The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  My mother doesn’t like a scene.

  “Oh.”

  And then she adds, “You threw up on him.”

  “Oh,” I say again at this new bit of information.

  She wipes her eyes with her hands. I could offer her a tissue or a paper towel, but I don’t move.

  “He would turn up every now and again. That lasted a while. I would see him parked at the grocery store, or across the street at the pharmacy. It always frightened me, seeing him. I thought maybe he was unstable or angry. I was afraid for you. Then, before it got unbearable, it sort of resolved itself.”

  I huff. “What does that mean?”

  “He stopped popping up, and eventually I never saw him again.”

  Of course he stopped. I was a ghost to him—he would see me places, I would appear, but I was in another dimension, belonged in another world—he couldn’t get close enough to touch me. Frank, in a cruel twist of fate, was now the father of two lost children. “For the first time I’ll bet he really understood his wife.” I emphasize wife to underscore a moral condemnation, even though I’m not clear in this moment about my level of outrage.

  “One other thing.”

  I wait for a final shoe to drop. My mother doesn’t say anything; my head quivers, a sort of physical prompt.

  “He wanted to be a . . .” she finally starts.

  “A what.”

  My mother just looks at me until she breaks and whispers, “Like you.”

  “A homosexual?” I’m thoroughly confused.

  “A writer.”

  The room narrows and the silent screaming in my head returns until it bubbles over and out into the kitchen. “No!” I yell, although to what I’m not sure. All of it, I think. “No, no, no, no, no!”

  A car pulls in the driveway and the engine stops. I look out the window. Sunlight. Kenny sits behind the wheel but doesn’t get out of the car.

  “Kenny’s here.”

  My mother bursts into sobs. “This is why I didn’t want to be written about!”

  I don’t understand what the this is. The affair? The shame? She’s fully sobbing now, big heaving jags. Again I make no move to comfort her; instead my throat burns and my body aches with feverish chills and my feet are leaden. I use the last of my strength to remain upright, and just when I feel like I might fall, a question pops into my head. “What is Frank’s full name?”

  My mother turns away from me, and when I know my own tears are inevitable I take a step back and repeat myself.

  “What?” she responds. “Latimer. I told you.”

  “Is Frank short for something.”

  No response.

  The whole kitchen rumbles like a large truck is driving by, but I know from the heat in my face that the thunder I feel is the manifestation of my growing rage. Through grit teeth: “Was his name Francis? Is that why you . . . Is Frank why you called me Fran?”

  She starts to cry even harder as the kitchen walls fully close in around us.

  “I told Jackie I was named after . . .” I can’t even finish, the humiliation is too much. In my whole life I’ve never been this angry. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  ◆ TWENTY-TWO ◆

  I grab my scarf and my jacket and stuff my feet most of the way into the shoes I kicked off when I arrived (less than eighteen hours ago) and I’m out the door in a blur, closing it quickly behind me before Domino can escape. I lurch toward Kenny’s car as I struggle to get my left arm through my jacket sleeve, and when I bang on the passenger-side window it looks like I don’t have a hand.

  “Christ on the cross,” he exclaims. I can read his lips through the window.

  “Let me in.”

  Kenny reaches over to unlock the door and I climb inside; it’s warm and Dan Fogelberg is playing on the radio and for half a second I mistake the blast from the heater for a gentle ocean breeze and my body almost relaxes before tensing up again.

  “I came by to see how you were doing,” he says.

  “The leader of the band is tired.”

  “What?”

  I point to the radio. And then I add, “We need milk.”

  Kenny mutters something in response, but my brain feels like soup and I look around the car as if startled to find myself in it. Fortunately, he repeats himself: “What for?”

  This time I understand. “I don’t know. For drinking. For Corn Flakes. We’re out of it, that’s what for.”

  “You bring your wallet, superstar?”

  “Just drive.”

  Kenny puts the car in reverse, and when we’re safely down the street and I can no longer see the house in the side-view mirror, I slap the glove box a good six or seven times.

  “Hey, this is a nice car!” Kenny protests.

  “It’s German. It can take it.”

  “You okay?”

  No, I’m not okay! “Daniel says I say ‘melk.’ Do I say ‘melk’?”

  Kenny shrugs and flicks his left blinker in preparation to turn.

  “Milk,” I say, over accentuating the i. It sounds completely ridiculous. I turn to Kenny. “Did you know Corn Flakes were invented to cure masturbation?”

  He chews on that before answering. “I think I knew. That rings a bell.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “What, you think I knew about this? I did not know about this.”

  My brother’s a genius in many things, observant—especially of human behavior. It’s what makes him a great attorney. I don’t know if I believe him, but I also have no reason not to. “This car smells. Your car smells.”

  “The kids.” Kenny takes a deep whiff. “There may be a McNugget under the seat. I’ve lost control of my life.”

  YOU’VE lost control, I want to protest. “McNuggets sound good right now.”

  Kenny laughs. “It’s like seven in the morning.”

  We drive in silence for another half-mile or so.

  “His name was Frank.”

  “Who?” Kenny asks. I glare at him as he pulls up to a stop sign, then he looks over at me and mouths, Oh.

  “Yeah, oh.”

  “You’ve talked about this already? Like, you just went there?”

  “She went there. I didn’t want to go there. I wanted raisin toast!” I should have done more to stop my mother from sharing—stuck my fingers in my ears, left the room, blasted a stereo.

  “She probably had a lot to say.”

  “Don’t you dare take her side!”

  “I’m not!”

  “You don’t know what it was like for me. He loved you.”

  “Dad? He loved you too.”

  “He didn’t like me all that much. And to think my whole life I thought it was my fault.”

  “What, you think he knew?”

  “You think he didn’t?”

  Kenny stares at me until I focus my attention on the road. “So what did she say. Exactly.”

  To think back on it exhausts me. “She said his name was Frank.”

  Kenny exhales his frustration, but seriously, what am I supposed to do, just launch into the entirety of it?

  “And . . .”

  “And I don’t know. There was a whole long spiel that touched on Democratic politics and something that happened in the New York Supreme Court, some other thing that transpired in the European Theater during World War Two. There was a teacher’s college in Herkimer County and also a woman who saw ghosts.” All of this is now jumbled in some horrific mishmash in my head, and I can feel a tight pain growing at my temples as this is all starting to sound like the plot of some lesser work by Eugene O’Neill. Did we really talk about ghosts?

  But isn’t this entirely about ghosts?

  “Why do they call it theater, the different fronts of a war?” Kenny asks. “The Pacific Theater. The European Th
eater. Why theater?”

  “Seriously?” I ask.

  “Seriously.”

  “I don’t give a fuck!”

  I press my head against the window and count telephone poles as they go by. When I get to eleven, Kenny says, “That’s the kind of thing Dad would have known.”

  “Whose dad?”

  Kenny doesn’t respond, he just looks at me with something akin to pity. “There’s no chance she’s making it up?”

  “If she is, she’s a better writer than I am.”

  Kenny nods. He’s slept on this. I think in his heart he knows that it’s true.

  We get to the market, but they don’t open until eight. Kenny grabs coffee and donuts from the little bakery on the corner and we sit in the car for twenty-five minutes making small talk, waiting for the store to open its doors. Kenny mostly blathers on about an eminent-domain case he’s consumed by and I half listen while refolding a map to restore the integrity of its original pleats.

  When the store opens Kenny stays behind to listen to the NPR news update at the top of the hour. I walk inside the sliding double doors and someone says “Good morning” and I almost say “What’s good about it,” but instead I tighten the muscles around the corners of my mouth and draw them upward as best as I remember how. I grab a basket and locate the dairy coolers at the back of the store. I’m struck by how small it is, the market. Grocery stores in New York are tiny, the carts look as if they were hit by a miniaturizing ray, and the shelves are stocked with itty-bitty cartons of things. If halfway down the aisle you meet someone pushing a cart in the opposite direction, one of you has to back up and retreat. This market is small in other ways. The food looks white and bland, there are no aisles with signs for ethnic selections. No shelves with oyster sauce, or tamarind paste or Mexican prayer candles, and I doubt anything in the store is kosher. I work my way up and down the aisles like my father did on the rare occasions we grocery-shopped together. “You never know what you might need until you see it,” he reasoned. My mother, on the other hand, thought it a waste of time to go down an aisle if there was nothing in it you required. But maybe with Frank she opened her eyes to another method: She didn’t know what she needed until she saw it. Perhaps that was good for her. I approach the produce, disgusted with myself for trying to draw larger conclusions from food shopping, and then continue my trek up and down each row until I reach the far end of the store—the bakery—not because I want another donut or don’t know what I’m shopping for, but to prove to myself that I am indeed my father’s son.

  I loop all the way back to the dairy coolers before I have to crouch to keep from vomiting. I lean my head over the yogurt and wait for the sensation to pass. When I feel like I can stand up again, I head to the checkout empty-handed. Remembering the milk, I go back and select a half-gallon because the fridge is too full to hold a full one. “Melk,” I say out loud again. It just sounds better.

  We drive home in silence until Kenny shares a story about Ellen answering a phone call from a marketing survey company asking about lotion.

  Q: What do you like about the lotion?

  A: Its moisture.

  Q: What specifically about its moisture do you like?

  A: The moist part.

  And then out of the blue he says what I imagine a lot of people think: “What type of person has an affair?” His words drip with judgment, but I don’t take the bait. Not when I came this close to kissing Mark mere days ago. Besides, it’s not the affair that I’m upset about—at least not yet. That wasn’t a violation of her relationship with me. It’s not even the lying to cover it up. It was never allowing me to know who I am, all the while knowing my identity was something I struggled with.

  When we pull in the driveway, Kenny hesitates. He turns off the engine but leaves his hand on the ignition. “So. You have a father again,” he says, all of it still sinking in.

  I blow air through my lips. “Appears so.” I can tell this is not the reaction he wants. “Jealous?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Are you going to contact him?”

  I shoot him a look before answering. “Papa Frank? That’s . . . something to think about.” My leg starts doing this involuntary shaking thing and it rattles the whole car. “Are you coming in?”

  Kenny puts his hand on my knee until my leg slows and then stops. “I haven’t decided yet,” he says.

  I sink back in my seat. “She was crying.”

  “Mom? When.”

  “When you got here. Sobbing.”

  “What did you do?”

  I look at him incredulously. “What do you mean what did I do? I left to get milk!”

  Kenny nods, like he’s unsure of what he would have done in the same situation. “You do kind of say ‘melk.’”

  Silence.

  “I can’t finish the book now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re feeling sorry for her?”

  “No! It’s just . . . The book doesn’t have an end and now my whole life is reset—all the way back to the beginning. I think about what I wrote and now none of it is true.”

  “Does it matter? I thought it was a novel.”

  “Yes, it matters!”

  “Now I really don’t know if I’m coming in.” I look down, surprised to see Kenny’s hand still on my knee. “Can you get out of it?” he asks.

  “Out of what?”

  “Your book deal.”

  I didn’t even think of the legal ramifications. “I have no idea.”

  “Do you want me to look at the contract?”

  “Jesus, Kenny. Can you not be an attorney for like five seconds?”

  With the engine off, the window begins to fog. Kenny just shakes his head; it’s clear he wants to say more, but he doesn’t. When the silence becomes unbearable he punctuates our conversation with the obvious. “This is so fucked up.”

  Naomi appears in the doorway, her figure blurred by the window fog. She’s waving frantically at us to come inside.

  “Look who’s up.”

  “What does she want?” Kenny asks, almost annoyed. He wipes some of the condensation from the windshield with his glove.

  “I don’t know. The milk?” It’s as if there’s no real way to figure it out, no action we could take to lower the glass partitions between us. We’re in another dimension; there’s no way for us to reach her, there’s no way for her to reach us. We’re so far away, this communication may have been recorded months ago and we’re just receiving it now in the way that astronauts in science-fiction movies receive messages previously recorded on Earth.

  Disgusted, Naomi sticks out the thumb and the pinky on her right hand and holds it up to her ear. I recognize this sign language: telephone. Someone is on the phone. We step out of the car and she crosses her arms to protect herself from the cold and pulls her sweater tight. “Why couldn’t I have had sisters?”

  I walk into the kitchen, clutching the milk in the crook of my elbow, tightly to my chest. My mother is holding the telephone out to me, her arm locked, as if the receiver itself might explode.

  “For me?” I mouth.

  She shakes the telephone insistently, like it’s growing hotter in her hand by the second. There’s a redness and swelling around her eyes; when she catches me looking, she turns away. I take the phone and lift the receiver to my ear.

  “Hello?” I can feel the cold of the milk carton through my shirt.

  “James, there you are. It’s Jacqueline Onassis.”

  I look up and everyone is staring at me, Naomi, my mother, Daniel—everyone except for Aaron, who runs full speed and head-butts me in the balls. Kenny walks through the kitchen door behind me as I double over in pain and Naomi starts jumping up and down and pointing excitedly at the telephone pressed against my ear.

 
“It’s her,” she whispers hoarsely, giddily clapping the backs of her hands like a seal. The Presidential Seal.

  “Oh. Hello. Hi.” I ease my grip on the milk and set it on the counter. I feel my heart beat, as if jumpstarted by one of the defibrillators that earned my father a letter from Jackie’s first husband all those years ago.

  “I received your message.”

  “My message?”

  “Yes, I came into the office to get some work done and you left a message on the machine.”

  How could I have forgotten? But honestly, with all that’s happened since then, how could I have remembered? I can feel the heat of so much attention on me. I take a few steps away and then stop abruptly; my mother’s telephone cord has been replaced since I stretched out the old one in high school, and there’s only so far I can roam. “That’s right. I wanted to tell you . . . to come clean about something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I didn’t do it. What you suggested I do before writing the end.”

  I can’t be certain, but I think I hear Jackie purr. Mmmmmm.

  I take one last look at everyone gathered around me before I lock my sights on my mother.

  I take a deep breath.

  “But I’ve done it now. What we discussed. I want you to know that it’s done.”

  Everything Turned Around

  December 1992/1993

  ◆ TWENTY-THREE ◆

  Allen is running late for our meeting and my anxiety increases exponentially with each passing minute. This should be done like the ripping of a Band-Aid, and yet here I sit, picking around the edges of a proverbial bandage, just trying to lift a tiny corner, any tiny corner, from my skin. I turn to look at the clock on his office wall for the hundredth time and knock over a stack of magazines with my messenger bag.

  “I’m sorry,” Donna says, “he should be here any minute.”

  “You guys need to clean up in here.” I kick the last few magazines by my feet to illustrate my point. I’m on edge all the time now, the slightest things set me off. Last night I snapped at Daniel for chewing too loudly, as if this mess were somehow his fault. I catch Donna’s reaction to my rude comment, so I quietly apologize by restacking back copies of Publishers Weekly along the side of the guest chair. “Who’s he with, Reggie?” I ask, wondering if I’m going to be subjected to the sight of my agent limping in with a raw steak over his eye.