Tony and I stood on the barren roof of Ralph’s building and watched distant fireworks over the Hudson River. He brought a camera that night and photographed everything, almost randomly: the treetops and rooftops around us, the sky when it lit up, blooming with neon chrysanthemums. Our faces and torsos, our glasses of wine, the sparkling tarpaper under our feet. When the fireworks ended, he left abruptly. “Appearance I have to put in,” he said. I did not need to ask to know I wasn’t invited. For hours, I comforted poor Rodgie through his first night of bottle rockets and cherry bombs. He slept, shaking when the explosions came, under the sheets against my naked legs. His silky fur was wistful consolation.
I called Mal almost every day; when he felt well, he would bristle at the sound of my voice. “You again? What, you need a cup of kidneys for a pie?” He did not go to Europe for the festivals, but he was still reviewing new recordings and covering the few local concerts that mattered in the off-season. From working, especially from writing, he would gain more energy until he was, if not fully active, able to refuse with predictable arrogance all my offers of help. “Is this the diaper service calling? The baby hasn’t been born yet.”
When he did need me, he was all business, his gratitude hidden. I did not mind, because I had begun to think of this time, this season, as Mal’s Last Days, and my vigilance was selfish. I did not want him to die, and I knew I would miss him, but I planned on looking back and seeing myself as a minor league angel. What might yet be expected of me, I did not care to know, but I would face each task as it came. So far, my tasks were easy.
In September, when Mal’s lights were on more evenings than not, I began to wonder about his work. Unsure whether I wanted to reassure myself or brace myself for The End, I would search the paper for his byline, and just as I was sure his continued shoptalk must be delusion or pretense, there it would be, over an interview with Michael Tilson Thomas or a review expressing arch bewilderment at the hackneyed art direction in a new
Swan Lake
. “If we must go through the anguish of expiring on those waters yet again, cathartic though it may be, don’t we deserve the justice of a fresh imagination? Don’t we deserve to mourn without the black tutus, the crowns of black nylon roses, the forest backdrop that looks like it was lifted from a decorator’s dumpster at the Plaza Athénée?” He made less effort now to soften his critical blows.
One evening when I picked up his cleaning, I found two young women in front of his building unloading boxes from a taxi. “Excuse me, excuse me!” one of them called out as I climbed the front steps. “You live here?”
No, I said, I was visiting a friend.
“Not Mal, not Malachy Burns?”
After a bit of scrambling and ferrying, the three of us stood outside Mal’s flat with four cardboard boxes, a large framed picture wrapped in paper (plus a newly cleaned tuxedo and a package of pressed bed linens). “Hey, Mal,” the girls chorused when he answered the door. “Hope it’s all here! Juliette did the packing. She said to say thank you for letting her snag your spot. You can borrow it back anytime, she says.”
They helped bring the boxes inside but turned down a drink. Before they left, one of them hugged Mal and kissed him on the cheek, clearly surprising him. “Ciao,” he called quietly as they closed the front door below.
“Early Christmas?” I said.
Mal began unwrapping the picture. “The next-to-last good-bye. ‘Congratulations: You’ve earned the prestige of working at home.’ Proto-severance.” Pulling away the paper, he revealed a poster of a richly colored costume design: a girl or boy, it was unclear which, in a turban and translucent harem pants. He or she held a slim curved sword, testing its point on a fingertip. Mal stared at the picture for a few seconds, then turned it fully toward me. “La Sultane Bleue from
Schéhérazade
.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Well it’s yours if you like. I’ve looked at it long enough.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Say no if you want. I wouldn’t be insulted.”
“I’d like it. I would.”
“Well good.” He leaned the picture against the wall and walked into the living room. “Have a drink. To you, that’s an order. Though I am relieved those girls didn’t stay. Nice girls, but girls, and I don’t mean their gender. Funny how twenty-four-year-olds begin to look prepubescent. Remember that age? Remember how indignant you felt when your parents’ friends told you how young you were? How maddening it felt when you knew they were married by then, even had a baby or two?”
“Or had gone to war,” I said.
“Oh mine got off. Not that he wanted to, or so he claims. His mother smuggled him off to Wisconsin, to her childless brother’s farm. He’d never milked a cow in his life, but he acquiesced. The world might be at war, even at worthy war, but to his mother, my father
was
the world.”
As Mal was to his.
We ordered out for dinner (Codpiece coq au vin), and we ate in the kitchen, in full view of the unopened, unmentioned boxes. I knew better than to offer to carry them back to his bedroom or help him unpack. I could imagine their containing the dull knickknacks of any office—files, staplers, tape dispensers, a dozen half-used pencils and Biros—but more likely they were filled with artifacts as beautiful and rare as the furnishings in his flat: an autographed toe shoe, a costume tiara, the gold-leafed program to a gala premiere, a pair of antique kid gloves, a collapsible silk top hat.
After we finished our chicken, Mal opened his freezer and offered me a choice of several ice creams and sorbets. I declined; he helped himself. Our conversation had hit a lull, and I listened to the sound of a spoon scooping ice cream methodically into a bowl. When Mal returned to the table, he looked at me steadily and said, “Do you realize that you never ask how I’m feeling?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, though I was irritated. How much could he expect of me?
Mal shook his head. “No, no. Don’t crumble on me now. I wasn’t criticizing, I was . . . marveling?” He spooned ice cream into his mouth, closing his eyes at the pleasure. “I may be needy at present, but I do not need a nurse, a daily taker of my pulse.”
Not yet, I couldn’t help thinking.
IT’S BEGUN TO RAIN
lightly again, and the barn is dim.
The minute I enter, Lil says, “Fenno, this is such a bloody mess.” She starts toward me with her honeydew embrace, but I stop inside the doorway and fold my arms. This stops her too.
“I can hardly disagree with that.”
Her eyes shimmer. “You are so cross.”
“Yes. And I wonder if you even know why.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says. She covers her face with her hands.
I will myself not to complicate matters by comforting her. I say quietly, “If you could please stop crying for a minute, I could think a bit more clearly.”
She swallows her weeping and wipes her face on the sleeves of her white lab coat. Beneath it, I catch sight of her flowered summer dress and the delicate freckles on her chest. “That dreadful letter, so stupid to have dashed it off like that without—”
“It wasn’t dreadful,” I say. “It overwhelmed me, but it would have knocked me flat in a sentence or two. I was already knocked flat.”
“But you’re—”
“No, it’s my turn here,” I say sharply. I sigh and look away from Lil’s mournful face. I realize I’m leaning on Nero’s stall. The pony is lying in the straw, snoring. (Aren’t horses supposed to sleep on their feet? My poor selfish mind craves any distraction.) “I wish people would stop treating me as if I speak a foreign language and can’t be spoken with directly about anything whatsoever. Am I that intimidating? Am I that difficult?”
“This is hardly ‘anything whatsoever,’” says Lil.
“I’m not talking about ‘this’ or
just
this. The piper at the luncheon! The hymns at the church! The ridiculous ashes, which of course I do not have.”
Lil’s breath catches rhythmically in her throat, the aftershock of tears. “Well maybe we wish the same thing. And maybe we’re not the
we
you see us as. Not even me and David.”
“Well I
am
cross at David, I’m very cross at David. I don’t have the faintest idea where Dad’s ashes got to. If we’d just gone and buried them—”
“Please don’t let’s talk about that. Please.”
“You mean, can we talk about your agenda please? Well, I will talk about whatever I like,” I say. “That’s part of my point.” (I hear myself lapse into a whine, and then, reflexively, I hear Mal: “Nix the Rodney Dangerfield. No one’s dissing you; they’ve just got lives to live.”)
Lil begins to cry again. “Oh David should have—I wanted David to . . .”
“If you wanted David to talk to me about this baby crisis, that would have been an enormous mistake.” Giving in, I wrap my arms around her, which makes her cry harder, into my shirt.
“Stop interrupting,” she sobs. “I wanted him to
apologize
. . .” On the wall, the intercom sounds. “Oh bloody Christ.” She pulls away from me and picks up the receiver. She tells Neal she’ll ring someone back. She tells him she’s fine, she’s just had a sneezing fit. Must be the new straw. Observant Neal will swallow that one.
When Lil hangs up, she takes a deep jagged breath. I hold out my handkerchief. She sits in the chair by the intercom and blows her nose. She leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes. “You’re right, you talk. Talk about anything.”
From the stall next to Nero’s, a large bored-looking Angus cow keeps an eye on me. If I were paranoid, her expression would seem accusing.
“If you and David were to have a child that I—that you’d had because I helped you out—that is, if I could—and if I came back on the occasional holiday, the way I do now, what would that be like?”
Lil opens her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her breath catches in hiccups. “What would you want it to be like?”
“I don’t know either, and that’s what worries me.” Except that I do know one thing: I’m afraid I would want it to make me very important, from the moment I carried my suitcase into the home I loved as a child to the moment I left, each and every time. In truth, I would want to
reign,
as if primogeniture had come back into fashion. But I tell her an easier truth. “You know, I was quite surprised, and I still am, to discover how much I love being an uncle. It’s almost embarrassing. I mean, it’s so—well, it makes me so much, as your husband informed me the other day, such a textbook poofter.” Lil gasps and starts to speak, but I raise my voice. “Well, I don’t want that to stop, and I don’t want something . . . something other which I can’t possibly predict . . . to interfere with that. I mean, it’s a very passive state, isn’t it? Who would call me ‘doting’ or ‘involved’? I don’t take those girls to the zoo or confide in them about the vagaries of life—well, not yet. . . .” The cow regards me like the sputtering fool I am. Nero snores on.
“David says you could be as involved as you like,” says Lil. Her body and her voice are stiff—the paralysis of sudden hope.
“Magnanimous Davey,” I can’t resist saying.
“He is, you know.” She says this with sorrow, not anger. Sorrow, I’m sure, at my inability to
like
this brother as much as she knows he deserves.
The pause that stretches before us feels like a long quiet tunnel, an elastic band with eternal give. Now here, I think, here is the quintessentially pregnant pause. I have not lost sight of where I am and why I’m there. For the length of that pause, I am in power. I do reign.
I say, “I’m torturing you, and that’s the last thing I want. Listen. I ran away. The fix I’m in, dear Lil—and it’s to your advantage—is that I simply can’t imagine saying no to you, not about anything important, and it doesn’t seem fair to my sanity. Not a momentous statement and not one I came here planning to make, in fact I came here with my head in a storm of dotty confusion, and I’m sorry if that seems thoughtless. But this is a start, isn’t it?”
Serendipitously, the cow passes a large gust of wind, and when I look at her now, she beams with genuine benevolence. All right you idiot, I scold myself. Pull yourself together and live. Live: a command I received explicitly some time ago and try to respect for all the privilege it gives me. Never mind that it often feels like a burden I’d rather stow in an attic with the rash luxury, the true luxury, of saving it for some undetermined season in the future.
ELEVEN
I
N OCTOBER,
Tony left again. This time he announced his departure. He was returning to Paris, because he could care for the same flat (and the same four Persian cats) he had the year before. He might be back by Christmas. He would let me know.
“Now there,” he said. “I’m being a good boy, aren’t I?” We were eating at the Thai restaurant that had become our haunt. It was cheap, and it was just enough outside my neighborhood that I could avoid running into regulars from the bookshop. I do not thrive on what Ralph calls “schmoozing.”
“You’re leaving tomorrow, and you tell me now.”
“Plans can change! I wouldn’t want to mislead you by letting you know too soon and then, oops, the whole thing falls apart. You might have made plans yourself, you know, that depended on my absence.”
“I could do that regardless.” I smiled. “Orgies and the like.” I knew that what he said was probably true, the first part at least. Tony hated making plans of any sort more than a day in advance. It suited him perfectly to buy those cheap air tickets they call you about the day before there’s an open seat.
I had never been to Tony’s flat and had surrendered my curiosity. And though I knew that he sold pictures here and there, I did not really know how he made ends meet. From what I knew of his history, I was certain he had no family money. If I were American, I’d have asked outright, and I’d recently realized that one reason Tony liked being with me was that my rigid culture-bound reserve was a perfect match for his childlike secrecy (much of it gratuitous, simply a form of control). For all I knew, he had a job, even a respectable job, but concealed it to keep me wondering (and I, of course, would never express such wondering). Now and then we went to art openings and ran into someone Tony knew. Tony would introduce me, and the acquaintance would give me a swift knowing smile, as if to acknowledge our shared role as happy dupes, willing victims to Tony’s slippery charms.
Among those charms was Tony’s talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered silver reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams’s
Journey to Love
(its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. (“Here. Picked this up for you.”)
Sometimes I wondered if the gifts were bribes. Payments to maintain our fundamental aloofness at everything but sex. There we felt an equal fire, meeting each other without words but often face to face, looking each other gravely in the eye before contorting our bodies, unexpectedly tireless, into another configuration. Tony rarely stayed till morning, and when he did, our proximity ended the minute he left my bed. He would begin the day by ridiculing my “old-lady hotpot” (the kettle that switched itself off) or my “tender toes” (I like to wear slippers). Or he would answer Felicity’s morning summons with “Polyanna want a dildo?” or some other childish retort. In the end, I preferred his predawn departures.
I did not believe that I wanted anything more. After the initial panic at hearing Tony’s news, I felt relief. His absence would give me a productive respite for two or three months. This seemed to prove to my dense, illogical self that I was content with or without him, that I was a free agent. I did not wonder if what his absence would spare me was the exhaustion of a longing so relentless it had become nearly unconscious, as if I had failed to realize that the water I drank was salty, always salty.
Around the same time, Mal announced his retirement. He invited me, formally, for dinner. On my arrival, he opened an expensive bottle of champagne. He allowed himself two sips. “To my languishing liver,” he toasted on the first. On the second, “To my golden parachute. May the descent have glorious views.” He sat down and began to laugh hysterically. “Sounds incredibly sexual, doesn’t it? Like ‘golden showers.’”
I couldn’t laugh. “They fired you?”
“Oh please, ‘they’ have a conspicuously liberal reputation to uphold. They’d never dare. No, my pride’s the one that gave me the ax.” Mal told me that he’d begun to experience blanks while writing. Words he was about to type would vaporize, leaving his mind a hazier gray than the screen before him. After a few moments, like an overtaxed computer, it would hum to attention again and reel out all the words he thought he’d lost. But the more this happened, the more he doubted the words that followed the blank. They felt like the words of a mental intruder, a stowaway, and everything he wrote thereafter felt false, imposed, even insincere. He would lose touch with his convictions: catastrophe for a critic.
“I saw myself handing in a piece that my editors would turn down because what I’d written was delirious or demented or just a stupid bore.”
I had no easy reply. Mal had built a fire, and I turned away from him to prod the logs with a serpentine brass poker. Behind me, he said, “Here’s where you ask if I plan to use all my free time to travel, jet about with friends and family, take solitary walks on the beach because it’s really most posh in the off-season when nobody else is there.”
I put the poker in its stand and turned around. “No. Here is where you try to humiliate me by making me believe I would actually have said something so fatuous and daft.”
Mal laughed. “I can’t play these games anymore?”
“You can do whatever you like.”
“Because I’m a free soul?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“And another?”
“That you like to pretend you’re not cross or fearful or furious at me for . . .” My heart resounded with fear of my own. What was I saying?
Mal said wearily, “For your health? For your continued obligations? For winning the dumb luck trophy?” He smiled vaguely out the window. I had embarrassed him, an impressive feat that left me feeling ill. He stood. “I’m going to put in the cassoulet. I hope you like fennel. . . . No, no. Sit. Stay here and drink the champagne. It mustn’t go to waste.”
Over dinner, he said he had yet to tell his mother that he had stopped working, but he would have to, and he knew what it would mean: She would make herself much more present in his life, and yes he loved her, but . . .
“You don’t want her to take over.”
The skin around Mal’s eyes looked gray and brittle. New wrinkles reaching toward his temples resembled the fibers of a sable paintbrush. This accelerated aging made him look more than ever like Lucinda. “I don’t want to expend the energy it will take to stop her. Or inflict the pain.”
“So give in, just a little.”
He sighed. “If just a little were only possible.”
Conserving energy became Mal’s chief occupation. He would save up precious reserves to spend on a weekend away with friends or a few hours on his feet at a museum. At first, he spent most days in his flat listening methodically to his records, by composer or performer, in chronological order. (He was a defiant turntable purist, using his CD player only to listen to new recordings he had to review; these days, of course, it was useless.)
I would deliver firewood now instead of dry-cleaned dress shirts. Sometimes I would reshelve stacks of records strewn on his bed, wash dishes left in the sink. One evening, when he fell asleep listening to Lotte Lehmann singing Schubert, I found a step stool and refolded the linens kept on high shelves in his bathroom. Not long before, he would never have let a stranger dust his belongings or choose his fruit, but now a Honduran housekeeper came to the flat, and he paid both the grocery store and the Chinese laundry to deliver. He did not yet need anyone to care for his body.
He still crossed the street to see Felicity, once or twice a week. He would sit at my desk in the shop for an hour, sometimes reading an art book, while she patrolled the breadth of his narrowed shoulders and preened his thinning hair. One day in November, he sat paging through a slick new tome on Caravaggio. In the singsong voice he used to address Felicity, he said, “Now there was a short, vivid life, wouldn’t you say?” As if in affirmation, the sky released an unexpected downpour. It sounded like a truckload of glass beads spilling on the pavement out front. Felicity answered with a passionate glissando.
We laughed. “She’ll be doing that long after I’m gone,” said Mal, “and you won’t play her a note of opera, will you, you cretin?”
“All right, a little people’s Pavarotti now and then,” I said without thinking. Increasingly, I forgot to go through the motions of protesting his doom.
Mal continued to page through Caravaggio. “And no Streisand, please, especially not those ghastly duets with that hairy castrato BeeGee. You wouldn’t own such a thing, would you?”
The rainstorm had darkened the shop, and I went around turning on the banker’s lamps usually reserved for evening hours; Ralph liked what he called their blue-blood glow (I thought them clichéd but not a hill worth dying on). Suddenly, the front door blew open with a bang, sending the bells into a brief cacophonous frenzy. In the blast of cold wet air, I remembered another day just like this one, three years before, the day Mal had brought Felicity to meet me. From his shoulder, she was watching me now, and when I met her eye, she tipped her head askew as if to ask, What next?
AFTER A FAMILY CONFERENCE
over a late, argumentative dinner, we conclude that Dad’s ashes must have been put in the rubbish by the careless adolescents who cleaned up after the luncheon.
When Véronique makes this suggestion, Dennis laughs loudly. We’ve all had too much wine—Dennis more than I’ve ever seen him drink by far.
“You think it’s amusing?” says David.
“Well hang on, it’s awful, of course it is, Davey, but it
is
rather like some situation on
Fawlty Towers
or that restaurant farce everybody thinks I should like, what’s it called,
Have You Served Me
?
” Dennis contains a new round of giggles.
“You astound me. You bloody astound me.” David has been on edge since returning from work, the last to arrive at Tealing after the long day which began, for me, with watching him stitch up Nero’s leg. He’s made no effort to get me alone, though he did catch my eye during dinner and tried to give me a significant smile. I couldn’t help looking away. Now the wine has set him on edge yet further (while making Dennis just plain silly).
“This is what befalls of not engaging true professionals,” says Véronique.
“Thank you for your perspicacious hindsight,” David says.
If I have resented being on the sidelines before, tonight I am glad to feel like a bystander as these accusations fly (none directed at me, since everyone feels guilty about having blamed me for Dad’s disappearance). And undeniably, I’m enjoying the sitcom angle on our plight, even as I share David’s dismay. Then it occurs to me that all those sacks of rubbish are still in the garage, the luncheon having taken place (unbelievably) just three days ago. David, typically frugal, had said he’d haul it away himself.
“So. Let’s roll up our sleeves and have a look,” I say.
David takes a moment to see what I’m suggesting. “Well yes, right you are, Fen. Let’s have a go.” He stands and looks at Dennis.
Dennis makes a face of hilarious disgust and says, “Oh dear. I do have a bit of washing up on my hands . . .” He gestures at the long kitchen table, where three courses’ worth of dishes lie about.
“And a bit of sobering up,” says David. His twin, noisily stacking plates, ignores him.
As we walk to the garage, I say, “Why do you always come across as the oldest when we’re all together?” This is the first time we’ve been alone since our argument over Mum, and I am petrified of what we must face. (That my sperm may stand in for his? That a blood test might show I’m a corpse-in-waiting, the next family member whose ashes might be misplaced? That life can be cruel in devious ways?)
“The middle child’s the squeaky wheel, isn’t that what they say?” David pulls open the garage door and reaches for the light. “Or is it because I’m the one who still goes to church?”
“Food for thought,” I say absently. We step into the damp concrete chill. There are spaces for three cars, one occupied by Dad’s old Volvo. In the second is a cache of miscellaneous objects: a lawn mower, three large metal dog crates, an impressive stack of cardboard cartons (according to meticulous labels, back issues of veterinary journals like the one that held me hostage this morning), and an enormous box which claims to hold components of an x-ray machine.
In the third space, the one where Mum’s car once stood, lie the vestiges of Dad’s memorial luncheon: three stray folding chairs which were found only after the rental company pickup; a threadbare carpet placed under the bar on the terrace; and five bulging sacks of rubbish, each one the size of a walrus.
David sighs. “Maybe we could feel it, the box,” he says as he wrestles one of the sacks aside and frisks it from top to bottom. Struggling with another sack, I follow suit.
This strategy tells us nothing. David sighs again. He crosses the garage, rummages behind Dad’s car, and returns with a paint-stained tarpaulin. He spreads it over the concrete floor. “This is going to smell heavenly,” he says. “How’s your stomach?”
“Surprisingly sturdy.” I watch, admiringly, as David unfastens one of the sacks and fearlessly dumps its contents onto the tarp. But then, this is a man who can sink his hands into a cow’s intestines.
As if reading my mind, he goes back to the car and returns with what looks like a rag. “I keep them in the boot for breakdowns—for fooling with the motor.” He gives me a pair of surgical gloves and deftly slips on another.
We spread out masses of sodden paper napkins, tea leaves, smashed fruit crates, floral clippings, peach stones, broken glass, and slimy vegetable offal. It takes us two minutes to conclude the box isn’t in this lot—but then we face the far more challenging task of getting it all back into the sack.