I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  I can’t say that any one part of this made me feel more awful than another. I was doing what Lindsay and I had always done, a kind of triangulation to see if it was strange to hear any of this. She said that yes, it was strange. She didn’t say more. There’s a battlefield triage level of compassion that runs thin after a while.

  * * *

  —

  After three weeks, my mother had numerous inquiries into sales jobs for multilevel marketing positions, but no income still. Her final option was something called Project Share, which matched homeless but responsible people with elderly clients who were enfeebled and needed helpers. One afternoon, she took the bus an hour to San Leandro to meet a former chiropractor who greeted her by announcing she hadn’t seen a doctor since 1953. She had also stopped throwing away food and no longer flushed the toilet. When my mom arrived, the woman offered her a dish of ice cream, which my mother ran her spoon around, afraid to eat it. The woman glared at her and the melting ice cream, obviously feeling insulted and asking increasingly mean-spirited questions. That match didn’t work.

  Mom sat in our living room and read aloud to me the descriptions of other seniors she might meet. Hildegarde, 80, an intellectual—has limited eyesight and likes to be read to…Sue, 90, Alzheimer’s, needs to be escorted to the bathroom at night…Sam, 74, Parkinson’s, has his own car, but needs someone to drive it.

  When she was discouraged, I played classical music for her on the stereo because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. With sighs, she explained to me how hard a worker she was in the office jobs she hadn’t even wanted. She just wasn’t a team player—she hoped that if she were professional enough, nice enough, her bosses would eventually have to be nice back. Someone named Candace had paid her five dollars an hour, but paid the janitor eight dollars an hour, and yelled at my mother when she offered advice. Law students got their résumés done, then sued her when she tried to get paid. Jared, another boss, stole her paycheck. Another set up an investment pool that turned out to be a pyramid scheme. Mom only found out when she came to work on payday to find all the equipment gone and the FBI asking questions. Paul was a physician who made her babysit a girl he’d gotten pregnant and performed an abortion on. She shook the list of Project Share candidates as she talked.

  It was a moment transparent enough that I understood it. Here was a rogue’s gallery of people who had already been cruel to her; here was a list of seniors who would be the same way. Why bother? She made an appointment to apply for food stamps. She had to throw away her only pair of sandals because they’d fallen apart.

  * * *

  —

  Lindsay and I were tentative around each other. Mom tried to be as unobtrusive as possible but the fact of her was a constant reminder of something dark. Her troubles seemed to bend whatever environment she was in until it matched wherever she’d come from and wherever she was going next.

  She wanted to be a good guest. She insisted on doing the dishes after dinner, working hard at the sink. After she closed the door to the study, Lindsay would go to the kitchen and do the dishes again to get the spaghetti sauce off of them while the television shows my mother watched beat against the walls at high volume. America’s Funniest Home Videos, or TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, the canned laughter distorted into wails you could feel in the floor coming from what I no longer called Fifi’s room.

  * * *

  —

  A couple Lindsay and I knew were going away for a month. Their apartment would be empty. I asked if my mother could house-sit. I couldn’t blame them if they said no. But then they said yes, and I wanted to fall on them with gratitude.

  Telling my mother about the house-sitting was tense. Did I pitch it to her like this, perhaps? “You’ll have a month to recoup. You can stretch out without us underfoot. It’s a lovely space in a great neighborhood.” I can still see her face intelligently sizing up the situation—the house was high in the Oakland Hills without access to public transportation. If she went there, it was a guarantee she wasn’t going to find a job. If I suggested she go, it meant to her it was more important to me that she get out of my house than that she actually support herself.

  With grace, she agreed the change in scenery would be nice. It only took part of the morning for her to insert her belongings back into the cardboard boxes she’d kept in the study. She taped them shut.

  I drove my mother away from my house, the trunk and backseat overflowing with clothes and papers and knickknacks. She rode with her Rolodex in her lap, because she wasn’t going to give up her sales leads.

  We stopped at the Safeway on 51st, which had a huge parking lot that always seemed to bake in the sun. I was going to buy her a week’s worth of groceries. But I didn’t have much money. Brown rice and vegetables. Canned tuna. My mother saw yogurt was on sale, three for a dollar.

  “I had no idea there were so many varieties,” she said. “If I eat three a day, that should be enough.” She stood in the dairy aisle for a good, long time, taking in all the flavors, asking a clerk what the difference between the white and the colored containers was. The colored ones were pre-stirred.

  She counted out twenty-one yogurts, and looked to me for confirmation, and I said it was a good choice. But was she sure she didn’t also want brown rice? Vegetables? She was ambivalent. There were some basic hygiene items, too, toothpaste, for instance. She didn’t want to run up too much of a bill.

  Walking with my mother through the aisles of the supermarket defined me in ways I still don’t understand, because with every item she rejected as unnecessary, I was seeing her diminishment. She had gotten so much smaller than when she used to have a checking account and money in it. She was choosing now to be smaller still. She was tucking her legs into a steamer trunk, seeing with something like pleasure what a refined and uncomplaining appetite she had for a life that wouldn’t be a bother to anyone as she tumbled back into chaos and its deep, familiar shelter.

  As she was leaving my home, I was going to stand on the shoreline and wave. I started to see her receding as the twenty-one yogurt containers went into the plastic sacks that we carried into the parking lot.

  When we were outside the Safeway, a homeless guy put his hand out. “Spare change? Be generous.”

  It took me by surprise. I laughed harder than I had in weeks. It was a cruel, stupid, heartless laugh, and I didn’t even stop walking. I yelled over my shoulder, “You have no fucking idea.” I remember my mother either smiling or grimacing. What did she think of me? Who did she identify with?

  * * *

  —

  A couple of days later, I was sitting on the couch with Lindsay, who was slowly paging through a Penthouse magazine I’d bought to show her. There were photos of women I thought she would like. I rubbed her feet the way you would rub two sticks together, my eyes flicking toward any page she lingered over. I couldn’t remember when we’d last had sex. Her eyes had that kind of cool appraisal that homed in right before her drive to fuck woke up, I thought.

  The phone rang. Lindsay picked it up and said hello. She started talking to someone. She continued to turn the pages of the magazine, talking as if fully engaged to whoever it was. I couldn’t interpret from her tone if it was a relative or one of her friends, and my inability to read her made me feel weak. I felt I was witnessing my own cuckolding. I began to tell myself it was Charles Blank on the phone. I pressed against the most sensitive part of her arch as if that would tether her to me. I was thinking, I will feel an inch beyond the tips of my fingers again. I will bring you back from outer space. That’s how it works with us. We have a connection.

  After she hung up, she looked at me. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  She kissed my forehead, tossed the magazine to the couch, and went to make tea.

  * * *

  —

  My mom was in her house-sit for a couple of we
eks before she started having a problem. She’d had the landlord over for dinner and he’d made a crude pass at her, which she’d rejected, and since then he had been making her uncomfortable. I asked Lindsay if in the time we’d known our friends they’d ever mentioned their landlord. No. Lindsay said it was odd for him to both materialize and hit on my mother.

  I said it was like her presence had contorted the place until it matched her world she’d brought with her.

  Lindsay realized I didn’t understand what was going on. “Your mother is trying to move back here.”

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, I got a phone call from Susie, who said my mother was exploring returning to England. This made sense to me—she should return to her family. But Susie wanted me to stop this, to kill it. My mother wanted to bring Daniel with her.

  I almost said, “But Mom and Daniel broke up,” but then I realized of course, right. They weren’t broken up—they were apart. My mother was seeing a path to a friendly horizon and a cottage somewhere in which Daniel could start over again.

  I called my mother to tell her she shouldn’t take Daniel to England. She bristled. It wasn’t any of my business. Why would I say something like that?

  “He’s a drug addict. He steals.”

  “Your relatives are drug addicts. They’ve stolen themselves many times. Don’t get on your high horse about that.” And then she said, “He’s just fine when he’s not around drugs. I’ve told Susie that.”

  “That’s like telling her he’s great—just keep him away from knives. He’ll find knives if he wants to, Mom.”

  She said I didn’t understand. I shouldn’t be so critical about him. He spoke in tongues in his sleep. He’d had a hard life. He’d been jailed as a teenager and raped there. He’d been to many of the fifty states.

  She was no closer to knowing where she could go. Oregon, where her sister Elizabeth lived? My mother didn’t like this idea. She said, “Elizabeth is, well, you know.”

  Elizabeth was disorganized and friendly and chipper, and chaos followed her even more closely than it did my mother. She tended to spontaneously drive several hundred miles in a car filled with clothes and broken furniture and what she called gifts, but which no one wanted. I wasn’t quite sure how many times she’d been married. At a picnic with my cousins, I once saw her running up the side of a hill naked, with a butterfly net, yelling at the summit, “Heigh ho, Glen! Heigh ho!” Of all the many sisters, Elizabeth was the one the rest could agree was impossible. I understood why my mother didn’t want to live with her.

  My mother said, “I keep telling Susie, it’s so difficult when she and I are the only sane ones.”

  * * *

  —

  I had a huge straw cowboy hat that was tattered and ridiculous, the kind of thing that should have had holes cut in its brim for a donkey’s ears. At parties I photographed friends in the hat. When writers did readings at Black Oak or Cody’s, I’d bring the hat and ask if they minded posing with it on. So I photographed Jay McInerney, I. F. Stone, and Tama Janowitz wearing it, or holding it with confusion. It felt like a better trophy than an autograph.

  When Don DeLillo came, I thought I should leave it at home. Same with David Leavitt. That time, I didn’t trust myself, as if I might accidentally do something snide with it.

  Leavitt read endearing material, however, and during the Q&A afterward, my hand shot up of its own accord, and he gave a very funny answer to my question: he hated that Esquire had called him the voice of a new, as-yet-unnamed generation. All he’d done was sell them an essay, and when it came out with that claim on it, he’d winced, and his friends had made fun of him ever since. I liked this answer.

  While he signed books, an acquaintance of his talked about how his agent and publisher were worried about sales numbers. This was a strange thing to overhear, because I’d assumed that after you were declared the voice of a generation, you had nothing further to worry about. Publication—still an unimaginable distance away—was supposed to be some kind of finish line, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  * * *

  —

  I bought Lindsay and myself a present. A psychic astrologer read our charts. I’d visited first, and though the psychic was accurate about describing me, she couldn’t quite grasp my relationship with Lindsay. She wasn’t sure we’d known each other in previous lives. “If so, it wasn’t as lovers. Maybe one of you was the other’s patron? Or a mother and a son?”

  I had two thoughts as my session ended. One was that she was wrong and this was a scam. The other was the opposite thought, that it was all accurate, which depressed me more. I wasn’t prepared for a third possibility, which turned out to be the correct one.

  The astrologer made audiotapes for us. Lindsay’s tape begins with several long minutes of the astrologer getting only about half of it right. Maybe less. She could feel Lindsay’s attention drifting. It struck her as strange, as she didn’t tend to make spongy observations that may or may not fit. Then she showed Lindsay the information she copied down. Wrong birthday.

  With the correct birthday information, she was immediately on track. She described Lindsay with great accuracy—funny, vibrating one-half second away from the world, a former femme fatale, fighting off the death-obsessed influence of her father, striving to go forward and do some sort of public work for the common good. The astrologer described this desire in depth, ecological remediation, and as I heard the tape, I thought, “Maybe, potentially, but—”

  And then, on tape, Lindsay said that yes, she was interested in exactly that. She’d been thinking for months about going to grad school. This was news to me.

  I had wanted a moment of magic and there it was, yanked from the clouds, a deep understanding of desires she’d never spoken, and it made me uneasy. I hadn’t thought the magic would take the form of a stranger knowing Lindsay better than I did. But, annoyingly, that turns out to be how magic works sometimes.

  After describing Lindsay’s conflicts and desires and options, the astrologer turned back to our relationship. She still wasn’t sure we’d known each other in a past life. She also thought I needed Lindsay more than she needed me. I don’t remember what she said after that.

  A few days later Lindsay and I went to a party where I talked to nobody but instead sat on the couch, petting a cat in my lap. I can’t remember the house we were in or the time of day, just a small pair of spotlights on myself and on my girlfriend. I watched her interact with people, how she nodded and showed an interest in their lives. I knew I should be doing the same. She was learning how to say, “I’m going back to graduate school,” and with every conversation she repeated it, I wanted her to tell me we were okay. I had a poetic or paranoid feeling that the more she talked about her future environmental career the more likely she was going to leave me. I was thinking, How did we get here? Weren’t we a little more like myths once?

  * * *

  —

  In late September I took my mom to the Greyhound bus station on San Pablo, an avenue wide enough to seem like a highway. It was deserted except for the homeless people the cops were rousting from the bushes. Mom found a shopping cart, and I helped her unload her cardboard boxes and her luggage from the car. She wheeled it into the station. I paid for her fare at the ticket window, and then I joined her on the platform.

  Her trip to Oakland had failed. And here we were. I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying because a bad reckoning was welling up in me. I was telling myself, “This is what my mother looked like on the day I gave up on her.”

  She was wearing running shoes and a plastic raincoat. Her hands were on the rim of a metal supermarket shopping cart, and her nails drummed without rhythm as she talked about what she would do next. Oregon had better programs for job training. She’d looked into it, and she qualified for something, she thought, but she could only get the details o
nce she was a resident there. She would learn to deal with Elizabeth until she found a place of her own. She wasn’t going back to Daniel, she said. That’s when I realized, not for the first time, my mother believed everything she said, until the next thing she said.

  They loaded her boxes into the bus. She had food for the trip. Before she got on board, I gave her the money in my wallet, fifteen dollars. It doesn’t matter if we kissed or hugged goodbye, because I’d already said goodbye from whatever you would call the place my heart was.

  Later I was sitting in my car, somewhere. I was thinking about Lindsay, to whom I had finally talked about how hard it was that she no longer wanted me. She had said, shrugging, “Celibacy gives me strength.” I burst into tears, and then I stopped crying because I understood there was no point to it.

  THE BENSHI

  LINDSAY SAID, “I want to start trying to be the woman you wanted to marry.” She’d been lost, the way people are after graduation, only she’d meandered now for almost five years.

  The University of Colorado had an excellent ecological studies program. She studied for the necessary exams, did some volunteer work, and applied to grad school. If she got in, the plan was for us to move to Boulder in September 1990. I’d get a day job of some sort while I finished my new novel.

  I’d written and rewritten The Clown Joke, which a few agents and editors had read the first fifty pages of. One had asked for the whole thing, and returned it in an untidy mess that I liked looking at. Her rejection note was extensive and heartfelt and suggested I try writing something more personal.