by Amy Hempel
He got a second cup of coffee, a plastic cup of juice, and a couple of refrigerator-cold bagels (the waffle iron and fresh fruit had disappeared a couple of visits earlier) and took them back to the room. He and his son ate there, then Loomis decided that they should get away from the motel for the day. The boy could always be counted on to want a day trip to San Diego. He loved to ride the red trolleys there, and tolerated Loomis’s interest in the museums, sometimes.
They took the commuter train down, rode the trolley to the Mexican border, turned around, and came back. They ate lunch in a famous old diner near downtown, then took a bus to Balboa Park and spent the afternoon in the air-and-space museum and the natural-history museum, and at a small, disappointing model-railroad exhibit. Then they took the train back up the coast.
As they got out of the car at the motel, an old brown van, plain and blocky as a loaf of bread, careened around the far comer of the lot, pulled up next to Loomis, and stopped. The driver was the older man who’d been at the pool. He leaned toward Loomis and said through the open passenger window, “Can you give me twenty dollars? They’re going to kick us out of this stinking motel.”
Loomis felt a surge of hostile indignation. What, did he have a big sign on his chest telling everyone what a loser he was?
“I don’t have it,” he said.
“Come on!” the man shouted. “Just twenty bucks!”
Loomis saw his son standing beside the passenger door of the car, frightened.
“No,” he said. He was ready to punch the old man now.
“Son of a bitch!” the man shouted, and gunned the van away, swerving onto the street toward downtown and the beach.
The boy gestured for Loomis to hurry over and unlock the car door, and as soon as he did the boy got back into the passenger seat. When Loomis sat down behind the wheel, the boy hit the lock button.
“Was he trying to rob us?” he said.
“No. He wanted me to give him twenty dollars.”
The boy was breathing hard and looking straight out the wind-shield, close to tears.
“It’s OK,” Loomis said. “He’s gone.”
“Pop, no offense”—and the boy actually reached over and patted Loomis on the forearm, as if to comfort him—“but I think I want to sleep at home tonight.”
Loomis was so astonished by the way his son had touched him on the arm that he was close to tears himself.
“It’ll be OK,” he said. “Really. We’re safe here, and I’ll protect you.”
“I know, Pop, but I really think I want to go home.”
Loomis tried to keep the obvious pleading note from his voice. If this happened, if he couldn’t even keep his son around and reasonably satisfied to be with him for a weekend, what was he at all anymore? And (he couldn’t help but think) what would the boy’s mother make of it, how much worse would he look in her eyes?
“Please,” he said to the boy. “Just come on up to the room for a while, and we’ll talk about it again, and if you still want to go home later on I’ll take you, I promise.”
The boy thought about it and agreed, and began to calm down a little. They went up to the room, past the courtyard, which was blessedly clear of ridiculous Gypsies and other guests. Loomis got a bucket of ice for his bourbon, ordered Chinese, and they lay together on Loomis’s bed, eating and watching television, and didn’t talk about the Gypsies, and after a while, exhausted, they both fell asleep.
When the alcohol woke him at 3 A.M., he was awash in a sense of gloom and dread. He found the remote, turned down the sound on the TV. His son was sleeping, mouth open, a lock of his bright-orange hair across his face. Loomis eased himself off the bed, sat on the other one, and watched him breathe. He recalled the days when his life with the boy’s mother had seemed happy, and the boy had been small, and they would put him to bed in his room, where they had built shelves for his toy trains and stuffed animals and the books from which Loomis would read to him at bedtime. He remembered the constant battle in his heart those days. How he was drawn into this construction of conventional happiness, how he felt that he loved this child more than he had ever loved anyone in his entire life, how all of this was possible, this life, how he might actually be able to do it. And yet whenever he had felt this he was also aware of the other, more deeply seated part of his nature that wanted to run away in fear. That believed it was not possible after all, that it could only end in catastrophe, that anything this sweet and heartbreaking must indeed one day collapse into shattered pieces. How he had struggled to free himself, one way or another, from what seemed a horrible limbo of anticipation. He had run away, in his fashion. And yet nothing had ever caused him to feel anything more like despair than what he felt just now, in this moment, looking at his beautiful child asleep on the motel bed in the light of the cheap lamp, with the incessant dull roar of cars on I-5 just the other side of the hedge, a slashing river of what seemed nothing but desperate travel from point A to point B, from which one mad dasher or another would simply disappear, blink out in a flicker of light, at ragged but regular intervals, with no more ceremony or consideration than that.
He checked that his son was still sleeping deeply, then poured himself a plastic cup of neat bourbon and went down to the pool to smoke and sit alone for a while in the dark. He walked toward a group of pool chairs in the shadows beside a stunted palm, but stopped when he realized that he wasn’t alone, that someone was sitting in one of the chairs. The Gypsy woman sat very still, watching him.
“Come, sit,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
He was afraid. But the woman was so still, and the expression on her face he could now make out in the shadows was one of calm appraisal. Something about this kept him from retreating. She slowly raised a hand and patted the pool chair next to her, and Loomis sat.
For a moment, the woman just looked at him, and, unable not to, he looked at her. She was unexpectedly, oddly attractive. Her eyes were indeed very dark, set far apart on her broad face. In this light, her fierce nose was strange and alarming, almost erotic.
“Are you Gypsy?” Loomis blurted, without thinking.
She stared at him a second before smiling and chuckling deep in her throat.
“No, I’m not Gypsy,” she said, her eyes moving quickly from side to side in little shiftings, looking into his. “We are American. My people come from France.”
Loomis said nothing.
“But I can tell you your future,” she said, leaning her head back slightly to look at him down her harrowing nose. “Let me see your hand.” She took Loomis’s wrist and pulled his palm toward her. He didn’t resist. “Have you ever had someone read your palm?”
Loomis shook his head. “I don’t really want to know my future,” he said. “I’m not a very optimistic person.”
“I understand,” the woman said. “You’re unsettled.”
“It’s too dark here to even see my palm,” Loomis said.
“No, there’s enough light,” the woman said. And finally she took her eyes from Loomis’s and looked down at his palm. He felt relieved enough to be released from that gaze to let her continue. And something in him was relieved, too, to have someone else consider his future, someone aside from himself. It couldn’t be worse, after all, than his own predictions.
She hung her head over his palm and traced the lines with a long fingernail, pressed into the fleshy parts. Her thick hair tickled the edges of his hand and wrist. After a moment, much sooner than Loomis would have expected, she spoke.
“It’s not the future you see in a palm,” she said, still studying his. “It’s a person’s nature. From this, of course, one can tell much about a person’s tendencies.” She looked up, still gripping his wrist. “This tells us much about where a life may have been, and where it may go.”
She bent over his palm again, traced one of the lines with the fingernail. “There are many breaks in the heart line here. You are a creature of disappointment. I suspect others in your life disappoint you.”
She traced a different line. “You’re a dreamer. You’re an idealist, possibly. Always disappointed by ordinary life, which of course is boring and ugly.” She laughed that soft, deep chuckle again and looked up, startling Loomis anew with the directness of her gaze. “People are so fucking disappointing, eh?” She uttered a seductive grunt that loosened something in his groin.
It was true. No one had ever been good enough for him. Not even the members of his immediate family. And especially himself.
“Anger, disappointment,” the woman said. “So common. But it may be they’ve worn you down. The drinking, smoking. No real energy, no passion.” Loomis pulled against her grip just slightly, but she held on with strong fingers around his wrist. Then she lowered Loomis’s palm to her broad lap and leaned in closer, speaking more quietly.
“I see you with the little boy—he’s your child?”
Loomis nodded. He felt suddenly alarmed, fearful. He glanced up, and his heart raced when he thought he saw the boy standing on the balcony, looking out. It was only the potted plant there. He wanted to dash back to the room, but he was rooted to the chair, to the Gypsy with her thin, hard fingers about his wrist.
“This is no vacation, I suspect. It’s terrible, to see your child in this way, in a motel.”
Loomis nodded.
“You’re angry with this child’s mother for forcing you to be here.”
Loomis nodded and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.
“Yet I would venture it was you who left her. For another woman, a beautiful woman, eh, mon frère?” She ran the tip of a nail down one of the lines in his palm. There was a cruel smile on her impossible face. “A woman who once again you believed to be something she was not.” Loomis felt himself drop his chin in some kind of involuntary acquiescence. “She was a dream,” the woman said. “And she has disappeared, poof, like any dream.” He felt suddenly, embarrassingly, close to tears. A tight lump swelled in his throat. “And now you have left her, too, or she has left you, because”—and here the woman paused, shook Loomis’s wrist gently, as if to revive his attention, and indeed he had been drifting in his grief—“because you are a ghost. Walking between two worlds, you know?” She shook his wrist again, harder, and Loomis looked up at her, his vision of her there in the shadows blurred by his tears.
She released his wrist and sat back in her chair, exhaled as if she had been holding her breath, and closed her eyes. As if this excoriation of Loomis’s character had been an obligation, had exhausted her.
They sat there for a minute or two while Loomis waited for the emotion that had surged up in him to recede.
“Twenty dollars,” the woman said, her eyes still closed. When Loomis said nothing, she opened her eyes. Now her gaze was flat, no longer intense, but she held it on him. “Twenty dollars,” she said. “For the reading. This is my fee.”
Loomis, feeling as if he’d just been through something physical instead of emotional, his muscles tingling, reached for his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She took it and rested her hands in her lap.
“Now you should go back up to your room,” she said.
He got up to make his way from the courtyard, and was startled by someone standing in the shadow of the Gypsies’ doorway. Her evil man-child, the boy from the pool, watching him like a forest animal pausing in its night prowling to let him pass. Loomis hurried on up to the room, tried to let himself in with a key card that wouldn’t cooperate. The lock kept flashing red instead of green. Finally the card worked, the green light flickered. He entered and shut the door behind him.
But he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there. The sliding glass door to the balcony stood open. Loomis felt his heart seize up and he rushed to the railing. The courtyard was dark and empty. Over in the lobby, the lights were dimmed, no one on duty. It was all shut down. There was no breeze. No roar of rushing vehicles from the 5, the roar in Loomis’s mind cancelling it out. By the time he heard the sound behind him and turned to see his son come out of the bathroom yawning, it was too late. It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away. He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough. The obstetrician said, “This baby is very sick,” and nurses wheeled the incubator out. He’d gone over to his wife and held her hand. The resident, tears in her eyes, patted his shoulder and said, for some reason, “You’re good people,” and left them alone. Now he and the child were in this motel, the life that had been their family somehow dissipated into air. Loomis couldn’t gather into his mind how they’d got here. He couldn’t imagine what would come next.
Brad Watson has spent most of his life so far in Meridian, Mississippi; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; and the Alabama Gulf Coast, where he dispatched many newspaper stories about dwindling water supplies for the coast’s rapid development as well as the lack of adequate sewage treatment plants. It was fascinating work, and no doubt he wouldn’t be the writer he is today if he hadn’t dispatched so many stories about salt-water intrusion and floating solids. Later, he spent five years in Boston, teaching at Harvard. Then, he knocked around for a while, brooding. Now he’s spent five years in Wyoming, where he’s discovered true winter, teaching at the University of Wyoming MFA program. A more intimate biographical note would reveal that he is, unfortunately, supremely qualified to write a story like “Visitation.”
I wrote “Visitation” after spending a number of years commuting to visit my own young son in similar circumstances. I wrote it in longhand in the backyard of our house in Laramie during the summer of 2008, while I was enjoying a blessed and too-rare long-term visitation from him in my own home. It was such a relief from the motel-dad life that I was able to look back on those years with some remove and write about the experience with the necessary detachment and invention. Which is usually when the darker emotional experience of it all comes back to you with a power that needs some outlet. You find a way to ground yourself and let the current pass through. Into a story is good.
Wells Tower
RETREAT
(from McSweeney’s)
Sometimes, after six or so large drinks, it seems like a sane idea to call my little brother on the phone. Approximately since Stephen’s birth, I’ve held him among the principal mother-fuckers of my life, and it takes a lot of solvent to bleach out all the dark recollections I’ve stashed up over the years. Pick a memory, any memory. My eleventh birthday party at Ernstead Park, how about? I’d just transferred schools, trying to turn over a new leaf, and I’d invited all the boys and girls of quality. I’d been making progress with them, too, until Stephen, age eight, ran up behind me at the fish pond and shoved me face-first into the murk. The water came up only to my knees, so I did a few hilarious staggers before flopping down, spluttering, amid some startled koi. The kids all laughed like wolves.
Or ninth grade, when I caught the acting bug and landed a part in our high school’s production of Grease playing opposite a girl named Dodi Clark. We played an anonymous prancing couple, on stage only for the full-cast dance melees. She was no beauty, a mousy girl with a weak chin and a set of bonus, overlapping canine teeth, but I liked her somewhat. She had a pretty neat set of breasts for a girl her age. I thought maybe we could help each other out with our virginity problems. Yet the sight of Dodi and me dancing drove Stephen into a jealous fever. Before I could get my angle going, Stephen snaked me, courting her with a siege of posters, special pens, stickers, and crystal whim-whams. The onslaught worked and Dodi fell for hi
m, but when she finally parted her troubled mouth to kiss him, he told me years later, he froze up. “I think I had some kind of primeval prey-versus-predator response when I saw those teeth. It was like trying to make out with a sand shark. No idea why I was after her to begin with.”
But I know why: in Stephen’s understanding, nothing pleasant should ever flow to me on which he hasn’t exercised first dibs. He wouldn’t let me eat a turd without first insisting on his cut.
He’s got his beefs, too, I suppose. I used to tease him pretty rigorously. We had these little red toads that hopped around my mother’s yard, and I used to pin him down and rub them into his clenched teeth. Once, when we were smoking dope in high school, I lit his hair on fire. Another time, I locked him outside in his underwear until the snot froze in scales on his face. Hard to explain why I did these things, except to say that I’ve got a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother’s wrath. Stephen’s furies are marvelous, ecstatic, somehow pornographic, the equally transfixing inverse of watching people in the love act. That day I locked him out, I was still laughing when I let him in after a cold hour. I even had a mug of hot chocolate ready for him. He drained it and then grabbed a can opener from the counter and threw it at me, gouging a three-inch gash beneath my lower lip. It left a white parenthesis in the stubble of my chin, the abiding, sideways smile of the imp.
But give me a good deep rinse of alcohol and our knotty history unkinks itself. All of the old crap seems inconsequential, just part of the standard fraternal rough-and-tumble, and I get very soppy and bereft over the brotherhood Steve and I have lost.
Anyhow, I started feeling that way one night in October just after I’d crossed the halfway point on a fifth of Meyer’s rum. I was standing at the summit of a small mountain I’d recently bought in Aroostook County, Maine. The air was wonderful, heavy with the watery sweetness of lupine, moss, and fern. Overhead, bats hawked mosquitoes in the darkening sky, while the sun waned behind the molars of the Appalachian range. I browsed the contacts on my phone, wanting to call someone up, maybe just deliver an oral postcard of this place into someone’s voicemail box, but I had a reason not to dial each of those names until I got to Stephen’s.