The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Fine, said John.

  You still working on Brady’s new company?

  Oh, I told you about that? said his brother, surprised. That’s right; you were one of his clients.

  No, he was one of my clients.

  That’s what I meant, Hank. He came to us right after the Peterson case was resolved.

  Pretty lucrative?

  The Peterson case?

  No, I meant Brady.

  Very.

  Listen, John. There’s something you ought to know.

  Sour grapes, is it? said John with his usual quick intuition of Tyler’s worst motives. You want to backstab Brady because he fired you? I’m going to take us to Priceway.

  Okay, fine, said Tyler.

  So what should I know?

  You know what Brady’s business is?

  Of course I know. Are you saying I don’t do my homework?

  It’s virtual girls, right?

  Well, that and a lot of other things. Slot machines, restaurants, a family arcade. So what?

  He may be riding for a fall. I’ve heard from at least one source that those girls are real, although I haven’t verified it. It’s forced prostitution and maybe worse, do you understand?

  Yeah, you’d know about that, said John, steering. Look, Hank. Don’t worry your head about that. You’re way out of your depth.

  Okay, John. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.

  His brother laughed and laughed, so that Tyler could see the adam’s apple jerking and twitching. —That’s news, he finally said.

  There was a long silence, and then John finally said in a tentative voice: About Brady, I. . .

  You what?

  Oh, forget it. Forget the whole thing.

  There was another silence, and then John said: Well, are you willing to check him out for me?

  What do you mean?

  You’re a private eye, Hank. What do you think I mean?

  We have access to this stuff, yeah, we’re licensed, and I maintain a lot of insurance. I really think if we don’t self-regulate the government’s going to come along and do it for us.

  In other words, no.

  Oh, I’ll do it. I’ve already done it. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. What do you want to know?

  You’re telling me you won’t do it. You’re saying you won’t help out your own brother.

  I never said that at all.

  Then what’s all this crap about self-regulation? You think I don’t know a euphemism for no? You don’t have the guts to say no outright, do you?

  You know, John, I’m tired of your crap, Tyler was shocked to hear himself say. I’m really tired of it. How long are you going to hold Irene’s death against me?

  Let’s leave my wife out of this. Don’t ever let me hear you mention her name. You have no right to mention her name, do you understand me?

  If you want me to leave her out, then don’t keep bringing her up. You’re the one who keeps making insinuations.

  They sat there with trees and houses and street signs slowly passing them, and John’s throat jerked, and John said: You’re right. I admit it. Now tell me this. Did you ever go to bed with Irene?

  No, John, I never did. I won’t deny that I kind of envied you . . .

  You crooked bastard, his brother laughed.

  What does that mean?

  You know what it means, Hank. Hank the prick.

  So you’re calling me a liar, John?

  You were a liar before you came out of Mom.

  I’ll let that one pass. Now, John, for the last time, I’m telling you that I never slept with Irene. Do you believe me or not?

  Forget it, said John. We can have this out after Mom—after Mom’s better. We can’t stress out Mom.

  No, I’m not going to forget it, Tyler said. We’re going to have this one out right now. Either you believe me or you don’t. If you believe me you’ve got to stop making those remarks, because I can’t tolerate them anymore. If you don’t believe me, John, then I guess I, uh, I don’t want to see you.

  Is that a promise? I should be so lucky.

  We can work out Mom’s care so that we don’t have to meet.

  You feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you, shithead?

  Okay, John, one week off, one week on. I’ll take the rest of this week being on call for Mom. If she needs me, I’ll come up. You take next week. She’ll like it better that way. It’s not good for her to see us—

  Tell me about it.

  So, will that fit into your schedule?

  John made an illegal U-turn. —Let me drive you back to the house then, Hank, he said. You can get in your car and go back to the city right now. I’ll call you if there’s an emergency.

  Oh, so you’ll take the rest of this week then?

  That’s right. I’m already up here, and unlike you, some people have to work.

  Let me give you some money for Mom’s groceries, said Tyler. Is forty bucks enough?

  You can keep your goddamned stinking money, said John. Let’s make it Monday to Sunday. That way we each get a weekend.

  Sure, John.

  And another thing. Don’t let me catch you down at Irene’s grave anymore.

  Tyler said nothing, but he reddened with rage.

  Did you hear me?

  I heard you, John. Why don’t you let me out here? It’s only a few blocks to Mom’s house. I’d really rather walk it.

  John accelerated. He was doing almost fifty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. He went through a red light. His face was the color of brick. Tyler felt extremely hot, and there was a hurtful tightness inside his ribs.

  I said, did you hear me?

  Cemeteries are public places, John, said Tyler with a deliberately goading laugh, and watched John grip the wheel harder with his right hand while his left hand became a fist and began to swing toward him as John’s face turned away from the road, and just then there came a yowling of horns and John’s eyes flicked rapidly back to the view ahead; they’d just driven through an intersection, and a police car was already coming with full siren.

  You don’t want to hit me now, John, said Tyler. Not in view of a cop. That wouldn’t be good for your career.

  John pulled over.

  Not here, John, said Tyler. This is a bus zone.

  He opened the passenger door and leaped out. John, murderous-eyed, began to reach toward him, so Tyler slammed the door on his hand. He heard his brother scream with pain, and instantly his gloating, furious joy became anguish.

  | 125 |

  O George Eliot with your garden parties, formal dinners, long leisurely meetings, family discussions; O Dostoyevsky (beloved of Mrs. Tyler) with your glittering-eyed train-companions listening to each other’s life stories, your wretched, teeming flats inhabited by souls intoxicated by quarreling and religion; I ask you, where have all the interlocutors gone? For there are more people than ever; and more strange worlds in San Francisco, which does itself comprise a world, than can ever be plumbed! And yet Tyler cogitates alone, as does his brother. Is it television that’s done it? Or is there some other reason why people just don’t talk to each other anymore? Granted, Dan Smooth is eager to talk; he has a longing to defecate his soul’s excrement upon the consciousnesses of others; and Mr. Rapp and Mr. Singer will both likewise unburden themselves to John if they are in the mood; Celia yearns for John to communicate with her; Mrs. Tyler checks in regularly with both her sons; Irene, perhaps, seeks to explain something from beyond the grave; all the same, when I peer into the sky-blue screen of the computer on which I compose this, I see all the way down to San Francisco where Henry Tyler himself sits alone. And so many people, too! Old Chinese with bowed, capped heads, wearing jackets the color of smoke, passed slowly, occluding the gratinged streetwall as Tyler sat wearily inhaling the scent of green tea, and static distorted the white legs of television baseball players into wriggling shrimp. Less rudely than indifferently the red-jerseyed waiter set his dinner down. Snow peas, miniat
ure corn, and white chicken pieces shone with oil. Ten dollars. Outraged, he under-tipped. Although he had been to Chinatown with Irene, it force-fed him no sad associations, unlike all the worlds of coffee shops in Noe Valley, each with its own devotees and sidewalk benches, its courtyard cafés and restaurants, to several of which he had taken Irene, its liquor stores whose virtuously learned salesmen could unblinkingly explain the palate-differences between Caol Ila and Ardbeg; on those foggy, chilly summer days, women strode along rapidly with lowered heads; boys with boyfriends walked the dog. People were talking there; he was all wrong; there were no silences. A sudden rattle of a startled pigeon’s wings, and then a family gathering of smiling Chinese punctuated the day, above which the faux Jurassic terrariums of trees reflected in the watchful bay windows of two- and three-storey Victorians provided spurious greenery. A paramedic sat in his ambulance truck, the engine idling. He, or someone like him, had probably sat just like that while his colleagues brought Irene out.

  Tyler drove down to Capp Street, but there were no women on the corner. Maybe there’d been a sweep, or maybe it was merely too early.

  He drove to the Tenderloin and thought he saw Domino, but she disappeared into a hotel too quickly to be sure.

  He drove down to Mission Street and parked at Fifth. Then he began to stroll aimlessly. Inside the new Museum of Modern Art building, which was striped with smooth black and rough grey stone, there was a Frida Kahlo exhibit, and a bespectacled woman said rapidly to her companion: All of her portraits deal with her pain and suffering.

  This concept seemed to make the other woman very happy. —Go ahead, thought Tyler to himself. Go get empowered.

  I guess she’s the patron saint of women, a sour man was saying to his buddy. In this show they relate to her through their menstruations or something.

  Christ, he thought, I don’t know which of them is worse. Probably the guy, because he’s so obviously malicious, whereas Ms. Spectacles there is just a parrot. I guess I prefer parrots.

  Then suddenly he recollected Domino on the bed in the Tenderloin hotel room. She’d complained about something and he’d sarcastically replied that this heart bled. —Of course, it always bleeds around now, he’d said. It’s that time of the month. —He began to sweat with shame when he remembered, admitting to himself that he was as boorish as anyone. But then defiance stung him and he thought: Well, she deserved it. She was so humorless and shrill. She kept asking me if I was a misogynist. She kept . . .

  He went to the gift shop and bought his mother an exhibition catalogue.

  The sour man was at the gift shop also. He wasn’t buying anything, anything. Tyler saw him spitefully fold down the page of a book, while the other man grimaced with mirth. He kept saying unpleasant things about women. Tyler started hating him. He wanted to feel tolerance or even compassion for the man, because hatred on such grounds really constituted hatred for himself. Tyler might not actually be, as Domino had labeled him in her catholic hostility, a misogynist, but he confessed his grey and nasty edges. The encounter with John had left him in a state of anxious irritation; he was not himself. He had a friend in Noe Valley who’d embarked on a program of self-improvement through meditation. Tyler asked whether meditation would in and of itself induce serenity (he had in mind the feeling he experienced when he sat inside the Roxie movie theater with its smell of stale popcorn, waiting for the commencement of some comfortingly ancient print of a European film about other people’s problems, with subtitles which would tersely recapitulate dialogue of a picturesque langorousness and sadness). The friend was of two minds about that. If one’s aim was to reach a higher spiritual level, the end result might be increased coherence, and thus perhaps decreased strain on the soul; but to get to that point, one would surely be required to rearrange oneself, which necessitated disequilibrium. It was obvious to Tyler that his relations with John were moving toward some permanent conclusion of honest mutual exposure. But what if that change were actually, as any superficial observer would conclude, a regression such as driving down the hill to Gough Street where it was low and dark with many weak stale lights? For that matter, one might propose as an example that same Roxie Theater, where he had once taken Irene to see “Queen of Hearts,” in hopes of holding her hand in the darkness. The movie had not yet begun. Tyler was already feeling serenity (mixed, to be sure, with pleasurable anticipation; he was hoping that Irene’s delicious palm might sweat against his at all the thrilling parts); however, some noisy boys with yarn in their long hair were sitting in the row ahead; and Irene, shocked, said to him: I’m just looking at those four people in front of me and they’re drinking hard liquor! —She was a little prudish; she could not enjoy herself after that. —Tyler’s friend had proposed that a graphic representation of travel from one spiritual level to another might well require many more than two axes, so that one might simultaneously be rising on one plane and sinking on another. The Gospels said that a seed could not flower until it had fallen into the earth and died. Tyler could not remember exactly how the parable had gone. He wished to know more about Christ, even if only to struggle against Him and clarify his own allegiance, which, as Dan Smooth had jeeringly insisted, might well be to the Canaanite idols. If he was satanic or ungodly or merely unbrotherly, wasn’t it worse to fog over the fact, pretending that he was still trying to be good? Although he still felt wretched whenever he recalled that hot afternoon in his mother’s living room with the reddish-brown blinds drawn against the sun and his mother asking whether he and Irene had betrayed John, his anguish contained a tincture, however pale, of relief. He had not obfuscated. He had quite simply and bluntly refused to answer her charges. It’s too late for that, he had said. No matter what he might fear or yearn for, month by month his existence was clarifying itself. The issue of Irene, rather than dissolving with Irene’s dead flesh, continually took on a more evident and permanent materiality. Irene no longer lay but stood, no, towered, between himself and his mother, between himself and John. Well, let it be so. Irene was the seed of Christ. She had died, and now she rose up bearing leaves and fruit like the grand old tree in his mother’s front yard. Tyler had not and would not contest anything. He would let all aspersions be. He would wait, and live, until the change within him was complete; then he’d know what to do.

  But he was afraid. And his was one of those natures which do not cower, but bristle at a threat. He scorned to reply to his mother or argue with John, but he could not help feeling an aching resentment which narrowed his eyes and ground tooth against tooth within his mouth. The sour man at the gift shop, who probably was unafflicted by awareness of Tyler’s very presence, was flipping through the catalogue now, calling Frida Kahlo a man-hater, a vagina-centered mediocrity, a once-a-month artist. To the sour man, it seemed, no woman had a brain, and Frida Kahlo’s paintbrush was one with the tongues of the ice-cream-licking girls in the bright bay window of Rory’s Twisted Scoop. And Tyler was incensed. The reason, of course, was that the whole world incensed him just then, but seeing that would have entailed seeing his own absurdity, so it merely seemed to him at that moment that any slighting nastiness directed toward femininity must insult Irene’s memory. He craved Irene. Closing his eyes, he saw her once again. She had lost a little weight since her marriage and her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones so that she resembled a pale, debauched skull. Round and round, round and round. He had nowhere to go.

  I see you’re actually buying that catalogue, the sour man said to him.

  I’m a misogynist, Tyler said. I’m just buying it to jerk off to.

  The sour man, uncertain whether Tyler was on his side or instead a sarcastic enemy, remained silent. The sour man’s friend, more astute, glared.

  The salesgirl took the catalogue out of Tyler’s hand to scan it through the red laser eye-beam beside the register and said: I heard what you said.

  I’m evil, Tyler replied. But I do have enough money to pay for that. Yep, I’m a paying customer. I’m an American.

/>   I think you’re disgusting.

  Tyler could hear the sniggers of the two diabolical men beside him. He had struck a blow against feminism. He had come out on the side of Satan. They were sure that he was one of them now.

  He turned around and said to them: I bear the Mark of Cain.

  Then again they fell into a baffled silence.

  You’re sick, said the salesgirl.

  It was a clammy summer’s night in the Marina, lights frozen at the bases of harbor-masts. He went up Buchanan Street, and across from the Safeway met a bright window offering row upon row of massage chairs in an empty room. Near a dessert shop—yes, almost within reach of the fragrance of chocolate and steamed milk—he spied another parking garage, now closed, and peered down a long curvy greasy tunnel of light which passed beneath a round mirror, different only in scale from what the dentist always put in his mouth; then a right turn put an end to his seeing. The Queen could be there now; she could be anywhere. But no—why would she be here? This place was too far from the humid commerce she fed on. He sighed and trudged on, a little cold. Farther up the street, at Bay, a store of telescopes on tripods and binoculars in narrow glass shelves on the wall caught his attention; it had probably been closed for a good four or five hours now. Did John ever shop here? Tyler turned onto Bay and stood beneath the greenish foggy sky, on his left white flowers so bright and lovely and uncruel.

  | 126 |

  Oh, what a lovely catalogue! his mother said. Thank you, Henry. It looks as if it does full justice to the original. The colors are beautiful. What do you think of Frida Kahlo’s work?

  I think it’s pretty good, but not as good as Diego Rivera’s, he said. I respect her.

  It’s really quite moving, don’t you think?

  Yes, I do, he said.

  That was really thoughtful of you, his mother said. What a treasure.

  Well, I’m glad you like it. How are you feeling?

  A little weak, but not so . . . Henry, where’s John? I was under the impression that you were coming up with John . . .