“That’s what I told my mother.”
“I’m sure she was relieved.”
“She likes you. She said, ‘At least it would be good-looking.’”
“I really want to go with you to Atlanta.”
“You can’t. I want to do this with my mother.”
I’m silent.
“Listen, Harper. I should do this my way. I want to keep talking, to try to work through this, but I’ve made up my mind.”
I don’t say anything for a few seconds, then, “I’ll pay for it.”
“Mama thought you would offer to. She says you’re a gentleman. She told me to tell you not to worry about it.”
“I want to pay for it.”
“You can’t.”
“Then I’ll give you a present. How much is it going to cost? God, I’m so sorry, Savanna.” I’m not sure how I feel, if I feel anything at all.
“I have no earthly idea. It’s not your concern. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ve got to pack.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. Bye, Harper. I’ll call you from Atlanta.”
“I’ll be with you in spirit . . .”
She laughs strangely and hangs up. It was a lame thing to say.
November is the coldest month of my life. At night it drops to zero. Polar winds howl off the Atlantic. It hurts to be outside. Growing up in South Louisiana, my blood is thin. I’ve finished the two houses, turned down contracts on others. Too cold. I start waiting tables at a restaurant that gets a lot of weekend traffic from the mainland and working as a bouncer at the Chicken Shack, where the regulars call me Little Cage. In the summer the place is packed and the bouncers are burly fuckers who take shit off no man. In the winter there are a few dozen locals, and the medium-size bouncers like me have no control over the flammable mixture of alcohol and cabin fever. My income is quartered.
Savanna hasn’t returned my calls in two weeks. I do some phone sessions with Jack, who assures me that women always have a lot of anger when they go through an abortion. He tells me not to take it personally, not to beat myself up about it. He commends the work I’ve done on my own, suggests that I think about going back to school instead of freezing my ass on the island. The only action I’m getting on the island is winks from desperate old fishermen who’ve been months out at sea. One night a grizzled salt grabs my ass. I spin around and am just about to smash his face when I see what a pitiful old guy he is. I drop my fist and say, “Lay off, you old queen.”
I start writing Savanna letters. I tell her she is the love of my life. I tell her I can’t live without her. I tell her that I can’t sleep. I go into Boston but her roommate won’t let me in the door. I put some Tiffany pearl studs in her hand.
The first day of December is two below zero. Riding in the dune buggy from the house on the bluff to the Nantucket post office is like dogsledding across the tundra. The wind rips the tattered top off the car, nearly blows the car off the road into a cranberry bog. In my mailbox are the earrings and a letter:
Dear Harper,
The pearls made me cry. It was so sweet of you. I almost ran after you on the street, but Lindsey held me back. And she’s right. There is no point in seeing each other again. It would only be painful. You are a dear, sweet boy. I will never forget you. But there is no future for us. This terrible thing has made me realize that. You have to figure out your life. I’m ready to get on with mine. I do want babies one day, and I believe you when you say that you do not. It’s hard to say all this. Don’t think I’m cruel. I’ve started dating a guy here in law school. Take care of yourself, Harper. You’re a good soul. You’re a great lover. You’ll always have a place in my heart and I hope that I have a place in yours.
Love,
Savanna
I open up the box and look at the pearls. Three hundred bucks. The most expensive present I’ve ever bought. I wonder if they will take them back. I moan, “Oh fuck.” In the afternoon I telephone the registrar’s office at Tulane. I decide I will major in philosophy. Go to law school like everyone else.
Cage
I am rescued from Taunton by a debonair young Ivy League psychiatrist named Peter DeJarnette of Baton Rouge who convinces the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health to release me into his personal care. Dad married him and his dreamy wife, Louise Spencer, who was a couple of classes ahead of me at Louisiana Episcopal. I remember her as smart, sweet, and slightly shy. They look like the perfect couple. Peter heard about my predicament, called Dad, even offered to put me up in their pool house. A friend of the family, a developer, Walter Fairfield, offered to give me a job running a crew. They laid out a little map of the future for me. Harper came over from Nantucket and drove me to the airport in Boston.
It’s humiliating, going back to Baton Rouge after seven years, after five months in state asylums, a fuckup, a nutcase, a twenty-nine-year-old carpenter. I feel diminished, spiritless, unworthy of anyone’s help. Everyone is warm and kind and I am tentative and hesitant with old friends and strangers.
Peter and Louise are having terrible fights, sometimes right in front of their three-year-old. This is depressing in itself, overhearing the psychiatrist screaming at his wife while little Phoebe cries.
“Do you realize how hard I work? I don’t need to come home to your paranoid suspicions!”
Louise’s voice is always too low to hear across the patio and pool.
“So what if I bought a motorcycle? I’m thirty-eight. Just because I’m a shrink doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to have a midlife crisis. This one’s premature. Better a motorcycle than a mistress!”
Louise’s voice doesn’t carry but Phoebe’s cries do.
“I ride alone, goddammit, get it? Alone!”
I’m pretty sure Peter is fucking a nurse or an old girlfriend or both.
After a couple of weeks I move into a little converted garage only a quarter of a mile away from our old house on Chatmoss, in a neighborhood of several square miles of massive live oaks, most more than two hundred years old, permanently green canopies the size of circus tents, great curling limbs like tentacles of monster squids swooping down to the ground. When I’m feeling particularly lonesome, I climb up into the top of a live oak next door the way Nick used to do when he was nervous about a race or down about a girl.
I run a Fairfield crew of three black carpenters building a small, faux Victorian clapboard on a narrow lot not far from my garage studio in the part of town covered by the grand water oaks. The crew resents the fact that I came in from nowhere and was placed above them because I’m white and a friend of the big boss. I try to be egalitarian, divide the tasks evenly and always work as hard as they do, which they probably take as a mark of weakness. I’m the one that Mr. Fairfield always talks to when he comes around. I’m younger than everyone by ten years.
I look up from where I’m framing-out a window and see that Oranjello and Limonjello, twins in their late thirties, and Erasmus, a grizzled guy in his fifties, have just finished framing the roof over the short bar of the T-shaped house, the first section up top to be finished, what will eventually be the kitchen and dining room. As they drop to the ground, I walk around the house, look at the big rolls of tar paper, and decide that with a few more we could cover this part of the house and be able to store materials safely out of the rain by the end of the day. I tell Limonjello, who is the fastest carpenter, to hang the exterior kitchen door and Erasmus and Oranjello to move tar paper from around on the other side of the house to the kitchen. I drive over to the lumber store to get a few more rolls of tar paper.
Forty-five minutes later when I get back, the three of them are framing windows in the other part of the house. The tar paper is still on the ground, the kitchen door on top of it. I park and get out and walk up to Limonjello. It’s difficult to tell the twins apart, but Limonjello has a gold incisor you can just barely see and at seven every morning when they arrive smiling, I mark his clothes. He’s about my size. He has on a Grambling Tigers sw
eatshirt.
“Limonjello, why didn’t you hang that door?” I ask him calmly, trying not to let fear creep into my voice.
“Why you asking me? Ask Limonjello.”
I smile. “I am.”
“No, you ain’t. That’s Limonjello over there. Ask him. Can’t you tell the difference?”
“Stop foolin’ with me, Limonjello.” Is he fooling with me? Suddenly I’m not sure. “Well, whoever you are, hang the damn kitchen door,” I say low enough for Oranjello and Erasmus not to hear.
“Yes, sir, big boss man. I’ll jump right on it. Didn’t know nothin’ ’bout no door. Which do’?” He raises his voice: “Did boss say something ’bout a do’?”
“What do’?” Erasmus chimes in. “Front do’ or back do’?”
“Nah,” says Oranjello—or is it Limonjello? “Boss ain’t said nothing about the do’.”
“What about the roofing paper? I told you two to move the roofing paper.”
Erasmus and one ’Jello look at me for a beat and then at each other and then start shaking their heads. “No, boss, you told us to frame these windows.”
“That’s not what I remember. Come on y’all, get the tar paper over the kitchen and the dining room before it’s time to knock off.” I speak slowly, confused about my place in space and time. “I’ll hang the door.”
Once the crew sees that I’m weak, they are on me like a pack of hyenas cutting a deformed calf away from the herd. I think I am losing my mind. They are making it worse. When I try to speak to people, I stutter and forget what I’m trying to say. I’m losing my coordination, dropping tools. I am scared of seeing people that I used to know, scared that they will see what a pitiful weakling I have deteriorated into.
After work I go home to my shitty garage and make some pasta or eat something from a can and then sit spellbound by the TV, oblivious to what is on, trapped in my head, dreading going back to the site the next day, too ashamed to call any of my old friends who have real lives, homes, children, careers. I start going to bed too listless to bother to shower. Sometimes I forget to take my lithium. Sometimes I double the dose to make up for it. The crew start holding their noses when I come around and leaving bars of soap on the hood of the company pickup I’m driving. When I shower, I zone out and focus in on the present moment only if the water suddenly turns scalding or freezing. Peter puts me on Zoloft. I’m not sure if I remember to take it. Mom and Dad call most nights to see how I’m doing. I have already caused them so much grief I don’t want to tell them that I’m not sure how long I can keep it together. One day I stop going to work.
“Cage,” Mr. Fairfield says from the door. It’s about eight o’clock on a warm December morning. It’s probably sixty degrees, green outside like midsummer in Massachusetts. I can hear a mourning dove cooing. I’m lying on my bed with my work clothes on from yesterday. I know that I have had them on for days but I don’t care. I don’t have the energy to change them. I can’t remember the last time that I did the laundry. I’m too tired to call out to him.
“Cage, are you awake?” I hear him open the kitchen door.
I sit up on the bed. “Walter?”
“Hey, son.” He comes out of the kitchenette into the room, a silhouette with the sunlight behind him. “How you feelin’?”
“Scared, Walter.”
“It’s okay, Cage. Can you get out of bed?”
“Yeah.” I stand up, waver on my legs for a moment, steady.
“It’s almost Christmas, only a couple of weeks away. You want to go up and see your parents for Christmas?”
I don’t say anything. Yes. No. What’s the difference? I don’t know.
“I think you might as well go on up to Memphis. They miss you. You sure have a sweet mother and a fine father, you know.”
“I know.”
“I tell you what.” Mr. Fairfield moves around the room, opening the windows. He’s a big man but he has been nice to me for fifteen years and I’m not scared of him. “You take a shower and I’ll pack up a little bag. I can have the rest of your clothes sent up later. Peter DeJarnette’s on his way over.”
I move stiffly like a robot into the little shower. I can hear Mr. Fairfield moving around in the room so I remember to soap up and rinse off without drifting into a fugue state. I come back in the room with a towel wrapped around my waist.
“These’re the only clean clothes that I can find.” Mr. Fairfield nods to a pair of gray flannel pants and a blue button-down and a black V-neck sweater. “You’ll look like a banker.” He laughs.
“It’s not funny,” I say. “I could have been a banker.”
“You can still be a banker, Cage.” He hands me the button-down. “You could finish that degree easy.”
I laugh because that’s preposterous. “My brain is damaged.”
“Nah,” he says. “Your thinking may be a bit foggy, but you’ll come out of it. You’ve got a good mind.”
Outside, I hear Peter’s Porsche pull into the driveway.
Margaret
“He’s withdrawn into himself,” Joanie Fairfield tells me on the phone. “It’s so strange. Just two weeks ago I ran into him at Calandro’s and he seemed just like that ol’ charming, good-looking devil everybody loves, not quite as exuberant, but that’s understandable. Now he’s just not there at all. Hardly says a word.”
“Frank and I will come down and get him,” I say. She is a good soul, Joanie, and practical.
“Don’t make Frank go to all the trouble changing his busy schedule,” Joanie says. “Walter thinks he and Peter should just put him on the train. Cage will be okay until he gets to Memphis. He’ll just sit there, the poor dear.”
“Tell them to put him on the train today, Joanie. That’s the best thing to do. I’ve got a psychiatrist ready here, a nice man who goes to the cathedral. I’ve got a room made up upstairs.”
“Cage will be fine, Mars. Don’t you worry. Every good southern family has a manic-depressive.” Joanie Fairfield has a lovely South Carolina low-country accent. “Fine old families often have more. They all learn to get by. They often distinguish themselves.”
“Thanks for making me laugh, Joanie. Love you.”
“Love you.”
I hang up the phone and walk into the garden. My head starts to hurt right behind the eyes. Six weeks ago Peter DeJarnette warned us that a severe depression would follow the manic period that ended just six months ago, after running unchecked for a year or longer. He’d said if we were lucky, we could pick it up early and avert it with the right combination of drugs. “New drugs are coming out all the time. If we get the right mixture for Cage, we can control it.” It looks like they haven’t found the right mixture. Or caught it in time. Nick would be such a comfort right now, levelheaded, understanding. How many times have I wished that I’ve had him beside me through Cage’s crisis? I do not believe in a God that says, You will die in a car crash. You will get cancer. You will be manic-depressive. I do not believe in a God like that. Suffering is still a mystery to me. I wonder how many generations of women in our family have pulled everyone through struggles such as this. Mother with Father’s drinking. Grandmother Madora with Grandfather’s early senility, whatever that would be called today. Great-Great-Grandfather Cage was surely a manic-depressive. He built up a steamship company on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers, then gambled it all away. The original Cage to settle on the river was probably a bipolar Cherokee killer, that’s what it took to thrive back then. I feel weighed down by generations of illness, a heavy sense of futility.
I call Frank at his office and tell him to expect Cage in the afternoon. His voice sounds tired. He says he will meet the train.
Cage
“You’re diving now in the downward part of the cycle, Cage. It’s awful. But you will come out of it.” Pete is wearing his white lab coat. He is driving his Porsche Carrera ninety miles an hour along the yellow concrete highway through a vast expanse of tall reeds due east of Baton Rouge. “It wo
n’t last long. I’ll consult with Dr. Fielding in Memphis. We’ll figure out the right meds.”
I can barely hear him across a vast plain of apathy, as wide and dreary as the flat marsh that runs to every horizon under gray light. I don’t feel like myself, like anyone. I don’t care. I watch the approaching green signs grow larger, then swoop over the open sunroof without reading the words. I think the letters are scrambled but I’m not sure.
“Cage, are you listening to me?” Pete squeezes my thigh.
“Are you obeying the speed limit?” my mouth says on its own.
Pete laughs, cuffs my shoulder. “You’re going to be okay.”
Pete is out of his mind if he thinks that I am going to be okay. I’m not sure where I’m going but it’s not okay. I say things by pure reflex. I make people laugh by reflex. It’s not me who is talking, making you laugh. I don’t know who it is. I don’t particularly care. It takes too much of an effort just to scratch my nose. I look at Pete and I can see his skeleton through his skin, a death’s-head grinning skull shining through his tan face. Pete is Dorian Gray, a facade of virtue—the brilliant young psychiatrist—cloaking a coke-snorting philanderer with a miserable wife and child. But he cares about you, I hear Nick’s voice in my mind in stereophonic Dolby sound. He cares. He has his problems, he needs to do some soul-searching himself, he might even need medication, but he cares about you.
In the Hammond station parking lot he watches me swallow a Xanax capsule and three little lithium pills. He puts his arm around my shoulder as we watch the City of New Orleans barrel out of the swamp and pull into the country station.
“Thanks, Dr. Pete,” says the part of myself that talks automatically. “Can’t say you didn’t try.”
“Cage, you’re bright. You’re going to beat this illness. It’s just an illness, like diabetes. There’s no shame. No stigma,” Peter says, walking along the platform. Nobody is riding the train that carried the black diaspora out of the South no mo’. Which is fine with me. People make me nervous. “And you can beat it just like hundreds of thousands beat diabetes.”
Cage's Bend Page 14