Jack stayed home for the rest of the day. Whenever the phone rang, his stomach lurched, until he heard the voice at the other end: Bob Garvin calling from South Wellfleet to say the invitation was still open if Jack could handle the visit. Yoshi calling from Maine: “Maybe you’d like to come up for a week or so.” Al Barlow calling from Santa Barbara: “We’d love for you to come stay with us.”
Jack did not go to South Wellfleet. He did not go to Maine or Santa Barbara. He was scarcely able to walk out the front door—a hurried drive to the supermarket, a hurried drive back home—and when he found the red light blinking on the answering machine, he wouldn’t play it back, not right away. He sat and stared at it, as though the machine were a living thing, possessed of a power, benevolent or malicious, capable of meting out good news and bad. Jack would think, Please, no disasters, and watch the red light blink. He would try to calculate by some internal psychic measure if this was the time his father’s heart had chosen to stop beating; if one of those chemical reactions that kept the saline at the right level had failed. Jack would wait a little longer, until a resolve settled in. He’d prepare himself for the bad news. He would play the message. But it wasn’t the message of disaster, it wasn’t bad news at all and he would think: Not this time. Not now, with a renewed sense of foreboding; scared of the next minute, the next day. Scared of the summer lying in predatory repose.
XI
Each morning when he called his father, Jack never said what he was thinking, never talked about the fear. He didn’t say, “I’m afraid if I leave the house, you’ll die.” He didn’t say, “I won’t even mow the lawn for fear I won’t hear the phone ring.” He didn’t tell his father, “I think the most gruesome thoughts about the caprices of life.”
He didn’t say, “I can’t seem to do anything.”
But he was doing a hell of a lot of thinking. About the past. About the time he was an undergraduate at Gilbert College and he had a girlfriend named Anne Charon, who was an art student with hair the color of dark molasses, who smelled of sweet perfume and perspiration. In the spring they drove along the roads in southern Indiana and followed the Ohio River. They would stop in New Harmony and look at Paul Tillich’s church. They would eat lunch in Newburgh and buy candles and fruit at the little stores along the road.
He used to think he was golden, that he had the charm. That whatever he set his sights on could be his. Anne, who was beautiful and artistic and sexy, and whom he loved very much…their loft on Crosby Street…the professorship at NYU…the published books…their friends, who discussed the future of cinema, Marcel Duchamp and the death of painting…parties on Saturday night…Sunday afternoon salons…dinners with his parents, who were healthy and vital and who talked about art and literature and their trips to Africa and India…drinks with Lana, who represented Anne’s work…dinner with Erica, who edited Jack’s books…
Jack once thought he was golden, that he had the charm. He’d had a wife, then he’d had a wife and a son. Then his wife left but still he had his son, whom he loved very much. He’d thought he was still golden, that he’d still had the charm, that he could turn bad luck into good. He moved with his son to Gilbert and lived in a house they both loved. When Jack’s mother died, he’d held it all together, he still had the charm. But now his son was dead and he was alone. He was golden no more. He no longer had the charm.
When Anne left, a piece of Jack’s life, and with it a piece of himself, had been chipped away. When his mother died, he’d lost another piece. And now Danny was dead, the living Danny, receding into the past. The living Danny consumed by the dead Danny, and another piece was gone.
It was more than intellectual, it was palpable, the sensation of Danny moving further away. Jack walked from room to room, sat in his study, lay on the couch and felt the cavity within himself growing; and just as the living Danny was receding from him, moving into the past, the Jack Owens who had been Danny’s father was also receding, becoming part of the past, joining his son in memory.
There was not enough left of Jack to offer resistance to this, there was only the man worrying: What next? There was only the man who was afraid to leave the house, who stopped going to the supermarket, who did not step into his backyard, where the air was rich with summer; did not walk by the creek and sit where the trees shaded and cooled the ground. Who sat on the kitchen floor dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, a sheet of labels and a pen at hand, and carefully rewrapped the food his friends had brought him. The coffee rings, the tins of cookies, the rolls and cakes; resealing the covered dishes, neatly writing the contents on the labels, food for the refrigerator, food for the freezer, the name of the person who’d brought it, keeping a list for the thank-you notes he intended to send.
When he was done, he stood, one hand in his pocket, leaning against the door, a gesture of nonchalance that was anything but, a gesture of fatigue, the fatigue of sorrow, the fatigue of anxiety, and considered his work, decided there was nothing more to do here, at least for now, and feeling neither a sense of accomplishment nor futility, went to work on the living room, dusting the furniture, dusting the windowsills, vacuuming the floor, as though he might cleanse the room, purify it, purge it, as though there were a suicidal germ alive in there, a sentient organism triumphant in the cracks. He thought: You’re putting things back together, that’s all.
He continued the purification, the same ritual in the halls and staircases, until this day, this piece of time without his son, had been vaporized.
The following morning, Jack began first, and second, drafts of thank-you notes. He hadn’t eaten breakfast for the third consecutive day, but no matter, it was more important to get the job done. He took special care not to hurry. He did not finish until early afternoon, in time for the mailman to collect the mail.
Then the purification ritual was renewed. He reorganized the downstairs closets, touching and holding Danny’s leather jacket, Danny’s winter coats and gloves. Rearranging the linen closet. Stacking and restacking sheets and blankets and pillowcases.
He had fallen into a comfortable and safe routine: feeding Mutt. Washing windows. Dusting. Sweeping. Scrubbing. Working upstairs and down. Two, three, four days, an entire week subtracted from the summer, from the awful expanse of time, and always the telephone nearby, always the fear of: What next?
Jack did not think about why he was afraid to leave the house. He did not think about the work he was doing, or why he was doing it. He only thought about putting things back together. He only thought about how he could erase an entire morning with the most menial job, annihilating entire hours by simply trying to decide what to work on next, preparing the buckets, the mops, the rags, the cleansers, the soaps and waxes. He took pride in how disciplined he was, how slowly and thoroughly he planned each assignment, the organizing, the labeling, the filing, the storing; then slowly, conscientiously carrying them out, tearing time from each day, working into the night, purging and cleansing.
He dusted all the pictures on the Danny wall, cleaned the glass in the frames, polished the wood, the metal.
He vacuumed and cleaned his own bedroom, hung his clothes according to color and season.
He scrubbed his bathroom, gouged the flecks of dirt between the tiles. Re-grouted the shower and bathtub. He arranged the bottles and jars and tubes in the medicine cabinet. He put a shine on the mirror. He thought about how he was putting things back together.
He shampooed the living room carpet and the chairs and the couch. He waxed the floor in the front hallway, digging his brush into the door-jambs, careful not to miss a stubborn bit of—what?—dried mud left behind by whose shoe? His? Danny’s? The plumber’s? No matter, he’d get it out.
In the kitchen, on his knees waxing the floor, sweating his way across the room. Washing the dishes, the ones for everyday, the ones for company. Polishing the silver.
When he finished washing and polishing and scrubbing, finished arranging plates and cups, forks and spoons, rearranging and arrang
ing them again, Jack retreated to Danny’s room. He breathed the air, which was less Danny’s air, less Danny’s mornings and nights, than it had been back in May, than it had been just an hour before. He sat among the piles of clothes and books left behind in the wake of his search the day Danny had died, Danny’s spring jackets and summer shirts, his shoes and sneakers—he was already outgrowing this year’s clothes—and it made Jack think about the year Danny turned nine and went away to summer camp. They had shopped for new clothes at Coleman’s department store. The tailor sewed name tags into all the collars and waistbands. The other boys had mothers to do their sewing, but Danny said he liked the “bachelor life.”
It was Danny’s first summer away from home. He was so self-assured when he came back, so much more mature, which was to be expected. Jack could see the change even before Danny left, but something else had changed as well. It was the last time Danny asked about Anne:
“Do you think she’s still mad at us?”
“She was never mad at us.”
“Did she stop loving us?”
“No. It wasn’t because she stopped loving us. Or because she stopped loving you. She’s a very talented artist, and creative people often need to be alone to do their work.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I love the things the three of us did together.”
“What if we went to England sometime, for a vacation, and we accidentally bumped into her on the street, what do you think she’d say?”
“She’d say you’ve grown into an extraordinary and beautiful young man.”
Jack stayed in Danny’s room, putting shoes back in the closet, organizing ties and belts, picking up books and arranging them on the shelf. He made the bed, stripped it and made it a second time. He polished the furniture to a high sheen. He vacuumed around the doorway, under the desk and windowsills. He pulled the bed away from the wall, the better to vacuum out the cracks and molding. He thought about how he was putting things back together. That’s when he found the box stuck away in the corner.
It was one of those wood boxes with the sliding lids that pastels come in, that used to inhabit the loft on Crosby Street, that Anne had kept on the shelf next to her easel and filled with crayons for Danny and scraps of cloth and wire for collages. How familiar it looked, and how alien.
Jack’s first impulse was to leave it where it was. He had never been the kind of parent to look through Danny’s things and he wasn’t comfortable doing so now. It felt intrusive, not unlike eavesdropping on a conversation or reading Danny’s mail. Just an old box. It didn’t mean anything—except it meant something to Danny because he’d taken it with him when they left Manhattan and never told Jack. Important enough for Danny not to leave behind. Important enough for him to keep secret—important enough to offer a clue, an explanation, if Jack had come in here looking for clues and explanations. But he’d been doing nothing more than following his compulsions and now he was afraid that whatever was left of Danny, left of himself, was about to break apart.
It was just an old box, he thought, while he stared at the smear of colors along the edges, at the dark finger stains where the lid had been opened and closed time and again, at the name in black ink: Dearborn Pastels. Chicago, Ill. Just an old box. But he couldn’t stop himself from picking it up and holding it in his hand, the way Danny must have held it in his hands and Anne in hers. Jack ached inside thinking about that. He ached even more after he pushed back the lid.
The colors were all faded now but not the details, they were still clear and sure on the tiny cutout animals that Anne had made for Danny when he was three. There was a color snapshot of Anne with Danny when he was a baby and a black-and-white of Jack and Anne standing outside the old warehouse the day they moved into their loft, and beneath that, a folded sheet of yellowed paper.
Jack traced his fingertips across the cutouts and spread them on Danny’s bed. He touched the faces in the photographs as though he might reacquaint himself with their flesh. He unfolded the sheet of paper, a pen-and-ink drawing of Danny that Anne had done the year before she left; the creases were smooth and straight, made by an adult’s hand, not the hand of a child. And there was something else in the box. Anne’s orange button, staring up at him like a jaundiced, myopic eye.
It startled Jack to see it, and he hesitated, just for an instant, before he lifted it out and held it in the palm of his hand. He started to sob. A few strands of thread were still attached to the eyelet, and he brushed them against his lips. The ache he felt now was the ache born of familiarity, of memories he had not allowed himself to articulate and a past which he refrained from recollecting—is that why Danny kept the box under the bed? Jack wondered. Did he think he was protecting his father? Is that why he kept it a secret?
For ten years, Danny had squeezed a part of his childhood, mementos from his life, into a corner of his room, all that was left of Anne, all that had been left to him. And when he looked at the faces in the photographs, at the delicate cutouts Anne had made just for him, did he feel time extending all the way back to the loft on Crosby Street? Could he look out of this window and see the streets of SoHo, conjure the sounds of his mother’s voice, breathe the odors of linseed oil and paint? Was this where Danny could find them, inside the old box of pastels?
Had Anne given these things to Danny, and had she, in that last moment of good-bye, ripped a small piece of her clothing and clasped Danny’s hand around it? Had she been afraid that Danny might otherwise forget her? Or could a four-year-old boy think far enough ahead to fill a box with his own memorabilia and hide it inside a carton on moving day?
Jack sat with the cutouts and the snapshots and the drawing for a little while longer before he returned them to their resting place. But he did not want to put them back in the corner, he did not want to leave them alone and unattended. He did not know why he felt this. Perhaps it was a way to make Danny’s secret his own, or to take Danny’s secret away from him. Perhaps he was unable to admit that Danny had any secrets—kids always have their little secrets, he thought, and this was Danny’s. But that was the living Danny, not the Danny who killed himself.
He carried the box into his own bedroom and placed it on top of the dresser. He wondered what other secrets Danny had been keeping. What else had he been afraid to talk about?
It was late June, the longest day of the year, and pacing was everything. Jack stretched the phone call to his father into an hour of small talk and reminiscences and went about his work with a dull single-mindedness. It distracted him from thinking about the past, when he had thought he was golden and charmed. It distracted him from believing he could keep his father alive. It restrained his fear of What next?
He was getting used to the long days alone. He filled the silence with the sound of his own voice. Talking to Mutt, talking to himself, talking to Danny, self-consciously and ashamed at first, but soon indiscriminately: “What were you thinking?” he’d ask. “What weren’t you saying?” “Why did you do it…”
As he cleaned and waxed, while he alphabetized the books in his study by author—then title, then subject, then back to author—he’d yell: “I was too busy to know what was happening. I had to do my work. But I still made time for you. You could have told me.” He’d say, pathetically and desperately: “You could have talked to me. We still had time.” Then he’d look around quickly and whisper: “This isn’t normal.”
Some days he would think about Anne. He would see her in quick flashes, her face against the gray urban sky, sitting at her easel, her hand poised above the canvas, out of context, out of time. Sometimes he would recall the sound of her voice or a piece of conversation. He would remember the expression on her face when she spoke to him, when she said, “Sometimes people lose the thing that makes them each other,” and how that had confused him, how he didn’t understand it.
He would remember things he had not allowed himself to remember before and it made him feel guilty, it felt like a betrayal. Only there was th
e box he’d found under Danny’s bed, and was that all the permission he needed? He would wonder if he’d forced Danny to hide his memories. “Would that have made a difference? Would that have…”
At night he’d lie awake thinking about Danny, thinking about Anne. Or fall into a shallow sleep knowing that he was losing more than the illusion of control over a capricious universe, he was losing control of himself. He’d whisper “This isn’t normal” into the dark, and assure himself that tomorrow he’d walk out to the creek, take off his shoes and wade in the water. He’d eat more than the few crackers, the cups of coffee. He’d make himself a full meal…Tomorrow…The next day, definitely…Or maybe the day after that…
Jack was standing on a stepladder in the pantry, reaching into the corner to smooth the shelf paper he’d just put down. He’d been working on this particular shelf since early morning and wasn’t even half done—at this pace he wouldn’t be finished until sunset. The air breezed through the screen door warm and heavy with the earthy scents of pasture and field. “July. You can smell it,” he said to himself. He thought of where he would have been, where he had planned to be, this July Fourth weekend: “Yankees-Detroit.” He had the tickets in his bedroom. “Two days after that we’d be heading to the Cape. That was going to be fun, the Cape with Bob and the kids. Danny was looking forward to it, sailing with the boys. Tacking to the wind.” He nodded his head. “Danny always looked forward to that. He was also looking forward to turning sixteen and getting a summer job. He was getting too old to be seen with you.”
He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him, he hadn’t been aware that she was standing there until he heard her knock twice on the side of the house.
He turned too quickly and his foot slipped just like one of those old-time burlesque comics who steps on a banana peel and does airplane whirls with his arms to keep his balance. He managed to grab the shelf at the last second and hang on, leaning his body into the wall. Over his shoulder he saw Mary-Sue Richards, Sally’s daughter, holding a covered dish.
Light of Day Page 11