The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “There’s always something they do wrong.” She looked down at her pasta primavera.

  I sipped my wine. I had ordered a glass of house red and she gave me the look of the Mormons. She smeared a dab of butter onto her bread roll.

  “I’d like to scatter his ashes at the Stanford accelerator,” I said.

  She held a piece of pasta an inch from her plate. In that moment the known universe was contained in the gap between morsel and mouth; I inched forward in my seat. “Why on earth would you do a thing like that?” she said.

  “He wanted that.”

  She folded and unfolded her napkin. “He didn’t know what he wanted.”

  “He didn’t want his ashes kept around. I don’t think he believed in holding on to the past,” I said.

  She was chewing now, timing a response so she could think. “Who says it’s up to him?”

  A silence fell over us for a moment.

  She continued, “Those ashes are for me, not him.” It was said simply, with no hint of apology. A widow’s entitlement.

  “I found a letter he left.” I slid it across the table, deft as a ransom note.

  She held the letter between her fingertips, opened it. Her tight, proud chin quivered slightly as she read. “Where did you find this?” she asked, not looking up.

  “In his study.”

  Her eyes moved across each sentence several times, taking it in.

  “Why didn’t he leave it with his papers?” she asked.

  “He was embarrassed. He always said he didn’t believe in God and here he is pouring his guts out to Him. We need to stop having him watch from up on the mantel. He didn’t care what happened in that house when he was alive and he certainly doesn’t care now.”

  The words came out harsher than I had expected. She leaned back in her seat, composed. The waiter came and refilled our water glasses.

  I said, “We need a fresh start.”

  “No,” she said, placing her napkin on the table. “That is not true. I’ve moved on with my life.”

  “Mom, you sealed the parlor with yellow accident scene tape.”

  “You’re the one that’s not adjusting,” she said.

  I turned my water glass in circles. She smoothed the hem of the tablecloth. I mentally counted to ten.

  “Whit loves you,” I said.

  She set her jaw at an angle and looked at me squarely. “Nonsense.”

  “He always has. I see that now, the way he used to hang around when I was a kid. It wasn’t just for dad, it was for you. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “He’s a friend. He helps me around the house. Someone to cook for…a mutual arrangement. I’d say that we’ve struck a very amicable arrangement.”

  “The man is pining.”

  She gave a terse head shake. “This is silly.”

  “He’s in that basement talking in code to Russians and Filipinos on the radio. He’s doing push-ups before bed. His whole life is one long cold shower.”

  “Now that is enough.”

  “You don’t want to believe it.” I looked at her hand, the thin gold band on her wedding ring finger. “You’re married to a ghost. Most of the time he was a ghost, even when he lived with us. But he tried in his own way, as best he could.”

  She put her plate to one side, indicating the end of the discussion, and gestured for the bill. She wrote a check, tore it off neatly, and wrote the amount in her pocket ledger—the little balance sheet that ensured she would never be caught short.

  forty-five

  We planned a date for the ash scattering. I invited Toby and Teresa and they were going to meet us in California. Whit paid for their airfares, as a gift to our family. He called ahead to make the arrangements at the accelerator and made a pine box with dovetail joints for the transport of my father’s remains. I transferred the contents of the Italian urn to the box and covered it with bubble wrap. As we shuttled toward San Francisco, my mother held the plastic-encased box on her lap, refusing offers of peanuts and soda from the hostesses. I looked at her, thinking here is my mother, holding his body, and surely now he has material presence, can be captured and held the way he never could in life. No wonder she was reluctant.

  “We’re doing the right thing,” I said. “He wanted this.”

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  I stared out the window. Clouds broke apart to reveal suburbs, then wheat-colored fields dotted with stray farmhouses. I could see depth and contour. Chalky river bluffs and canyons, features etched into copper.

  Toby and Teresa arrived at the San Francisco airport within an hour of each other. We found Toby by the baggage claim area. He was dressed like an opera singer or a gangster—a camel-hair coat, collar up, cinched waist, bounding around with his cane. He wore glasses now. Not sunglasses in the fashion of Stevie Wonder, but reading spectacles—they may have even been bifocals—and it was meant to be funny, a kind of antistatement.

  “Toby?”

  He turned his head slightly and carefully, like a man with a neck injury.

  “I thought I heard your shuffle on the approach,” he said.

  He held his arms wide and we embraced. He smelled of expensive cologne.

  “You remember Whit and my mother?” I said.

  “Sure,” Toby said. “Whit’s a fellow disciple of the darkness.”

  “Glad you could make it,” Whit said.

  “Yes, it means a lot to Nathan to have you here,” my mother said.

  While we waited for Teresa by the gate, Toby told me about his life in New York. Several times he’d gone on tour and was recording an album. Recitals in Amsterdam and Prague, standing ovations and flowers and interviews on the radio—these were the brash, spilled details of his new life. He spoke about playing pianos in the cathedrals of Europe, playing requiems and concertos, feeling the air vibrate because the marble and slate floors absorbed nothing. I sat there, nodding, remaining on the surface of his exploits.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “The library.”

  He lowered his voice. “You getting laid?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Teresa arrived late. She had carry-on luggage only and wore a black miniskirt with knee-high boots. We all stood near the ticket counter.

  “I need a cigarette,” Teresa said, kissing me on the cheek.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello. Nice to see you again,” my mother said, extending her hand to Teresa.

  “Hi,” Teresa said.

  “It’s our favorite miracle worker,” Toby said.

  Teresa kissed Toby on the cheek and told him to be quiet.

  “How are the sick and the ill?” Whit asked Teresa.

  “They send their wishes,” she said.

  We walked outside and stood in front of the curbside check-in. “It’s good to see you guys,” she said, smiling at Toby and me. She lit a cigarette. My mother locked a stare on her for a second, performing some kind of private, maternal calculus.

  “I’ve never been to an ash scattering,” Toby said.

  “Hope the weather will be nice,” Whit said, craning up at the sun.

  Teresa blew some smoke downwind.

  “I understand you’ve been working in a hospital?” my mother asked Teresa. There was the slightly formal tone of an interview in my mother’s delivery.

  “Yes,” Teresa said.

  “What do you do?” my mother asked.

  “I tell the dying how to stop lying to themselves.”

  My mother adjusted the zipper on her handbag without making eye contact. “Oh,” she said.

  I stared at Teresa. A year with the sick and dying had given her authority and poise. She now had one of those enigmatic faces you glimpse in the street—the Raphaelite child in the rear window of a car, the seer bum on the curbstone, the wistful and elegant old man smiling at you in the grocery store; a flashbulb of sage, the suggestion of a secret the rest of us will come to learn too late.

  WE ARRIVED AT THE STANFORD
Linear Accelerator just before dusk. The security guard at the main gatehouse checked us in and issued us visitor badges. He noted on his clipboard “family memorial” as the reason for our visit. My mother looked around the accelerator campus, nonplussed. A metallic freight train, an ugly terminal building with drab bricks and no windows. I could tell she was wondering what all the fuss was about, why my father had made pilgrimages to a place that resembled a series of Leninist public buildings. Whit refrained from mentioning the key facts about this place, that a string of Nobel Prizes had been won within the same three buildings.

  We drove out toward the western terminus, toward the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the darkening afternoon the mountains stood serrated against the western sky. We drove beside the tunnel and passed beneath the 280 overpass, a steady stream of headlights passing above us. People were returning home from work, carrying groceries and listening to talkback radio, oblivious to the subatomic war that raged below. We passed the spot where the electron gun lay buried. It was capable of firing electrons at the speed of light, sending pulses of Armageddon down a braided copper wire. This was his resting ground.

  Dr. Benson, the director of the accelerator, had informed Whit that there was a picnic spot that overlooked Jasper Ridge, a Stanford-owned ecology preserve where nature had been undisturbed for generations. He suggested it was a good spot for “small-particle dispersal.” We pulled up a hill and parked amid a series of picnic tables. A wire fence separated the nature preserve from the accelerator campus. The wind blew out of the southwest and would carry my father’s ashes down over the tunnel and partially onto Jasper Ridge.

  Whit retrieved the pine box from the car and we all gravitated toward the fence. Everybody stood and waited for me to begin things. I hadn’t really planned any kind of ceremony.

  “So I thought we should get rid of these,” I said. “He brought me here when I was a kid. For my birthday. I thought he was going to take me to Disneyland when I realized the plane was going to California.”

  “For him it was like the Sixteen Chapel,” Whit ventured.

  Toby winced and said, “Sistine.”

  “Anyway, this seems like the place for him,” I said.

  I opened the box and dipped a hand inside. The ash was the texture of silt, the color of pumice. Shards of bone flaked and studded the mixture. A steady breeze came up, off the mountains that stood behind us. I threw a handful of ash into the air and it shot off the side of the hill. The heavier specks made a brief silhouette against the darkening blue of the sky.

  Toby said, “Somebody give me the visuals.” Teresa leaned close to him and narrated.

  I did this for some time, casting handfuls of my father into the air. I asked my mother if she wanted a turn. She stepped forward and dipped her hand into the box, at first reluctantly. She sprinkled it delicately into the breeze, as if it were oregano going into a simmering broth. Then she began throwing it like confetti, whisking it toward Jasper Ridge. Nobody cried and nobody made any speeches. There was something secretive about it, the way we stood gathered, watching the dregs of a human life pass into the twilight. I imagined my father floating and melding with ozone and oxygen, becoming the air itself.

  forty-six

  Toby and Teresa came back with us to Wisconsin for a few days. Toby was on vacation and wanted to visit a fellow Juilliard student in Madison. Teresa said she was curious to see where I’d been “incubated.” The five of us flew to Madison on a late-night flight. My mother didn’t say much as we performed the errands of travel, passed through metal detectors, had the contents of our carry-on bags reduced to skeletal images on small television screens. Teresa touched my arm and gestured to the screens as we passed by. “Look,” she said, “the X-ray channel.” We arrived home after midnight to the empty, dark house. My mother turned on a few lights. The mantel stood unadorned. She moved about the house, adjusting the thermostat and drawing curtains, reclaiming her dominion.

  My mother’s eyes were sunken, her face pale. “Good night, all,” she said wearily. She had no patience for houseguests right now. Toby, also tired out, stood in the hallway, tapping a finger at the edge of a picture frame. “Buona sera,” he said.

  “You, Whit, and I are in the guest room. Straight down the hallway, to the end. Teresa will sleep in my room,” I said.

  “You mean we bunk down with Buck Rogers?”

  “Of course. And you might just be in time for his evening calisthenics.”

  “Jolly.” Toby reached a hand up to his mouth, kissed his fingers, and waved at us. He tapped his cane along the floorboards of the hallway.

  Teresa and I went and sat in the kitchen. I made us both some hot chocolate.

  “Nobody has ever cooked in this kitchen,” Teresa said.

  “She waxes the oven knobs,” I said.

  “People do not live in this house,” she said.

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “You’ve been through a lot, I can tell.” She tugged a piece of her hair into place. “Why did you stop writing me?”

  “I didn’t have anything to say.”

  “I never cared about what you did with your life.”

  “I know,” I said. “Nobody did except the guy who died.”

  I poured some hot chocolate into two cups and handed her one.

  “How are your patients treating you?” I asked.

  “Liars and cheats mostly.” She stared into her cup.

  “I’m glad you’ve stayed cynical.”

  “I stole pills from the hospital for a while, but I just hoarded them at home. Little neon piles waiting for a rainy day.”

  “Were you depressed?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Those people can get to me. I know you were angry with me for seeing the tumor. It’s only natural. I’m the most hated person in the state of Connecticut.”

  “I wanted to blame someone.”

  She held her cup between two hands. “Do I make your mother uncomfortable?” she asked.

  “She’s not used to women in the house. Girls didn’t exist in here.”

  “What did you have instead?”

  “Cloud chambers and travel enthusiasts and barbecues with astronauts. I never had girlfriends.”

  “That’s right. I was your first. I forget that sometimes.”

  “Numero uno.”

  She considered the kitchen and looked out the breakfast window, where, in the midground, the orchard stood in half-bloom.

  We finished our drinks and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. She looked around the room at the chemistry set and the star constellations on the ceiling.

  “This is about what I expected,” she said.

  “We’ve kept the house like a museum from 1980.”

  “Your mother could charge admission. People could lie on your bed and stare up at the Milky Way.”

  She peeled back the bedspread to reveal Superman in various poses: outrunning a locomotive, leaping a building, flying with one arm outstretched.

  “Sexy,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll see you in the morning. If you want to make a voltaic cell in the middle of the night, all the ingredients are right here. Good night.” I turned for the hallway.

  “Nathan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there—have you been with other people?”

  I stood helplessly in the doorway.

  1 in 600,000 that you get struck by lighting during your life

  “No. I mean, one kiss,” I said. I studied the wallpaper. “What about you?”

  “No one special.”

  I watched her sprawl across my bed, exhausted, face in pillow, arms flung wide like an adolescent girl captured mid-pout. There was still something there: the thought of her sleeping in my bed made my blood jump. I hadn’t felt a clear emotion in some time. Arousal came in over the wire of leveled expectations and I could imagine kissing her again. Time was loosening. Outside, apples were programmed to peak and fall from their stems on a certain day; hyacinths were growing t
hrough my father’s composted beard, already mulched down to the proteins and enzymes. Nature had been telling us to move on all along.

  “It’s good to see you again,” I said. She got under the covers and I switched out the light.

  “You, too,” she said.

  THE NEXT DAY TOBY, TERESA, and I took a drive in the Oldsmobile. Like me, Toby loved to be in a car, clipping along at seventy, eighty, air siphoning through the windows. In Iowa we’d taken drives, me narrating the scenery, describing the dozen versions of the same farmhouse as they streaked past our windows, the people riding horses and plowing their fields. Teresa was oblivious to car travel. She read a magazine and napped. As usual, I took the rural roads and we found ourselves in a sorry back pocket of dairy land. Muddy cows pulled at round bales of hay at the edge of gravel beds; low-yield fields lay greened out, spent.

  As we drove I glanced at Teresa in the rearview mirror while she slept. On the outskirts of Madison we hit traffic. We drove past farms that had now thinned to five-acre plots, pottery sheds with homemade signs, people selling yard shadows from trailers, a string of self-storage businesses, an attack-dog training academy. Soon we came to a standstill. The traffic was gridlocked and the shriek of an ambulance came from up ahead. Drivers all around us began muttering to themselves and obsessing with their dash controls.

  After several minutes of idling, I switched off the engine. The traffic moved forward again and I turned the key. The ignition was dead. I tried to turn the engine over again. Nothing.

  “That didn’t sound very good,” Toby said.

  A lane of cars was trapped behind us. Somebody sounded their horn. A chorus of honking erupted. Teresa woke in the back and stuck her head out the window. Within seconds the two-lane freeway came alive: cars and pickups calling to one another like territorial birds, accusing one another, because nobody could remember who was the cause anymore. I saw a flurry of colored arrows and darts take to the air. I tried to start the engine several times but it didn’t even click over. I put the hazards on, popped the hood, and stepped outside. The horns were belligerent, a distant then a close bawl. Toby and Teresa stood beside me as I opened the hood. The engine was neglected but intact: starbursts of corrosion in the welded joints, grease stains, but nothing like dismembered hoses or a shredded fan belt. The noise by now was deafening and Toby clicked his tongue several times in disgust.