Imagine Me Gone

by Adam Haslett

  Beyond the terminal and the car-rental lots, the view opened onto a flat and nearly empty plain, an expanse of scrub brush stretching either side of the highway. The low clouds of a winter sky met the outline of foothills on the far horizon. Valerie sped down the passing lane, cruising by trucks and utility vans as she and Seth chatted over the sound of hit radio turned low. After a while billboards appeared, followed by gasworks and factories, and mile after mile of single-story warehouses built along empty access roads. Eventually I could see trees and the beginnings of neighborhoods, the Denver skyscrapers still off in the distance.

  Seth’s parents lived in a large ranch house on a street of ranch houses set back on one-acre lots lined with cottonwoods. His mother met us at the door wearing a white blouse and a necklace of braided pink coral.

  “There now,” she said, placing her hand gently on my arm. “I finally get to lay eyes on you.”

  I’d expected a friendly reception from her, in particular, given what Seth had told me, but the warmth of it came as a surprise. She led us onto the sunporch, where she’d put out cookies and iced tea. In the yard beyond, a blue tarpaulin sagging with unmelted snow covered a swimming pool rimmed in white concrete. There were well-tended juniper hedges and a flagstone path leading down the middle of the lawn to a creek. All of it appeared to me as most everything had for the last many weeks, as a still photograph of a place now vanished.

  Seth’s mother and sister asked me anodyne questions about what parts of Colorado I had visited, and about the winter weather in New York, any topic other than my family. I answered politely, watching Luke roll on the floor with his grandmother’s terrier.

  Since Seth and I had met, I had wanted to come here and meet his family, but for the last two months it had been hard to want anything. It will be good for us, Seth had said, encouraging me. It’s time. And so I had come.

  After our snack, I went to nap in the room we’d been given on the opposite end of the house from his parents’ room. It wasn’t Seth’s. He hadn’t grown up in the house. It was a room meant for guests. Plush beige carpet, a chaise longue under the window, two sinks at a double vanity between two sets of louvered closet doors. I fell asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow.

  An hour or more later, Seth woke me with a kiss on the forehead. He rubbed my chest and kissed me again on the lips.

  “They want to take you to the mall without me. Is that awful?”

  I had been terrified that I would lose him. That Michael’s death and the blank state it had delivered me into would annul what we had begun. But he had helped me as no one else could have by insisting we go forward with finding a place to live together, even when it seemed for a few weeks that I might not get my job back. At my weakest moment, he had refused to doubt us.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  His mother and sister and I drove for twenty minutes in his mother’s ample Lincoln, through a wide grid of commercial strips whose intersections had long lights and generous turning lanes, the late-afternoon sun glinting off the columns of windshields.

  “We didn’t mean to kidnap you,” his mother said. “But he’s kept you to himself long enough, and I have to ask somebody what he likes to wear these days.”

  “You’re earning major points,” Valerie half whispered to me as we crossed the parking lot. “This is what she does with people she likes.”

  It was Saturday and the mall was full. Parents herded small children through crowds of dashing teens. Seniors ambled along the promenade. Salespeople in chinos and polo shirts smiled vaguely from the stools of jewelry carts. A janitor mopped orange soda from the white tile floor, while above and through it all played “Friday I’m in Love,” one of the Cure’s lighter pop ballads.

  “I just want to know if he’s as much of a neat freak with you as he is with us,” Seth’s mother said. “He practically alphabetizes his shirts.”

  In the Brooks Brothers, I limited myself to recommending mediums over larges and suggested Seth would probably want to purchase his own jeans. When his mother pressed me to let her buy me a tie, I fended her off with Valerie’s help.

  We kept at it for an hour or so, through several stores, and then sat together at a Starbucks. They asked me more questions, venturing now onto the subject of my mother, and of Celia and Paul. I did my best to reciprocate, inquiring about where in Denver they had lived when Seth was a kid, and about Valerie’s work as a guidance counselor. It was kind of them to be doing this with me, and I wanted them to know that I was glad for it.

  By the time we got back to the house Seth’s father and Valerie’s husband, Rick, had arrived and were in the sprawling kitchen with Seth unloading meat from a cooler. His father was an older, rougher version of Seth, taller by a few inches, with a larger jaw and broader shoulders, and the mottled skin of a man who’d spent his life working outdoors. He had the same upright posture, the same way of gesturing with his shoulders, and he spoke in that clipped rhythm of Seth’s, flat and quick. Their resemblance was uncanny.

  He gave my hand a firm shake, introduced his son-in-law, and then asked me if I liked to grill. Rick stood a few feet off holding a platter of marinated steak.

  “Alec wants to talk to us,” Seth’s mother said as she leaned down beside her husband to rummage through the vegetable drawers of the fridge.

  “You’re saying he can’t make up his own mind?” his father retorted, as though I were not in the room. Seth smiled at me in mock apology but remained conveniently silent. Rick’s expression suggested the better choice was to join them. Reaching over his wife’s back, Seth’s father grabbed me a beer from the top shelf, and the three of us walked out onto the patio together.

  They had come from a meeting with a developer. A set of permits for a condominium on the outskirts of downtown had been delayed, costing their firm thousands of dollars. They included me in their talk of the minutiae of contracting as though I were an old pro.

  “I’ve been telling Seth for a couple years we need a designer,” his father said. “He’s got a job here anytime he wants it.”

  The burnished gold of his father’s wedding ring and the gold face of his watch caught the light of the flames. I found it hard not to keep staring at him, the way he had planted himself in front of the grill, moving only his hands and arms as he flipped the slabs of meat with a fork, addressing his comments to the fire. I wondered how he saw me. What did he think of the man who slept with his son? Did my presence force him to imagine it? Had his wife instructed him to accept me? Had he ever desired another man himself?

  At the dinner table he stood at the head and carved the steak into strips, arranging them on the plates his wife held out for him, making sure everyone had been served before sitting. As we ate, Seth reported on our plans for a trip up to the mountains early the following week, and Valerie and her mother made suggestions for places we should stop along the way. When Rick asked me what kind of work I did, Seth’s mother answered for me, informing him that I wrote about politics. At that point a quiet descended on the table.

  “If those congressmen sell themselves any faster,” Seth’s father said, “they’ll be shipping their own jobs to China.”

  I laughed. And soon everyone was laughing, nervously relieved, Seth most of all. He slid a hand onto my knee under the table and squeezed it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had let go even this much. His father, delighted with the response to his quip, began to opine on government corruption and shoddy foreign building materials, and the uncertainties of interest rates, until eventually his wife told him he was boring us and announced there was pie.

  I imagined Celia rolling her eyes at the scene of Valerie and her mother clearing the dishes and disappearing into the kitchen to tidy and wash while the four men kept their seats. But then Seth got up to help them, leaving the three of us alone once again.

  “Let’s fix you a drink,” his father said, signaling with a tilt of his head for Rick and me to go through with him into the de
n. There a leather-topped bar with brass edging and a mirrored shelf stood against a paneled wall. Darkwood beams ran the length of the ceiling. There were birch logs stacked in the grate of a raised hearth. At the far end of the room a brown leather sofa and chairs faced a flat-screen lit up by the vivid colors of a basketball game playing out in silence.

  “Rick here is bourbon, and I think tonight I am too—what can I get you, Alec?” He rested his hand on the amber bottle as he awaited my answer, the underside of his link bracelet touching the leather of the bar’s surface.

  “Bourbon’s fine,” I said.

  He palmed ice into the tumblers and poured three generous drinks.

  “Cheers,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time, just for an instant, and offering a small nod of the head, as if allowing me still further into the circle of his acknowledgment. Rick did the same when I glanced at him, and the three of us clinked glasses. It was a simple, male gesture, this little close-lipped dip of the chin, the eyes meeting ever so briefly. I’d given and received the nod a thousand times. It was what remained, I suppose, of tipping your hat. But I’d always experienced it as more than that. As a forswearing of an implicit threat of violence. A sign, between men, of disarmament.

  “Cheers,” I replied, aware of the closeness of their bodies to mine—Seth’s father’s big frame, Rick’s barrel chest and thick legs. These two men I had only just met were granting me an unspoken acceptance, giving me that minimal respect of belonging with them. But only in the narrowest sense. I’d earned the right in their eyes to be treated as a man. As a participant in the basic competition among all men.

  Just noticing this, not letting it pass as an ordinary fact of meeting strangers, unclenched something in me. A fist in my gut. A bracing against attack.

  I tried listening to their talk about suppliers and the housing market but I couldn’t focus on their words. I saw their lips and eyes move, their weight shift, and as I watched them I understood clearly and for the first time that this was the reason part of me had come to loathe Michael. His refusal to be like other men. His refusal to compete. To live in the grip of that fist, the way I always had, and the way these men did. And I glimpsed what I had never allowed myself to admit before, which is that somewhere in me lay a hatred of my father, too, though for the opposite reason—for playing the game but being too weak to win it. A hatred I’d kept hidden from myself as a boy but never let go of, and which his death and my pity for him had prevented me from owning up to all these years.

  “But on the whole,” Seth’s father was saying, “it’s not a bad life.”

  Rick, as seemed to be his role, agreed with his father-in-law.

  Behind me I heard Seth’s footsteps and a moment later he was standing next to me, our circle widening to admit him.

  “Sethy,” his father said. “Get yourself a glass.” He topped off all of our drinks and poured one for his son.

  As the four of us raised our glasses, his father once again gave me that quick nod. But I didn’t play my part this time. Returning the gesture seemed too small a response, and too cold. It was a kind of acting—a kind of life—that had led me, without my realizing it, to despise the men I loved.

  Instead, I put my arm over Seth’s shoulder and said to his father, “I want to thank you for having me here. I love your son very much.”

  Margaret

  I find it remarkable how time works its way into a place. And thus how blank of time new places can be. This ceiling, for instance, here in my bedroom in the morning light of September. It means almost nothing. It is new, like the light fixture at its center, and the double-glazed window that the light comes through, and the louvered closets either side, which have so much less in them than the ones in Walcott ever did. All of which is right, and really as it should be.

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

  Those quotes Michael carried with him everywhere on sheaves of paper in his messenger bag turned out to be declamations, mostly, about the lasting evils of slavery. But there were others, too, on music and art, and life more generally. A few of which have stuck with me since I read through them last winter, in the months after he died. They were like notes to us that he had written but never delivered. Or delivered by speaking them only after I had stopped listening.

  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

  That is how it was for a time: abstract. Moving through tasks at a great remove. Meeting with Veronica, the real estate agent. Tidying the house for the prospective buyers she brought around to view it. The hardest, of course, was going through Michael’s things. Discovering from the pile of correspondence with his creditors, and his handwritten lists of the status of each loan and the amount outstanding, how he had tried right up to the end to manage his debts.

  It took Alec less than a day to dispense with them all, except the one that I had cosigned. It required nothing more than a death certificate.

  And then there were his records, in the gray milk crates along his walls, in boxes in the study and Alec’s old room, all around the edges of the basement, too—thousands of them. I have no room for them here in the new place, but we weren’t about to throw them away, so they sit in storage until we find them a home, where hopefully they can be kept together, and played.

  In the new bathroom, the tiles are grouted a perfect white. The medicine cabinet is a perfect mirrored rectangle reflecting the snowy-white walls. I took baths before, but now there is only this glass stall shower, which the water beads on, catching any light in the room.

  Are you sure you want to move? Alec asked, over and over.

  I did consider staying, a while longer at least, mostly for his sake. Because he tried so hard to allow me to keep it. But I couldn’t live in those rooms anymore.

  Here, I walk to do my shopping, or along the wooded path around the reservoir. The neighbors have had me in for meals. I’m getting to know the mail lady. Best of all, Dorothy is only five minutes away. A few months after I moved, she told me she’d had enough of the suburbs and wanted to be closer to Boston, for concerts and museums. We see each other at least twice a week, for which I couldn’t be more grateful.

  After showering and dressing, I tiptoe past the guest room and hear Celia and Paul beginning to stir. Paul could have stayed with his mother on the night before his wedding, but he and Celia wanted to be here together. I cross the dining room and close the French doors quietly so Alec and Seth can keep sleeping there on the foldout.

  I baked the muffins yesterday afternoon, I just need to warm them in the oven, slice up the fruit, and start the eggs. I offered to do a larger breakfast, at least for their friends Laura and Kyle and for Paul’s parents, but Celia said there was no need. Once my sister arrives from her hotel, the six of us will eat around the old dining room table that I brought with me, along with most of the other furniture that would fit. (Alec wheezes here as well, and says maybe it wasn’t the mold in the basement that forced him to wear a mask, after all, but something in the rugs.)

  “Let me do some of this,” Paul says, coming into the kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He takes a melon from the counter, and a knife from the block.

  “It’s all right,” I tell him, “I’ve got it.” But he’s found a cutting board already and starts in.

  Despite the many Christmases he has spent with us, I’ve rarely spoken to him on his own, Celia or the others always being around. We did talk more when they had me out to San Francisco back in March. He was as attentive as I’ve ever seen him, to me and to Celia, making meals and arranging outings. I suppose some parents would worry about their daughter marrying him, given the financial instability of the sort of work he does, but I could never drum that up in myself, and I certainly can’t now. I’m just glad for the fact that the two of them have decided to make the commitment, and glad to remember how well he got along with Michael, how he always laughed at Michael’s antics.

  On one of those outings, walking on Stinson Beach while Celia playe
d with the dog ahead of us, I found myself telling Paul how I wanted Dr. Gregory and Dr. Bennet and Dr. Greenman, and the people who’d invented all those drugs, imprisoned for what they had done. I hadn’t said it like that to anyone before. Even to myself. And he took it in stride, saying that he understood.

  He hands me the melon and I slide it into the bowl with the apple and the berries. “Really,” I say, “you should go and do whatever you need to, I’m fine.”

  Seeing me infrequently, he is still solicitous of the grieving mother in a way that those nearer by no longer are, now that it’s getting on toward a year. For them, Michael’s death has been absorbed into the everyday.

  I listen to the four of them moving about the house as I set the table and get started on the eggs. It’s the first time they have all been here together. I’ve been looking at the forecast all week, keeping my fingers crossed, and so far the prediction of a clear day is holding.

  After Penny finally appears, we gather, and I wait until everyone has been served before helping myself to a little fruit. When Alec instructs me to eat more, Seth glances at me almost beseechingly, as if trying to apologize for my son. Until a few months ago, I’d never met a companion of Alec’s. He’s been unfailingly polite, and, like Paul lately, speaks to me as if I’m in imminent danger of falling apart. He seems terribly young, though he is only a few years younger than Alec. His mother sent the nicest card about Michael, which, having never met me, she certainly didn’t need to do, and I wrote her back, saying I hoped we would meet one day.

  For so long I worried Alec would never find anyone, given the difficulties of that world, and how tightly wound he is. Perhaps if he’d had his father’s acceptance it would have calmed him. I’m just his mother. I can’t pick and choose among his qualities, which he has always known, and so my acceptance means less. But he and Seth have moved into a new apartment together now, and I think he is happier than he wants to admit.