by Lucas Mann
“Play more,” Beth is telling him. “Again. Can you do that exact same thing again?”
And he does it. He complies with her request, happy to do so.
The drum set was a birthday present, one of the last things that Beth and my father ever agreed upon and bought together. They gave it to him the morning he turned twelve, and both were too rapt, too hopeful, to give in to impatience when he spent the day beating on the cymbals, eschewing all rhythm in favor of sheer volume.
Then my father splurged on four good seats for Dreamgirls on Broadway, and they went as the kind of family Beth always wanted to have—father handsome and suited, sons near stoic, behaving as though they weren’t overmatched by high society but rather born of it. Josh stared at the orchestra section, his feet tapping along with their sounds, and Beth smiled to herself as she planned how she might describe him to anyone who asked—oh, he’s our musical one.
It was a moment so brief and perfect that Beth feels the need to prove and reprove its existence to herself. For two years, she has worked at quantifying his talent. Every day noise fills the apartment and still she asks for more. Play again, play louder. Her friends say she’s something between a lunatic and a saint, but it’s just the two of them in the apartment so often. My father is gone. Dave is out with friends, being a normal boy who wants nothing to do with his mother. There would be no sound at all if Josh wasn’t providing it.
He messes up a little on a transition and says, “Shit, fuck.”
She rushes to him. No it wasn’t even a mess-up, she tells him. She couldn’t hear anything wrong. Play it again.
“My little Ringo Starr,” she says, sitting down on his bed. “My Ringo, it was perfect.”
Ringo is the only drummer she knows.
“Ringo, what will you play for your mother next?” she says.
“Ma, stop it,” Josh says, but it doesn’t sound to Beth like there’s much conviction in his voice. This is banter, for God’s sake. Real, snappy, teenager-to-mom banter, the boy growing bashful the way he should, the mother pushing through the bashfulness, saying, No way, mister, I’m not going to let you off the hook of my positive reinforcement.
“Play it again for me,” she says. “Please.”
“It wasn’t even anything, Ma. It was nothing.”
It’s never nothing. It’s always something, and something new. Last week she paraded him in front of two neighbor ladies who had come over for afternoon coffee and a standard post-divorce checkup, though they never would have said it aloud. “How am I?” she said to them. “Come look at this, and you’ll see how I am.” Josh had been given a xylophone and sheet music by the percussion teacher at school, and he was dutifully staring at the squiggles on the page, forcing himself to play until a sound that was sophisticated and melancholy rang from the metal strips. It was a classical German song with an impossible name. He was making beauty out of something Beth couldn’t even understand.
Beth clapped long and loud for him then, kept going after the neighbors stopped. She claps that way now as Josh relents and begins to play once more. She stays on the bed, leans in as though she can barely hear him. They are maybe two feet apart. If she wanted to, Beth thinks, she could reach out, cup his shoulder with her hand, and he would not shrug her off because he would be concentrating too hard.
The next morning, the fan is creaking in the kitchen and he hates her. That’s how things go. He calls her a bitch while she makes him eggs and won’t tell her why. She watches him eat in silence. She hates silence. He leaves the plate for her and stalks back to his room, and it feels like she can’t breathe. All morning, she can’t breathe. But at some point, finally, she hears music. She returns to his doorway, and there he is, talented and restrained, the way she loves to see him. He is concentrating all his energy on making something sound right. She walks to his bed and he doesn’t tell her no. She asks him to play more.
—
Fifteen years later, none of the furniture has been replaced. Beth has accumulated new possessions, hasn’t removed anything. The couch has picked up throw pillows to the point of being almost unsittable. The shelves have collected trinkets and now bow slightly in the middle. Being alone, it’s comforting to pack in the open spaces.
Josh is home now, though, so home feels crowded. Beth doesn’t know how long he plans to stay, but he’s here and so she cares for him. He sleeps in his childhood bed, the one bought when he and Dave first got separate rooms. She checks on him at night, sock-shuffling on tiptoes to be quiet, gripping his door frame and craning her head, a movement that has returned effortlessly to her. He doesn’t stare back like he did as a boy. He doesn’t have the energy. Either he shivers and moans and stares straight at the ceiling or finally, mercifully, he sleeps. Beth is happy in these brief moments. She likes to watch him sleep.
He arrived a few days ago, unannounced. She hugged him and he went limp in her arms. They almost fell together. He didn’t pull away, and though his sweat bled through cotton and felt itchy on her skin, it was a nice moment. He put his bag down next to her and walked to the bathroom. She stood outside the door and heard him vomiting, a sound both young and old. His voice was hoarse and tired when he moaned in between bouts. When he wasn’t making noise, she asked if he needed anything, and he didn’t respond. Sometimes he gasped, quick breaths, almost cute.
She worked up the courage to open the door, and he didn’t tell her to get out. He looked up at her and nodded, which felt like thanks. She knelt behind him and ran her fingertips in circles between his shoulder blades, the spot that always made him coo as an infant. He let her. He was folded in front of her like a closed accordion. He was, for the first time in a long time, soft to touch.
She couldn’t help but look at his arms. She’d never seen needle tracks before. They were little holes in him, and she thought if she put her ear up to them, she could hear air escaping. She wondered how long they’d been there. And then suddenly it was like they’d never not been there, all at once, that fast.
“There’s meat loaf,” she said. “Fresh. I was just making it.”
He couldn’t eat then. He couldn’t eat for nearly two days. He could only puke and shake. But now he’s a little stronger. Beth is heating up the leftovers in the microwave, and he smells the meat and pads out to join her in the kitchen.
“It’s so nice to see you better,” she says as she sets a plate in front of him.
He says nothing and takes a bite. She smiles as she watches him savor it.
“So how long are you planning to stay?” she says. “Now that you’re strong.”
She doesn’t mean to pressure. She wants to know, that’s all. What does he need? What can she do for him and how long can she do it for? He has been so gentle. He has been so willing to be helped, and that has made her greedy for more.
“Jesus, Ma,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What, me, worry?” she says. She’s trying to be funny, since she always worries, so she laughs a little to show him that she’s joking. When he doesn’t laugh with her, she says, “You know me. I’m a worrier.”
“Well, stop,” he says.
“I worry for you.”
“Fucking stop.”
“My—”
She hasn’t measured the room since they moved in, so it’s hard to say exactly how far his plate travels. At least ten feet, she has to figure, diagonally across the kitchen. She watches her meat loaf float past her head and then smash into the off-white wall—eggshell, the color is eggshell. It’s a loud crash this time. It’s the sound of a grown man who, no matter how weak he was a day ago, no matter how gentle, could kill her with thrown porcelain. It’s not that she thinks he wants to, just that he can.
He walks out because that’s how it’s always been. He leaves her to clean. This time she weeps. She weeps for how many times she can be fooled. She weeps because when a boy feels small and afraid all you want to do is make him feel big and unafraid, and the moment he does he hates you for you
r effort. She should have thought these things before. Maybe she did, then forced herself to forget them. But now she’s older and he’s thirty and he’s, apparently, a heroin addict, and it feels like the first time she ever thought that maybe she tried too hard to be nice.
Josh returns to the doorway to glare at her, but his face seems softer already, almost sorry. She pities him, even now.
“Ma,” he says. “Ma, I told you to leave it alone.”
“Josh—”
“You made me.”
He walks away again. She kneels. She works over her floor with a sponge, rubbing with the coarse side, scooping up every bit of splattered beef, good meat that will never be eaten.
—
There is a last moment. It’s not really the last one, but it’s one that stands out, a break from their routine, almost nice, so it will live over and over again in Beth’s mind. She doesn’t know that yet. She just knows that he has returned for another detox and she can no longer remember how many times it’s been. She spent years, his whole twenties, wanting him to come home. Now, too late, he seems nearly always present.
He enters with a cane and a shuffling limp.
“I’m like Richard the Third,” he says, and Beth forces herself to smile.
It’s the first time she’s ever felt conscious of not just her son’s impending death but how it might come, how he might look when it happens. As she watches him struggle to hang his coat in the hall closet, she feels liberated. There is nothing to worry about anymore because there is nothing that she can do. Maybe it was always that way. What a thing to think.
He offers information without her asking. The limp is from an infection. He put a dirty needle into the narrow band of skin between his big toe and the next one. It hurt like hell, he says, but his arm veins, those once-raised cables that Beth watched snake along his skin as he pounded his drums, are depleted.
“There’s nothing left to shoot,” he tells her, and he holds a wilted appendage up for her to see. She looks away.
Before she can ask, he says, “I haven’t gone to the doctor. I know, I know, I’m sorry. I haven’t been home for a while to call him.”
She doesn’t ask where he’s been.
“I need to go home now, though,” he says. “There are pills at home for the pain.”
He pauses because the next bit is hard to say.
“I don’t want to go alone. I don’t think anything good will happen if I go alone.”
She will take him. He wants to feel better, and she will help him feel better, watch the relief, impermanent but still sweet, move across his face. On any day before this one, she would have cycled through the logical questions that get a meat loaf thrown. What pills? Are they safe? How did you get them? Don’t you think that maybe this could be an opportunity to get clean for real, cold turkey, to decide that this pain will be the end of it?
No more questions.
The subway has been running to Roosevelt Island for years, but they ride the tram because he wants to. He wants to fly over New York like a pigeon, too small and high up to be noticed, seeing everything. They sit side by side. Beth’s shoulders, beginning now to slope and round, press against the skin just above her son’s elbow. They get on the bus going downtown. They’ve never ridden this bus together. They are never in Manhattan together. They are hardly outdoors together. Beth goes to work, then back to her apartment. Josh moves around the city in dark places that she used to imagine and now is content to never see, returns home to her when he needs something.
It’s rush hour for other people, and on the crowded bus they are beautifully anonymous, a mother and a son like any other, which, Beth thinks, is the full expression of all she has ever wanted for them. People jostle and mutter. People live lives and Beth watches. Then she has a funny thought. It’s really funny, not just funny in her head but something to make him laugh, too.
“This is like Midnight Cowboy,” she says. “I’m Jon Voigt and you’re Al Pacino. With the limp.”
She feels Josh shake as he laughs.
“It’s Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy,” he says. “But, yeah.”
They’re on a bus, like in the movie. They’re heading south, not all the way to Florida but, still, south. And nobody else around them knows about his limp, about what they’ve seen, about what they’re going to do.
Josh laughs again and says, “That’s pretty funny, Ma.”
She feels his warmth on her. They don’t speak for the rest of the ride. They let their bodies lurch together in silence as the driver stops short and starts again. There are other things that she would like to say. There has to be something more than Midnight Cowboy, Josh as damaged hustler, Beth as loyal Texan gigolo.
They get off the bus, and he’s all focus, walking ahead of her as fast as he can in his condition. She listens to his cane on the sidewalk and thinks of a scary story she was told as a girl, something she can’t quite remember about an escaped psychopath and a knock knock knock sound. He fumbles with his keys in the door, rushes in, and starts digging through papers and old tissues, unopened mail in ominous, official envelopes. She sees him find the pills by the kitchen sink. Sees him sigh and try to turn away from her. Sees him pour them into his palm, sees him swallow, sees relief, will remember that look of relief.
—
Jamaica Kincaid wrote a memoir about her enigmatic younger brother who died of AIDS. It’s a detailed portrayal, but her brother remains, appropriately, a hard character to see. He is most vivid when she describes her mother with him. When she describes the two of them together in the ocean near the end of his sickness, their images melding into a womb, into a horizon.
She writes: He was swimming with my mother and they looked so beautiful, the water parted for them in ripplets, forming fat diagonal lines on either side of them, the two of them, one black, one gold, glistening, buoyant, happy just then, within speaking distance of each other but not speaking to each other at all.
In the ocean, on a bus, mother next to broken son, like if she’s peaceful and present all his fragments won’t crumble apart. There’s no closeness like that one.
I’m fidgeting and thinking about Jamaica Kincaid, watching Beth cry in her living room. She pantomimes Josh’s relief. She closes her eyes, slackens her face, lets her shoulders sag in perpetual exhale. Like that, she tells me. I look past her out the window. Night has fallen. The river is black, and I can see Manhattan lights smudged on the water.
Beth ends her impression and shrugs.
“It’s just, I felt so bad for him,” she says. “I still do. Maybe there are people in the world who should get more pity, but for me, he was mine and I always pitied him.”
She takes a breath and holds it in, deciding whether to say what she wants to say before she exhales. I grab a tissue box from the coffee table and hand it to her. The idea is to feel useful, but I think I just come off as condescending. When I sit back, the couch groans under me, a vulgar noise.
“When you came along,” she begins, “I knew he was in trouble. That’s all I remember for a while, is thinking of him and you. I didn’t know what he might do to be heard. I think with boys, maybe the whole idea is that people listen to you. So I was going to listen to him. I thought somebody had to listen to him.”
I’m quiet. I hold still. I have the strange feeling that if I move or speak, a well of emotion will rush out and I won’t be able to plug the hole. I hadn’t entertained this thought, this now obvious possibility that I belong in the same breath as all the things that enraged him, that closed in around him, that he wanted to break. Even as I worshipped him, it was not nearly enough to make amends for my presence.
Beth’s cat leaps onto her lap.
“Hi, little girl,” she whispers. The cat noses her fingers.
“She does yoga with me sometimes in the morning,” Beth says. “No, really, you should see it. All the poses. That’s our thing.”
She smiles at me and then looks down at the coffee table, licks her th
umb, and wipes the glass.
I am looming in a very different way than Josh used to in this apartment. There is the obvious looming—I’m so much bigger than Beth and all the collectibles that crowd around us—but there’s also something overbearing in the sheer audacity of my being here, my prodding her forward through each anecdote, asking her to tell me more about how it hurts. She lost her son to the holes he punched in himself, to the heart that he stopped while trying to feel relief. I am not dead and I need less relief. These are basic truths, maybe biological, maybe biographical. Luck, either way. I wonder if being the mother of Josh, if being the mother of any dead addict son, means that all live sons, young men who are strangers or kin, feel like they’re taunting each time they look at you, clear-eyed, and say hello.
I don’t know Beth as anything but a mother. She was doing it before I was born. She has worked at it, and I have seen the lines of that effort on her face, across Thanksgiving tables as she watched Josh try not to fall asleep. I have seen the strain in her eyes as they followed him out every door he exited. I remember the closeness of the two of them now, her gaze never off him, and I remember wanting to understand it, the unity of it, a twinship. Since he died, without realizing it, I’ve associated her mostly with that death, as though part of her has rotted and finally fallen off. How can every grown man not remind her?
Now I’m in his place on the couch where I was never meant to be, and he cannot pad back into the room to apologize.
“I remember one particular moment when it was just me and him talking,” Beth says. “We were on this couch. We were as close as you and I are now. He goes: Yeah, Ma, Luke seems happy and good and loved and all that, but just wait a few years. Then the shit will hit the fan for him. He’ll know he’s alone. He’ll be miserable.”
She coughs and keeps going. “And I remember his voice. It sounded like he was really looking forward to that because things seemed so solid around you. And it didn’t seem fair.”