“But your brother. You see what it’s like between one of my brothers and myself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And so are you saying that he might have pulled out of the divorce then got rid of Terri because otherwise he’d be alone? How does that work? That’s terrible if it’s true, just awful.”
“Maybe it’s not true, though.”
“So what is it, then? If it’s not that then what else could it be? Why would he pull a stunt like that? He sat here in this kitchen and talked to your dad and me over a year ago and told us it was over between him and Deanne and that he was happy with Terri …”
Mom had the often infuriating habit of digging into something until she got a satisfactory answer but rarely got one. For years after Perry and I moved back from Europe, she would stop me in the house in Memphis when I was visiting and say, “I want to know what your father and I did to make you so distant. Did we say or do anything? Just what the hell happened?”
And I would have to tell her, again and again, nothing had happened at all really. I’d just gotten older and changed. I couldn’t explain it. I was more withdrawn, I’d learned to rely more on myself, and then too I had Perry. I’d stopped talking about my problems with them. I’d gone to a shrink, for another thing. Finally, around the time that my father got sick and Jeff and I went to Memphis for the surgery the year before, she’d backed off. And then when the following year Jeff and I returned to Memphis for Dad’s surprise seventieth birthday party, she’d said, “It’s good to see you and your brother talking and laughing again, like when you were younger …”
It occurred to me that I’d never get certain points through to her— and this, according to Bob, was going to have to be okay. And so now I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m not worried.”
“I can’t find that note from Terri,” she said, “but I’m telling you it’d just break your heart. He’d led her to believe she was the one, and she obviously thought he was the one.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind again,” I said. “Who knows?”
“You think? Maybe. I could just kill his ass. How are you on your smoking, do you get weak at times? Tell me the truth, I want to know.”
“I have my weak moments,” I said, without telling her how many of them I had per day.
“In the middle of it, and now with this shit with Jeff I do again now too, but in the middle of your dad’s cancer, all that treatment and his getting sick from the chemo? I won’t lie to you. I had to stop in the middle of everything and go outside and sneak me a ciggy, one or two and then I was fine. I’m telling you, there were times I couldn’t deal with it. I told him, I said, ‘This is on you, I can’t,’ and I’d make him drive himself to the hospital for the treatment. And then I’d be in the house thinking about him and break down and go outside and sneak one. He knew. I wasn’t going to lie to him or anything. But you do? Sometimes? Get weak and then go and light up?”
“I go in waves,” I continued to lie, and was probably into the wine by then, too.
After a time she said, “Well, I could kill that boy’s ass—and that fucking bitch’s, too.”
She laughed girlishly, though she cackled when really cracked up: “I am fit to be tied!”
But what finally did it,” he said, “I came home and she had all my tools out on the lawn, doing a yard sale. All my shit, my clothes, my power saw, every damn electric tool and Craftsman tool, socket wrenches, screwdrivers, what have you, and a sign that said Tool Sale, and she was sitting right there at a card table with a cigar box taking money, hand over fist—and what the fuck?”
He still has not entered Walmart, I thought.
“Had she sold it all?” I asked.
“Had to wrestle my power saw from a man’s hands, and he wasn’t letting go. I got really close to popping him one upside the head and almost knocking his lights out but then didn’t have to. Fucker saw the look in my eyes and said, ‘Man, you’re just crazy enough!’ and let go, but by then I’d lost a good half of everything, and that’s when I decided, fuck you bitch, I’m doing it.”
I heard voices from his end. He’d gotten into Walmart and I could hear the crash of metal mesh and bars, his removing a cart from a line of shopping carts. I only went to Walmart now up in Maine. Walmart was one of the few reliable places in that small resort town for groceries and everything from underwear to toiletries. When I went to Walmart I was acutely aware I ought to be ashamed of myself, because of their low wages and even lower benefits, their flouting of labor laws, but when I went the people working there didn’t seem unhappy; on the contrary, they acted happy to see me, another customer who kept them in business. I still felt guilty, but with Perry I was the only one to curb expenses. When I’d first met Perry and decided to move to Paris to live with him, he’d said, “Maybe you can help me with my budget. After I seroconverted I started to throw my money out the window at practically any passing stranger.” I’d lived with Perry there in Paris for three years, and there weren’t a lot of ways to save money. In Paris, food is good but it’s also very pricey—precisely because they don’t have places like Walmart. Not that the French were any happier for it. In the realm of unhappiness, they gave Americans a run for their money.
Jeff said to the Walmart greeter, “Hey, how are you today? I like your hair like that!”
I heard the hoot and drawl of the greeter but couldn’t understand what she was saying.
I said, “Hey, Jeff. Can you smell popcorn? I always liked that smell.”
“I don’t smell any popcorn. I think you’re thinking of Kmart, bro.”
“Right,” I said, and I remembered my grandfather buying me Polaroid film at Kmart.
He said, “Now, Deanne didn’t know my schedule. She thought I was pulling a shift at the station, but she got the day wrong. And then I pulled up and there she was trying to sell my shit. Caught her red-handed, and all she did was get more pissed. Am I boring you? I realize I might be taking things too far. But hey, know what? I’m coming to see you, man, I’m finally coming.”
We’d talked about this in Memphis, both years. Pity the Southerner who has to extend an invitation repeatedly, even when he dreads the actual visit. The visit my mother was referring to, the one where Jeff and I were laughing and generally hanging out, on the occasion of my father’s seventieth birthday party, my brother and I would sit up late watching DISH TV, raiding the liquor cabinet, and eating snacks in the entertainment room. We’d gotten to a channel playing a concert movie, Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same. It was still a terrible movie. We’d first seen it together in high school, when Jeff was first dating Deanne, and when Jeff let me tag along with him and a friend to a midnight showing of the movie at the Regency Twin, where all the midnight shows played. I had fallen asleep during “Dazed and Confused,” still a boring song, too long and ponderous and psychedelic. It was the drum solo by John Bonham, God rest his soul, that did it, all that cymbal-splashing and tom-tom-thrumping. I’d felt guilty about falling asleep in front of Jeff and his friend, and I remembered avoiding him all the next day. I still wasn’t impressed by it, though since I’d cottoned to Led Zeppelin. I was the Zep fan now. I’d bought everything on CD. I’d made a conversion, late on the heels of his religious conversion with Deanne. And then at the airport at the end of that Memphis trip I’d said, “You should come see me in New York.”
I got nearly through security when he hollered, “Hey, I’ll do that! Come see you, okay?”
“Okay!”
“Just got to do a little math, take a look at my budget.”
“Come, come!” I had called back, thinking of my first cigarette at the end of my flight.
I was going to have to open all the windows, turn on the fans, light some scented candles, get the smoke smell out before Perry returned from Minneapolis. Here I was lighting up again.
From in Walmart now, he said, “Good-ass deal on Cheerios, and Folger’s coffee—but in humongous containers, and two-for-one. Get me som
e of that. Now that’s a deal if ever I’ve seen one.”
I said, “Do you and Darby split the expenses down the middle?”
“Not always.”
Jeff said this sotto voce. I could picture him studying and marveling at the giant family-size packaging. Our mother had always been the ultimate bargain hunter. She and her sister, our Aunt Joyce, would head out for an afternoon of driving from store to store, buying canned goods here and meat and produce there, in the process burning God knows how much gas—back during the seventies oil crisis—and armed with stacks of variously labeled rubberbanded envelopes full of coupons they’d sat up late on previous nights clipping and sorting, Breakfast Cereals, Roll and Bread Mixes, Canned Rolls and Biscuits, the craft of their executive-homemaker generation. My father would come home and stand in the kitchen in his gypsum-encrusted work boots (he wasn’t allowed to go on the carpet without pulling them off in the garage), sip his can of Old Milwaukee Light, and open the Amoco card statement and mug heart-attack shock, eyes agog, bill trembling in his hands, and say, “Well lady, you saved a bundle on pork chops but sunk us on fuel!”
“Fuck you. You try and make a go of this shit,” my mother would say.
For the moment, Jeff was living with a friend from his old church called Darby, who had a house but had started living on disability. Darby had a degenerative eye disease and was going slowly blind. He couldn’t work, and without an expensive operation—which his welfare doctors were putting off—he would never recover his eyesight. Jeff called him the forty-year-old virgin. Darby needed Jeff to drive him to the doctor, take him shopping, help him with his bills, and Jeff said, “Between him and Deanne, I’m frankly at a loss for words how to describe it. Both of them need me and at ridiculous, unpredictable hours. Deanne, for example, whom I’d already told she should get her oil changed, just last week the woman calls me from the side of the road in a rage. She’d half burned the engine out. And as long as we’re still married, it’s on me. I’m on the way to work, but no. She’s been to Target and she’s angry at me. And Darby, well, he’s just my other son, my third son. But I leave that alone. He actually truly really needs me, but if he could meet a girl. Guy’s not bad-looking. Blind as a bat but presentable. Needs someone to tell his troubles to, not just me. Relies on me a bit too much. Holy shit, a tower of Charmin bathroom tissue, for what? $9.99? That could last us three entire months. When should I come? June?”
“June sounds good,” I said, doing a quick calculation. “Second weekend of June, bro.”
I knew that Perry was going to Italy for most of June, and I’d been looking forward to the time alone in the apartment. This would have been six months before Perry’s first stroke. I still had a romantic view of living, the optimistic Protestant. I wanted the party to go on, and for now it was continuing. Perry was still traveling around the world making appearances by himself and leaving me to take care of things in New York. Perry was overweight, and his solution for getting out of breath was taking a taxi even when he was only going three blocks. My solution for a few years had been to sit up at night drinking wine and smoking. What am I going to do, I thought, if it really happens? I worried when he was gone, but I would also have peace of mind. Perry was only getting more famous but he was a literary author, meaning readers recognized his name but didn’t buy many of his books. Perry had to fly coach to collect an overseas honor or attend some festival, and you know how uncomfortable those seats must have felt. His doctor was after him to lose sixty pounds, but I’d grown up in the seventies and resented body fascism and knew from watching my friends and their parents that nagging was not an effective inducement to change. It only made things worse. I had wanted my June in New York to myself but at the same time I was intrigued. I’d never really had a chance to get to know my brother. It’s not that we were never, ever close. For maybe a year when he was a high school senior and was working at a grocery store and began seeing Deanne, we talked. Once I went to the kitchen around midnight and saw my mother in the foyer standing on tiptoes peeping through the front door’s small slot window. Double doors, so I crept up to the other small slot window and looked out. Jeff was standing on the driver’s side of Deanne’s MG—the top was up—standing still but staring back at the house as though he saw us. I think she was giving him a blow job, but it hadn’t occurred to me until much later—when I was sitting in Deanne’s car which was parked in our driveway. She was about to become persona non grata, then not much later family—it felt coolly rebellious to be sitting in her MG passenger seat while Deanne sat behind the wheel listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. I nodded and smiled along to the music saying, “Great, cool,” and when the whole album was through Deanne ejected the eight-track and handed it to me in the dark and said, “Gift.” So I’d defended her all that time, in the early years. I had stopped when I got home from college after my first semester and they began talking to me about God, quite earnestly.
In the foyer, my mother had screamed, “Go to bed! Get out of here! Go to your room!”
She was desperate, full of gnashed-teeth rage. She saw the future. But later when I came home from college all those fate-done years later, Mom was calm, composed and not a little arch.
She said, “So here’s the juice. Deanne said that when you came in from Tallahassee, she felt the presence of Satan in her living room. Her living room! What a—”
I wasn’t used to hearing my mother say the c-word. The f-word, okay.
So it was imagining him in Walmart hunting for a bargain that brought all that back.
It fascinated me while I was talking to him to consider, I do have a brother! His name is Jeff ! To think I lived in New York. It seemed almost mystical to him now, as it once had for me.
He said, “To be honest, I just want to walk around a lot, just look at everything. If I could come for a long weekend and we could hang out and chill—you say Perry’s going to be away?”
“He travels a lot,” I said.
I wasn’t ashamed to have Jeff around my lover. But Perry and I had an open relationship, and I didn’t want anybody coming over to fool around with Perry while Jeff was in the apartment, and I didn’t feel like explaining the arrangement. The arrangement was, Perry hooked up online from a “daddy” site and usually hosted, since the guys he met there were younger and didn’t live alone and not all of them were out. Most of the guys, incredibly, even though it was anonymous, were jealous and would have freaked out or walked out if there was a guy in the next room while he and Perry were having sex. When a date was announced, I’d go to the movies, or if there was nothing playing at the movies, my neighborhood bar. It didn’t bother me in the least but some of our friends pitied Perry and me both. My parents adored Perry but wouldn’t have understood. It would have run like this: my mother would ask me over and over to explain, and I doubted there could ever be an explanation on the planet that would satisfy her. I wasn’t proud of my attitude; I just thought it was the best arrangement for everyone. So no, Perry needed to be gone.
“Well,” said Jeff, “I was hoping to meet him, but next time, I guess.”
“Sure. Some other time. He just stays in motion,” I went on. “He’s curious about you.”
“Mom and Dad adore him,” he said, and I smiled at that verb. “They say he’s one of the nicest people they’ve ever met. They wanted to meet Terri. What did Mom say about Terri?”
“Not much. You know how she never wants to appear nosy.”
I’d almost let it slip, but I could keep my wits about me even on my third glass.
“Yeah,” he said, “whatever. I know that’s one of Mom’s ideas about herself. You know what I’d like to do when I come up? Go out dancing. Is that something we could do? Because I love dancing, and this is my time. It’s so freeing, you know, just to get your ass out there on the floor and shake your ass and boogie. I’ve got places I’m starting to go to at the beach. One time I took the forty-year-old virgin. Darby didn’t dance. He’s just such a shy kid and pret
ty easily abashed, plus he’s self-conscious about his eyesight—the noise and the dark and not knowing what’s going on around him. That night girls were giving me tips, because I’m always the first out there getting the party started, and I don’t care. I don’t care how I look. I get extra points, too, for it. But is there someplace you know of where we could dance?”
“There has to be,” I said vaguely. This was going to be even more work than I’d thought. Now I had extra homework and was already losing my precious free time. “I will look into it.”
“That’d be much appreciated. But hey, I’ll call you again when I look into flights. I’m headed to the register now. I need to get out of here. I’ve got somebody’s well I have to go over and look at. I won’t buy a ticket until after talking to you—but can’t wait to see you, Bubba.”
That’s something guys hadn’t done in high school: dance. Nobody wanted to look like a fag, so the girls had danced with each other. To this day I had to be in a foreign country to dance.
I’d let Jeff chew my ear off and I talked to Mom one more time before his visit. She was thrilled he was going through with the divorce, and there wasn’t any more talk about Terri. Jeff needed a little recreation, she said. He deserved it, and she cackled. I told her about Jeff’s dancing idea.
“Sounds fun,” she said and repeated, “The boy could definitely use some recreation.”
The boy who was going to be fifty before long.
To pay off the debts so he could finalize the divorce, Jeff was working as a fire lieutenant downtown and earning extra money as an EMT reviving heart-attack and pool-drowning victims, and he was also digging shallow wells for people who wanted to water their thirsty Florida lawns off the grid of the expensive municipal utilities. His voice sounded calmer and he said, “I’m ready to do it, and I’m ready to come see you. I know I’ve been a sob-sister, but I really want to spend some time with you, find out how you are. And I’m curious about your life up there, I’m curious about the city, I’m just generally curious, ready to have some fun, go out for long walks, see shit.”
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 16