O My Darling

by Amity Gaige

  Finally, Penny began to laugh.

  “Unbelievable!” she cried, slapping her thigh, stirring the gauzy hem of her dress. “You almost had me!”

  “Yeah,” said Clark, smiling. “Almost.”

  PINK ELEPHANT

  The trio sat at a cocktail table near the window. The table was so small that Penny’s elbows could touch both men at once, while their knees faced off underneath. Wallace placed his large shoe atop of Clark’s, thinking it was the foot of the table, and fifteen minutes later Clark was still waiting for a good time to move it. Once the sun set, the bay looked like a tub of oil, and the moon slid unbroken upon the water. Chinese lanterns were strung over a small dance floor outside. A syrupy, instrumental version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” played on. No one danced.

  “Now, if we introduce you to our friends,” Penny cautioned Clark, “don’t feel the need to be nice. They’re a bunch of geriatrics and they won’t remember what you say tomorrow. Besides, you’re Wally’s son. They’ll be surprised that you don’t have snakes growing out of your head.”

  “Damn it,” snapped his father. Clark jumped and placed one hand on Penny’s arm, in a protective gesture of which he was immediately ashamed.

  “Xylophone music again,” said the old man, as Clark removed his hand. “It makes my skin crawl. Who in the world considers the xylophone a legitimate instrument? Doesn’t anybody remember the piano? Did Tony Bennett live in vain?”

  “Why don’t you put your comment in the comment box, dear?”

  “Because it’s a gripe, not a comment. Do they have a gripe box?” Wallace turned and nudged Clark with his elbow. “Get ready, Clark. When you’re old nobody listens to you. They just string you along until you die.” The old man turned to Penny, seized her hand and kissed it.

  “Cut it out,” said Penny.

  “Are you afraid Birch Henderson will get jealous?” Wallace turned to Clark in mock confidentiality. “Penny has Birch Henderson lined up to marry her after I’m dead. A real poohbah. A dentist. With a hairpiece.”

  “At least he dances,” Penny sneered back, turning also to Clark, so that the both of them were looking into his ears. She whispered, “Wallace doesn’t dance to xylophones. Wallace doesn’t dance unless he can be the best dancer on the floor.”

  “I do not.”

  “Do too.”

  “I do not.”

  “Wallace can turn anything into a competition.”

  “I can not.”

  “Can too.”

  “Lies! Women’s lies. I’m fabulous.”

  “You dance insincerely.”

  “I didn’t know you danced at all, Dad,” said Clark.

  The two bodies leaned away from him. Clark took a sip of water in the short, ensuing quiet. He had drawn attention to something sour. He could feel the pair resenting him for it. But he had truly never seen his father dance, not in twenty-nine years of life. He wiped the sweat from his water glass and felt once again ashamed. He was no fun. Penny and Wallace moved in a flickering shade and he stood out in the open as he was told—a slow, clear target.

  He tried to explain, “I’ve just never seen you dance, Dad.”

  “Well,” Penny said. She took a sip of wine, looking out into the dining room.

  The old man leaned back and narrowed his eyes. His colorless face was cold and flat as a sketch. “I smell an elephant,” he said, shaking his finger.

  “No you don’t,” said Penny. “It’s your own scandal-mongering.”

  “But I do. I smell a big pink elephant. What I want to know is, who brought him?”

  “Wallace,” said Penny.

  “Is he under the table?” Bending stiffly, the old man looked under the table. Clark removed his foot from under his father’s. The old man lifted his bread plate and sniffed it. He sniffed the air around his son. “Who’s got an elephant in his back pocket?”

  The waiters at the club wore white coats and tuxedo shirts. Not until their waiter reached the table did Clark see that he was an older black man, with large eyes and freckled cheeks. Clark thought it was repulsive to see a club full of white people being served by blacks, along with a couple of white single-mother types. Clark’s mother and Wallace had belonged to a similar club in Carnifex Ferry when Clark was a boy, and Clark had retained a loathing for such places. He remembered pacing outside the ladies’ room as a child to catch swinging-door glances of his mother as she smoked, casting long, trance-like glances at herself in the mirror.

  “Hello,” Clark said warmly. “How are you this evening, sir?”

  The waiter looked at Clark without recognition. Then, to Clark’s horror, he put his hand on Wallace’s sport coat. But Wallace turned stiffly in his chair and smiled.

  “David,” he bellowed.

  “David,” cried Penny.

  “They’ve got the crap music on again tonight, David.”

  “I know, Wally. I know,” said the waiter, soothing the old man’s shoulder with his white-tipped fingers.

  Clark blinked. His father’s face had been overtaken by a modest and attentive grin, and he clapped his hand around the other man’s where it lay. Who was this Wallace Adair—a nice man? A happy man? A man who talked to marigolds? A man who liked to be clapped on the shoulder? The same man who had not touched his wife in her coffin but placed, inexplicably, a dollar bill in the pocket of her dress? Had he left all of it behind, who he was, freed by disaster?

  “Oh, David,” Penny was saying. “Let me introduce you to Wally’s son, Clark.”

  “How do you do?”

  Clark nodded. Now that they’d been introduced, David’s eyes were full of limpid recognition. Suddenly, he appeared handsome and urbane.

  “If Wally won’t dance with you, why don’t you dance with the young man?” the waiter suggested to Penny. Penny fiddled with her necklace.

  “Penny wants to dance with Birch Henderson,” said Wallace.

  “Good thing for you, Wallace, Mr. Henderson isn’t here tonight. He’s gone into the city, to visit his daughter.”

  “I didn’t know he had a daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” said David.

  There was another tiny hitch in time after that. Clark noticed that time was starting to stick all over the place. Wallace’s enormous hands paused over the breadbasket and his face loosened itself to thought before the hands descended inside the linens and they all went on laughing and talking. Within moments it had been decided that Penny would dance with Clark after dinner, wouldn’t he, and wouldn’t it be warm enough for her since she was such a filly, and the young man was so tall and just like his father forty years ago and look just now Alfred and Bunny Malcolm had taken to the floor and if they could do it…

  But halfway through the meal Clark reacquired a weariness he’d not felt in months. He did not feel free, having escaped Clementine. In fact, he felt worse. Heavier even than he had that past summer, before he saved the boy. He felt that taking a single step or raising a fork of chicken to his mouth would be a heroic act of which he was incapable. Time favored unhappiness. It slowed you through the awful parts and whisked you through the good ones.

  How were you supposed to make it all the way through such a life, never ducking through that tempting little chink in the hedgerow like his mother had? Penny was chatting about a sect of occultists who were rumored to meet in the Drum Point golf course at night. Her teeth were stained pink from wine and she’d begun to hiccup at intervals. The small convulsions made the ruffles on her sleeves hitch upward, as if she were taking flight, and her voice, sweet and happily drifting, curled around Clark like the shoots of a vine curl around a fence post or chair within the course of one hot day, binding him to his seat until he found himself staring openly at his father.

  The old man was enjoying himself. Clark hadn’t seen the man look so happy in years. He obviously liked to be out and about. Suddenly, it pained Clark, right at the core, that while his poor crazy mother was dead, and he himself was h
ungover and lost and Charlotteless, his father got so neatly what he wanted. For Wallace, Penny Flanigan had always been the pinkness flashing in the far beyond, past the locked gate. And now here they all were, at Point Drum Country Club, drinking pink zinfandel, as if the fulfillment of one wish sated the need for all wishing, like a prisoner who, once he’s scaled the holding wall, looks down at his conspirators with tender indifference.

  “Quit staring at me, son.”

  Clark shook his head. He took a quick breath. His father had said it discreetly, while Penny was calling for more wine, and this seemed a kindness.

  Penny turned back to them, still laughing at a joke Clark had not heard, her eyes in merry slits. She sighed.

  “Well,” she said, to no one in particular, “what a lovely, foggy night.”

  And it was. The fog had rolled in from the water and was hanging over the dance floor. The Malcolms were still dancing. Mr. Malcolm guided his wife back and forth, stiff-armed and somehow graceful, on the invisible plane.

  “I’ve left Charlotte,” Clark said.

  He looked at his father. Behind him, through the window, the dancers danced in smoke.

  “If I could stay for a couple days, to figure out what to do—”

  The old man said nothing. He took a loud sip of his scotch and soda.

  “Of course you can,” said Penny. “Oh poor dear.”

  Clark looked down at his plate. Then he turned to Penny and began, helplessly, “I don’t know how it happened. One minute we’re happily married and the next thing we’re arguing all the time and she’s drinking in the dark in that house, just—staring at me. Like I’m some… complete disappointment. And so I try to go out and have a life and help these kids from school and then, okay, so they were stealing from us—oh just crap, who the hell knows? All sorts of strange things have been happening in that house. But maybe it’s all in my mind. Maybe it’s me—”

  “Slow down, dear,” said Penny.

  “And we had this fight and said things… So I just got the hell out of there. But because of the snow I had to stay in the Royal Suite and talk to a wall,” he continued, though he wanted desperately to shut up. He put his hands on his head and stared at the candle flame. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” he said. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I thought that by my age the right thing to do would just be obvious. I’m not in the damn ballpark.”

  The old man frowned. Signaling what? Clark was losing the thread of his story.

  “I left my wife,” Clark said more urgently, underscoring the words by rapping on the table with his butter knife. The candlelight flickered on the wall.

  Finally Wallace said, “That’s it?”

  “What?”

  Penny put her hand on Clark’s. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t left her.”

  “What?” His voice rose. “I’m here, aren’t I? I left.”

  “The moorings don’t give just like that,” Penny murmured. “You’ll see.”

  “I see already!”

  Penny gathered her hands in front of her calmly, and lowered her eyes as she spoke. Behind her, the waiters moved in the candlelight, quiet as fish.

  “A person may create certain things,” she began. “A person may create certain bonds that eventually surpass him in strength. The bond takes on a life of its own, like a third life, a child, you build between yourself and someone else. It’s mightier than you’ll ever be. It’s half beautiful, half awful. It’s love!” She laughed softly, shrugging. “But it’s the only thing immortal about you. Even when you leave, it’s still there. Even when you die, it’s still there. Behind you, as smoke. Love smoke.”

  The woman’s eyes took on a shade. She lifted them, full of years, to her lover, then brushed her lips with her napkin. “Well, Wally,” she said briskly, “There’s your pink elephant. Clark and Charlotte, on the rocks.”

  “No,” the man said, shaking his head. “That’s not it. That’s not the whole elephant.”

  “Oh come on,” the woman moaned. “Let’s dance. Let’s feel good. It’s Saturday night! Don’t worry, all this crap will still be here when we come back.”

  The woman tugged on both arms until Clark was standing.

  “Will you watch over our crap while we’re gone, Wallace?”

  “I’ll watch the crap. I’ll make sure no one takes any.”

  “But I don’t want to dance!” cried Clark.

  “You sound just like your father,” Penny said, pulling him toward the floor, where dancing couples moved half-obscured, in and out of the fog.

  THE DAMAGE

  Clark was looking at Penny’s scrapbook of dried flowers the following afternoon when his father stood up and hitched his pants. “My boy,” he said. “You’re my favorite fool.” Clark paused with his finger pointing appreciatively at a flattened gardenia. It was the afternoon, the sun was edging across the yard, and all of a sudden Clark realized his father was telling him something true. He had not come all the way there to look at dried flowers. He had not come to make nice with his father’s mistress, going rock hounding, rolling over like a dog to her affection. In fact, the invigorating violence that had spirited him out of Clementine and onto the road to his father’s house before he even knew where he was headed had absconded and left him with a faint kiss mark, and he felt again that he was standing on nothing. Here he was, a fool, looking at dried flowers with the two people whose love had killed his mother, as if he were being shown the very evidence against them.

  And yet Clark did not leave. He physically could not. He thought of Charlotte and felt her, but then just as readily he stuffed her back down into some kind of invisible hole. Four days into his stay, even Wallace seemed to accept this, pacing with his scotch around the willow trunk, at intervals taking in a breath of air so cool and briny it must have penetrated the dead space—the skeptical, occasionalist deadness inside him. Christmas was fast upon them and it seemed that the old man was becoming resigned to sharing the holiday with his son.

  Later, Clark lay on his twin bed with one arm propped behind his neck, his feet hanging off. His room was the last on the hall, a dark small room with a bookshelf of moldering mystery novels, which he had begun to read. He took care to keep the room and bed neat, and to pair his shoes, and to come quickly when called. Yet he also felt safe doing nothing, like some overgrown child, alone and absorbed.

  “Hello.” Penny poked her head through the open door. Her hair was loose, betraying its soft thinness.

  Clark put down his book. “Hey. What can I do?”

  “I need your help with something,” Penny said. “Follow me.”

  He followed her down the hall toward the living room, his long shadow trailing behind, until they reached the small blue spruce, decorated with seashells that Penny and Clark had found on the beach. Underneath the Christmas tree sat a modest collection of gifts.

  Clark laughed. “If Charlotte was here, she’d be shaking those boxes all day long.” He walked around the tree admiringly. “She can’t stand guessing. Wrapped things make her crazy.”

  “Hold this,” said Penny, handing him an ornament. “I bet she wouldn’t mind knowing where you are.”

  Clark pursed his lips, looking at the tree.

  “Have you phoned her yet?”

  “No,” said Clark.

  Penny turned to the crate and began to rummage in it noisily. She withdrew an angel made out of driftwood with a painted face and gold foil wings. She gave him the angel.

  “I need you to put him up there.”

  “When I was a kid, I used to make ornaments too.”

  “Really?”

  “Hobby horses made out of socks, painted tin cans. I found a whole box of homemade Christmas ornaments when Mom died. She had kept them, every one. Then again, she also kept boxes of old pantyhose and used aluminum foil. She had a little problem, you know, throwing things out. She thought someone was examining our trash.”

  Penny placed a chair before the tree.
Clark stepped heavily onto the seat.

  “Anyway,” he said. “It’s all in the dump. Mary and I took it all to the dump.”

  Clark secured the angel on top of the tree. Turning his head, he looked out the window. He saw his father coming up from the water in a wooly cardigan. Addled steps. Greasy head bent. Those large stiff paws, swinging at his sides. Clark looked away.

  “You know, I saw you once,” he said, standing on the chair. “When I was a kid. Through the window of an ice cream parlor. I thought you were pretty.”

  He stepped down from the chair, when to his enormous surprise, Penny grasped him by the shoulders. Her lips were clenched white around the edges, and the cords of her neck stood out. She held him so hard he almost had to laugh. His hands were retracted awkwardly at his chest.

  “You make me so sad,” she said, her voice shaking. “The way you are. You lay yourself bare. Don’t you know people hate that? Poor child. Why are you so careless with yourself?”

  Terrified, Clark looked out the back door. He wanted to push her away.

  “I really must tell you something,” she said. “You were a patsy. You and Mary and my kids too. We set you up. The world was our responsibility, you see. But we had you and then we passed off the world to you. All our miseries. Finally, we didn’t care about you enough. Even your poor mother didn’t care about you enough. We were all… elsewhere.” She let her arms down and her whole person seemed to slump, as if her very juice—her pinkness—ran off through her fingertips.

  “And so I apologize. For all of us. You know of course your father never will, and your mother… can’t. I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe it’s too late for me to say that now. But not for you. It’s not too late for you. You could be trusted, if you were to say, for whatever you’ve done or not done so far, that you were sorry. That you were truly, truly sorry. You could mean it. Have it matter. Surely you could be braver than us…” Penny bent her head. “When your mother passed, life went on so unyieldingly. We watched it. We knew we’d follow soon, and just like her, leave mostly damage. We would end, but the damage… The damage—”