The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.

  That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.

  “But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?

  Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.

  I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers. . . . Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield. . . . No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.

  My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.

  The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”

  Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, I didn’t know how to fill up my days. That first Monday, I sat and stared at the morning TV shows, did the Times crossword, did my laundry. At noon, I drove over to the mall for lunch and human contact. Bought a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.

  Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.

  I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.

  After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been Annie’s doing. “Shabby chic,” she called it.

  On the first of July, I moved into the bunker. I hate it there. For one thing, there’s a nightly racket from the bar across the street. For another, the old gal in the apartment across the hall is needy. Pesty. She seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

  By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened
to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”

  I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.

  Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”

  Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.

  “Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”

  She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”

  “I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”

  Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”

  “New England? Manhattan?”

  “All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”

  “A bowl,” I say.

  “Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”

  I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.

  Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if . . . The right says . . . I care!

  After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.

  At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him. . . .

  “If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.

  I told him I disagreed, and so did the experts. “The DSM stopped classifying homosexuality as a sickness way back in 1973,” I said. “It’s as much an inevitability as blue eyes or someone’s shoe size.”

  “So why’d she even marry you then? Why did she have us?”

  “Because she loves you guys. And she loved me, too.”

  “Yeah, well . . . this Vivian person?”

  “Viveca,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever. In that note she wrote me? When she said she hoped me and Casey can make it to the wedding because it would mean so much to Mom? Hey, sorry, lady. That ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “It’s your decision.”

  “You’re not going, are you?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “You’ve met her, though. Right? Mom’s . . . friend?”

  “Uh-huh. You’ve met her, too. Do you remember that time when your mom had one of her pieces selected for the Whitney Museum show? And the five of us took the train down to New York? Stayed at that nice hotel and went to her opening?”

  “Vaguely,” he said. “Was that when you took us to the NBA store and we saw Rick Fox?”

  “Yup. Same trip. But I’ve seen her two or three times since then, too.”

  “If you ask me, I don’t even think Mom is gay. I think she’s just mixed up. Living in New York, hanging out with all those artsy types. Who wouldn’t get their head messed up? You know what Marissa said? In this e-mail she sent me? That she thinks everyone’s bisexual, and that some people deny it and some people don’t. Now if that’s not fucked-up New York thinking, I don’t know what is. And I wouldn’t put it past that little twerp to be doing some experimenting with the lesbo stuff herself. You know how many gay bars there are in New York City?”

  I said I didn’t. Did he?

  “Plenty of them,” he said.

  I told him I didn’t think living in New York, in and of itself, would turn anyone gay, so we were going to have to agree to disagree on that one. “And as for your sister, she’s an adult. Whatever experimenting she may or may not be doing isn’t really our business, is it?”

  “Yeah, but I’m just saying . . . So what’s this Viveca person like, anyway? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”

  “It’ll take some getting used to, Andrew. I realize that, but—”

  “Don’t defend her, Dad. Mom having a wife? It’s messed up.”

  “Well, it’s legal now, Andy.”

  “Because some asshole liberal judge back there—”

  “It wasn’t decided by a judge. They voted on it in the state legislature.”

  “Yeah, and what are they going to make legal next? People marrying their dogs or something?”

  “Oh, come on now. That’s kind of a specious argument, isn’t it?”

  “All I’m saying is, it’s unnatural. Do you think that’s what God wants?”

  Instead of getting into an argument about God’s existence, I told him I had no idea what God wants. “Hey,” I said. “Not to change the subject, but I saw on the Weather Channel that you guys are getting a lot of rain down there. Right?”

  “Yeah. Last couple of days there’s been tornado watches, too. I mean, if women marrying women and men marrying men was God’s plan, then why’d he make Adam and Eve instead of Adam and Steve?” . . .

  Chapter Five

  Annie Oh

  Viveca has left the prenup on her desk in the study: six legal-size pages with little cellophane flags to indicate the places where my signature’s supposed to go. She’s signed it already in her deliberate, forward-slanting penmanship. I haven’t signed it yet and may not. What’s she or her father’s lawyer going to do if I don’t? Stop the wedding? No, she wouldn’t do that. I’m not powerless in this relationship. Gallery owners need artists more than artists needs gallery owners. . . . But that’s not fair. I mean more to Viveca than those com
missions. She loves me. I know she does. But I also know that she envies me my creativity, my treacherous rides inside the cyclone. “Other agents have approached you. Haven’t they, Anna? You can tell me,” she’s said more than once. That’s where my power comes from. I know what her professional insecurities are, and also her personal secrets: that she terminated a pregnancy by a former lover, a man who refused to leave his wife; that she was not an only child like she tells everyone but had a mentally retarded brother who was hidden away at some training school. Profoundly retarded, she told me. She used to hate it when her parents made her go with them on those visits and she had to look at him, drooling and wearing a dirty helmet, banging his head against the wall. I’ve made it my business to know these things but have told Viveca very little about my own history. I hold my cards close to the vest, the way I did all those years with Orion. I may have been powerless against those floodwaters. Powerless against Kent’s secret visits to my room. But I learned about power the day that I got on that Greyhound bus and the driver pulled out of the depot and carried me away from the black hole that had almost sucked me in. The black hole that my life was about to become with Albie Wignall. . . .