O My Darling

by Amity Gaige

  “Hmm,” said Clark to the wall. “Let me think about it.”

  He pushed himself away from the wall and went to sit at the small chipboard table next to the bed. Aside from the bed and the table, the room contained a fake leather club chair not unlike the one his father used to have in his study. Clark groaned. The last thing in the world he wanted to be reminded of was his father, Wallace Adair. Wallace Adair had an ugly pink cardigan that his mistress Penny Flanigan had knit him. He used to wear it to spite everyone, even himself, it was so damned ugly. At six foot four, he cut quite a figure. A Tall Man with a square jaw in a pink sweater. But Wallace Adair apologized for nothing. He was a man meandering through fire, on fire but not burning. He had the poise and the stealth of a career criminal. His hands were quick, and nothing—once he took it—could be wrested back from him. It’s hard not to admire the cruel. After all, they are awesome, and there you are covered in scars.

  Once, as a teenager, Clark had seen his father and his mistress together through the window of an ice cream parlor in town. They were not speaking or touching, but rather passing between them a tall, pink milkshake. She had a pretty, snub nose, a slim waist. She wore a pink jacket the same color as the milkshake. Instead of being horrified, Clark’s reaction was strange. He’d found them picturesque, and he had leaned against a lamppost and watched while they shared their treat. Smiling backward at this insensible memory, he was now punching out the numbers on the phone pad, overcome with a wonderful enthusiasm.

  The telephone rang numerous times on the other end. Clark listened, mouth open. He chuckled. He could almost see the old man groping around in the dark, cursing.

  “Hello? Damn it…”

  “Dad! Dad!” he laughed. “It’s me.”

  A pause. Then finally, “What in God’s name?”

  “Well, I’m not calling you in God’s name, Dad. I didn’t mean to wake you up. I didn’t notice the time.” Clark hiccuped. “OK. I didn’t even look at the time, but I bet it’s late ‘cause it sure is dark.”

  “Clark?”

  Clark twisted the phone cord around his fingers. “They don’t have clocks in this place. But then, real royalty probably don’t have clocks. They probably have a whole person whose job it is to follow them around saying what time it is.”

  There was a short pause. “Oh Jesus. No. Not you too.”

  “Not me what?”

  “Are you calling from the nuthouse?”

  “No. No—” Clark laughed, swatting the air in front of him as if the old man was right there. “I’m calling you from the Royal Suite of the Motor Inn. Hey. If you’re not too pissed at me, why don’t I come and visit?”

  It had only occurred to him just then. Naturally! Why not? He was free now, life blown open, wasn’t it? On the other end, shuffling. Muffled explanations. Despite the fact that it was Penny Flanigan’s house, Clark had somehow not anticipated the actual presence of Penny Flanigan. They lived together now, by the sea. His dad had moved in with her after Clark’s mother died, and now they shared it like a married couple. When you thought about it, they’d been waiting twenty years to be together. Penny Pinkypink with the pink waist and the pink hair, swimming naked in milkshake.

  “Man,” said Clark. “I’m really sorry. Tell your—Mrs. Flanigan—that I’m really sorry I woke her up.”

  “Oh, don’t be so drunk,” snapped Wallace out of nowhere. “Call me in the morning. Call me and we’ll talk then. I refuse to chat with you at four in the morning. I’m not your goddamned high school sweetheart.”

  “Hey hey,” Clark said, spinning around in his chair until his butt burned pleasantly. “I was just thinking about you is all.”

  “Think about me on your own time.”

  “Thinking about you,” murmured Clark, “You and Mom.”

  Clark was enjoying himself. It was fun to be drunk and call people. It was fun to be a Man on the Run. Nobody’s Friend. He smiled with touching arrogance, because it just lasted for a moment before he heard his father’s voice respond—flat, low, with that terrible frankness he had forgotten about these years he thought he’d escaped it.

  “I’ll say this once,” Wallace growled. “If you come here, don’t you come here with ghosts.” The old man’s breathing was ragged and almost felt hot in Clark’s ear. “Do not try to stir things up. I’m warning you.”

  Clark swallowed.

  “If you come here,” said the old man, “come here to dance. We’ll take you to the Club. No thanking or apologizing or rehashing any of it.”

  “OK,” Clark said, holding his head, the two halves of which had suddenly began to march in separate directions. His breath smelled poisonous. He felt his drunkenness slip away like a flirt. “Got it.”

  There was a pounding in his head. Soon he understood the pounding was actually on the wall, and a voice was shouting Go to sleep! Go the hell to sleep! He tried to walk away from the anger, dragging the phone off the table and out of the jack. There, in the window, was his big-nosed stupid earnest face sailing by.

  THE ACCIDENTALIST

  She stood just inside the small, dark ranch house, her brow pressed against the screen. Dried yellow mums sat in two large casks on either side of the door. Clark walked up and faced her through the screen. He raised his cheap drugstore sunglasses.

  “You’re so tall!” his father’s mistress cried.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “You look like a tree. You look like an Indian brave. Your father says you have Indian blood in you. Is that true?”

  From somewhere inside, the old man’s awfully familiar voice rang out, “Everything I say is true.”

  “Who cares,” said the woman, not looking away. “I’ll believe anything, long as it isn’t dull. Don’t you agree? Are you still a very serious boy? I remember you perfectly. Those unusual blue eyes. I’m Penny.”

  She didn’t wear pink at all but rather a black dress printed with orange flowers and capped with short ruffled sleeves. Her hair was grayer than he expected, but she had good, youthful-looking shoulders, the same pretty little nose, and her hips swelled under a tightly cinched belt. She was almost too much, the way she kicked open the screen door so that he had to hop out of the way. She took his hand warmly and then let it go.

  “I’ve always liked you, dear,” she said in a lowered voice, touching his arm with the pad of her finger, “but you mustn’t pretend to like me if you decide that you don’t. I won’t take it personally. Most of the time I don’t like myself, so you see it would only bring us closer. I’m not afraid of anyone, really. It’s something lovely that happens to you when you’re old.”

  “Bring him out to the porch, already,” yelled the old man, whose elbow caught in sunlight Clark could see through the dark house. “Bring me the virgin sacrifice!”

  “Your father loves you so much, although I know it doesn’t always feel like love. I have the patience of a stone, you see. That’s why I get along with Wallace so well. Do you dance?”

  Clark looked at his feet.

  “Don’t you have any bags, dear?”

  “Oh,” said Clark. “It was kind of a whim, this trip. I—I was just out for a drive.”

  “Out for a drive,” the woman said, nodding.

  After getting his car pulled from the Triplex ditch early that morning, Clark had at long last taken to the road. The sun had come out with a vengeance, shining doubly off the snow, and he had to buy the sunglasses just to see without his head splitting. Several hours south of Clementine, he’d stopped at a bar in a small, undistinguished town. For a while, he’d sat in the bar looking out at the telephone booth outside, which trapped the morning light in its dingy cylinder, with a mounting sense of dread. He had two possible calls to make. Only two people in the whole world were expecting his phone call, and yet he doubted if either of them wanted to hear from him, King of What Next.

  When Clark’s father recognized his voice over the line, the old man had expressed surprise. “I thought you wouldn’t remembe
r in the morning,” he said with a sigh.

  Clark said that of course he remembered, and was on his way. He was already in Suchandsuch and would be there in an hour.

  “And where’s your wife, incidentally?” Wallace asked.

  “At home,” Clark had replied.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Wallace. “A year goes by and I barely hear a word from you, and now all of a sudden you’re out for a drive without your wife, and find yourself coming to see me?”

  “Guess so.”

  “All right,” grumbled the old man, “well then that’s your story so stick to it. So come prepared to dance, because Penny and I are going to Point Drum tonight and she’s very set on having a good time. And if you come, she’ll want to dance with you. You can borrow a tie. Have you ever met her?”

  “Once,” Clark had said. “Dad,” and here his voice—damn it—had broken on the word. The traffic lapsed and the road was quiet. Clark gazed out of his plastic box, the world through his cheap drugstore sunglasses thick with shadow. “Dad, I—”

  “Just please don’t thank me for anything,” the old man warned. “Don’t thank me or ask me to thank you.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t simper. Just dance.”

  And here it was now, emerging from the shadows of the dark house—the old man’s high-browed, truculent face. He walked out of the brightness in the back of the porch into the interior hallway, a tall dark silhouette, and moved so quickly forward that Clark’s hand hadn’t time to close around his, which was dry and hard like a wooden prosthetic, before it was swiftly rescinded and swinging at the old man’s side.

  “Come on in,” the old man said.

  Wallace Adair sat on a patio loveseat that was covered with a green rubber sheet and rustled like a diaper. Penny Flanigan sat beside him, crinkling her nose in a rather vacant smile. It was cold but neither of them seemed to notice.

  “So,” Wallace said. “Tell me about life in your new town, Whatsitsname.”

  “Clementine.”

  “Like the miner 49–er? And his daughhhhhter, Clementine. Let’s get Penny to sing it. Penny has a lovely voice.”

  “I sing like a toad,” said Penny.

  “Light she was and like a fayyrie,” prompted Wallace, slapping her thigh with his large hand. “And her shooooes were number nine. Herring boxes without topses… da dee dee dee Clementine. Oh my darling oh my darling oh mah darrrrrling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

  “That’s good,” laughed Clark, bobbing his head. “I don’t know the song.”

  “You live there and you don’t know the song?” Wallace’s expression was grave. “That’s like living in a nudist colony without knowing what an ass looks like.”

  Penny and Clark laughed but Wallace didn’t.

  “It isn’t much of a town,” said Clark, remembering it fondly anyway. “We moved there because of the house. We were just drawn to it. Like the house chose us. Weird.” Weird, now that he thought of it. “I sent you a photograph? It’s small, yellow. Homey, you could say.”

  “A perfect starter home,” said Penny.

  “Sure,” said Clark, leaning back. “A normal house in a normal place.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of Clementine and I used to live right around there,” said Wallace.

  “Well it exists all right,” said Clark. “It’s even got a zoo.”

  “I adore zoos,” said Penny.

  “And a statue of Vincent George. He was born there.”

  “I adore mimes!”

  “All right,” said Wallace, bringing his hand down on the glass end table. “Everybody adores everything. So I’m glad for you. I suppose I should come visit one of these days. But I’m a difficult houseguest. You know how I am. Can’t please me. I don’t eat anything unless it’s got gallons of salt on it. I’m not sure I even like people…”

  “Wallace is an antisocialite,” said Penny, drawing her arm across her body and grasping her cocktail from the glass end table. “He likes to be around people so that he can yell at them. He’s surprisingly popular.”

  “People love to be yelled at,” said Wallace. “I don’t get it.” The old man looked over at his mistress and stabbed a finger in her direction. “I like her,” he said. “And I like that rebel wife of yours. I liked her from the minute I saw her. A real bluestocking. I love her screechy ways. I used to love sitting in the kitchen with her at the old house, drinking bourbon. How is she?”

  “Charlotte?”

  “Yes Charlotte. Charlotte-who-stayed-at-home.”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” said Penny. “What a beautiful girl. She could cut that hair and sell it for a lot of money.”

  Clark grasped his drink by the rim, swirled it. He sighed and looked up at the pair, who gazed back. Behind him was the view, at which they kept stealing glances. They owned a square of blue green grass and a row of shadbush and beyond that, a portal-sized view of the bay. Clark could smell the shells and seaweed in the air.

  “Well, I’ve never come to visit you either,” Clark said. “And you’ve been here, what, about a year?”

  “I’ve lived here for five, since I retired,” said Penny. “But yes, your father joined me… later.”

  “Right,” Clark turned around and took in the view. “Well, this is a really nice place, you two.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The view is nice,” said Wallace, “but the house is dark and damp and full of Penny’s farts and craps.”

  “Wallace.”

  “Your objets trouvés. The crap you find on the beach,” he turned to Clark and explained it. “She finds things on the beach—crap—varnishes them, and props them against the walls. This is art?”

  “Don’t you believe a word,” replied the woman, shaking a finger, “Wallace loves his little garrison. Wallace loves it all, even the beach art. You can catch him in the morning, gazing down at the garden over there. When the marigolds start to bloom, he stands there and cheers them on. You can do it! he tells them. That’s the Wallace that Wallace doesn’t want anyone to know about.” Penny smiled and rolled her head against the back of the patio sofa. “Oh Clark, what can we do? We’re all secretly enchantable. Our heads are lined with silk, like jewelry boxes.”

  “I agree with that,” said Clark.

  Penny stood up and walked to the edge of the porch. The heels of her shoes scraped the smooth concrete. Already she seemed light with drink. Clark liked how the drink made her gentle rather than harsh, as drinking tended to make his father. Though her face was visibly aged, the apples of her cheeks were still high and taut-looking, and her arms seemed extraordinarily hairless, and the little dingbat sleeves on her dress, which were more like ruffled bonnet lids, exposed the balls of her shoulders.

  “You know what’s pretty, though?” she murmured. “When the fog gets stuck in the yard.”

  “The fog?” Clark asked.

  “It gets stuck in little patches. You can see it in the morning.”

  “Good Lord,” said Wallace. “Let’s go to the club.”

  “But it does. Don’t you believe me, Clark?”

  “Well, don’t ask Clark,” said Wallace. “Clark’ll believe anything.”

  Then the old man grabbed Penny’s arm and bit it while she squealed.

  Clark looked away. Suddenly, a sense of shame rushed through his body. What was he doing there? He’d come with such resolution, such will, but what was the resolution, what was the will? I mean, what content? It was the sort of overcharged gesture that bad actors make. He missed his ratty plaid blanket, under whose shade he had recovered his strength last summer, watched the finches through that large window in the living room, watched the hawthorn proffer its white flowers, little white bunches like feather dusters. He missed the finches, missed the hawthorn. And yes, he missed Charlotte. How was even this possible? To miss the person with whom you caught on fire? He could not think of her without thinking of himself. And himself
… well, he hated that guy.

  “Clark?” Penny asked, poking him with her shoe. “Don’t you believe me about the fog? Wallace never believes me. He’s a skeptic—”

  “I’m an occasionalist.”

  “—and he thinks that everything ought to be disbelieved.”

  “No dear heart, I’m an occasionalist. I believe that nothing has a precedent. I believe that one should treat each moment as if it’s never happened before.”

  “How dreary,” Penny groaned. “God forbid we learn anything from the whole of human history.” She turned to Clark and plucked at his pant leg. “What are you, Clark? An accidentalist? A breathmintalist?”

  “An accidentalist,” laughed Clark sincerely. “Yeah. That’s what I am.”

  Penny leaned back on the sofa, so that she was looking down her body at the two men. “I like having you to visit, Clark.”

  “Thank you,” Clark said.

  “I’ve always been very fond of people like you. You’re a good sport, and I can tell you sort of believe me about the fog getting stuck in the yard. No one ever believes me. Now you tell me something unbelievable.”

  “Good Lord,” said the old man. “Let’s go to the club already.”

  Clark blushed. “I don’t know.”

  Penny clasped her knees. “Come on, you can tell me. I’m an ass!”

  “Let’s go,” begged Wallace, his legs opening and closing like wings, rustling the green diaper. “We’ve got a reservation.”

  “Pooh the reservation,” said Penny, swatting his shoulder. “What does it matter?”

  “It’s you who wanted to dance.”

  “I always want to dance. Why does it upset you just now?”

  “I’m not upset, I’m hungry.”

  “Eat a peanut.”

  “You eat a peanut.”

  “I think there are other people living in my house,” said Clark. “Lots of them. All at the same time.”

  Silenced, the pair looked at him. Wallace fell stiffly back against the cushion. Penny paused, shoe dangling from her toes. Behind Clark was the soft, washer-like sound of the bay.