The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Probably threw him in the garbage, Tyler thought to himself.

  Bending over, the waitress reached beneath the table, turned on the gas jet, and then lit it. Blue flames danced evilly up. With tongs and scissors, the waitress took the kalbi and bulgoki strips out of the marinade and laid them into the grill, where they began to sizzle loudly. With a mechanical smile, Irene accepted the tongs from her and began to turn the meat. Then the waitress thrust the scissors into the marinade bowl and carried it away.

  So they got me another cat, Irene said. Another boy cat. I was about fifteen then. I was late starting my period, but one day it came. And the cat knew right off. He started to lick me.

  Were your parents happy that you’d become a woman?

  I didn’t tell them. In my family we don’t talk about those things.

  I know one Japanese girl whose mother cooked red beans that night to celebrate, said Tyler. And when her father wanted to know what the fuss was all about, her mother just said that a very good thing had happened.

  I guess my mother must have known, because my underpants were bloody, Irene said, picking up strips of well-done meat with the tongs and putting them on his plate. —My cat sure knew. In our house the cats weren’t supposed to sleep inside. But every night at around midnight this cat would scratch at my window, and I’d get up and let him in. And he’d come into my bed and lick my nightgown all night, right between my breasts. His tongue was kind of rough, and sometimes it almost hurt, but it also felt really good. He licked so much that my nightgown turned black there. Every night he’d come and do that, and sleep with me. It was kind of my secret, I guess. It made me feel special. And in the morning when I went to school, that cat would follow me along the top of the wall as far as he could, and then in the afternoon when I came home he’d be waiting for me. Well, we were getting ready to move to America then. My grandmother was already in Los Angeles, and then my big aunt and uncle, and then little aunt and uncle, and then it was just us and we’d already sold our house. I asked my mother what was going to happen to my cat, and she didn’t answer. And one night that cat didn’t come scratching at my window. I kind of wondered and worried about that, ’cause he’d never failed to come to me before. And in the morning I didn’t see him. My mother said that he knew we were going to leave him, so he was sad and ran away. Cats just know.

  Your mother probably gave him away and didn’t have the guts to tell you, Tyler thought.

  You want another beer, Irene? he said. Here’s to fetal alcohol syndrome!

  Oh, Henry, I’m feeling—I don’t know how I’m feeling. Can we please please finish? I want to go home and lie down . . .

  Irene . . .

  I don’t know. I’ve almost had it with everything.

  And John?

  He’s good at digging into everything. I used to tell my parents and they’d say trust your busband, but they are not saying trust your husband anymore. He’s taken away all my credit cards. He takes all my paycheck. He’s never satisfied. I’m sorry; he’s your brother; maybe you—

  You know better than that, Irene.

  Can we please please go now? I want to lie down. I want to go to bed.

  | 47 |

  Irene was supposed to meet him on Union Street. He stood waiting in front of the shop with the phony picket fence below the window. Inside lay a long narrow glass table whose legs were naked bronze women bending backward and supporting the top with their outstretched arms. Behind the table he perceived stained glass lamps (he didn’t know whether they were real Tiffanys or not,) and green drinking glasses like magnifying lenses. —He looked at his watch. —Another shop window boasting of gold-ivied dinner plates as round and white as the breasts of a girl with whom he’d once gone skinnydipping in high school, a shy girl who probably never undressed except at night, for her skin had been as pale and perfect as a hardwood floor kept under a ratty old carpet. In the next window he saw a cat made of milk-porcelain, watching herself in the mirror, a seven-drawer lingerie chest in the Queen Anne style on sale for $279.00—how many pairs of underpants did a woman need, to take up seven drawers? Next was the window of the optometrist’s shop, whose many double lenses, yes, those, too, reminded him of breasts.

  Irene had not arrived. He went to the espresso bar and ordered a double shot. The coffee soon began to kick in, rewarding him with a pleasantly twitchy feeling. He went out and looked for her black Volkswagen Rabbit but didn’t see it. The orange and white # 45 bus with its long feelers drank from wires and disappeared, and that moment he knew that she was not going to show up. A watch-gaze: Forty minutes late. Irene was never late.

  He began to walk east, toward the Tenderloin, and suddenly right in front of the next coffeehouse or maybe the next he met a grizzled grimy panhandler whose hands were streaked with blackish-grey, as if human flesh, like the silver it so often sells for, could tarnish; and the panhandler said: Can you give me anything?

  Why, sure I can, said Tyler, grateful that for the next twenty to thirty seconds that heavy sadness in his chest and the nervousness in the cesspool of his churning stomach and the anger against Irene that dwelled behind his eyes might not be felt. He turned out his pocket, finding three dimes, which he gave the man, for the first time looking into his face. But the panhandler was gazing far beyond him. Tyler would never see what he saw.

  Past Buchanan the shops were not so fancy, the jewelry plated rather than solid, the shop windows weary with glass eggs or glass snail shells or cast ballerinas whose tits he could barely see. Skinny, hairy-legged joggers headed back toward their medium-rent apartments, clutching freshly purchased cappuccinos and raspberry-papaya smoothies, emanations of royalty.

  He gazed down the gentle slope between white houses that led to the Marina district where John and Irene lived.

  When he got to the next pay phone he reached into his pocket and then remembered that he’d given all his change to that panhandler. He went into the corner deli and bought a candy bar with a dollar bill. They gave him two quarters back. He dialled.

  Yes? said his brother before the second ring.

  Hello, John, he said as mildly as he could.

  What did you have to do with this? said the cruelly level voice.

  His heart sank. —What do you mean?

  Don’t lie to me ever again, said John in the weariest voice that he had ever heard. I just don’t have any more time for your lies.

  Tyler thought for a moment. Then he hung up the phone, changed another dollar, and called his mother, who also answered before the second ring.

  How’s everything, Mom?

  His mother began to cry. —Oh, Henry, she wept. John just called. Oh, poor, poor Irene.

  * * *

  •BOOK III•

  * * *

  Visits and Visitations

  •

  * * *

  The nonuniformed or plainclothes investigator is in a good position to observe illegal activities and obtain evidence. For example, a male plainclothes officer may appear to accept the solicitations of a prostitute . . .

  WAYNE W. BENNETT AND KÄREN M. HESS, Criminal Investigation (1991)

  * * *

  •

  | 48 |

  Tyler’s car still smelled of flowers. Just before driving down to Los Angeles, he’d stopped at a florist’s in the Mission and filled the back seat with funeral wreaths upon double plastic bags of melting ice.

  A blonde salesgirl stood outside of a bridal shop, leaning against one of the parted steel shutters and smoking a cigarette. Her windows screamed with whiteness.

  Previously Tyler had allowed himself to blueprint the structure of a future life lonely but not unpleasant, a life of sitting on empty bleachers on Sundays and holidays, gazing unseeing through the mesh of some park fence, politely oriented toward the baseball diamond upon which shouting Little Leaguers might or might not be practicing as he listened to the crows declaim: Ewww, ewww! in demagogic accents—not a bad life at all, a privileged one, in fact, a thi
ckening-around-the-middle life of birthday cards to nieces and nephews, of going to movies; maybe he’d take up fine art photography in earnest some day. He already had the equipment and the technique; it sounded less tedious than jerking off into the locator fluid. And John and Irene would have their mixed-race children, the ones to whom on birthdays he’d send stupid cards; Irene, who’d owned cats as a child, but always wanted a dog, would have a German shepherd or maybe a border collie by then—the eternal Mugsy. Irene and John could visit Tyler’s mother in the nursing home in which she’d surely be settled, if in fact she were still above the dirt. Tyler himself would accordingly be free to relocate. His needs were low; perhaps he couldn’t live on three hundred a year, like the Unabomber, but ten grand per annum might well see him through. —No more photography, then, and no fancy women—maybe a bottle of bourbon when he wanted it. His grandfather had done nicely on Black Velvet. In the old man’s accounts of his vacations, whiskey of some sort would always figure. —I remember when Elma and I took a trip out to Salt Lake in a Pullman car, he’d say. Those were good times, Henry; you can’t imagine how good. Elma liked to rest, of course, so I’d sit with her and we’d have a few nips, and then when I got sick of that, why, I’d leave her alone and head to the dining car, order a couple shots . . . —Now his grandfather was dead. Life passed, full of passions like a van crammed with shouting dogs; every year there’d come another Easter without a resurrection, a Fourth of July without children or hot dogs or fireworks, a silent telephone, every month half a dozen bills in the mail.

  He knew that twice a year, for ever on, at New Year’s and on August ninth, which was Irene’s birthday, relatives would clip the errant grassblades from around the corners of her headstone where the mowers of the sexton’s office hadn’t reached, polish the slab with window-cleaner, seat themselves upon a blanket, and sing hymns. She’d be well taken care of.

  Taylor Street was full of cars and people in white summer shirts. They almost blinded him, like angels. He drove on.

  In the O’Farrell Street parking garage a fat man whose tie was wrapped around his neck came strutting down the white line that spiraled along the path of waiting cars. Ugly cubical lanterns hung in immense grottos, and parking attendants waved their white sleeves.

  Tyler got out and locked the car. It was a very hot day. A woman was yelling and sobbing on the pay phone. When she was finished, he dialled John and Irene’s number to see whether Irene’s voice might still be on the answering machine.

  Hello? said John curtly.

  Tyler hung up.

  He’d forgotten that it was a Saturday. No wonder downtown was so crowded. With tentative steps he approached the fresh-smelling, faintly mysterious hedge-walls which ran along the perimeter of Union Square and walled the upsloping sidewalks which comprised the inlets of that park. A Peruvian quartet was playing there. The mandolinist was tight-lipped and intense—difficult to believe so sullen-seeming a fellow could produce such sweet sounds. The drummer, who wore a pillbox hat, kept gazing searchingly about him as he played. Of the other two men Tyler could not glimpse their features as he strode past. Some weary tourist ladies, one very fat and in purple, sat waiting, probably for the more energetic members of their family or other sociological cluster to finish shopping; they applauded the Peruvians from time to time because they were well-mannered ladies, but their expressions of stranded desolation never altered. Their lives were passing, tvacations trickling through the hourglass; moment by moment this warmish blue San Francisco day was being wasted. They sat beneath lush palm-trees, and distantly a trolley-car sounded its bell as he heard the ladies talking about grilled cheese sandwiches; then he was past them and could not hear anymore. (He called his answering machine: No messages.) The Peruvians had ceased. Some moving object, toy-red, caught his eye—an armored car. He wondered which parking garage it patronized. Now the Peruvians had begun again, a sweet song whose flute-wails did indeed remind him of mountains, although if their placard had said that they were Plains Indians instead he might have imagined open spaces. The melody dwindled behind him as he ascended the walkway to the high ground of seated ones and teeming pigeons, more hedges and then the pigeon-adorned column whose base said SECRETARY OF THE NAVY; he’d never taken the time to read the rest, and learn the significance of it. He sat down. A white girl in shorts, with nice breasts and a birthmark on the back of her thigh, hurried quickly past, almost goose-stepping, leaving him with the impression of a bland blurred face half obscured by chestnut hair. Was he the only one who looked at anybody? In the Tenderloin they always gave you the once-over as you went by; here they studied the sky, like astronomers, or watched the children whose hands they held, or spied out the reflections of their destinations upon their moving shoe-toes; let’s not forget that the seated ones had their blizzards of pigeons to watch.

  It’s not at all impossible that John will marry again, he thought to himself. In fact, it’s very likely. When that happens, I’d better keep my distance. I’d better move away . . .

  He wondered whether Irene’s parents had insisted on paying for the cemetery plot. She used to go to them in secret for money when she faced some unexpected expense, being afraid to importune John. But John did have that emergency backbone which during crises he could slip into his otherwise hollow spine. Tyler rather thought that he must have donned his most noble and generous armor so that no one could reach him, refusing to let Irene’s family contribute financially or in any other way, unless, as was plausible, they had gotten to choose the minister—their own, most likely. It was impossible to know who’d won, and Tyler couldn’t ask. When he’d offered to help, John had only said: I don’t need anything from you, Hank.

  The sunshine felt uncomfortably warm upon his temples. A grey-haired man trudged by, clutching a sweater; out of the side of his eye Tyler saw the man stop to thrust an arm deep into the garbage can, peering, his mouth open. Then he shot suspicious looks at life and went on. Pigeons crawled and thronged. A long Muni bus eased down Stockton Street with a series of squeaks, and passed into shade.

  Tyler got up and inspected the column. He read: CAPTURE OR DESTROY THE SPANISH FLEET . . .

  Reflected palm-tendrils swerved and curved in the windows of Macy’s, and skyscrapers’ terraces swelled and bowed there as if in the throes of an immense explosion. The Peruvians’ music, gentle and strangely liquid, seemed the appropriate solvent for this image of dissolution.

  | 49 |

  Irene and John’s marriage endured for almost four years. Tyler cherished the conviction that according to some divine calendar she hadn’t been his brother’s wife for nearly as long as that, but he was equally certain that he had known Irene much, much longer than four years, which only went to show how inferior to locator fluid was certainty. As long as he could remember, he’d relieved his thoughts every now and then from reality’s blind bonds—a sort of recreation which possessed no power to harm him if he kept simultaneous sight of actuality, ideal and the angle of deflection between them; which is only to say that he trusted himself, not merely because he had to, but because he knew himself so well.

  He remembered the first time that he had really been alone with Irene. It was a month or two before the wedding, and Irene, whose car was still in the shop because her sister had borrowed it and hit a lamppost, animated his ruby answering machine light to say that she needed somebody to drive her to the Kobletz outlet, where she and John planned to register. Tyler had been suprised when John, whom he met for lunch, explained that he was too busy; of course John was always busy, but one would have thought that a man so in love with suits and neckties would also be fascinated by the dinner service upon which he and his wife might someday entertain special clients—that is, rich people, whose nature John and Irene, or at least John, hoped progressively to assume. But Mr. Singer was shouting for the Knightman brief, and Tyler, between jobs as usual, had agreed, partly out of the sense of guilt which John usually inspired in him, and partly because it felt honorable,
novel and almost titillating to act for the first time in the capacity of brother-in-law; his mother would be happy, too: she always wanted for him and John to get along better. At that time Irene had not made a great impression on him, his attitude scarcely stretching beyond the scrupulously benign. He remembered that as soon as they reached the showroom she’d needed to go in search of a restroom, and he’d sat observing a young couple who’d also come to register bone china for their wedding. The man had a weary, somewhat loutish face. He seemed ill at ease in his big boots, which fortunately made no mark upon the carpet. Tyler could see that he would not be the one to initiate divorce proceedings. Introverted and browbeaten, he might possibly be driven into a fling in three or four years’ time, or the bride might openly take a lover and end matters, but he himself, merely reactive, would wait for the axe to fall. The bride, a slender chestnut blonde, strutted about with a little smile on her face. The bridegroom followed her everywhere while she paced and swooped with tiny delighted cries. Awkwardly, he tried to put his arms around her, but she threw off that embrace with annoyance. Then he retreated to a table in a little thicket of that crystal forest, where he gazed moodily upon the plates and saucers of his future, yawning. The bride bestowed upon everybody, even Tyler, little smiles of rapture. Finally she returned to her groom, knelt beside him, and slipped her arm lightly around his neck as she commenced showing him plates. But he wore a glum face now which could not change. Offended, she retired across the table, and then the pair gazed silently at their knuckles until the saleswoman came. Standing over them, this muse began to reveal arcane principles while they gazed up at her lips like obedient schoolchildren, the girl thrilled to memorize the lesson (which probably had to do with prices), the boy afraid not to. This too was life, this charnel-house of cream pitchers rather than herpid flesh; it was the market, which must be respected.