Disasters in the First World

by Olivia Clare

  Our worry over the possibility of personal disaster grows in the isolation of a two-person house. Our fretting, like two notes played at once. If I try to reason with or comfort him, he won’t accept. His life feels brief, he says—it’s both trivial and overwhelming, not enough and too much, to want good health.

  He wakes early and takes a long time deciding which book he’ll read in the clinic’s waiting room.

  “They have no respect for your time.” He picks up and puts down books from the mess he left on the floor, the pile widened and shortened. He’s going to the clinic for more tests. “They think they can make you wait because they’re doctors. How do I know to trust what he tells me? These are not sainted people; there’s talent or no talent in doctors, too.” I don’t answer him when he performs his indignation: at incompetence, at mediocrity.

  To tell him he is ill is to tell him he hasn’t known fundamental parts of himself, or that he hasn’t conceived of all branches of his quantum tree of lives. I consider making a parallel between him and sickly Keats. Rimbaud. But I remember both poets died early—Rimbaud, ill in the mountains of Harar.

  Just after Tristan leaves, his half sister, Gretchen, calls. Every­one’s worried about him, she says.

  “And how are you? We haven’t talked. Look, I couldn’t get hold of him. But I’m in the neighborhood.”

  By the time Tristan returns, she’s already sitting at our table in the dining room, fanning herself with a catalog. She’s just arrived and hasn’t said much to me besides Los Angeles small talk, about the traffic and heat.

  “I’d hug you,” she tells him. “But I’m a mess. Any news at the doctor?”

  “You called her?” he says to me.

  “I came on my own,” she says. “What’d they say?”

  “Nothing. They just took more blood.” He goes into the kitchen and comes out with a tomato, eating it like an apple. “To find out specifics, to see how bad it really is.”

  “Why don’t you come to our house tonight? Carter wants to see you. He wants you to read to him, he’s been asking for you. You should be with family.” She looks at me. Her floral dress is low-cut. She wears silver hoop earrings that, she’s told me, people compliment her on. There’s sweat on her nose and above her upper lip, and she pushes her dark hair behind her ears.

  “I can’t right now,” he says.

  “We don’t have all our information, so no panicking, okay? How do you feel? Sit down.”

  “He’s fine,” I say. “He feels fine.”

  She watches him eat and go through the mail. He’s wearing his oldest T-shirt, fraying at the bottom, and he hasn’t shaved.

  “I sent some e-mails to old friends,” she says. “Friends from college, who are doctors.”

  “I’m glad worrying gives you something to do.” He walks back into the kitchen. “I’m sorry, but I’m so tired.”

  She fans herself and looks over at me for, I think, familial female complicity, which she knows I rarely give her. From our mail, she pulls a piece of paper from a ripped envelope—one of Tristan’s poems, a proof for correcting, some blue-ink markings on the typed print visible like hieroglyphs. I hear our bedroom door close. He’s left me with her. Her lips and eyes move over the paper.

  “I never have time to read,” she says. “I haven’t even read his book. I read a review of it.”

  “It’s good,” I say. “Other people say it is, too.”

  “You wouldn’t know this, but he’s just like he was in college,” Gretchen says. “He knows it. He’s just like that grasshopper. The ants tell him to work, to store food for the winter, but he won’t because he simply doesn’t want to. Now maybe he’ll reevaluate things.”

  Her side of the family resents him. For his impracticality, they say, but really for his intensity and pride, which, though they would not say it, seem archaic.

  “But he works so hard,” I tell her.

  “I wake up at five in the morning because I have to. He has no idea,” Gretchen says to me. “You realize he’ll have to take care of his mother in a few years. There’s no one else to do it. Have you thought about that? She has no money. She has no friends. She has no one.” Tristan’s mother had been Gretchen’s stepmother when she was a child, and they’d been close, Tristan had told me. But after her divorce from their father, his mother stopped talking to Gretchen. “But what I really want to know is: Is he that good?” She starts to fold the poem proof into fours. “I’m going to show this to someone. You don’t mind? You’ve got to be curious, too.” She unzips her purse. “I know someone who’ll look at it. I’ve already asked them to.”

  “You can’t take that,” I say. “It’s a proof.”

  “A what?”

  “Just leave it here.”

  She looks up, waiting for me to qualify, to soften.

  “Put it down,” I say. “Put it back where it was.”

  I never speak to her this way—she waits for my apology.

  “Maybe,” she says finally, “a part of you, a small one, should be glad this is happening.” She unfolds the paper from its square. “It’s not life threatening. Maybe he even needs it, or you both do. Maybe he’ll start to understand.”

  She then folds the poem into an airplane. “Weaknesses are important,” she says. “I have mine; you have yours. You’re more human than he is.”

  She says what so many already feel about him. That no one should be immune to what no one’s immune to. I take the airplane away from her.

  He leans over his plate. He has something to say. He is ­truthful—he often reveals to me what he thinks without being able to help it. The doctor will call tomorrow. Maybe Tristan won’t want to tell me everything, but he will tell me. He is the only completely honest person I know, and I won’t lose this.

  “What happens,” he says. “Tomorrow I find out my kidneys fail soon. Is that what happens? I carry my piss around in a bag, and then what?”

  “But we don’t know. We don’t.” What I do not say is that I worry the change in him will not be in one piece, that it will be gradual enough that we’ll both change, mutually, without realizing. It’s not that he, or we, seem more mortal, or that we’ve discovered mortality, but we’ve broken it into its phases, and I sense we have begun to enter the next phase prematurely.

  In the morning, he calls the clinic and asks the receptionist for his results. He’s told the doctor has them, that the doctor will get back to him.

  He calls his mother. They have a way of excluding me. She spends a long time telling him what she found on the Internet: to eat juniper berry and burdock root. Water, but no wine. She tells him she prays, she hopes he feels taken care of. Once she gave me a photograph of him as a child—a cousin’s birthday party, a sheet cake on a table, Tristan seated at one end, a secretive, seemingly unassailable boy on the periphery.

  He sits now in his robe in front of one line on his computer screen, as if waiting for the line to multiply on its own. If it does not come in one piece, it does not come.

  “I can’t write anymore,” he says.

  “Put on your jacket,” I say.

  He hasn’t shaved in two days, and he’s eaten no breakfast. He taps the table, not the keyboard, with a kind of insect energy, steady, remote.

  “We’re going over there,” I say. “I’m tired of this. The doctor will talk to you if you show up.”

  “The clinic? We might as well wait here.”

  “We’re going over there. I’m driving.”

  Miles north, the Hollywood Hills houses are tiered like rows in a coliseum. I have never been this way. He found the clinic on a website, in a strip mall on Wilshire.

  On the receptionist’s desk, a red-lettered sign says: full checkup for $95. 20 minutes. Someone drills in the concrete outside, and the noise shakes through the walls. A girl inconspicuously twists the dried, inky ends of her mot
her’s hair into a braided tether. The mother pushes a banana nub into the girl’s mouth, and Tristan hands me the book he brought and goes with a nurse through a door.

  I read,

  White under a ceiling of insects, poorly lit in profile,

  Your dress stained by the venom of lamps,

  Across from me a dozing man with sunburned arms has propped a toddler on the floor between his paint-spattered boots.

  . . . stained by the venom of lamps,

  I find you stretched out,

  Your mouth higher than a river breaking far away on the earth.

  Broken being the unconquerable being reassembles,

  The girl sneezes banana out, into her mother’s hand, waking the man, and the mother says, “All right,” and the toddler begins to laugh.

  Broken being the unconquerable being reassembles,

  Presence seized again in the torch of cold,

  The door opens,

  O watcher always I find you dead,

  and Tristan comes out.

  Douve saying Phoenix

  He gives the receptionist cash.

  . . . I wake in this cold.

  “I’m fine,” he tells me.

  “But it—”

  “It happens that I’m fine.”

  “How can you be fine?”

  “The whole first test was wrong. They tested everything this time, and everything’s normal, Pixie. All the numbers are in range. Normal.”

  I follow him outside, into the car.

  “It was wrong the first time,” he says. “They made a mistake.”

  I don’t believe him, only because it seems as though I should have foreseen it.

  “The doctor seemed embarrassed; he never stopped talking.”

  A family of five enters the clinic as Tristan backs out of the parking lot. I wonder what they’re there for. How quickly we’re no longer part of the population of patients, the sick. How quickly we might be there again.

  “So you’re fine,” I say.

  “I told you, nothing happens to us,” he says. “At least not now. Not yet.”

  “Well,” I say. “And what—is there some kind of lesson here?”

  “What are you talking about?” he says.

  He’s driving very fast. It’s almost dark, car lights on the freeway, east red, west white. I imagine the grasshopper will have a large dinner and write for a while and come to bed late. He sees his life as a narrative. Sometimes a character goes through a change and doesn’t learn anything, and you can’t ask him to when he thinks he doesn’t know how. Sometimes the grasshopper gets away. I don’t know what happens after this.

  Two Cats, the Chickens, and Trees

  Dora didn’t shake my hand or greet me at the door. She stayed on the piano bench at the back of the room when I entered her house. I will not come to you, either, I thought. But I did. And kissed her on her cheek. Here was a woman who looked as though she did not need me.

  I’d been seeing her son for a year. She lived in a house on a mountain, a stratospheric residence from a children’s book far up a spiral dirt road. Lee brought me there for Christmas when we were seniors in college. Up there, she was unknown. No friends to speak of, Lee told me, and few neighbors. Unthought of, except by Lee.

  The house was unfinished, cold. The front room had a potbelly stove, a piano, a shabby old couch. Dora sat at the piano reading, her mouth moving, her eyes moving across the page slowly. Hair past her shoulders. The keyboard lid and piano lid were shut. The dog in her lap twitched and shivered, the color and size of a squirrel. Dora looked up, made a small but demonstrative noise of delight. Lee had crossed the room and bent to kiss her cheek. I kissed it, too.

  “If you shall need anything while you’re here,” she said, “just tell me.” She said shall. She had this other-place way of speaking, not formal exactly, not southern exactly. She wasn’t southern. On the piano was a metallic sphere. Dora leaned over and touched it lightly. Thin hands, the finger bones articulated. No rings. Her fingertips lingered on the sphere, and then she left the room.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “The globe,” said Lee. In fact, it was the size of an actual globe my own mother had kept in our living room. “We called it that for fun, but it stuck. Touch it for luck,” he said, and I did. Slowly, as she had.

  Lee touched the side of it. Sun through the window lit that spot. Then he lifted his hand and brought it down and pinged the globe, the noise echoing like a bell on a mountain.

  “Not real luck,” he said, “but you know what I mean.” I didn’t.

  Dora offered cinnamon tea, which she made in the adjacent kitchen. Fruits and vegetables in bowls and bowls. Her celebrations required excess and feast. This was the way you lured back your wandering son. She moved between stove and countertop. Swift and sure.

  “The thing with Jack is he was a sculptor,” she said the next morning by the fire. “That’s what he was. That’s what he said when I met him. It’s like someone telling you they’re just about anything, and you say, okay. That’s what you are.”

  It was early morning. I’d woken before Lee and gone into the front room. She had on no makeup but was already dressed, her long, straight hair wet. She was cross-legged on a thin bare mattress in front of the woodstove, her dog, Marina, in her lap. My mother never sat like this, would never sit on a mattress on a floor. We had a sofa and an armchair she’d bought from a catalog. We had all the things you have, in all the places those things go, when you’re trying to look like everyone else.

  “When’d you meet Jack?” I said.

  “After Max, Lee’s dad,” she said. “After Max and I divorced. So this was, let’s see, ten years ago. Lee was still a kid.”

  Holding Marina with one hand, Dora fed the fire with newspaper from a stack by the woodstove. A delicate feeding. I was in embarrassing fleece floral pajamas, my warmest. I felt my nose about to run and wiped at it with my hand.

  “Jack worked with metal,” she said. “All kinds of metal. He bent it. Bent it with his hands. Bent it with tools, with fire. So many burns on him from that fire. He had a little studio a few miles from his house.”

  On the drive up in Lee’s deteriorating Jeep, he had tried to prepare me for Dora. Her ideas, what she would say. Pay attention, he’d said. She’ll tell you she’s making a film, but I’ve never seen any of it. I’ve never seen her working on it. Never seen a drop.

  “I moved in with Jack almost immediately,” said Dora. “There was rat shit in the kitchen. Food everywhere. He was just bad at things.” She looked at me. “Lee isn’t like that. He’s lucky that way.”

  “So you loved him,” I said. “You wanted to take care of him.”

  “Oh yes, I loved Jack,” she said. “All he did was work on his sculptures every day. And I’d work on my film. I’ve no idea where he got money. He sold a couple, not much. We had gobs and gobs of sculptures in the house. Our own gallery, our warehouse.”

  “Oh,” I realized, looking at the metal sphere on the piano. “The globe.”

  She seemed pleased I’d called it by its proper name. “Touch it. It brings strange luck,” she said.

  “I did that yesterday.”

  “Oh, I do it every day.”

  “I’d like to see your film,” I said. “Would love to see it.”

  “Not yet,” said Dora. “It’s never done.” Her dog shivered. She took the scarf from around her neck and wrapped it around the ratty thing. “One thing Jack never told me is that he had a wife. A wife, believe it? I found that out on my own.”

  “Mama, what are you telling her?” said Lee. He scuffed down the hall in his socks, a blanket around his shoulders. Man of the house, he’d have us believe. “Embarrassing things? You girls saying anything embarrassing about me?” He squinted into the room.

  “Come by the fire,”
she told him. “I shall go make you tea. I waited for you.”

  “Tell me the story,” I said. “Tell me about Jack’s wife.”

  Lee was outside, chopping wood for the fire. He wasn’t good at it, but you couldn’t tell him that. Chopping gave him the temporary illusion of being self-sufficient. Dora and I were cutting apples for the salad for dinner. She’d moved the globe to the kitchen island—it was quite heavy, and I’d helped her. It should be with us, she said. She was careful setting the globe down, then touched its top. Twice. I touched it twice, too.

  “Jack’s wife,” said Dora. “He’d said she was kind. I’d moved in with him by that time. This was all in Los Angeles, by the way. He’d work and I’d work and then we’d have dinner. That was our life. I had savings.” She stooped and fed a piece of apple right into the mouth of her little dog. “And I see a car up the road—I was in the kitchen chopping things just like this by the window—and I see a car coming up the road, and I wonder at it. I knew when she got out of the car it was his wife. I didn’t even call for him. I could tell she wasn’t there to see him.”

  “How can you tell something like that?” I said.

  “And don’t you know I open the front door before she can ring the bell,” she said. “She had on a suit, like she’d been to a courthouse. Well, she’d come to tell me this. She said, ‘So you know, your dear one is sick.’ Your dear one. Now just what in hell did that mean?”

  “What did it mean?”

  “He was sick. The disease that comes for everybody, cancer. That’s what the wife ended up telling me. And then she turned around and left. Got in her car. Left.”

  “What was the point of that?” I said.

  “Maybe revenge. Revenge on both our lives. Nothing ever in this life could—”

  “Mama,” said Lee, coming into the house. “Mama, where do you want me to put these gloves?”

  “Nothing ever in this life could, could what?” I said.