Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “I’m sorry.”

  These were old words. Orphans. Exiles. Wandering the years. Looking for home. Looking for absolution like lost parents.

  “I’m so sorry … I have failed you.”

  Angus reached past me and tore a paper towel off the roll. He dampened it and wiped the blood off my face. I was a child again, standing in my father’s home. I did not fight the feeling, but neither could I sufficiently overcome my shame to look at him.

  He gave me a clean paper towel, folded into eighths, to hold against the wound and then wrapped several cubes of ice in the tea towel draped over the oven handle. He handed it to me and I pressed it against my forehead. Angus turned off the water. As he did, I saw the skin of his face beneath the short, silver hairs of his beard. A ridge of flesh traversed his right cheek and across his chin. I touched it lightly with my free hand.

  “You have a scar,” I said, sniffling, more to myself than to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “You apologize far too much for a woman your age,” he said, putting a bit of his old self back into his voice. “Regrets are supposed to reveal themselves with age. To be young is to be unapologetic about being an ass.”

  “I thought that was what it meant to be old.”

  Angus scowled.

  “Yes. I have a scar. What else must you discover about me?”

  “Is that why you have a beard?”

  “Are you suggesting that I suffer facial hair for my own vanity.”

  “No. I…”

  “You would be right. It made me look like a damned criminal.”

  “How’d you get it?” I asked, already suspecting the answer and astonishing myself with my lack of tact. I wished instantly that I could have regathered those words, that dark butterfly of knowledge, flitting out of its cage. But it was too late. An instant of shock opened its wings across his face. I felt myself blush. I tried to cover with humor.

  “I mean, you know, knife fight or … never mind. I’m sorry. Can I blame that question on the head wound?”

  In his eyes I could see the realization dawn that I knew at least something about the accident; that my question had been a clumsy way of confirming or learning more. I was ashamed, but not as much as I should have been. Not as much as I would have been had I known the whole story. For it turned out that I knew very little.

  But that is the thing about being famous. Strangers talk of you to others. They write about you in articles that are reprinted and compiled and live on forever in the digital ether. They tell bits and pieces of your story, much of it ridiculously incorrect and out of context, and you are left wondering whether the person before you with the smug look on her face and a sprinkle of facts on her tongue has the first real clue about who you are. Then you have to decide whether or not you care; whether what she thinks of you has any importance to your life.

  Perhaps this is all by way of rationalizing my monstrous manners, but I have come to believe that my purpose in asking was more than idle curiosity. I believe I was fishing for confirmation that Angus Mann cared about what I thought of him. I was fishing for mutuality.

  “Do you have any coffee in this place?” he asked, apparently choosing to avoid the subject entirely.

  “No. I go out for my coffee.”

  “That’s not coffee. That’s hot ice cream. Real coffee is utterly lost on your generation. You’ve all been corrupted by refined sugar. Sugar and movies.”

  He began randomly opening cupboards as if he didn’t believe me.

  “You take it black I’m guessing.”

  “Of course. Next to a good bourbon, coffee is a writer’s best friend. It keeps you up late and brings you back to life early. It induces wit. That’s according to Gustave Flaubert. My God, you really don’t have any.”

  He closed the last cupboard and turned to look at me looking at him from beneath the bundle of ice.

  “‘As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move... similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.’ That’s Balzac.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not one of those early risers, ‘fussing with their cups of black ambrosia.’”

  Angus raised an eyebrow.

  “John Banville,” I said.

  “Well, well,” he said. Inscrutability having returned to his face, but not his voice. “See how you keep up.”

  “I have herbal tea.”

  “It will have to do.”

  I opened the pantry and pointed with my free hand. I was feeling woozy and my head was throbbing so violently beneath the pack of ice that threatened my balance.

  I returned to the living room and laid down on the couch. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of Angus Mann, one of the truly great writers of his generation, in my kitchen bumping and clanking as he boiled water. My life felt like an office building sounds when the power suddenly goes off, or when the subway stops unexpectedly, and all of the voices and shuffling about comes to you with a delicate clarity that makes you re-examine your circumstances. My agent had fired me. My director had fired me. The Lion Tree was over. Angus was soon gone. Zack was gone. Ivanova was gone. I was lousy with scandal. I was bleeding. I was, for the first time in a very long time, homesick.

  The kettle whistled. Angus appeared with two steaming mugs and a clean wad of paper towel. He set down the tea on the table where I could reach it and hovered above me, gently replacing the dressing on my head.

  “Thanks,” I said when he had retaken his seat, just behind my head. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “Yes. I think you’ve made that abundantly clear.”

  “When does your plane leave?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “You’re out of the hotel?”

  He nodded. He sipped his tea. We listened to the nothingness gathering in the darkened room.

  “Do you want more light in here? There’s a switch…”

  “You remind me a lot of her,” he said. “It’s rather uncanny.”

  The arm I had been raising to point to the light switch resettled on my stomach. I tried to rotate my head up and back so that I could see him. I couldn’t. A lawn mower began to buzz on the horizon of my hearing.

  “Who?” I asked.

  He exhaled slowly through his nose. I imagined him considering his tea. He took another sip.

  “My wife.” Simple. Declarative. “Julia.”

  “I didn’t know that you…” I broke off. I couldn’t finish the lie.

  “You didn’t know that I was married? Really? Well, I’m not. I’m a widower, lo these many decades. And I’m quite sure you knew that.”

  His voice was accusing and hard. I didn’t respond. When he resumed, a measure of control had returned.

  “She was a truly stunning woman. Your hair. Your eyes. The bones of your face. Even some of the qualities of your voice. The lower octaves especially. When I first met you, in Mombasa, I didn’t…well, let’s just say the resemblance took me by surprise. I was very abrupt with you that entire trip. I’m sorry. I was defending myself.”

  “Against what, exactly?”

  “Ghosts.”

  “Angus… I had no idea. I…”

  I tried to sit up. I wanted to show him my remorse for having unwittingly raised the specter of the past and then so callously inquiring about it. I felt his fingers on my right shoulder. They pressed with enough force to keep me from rising off the cushion. I settled. I listened to him sip his tea.

  “Tell me about her,” I said by the force of some unknown will. “I want to know.”

  I waited for the reproach that I deserved for daring to pound so insolently on that locked door. It never came. He sipped his tea.

  “I think what has taken me the longest to understand is that I never actually loved her. I would have realized that much sooner had she lived, of course. Death stops the action. It keeps life from decaying. It embalms our memory with a sticky, saccha
rine sentimentality.

  “So it took a long time for me to realize it, but the truth is that I never actually loved her. I married beauty, not love. There is so little difference between those things when you are young and full of yourself and deserving. The beauty of youth loves itself. At that age we are all Narcissus at the pool. I believed that everything I wrote was uniquely brilliant and insightful. I was destined to change the face of American literature. Not that I had actually published anything of much significance, mind you. Not that I had amassed any accolades beyond the perfunctory awards that any writer collects.”

  “Being the youngest recipient of the Bridgelong Prize for New Fiction is hardly perfunctory, Angus,” I interrupted.

  “That’s a matter of opinion I suppose. In any event, that was later. When I married Julia I had written one bad novel and a half-dozen mediocre stories, none of which were remotely publishable. But I was undaunted in my self-appreciation. More persuasive to me than those early rejection letters was the fact that Ray Bradbury himself had come to my high school in little Clyde, Ohio and shaken my hand and told me, in front of my entire class, that my silly little time-travel story had knocked his socks off.”

  “Quite the honor.”

  “Yes. Well. From then on, I was destined for greatness and insulated from all lesser concerns. Like the difference between beauty and love, for instance. Julia was the prettiest creature I had ever seen, like a great white trillium growing up out of a field of shale. I had to have her. I would write her a garden and transplant her there, where she belonged.”

  “Do you think she loved you?”

  “Yes. Incredibly. Maybe my self-flattery persists into my old age, despite everything that should have killed it. But yes. I think she did genuinely love me. She came from unfortunate circumstances. Her mother died young. Her father was an insurance salesman by day and mean drunk by night. She dropped out of high school and ran off to Cleveland, just to get away from him. When I met her she was serving steak and lobster to jazzheads, celebrities and mobsters for Mushy Wexler at The Theatrical Grill down on Vincent Avenue. Short Vincent we called it. I was a senior at Western Reserve and The Theatrical became the habit I couldn’t afford. I went damn near every night for a semester just to see Julia. She took a lot of abuse from the patrons, all of whom went to The Theatrical to spend their winnings on booze, listen to music and gawk at Mushy’s hand-picked employees. Julia knew how to wait tables and serve drinks. But that is not why she was hired.

  “Eventually, Julia and I got to know each other. I think she took an instant liking to me. Not that you’d know it from this old mug on my shoulders, but I was a good enough looking guy in my day. Anyway, she was easy to impress. Even just a little kindness went a long, long ways. I didn’t hit her. I didn’t call her names. I worried about her. Is that enough for love? I think it was for her.

  “I convinced her to quit Mushy Wexler. Before she got the chance to quit – in fact, the day before she was to turn in her notice – The Theatrical Grill burned to the ground. Fate, we surmised was on our side. After the blush of a whirlwind courtship, we married in a little Protestant church in Elyria. My father attended, as did my college friends, some of whom had come to know Julia through me. They doubled as her friends. Even her Maid of Honor Julia borrowed from my life.

  “We lived in a small house in a cramped and uninspiring neighborhood about five miles from the church where we were married. Julia gave up her career in food service and threw herself into the identity of homemaker. That role was not only expected of her in those days, but she was sincere about wanting to manage domesticity. And not just to manage it for its own sake, but to manage it specifically for my sake. Not just so that society might cast an approving glance at her pot roast and her hospital corners, but so that my soul might somehow be enriched and nourished by a well-swept floor and neatly trimmed rose bushes while I was away conquering the world with my words.

  “Away. I say that word. Away. As if to imply some geographical distance. Writers are away as they sit across from you. They are away as they eat their dinner and nod as you talk about the neighbors. They are away in bed. They are away as they drive the car back from Christmas dinner at your parents’. Writers are always away. Always leaving you alone as their eyes glaze over and they disappear down into their secret rabbit holes. Writers inhabit other, half-formed worlds. We live other, inchoate lives. No one can come with us. No one can follow us into those dark, crenulated warrens. Everyone must wait until we decide to reappear, triumphant with pages in our hand like the head of some foreign king that we have severed with the nib of a pen.

  “Almost from the moment our courtship became a marriage, I was engaged in a kind of leaving her. A night of love. A talk of the future – my future, mostly – as I dressed in the morning. Breakfast. And then I would retreat to my small corner study and disappear into myself for the day, abandoning her to a world all her own, without me.”

  “Oh, come on,” I objected. “You were a writer. She knew that. At least you were home. You could have been a banker. I’m sure she understood.”

  “She did understand. She did. She was as patient and understanding as a Golden Retriever. She waited for me. And when I emerged into the rest of an immaculate and orderly home for lunch, and again for dinner, she was there, looking like a Waterhouse siren, reading her magazines and darning my socks. Waiting for me to pop my head out of the warren. Just... waiting.

  “Inwardly, I received Julia’s patience as a kind of pressure; her silence a kind of lament. I could feel her through the door as I banged away on my typewriter. I found myself rushing my own words. The long, quiet spells in which I stared at a blank sheet of paper became less contemplative, less creative, and began to feel like a waste of valuable time before I would need to surrender myself to the here-and-now world of domestic bliss. Through the window above my desk I watched her prune our rosebushes with shears. I came to anticipate that daily ritual. The pointless futzing in her garden. Wearing her special smock. Waiting. Eventually she would wander languidly out of view and I would try to return to writing.

  “I took to taking ever more frequent breaks, reporting my paltry progress and making assurances about just when she could expect to have me for the evening. She gladly seized upon these unexpected gifts of companionship, which only increased the unspoken pressure to be available.

  “Deeper still, beneath the level of my own understanding, I thought less of her for so graciously accepting my terms. For not demanding more from life as I surely would have. As I did. I resented that it was all enough for her. Being a Golden Retriever. I resented the ever-present downward pull.

  “It did not help any that Julia was not a literary person. She was not unintelligent. She was quite smart; in her own way. But she was, from my lofty perch, overly enamored with life’s patina. Simple pleasures satisfied her. Popular culture held her interest. Where I was tormented for weeks or months or years finding and distilling the hidden vagaries of … of… humanity, Julia’s incuriosity filled the room like scented bathwater.

  “An example. She spoke often of having babies, not raising children; as though they might have been little human playthings rather than responsibilities. I confess that as beautiful as Julia was, and as central as her sexual availability was to my initial pursuit of her to the alter, it was my own misgivings about what kind of children she would raise that severely tempered my efforts in the bedroom. I was not interested in a litter of puppies. I considered it a stroke of tremendous good fortune that my wife was more beautiful than she was fertile. Eventually, we stopped speaking of children altogether.

  “In the early days, Julia asked to read samples of whatever had been occupying my time. I think she wanted to see some evidence of my travels in my mysterious foreign land. I obliged willingly enough, even though I have never liked sharing my drafts. I think I hoped that my words would somehow deepen her; broaden her perspective.

  “My God. The hubris in that notion astounds me e
ven today.”

  Angus sipped his tea, thinking. I pulled myself upright on the couch, bracing my bare feet against the table. I emptied what remained of the ice into the discarded pizza box and refolded the wet towel into a bandage that would replace the sopping paper towel. Being vertical made my head throb. I lifted my cup from the table, giving Angus a sideways look. He was staring into his cup.

  “But she couldn’t speak the language,” he said, shaking his head. “She couldn’t reach the ideas. Or wouldn’t.

  “When my father died, he left me his Purple Heart, which I kept in an envelope with my deferment papers, his 1949 Chevy pick-up, and the cabin on Leesville Lake. The truck, which by the time of my possession had long since seen its best days, had a brown and cream metal visor across the outside of the windshield resembling the bill of an automotive baseball cap; which was remarkable, because the truck itself resembled a saddle shoe. The sparkling chrome grill of my memory was bent and corroded and the whitewalls had been replaced by dusty black and balding tires that left no impression whatsoever. Well, no favorable impression anyway.

  “I kept the truck parked on the side of our house under a tarp to protect it from the elements as my father would have insisted. In those days I drove a hardtop Ford Fairlane three-speed automatic. Green and white. That was my car. I still have a photo of it at home. I probably would never have driven the old saddle shoe pick-up at all had it not been for the companion bequest of the cabin at Leesville Lake. We used to go out there a lot when I was young. That’s out there a bit east of New Philadelphia off the 212.”

  “I know where it is,” I said. “My dad’s hauled me out there fishing.”

  “Yes, indeed. Halcyon days to be sure. My dad loved to fish for trout. He holed up out there every weekend. My mother would have nothing to do with the place, of course, which suited him just fine. It was a boys-only retreat. He kept it up. Kept it in shape. Before he lost his ability to drive, he used to go out there in his truck just to be alone. Just to sit and think about things and to listen to the trees. It meant something that he left it to me. More than the truck and the Purple Heart. It meant something. Whenever I went out to the fish shack, which is what my father called it, I took the truck.