The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  Seana nuzzled the nape of my neck. “Mmmmm,” she said.

  Trish got out of bed, dropped an orange muu-muu over her head, then kissed each of us, me on the forehead, Seana on the back of her neck, and, stepping over toys and around baskets of laundry, called out to Anna that she was on her way.

  “Did Max ever tell you about his Uncle Ben?” I asked when Trish was gone.

  “No,” Seana said. “Max never told me about his Uncle Ben.”

  “Ben was his favorite—his father’s younger brother, who died at sea while in with the merchant marines—but that’s another story—and he was cremated. The ashes wound up with Max, who kept them in a small covered Japanese bowl on our fireplace mantle. This was when I was a little boy, and whenever I pointed to the bowl, he’d say, ‘The way I look at it, a Benny saved is a Benny urned.’”

  Seana groaned and, both arms around my waist, pulled me tight against her. “I like you a lot, you know,” she said, “even though you’re a much younger man, and more like Max than is good for me.”

  When we woke the next time, I said I’d been thinking about Max—worrying about leaving him alone in our big house. I was feeling nostalgic about him—lonesome really, though perhaps not for him so much as for things we’d done together we wouldn’t ever do again.

  “Lonesome’s okay,” Seana said. “But nostalgia’s a bitch, a veil for rage most of the time.”

  “‘A veil for rage,’” I said. “I like that—Wallace Stevens?”

  “No.”

  “Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan?”

  “No.”

  “A veil for rage because remembering stuff that way, especially childhood, masks how miserable it really was?”

  “You’re smarter than you look,” she said.

  “But I am definitely feeling lonesome for the guy,” I said, “and I’m wondering why I’m feeling this way now and if you’re feeling the same…”

  “You know it,” she said.

  Earlier, I’d been remembering something that happened on one of our first trips to New York. Max had given me a tour of his old neighborhood—shown me the famous places: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park, where Ebbets Field used to be—but what I’d been remembering about the trip wasn’t anything we did or saw, I told Seana, but what happened on the subway.

  “Going into Brooklyn we’d stayed in the front car so I could watch the train rocketing through tunnels and switching tracks, and I remember being excited—and frightened—by the possibility we might crash into an oncoming train, or that I might see somebody fall from the platform onto the tracks as our train entered a station,” I said. “Then, on the way back to Manhattan, our subway car was crowded, lots of people standing. It must have been rush hour, and there was one huge black man taking up three seats and, with a glowering expression, daring anyone to question his right to do so. He wore a red bandana on his head, pirate-style, and a sleeveless T-shirt—the kind my father said Italians called wife-beater shirts—that showed off how buff he was.

  “Without warning me about what he was going to do, Max bent over and spoke to the man. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Max said, ‘but I was wondering if you would be kind enough to make a bit of room so that my son and I might sit.’ The man did a double-take, frowned, then said ‘Sorry,’ shifted to the side, and made room for us, after which, at station stops, and when we were stuck between stations a few times, my father engaged him in conversation, starting off by admiring a tattoo of a large-breasted mermaid that adorned the man’s shoulder—it turned out that the man, who gave his name as Willy Williams, had, like Max, served time at sea—and inquiring about Willy’s line of work. Willy said that after a stint in the Navy he’d been a millwright—a kind of jack-of-all-trades—in an Indianapolis auto factory, but had come into hard times, and my father offered the fact that he was in the education business, and that he might be able to provide useful contacts and information. Had Willy been to the local VA facility? he inquired—careful, I noticed, not to call it a hospital—and Willy said he’d been meaning to go, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

  “My father took out an index card on which he wrote his name, address, and phone numbers—office and home—and when we got out at Penn Station, Willy shook my father’s hand. ‘You’re the man,’ he said, and then he shook my hand and said that one day I’d be the man too.”

  “Did your father ever hear from him?” Seana asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never asked, he never told.”

  “Maybe he’ll show up when we’re in Brooklyn together,” Seana said. “You never know. Weird things happen if you make room for them.”

  For breakfast Trish made blueberry pancakes, along with link sausage, fried scrapple, and hash browns. Anna, sitting in a high-chair and using her fingers, ate everything, and when I remarked on how unusual this seemed to me for a child her age—how un-American!—Trish beamed with pride and said she believed the best thing for children was to feed them what you fed yourself and not to give in to their whims because if you did you put limitations on what their taste buds would accept when they became grown-ups.

  “And speaking of the future,” she said, “I forgot to tell you about something I was thinking last night about the past—about another one of my dreams. Do you want to hear?”

  Gabe was sniffing at the air and talking about how good the house smelled. Not breakfast, but the other smell, like the smell in the kitchen whenever his mother spilled spices on a hot stove. His favorite smell of all, though, was burning wool or burning hair. Sometimes, after his mother gave him a haircut, he said that she let him take hair she’d cut off and he’d pinch the strands with metal tongs and hold them over one of the burners until they sparked and sizzled.

  “I never play with fire otherwise,” Gabe said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “What I remembered last night was about who I wanted to be,” Trish said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Who who,” Gabe said. “I’m an owl too.”

  Anna giggled. “Hoo-hoo,” she said. “Hoo-hoo.”

  “Who I wanted to be was the young woman who puts a daisy in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at an anti-war rally,” Trish said. “Do you remember her? I had a poster of her up on my wall at UMass.”

  “My mother says she used to be a flower child,” Gabe said.

  “Hoo-hoo,” Anna said again. “Hoo-hoo.”

  “Flo-wer pow-wer,” Trish whispered in Anna’s ear while she nuzzled her. “Flo-wer pow-wer. Do you have flo-wer pow-wer, sweetheart?”

  Anna laughed, and repeated the words, which came out clearly, though without the ‘l’: “Fow-wer pow-wer… Fow-wer pow-wer…”

  Under the table, Seana took my hand in hers. “I like it here,” she said to Trish, “and I was wondering: Have you considered selling time-shares?”

  “No,” Trish said. “But it sounds like an idea whose time may have come, even though with the money Nick left me I probably won’t have to take in boarders for a while.”

  “Can you tell me about my father?” Gabe asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” Gabe said.

  “As it happens, I may have a good deal for you this morning,” I said. “But you have to be patient. Can you be patient?”

  “Sometimes,” Gabe said.

  “Okay,” I said, and I took a deep breath, one eye on Seana while I spoke to Gabe. “So here’s the scoop: My father and Seana have been encouraging me to write a book about your father, and I’ve been thinking I might just do it.”

  “Really?” Gabe said.

  “A book about Nick?” Trish said.

  “Not just about Nick. The book would be about Nick and me—about our lives in the Far East.”

  “In Singapore,” Gabe corrected.

  “In Singapore,” I said. “Yes. And if I write the book, I’m thinking I could also write about our lives before Singapore, when we were in colleg
e together.”

  “Will you write about how my father died?” Gabe asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Not good enough,” Seana said, and she went to the stove, where Trish was whipping up batter for another round of pancakes and spoke to Trish. “Will you tell us stories about Nick even if they’re not for publication?”

  “Maybe,” Trish said. “Who knows?”

  “Stories that took place in the olden days?” Gabe said.

  “Olden and golden,” Trish said. “When families were happy the way we are this morning.”

  “In my family—O’Sullivans and McGees, and on my mother’s side, Kearneys and Mahoneys—we found happiness and inner peace by humiliating one another on a regular basis,” Seana said.

  “Though we’re not Irish here in Thomaston, we still drink our fair share,” Trish said. “And rumor has it that Ozzie and Harriet retired to rural Maine and are living among us.”

  “Ha ha,” Gabe said. “My mother tells a lot of jokes about Ozzie and Harriet, but I don’t know who Ozzie and Harriet are.”

  “They’re illusions,” Seana said.

  “My favorite family is Abbott and Costello,” Gabe said. “We have a collection of their movies on DVD. Do you like Abbott and Costello?”

  “I love Abbott and Costello,” Seana said. “If Costello were still alive, I’d marry him.”

  Gabe started to laugh, a high-pitched laugh that got louder and louder until, his face bright red, he gagged and had to spit out what was in his mouth.

  “Can you tell us what was so funny?” Trish asked when Gabe had stopped coughing.

  “What’s so funny is Costello,” Gabe said. “But he’d make a silly husband because he’d do everything wrong all the time.”

  “He’d keep me laughing, though,” Seana said, “and I believe he’d be wonderfully affectionate.”

  “But he’d be—” Gabe paused, then did the best imitation he could of Costello—“a baaaaad boy…”

  “Well, we like bad boys,” Seana said. “Don’t we?”

  “Story of my life,” Trish said.

  “Because if you marry a bad boy,” Seana said, “you get a father, husband, and child all rolled up into one, and who could pass that up?”

  “Would you marry me some day when I grow up if I’m still a baaaaad boy?” Gabe asked.

  “Of course,” Seana said. She brought another stack of pancakes to the table, along with a fresh pitcher of warm maple syrup, and told me she was glad I was going to write Charlie’s Story, because that was what she believed Max had intended in the first place.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered.

  “Wrong?”

  “Why’d you say you’d marry Gabe when he grew up?”

  “Because I wanted to,” she said.

  “But don’t you know he’s going to take your promise seriously?”

  “The way he took your promise to write about his father?”

  “But I didn’t make a promise—I said I might try to write a book about me and Nick. But you promised to marry him some day…”

  “So?”

  “So be careful, that’s all. He’s not like other kids. He’s not…”

  “He’s not what?” Seana asked, loud enough for Gabe to hear.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Jesus, but you’re a case sometimes. You should be more careful, that’s all.”

  “If I were careful all the time, I wouldn’t be Seana,” she said.

  “That’s true, Charlie, and you shouldn’t forget it,” Trish said. “And also, didn’t we agree last night that it’s important to believe in a future—to believe there’ll actually be one?”

  “I recall that we did,” Seana said.

  “In my opinion, that’s what last night was about,” Trish said. “Otherwise, why are we here?”

  “We’re here because Nick’s dead,” I said.

  “That’s merely the proximate cause of our visit,” Seana said, and she walked to the stove, where, while glaring at me with eyes devoid of anything resembling affection, she kissed the back of Trish’s neck in a way that made Trish shiver.

  Gabe leaned toward me from across the table. “In less than eight years I’ll be eighteen,” he said.

  I felt a pale whooshing and clicking inside my head then, as if the fumes from what we’d smoked the night before were drifting away into dark rooms, the doors to these rooms closing one behind the other, after which a voice rose up from the floor of my brain and called to me: Hey Charlie—don’t you think you’re getting in just a little bit over your head this time?

  “All done!” Anna said. Trish wiped Anna’s face with a washcloth, lifted her from the high-chair, and told Gabe that in fifteen minutes he had to be ready for school. Gabe got down on the floor next to Anna, and the two of them began playing a game that involved moving clothespins in and out of empty yogurt cups. “I’ll be ready on time,” he said. “I always am.”

  “After Gabe leaves, I can tell you about Nick if you want,” Trish said.

  “Whenever,” Seana said, and she turned to me. “Will you take notes?”

  “For somebody so smart you can be pretty stupid sometimes,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” she said, her voice pure Brooklyn.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well then, chuck you, Farley.”

  “Hey you two—we’re all friends here, remember?” Trish said. “None of this nasty stuff allowed, especially in the morning. You’ll send me straight back to my caves of gloom, and I’m hell to be around when that happens. Charlie can vouch.”

  “I can vouch,” I said.

  It was past ten in the morning, and we were still sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee, Anna on the floor playing with her clothespins and yogurt cups—Gabe had been picked up by the school bus more than an hour before—and Trish was telling Seana about her and Nick: how they met on our infamous double-date, me with her, and Nick with a hot, young Israeli student named Shoshana. What happened, Trish explained, was that she and Nick couldn’t keep their eyes off each other all night—we’d gone bowling, and then to a late night drinking spot in Hadley called The Rusty Nail, where they had punk-rock bands and access to a smorgasbrod of drugs—and how, afterwards—the next morning, in fact—Nick had asked my permission to call her.

  “He acted honorably toward you in doing that—in not just going after me,” Trish said, “and I was thrilled.”

  “That he acted honorably?” I asked.

  “That he acted honorably toward you and that he wanted to go out with me.”

  “You had it wrong,” I corrected. “He wanted to get into you.”

  “Well that was okay with me,” Trish said. “And with you too, Charlie, so don’t deny it.”

  I shrugged, and Trish began telling Seana about the first time the three of us got it on together, which happened a week later in a hotel Nick took us to on the coast of Maine, near Ogunquit. It was off-season, and we stayed in a large room in a place straight out of a Hopper painting, with an in-room fireplace and a spectacular view of the ocean, and waves crashing in on rocks all night long. Nick brought along a stash of Golden Montana—‘the champagne of Mary Jane,’ he called it—and before long we were sky-high happy and doing things you only fantasize doing most of your life, or read about other people doing.

  “Nowadays, it’s all on You Tube,” Trish said. “Everything you can imagine, and in all possible combinations and permutations. It makes me sad.”

  “Because it leaves so little to the imagination?” Seana said.

  “Maybe,” Trish said. “But for a more personal reason. I mean, a lot of our friends were doing what we did, but it makes me sad because it turns what we did, which I thought was special, into something common.”

  “Oh yes,” Seana said, and was about to say something else—about things she’d done in her earlier years?—when the doorbell rang—a buzzing instead of a ringing—followed by a loud, insistent rapping. Trish went to the
door and let in a state trooper, and for an instant, my bourgeois conscience back on the job, I thought he might have come to tell us we’d violated some state law. We don’t allow things like that up here, mister, I imagined him saying.

  The trooper, built like a tight end—about six-five and two-forty—had taken off his hat and had his arm around Trish. From the soft, polite way he was talking with her, and from the way she rested her head against his chest, and then from the way her eyes filled up when she turned to us, I was suddenly afraid something had happened to Gabe.

  Trish walked toward us slowly, tears streaming down her cheeks, and I opened my arms wide, for a hug, but she stopped when she was a few feet away. “Officer Guardi—Richard—needs to talk with you, Charlie,” she said. “I’m sorry. Really sorry. Really, really, Charlie…”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Fuck,” Seana said. “Fuck and double-fuck.”

  “It’s my father, isn’t it,” I said to the trooper.

  He nodded. “I’m awfully sorry, Mister Eisner,” he said.

  “I knew it,” I said. “I just knew it. “We shouldn’t have left him alone.”

  “Nonsense,” Seana said.

  “We shouldn’t,” I insisted. “We shouldn’t have—even if he wanted us to.”

  “And we’re being punished for having done so, right?” Seana said. “Punished for our pleasures.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said we shouldn’t have left him alone.”

  “Can it, Charlie,” she said. “He’s gone. End-of-story, as young people say these days.”

  Then she turned to Trish, who opened her arms wide for her. Seana held to Trish, let her head rest on Trish’s shoulder, and I was suddenly confused. Why was she embracing Trish when it was my father who had died? Why was she shutting me out? And if I went to her, and tried to pry her from Trish’s embrace…

  “I’m awfully sorry, Mister Eisner,” the trooper said again. “We received a request from the Northampton police to try to locate you. I checked hotels and motels in the area—we had the license plate number of your father’s car—and at the Ocean House, in Port Clyde, they said you’d mentioned visiting some one in Thomaston.”