I wandered over to the door between my suite and the Guinevere suite and peeked in; Froissart’s description (was it Froissart?) of the sack of Aleppo came to mind, if only because Crusader imagery had me in its grip. Open boxes from various department stores were scattered everywhere; tissue paper that had once enclosed new garments was in piles everywhere; some of it had floated into the Jacuzzi. The new clothes themselves were draped on chairs and couches; collectively they seemed pretty garish. Toys had proliferated: there was a giant green turtle that a child Jesse’s age could ride; there were heaps of half-assembled rubber monsters; there was a red bike with training wheels. Propped by the bed was a real, as opposed to a toy, AK-47; a case of ammunition sat on the coffee table. Transistors, tiny TV sets, and huge ghetto blasters were scattered around the room. I peeked into the bathroom, which contained a vast array of makeup, shampoos, lotions, oils, perfumes. T.R. had indeed learned to spend money.
I went back to my own suite, ordered up a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches and some lemonade. The two sandwiches tasted ambrosial. It occurred to me as I ate them that I might be eating my last orderly meal, or at least my last meal as a solitary.
I had never before actually admitted to myself that I was a solitary—perhaps it took the soaring sense of clarity that one is given for an hour or two after an intense migraine to bring that fact home. No one is supposed to be solitary—much less a solitary—in this relation-laden day and age. The planet is blanketed now with the literature of relationships, most of it middlebrow at best. But there would seem to be no book for the solitary. It was just such a book that I had been setting out to write—a book about the splendors and miseries of being alone and about what it takes to sustain a cultivated and civilized aloneness.
It would be an irony, if a common one in literature, that I would be writing the book—if I wrote it, managed to write it—just as I lost the condition I aspired to describe. The deep harmonies of silence would soon be replaced by the screech of family life—loud, sharp tones—the very tones that, in “Al and Sal,” had made my fortune. Only this time I wouldn’t be imagining domestic life; this time I’d be living it.
For a moment I felt the same panic I had felt the morning T.R. called; the apprehension that had been with me on my drive to Houston came back. It wasn’t a simple fear of parental inadequacy, either; I wasn’t that worried about my ability to get along with T.R. and the kids. Rather, the panic was literary: What if I forgot the texture of solitude so fast that I couldn’t manage to write about it? Gaining my family at long last was great; what wasn’t great was the thought that I might lose my book. Already I was losing the subtle insights and high clarities of the solitary. Five minutes with T.R. and Jesse in the room and their immediacy robbed me not only of my old state but of my memory of it. There I was, and happy to be there; but what had become of the other, older, more familiar lonely me? The me that didn’t start his car for six months, the American Oblomov? What if that turned out to be not so much the real me—there could be several mes—as just the more fruitful me?
Such troubling questions could not be answered over a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of lemonade in an Arthurian motel in Arlington. I resolved, however, to call up Blackwell’s first thing in the morning and order all the books they had on hermits and hermitry. I could no longer be a hermit myself, but at least I could read about hermits: St. Anthony, St. Simon Stylites, and various others who had lived in caves or sat on pillars for forty years. I was not so much afraid of no longer being solitary as I was of not being able to remember what being solitary felt like. Maybe the books would help.
It was annoying that it was already night in England; otherwise I would have called Blackwell’s right then; I still liked to act on my impulses immediately. Instead, I called Jeanie Vertus. I didn’t get her but I got her machine and a toneless, totally noncommittal invitation to leave a message.
“Hi,” I said. “I’ll be home in three hours. I found my daughter. She’s wonderful and so is my granddaughter. I’m taking eight people home with me, mainly her friends. My granddaughter’s father’s along too, we had to break him out of jail.”
At that point in the message I stopped to think. News such as that would startle Jeanie a lot. I wondered if I should explain that Muddy was only a burglar and not really harmful or dangerous. But if I started explaining in depth, my message might run for several hours.
“I have a lot more to tell you,” I said, deciding against extensive exposition, “but I can’t talk too long on this phone. I love you, call me soon.”
For some reason I didn’t feel satisfied with my message—it did no justice to the transitional mood I was in, whereas Jeanie’s brilliant messages always did justice to her transitions, which were frequent and in many cases extremely subtle. Just changing her outfit could mark a significant transition for Jeanie, involving, as it did, a decision about who she wanted to be on a given occasion.
The transition I was making, from solitude to family life, was more complicated than changing an outfit; I was going to change a life, or at least I was going to try. It would be a big change, and if I left a coherent message about the change I would not only be preparing Jeanie for it, I would be preparing myself as well. My message would be the moral equivalent of the first sentence of a book—the book of my new life.
A few seconds ticked by; the more I contemplated the change the less I felt prepared to summarize my anticipations on a message machine, even Jeanie’s, the machine of the person I felt the most compatible with.
“Things are going to be different now,” I added, not at all sure what I meant by the statement. It seemed an inadequate statement, too, but a few more seconds ticked by and I could think of nothing more satisfactory to say—nothing that wouldn’t take the equivalent of a chapter, at least. Finally, after another thoughtful pause, I just said “Bye,” and hung up.
THREE
1
Godwin was wearing only his ratty old green bathing trunks when he opened the front door of Los Dolores and confronted the mob of us for the first time. He looked as if he might have been bingeing for a few days, taking drugs, and listening to the Rolling Stones through his earphones.
“Where’s the yard?” T.R. asked, surveying my expensive adobe home. “This stupid house looks as if it was made of mud pies.”
“It’s nice inside,” I said meekly.
T.R. and Muddy had quarreled all the way from Arlington, and T.R. was not in a good mood, to put it mildly. Before I could even help Granny Lin out of the Cadillac—she had stiffened alarmingly during her stay in Arlington—the delicious Jamesian moment occurred in which Godwin and T.R. first set eyes on one another: T.R., beautiful despite her terrible-taste new clothes, sailing up to the house with Jesse on her hip, the epitome of American youth, American good looks, American ignorance, American energy; and Godwin Lloyd-Jons, the ultimate Euro, drugged out, fucked out, arted out—nothing left but brain.
“Who are you? I bet I could get AIDS just from shaking your hand, don’t you kiss my babies,” T.R. said, momentarily taken aback by the skinny, toothless figure inside the door.
Actually, Godwin wasn’t quite so far gone as he should have been to fit the Jamesian equation I was placing him in. An immediate gleam came into his eyes at the sight of such a splendid young woman. Seeing the gleam gave me a powerful sense of déjà vu, for he had had just the same gleam for Sally, T.R.’s mother, a quarter century earlier; Godwin, in his disgusting way, was a sort of survivor.
“My dear, I’m Godwin, and I assure you I’ve led a life of chastity and scholarship these last few years,” he said suavely. “I knew your mother well, do come in, what beautiful children you have.”
“I’m Gladys, I do the cooking,” Gladys said, amazement in her eyes. T.R. set Jesse down and Jesse, glad to be out of the car, toddled over to Gladys at once, winning her wizened heart in half a second.
“Well, look at this precious girl,” Gladys said. She hunched over like a sho
rtstop and scooped Jesse up.
“You should get dressed, I don’t want to have to stand here counting your ugly ribs,” T.R. said to Godwin. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to bring in, you could help if you were dressed.”
“Righto,” Godwin said submissively and went to do as he was told. Gladys and I were both very surprised—we were constantly ordering him to get dressed, and he didn’t.
Before introductions could proceed further, Bo instigated the first crisis of our new lives by racing over to the swimming pool and installing himself with his AK-47 on the very end of the diving board. The problem with that was that the pool had been drained for cleaning; if he fell off it was a twelve-foot drop to the tile bottom.
“Muddy, get him!” T.R. commanded.
Muddy, carrying the real AK-47, was surveying his new surroundings apprehensively. Actually there was not much in the way of surroundings to see—the house sat on a bluff, with the great plains stretching away to the north, and a few blue knobby hills to the south. Mainly what there was to see was the deep western sky, a feature that apparently didn’t appeal to Muddy Box. He exhibited not the slightest interest in rescuing Bo from the diving board.
“This place is way out in the country,” he observed with surprise and dismay.
“That’s right, Daddy picked it just to keep you out of trouble, Muddy,” T.R. said. “No apartment houses for you to steal TVs out of, no malls for you to shoplift from. I don’t know what you’ll do for excitement.”
“I don’t know what any of us will do for excitement,” Dew said. She too looked a little apprehensive at the thought that she was going to live amid such empty vistas.
“Well, there’s lots to read,” I said nervously, realizing even as I said it that this was not a crowd likely to be won by my ten thousand eclectically selected books. But maybe the thousands of records and hundreds of videos would keep their minds off where they were for a while.
Muddy, ignoring T.R.’s command to rescue Bo from the diving board, wandered off across the hill, his AK-47 slung across his shoulder.
T.R. looked disgusted, and her disgust was of a voltage to make everyone nervous. As soon as I helped Granny Lin into the house, T.R. turned her disgust on me.
“That’s your grandson out there about to fall off a diving board and crack his skull,” she said. “If he falls off and kills himself I’m gonna sue you for the whole three hundred million, I don’t care if you are my daddy. Why don’t you at least act like you can do something and get him off it? What do you mean leaving that swimming pool empty when there’s kids around who can fall into it?”
“I didn’t know they were cleaning the pool this week,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I walked over to the pool. Bo was now lying on his stomach on the diving board and seemed to be in no immediate danger of falling off. He trained his toy machine gun on me as I approached.
“Hi, Bo, why don’t you come and see what’s in the house?” I said. “There might be something in there that you’d like to play with.”
“Bambo,” Bo said. Then he made his approximation of an AK-47 spitting out bullets—in this case spitting them out at me.
T.R. and the gang had vanished into Los Dolores; Muddy Box was already halfway across the long hill. I was alone with Bo for the first time in either of our lives. He showed no sign of wanting to leave the diving board.
Bribery occurred to me as a possible solution. Many times, wandering through the zoos and parks of the world, I had seen desperate parents trying to bribe their kids. The bribes weren’t always in the form of cash; they might be in the form of ice cream, cotton candy, or another trip to the small-mammal house; but the fact that the parents had been driven to naked bribery was always evident from their guilty looks.
What was good enough for them was certainly good enough for me. I reached in my pocket, but all I had in my pocket was a wad of hundred-dollar bills. In an ideal world—that is, a world in which I didn’t have to account for my actions to anyone else—I would have given Bo the wad of hundreds in a second if I’d thought there was the faintest chance it would induce him to come off the diving board.
But it wasn’t an ideal world; it was a world in which complications multiplied like ragweed. Bo probably had no interest in one-hundred-dollar bills—after all, he was just three—and if he accepted them and transformed himself into an obedient little person, I would still have the problem of peer disapproval to contend with. I could just imagine the ridicule I would be in for if Bo marched into the house and let it be known that I had given him eighteen hundred dollars to come off a diving board. Everyone would think I was insane, not to mention inadequate, though in fact eighteen hundred dollars had no more meaning for me than it had for Bo, and any one of my critics might have done the same if they were as rich as I was and as hopeless with children.
“Please come back off the diving board,” I pleaded. Forced to reject bribery due to a lack of small change I fell back on groveling.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work. Bo continued to lie on his stomach, pointing the toy machine gun at me.
Then, to my surprise, I had a practical thought. Why not just fill the swimming pool? I had done that a few times and was pretty confident I could manage to get the water on. The swimming-pool man would show up and be annoyed, since it meant he would have to drain it again to finish the cleaning, but on balance I felt I would rather have him annoyed with me than T.R. I could just let three or four feet of water in, enough to prevent Bo from cracking his skull in case he fell.
I went over to the pumping apparatus and turned the big valve; to my delight water immediately began to gush into the pool. Having a practical thought and being able to put it into practice gave me a sudden flush of confidence. It seemed to me I was developing; far from being defeated by the exigencies of grandparenthood, I was stimulated by them.
My euphoria lasted only a moment. Bo looked over the edge of the diving board and saw the water rushing in beneath him. To my surprise he reacted with shock and horror. He immediately got to his feet, clutching his gun, and began to scream and dance around on the diving board. Several times he seemed in danger of dancing off the edge. Of course there was not yet even an inch of water in the deep end of the pool, so he was still in as much danger as he had ever been.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m just filling up the pool. Don’t you like to swim?”
Bo only screamed louder—he was hysterical with fear of the rushing water beneath him. I saw that in fact he was going to fall off because he was crying so hard he couldn’t see. I hadn’t been on the diving board in years, but I was on it in a second. I managed to grab Bo by one arm and pull him off it just in time; his gun fell in and was swept toward the shallow end of the pool. Bo continued to scream and punch and kick but I hardly noticed; I dragged him with me to a nearby chaise longue and sat down. He was in a blind fury, but he was also very small, and it was not that hard to hold him. I slipped into adrenaline shock so strong that I felt a little faint, but I still kept a good grip on Bo.
“Hey, Daddy, you’re doin’ better,” T.R. said. She had arrived poolside without my noticing, looking radiant. Beside her stood Godwin, but a Godwin transformed; he wore a clean seersucker shirt and immaculate white pants; if I hadn’t already been in shock, I would have gone into shock at the sight of him—in a matter of minutes he had transformed himself from a fading intellectual derelict into a model colonialist; he looked as if he could be running a teak plantation in Ceylon. Not only did he look better than he had looked since moving in with me, he had also quickly managed to make friends with T.R.—they were casually passing a joint from hand to hand.
“I take back what I said about your house,” T.R. said. “It looks like mud pies from the outside but it’s pretty nice on the inside—only a lot of them books need to go. Half the rooms have so many books in them you can’t see the walls.”
“I guess Bo’s scared of water,” I said, hoping to draw atte
ntion to my last-second rescue.
“I caught him just in time,” I added, but neither T.R. nor Godwin were paying the slightest attention. They seemed to be discussing post-New Wave rock bands, and took the fact that Bo wasn’t dead as a matter of course.
“I did have quite a few good heavy metal cassettes, but Muddy stole them,” T.R. remarked. “Muddy’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down, and if you give him time he’ll yank out the nails and steal them too.”
“We’ll have to watch him closely,” Godwin said gravely. “He seems a rather pleasant boy.”
“Pleasant unless you cross him,” T.R. said. “Then he swells up like an old frog.”
Bo tore loose from me and wrapped himself around one of his mother’s legs. He continued to sob, now and then pausing to point tragically at his machine gun, which had floated back near the middle of the pool.
“Speaking of the devil, where is Muddy?” T.R. asked.
“I guess he’s just taking a walk,” I said. “He wandered off with his machine gun.”
“Would you like a swim?” Godwin asked. “The pool will be full quite soon. I could make some Bloody Marys and we could have a swim.”
“Make that margaritas and I might just take you up on it,” T.R. said. “Me and Dew bought quite a few new bathing suits we need to try on.”
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