The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “What do you mean, ‘what happened to Cady’? She left me, Alice.”

  “Well, I think it’s more than a little strange. She called me and told me where the two of you were, and then just like that, she’s gone?”

  He said nothing, only kicked at some dirt, which settled in dust over Alice’s ankles.

  “Ever think about what I was doing while you were off at a resort? While you were feeling so blue over the poor imprisoned animals?” She found she was holding back from kicking dirt in his direction. “You thought you could marry Cady De-Forrest and then take up with the first vaguely attractive woman you met? My God, she’s pregnant.” The wind had picked up and they stood on a stranger’s unattended land, both of them squinting at the light and the wind. “It’s yours, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”

  “Stop yelling,” he said.

  “I’ll stop yelling when I feel like stopping. You don’t hear

  me” she said, “ever.” She shook her head, and deep in her gut a current emerged and drew away her restraint. “You never listen. You never ask any substantial questions and you never really have. You kept our mother all to yourself by never coming home. You played up your devastation so completely that you got away with doing nothing for Dad. When I asked you for help you ignored me. Over and over again I asked and I asked. And then, when you did come, when you finally showed up, you hold my hand at the funeral, you tell me not to cry, that you’re there, and then you go and disappear again. You left without saying good-bye, Gus. You left and that was it. What are you trying to do to me? It’s humiliating.” She was breathless but far from finished. “So it’s hard, it is very hard not to yell.”

  Sitting on the cement steps, Gus gathered himself inward like a kid hiding in a closet. He looked up at his sister who loomed above him, parchment and crimson and copper against an invisible house. He looked up in that exaggerated manner, his chest heaving up and down, and he reached into the pocket of his drawstring pants. Alice thought he was reaching for a wadded-up tissue, but he withdrew a few folded pieces of paper and thrust them at her. The thin pages flapped in the wind. She knew it would be a mistake to get greedy and grab for them and so she kept her hands at her sides; the effort in doing so caused her whole body to go slack.

  He was crying. At first Alice thought it was only the wind— it had really picked up. “Take this,” he said, he kind of yelled. “Hold on to it carefully. This is what he left me. This is why I left so quickly. Read it.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No,” he said wearily, “no, it’s not.” And he rose to his feet and started walking. But Alice didn’t even notice, for her eyes were on her mother’s violet-black ink, the spare and slanting uppercase letters that had always looked so unlike Charlotte. Her handwriting was cramped and economical—as if the letters themselves bore the full weight of the content they created.

  The pages were oily from frequent handling. Unidentifiable colors—maybe wine, maybe blood (a paper cut?)—had left their mark, as well as ubiquitous water stains. Two rips on the first page on the sides, where his fingers must have worn away the eggshell-colored paper. When? Maybe on the sixth read, maybe on the fifty-first, but it was most likely, Alice thought, as her eyes began allowing those letters to become words and letting those words possess their meaning, that those rips were made by Gus during reading number one.

  In the upper right corner there was a date.

  November, it said, 1985.

  18

  My Dear August,

  I can’t sleep. Fm not at home and I miss home. I am homesick so much more than I ever let on. Some stories I told featuring me going out and listening to music or chatting at wild dinner parties were simply not true. Some were true, don’t get me wrong, but I also watched television in hotels a good deal. I drank alone and practiced speaking foreign languages with Berlitz recordings. There. Thats one confession.

  Where are you now? Do me a favor and look around. What does the room look like as you read these inadequate words? How does the air smell? I wonder if you are still so handsome, still young, and I wonder if I could ever see you

  any other way, no matter if you were old and decrepit, fat and criminal, no matter what.

  Are you still in love? You were. I bet you didn ‘t know that I really thought that. I bet you didn’t know that I saw you in the poolhouse, the two of you—I know I don’t even need to write her name. Don’t be angry—I wasn ‘t spying and I didn’t look for long—but one night a few weeks ago, a warm October night when Alan and I had gone out to one of those unbearable neighborhood parties, I came home early. I must have assumed that Alan wouldn ‘t mind getting a ride. To be honest, I don’t remember. I said I was sick when I was merely very drunk and I drove home drunk, hitting a poor rabbit on the way. The weather has been so queer this year, disorienting and humid, and when I pulled up in the driveway I didn’t even go into the house. I walked straight down the lawn to the water and by the time I approached my beloved poolhouse, a light rain was falling. I don’t know why I looked in the window. God knows I’m not a tentative drunk, and I’m surprised I didn ‘t just bound right in, but I suppose I wanted to feel like I could look in on my small creation of a room and see what it looked like from the outside. But what I found was you. You and Cady in front of a small, tidy fire. I realized I didn’t even know if you knew how to make afire—Alan keeps such a tight rein over our fireplace in the living room—and I remember thinking, I bet she did it; I bet she stacked the wood and found the newspaper, and I bet that my son was impressed. Cady was reclining and you were sitting the way I always envied—kneeling, with your legs splayed to the side, the way only children and the double-jointed can do, and you were wearing your father’s green corduroy shirt, unbuttoned. The way my view was obscured,

  I couldn ‘t see Cady very well, but I could see that she was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. This shocked me, I couldn’t help it, and I quickly turned away. I was afraid, I guess—not of being caught looking; I think I almost wanted you to see me—but of my seeing a glimpse of what I wasn’t privy to, of what Yd never know, and how this was your life and only yours and you looked undeniably happy in that corny firelight. I saw your face, you see. That’s what sent me back to the house, back where I belonged. Your face was nearly unrecognizable. Can you begin to imagine what that felt like? I stared at your face and I had to say your name, the one we had given you; I said it out loud again and again the way I’d done during the first weeks after you were born. I remember being absurdly grateful that I hadn’t caught you—you know, in the act. I tried not to think about it and couldn’t help thinking about it, and I decided it had already happened that night, and who knew how many times before. You seemed so peaceful. So I did believe that you loved that girl but I never let you know. I didn ‘t cooperate with you and your devotion, and do you know what’s strange? I’m still not sure if I’m sorry about that. You were just so young, and love that young can be brutal. That moment when I didn’t recognize your face—I carried it with me up to the bathroom and sloppily into bed, and right before I fell asleep, I realized who I’d seen in your face. And I wondered why it had taken that long for me to really, truly see it.

  Did you know that all that time as your mother, I was repentant every day, every single one? You must be saying “who knew?” with an appropriate sarcasm; Lord knows I wouldn ‘t blame you. I’m apologizing now. Do you believe me? Sometimes I convinced myself that you did know, that

  you knew everything about me and it was our secret; it was what made us the way we were.

  I took that money. Do you remember? Of course you do. I took that money from those nice women and instead of purchasing furniture and fabrics for them, I hired an investigator. I asked around and found myself an expensive private investigator. I had basic information and I paid him a not-so-basic fee and he went to work and he succeeded. I had use of a private investigator. Are you surprised?

  And then I went away. His investigation
had led him to Oaxaca, Mexico, and that is why I went. That’s where I am right now. I’m writing from Oaxaca because it’s over. I found who I was looking for and he’s dead. He’s long gone. I waited too many years to try. I spent those years trying not to think about it and failing.

  There was someone. There was someone in my mind all this time, all these years while I have been your mother— your mother and Alice’s. There was someone. He was the only truly free person I ever knew, and if monogamy didn’t interest him, procreation interested him less. Yet as much as he was crude and wild, he was also tender and very affectionate and I loved him, I know I did, and now it turns out he’d gone and done what he swore he would never do: he went and had a family of his own. It doesn’t sound unusual and I suppose it isn ‘t; I mean, it is the oldest story in the world. People change their minds, people change, but you see, you never met him. And now I’ve done what I swore I’d never do: I looked for him.

  And so he’s dead. He died four years ago in a car crash. He and his wife had split before that. I talked to the wife. We spoke today, outside, sitting at a cafe table. It was before

  noon and neither of us hesitated before ordering a drink. I guess we could have been friends if you were looking in from the outside. She was a little mean like me. But she was honest and funny too, earthy, I think—not that I could really tell. There wasn’t a whole lot of room for personality.

  I’m going home tomorrow and I’ll find you as I left you: a senior in high school—angry, secretive, tough, and beautiful—but first I have to get this down for a someday-unknown you. I don’t know when you 7/ read this but I know that you deserve it.

  This is yours.

  If you’d show your sister I’d be grateful. She deserves it too. But it belongs to you.

  I was Charlotte Fine and I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College in the spring of 1966. You know that part. You know that I boarded a ship bound for France and that my parents were simply furious. But did you know that I carried a large green valise offered by my roommate, Marie? Did you know that Marie, who had family in Paris, tied a red silk scarf at my neck and handed me a list of phone numbers to call when I arrived abroad? Did you know the term abroad made me smile with nervousness? Did you ever know I was so young?

  So Charlotte Fine stood on the lower deck, with the hippies and the dreamers and the surprising majority of ordinary families, and she watched New York fade to gray. It was a clear white day. Most of the days on the ship were like that. They were good days to be in transit, to store up reserves of serious attention, waiting to really see. But even independent girls get lonely, and Charlotte eventually met another young woman, whose name and face escape me, who offered oranges and soft yellow cheese, earnest conversation. Joan Baez was in first class, wearing a red sweater.

  It’s infuriating what we remember, isn’t it?

  Then the young woman went to the ladies’ room, and Charlotte Fine stood up to look at the water below, to watch the way the ship ‘s metal cut through the dark surf. She watched for whales and dolphins; she narrowed her eyes and fruitlessly searched.

  “What are you looking for?” a low voice asked—asked me. This is a line that has survived as a whole and perfect entity. This question might as well have been put to me just moments ago, so clearly can I hear the words (ordinary) and their tone (nearly rude). The question is as clear in my mind as the car that is honking right this second just outside my third-floor hotel window.

  Night was coming on. He’d stolen tall white candles from the ship’s kitchen, and they flickered boldly in the tiny space of his cabin. He’d also stolen chocolate bars. He offered her as many as she wanted—I tell you they were children. He bit into a block of dark chocolate and told her she looked like the devil. “What does the devil look like?” she asked. “Plans,” he said. “You look like a plan and I don’t want one.” Then he kissed her.

  That line: What are you looking for? It might as well have caused the seed, the one that shot through her, straight to her greedy center. There was a whole night stretched out before them. There was, in fact, a row of nights open as windows of summerhouses; nights that were heavy with moon. And the ocean. Don’t forget they were still on the ocean. He talked about his dead brother, found shot up at twenty-three, on the south side of Chicago. He raged about his bad leg, the one that prevented him from running fast. He just loved to run.

  His mother was Polish, his father was Greek. He was not particularly handsome. His ears stuck out, he had a weak chin, and his fingers were stained with tobacco. But those hands were narrow—they moved with incongruous, almost feminine grace—and his hair, which grew past his collar, was thick and dark with a smell she would later in life identify (on a trip to Gubbio, Italy, during a late lunch with her husband) as truffles.

  She didn ‘t know about the seed when they docked in Le Havre. She was young enough to be unaware of just how fertile she was, and besides, she was still hypnotized by the rocking of the ocean, the rough stitching of his low voice. When he told her to have an important life and walked toward the train station near the harbor, his gait was purposeful and frivolous at the same time, and she couldn ‘t stop thinking of how much he reminded her of a ragged animal in heat. She wanted to be an animal but instead she cried for five days straight. She had begged him to let her join him. She had begged a man.

  So, no, she didn’t know. She had no idea. When she strolled through Montmartre, a zombie girl on pills(S’ilvous plait, monsieur, je suis tres nerveuse!), when she raised her eyes to Notre Dame for the first time, she didn’t know about the seed. When she finally dialed Marie’s Oncle Alan, and was disappointed to hear his American accent, she had absolutely no idea.

  The seed grew inside Charlotte as she learned French, as she worked for various expatriates who were delighted to have an audience to validate just how European they had become. The seed grew as she waited for Marie’s uncle at Le Croup Chou, on a rainy day, and it grew as she shook his warm dry hand, and said what a pleasure it was.

  It didn’t take long. This you should understand. Alan

  Green was a scientist, a Jew from Scarsdale who knew which wine to drink with a plate of brains or pigs’ feet, who had in fact eaten what sounded like every form of traif and who was currently doing research at the Sorbonne. Charlotte was deeply annoyed that her sea passage devastation did not in fact preclude her from feeling anything else. He spoke French and Italian fluently, he had eighteen years on her, and they were years filled with enough ex-lovers and transcontinental conferences and exotic meals to make Charlotte believe she’d never again meet anyone so interesting and important. And Alan not only believed that it was high time he married, but her fair face made him—a rigid thinker, a man of science—believe, quite firmly, in the woozy idea of fate.

  But you knew that, didn’t you.

  Charlotte was heady with travel and the new worlds that were opening to her on a daily basis. It was Alan who could keep her life this high, this full of pure entitlement. He brought her to the opera. He drunkenly carried her up the seven flights of stairs to her rented chambre de bonne, at the breaking light of morning.

  But how much was her interest and focus on Alan influenced by the fact that since arriving in Paris—city of romance, city of snails and light—her health had been embarrassingly poor? Had she been able to stay up later than midnight, to rise without nausea at the start of every day—had she not seen herself as disappointingly weak (not to mention knowing that she’d tearfully and unsuccessfully begged a man to let her accompany him absolutely anywhere he wanted; and, oh, yes, that she’d pay both their fares), how much would she have seen differently? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing at all. But certainly, when she went to the American hospital and learned that she was, in

  fact, not in poor health, not tainted by heartbreak, but indeed pregnant, Dr. Alan Green, with whom she had not quite yet slept, became even more perfect.

  While it never occurred to her that she could maybe seek out and actually find
the father of the child, this stranger by the name of Luke Varengis (she was naive enough never to have questioned whether this was in fact his real name), it also never occurred to her to get rid of the baby, which would have been easy enough to arrange. It also would have been easy enough to sleep with Alan that very night, and to tell him he was the father. But even if she had the guts to go through with that kind of lying, she couldn’t do that to Alan.

  Basically it would have been too messy, and contrary to how she sometimes came across, Charlotte didn ‘t deal well with mess. She couldn’t live with that kind of guilt—lying to a man that she sincerely believed she could love.

  This part of the story is confusing, isn’t it? Because she learned to lie so well later on, didn’t she? She—I lied. I lied all the time.

  But then again, though Charlotte was no innocent, she was still young enough to believe in the absolution of telling the truth.

  Did you ever believe in such a thing?

  And so, she told him, and he was sad, but not irreparably so. He was even more handsome in his sadness, and Charlotte no doubt grew more appealing to him with her initial degrees of guilt. There was sex, plenty of it, and it was … Well, I don’t need to tell you exactly everything. He bought her an emerald-cut diamond from an antique dealer near the Palais Royal, and they married, quickly, back in the States. Her family made the wedding at her grandmother’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. You’ve seen the pictures. She was no longer a Sarah Lawrence girl with a multitude of bohemian possibilities, but a spoiled dropout who somehow managed to land an impressive (if a bit older) man. Alan was dashing and made a toast, thanking everybody. There was ferocity in his voice. Charlotte got drunk. As they danced a quiet fox-trot to a song that neither could ever remember, she agreed to have another baby immediately after this one. It was only fair.