…it was one of those businesslike face-to-face meetings with my Dad that I always dreaded during that period between exiles, before I was lost in the opiate haze. I was trying to persuade the old man to cosign for me on a student loan and he asked me to come down to his condo in Portville to see how I was doing and whether or not I was serious. He interviewed me like I was a job prospect looking for a position within his firm, which I didn’t really mind so long as I could get him to sign the papers for me. He wanted to know if I was serious about being a student again, which I wasn’t, but I worked the con as best I could.
Scotch was served; cigarettes were smoked. My dad sat behind his desk. Behind him was a framed original oil painting of a female nude with jellied plastic poured atop it. On the desk, sat the same cannon-and-caisson set sitting opposite me in the other now of his namesake’s house. I was nineteen and being called to account for myself and how I was doing in life. I answered in the businesslike way my father expected of us. It wasn’t hard or hurtful, but it was tedious and I eventually drifted out of the conversation into a different frame of reference…
I floated out of myself then and looked back down at my father and me having the discussion in the tastefully furnished room, but wondered what the point of it was. It was all so stiff, so formal, so juridical, so by the numbers and seemingly insensitive. Yes, my dad was successful, again, after the years of tramping about aimlessly that I had personally witnessed. Now he had a new wife, and a substantially important government job, and plenty of money and many beautiful things that the job provided and which his artfully inclined wife expected and enjoyed. But outside of myself, I could see it for what it was: a show of success and triumph, the trappings of happiness, but not the substance. And in that momentary glitch then, I shifted out of that discussion of my life and its future direction, into an intuitive reference point that was objective rather than subjective. I saw things in a more clear, lightning-etched and color-muted dimension of what we were and where we were, and I could barely maintain my end of the conversation while my intuitive sense transformed my observations into verses. After a while, my dad excused himself to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone, I mowed through the first three verses of ‘Poem from an Empty Room,’ one of my first published poems. I finished it that afternoon after the drive back home to my mom’s house in Sagrada…
…now I was here in my brother Fran’s house, seeing it again as it looped back in on itself and closed the circle. And for the first time since I’d killed Vera and Jimmy and, nearly, myself, I drifted out of the conversation in the subjective sense and transformed what I was seeing and being and had seen and had been into an objective matrix of verses chronicling the story of Fran, the brother I loved dearly, and me, his murderous brother…
…then I watched the years scale off his face and saw him young again when he was my hero. Saw him and his high school buddies drinking Red Mountain wine out of gallon jugs, while our Dalmatian dog lay nearby with a peace symbol drawn on her side with my pastel crayons. Saw him up in his loft on Cannery Row with the spring-loaded ladder that you had to climb in order to enter it. Saw him with Eli when Eli was still a baby, then as a young boy with us in Las Vegas working for Endymion. Saw him with Alana in Boise. Saw him at family dinners on major holidays being praised to the stars by Peter for how hard he worked and all that he’d accomplished while I, one of the busiest reporters on the West Coast, sat ignored or asked an occasional question, and when answering, was interrupted by one of the women asking about the roast or dumplings. Saw him standing atop a tractor at some multimillion-dollar job with his hard hat on while I wandered penniless through the political sewers picking over the rinds that Louie Verde and his gang had left behind…
I came back to the conversation just as Fran was starting to tell me about Suzie’s plan to hold an Endymion reunion party the coming summer. He asked me if I’d come. I thought about it awhile as I puffed on my expensive cigar. After exhaling, I finally answered. “I don’t know, Fran. I don’t think so.”
“Why not? It’ll be a blast. Tor and Bochs and—”
“The whole gang, right?”
“Right.”
I played with my cigar a moment, inhaled a puff all the way into my lungs, then French-exhaled and spoke.
“I don’t think so. I like the people you mentioned, and in Tor’s case, I love him like a brother. But for me, those days are best left alone… Being around all the Endymion crew would only bring up memories, good memories, sure, but of a time that I’d rather leave alone.”
“Anyway, Suzie says you’re invited, and we’ll miss you if you’re not there. Just think about it sometime. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“I’ll think about it, but I don’t think so, Fran.”
Fran pulled on his cigar, put his hands palms upwards in the air, smiled, exhaled, and removed it.
“You seem bothered by something. What is it?”
I laughed, took a drag on my cigar, and exhaled. “You’re right. I am.”
“What is it? Is it something I said? Something somebody else said or did? What?”
…I leaned back, closed my eyes, and thought for a long while about what it was that I would say to him. How old a story was it now? Forty years? Something like that, way back when in the house on Goya is where it probably started—at least in my version it did, and that’s where I could trace it. The old man in a drunken frenzy, screaming at Fran in his Boy Scout uniform, my mom defending him, while Peter cried, and I, patient and quiet, observed from the corner. Then the troubles began… Peter sleeping with his loaded rifle under the bed and crying all night long, and on a few occasions, threatening to shoot himself. My mom would come in and cry with him, eventually talking Peter out of it, while I lay in the bed across the room listening… Fran, becoming quieter and more withdrawn year by year, until he discovered Erector sets, which he poured himself into, finding a matrix of planning, designing, and building that appealed to him while keeping the chaos at bay. And I, the troubled self-destructive one, whose hypersensitivity to calamity, pain, and chaos led him to search for the Rosetta Stone of chemical applications to quiet and soften the screaming beast until it wasn’t effective anymore. Then rehab, writing, success and failure, murder, prison, and back to square one again. And I thought of who I was now, an employed homeowner with a good job and bills paid; quiet and isolated, but not really so much anymore, and despite it all, having a feeling or intuition that things were about to change, although I didn’t know why I knew it or what it was going to change to. Maybe it was just an old journalist’s hunch, I laughed softly to myself. And I saw Fran, here and now, and how he was, building yet another classic Fran Le Doir house with a new wife just as difficult as the other ones were; father of a young daughter who was a gem; the only Le Doir woman in a three-generation hundred-year-long history of male progeny. I smiled at the thought of her, thinking that maybe she could break the pattern… I thought of all that and how it all descended and wondered why this was so for me when it wasn’t a cause of concern for my brothers. I’d switched off again into objectivity and was searching for a palliative that could tame the beast or put it to rest or slay it before it slew me. Then I remembered that Fran had asked me a question and I looked at him and smiled…
“Sorry, I got lost there,” I said.
We puffed on our cigars for a minute before I answered. I looked around the room at all the things in it, remembering my house at The Arbor with all its artwork and antiques and electronics. There wasn’t really that much difference, other than the names of the painters and designers. Finally, I answered.
“You didn’t do anything, and nobody said or did anything that upset me. It’s just that all this causes me to feel shame and remorse. I wish I could undo some things, many things, most of those things, from Vera to prison. That’s one reason I’d be afraid of going to that reunion. I’m afraid I might see the person that I might have been had I not met her, or pursued her so desperately, and the
n feel regret that I didn’t choose that, whatever it might have been. But then, too, that’s the past, Fran, not now… And the past is a different country as Priestly or somebody else once said. I’m learning to live with myself in the moment and I know that sounds simple enough, but for me, it’s not. I’m too mercurial for my own good—Hermes was what Wesley and Esmé used to call me… You never met them, did you, Fran, or most of the people I knew during those years. But I’m not so much that way anymore, if I bothered to stop and analyze it, which mostly I don’t. Now my life is like waves of an incoming tide where krill and little crabs and starfish and jellyfish and all such like scurry about, and it’s hard enough just to keep track of that world before another wave hits it and brings in another. Who I was, the Ram Le Doir that I was when I was a journalist, would’ve had all that mapped and chronicled and charted and analyzed before the next wave hit and deposited more that he then has to chart and analyze. Now I just look at it for the beautiful thing that it is in its moment, and I know that there will likely be another and that the whole tableau will change, either dramatically or innocently. It’s always changing… Sometimes, I deal with these things pretty well; other days are harder. I don’t mean that in some negative or dismissive way, Fran, nor am I trying to be esoteric. But since you asked the question, I thought, you deserved an answer.”
“Now it’s your turn, Fran. How are you doing?”
“I can’t complain.”
“Come on. I asked how you are.”
“Busy, Ram, busy, busy, busy.”
“Again, that’s not what I asked.”
Fran clenched the cigar in the corner of his mouth and added another couple fingers to his Scotch. When he did, I noticed the tremor in his right hand as he poured, the same tremor I used to have, the same tremor our dad had, the same tremor Aunt Hazel had. When he got back behind his desk, his insouciant look had been displaced by a graver mien. He re-lit his cigar, took a deep pull, and leaned in closer toward me.
“We’re going through a hard time right now. My partner and I don’t have enough money to finish the next house and we’re having a difficult time getting financing from the bank.”
“But that’s SOP with you, Fran, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but the timing couldn’t be worse. Maria and I are having problems, and it’s getting bad. We’re seeing a counselor now, and it’s coming out in almost everything we do. She’s not happy, she’s always sick, she can’t work, and it’s killing me to do everything, including all of the school stuff with Cecily.”
“So how are you dealing with all that?”
“Okay, I guess, but it’s getting harder, if I didn’t have the house to work on, I’d lose myself and be in worse shape than I am.”
I shook my head, laughed lightly, and puffed my cigar.
“…what?”
“It’s always the same with you, Fran. It’s always a house and a woman, although I don’t know if that’s necessarily the right order. And then there’s a new house and a new woman. The problem always stays the same.”
“I’m not so sure what you mean.”
“Well, look at your last marriage, when you were with Alana. Same deal, if I remember. It was great at first when you fell in love with her, and then you married her and found out what kind of person she was, bitchy and controlling and full of anger. No matter what you did or said, it wasn’t enough. Then you went to counseling. Then you started a new house, then you moved and got a new job and Maria became your secretary and the two of you fell in love—at least, that’s what I remember you telling me. I can imagine what Maria thought: here’s this successful man who’s brilliant and charming, but he’s unhappy with his wife, I bet I could make him happy, and so… Marriage after a few months and then a new home, then eventually a baby and all the newness and excitement of these changes wore thin or off, and she sees that you’re still unhappy, which makes her unhappy. Now you’re back where you were with Alana…”
Fran pushed aside from his desk, leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes rolling upward.
“You really see it that way?”
“I’m afraid I do, and you’re in dangerous water.”
“What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
I looked at Fran for a long moment and saw he was serious. I leaned back, inhaled the cigar that was by now a stub, exhaled, and looked again at Fran, who sat there expectantly. I laughed, at first softly, then loudly, then mostly to myself.
“I can’t answer that, because I’m not you, nor do I have choices as difficult as the ones you have. That’s purely by design, a conscious decision I made some years back to keep things simple for myself. I just keep my eyes fixed straight ahead and make sure that I don’t leave the path that I’m on and just keep plodding along. Where it leads, I really don’t know, but I trust it and keep plodding ahead forward as unerringly as I can… I also can’t answer that because I’m not precisely sure what your beliefs are and what your abiding principles are and what motivates your motion. I don’t know those things, Fran. I can only guess what they might be, and the why of it all. It’s also very personal, and it’s entirely yours. All I can do is to listen and observe and make a comment here or there that might help you better learn for yourself. I know it’s confusing. I know that from my own experience when I found myself in a similar situation that was all my own doing—the thing with Vera, the choices I made about my work, the Verde affair, all of it, the whole Marianne as Dad used to say. And like you now, there wasn’t anybody I knew or trusted who could help me with it because it wasn’t theirs to decipher. I had to hit the wall with that, and I hope you profit from my experience and avoid the long march that I had to take before I could begin to change. In the end, and for most people, the destiny of their living is fairly clean and simple—at least, that’s my belief, and why we obfuscate it and complicate it and avoid it is an absolute mystery to me. It was for me when I got lost in my own woods and look where it took me. When I came to and saw that I put all the anger and confusion to rest and just reduced it down to one simple objective: to re-find the path that I lost—my path—and once finding it, not veer off it again. I don’t mean to sound oblique, but it’s all I can do to keep my own focus on what I have to do and keep my objective clean… I hope you’ll re-find your way and sort out these situations… But only you can do that for yourself, Fran, and then, only if you want to. It’s either that or learn how to better accept the consequences of your actions and the choices that you make. Come to terms with it and the pain it causes you and continue on or reject it and accept the pain it causes you to change to a direction that you maybe don’t know or understand or can truly see until you begin it… Either way, it’s going to be hard and I can’t sugarcoat it or tell you anything more than that… All I can do is pray that clarity comes to you as you struggle with it. It may not sound like much, but it’s the best I can do.”
Fran looked away—out the double doors that led to the outside where the snow was still falling intermittently. Darkness was beginning to gather around the flanks of Mount St. Helena, and the poplar trees abutting the vineyard were swaying in the gusting wind. He rolled the cigar in his hand, closed his eyes briefly, and opened them and spoke.
“You really think that your experience applies to me in my case?”
“Maybe, maybe not. If it does, it’s certainly to a lesser degree than mine was. But it’s pretty much the same story in all dysfunctional families. I had the more dramatic symptomology in our family—drug addiction, alcoholism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. For you, its work and avoidance; for Peter, it’s control and escapism into sports. Although mine resulted in a dramatic fashion that saw two people die, mine is also the easiest to treat because it’s so evidently a cry for help. I don’t think you’re anywhere close to that, Fran, but you are in trouble because you keep repeating your history, again and again and again.”
“You may be right, but what do I do?”
“You do what you’re doing now—seeing a counselor—then you go back to where it started for you. Go back to the beginning.”
“I appreciate it and I want you to know how proud I am of you that you came here today. I’m a little envious of you…”
I laughed.
“What did I say?”
“Nothing, Fran, that’s what Tor said too.”
…the previous scene, all the way back to when Fran asked me, “What?” after telling me about his daughter, was just my imagination. It was the way we once talked during the Endymion days when we were closer than brothers. We hadn’t spoken in terms like that in at least ten years.
Fran smiled and I smiled with him. We both began to laugh—lightly at first, then louder, then hysterically until we were in tears. The noise brought Cecily into the room. She looked at both of us confusedly.
“What’s wrong with you guys and what’s so funny?”
“A lot, and that’s what’s so funny,” I said, putting my arm around her. Cecily crawled up on Fran’s knees and hugged him tightly. Fran shut his eyes and held her close, rocking her back and forth and kissing her neck.
“It’s I who am envious of you, Fran, what you have—an innocent child who loves you unconditionally, just as he is, as her dad. I missed that one, Fran, and it’s not likely I’ll ever get that chance now… Her future’s in your hands, so give her a new Le Doir legacy to live up to instead of passing on the old family baggage.”
We chatted for a while longer about inconsequential matters, then I gathered my things to go and Fran and Cecily walked me out to my car. A warm wind was stirring out of the west and the clouds were breaking up, revealing a haloed moon.
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