by Carol Anshaw
Nick was sitting on the sofa in front of his TV, which was even larger than his old one, its picture gigantic and blurry in an aquatic way. Nick had bought it off QVC. “I was lucky to get it,” he’d told her. “They only had twelve left by the time I got through.”
He looked over his shoulder at Alice from a vast painless place.
“This, by the way, is a great movie.” He nodded toward the TV, although the DVD—she recognized it as Bound—was skipping, breaking down from Gina Gershon into a thousand pieces of confetti, then reassembling once again into Gina Gershon. Her lips, magnified on the large screen, were nearly the size of throw pillows.
“Listen. Mom died.”
“I know. Your friend the doctor called. She is a very persistent ringer.” And then he went silent for so long Alice began to think he was preparing to offer something important. But when he finally spoke, it was to say, “Do you want an ice cream treat? I have tons in the freezer.”
She got a Nutty Buddy and took the chair across from him. “I love these,” she said when she was halfway through. She didn’t realize she was crying until her face was completely wet.
Loretta wanted to be sent off from a funeral home in Old Town. She left instructions about everything. She wanted to be laid out in an open casket, which was disturbing to Carmen.
“Who does this anymore?” she said to Alice as they sat in Chapel Number Two. “I mean outside of Sicily?”
“Who cares, though, really?” Alice countered. “All her chums can see her one last time. And she looks pretty good. I mean, they did a nice job. The makeup and all.”
“What are you even saying?” Carmen said. “She looks dead. I don’t even know what to say about her now.” And then all of a sudden, Carmen was weeping, then grabbing tissues from one of the many boxes set out all around the room to manage exactly this sort of flaring and unbidden emotion. She had clearly surprised herself.
“Well,” Alice said, borrowing Carmen’s part, “I guess we could say she didn’t lock us in the cellar and make us eat dirt.”
They looked around the room, which was decorated to resemble a small church.
“Where’s you-know-who?” Carmen said. Nick’s absence had just occurred to her.
“Indisposed. And for once, I don’t have any emotion to spare for his relapse.”
“You couldn’t get him to come over?”
“I tried. You could try if you want. Go over there. I don’t think he’ll straighten out, but you could have an ice cream treat.”
The funeral home asked for photos of the deceased, which had been slipped into frames and now cozily cluttered the tables in the foyer of the chapel. The one Alice had them put on the prayer cards was a shot of Loretta in her fifties, her deep-tanning years. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes popped out, as though electrically illuminated.
The first of the mourners began to drift in. The Old Town bohemian crowd from the early days of her marriage was present in faint outline—a man in a beret and a wispy ponytail, a woman in black chaps and a bolero jacket, a wide hat with a heavy veil. Alice recognized her; it was Cindy Beecham. Larry and Giselle Zorn arrived, natty and stylish, although the style was thirty years out of date. Their glasses were huge. Others of the old gang were absent because of illness, or due to being already dead themselves. Horace wasn’t invited; he no longer remembered who Loretta was so her death would mean nothing to him.
The largest contingent of those in attendance was Loretta’s new replacement friends—women from her church as well as the snappy dance partners. Behind them Alice spotted an aunt and windbag uncle she would just as soon duck.
“Look,” Carmen said, putting a hand on Alice’s arm, directing her attention to the other entrance. “Isn’t that Mom’s doctor? From the hospital? She must be so dedicated. To follow through like this.”
At the funeral, the front pew was filled with Rob and Heather, Gabe, then Carmen and Alice, who sat with Nick between them. Carmen had gone over to his apartment, got him to put on a sport jacket, and drove him over. He looked as though he was about to come out of his skin. He muttered something about having to leave for an appointment. Carmen clamped a hand on his thigh.
“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to do this. We’re all doing this and then we’ll be done.”
On Tuesday, Alice invited Dr. Pryzbicki over. She fixed a little dinner, or rather picked up a carton of duck tortilla soup from a pricey new restaurant across the street. She poured the soup into a pot, then chopped up an avocado and left the chunks out on a cutting board so they’d look like a last step she hadn’t taken yet. Alice was an inspired faux cook. She had a small repertoire of these tricks up her sleeve. For potlucks, which used to be such a cornerstone of lesbian social life, she would line an old pie plate with waxed paper (her touch of genius), arrange a boxful of KFC pieces inside, then cover the whole thing with a checkered napkin.
Diane said “Mmm. Smells good in here.” She probably needed to be put into the girlfriend category. Alice was being forced to abandon the initial plan (so perfect in a small way) to have a sleazy affair with her. She worried she was following Diane down some path just because it was easy. No stones or sharp inclines. Like what Carmen had with Rob. She feared she had traded passion for this, lost something intrinsic to herself. To make this case, though, she would have to ignore how poorly passion had served her.
Diane had brought along Ed, a short black dog her neighbor found in a garbage can behind her building and she had been keeping in a temporary way that seemed to be turning into permanent. The dog was an indeterminate mix with a luxuriously plush coat, a sweet lab head, a stocky body set on spaniel legs.
A purely wonderful moment gathered up. Alice could see it forming—the new dog and Diane, Etta James on the stereo, the avocado chunks still vibrantly green on the counter, ready to garnish—everything full of small promise and beginning. She tried to stare hard past all this, down the road to the patch where this would end badly. But the view was obscured by hope and distance, and by the mist that always lies over the new. They would get there, though, Alice tried to reassure herself. They just needed a little time.
Diane shouted, “Watch out! Here he comes.”
Ed the dog was high on his new life outside the trashcan. Set loose in Alice’s loft, he immediately disappeared into the shadows of her studio. Now he reappeared and was trying to work up some speed despite his shortness of leg. He ran in a rocking horse canter across the vast old wood floor of the loft, put on the brakes as he skidded to a stop in front of Alice and Diane, then looked up at them, super-ready for whatever came next. The usual fog hanging over Alice’s future lifted a bit.
the excellent sandwich
Nick sailed through a pocket of industrial haze south of the city. Astronauts described the smell of the universe as something like this—sparks off metal, and why not, it was a forge, all about creation and destruction. He was on his way to the exurbia of St. Louis.
He stopped at a 7-Eleven. They had a little sandwich he liked—peanut butter and jelly, but with the crusts cut off, the edges of the white bread pinched together to make a little square pad of delicious. He got two of these and a Coke, then, still in the parking lot, smashed two OxyContins on the dash with the can.
Shanna Redman lived in an apartment in a bare-basics building in a nondescript development near nothing. Sometimes he tried to figure who else lived here and why. The developers tried to liven things up with a Parisian motif. Shanna lived on rue Jacob, just off the Boulevard St-Germain. He had been visiting her for more than twenty years now. She used to live in a mobile-home community, so this was a step up. Until recently she had an office manager job at a factory that manufactured something crucial to something else. He forgot what either of these things was.
But she didn’t work anymore. She had cancer of everything. She called him yesterday. She had something for him.
“Hey,” he said when she answered the door. Always skinny, she was scary thin now, and
traveled with an oxygen tank on a small set of wheels behind her. From the smell of things, though, she was still a smoker.
“Boy, you look terrible,” she pre-empted him. “Have you been sick?”
“Just a little flu.”
“Well, I’m sorry you had to drive down on such short notice. I’ll make some coffee.”
“No, let me.”
They talked about her son, who now drove a truck for Budweiser.
“Good money,” she said. “Although you couldn’t pay me a million a year to wind around through the city in that huge thing, backing up into alleys with everyone honking.” She paused to catch her breath, then, “They tell me I don’t have long, and I wanted to give you something, you know, before—. She has never left me, you know. She’s kept in touch. Sometimes she whispers to me. Sometimes she’s in my dreams.”
“She’s in everybody’s dreams. She’s the star of all our dreams.”
“In mine, she’s running down a street of bricks, or stones. It’s a hot place, and it’s night and raining and the stones are slippery, but she’s a little lighter than air, or there’s less gravity in this place, and so she doesn’t fall, she only slides along, laughing all the way. I don’t know. Maybe she’s giving me this dream from wherever she is now. So I can see something besides her running in front of that car.”
“No one saw her,” he lied. He also did not mention that they were driving with only the fog lamps on.
“She was such a careless kid. Played on construction sites, climbed high into trees. Never looked both ways like I told her to. You can tell them that. The others. Not that it was her fault. But it wasn’t all theirs either.”
“I will. I’ll tell them.” With a superior painkiller surging through him, he suddenly felt like a winged messenger. He would bring this dispensation back with him.
She had to stop talking to cough into a paper towel. She kept a roll by her side on the sofa, a wastebasket on the floor nearby. “Sorry.”
“You have the cancer. You don’t have to be sorry.” He took advantage of her revelatory mood. “Why do you think she was heading home in the middle of the night?”
“Oh, I’m sure she just got fed up with the racket over there at her friend Summer’s house. They fought something terrible, Summer’s folks. The cops were always going out there to break things up. But they were decent to their kids. At home Casey was always getting on Terry’s last nerve. And I catered to him in those days. That is my lasting shame, that’s why I think she was taken away from me. I didn’t defend her against him. The best I could do was let her go out whenever she wanted, wherever. Wait here a minute.”
She got up and wheeled the small tank behind her into the bedroom. When she came back, without the tank, she sat down next to Nick, heavily for someone who was really just a sack of bones, as if she had landed in a parachute. She set on his lap a pair of beaded Indian moccasins atop a small square of folded clothing. Blue jean shorts and a madras shirt; he remembered the pink and green plaid so clearly it shocked him, as though the accident had happened last night.
“I couldn’t part with these. Couldn’t even wash them, so it’s all still there, the blood and dirt. Anyway I want you to have them.” She inhaled hard through the nosepiece, like a scuba diver. “I just wanted you to know how much it’s meant to me. That you never forgot.”
“No one’s forgotten,” he told her.
And then Shanna wasn’t talking, just smoking. Smoking and peering hard at him.
“You’re high as a kite, aren’t you?”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. I know you’re a junkie. And I know you’ve lied to me, so we could keep talking, so I wouldn’t blame you. But the thing is, I’ve moved beyond blaming anyone. And she’s beyond it, too. I got that from her. What happened that night was what was going to happen. It’s done. You’re forgiven. She’s forgiven all of us. She’s let us go.”
He understood what she was saying, but got lost in trying to find an emotional response. For once he wanted to feel something. He sat for a long time with the girl’s clothes and shoes on his lap, waiting for this to happen. But the drugs obscured the way, both hiding the thing itself while turning up all the colors around it. And then everything disintegrated, and he was floating way above the accident and the mother and the girl.
the joke about the complaining monk
So little had come through with his body on the flight from California. Alice was told there was a wallet, but only its contents had arrived, in an envelope, and they were meager. She opened the envelope and shook the lot onto Carmen’s kitchen table. A WorldPerks Visa card. (Later they would see the statement for the three-week free fall between his departure from the last-ditch rehab place in San Diego and his arrival at the alley behind the flower shop. They would make a calendar and a map. Alice’s gallerist in L.A. would drive down and take photos of the Dumpster he hid behind to die.) A jail release slip. A plastic keycard from Arnold’s Motel. A receipt for a $60 cab ride.
“He was really going to need a receipt,” Alice said, then, “He liked Southern California. I think because of how close it was to Tijuana. Once he told me you could get anything down there. I didn’t want to ask what that included. For the first time I was frightened to know.”
“His watch isn’t here,” Carmen said. The thinnest lozenge of gold, its leather band soft as skin at the inside of the wrist. Horace’s watch. Nick always wore it.
“I think when your lifestyle includes evenings spent unconscious in alleys, you can’t really expect that your jewelry collection won’t suffer.”
Stuck inside the envelope so Alice had to reach in and pull them out were two identical passport photos. Headshots. In them he looked as if he had either been badly beaten, or taken a dead fall from the ankles. His high, narrow forehead was covered with raked scrapes and scabs. One eye was swollen nearly shut, puffy and blue and yellow. Although he was staring straight at the camera, his nose—broken and reset—had this time been dislodged into profile; it sat a little sideways on his face. It was a scary picture. You would be frightened of this person, also frightened for him.
It was hard to stop looking at the photos. They hadn’t seen his body yet. The funeral home was making him as presentable as possible.
“Maybe,” Carmen said, “he was trying to get together some new ID after they took his license away.” She tapped a fingertip on one photo, then the other.
“I showed them to Diane before I came over,” Alice said. “She said she’s seen this stuff in the ER. Drunks and junkies in a bad way get a picture taken and keep it on them. In case they’re not recognizable when they’re found.”
“Well, that’s considerate of them,” Carmen said. “He was circling the drain for so long. I think I started thinking the circling was the important part, not the drain. But it turns out he was just ordinarily mortal after all. I really believe letting him fall was the right thing to do, all the literature supports that. It’s just a little tough sitting with my decision.”
“It was hard to know how far down he was. He was such a hilarious optimist. The first time he called me from the bad motel, he said he was suicidal, but that it was a really nice room, considering. The next time I asked him what he was doing and he said he was just watching a movie, but it was a pretty good movie actually.”
Carmen said, “Remember that time he wound up in the Salvation Army detox? Up in Minneapolis? And afterward I asked him how it was and he told me, ‘weird people, but incredibly good cheesy eggs.’” After a long silence, she added, “There should be a word for us. Some variant of ‘orphans.’”
When they had given up on making each other feel less lonely, Alice left Carmen’s house and sat out front inside her car. A Metra train rushed by, heading north. She put the heat on high and fished her cell from her jacket pocket and speed dialed Nick’s number. It rang in a gutter somewhere in San Diego, long since out of juice, but his voice-mail was still taking messages. She listened to his
voice, then waited for the beep, then told him an old joke he loved, the one about the complaining monk.
addison stop
Gabe finished his call to Donna, telling her he was on his way home, then put his cell in his pocket, took off his shades—a new pair he’d found in Florence, with frames the exact color of Scotch tape—and exchanged them for untinted glasses. He put his earbuds in and waited for a train north. A crowd had accumulated on the other side. It was election day and in anticipation of the Chicagoan winning, much of the city was heading down to the giant rally. Although it was the first Tuesday in November, the weather was pure September, as though God were providing congenial weather for the event.
Gabe was going in the opposite direction, north toward his wife and small son. He listened, through the buds, to Rufus Wainwright. His thoughts were on home; he had disengaged from the annoyances of public transport. And so he didn’t see, until just as his train was pulling up, that his mother stood in the small crowd across the tracks, on the southbound platform. She was holding a pole wound up in blue cloth. Unfurled—he knew without seeing that its message was HOPE. After all her disappointments, she had been rewarded with this man she thought would turn things around. We’ll see, he thought.
He moved behind a pillar and a fat teenager. He never saw her from a distance like this, when she was unaware of being observed. She was wearing black pants and shirt, her demonstration uniform. Sneakers. A ball cap. She was reading a book. He could see the cover, which was a photograph of an old woman—for sure a woman who struggled up some steep ladder, or against all odds led an important movement, or organized a union. Carmen was still so earnest, so totally ridiculous.
His train pulled up. He boarded, noticing how humid it was inside the El car, how thick the air was. He stood watching her out the window; he saw that she was looking up, her thoughts broken by the noise. She looked down the track on her side to see if anything was coming, then went back to her book. If she had looked instead through the window of the train, she might have glimpsed his huge, crazy love for her, before he recalibrated his expression, turning down the volume to what was bearable in the give and take between them.