I could see it then, our three women, the Sisters, or God forbid Ellie, would finally answer the front door, barely able to hold its hinges from gusts of unsolicited wind, and there, daubed on the porch like a landscape from Salvador Dali, three drowned husbands in a coffin of broken glass bottles, egg creates, sweet potatoes, and artichoke hearts.
Seven minutes of unsuccessfully fingering the bell, I beat knuckles over the door, but nobody answered. The weathermen had hailed this sudden splurge of wind and rain as San Francisco’s first great Storm of the Century. It was only supposed to last through the night, but hope was lost. I figured we’d be dead on the front porch by then.
“You’re not knocking loud enough!” Charlie shouted over a slew of wind. “Here, let me!”
He rattled her door. The branch of a majestic Monterey Cypress tumbled drunk as a skunk up the sidewalk and clung to his leg. Only sarcasm answered him. That and the excitable screams of Ellie, Susan, the Sisters, and our twin wives, who were likely engaged in another battle of Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii.
“It’s wet out here!” Charlie called to his wife with another full degree of innocence. “We’re soaked. Let us in!”
He fish slapped fingers over the door. The charcoal sky was cut in half by a singular jagged flame. A barreled roll of thunder followed. Nearby, another tree branch fell.
“Ah, San Francisco.” Michael grinned. “A golden handcuff with the key thrown away.”
“That sounds familiar.” I looked to my friend, shuffling the bag of groceries in my arm. “Who said that, Hemmingway?”
“Steinbeck.”
“Somebody, please,” Charlie groaned, pressing his forehead like a pathetic looking squeegee upon the door. “Let us in!”
“If three husbands knock on the door in a rainstorm and no one is around to hear them, do they even exist?” Michael grinned again. He was apparently finding amusement not just with this incident, but the entire weekend.
“Should I knock louder?” I asked the two, and then followed my own directive, competing simultaneously with another booming roar of thunder.
“Um, what are you three boys doing standing out here in the rain?” Ellie cracked the door open with a bag of trash in her fingers.
None of us answered her. We let the rain and the wind, explosive neon-slit sky and fallen fingertips of Monterey Cypress do our talking. Another boom of thunder followed.
“Did you buy artichoke hearts?” Elise said, digging through the bag in my arm. “I don’t see artichoke hearts. You forgot it, didn’t you?”
“We can’t have the last Thursday night dinner of my single life without artichoke hearts.” Josephine frowned from behind her sister, shouting over another slew of wind.
“This is unsalted butter.” Susan retrieved a box of it from Michael’s bag. “We said we needed salted butter. Michael, you know unsalted butter doesn’t taste like anything.”
“Can you go back to the store and get some for us, Charlie?” The lawyer said to her fiancé, sounding suddenly sweet and innocent. I wondered if she talked to the jury that way. How did she live with herself? “You won’t regret it, come Saturday night.” She ran playful fingers across his arm. Lawyers.
“And don’t forget the artichoke hearts, either,” Elise said, taking the soggy French bread and paper bag from my arms, leaving our twelve-pack of Pabst Blue-Ribbon on the porch. “You know we can’t have my sisters last Thursday night dinner without artichoke hearts.”
“Who is it?” We heard Aunts Patty and Nancy call from the other room seconds before the door closed.
“The boys forgot artichoke hearts and salted butter,” Josephine said as the door clicked shut.
“You know, I have this theory.” Charlie bundled his hooded sweater and jacket up again. “That my life is really a sitcom in a parallel universe. I’ve titled the show Twins in the Dark; the hilarious life adventures of two individual men married to a single split egg.”
“That would make this the segment of our twenty-two minute story where we cut to a commercial break,” I told the boys. “The artichoke hearts and salted butter will somehow roll from our bag and down the harbor for an Alcatraz swim before we reconvene on this porch, thereby resulting in a separate but entirely identical scene.”
“I’d like to think, somewhere in another dimensional plain of existence,” Charlie said, “for millions of television viewers, right now, this very second, hilarity ensues.”
Trudging forward for a second but certainly not last errand to the store, Michael gazed up at the ferocious sky, stopped only to light a cigarette, took a pleasurable breather from it and said, “What if this wasn’t a TV show? Perhaps you’re overlooking the far more obvious, that this is simply a segment from a book and anyone of us can be unconscious of the fact that we’re its narrator.”
10
From the moment we arrived at the Sister’s San Franciscan home Aunts Patty and Nancy couldn’t stop talking about their recent pilgrimage to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee to consecrate the King’s thirtieth anniversary passing. At least it wasn’t about the sixties.
“I know Priscilla and Lisa-Marie couldn’t make it this year.” Patty finished off her second glass of Pinot Noir. “But we could all feel them in spirit during the candle vigil. You ask me, that’s some serious hunk-hunka burning’ love right there.”
As we dug into the dinner that our wives had prepared after we husbands took three trips to the store…through a torrential downpour…. uphill both ways…. the thought occurred to me that there weren’t any dinner rolls or salted potatoes to go with the blander helpings of fish and Israeli couscous. No mayonnaise for the artichokes and certainly no dressing or croutons for the lettuce and sliced tomatoes. What had happened to the soggy loaf of French bread? No, I didn’t care how they diced it. This wasn’t a salad. It was an uprooted garden. I started to consider suicide as the better option. Then again, we could at least all be grateful that nobody had to call the fire department, seeing as how my wife had a hand in cooking the artichokes. I considered bringing that up. Then I didn’t.
I’m not exactly sure how we ended up thumbing through some of my nationwide wedding photography exploits, either. Something to do with Lisa-Marie being the stand-in ex-wife for Michael Jackson, the King of Pop dangling Baby Blanket from a hotel room balcony, and then, oh yes, that’s the connection – the wedding I photographed in Miami where two college aged-girls dangled not babies but bras from topless bodies for the groom and his line of groomsmen as I photographed them by the pool, pasting ear-to-ear sort of grins for the wedding album that I positively couldn’t muster on my own without squeaky-toy visual aids. Apparently, Miami Beach had plenty to go around.
Charlie, Michael and our wives howled with laughter as I described the recent episode where I was stuck paralyzed in the stall of a Boston bathroom for fear of getting caught after learning it was a woman’s changing room. And then of course there was the police officer that pulled me over only a couple of hours later for taking the directions from a carload of drunken women who played Shania Twain in eternal Samsara-like cycles on cassette tape.
“I love that story!” Elise almost spit her wine out with the telling. “Joshua, it’s hard for me to imagine that your life on the road can be anywhere as humorous as you make it out to be.”
“But have you ever been to Graceland?” Aunt Nancy stared at me disgustedly from her plus-sized swivel chair, strumming fingernails over the glass tabletop.
“Why yes!” I told her. “That was the time when I photographed the wedding of Bobby and Laurie, titanic Elvis fans, who later, as it turned out after the honeymoon, discovered they were Kissing Cousins, like the Elvis song, and had the whole thing annulled.”
“You haven’t told that one yet.” Josephine shifted in her chair, as if to prepare for a good punch line, and sipped wine. “Let’s hear it.”
“It’s almost like…I’m kissing…my brother.” Michael quoted a line from one of his favorite movies.
&
nbsp; “You would know.” Susan wrapped her arm around him.
“Well, you haven’t been to true Graceland,” Patty scowled, holding her head up high, “unless the King’s touched you, letting the silky scarf slide over your shoulders like he did to me once when singing Falling In Love with You in Vegas, 1976.”
That sparked to my memory a story or two concerning weddings I’d photographed in Vegas, one involving an intoxicated Elvis serving as minister, who in fact was really an undercover private investigator, and had the maid-of-honor arrested before it was over. I told them about it.
“Have you been to Woodstock?” Aunty Nancy scanned Charlie and her twin niece’s howls of laughter then stared at me, the damn boy who stole the little girl away from her, with parental disgust. “Well, have you?”
“Oh, certainly. I actually just photographed a wedding there last summer. The bride’s parents had attended the event almost forty years ago. But I can’t exactly say it was all that eventful.” I swished the wine around in my glass. “Except for the demon ghost squirrel of Woodstock who haunted the reception and totally destroyed their wedding cake when the couples pug took it up in the chase.”
“What?” Charlie howled for the absurdity of it.
“I haven’t heard that one yet.” Josephine slurred. “You simply must tell it to us from the beginning.”
“It’s so funny.” Elise told her sister. “Wait till you hear it! The pug was so fat, I don’t know how it could run that fast!”
“Well, you certainly haven’t seen America then,” Aunt Nancy crossed both arms across her bosoms, holding her head higher than ever before, “unless you’ve been to Woodstock, like I have, in August of 1969.”
11
Move aside, burn victim coming through!
Expressionless, the woman levitated down nearly a hundred zigzagging floors like Jesus on Galilee water, or perhaps less Messiah (I made note of it) and more of a horror genre zombie. The scene: the North Tower, September of 2001. All these years later, I let everyone know, she still sprung up in my nightmares.
As she moved past me, wide eyes brimming with the pointlessness of it all, never blinking, like a deer before the jury of flooded headlights, clothes lifted from flesh where third degree burns festered, skin flapping from her arms, neck and face, fanning off in scabs, it suddenly occurred to me that her hair was caked in gray layers of slime.
“I don’t know how else to describe it,” I told everyone seated around the Sisters table. Slime.
“OK, I’m gonna stop you right there!” Dr. Alexander scowled from her chair. “I said I wanted to hear your survivor’s tale about September Eleventh. I didn’t say I wanted to hear about that!” Ellie was the first to rise from her chair and leave the dining room in protest.
“Yes, really,” Aunt Nancy frowned. “We all know it was a government conspiracy. The people need to hear of that aspect. But you didn’t have to be disgusting about it.”
“Say that again, government conspiracy?” Elise looked at her two aunts.
“Wag the dog. Need I say more?” Aunt Nancy raised her chin.
“A little more would be nice,” she said.
“It’s simple. We needed to wage a war, and since nobody was willing to go for the coin flip, we had to create one.”
I crossed my arms and let my wife do all the talking.
“By hurdling hijacked planes into buildings?”
That was my girl, the future Dr. Chamberlain.
“Oh no, planes couldn’t have done that.” Aunt Nancy proudly smirked at the cleverness of her thought. “Think about it…how much of the buildings imploded. Rescue crews said there simply weren’t enough concrete and steel recovered in the wreckage to make up two entire skyscraper buildings. It’s like they vanished. And there’s only one solution.”
“Which is…” Josephine sighed. Now both twins were involved. I had this argument in the bag.
“Laser beams from outer space. Top secret government technology, not the sort of thing you’d read about in the news. People have been trying to shut up the real truth seekers who’ve been reporting it.”
“I see.” Elise sighed.
Nobody seemed willing to pursue the topic further.
“Do you think it’s disgusting when he tells it?” Susan said to Elise after Nancy and Patty joined Ellie in the other room.
“Surprisingly, I still do.” Elise lovingly patted my leg. “It disturbs me on so many levels. And it should.”
“And despite the terror,” I continued, “there was the New York City firefighter drenched with perspiration, seventy-five pounds of equipment on his bones as he charged up the stairs into the hellish fires, and the drawn-back curtain of eternity that awaited him. At one point, ascending the stairwell, I’ll never forget it, we all broke out in appreciative applause. We clearly knew, even then, what he was sacrificing.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like.” Michael glared off into the ashy theater of that day from his dining chair. “We shall never forget.”
“I’m not liable to forget,” Ellie cawed at us from the other room, “if I don’t know about it!”
12
After dinner Charlie convinced Josephine and the girls to leave us guys alone in the kitchen to clean up and do the dirty dish-work while they continued their invasive chat about babies, ovulation, and milking glands on their own, with the promise of mixed drinks to follow. Josephine kissed her husband on the cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said. “I’m marrying a keeper.”
“Just remember that on Saturday night, baby doll.” Charlie kissed her.
“Oh, I will.” She pinched his butt and left.
“Do you two wanna’ know a secret?” Charlie grinned. He opened the Dutch door a crack and peered through seconds after the ladies adjourned to the living room. “I think the coast is clear. I’ve found some of the Sisters hiding places.” Charlie hooked his arm under sink piping and retrieved a bag of salty potato chips.
“How did you know that was there? That’s the first thing the twins do whenever they arrive. They comb the house for junk food and toss it out.”
“You’ve got to think like the Sisters.” Charlie tapped his head. “It’s easy to climb into their heads. All it takes is a McDonalds parfait and that tasteless dinner and you’re in the club.”
“You’re on thin ice with Josephine, you know.” I sighed. “You’ve got that honeymoon to think about. As your best man, I don’t think this is such a good idea.”
Michael dubiously grinned. “Hey, we’re all on thin ice together. If he falls through, we all do.”
“Barbecue, you want some? And look.” Charlie retrieved another bag. “Tortilla.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Michael sighed with relief. “Only one meal of this low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, low-everything diet, and it’s already killing me. I won’t last the weekend. I’d rather die young.”
“Does Josephine know you’re doing this?” I smiled nervously. “Because if she doesn’t….”
“I’m not finished yet.” He stretched hands far as he could over the china cabinet and fingered the vase. It tipped and nearly fell to the ground. “This is where they keep the Verde sauce, and look.” He grinned devilishly. “I even found a package of Twinkies.”
“Oh, come to papa,” Michael held both hands out.
Charlie tossed him a single Twinkie.
Michael kept another hand held out.
Charlie tossed him another.
“And look what else I found, up there over the pantry, behind the house plant. Cookies, chocolate chip.”
“What happened to that innocent boyishness that I saw at McDonalds this morning?” I said. “I want to be best man to that guy.”
“Don’t be.” Charlie rebelliously opened the bag of chips, crinkled his fingers through, shoveled a handful into his mouth and clamped down on it.
“She’s going to kill you when she finds it.” I frowned, listening for the sound of girls stirr
ing on the other side of the kitchen wall.
He offered the bag of chips to Michael. “This must be heaven.” He sighed with relief as he crinkled his fingers through, having already just finished off the first of two Twinkies.
“In just a moment,” I peered through the door, “it might be hell.”
“How about a little Verde sauce to wash it down?” Charlie grinned. Michael dipped a chip in and crunched. He offered me the bag.
“You’re the devil.” I finally gave in, crinkling my fingers through. I dipped a chip into the Verde sauce and crunched. “And while you’re at it, I’ll take a couple of those cookies too.”
“I’ll second that,” Michael said.
“Keep eating.” Charlie lifted a leg over the kitchen counter. “I’m going for the soda behind the pantry.”
Josephine punctured her head through the door.
“How are you boys doing in here? Can I get you anything? Apple wedges or celery snacks?”
“No. We’re stuffed from your wonderful cooking,” I smiled, tortilla bag stashed behind my back.
“You’ve been awfully silent in here,” she said, looking first to the sink of dirty dishes, then the empty martini glasses on the counter. She studied her husband’s strange and awkward marble posture on the counter, next Michael (mouth filled), then me (hands behind my back), and finally one more auspicious glance at her husband.
“Are you hiding something?” Lawyer-like eyes shifted from person-to-patron. “I’m a criminal attorney,” she said. “I put people behind bars for a living, and if I even suspect that any of you are lying to me….”
Michael and Charlie’s mouth were too filled with outlawed snacks to say anything.
“Believe me, Josephine, as Charlie’s best man it’s better that you let the defendant stand there silently like a fool and let his representative do all the explaining.”
13
I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the rain spill over the roof. And more than anything, I needed to pee. Apparently Elise couldn’t sleep either. She sighed heavily. I didn’t open my eyes. She sighed again, only when I didn’t respond she cleared her throat with an a-hum, and just to get the ball rolling she nudged me in the side.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 35