by Lydia Millet
He was on the telephone discussing the details of a condominium conversion in Laguna Beach when Susan knocked on his office door and pushed it open, flustered. Behind her
stood his mother, who sat down heavily in the chair on the other side of his desk.
As he hastily cradled the receiver he saw his mother’s makeup was smeared; around her eyes the mascara had streaked and the eyeliner run. She was bedraggled and for the first time in his life he could see gray at the roots of her blond hair.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. She had never visited him in Los Angeles.
“Your father’s gone,” she said, and began to cry noisily, pulling a clump of wrinkled pink tissues from her purse.
He felt a wave of shock. He forced himself to get up. “Gone? What do you mean, gone?” he asked, and came
from behind the desk to kneel beside her with an awkward palm on her shoulder. He wondered if he should embrace her, but she did not turn to face him.
“I don’t know. Gone!” she wailed, and hunched over sobbing.
I don’t know, he thought. So not dead.
He stood and rubbed her back lightly with the heel of his hand, in circles, waiting with what he hoped seem like patience; he shook his head at Susan when she opened the door and mouthed Can I do anything?
Finally his mother finished crying and blew her nose. “Here,” he said, and guided her to the sofa against the
wall. “It’s more comfortable here.”
She sat down and instantly looked wretched and pathetic, so he sat down beside her. Wiping at her eyes with one of the balled-up tissues she only succeeded in spreading the black smears.
“Now take a deep breath and tell me what happened,” he said. “OK?”
“I just woke up and he was gone,” she said. “And he didn’t leave a note and he never called me.”
“And when was this?” asked T. “Three weeks ago,” she said quietly.
“Three weeks? It’s been three weeks and you haven’t told me before this?”
“I went to the police but they just looked at me like … this one policeman looked at me meanly. It was very mean the way he looked at me.”
“No doubt he failed sensitivity training.”
“Your father took exactly half the money from our joint accounts. I think he’s, you know. Left me.”
“I can’t believe it,” said T., shaking his head dully. “Did you—I mean—”
“We weren’t fighting,” she said. “We never fought.” “So everything was—”
“It was fine,” said his mother. “It was the same as it’s always been.”
“So you were—he was—happy?” “Apparently not,” she snapped. “I meant—”
“We weren’t having relations, if that’s what you mean.”
T. turned away from her and examined a potted plant, one Susan and Julie had given him called an asparagus fern. He closed his eyes for a second and opened them again on the fern. It had not moved, of course.
Meanwhile his mother was rummaging around in her purse, pulling out a purple rosary, a wallet with a checkbook, a pair of tweezers, a lipstick, a comb, keys, mints, and spreading them on the sofa on her other side.
“That’s none of my business,” he said softly.
“Not for years,” she went on, “many, many years,” shaking her head, and T. got up abruptly, experiencing minor palpitations. He wanted to block his ears.
“He hasn’t been in touch with you?”
“Nothing. He did use the credit card a few times. Once he got gas in Michigan. It was a Texaco. Or no, it was Exxon. No, Texaco.”
There was silence in the office for a few long seconds, broken only by the faint blare of a horn out the window. His mother found a compact in the spillings from her purse and snapped it open.
“Oh! Lord!” she said, and rubbed vigorously at the mascara. “Why didn’t you say something, T.? This is a time in her life when a woman has to look decent. Where’s my cold cream?” “Here,” he said, and lifted a small blue pot from between
the sofa cushions. “Is this it?”
She grabbed the pot and opened it, and while she spread the white cream around her eyes kept up a rapid patter.
“Mary Louise called from the K of C office and asked if we were going to come for the meningitis evening. I was so humiliated. You can’t go to those things by yourself. They have kids up on the stage that have bravely survived. But then they go deaf or retarded. Water on the brain. It’s always this overcooked salmon. Two hundred a plate. I don’t know where he is! He could be anywhere! What should I say? What if I tell everyone and then he decides to come back and it turns out I never had to tell them at all?”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Is that your main worry?” “It’s time for my car’s thirty-thousand-mile service, I got a notice from the dealership. He always takes it in. The lights give me migraines. The fluorescents. What if it just breaks down on me and I have to walk miles in the dark to a payphone to call triple-A and I get raped on the way? That would
be his fault then!”
“No one’s being ravished, OK? Here. Do me a favor. Can you just slow down a minute? Sit back and relax. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Would you do that?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy! I am your mother, T.!” “Of course you are. And I’m your son and I’m worried
about you.”
She looked at him blinking, and he thought she was considering his words until he noticed she was not looking at him but over his shoulder.
“And what is that?”
He turned and followed her gaze. It was a pencil sketch by a famous expressionist. He had bought it at a Sotheby’s auction.
“It’s art, Mother.” “Don’t be ridiculous.”
But she seemed mollified, and began to pack her personal items back into her purse.
“Let me take you to my place, OK? I’ll make you dinner.” “I’m not hungry.”
“Then maybe just a cup of tea.”
“I’m not an invalid, you know. I’m just a woman whose husband walked out the door. For all I know he’s doing it with his secretary.”
“He took early retirement. He doesn’t have a secretary.” “You know what I mean. Some random floozy.”
“Let’s just go, OK? Let’s talk about this when you’re rested.”
“And I don’t need to stay with you. I made my own arrangements. I have a room in a four-star hotel.”
“Well, I need you to stay. Come on. Come home with me.”
Weeks later she was still in his guest bedroom. He did not always mind and was even glad, at times, that she was there, but in terms of progress her presence threatened to reduce him. She was a liability.
He liked to present himself as solitary and free, an argument for potential; he moved and spoke with the official neutrality of a man sprung fully formed from the background of commerce. But now suddenly he carried personal freight, which threatened to hold him back. He cringed at the thought of business associates encountering his mother, whether by design or accident. He did not want his investors, for instance, to think of him beholden to a mother, childlike. And she was bad for his image, far too frail and specific to reflect the broadness of his interests and his command of prospects.
The most austere among his investors, in fact, the ones who had wide ocean views out their office windows, gave the impression of never having been born at all. They would die, admittedly, that much was tacitly conceded; but this was understood to be almost a polite gesture on their part, part of a genteel tradition whereby the old bowed out into the wings to make room for the young.
So they would die, when their race was run, but they had never been born: they had not been children. They had not ever been anything but what they were now. And he would not make the concession either.
Still his mother was pathetic, hurt and lonely. He could not bring himself to hurt her further.
When he was at the office she walked the dog
three times a day; arriving home he found his laundry washed and folded, shirts hung in the closet by color, mail carefully sorted. She busied herself with the housework usually done by the cleaning woman, and when for the first time since his mother’s arrival the cleaning woman arrived and let herself in she found a screaming middle-aged blonde in a kaftan and every surface spotless.
His mother rearranged dry goods and crockery and occupied herself changing drawer liners and purchasing items for
which he had no use, such as fondue forks and silver napkin rings. In corners of his apartment things sprang up that bore no relation to him. On the toilet tank, a china shepherdess with rouged cheeks and a crook and a curly-haired lamb at her feet; on a wall in the foyer, a framed picture of angels accompanied by a homily; on the arms of a leather sofa, elaborate lace sleeves.
“I don’t remember,” he mused over dinner on the day the shepherdess appeared, “you decorating our house this way when I was growing up.”
“What way?” asked his mother.
She insisted on cooking for him every night; the meals were low-fat and almost completely devoid of flavor. He had taken to eating a fast-food hamburger on his way home from the office.
“You know—the thing you put in the bathroom, the Little Bo Peep thing.”
“You don’t like it?” asked his mother, her spoon suspended halfway to her lips, trembling.
He heard something in her tone and noticed her eyes were brimming.
“It’s not that,” he said hastily. “I wouldn’t have picked it out myself, per se, is all I meant.”
“You needed somewhere to put the guest soaps,” she said, and resumed eating. “You can’t expect guests to use the same soap you use. It’s not hygienic.”
“What the hell good is soap if it’s not hygienic?”
“You get your germs on it. Or from shaving. A hair could stick to it.”
“I appreciate all your efforts,” he said. “I love having you here, and I know the dog does too. But maybe you should focus on yourself, for once. You know? There are good day spas in walking distance. Susan made up a list for you. Or
you could take one of those weekend cruises to the Catalinas.”
“When will you stop treating me like the walking wounded, T.? I’m fine. I like to keep busy.”
“I realize. But I think you’ve been looking after someone, two people, right?—for the last twenty years of your life …” “Twenty-three. Thirty-three if you count from when we got married, which you probably should. That man hasn’t
ironed his own shirts since 1963.”
“… and maybe you need to stop looking after other people and look after yourself. Concentrate on what you want, what you need. Because my guest soap is, let’s face it, not yet at the level of a national emergency.”
“You don’t like it, do you? It’s an antique. It is Dresden china, T. From Dresden, Germany.”
“Mother? I’m not entirely sure you’re listening to me.” “They’re famous for their china. Wonderful workman—
ship. Little blue marks … I may be alone, my husband may have left me, but I know how lucky I am, T. At least I know that.”
“I’m sure—”
“You know what we did to Dresden in 1945? Your father had friends who were pilots in the air war. And some of them—we’re talking about boys who were eighteen years old here, T., barely out of puberty who still had facial acne—they talked about trying them as war criminals. Their superiors told them they had to bomb Dresden, so they did. Some of them were shot down. They still had facial acne.”
She gazed at him balefully.
“You know what happened with the carpet bombing? There were fires that burned at fifteen hundred degrees. The cold air rushed in from outside and all the people got sucked into the flames and burned to death in terrible agony. Those
were someone’s friends, T. Their friends and their families. They had friends and someone was friends with them. Someone lost their friends then.”
“Uh …”
“Hundreds of thousands of someone’s friends burned to death then, screaming.”
He tried to catch her eye but she picked up a salt shaker. “They were someone’s friends and they saw right out of their eyes, like you do. They watched things pass, there was nothing they could do about the world. Nothing they could
ever do.”
“Are you—”
“And what did they get for wanting? They wanted the world to be different, T. You can be sure of that. They wanted the world to be a good place, full of holiness and wonder. We all do.”
“It—”
“But what did they get? They got burning to death.” “Lis—”
“They got watching their children burn. Their children and their babies. Babies, T. Little children, toddlers holding their toys, babies with those wide eyes … mothers had to watch their children die right in front of them, trapped in the burning buildings. Children die faster than adults. And their mothers had to watch it. Choking from smoke inhalation while they burned to death. Hundreds and thousands of babies. Watching them cry that sweet baby cry as their little faces burned away to a crisp.”
She spooned up her soup, shaking her head. His own utensils lay untouched on the placemat.
“And you don’t like that poor china girl holding the cute baby sheep? Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
There was a tinge of hysteria, certainly.
She paused to reach for the salad tongs and he leaned forward and laid a hand on her arm.
“Mother. Listen,” he said gently. “Isn’t it sort of a stretch? The firebombing of Dresden and my opinion of a toilet ornament?”
She shook her head, frustrated.
“Your generation thinks that wanting means getting. But most of the people in the whole world … for them what they want has nothing to do with their life, with what their life actually is.”
“I realize that.”
“Here people want something, they get it, and they say that’s, you know, happiness. Or success. And those other people, those poor people everywhere … I mean there’s nothing to envy, they live in terrible privation and I pray for them every day, but one thing they have you and your friends will never have.”
“What’s that?”
“Longing, dear. Longing makes the soul. Without it …” She gazed at him sadly.
“… the soul has nothing. It just gets forgotten.”
What rose in him was tenderness—he was sorry. He wanted to comfort her.
•
His father called him one day at work. He stepped out of a meeting in his conference room to take the call at his desk.
“Hey, kid.”
A forced tone of good cheer. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’m just driving. Stopped for a cup of coffee. Wanted to let you know I’m doing A-OK.”
“You need to call my mother. You’ve been together thirty years, you can’t tell her you’re taking off?”
There was a dull buzz on the other end of the line. “Dad? You hang up?”
“You know, there comes a time …” His father’s voice trailed off.
“She’s staying at my house. Call her on the phone there. She’s the one you need to talk to.”
“Easier said than done, my boy.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s your duty.” There was silence on the line again.
“It’s not a mid-life crisis, you know.”
“You already had one of those. When you got the hair plugs.”
“This is not a mid-life crisis.”
“I need for you to call her now. This is between the two of you. Seriously, you don’t think you owe it to her? A few words?”
“Did you ever have a dream so real it felt like you were awake?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”
“What if one day you woke up and you realized your whole life had been a dream like that? Your whole life, from some point where you fell a
sleep, was only a dream. The kind that tricks you into thinking you’re wide awake.”
T. was quiet, waiting. He looked around his office, the receiver pressed against his ear, and thought he saw a shade descend on it, roll dimness down the walls. A cloud had moved in front of the sun: his office had a weather all its own, and here he was, suddenly old. With the night coming on.
“My whole life was like that,” went on his father, over the static. “From when I left college, from something I did then. I mean I never chose a single thing, when I look back on it. When I married your mother I wasn’t really awake. I wasn’t awake when she had you. I never woke up once for all these years. It was just not real to me. You know who you were looking at, the whole time you grew up? I was a ghost. I wasn’t really there. It was all, I don’t know, some other guy’s life I stepped into by mistake.”
T. felt drunken, his legs heavy beneath the desk. He swiveled in his chair and sadness closed his throat. There they were in his bedroom, when he was a little boy. His father sat on the side of his bed; it was bedtime, and here was his father to read him a story. Usually his mother read the stories, but this time his father had left the television and come upstairs. He almost smelled the new fresh paper of the picture book; he saw his father’s large hands turning the pages with deftness, with authority. In the book there was a family of beavers, and they lived in a dam. Inside the dam it was warm and golden, and the beavers ate their dinner at a round wooden table. He remembered the softness of his father’s voice.
Not real to his father; a life lived by a stranger. Sitting there on the side of his bed, reading the book about the beavers who were warm in their dam, had been no one.
“Until a month ago. That’s when I woke up. It was sudden, like an alarm clock or something. Now I’m awake. It’s too bad, but your mother is an innocent bystander. She’s a casualty.”
T. found he could not speak.
“I’ll drop her a line, on down the road.” He barely heard the rest.
As soon as he got home his mother asked, as was her daily custom, whether his father had contacted him. He had fully intended to keep it from her—his father’s callousness could hardly fail to do her an injury—but as he crossed the threshold into his apartment he saw, first, all the contents of his kitchen cabinets and drawers spread over the counters around her as she organized them, listening to golden oldies on a tinny clock-radio; and, second, the lettering on her apron, which pictured a slice of bright-red tomato and the words RIPE AND READY.