by John Langan
"I cannot believe you're saying this to me."
"I'm only telling you what your father would have thought. I knew the man for twenty years. I think I have a pretty good idea what his views were. He would not have approved of you and—Roger. In fact, he would have been very disappointed."
"This is incredible."
"Don't kill the messenger."
"I have to go," I said, hating the quaver in my voice.
"It's not my fault."
"I'll talk to you later," I said, and hung up.
I was expecting it to ring the next moment, my mother's angry voice reaching across the country to me. I stood with my hand hovering above the receiver, unable to decide whether I'd answer it or just pick it up and let it drop. The kitchen shimmered, then fractured as tears flooded my eyes. I hated that my mother could get to me like this, that she knew exactly the right button to push. Of course my dad wouldn't have approved of Roger—not in the abstract, anyway—but he would have come around once they'd had a chance to meet one another, spend some time together, maybe go to a baseball game. I had been Daddy's little girl, true, and there was no doubt he'd wanted what he thought was best for me—but he had also been a pragmatist, and I was reasonably sure that, once he'd seen how serious Roger and I were, he would have decided that, like it or not, this was the way things were going to be and he'd have to accept them.
I wiped my eyes, tasting salt in the back of my throat. I knew what this was really about—this was Mom feeling insecure about Bob the boyfriend and trying to distract attention—and at the prospect of Bob, a fresh wave of tears spilled down my cheeks. I didn't begrudge my mother her happiness—really, I didn't. Dad had been gone a long time, and there was nothing wrong with her finding someone new. Although there was no one who could replace my father—warts and all—that didn't mean I wasn't prepared to give whomever Mom picked a chance. It was just—a guy who'd been divorced twice? Once, and it's like, Who knows who was at fault? Look at Roger and Joanne. Twice, though, and you start to wonder. Why does this keep happening to this guy, i.e. what's wrong with him? How did he convince my mother, the woman who told me that sex was a sacred gift from God that could only be enjoyed fully within the bonds of marriage—how did this guy, this travel agent, seduce my mother into shacking up with him? Yes, after about seventeen, when I had my first serious boyfriend, I decided Mom's ideas about sex were positively Medieval, but that didn't mean I wanted her to come to the same conclusion.
The floor creaked behind me. Roger stood there, looking puzzled. My hand was still stretched over the phone. "Are you trying to make someone call you?" he asked.
"More like the opposite," I said, dropping my arm.
"I thought I heard the phone ring."
"You did. It was my mother."
"That was unexpected—wasn't it?"
"And how," I said, sniffling.
"She upset you—obviously."
"It's stupid. She called to tell me about her new, live-in boyfriend, Bob the twice-divorced travel agent." I laughed. "When you say it out loud, it sounds kind of funny."
"Is this her first boyfriend since your father died?"
"The first she's moved in with. The first she's told me she moved in with. I don't know. There were other guys she went out with, before she moved to Santa Barbara. None of them was serious. At least, I don't think any of them was serious. It used to annoy me that she wasn't more connected to the guys she was dating. I complained to my friends that it was like living with a fourteen-year-old flirt. Irony sucks, you know?"
Roger nodded. "That it does. Safely confined to the pages of novels, it's an interesting rhetorical device; encountered loose in the real world, it's a beast with steel claws and mirrors for eyes."
"Hey—that's pretty good."
"Thank you—now if only I could remember it."
"The perils of age."
"The insolence of youth."
"Do you want some dinner?" I asked. "There's a plate warm in the oven."
"That was why I came down in the first place. The odors of your cooking reached all the way to the third floor and drew me down from my lonely garret."
"Get yourself something to drink—there's beer in the fridge if you want it—and I'll grab the plate. Do you want bread?"
"No thanks. Is there salad?"
"There is. All we have for dressing is blue cheese, though."
"That'll do just fine."
My mother's call had given us a fresh topic for conversation. Seated at the kitchen table, Roger with his dinner, me with a glass of wine, we batted her words back and forth, speculating on the situation that had given rise to them as if she were a character in a novel. Roger's eyebrows lifted when I told him what she'd said about my father.
"Do you think she's right?" he asked.
"Yes and no."
"A balanced answer."
"He would have been—concerned," I said. "He would have worried about both our motivations, especially yours. He wouldn't have been very comfortable with me as the object of desire of an older man."
"Especially one closer in age to him."
"Yeah. He would have talked to me—he would have done his best to talk me out of being with you."
"Would he have succeeded?"
"No."
"That's a relief to hear."
"There would have been some kind of falling out. Maybe we wouldn't have spoken for a while. In the end, though, he would have come around. What about you?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Your father, I mean—or maybe your mother. What would they have thought of you marrying me?"
"Hmm," he said. "Do you know, I've never once asked myself that question."
"Because you know what the answer would be, and you don't want to think about it?"
"Oh, I don't know. Joanne would have offended their sensibilities much more than you. They weren't as concerned with the North-South divide as some. Mother wasn't at all; Father—every now and then, when he'd gotten good and drunk, Father would ramble on about the damn Yankees and how they were responsible for—basically for everything that was wrong with the world today. If only folks were more like him and his, things wouldn't be in such an awful mess. I remember once—not long before his death, he went on this same ramble and, when he reached the part about people being more like him, I said, 'What? You mean drunk?' It was a good line, one that had occurred to me years prior and that I had finally gained the daring to use. His hand darted out and slapped me so hard I fell off my chair. He caught me on the side of the head—for about a week, my left ear rang from the blow.
"But I digress. Drunk, Father would have found Joanne a damn Yankee bitch who thought her piss was Perrier and her turds caviar (one of his favorite sayings). Sober, he would have been profoundly uncomfortable around her. Mother—I remember my mother as always indulging me. While I have no doubt that Mother would have done her best with Joanne, she would have been acutely aware of the class difference, which would not have been helped in the slightest by Joanne herself, who would have been constitutionally unable not to patronize my parents."
"I'm glad we can talk about your ex-wife so much."
"I'm merely settling myself into their viewpoints. Where I grew up, there certainly were marriages where a substantial age difference existed between spouses. The majority of those were because the man in question's first wife had died, in general leaving him with one or more children in need of a mother. Since his age also meant he had accumulated some share of material goods, he had more to offer than the difficulties of raising someone else's resentful children. There was security to be had. I have the impression that these matches were tolerated quite well.
"There were cases, though—one or two—where the man in question abandoned his still-undeceased wife in favor of a younger woman. In one instance, the man lived with his infatuation for a year, then returned home. In the other, he divorced his former love and married the new one. Both men were regarded as damned fools/damned old men, with the 'damned' inte
nded to be not only disparaging, but in some measure descriptive. They had surrendered to their lust, you see. This is not to say that the rest of the community was any purer. There was more than one child who looked nothing like its legal father. But these men had made a show of themselves—shown everyone else, I suppose, their own secret passions. That second couple—the ones that married—they were together almost fifty years, till he was ninety and she seventy, and by most reports quite happy, yet he never stopped being that damned old man.
"All of which is by way of saying that my parents' initial reaction would most likely have been shock and horror at their son's behaving like a damned old man, leaving behind a wife of thirty years for a younger woman—and a student of his, at that. If they could have kept the news from family and friends, I have no doubt they would. These days, everyone is more understanding than they used to be, but their appetite for scandal remains undiminished. Who doesn't love to see the mighty brought low, a big college professor acting like a goat in a pepper patch? The public implications of my decisions—the consequences for them—would have been foremost in their minds."
"And I would be, what? The siren whose song caused you to toss yourself onto the rocks?"
"Possibly. Probably—although they would have felt more comfortable blaming me. To them, I would have appeared some type of academic Don Juan, seducing pretty students willy-nilly."
"Willy-nilly?"
"It's a colloquialism. Perfectly acceptable in this kind of discourse."
"If you say so."
"My best guess is, the two of them would have treated you with formality so complete as to be absolutely freezing. You would have been an object of horror and fascination to them—especially Father, whose talk when he was in his cups would have been full of clumsy innuendoes and poor puns. God, I can almost hear him, now. We'd take them out to eat. He already would have had a few at the house, and when it was time to order and I chose something like chicken breast, he'd leer at the waitress and say, 'Ey-yeah, my boy's always enjoyed his breast—always liked it young and tender.'"
"Yikes."
"To say the least."
"So that would have been that."
"Pretty much. We would have been only too happy to watch them go; they would have been only too happy to leave. They would have found me—I almost said, 'a monster,' which isn't exactly true, but isn't that far from the truth, either. I can hear my mother saying, 'This is not how you were raised,' and while few if any parents counsel their children to avoid middle-age affairs and divorces, in a sense she would have been right. I—I stepped outside the bounds of what my parents knew. I behaved in ways that would have been alien and alienating to them. You might say I revealed hidden depths to them, but these would not have been depths they wanted to witness."
"What about the baby?"
"The baby?"
"The baby I—I lost. What if I hadn't miscarried? Would that have helped?"
Roger looked up at the ceiling. "Maybe. Since it was the reason for our actual marriage, I'm sure it would have added to the scandal—initially, at least. Mother was fond of babies, though. Even Father was a sentimentalist when it came to diapers and lullabies. He was worse when he was drunk. He'd want to hold any baby within a fifty-foot radius and talk nonsense to it. Slurred nonsense. Since he was both extremely assertive and not particularly coordinated after five or ten beers, he was a major source of anxiety to anyone with newborns at family parties. He dropped my cousin, Arthur."
"God."
"Arthur was fine—frightened, but fine. His father, Uncle Edwin, was so incensed he took a swing at Father that was clumsy enough for even Father to avoid. In return, he broke Uncle Edwin's nose."
"What a nightmare."
"Family gatherings were ever an adventure."
"We wouldn't have let him near our baby."
"How would we have stopped him?"
"Given the baby to your mom?"
"Maybe."
"You said she knew how to handle him."
"What I mostly meant by that was, when he hit her, she hit back, hard."
"Oh. Not much fun for a baby."
"No. Who knows? Maybe the old man would've dried out. If he'd lived long enough, maybe he would have followed Rick into rehab—I say followed, because there is no way he would have done such a thing himself. It would have taken something like my younger brother's constant pestering—which he can do; he can be very persistent—to convince him to lay aside the bottle. Maybe he and my mother would have mellowed with time. I can't picture them ever attending any kind of couples therapy. It's the problem with the dead. Not only do they remain as they were, they remain as they were to you. No matter what you may learn about them after they're gone—no matter how much you may come to understand them intellectually—emotionally, they will always be the same."
"I'm not so sure," I said. "I feel differently about my father now than I did when he died."
"No, you don't," Roger said. "You think you do, but what you feel now is what you felt all along. What you experienced when he died was the aberration."
"I'm reasonably sure I know my own feelings."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
"Fine, fine. I should be getting back upstairs. Always more to be done."
"Always."
"This has been nice, though. It's been nice not to argue for a little while, to talk."
I stood as he cleared his plate and carried it to the sink. My wine was long gone. I contemplated a refill, decided against it. As Roger went to exit the kitchen, I said, "Roger?"
He stopped. "Yes?"
"Why can't you see Ted?"
His face was instantly furious. "Why—what are you saying? Why can't you leave this alone?"
I held up my hands. "I'm not trying to be confrontational. Honestly, I'm not. I just want to know why it's been me."
"That was not Ted you saw."
"Okay, say for a moment it wasn't. It was, but maybe you're right. What about all the other stuff? Why me? Why not you?"
His eyes would have burned through metal. When he spoke, it was as if he were strangling. "I don't know," he said, and left.
So much for us talking again. Yes, I'd been reasonably sure he'd react this way, but hope springs eternal and all that. A civilized conversation, and I was ready to believe we could discuss what really mattered. In retrospect, I know that Roger must have felt like I was continually setting him up, constructing these increasingly elaborate dialogues that always ended in the same place. That I was right didn't help, either.
When the kitchen was clean, I decided to skip TV for a change. Instead, I went up to the library, switched on the computer, and logged online. Since he'd told me about the circumstances of its creation, the compulsion that kept him adding to it, Roger's doorway map had been on my mind. It was the heart of his days, and I suspected it lay near the heart of everything, all the weirdness. How, I couldn't say. Roger had called it a spirit map, a name he'd said he'd borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism. I called up Google, typed in "spirit map," and hit Enter.
Sifting through the 17,000 or so responses that popped up took some time. I didn't want a guide to Scottish distilleries. Nor did I want the eight steps for enhancing my spirituality. Arlington High's cheerleading homepage was right out. I entered new terms, refined the search, but the only effect adding "Tibetan," "Buddhism," or "Tibetan Buddhism" had was to summon links to sites about Tibet, Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism. Thinking that perhaps spirit maps didn't rate their own site—or that Roger had confused the terminology and it went by some other name—I clicked on the Tibetan Buddhism pages and skimmed them. It wasn't the most exciting way to spend an evening. A lot of the art the sites displayed was beautiful, strange and striking, but I'd never been particularly interested in comparative theology.
I found descriptions of the bardo, about which Roger had been broadly accurate. I also read about The Book of the Dead, the Lord of the Dead with his black and white pebbles and mirror of karm
a, and the six realms of the Wheel of Life. I wouldn't say I became an expert on the ins and outs of Tibetan Buddhism, but I learned enough to know that spirit maps were not among its paraphernalia. I mean, if you wanted to stretch a metaphor, you could say that The Book of the Dead was itself a sort of general spirit map, since it described the stages of the bardo and how to navigate them, but if you wanted the kind of individualized guide Roger had discussed, you had to turn elsewhere. Either he'd been mistaken, or he'd lied.
It was a strange thing to lie about, though; you have to admit. Inclined as I'd become to suspect Roger, I couldn't understand why he'd feel the need to deceive me about the origins of the spirit map. Unless, I supposed, there were no deeper origins—the map was just something he'd dreamed up and his reference to the Buddhists was an attempt to disguise how completely personal it was. Or, if he were embarrassed about its source—which seemed unlikely to the point of absurd—until I Googled "spirit map" one last time and, on a hunch, added "Dickens."