In that house.”
“Well I did, for several months. I do that. I take care of people’s houses. I like the change of scenery. If you’d been around when Madam Professor came back, you’d have found that out. Did I ever say the place was mine?”
I started toward the door. “I’m cold,” I said, as coldly as I could. My anger, against my will, was beginning to thaw. “And I have to be inside for the end of the reading.” As I passed Tony, he did not touch me, as I had hoped and feared he would. But he followed me, and just before I opened the door to squeeze back into the crowd, he pushed something into a pocket of my jacket. “My phone’s on the back,” he said. “I’m sorry you didn’t have it before. I tend to forget I’m not listed. It isn’t on purpose, you know.”
Ralph and I and a group of fans took the young author to dinner that night. Once we had ordered, I excused myself to go to the loo. There, I pulled the postcard out of my pocket. It was a reproduction of a picture I had helped Tony create: his distant face in the back of a spoon. The silversmith’s markings on the stem of the spoon looked like Chinese characters. Clover studded the surrounding grass. Over Tony’s barely discernible head, the edges of a large white cloud were ominously sharp. I turned the card over. There was nothing written there, but printed on the left hand side was
Tony Best, photographe,
below that a New York phone number, then
Maison Pluto,
with a Paris address and phone.
I had intended to rip it up and flush it down the toilet, but I didn’t. A week later we met at a Thai restaurant, then went to a club. Stepping into that tide of bodies felt like returning to a glamorous foreign country I had visited, long ago, with disappointing results. (Would I like it this time, the way everyone else did, the way you were supposed to?) We did not dance but drank beer and milled about, watching the other men. Watching me turn down drugs, Tony did the same. We barely spoke; we would not have heard each other anyway. After a stretch of time which might have been one hour or six, I felt calmed by the anonymity. Then Tony led me behind a curtain into an alleylike room. There was no furniture, and the lighting was blue, dim yet harsh. Half a dozen men fucked with abandon, as if each couple occupied a pod of invisibility. I had known about this, but I had never wanted to see it. It was more upsetting than I had imagined.
I walked quickly back through the dancers, the drinkers, out to the street. Tony followed. When I hailed a taxi, he climbed in close behind me. “It’s not my thing. I just thought you might like to look,” he said when the club was a few blocks behind us.
“How little you know me,” I said.
“Like you’ve made a big effort to let me,” he answered, but wisely kept his distance against the opposite door.
It was so late that it was early—hour of the quilt—and I did not bother to turn on the lights when we entered the flat. Two hours later, when the sun rose, Tony got up and dressed. Lying half awake in my bed, looking through the kitchen, I saw him examine the pictures on my mantel before he left.
The following week, he invited himself for dinner. He was all manners, complimenting my simple food, carefully skimming my bookshelves, charming Felicity by scratching the back of her neck; in no time, he had figured out exactly how she liked it. Eventually, he browsed his way to my family pictures. He held out the one of my parents posed in front of Tealing.