"Hold on—"
"I said it was a speech. Just listen. She's thrilled about you coming. In some bizarre way she's always idolized you, or at least some vision of you that I never had the heart to puncture. Or to be more honest the ability to puncture. You've always been like some kind of astronaut who was too busy circling the damn moon to come down to see her. She's pigheaded—you'll see. I'm sorry you're missing the ceremony or whatever they're calling it but I've got to confess I'm extremely relieved you're not going to be walking Stel down the aisle. Jon wasn't thrilled about that and neither was I. Mind me asking where that impulse came from?"
She didn't remember. The spark that set off the blast, & she didn't remember. Had I made it up? For a scant moment I panicked, fearful that some scene from, say, a nineteenth-century Polish novel, in which some numskulled fellow pledges to walk his infant daughter down the aisle one day, had lodged itself, shrapnel-like, in my soft and pickled brain. But no, I remembered. This was my life, I was there. This was where the road had forked. Had I perhaps overinflated the significance of the exchange? The lacuna in Stella's memory said yes but one must consider perspective. A piece of driftwood floating atop the blue ocean is hardly worth noting unless you happen to be clinging to it.
"Just something I got in my head," I said, close to a whisper.
Too close: "What?" she said. "Bennie, you're mumbling."
"You know how it is when I get something in my head," I said.
"Yeah, you always did put the pig in pigheaded," she said, following it with what sounded like a genuine laugh—a soft trill. Whether she was laughing about me or at her own wit was unclear. "It was a little weird, though, didn't you think? It's been a long time, Bennie. And not to be too literal about things but she certainly isn't yours to give away."
"Giving her away—wasn't the motive," I said.
"Well, moot point, right? Looks like the weather in Chicago saved us from that awkwardness."
"The weather here is fine," I said. "It's not the weather! What it is, the goddamn airline overscheduled itself into a corner and—"
"Whatever. Are you sure you're up to this, Bennie? Because she's not going to let you drop in and then disappear. That's not fair to her. You only get to run once."
"You ran."
"Oh, please," she said. "Don't even start. Please, please. And you followed? A handful of drunk phonecalls doesn't qualify you for martyrhood. But there's no use rehashing all of that. What happened, happened. And everyone's better off for it."
"That's one interpretation," I said.
"What's the other one? Come on, Bennie, we made our choices. Everyone does. You chose your barstool—the great saloon poet, right? While I raised our daughter. La la la. Life goes on."
"I ditched that barstool, you know. I tried to tell you that—"
"Jesus, you did, and I've owed you an apology ever since. That call couldn't have come at a worse time for me." She paused, as if deciding whether to explain any further. "I really am sorry," she went on. "I started a letter to you after that but for whatever reason it never got finished. When you called we were neck-deep in a terrible situation with Phil"—Phil was her stepson, Jon's younger son—"with alcohol plus drugs plus more than I want or can bear to remember and your call caught me smack-dab in the middle of it all. We'd just shipped him off to his second stint at a clinic up in Orange County, Jon was in the midst of selling his wine collection to get all the alcohol out of the house, and, no offense, Bennie, but you were about the last thing I needed at the moment. All I could think was: Great, maybe I'll get a call from Phil in thirty years saying sorry, Mom, had a rough go of it for a while, sorry for all that. I swear, what is it with you guys?"
"How is he?"
"Phil? He's fine, he's great actually. He's back in school with a respectable GPA. Has a sweetheart of a girlfriend he met in the program."
"That's good," I said. "That's good."
"How about you?"
"Oh, about the same."
"As Phil? Or ... you don't mean ... as before?"
"As Phil. Except for the parts about the GPA and girlfriend. But that's fine, you know. Miss Willa makes a decent prom date so long as the music isn't too loud and they play a rumba or two."
"That's funny," she said. "God, your mother ... that's actually funny. I am sorry, Bennie. For a lot of things. I did start writing you that letter, once things had calmed down with Phil, but ... I don't know, I'd put it all away, you know? It was all crazy back then, and it's so hard for me to recognize myself in those memories that I just—just filed it all away and locked it and tossed the damn key. You know, it's funny, one therapist said that was the right approach while another said it was dead wrong. So who knows?"
"They both cashed their checks, right?"
"Exactly, yes. Sheesh. We were just stupid kids. We made a giant mess of things but we survived, okay? And for all the operatic crap, Bennie, we made a beautiful girl. If she doesn't take your breath away then..."
"I'd give my life to take it all back, you know," I said suddenly, and hearing the faint, fleet echo of my words coursing through the wires, I asked myself—no, demanded of myself—if they were true. Because if they weren't true then there was no point to any of this, no point to me. But they were—all of them. A long silence swamped the line until Stella exhaled and:
"Yeah, fine, but you can't," she said. "God, Bennie, that's so like you. Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal. It used to tear me in two. I never understood why life was never enough for you."
"I don't..."
A gate-change announcement drowned me out. Omaha, Gate H7. From down the terminal I heard spurts of applause breaking out, someone whooping.
"What? I can't hear you," Stella said.
"Nothing," I said.
"You know, a few years back—this was right after 9/11, and I guess you were on my mind, being in New York and all—anyway, I saw this science article in Time or Newsweek or one of those. This article about butterflies."
"Wait—"
"No, just listen. This biologist did an experiment and he found that if you put a male butterfly in a cage with a live female butterfly alongside a photo of female butterfly, the male almost always went to the photo first. And I remember reading that and thinking, my God, that's Bennie. Always drawn to that ... what, that frozen image, rather than the real thing. Always stalking the dumb illusion."
Perhaps this was incisive—transcribing it now, I see her point—but what I gathered at that moment was that she considered me the kind of man who'd hump a paper butterfly. "Sounds to me," I said, "like a biological explanation for the porn industry."
"Jesus, why did I think you'd take me seriously? You never change. Look, I have to go. Stel's calling me. Just come see your daughter, will you? Don't expect too much but don't do too little. She's enough."
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with that stale airport oxygen. "I know she's enough," I said. "I mean I think I do." They were boarding my flight. The First Class passengers and Admirals' Club members had already vanished into the gangplank, none of them looking particularly classy and certainly not like admirals. Midshipmen at best. The gate agent announced that boarding would be done according to the "group number" printed on the boarding passes. Where was my boarding pass? Oh fuck me had I lost it? I tapped my shirtfront pocket. There it was, I had it, I was fine. Through the terminal windows I saw a plane rolling by outside like some great lumbering beast, some prehistoric meateater. "Bennie?" Stella said. I watched the passengers forking over their boarding passes to the gate agent. The permanence of the agent's smile seemed unnatural, painstaking. I refilled my lungs. Damn but I wanted a cigarette. A drink. Another chance. A soul scrubbed clean. A world made better not worse by my footprints upon it.
"I'm not sure the word sorry does anything justice," I said. "It's such a loose fucking word, isn't it?"
"Bennie, what are you saying?"
"I mean, how can one puny word like that encompass all the s
hit you did—I don't mean you, I mean us, everyone, me—but also all the, all the things you didn't do? It's the inactions that keep you up at night. The actions, they're done. They're done. The inactions, they never go away. They just hang there. They rot. How is sorry supposed to stretch across all that?"
"It's life, Bennie, not linguistics," she said.
"Is it? In Poland they say przykro mi."
"Which means...?"
"It doesn't really have an English equivalent, not culturally anyway ... somewhere between 'I'm sorry' and 'I'm in pain.'"
"Say it again?"
"What?"
"The Polish thing. Say it again."
"Przykro mi." Uttering the last syllable I heard my voice falter and I had to scrunch up my face to hold back a sudden torrent inside my head. I felt myself slacken and slump against the Plexiglas divider. "Przykro mi," I said again. "Przykro mi. My God you don't know."
I heard Stella sigh. "You broke my damn heart, you know," she said.
"I broke my own, too," I said.
"Well that was stupid," she said, and when we laughed together my eyes brimmed with tears that were neither happy nor sad but merely wet.
***
I should note that the preceding few pages were written at a cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. In Seat 31D, to be precise. Dear American Airlines, I'm on my way. The seat assigned to me was 31F, the one beside the window, but I offered it to the pretty young Chinese girl who was occupying this aisle seat when I boarded. She doesn't speak English so I had to pantomime my offer of the window seat and for a moment the poor girl got all flustered, thinking she'd made an error. Sah-lee, sah-lee, she apologized. Since pointing to the window with a generous smile didn't yield me any communicative success, I sliced my hand above my eyes while turning my head to and fro in wan imitation, I suppose, of an Apache scout searching the horizon for invading honkies. This was my way of suggesting that she might enjoy the view. When she finally got my drift she thanked me profusely and after settling into her window seat cracked open a notebook that my wandering eye noticed was filled with English phrases written alongside their Chinese counterparts. "Where is Gate 5?" "Excuse me, can you help me with my baggage?" "Where are the taxis?" Etc.
It reminded me of the failed system I devised for my mother back when she first moved in, pre-Post-its. Into a spiral-bound notebook I entered every sentence I could imagine her needing to say, the idea being that when she wanted to express something she could page through the notebook until she hit the sentence she wanted, then point. I tried to be as comprehensive as I could—in addition to humdrum requests for food, water, medicine, and whatnot, which I arranged by category, I also listed generically critical opinions about television shows, a wide array of weather commentaries, and her own trademark expressions (e.g. "My hair looks like something the cat dragged in"). Under the "Miscellaneous" rubric I even included me-directed unpleasantries like "Watch your language" and "How is your work coming?" This phrasebook took me hours to compile—the plural isn't an exaggeration—so I was stunned and not a little infuriated when after a middling skim she hurled it, with obvious disgust, into the trash. Taking a ballpoint pen to one of my Post-it pads, she wrote on three consecutive sheets: I HAVE MUCH MORE LEFT TO SAY THAN THAT. I hadn't considered that it might be disturbing for her, to see the entirety of her remaining life—and what is life if not the words that we speak?—reduced to fifteen or so looseleaf notebook pages, sharp convenience notwithstanding. Thus began our Post-it note epoch. The era of LOVE IS LOVE and other uncollected tersenesses.
I shouldn't pretend not to notice the connection between reducing one's life to a handwritten phrasebook and reducing it to a complaint letter to a corporation that doesn't give a flying, delayed, or canceled fuck. Or stuffing one's autobiography into a bottle as I believe I said earlier. We all hope to be more than we are which is often the problem. What I neglected to include in my mother's phrasebook was something like hope—not the sentences she needed, but the sentences she wanted to need. My recovery has been remarkable, hasn't it. I met a handsome gentleman today. Are those flowers for me? I would like two tickets to Paris, please. It has been so wonderful to paint again. We danced all night. I won't need this silly notebook any longer. Take away Miss Willa's delusions and she has nothing. Banish the Faraway and she's lost. As the sole surviving representative of the life she's spent decades trying to escape, I could defensibly resent it all, but then what's the point? To varying degrees we're all victims of our pregnant imaginations, of incurable dreams of transcendence. Thorns hoping to become the rose. The religious among us, counting on seventy-two lustsoaked virgins and/or plump white raisins in the afterlife, or more locally reunions with childhood pets and predeceased spouses or the all-you-can-eat king-crab-leg buffet in heaven's cafeteria, are just the mildest examples. Think of Henryk Gniech, believing he could outrun the nightmares of Dachau by fleeing to New Orleans, or believing he was granting a merciful reprieve to those legions of varmints he abandoned on the docks. Imagine the terror of that possum, the one that resulted in my birth, as it navigated the hot maze of crates and forklifts and shirtless longshoremen on the docks, starving and thirsty, skittering up Poland Avenue in desperate search of food and water, or the comforts of a tree or a fellow possum, unstrung by the honking, swerving cars and the nasty schoolchildren hurling rocks at this rarely seen creature. See it cowering behind some greasy spoon's trash dumpster as night falls, motherless or childless, tremblingly alone. Which was the better fate? Maybe the answer is that there are no better fates. You can't escape what you are be it possum or poet. Maybe you get what you get. Or as the old saw goes: You buy your ticket, you take your chance. Which by the way you might consider for a motto.
On occasion—after the Stellas had left me and, stripped of Speck's physical presence, I was able to think of her more as an abstraction—I used to wonder how things might've turned out had Stella gone through with it. The abortion, I mean. I admit this sounds wicked but the devil's advocate is by nature devilish and anyway I'm not expressing regret—only probing the divide between what was and what wasn't, what is and what isn't. We would have driven home in silence from that clinic in Gentilly with a somber pitstop at a K&B drugstore to get some feminine pads to stanch any bleeding. We would've watched something on television that night, something silly and irrelevant like a Bob Hope special, me faking a cringe when Charo bounded onstage. Maybe I would've fixed myself a drink. ("Is that okay?" I would've asked, Stella waving her defeated permission with all the brio of an invalid shooing a mosquito.) And then Stella would have cried herself to sleep—I know her; everything unspooled in the dark—and I would have held her, stiffly, sadly, hurting in unlocatable places. And sooner or later the unspoken guilt would have wedged a divide between us, a gulf of sour air. We would have become, to one another, constant reminders of a loss, the salt to the other's wound. And then, maybe slowly but probably rapidly, we would have slipped apart. A fluttering eyelash in the Exchange, and the woman to whom it belonged, would have dislodged my stance like tectonic plates shifting beneath my feet; or a better man, named Jon, with tales of alpine glory, would have whisked her from me. What I mean is that maybe there never was a happy ending for us. Or rather, we had the happy ending—Speck—but it wasn't enough for us. Or rather for me. What I mean is that maybe it never could have been different.
Which is more powerful: that realization or a gun? It's all so clear up here. At thirty-five thousand feet you can see the curve of infinity. It's all so possible.
As I write this the girl near me is scrutinizing her notebook. Every now and then she leans back into her seat and lifting her gaze to the ceiling she silently mouths one of the English phrases, to seed it in her memory. Excuse me. Excuse me. Where is Gate 5? Whenever she does this I catch a glimpse of the sky outside, and for whatever reason I find myself losing my breath, as if I am a child aloft for the very first time. Christ, my friend, do you understand how fucking beautiful it is up here? The
clouds look like glaciers, cold whiteness extending as far as the eye can see and then farther and farther and farther into dreams. Imagine the first pilot to crack the cloud barrier—what a blind rush that must have been, to break down the door of heaven.
Dear American Airlines, I'm not leaving. I apologize for all your time but I've changed my mind. You can keep your money after all.
***
But then I almost forgot: Walenty. No offense to Alojzy, but I've taken the liberty of rewriting his ending. I won't reveal Alojzy's actual conclusion except to note that it's violent and unjust—you can guess the reaction of Franca's surviving brother when Walenty reappears at the pensione; Franca's reaction is less predictable but no less brutal—which is how Alojzy has always viewed the world. Please don't feel cheated. Nothing's lost, to crib from James Merrill. Or else: All is translation /And every bit of us lost in it. With apologies to Alojzy, then:
At the train station he ordered a cup of coffee. The girl who delivered it to him was hardfaced and curt and demanded he pay immediately. She tapped her thigh while he fished the change from his pockets. Soon afterward he saw her arguing behind the counter with a young man in an apron who rolled his eyes at her with such frequency and exertion that he appeared to be suffering from vertigo. A small boy of three or four was merrily roaming the café and cocking his thumb and forefinger at customers as if to shoot them dead. Pow! he exclaimed to little or no response. When the boy's gun was aimed at Walenty he put his hand to his heart and tossed his head back which caused the boy to grin and jump and burst into a cheer. This caught the attention of the boy's mother who stood up from her breakfast and heaved the boy away by his collar. She dragged him beside her chair where she swatted him on the rump with enough force to make Walenty wince, spitting fierce words at the boy that Walenty was unable to understand save one: father. Stricken, the boy lay on the floor crying while the mother, eating small bites from a bread roll, ignored him.
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