As she remained beside him, nearly as silent and frozen as he was, there was a phantom car in the driveway one too many times, so that when Gus and his taxi finally arrived Alice wasn’t surprised. She rose for the first time and went to the window. She was prepared for Gus, for his sullen and potentially defensive behavior. She was prepared for him to lose it completely, to even take it out on her. What she wasn’t prepared for was that he’d brought someone.
Staring out the window, Alice saw Cady DeForrest. There was Cady looking offensively appropriate after all these years, her hair pulled back—a study in carelessness just short of austere. They let themselves in and called out through the house. Alice couldn’t find the voice to answer, and it seemed like minutes before they finally came upstairs.
“How could you bring someone?” Alice yelled without thinking. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until she tried to speak. “He’s already gone,” she said; and then more softly, “He’s dead.”
“Alice—” Cady said, coming toward her.
She didn’t want Cady’s frosty hug, her practiced line of condolence. She hadn’t exactly been coming around much lately. “This is a family situation,” she appealed to Gus.
But Gus was kneeling by the bedside with open eyes. He looked more curious than overwrought, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
“August,” Alice nearly shouted, anxious as she was, thrown beyond any kind of reason at Cady’s being present for this moment.
But he only looked up at his sister, offering no response but confusion.
“Do you hear me?” Instead of losing steam, Alice gained momentum.
Cady said, “Alice, listen—”
“My father is lying here dead,” she nearly screamed. “Do you mind leaving the room?”
“Have you called anyone?” asked Cady.
Alice shook her head.
“I’ll do it,” she said, and Alice didn’t argue as she watched Cady head for the door.
But when Alice looked down at Gus, who was kneeling at the bedside with closed eyes, she nearly lost her breath. Gus looked as if he was begging for forgiveness, begging for something so much larger than he could ever name. “I’ll leave you alone with him,” she whispered, before slipping out the door. And as she moved no farther than the dark hallway, she stood consciously breathing, smelling cedar and a puzzling trace of what she could only imagine was Cady’s favorite blackberry soap, the same after more than a decade. Alice ran her finger against the splintering molding on the wall, over and over until her finger was raw. The increasingly palpable gap between Gus and her father—she had always told herself there was nothing too unusual about it; sons and fathers, fathers and sons, pairs of them had been reinventing this strained male distance for years.
When Alice reentered the bedroom, August remained kneeling, not having seemed to register her presence. But eventually he stood up, wiped away tears with the hem of his sweater, and said, “Cady and I were married.”
“Excuse me?”
“We got married,” he said, and—still managing not to smile, not to give away what surely must have been a poor excuse for a badly timed joke—he nodded that yes, it was true.
“She married you?”
“What is that supposed to mean? We married each other. Last week, in Vegas,” he said, and finally gave up a grin. “And it was great.”
Cady knocked before opening the door. “They’re coming now,” she said. “They’ll be here any minute.”
He was buried next to Charlotte on a beautiful day, a day too beautiful for Alice. She wanted rain clouds, gusts of wind, water seeping through her shoes. A rabbi spoke at length, perhaps buoyed by the cloudless sky. After the list of scientific accolades, after the much-deserved praise, the rabbi spoke about questioning God, how the living had every right to rage. His passion was admirable but it made Alice tired. The sun was so bright she could barely keep her eyes open.
She was grateful to her father for his unorthodox request that the mourners not repair to their home, and Alice was beginning to think he’d made that request entirely for her sake. She knew that the tradition existed to bring the grieving family some comfort, but, for one thing, there weren’t enough people, and more than a few of them looked as if they hadn’t left a laboratory in years. She didn’t want strangers. She knew what to do. After everyone had thrown a shovel of dirt over his terrible coffin and had made their way toward the cars, Alice thanked the rabbi, letting his kind words pour through her. She thanked an old man, a man who was honestly too old to be walking. She let three women hug and kiss her; she was grateful for their softness, for their pliant, powdery skin. Then she remained—in her uncomfortable pumps, in the hard autumn earth—and lost track of time. She found that the air was perfectly still and that she was simply too tired to stand.
With her legs crossed awkwardly beneath her flimsy crepe dress, and her coat splayed on each side, she was sitting on the ground, growing very cold but feeling closer to her father, to the fresh wound in the soil. When she felt a hand on her shoulder she knew he’d been there all along, that he hadn’t moved either. “August,” she said, without looking. She registered bark, spearmint breath mints, the feral darkness of his hair. When she finally looked up, he was all that she saw; he’d successfully blocked out the sun.
“So strange,” he said, sitting down beside her.
Alice nodded and noticed that Cady was leaning against a tree—out of earshot in her slim black ensemble—patiently waiting. Alice was briefly overcome by this lovely display of etiquette. Cady would know what to say to the brainy colleagues, the frightened neighbors—this assorted well-meaning assembly.
“Everything looks the same,” Alice said. Then she started to cry.
He inched closer to her. “It’s okay.”
“I feel like everything’s over.” Her mother’s headstone looked almost mocking in its austerity. They’d brought white lilies for her grave, and the other mourners had also brought flowers for Charlotte—roses, peonies, and a smattering of carnations at which, Alice couldn’t help thinking, Charlotte would have rolled her eyes. “Is everything just … over for us?”
He shook his head calmly. He did not ask what she meant.
“It isn’t?”
“No,” he said. “Everything’s not over. Nothing is over, I promise.”
The sky was too blue, the ground was too cold, and it seemed that nothing would ever feel quite right again. There were bells in the distance—someone else’s wedding, someone else’s prayers—a trace of leather in the air.
“Come on, Alice, I’m here.”
She looked at him then, and for at least one moment her eyes were as sharp as their mother’s headstone, as raw as her father’s grave. “Finally,” she said, “you are.”
After the funeral Cady didn’t stay long. Her aunt had died years ago; she had no one left to visit and she had to be back for work, so it was three days of her making phone calls in the study, and providing the days with a kind of controlling— albeit appealing—structure. She made eggs. She made waffles. She fixed strong cocktails after five, served with a little something, if only a hunk of cheddar cheese and a small silver knife. She didn’t make a fuss over these elegant ministrations, and Alice couldn’t help but again admire her efforts.
“Thanks,” Alice told her for the tenth time that third afternoon, as Cady handed Alice a dirty martini after placing a bowl of Spanish olives at the center of the scratched and lopsided bay window table.
“It’s nothing,” Cady said, sipping her own neat glass of whiskey. “I’m just a fool for cocktail hour, the whole ritual; it’s in my blood, I guess.” Gus was under the table, sticking a folded-up piece of paper underneath the wobbly table leg. Cady looked down at him with a wan and complicated smile before addressing Alice again. “So your father really took shabby-chic to the next level, huh?”
Alice was so used to how the wallpaper was halfway peeled off right there by the kitchen phone, how the wooden floors, w
hich were slanty to begin with, were now giving way in earnest. She was used to the dust in the Oriental rugs, to the moldy saltwater evening smell emanating from upholstered furniture. Alice was so accustomed to the empty hooks and hoops of faded color left where pictures had fallen due to the warping of walls, that taking it all in through Cady’s eyes, she became nearly shocked. And it wasn’t only decay that marked demise. You had to look a bit harder to see the additions, but they too were there. In the cupboards there were sippy cups, the kind for children and the sick, and there were no children here. In the bathrooms there were safely bars installed on either side of the toilet—the one bit of home construction their father had finally approved.
It was difficult to remember how everything had looked the last time the three of them had sat there.
“So you’re going back to work?” Alice blurted—more statement than question.
“Someone has to, right?”
“Poor Cady” Gus said, now standing in front of the refrigerator and looking inside, as if waiting for a craving to declare itself. “I keep telling her to take some time off, come away with me….”
Alice snapped, “She can’t exactly take time off whenever she feels like it. Cady has actual responsibilities.” Why Alice was suddenly Cady’s defender was beyond her, as Cady had never returned Alice’s two phone calls, never sent her so much as a postcard after she and Gus had originally split. “Am I right? Cady?”
Cady just laughed. “Look, I like my job,” she said, in a tone that suggested that Gus had implied otherwise many times before.
“You’re always complaining about the people.”
“Yeah, well, my fellow workers tend to take their choice of chunky or wire-thin eyeglasses so seriously that matters of design begin to feel like religious fanaticism, but I do like it.”
“You just like the free meal,” Gus teased, coming to sit beside Cady with a bag of mini carrots in hand. “In her office,” he explained, “lunch is ordered in on the company dime. If you drop in around one there is sushi all over the place.”
“It definitely boosts morale,” Cady said, opening her mouth.
Gus left her hanging for a second or so before feeding her a carrot. “You have all that fresh fish to consider,” he said, his voice softening, his lips by her ear.
“Exactly,” she said, before crunching down, hard.
With Cady gone, it was meetings that measured the days. There were meetings with their father’s lawyer and accountant, and everyone cooperated to get it all done quickly. The vocabulary was simple and orderly and it bore no resemblance to the mess they were left to sort through. The real-estate agent called, offered her condolences, and in the same breath let Alice know that there were interested parties waiting. For three days people arrived in four-wheel-drive vehicles and didn’t bother to conceal their surprise when they saw the falling shingles, the sunken dank floors. Alice hated all of them and behaved with curious charm.
Each night after they’d all gone, Alice and Gus ate pizza and drank beer, and Gus swore he really was married. “We had a really good day,” was his explanation as to how it had happened. “Hadn’t seen each other in about six months. She was dating a jerk named Albert. French. So one Saturday morning she shows up at my place, all flushed in the face and full of plans—you know how she can get—and the day was so good I won’t even try to describe it, and the next morning I felt the same way. I wasn’t depressed the way I usually feel after spending a good day with her, and so I asked if she’d like to go to Las Vegas. A lot of people talk about that kind of spontaneity but we really did it. I can’t help being proud.”
“Do you regret it?”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Cady is an architect. She works in one of the best firms in the city. She is probably bored with my life, my routines, how everything revolves around the weather and swells and throwing myself around just like I did when I was sixteen. I don’t even think she was ever all that impressed with my daredevil shit anyway. That wasn’t the draw for her. So … it’s clear that I know nothing and could not care less about matters of architectural design, and yet I consider myself somewhat of an expert on being interested in Cady. To be honest, I can’t imagine ending up with anyone else.”
“I’m surprised that you see yourself ending up at all.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Where are you going to, you know, live? Are you going to move to the city?”
“I love her, Alice,” he said soberly.
“Good,” Alice replied. “Because you promised to spend the rest of your life with her.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Without even telling me.”
“It just happened that way. Would you have said, ‘Yeah, go to Las Vegas; that’s a great idea’? Of course not. You don’t even like her.”
“Cady? Come on, I like Cady. She is inherently likable. This isn’t about if I like Cady. You married someone who … You couldn’t even come home all this time, to this house, to us. She’s—”
“I know. Move on, right? Move way on—”
“Forget it. May you have many happy years together.”
“Could you lighten up on the sarcasm please?”
“I’m not being sarcastic; I just can’t get over it. Are you sure she’s not pregnant?”
“I told you before—I am sure. This is about the two of us.”
“So where are you going to live?”
“Not sure. It’s one of the many things we haven’t really worked out.”
“I see.” Alice nodded. “So now you’re going to tell me you really do have to head back. You need to sort out living with Cady starting this life together, et cetera.”
“I’m leaving you to deal with all of this. Which you knew I’d do. You knew it. All of these things she brought back from who the fuck knows where. All of the photographs, all of it. And I’m sorry.”
“And I’m sorry you never came home until now.”
He nodded. “Couldn’t,” he said, his voice cracking. “Stupid,” he said, “fucking upsetting, I know.”
“Wouldn’t,” Alice muttered.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t.”
Gus finished the last of his beer, pulling on the bottle a little too long. “That was, is, and always will be,” he said, “a very fine line.”
“Couldn’t and wouldn’t? Not from where I’m sitting. I’m telling you—”
“Alice, do we have to have this conversation again?”
“I just think you’ll regret leaving so soon. I think that you should stay.”
“I know you think so,” he said. “And I understand; I do. Part of me definitely wants to stay. But Alice, you have no idea what this is like, being here after so long.”
“You’re right,” she said, “I don’t.” Keeping her eyes locked in his direction, Alice let a question escape: “Do you remember that night when … when she locked herself in the bathroom?”
He shook his head.
“Come on,” said Alice softly, “the year before she went to Oaxaca when Dad was off giving a paper somewhere. She was in their bathroom and she was … well, she was crying. She broke something and I heard it break and I went to the door … and she wouldn’t let me in. I kept begging her to let me in and she wouldn’t. She ignored me and then she yelled at me to leave her alone. Finally I gave up, or I didn’t give up but I went to get something to drink. When I came back I realized you were in the bathroom with her. I heard you,” she said. “She’d let you in.”
“I’m sorry,” Gus said.
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t care. I just want to know.”
“Know what?”
Alice pushed her chair back from the table, balancing on the wobbly back legs of the chair.
“Be careful,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“What it was like,” she said, exasperated. “What she was like.”
“You know. …”
�
�No,” Alice said. “I have no idea.”
He sighed, and, opening another beer, he said, “We played cards. I brought in a deck and we sat on the floor. Alice, please stop. I don’t know why she didn’t let you inside. We played cards and it was like … it was like nothing. She smoked her head off and didn’t say much of anything and neither did I.”
She remembered cigarette smoke in the hallway, how she’d listened at the door, how she’d counted to one hundred over and over again. She recalled how everything was as quiet as the soundless high pitch of a scream.
“I’m tired, Alice,” he said. And he looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy-lidded; his nostrils flared with a yawn. “Let’s finish this in the morning, okay?”
⋆.⋆.⋆
Each night since the funeral, she’d heard him. She’d heard August in the kitchen, in the TV room, in the halls. She’d heard him in their parents’ bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet, shutting it, letting the water run. She’d heard him frying food on the stove, dialing numbers on the rotary telephone. She was already tracking him, as she’d done with Charlotte, the way she hadn’t done for years—visualizing her mother from room to room, bracing at the faintest sound. She had habitually guessed at Charlotte’s activities during those late-night wanderings; and as she’d listened so keenly for the difference between sleeplessness and restlessness, Alice had tried to discern just what each wandering meant in the context of her mother leaving. And now it was her brother whom she’d grown accustomed to hearing late at night. Despite herself, she listened.
The Outside of August Page 14