It was his father who had destroyed the collective family pleasure of watching “The Joy of Painting” together by drunkenly denouncing Bob Ross as a sell-out.
“It just really gets to me how mediocrity is rewarded again and again in this country while true artists go hungry in the streets. I mean, this guy must be a zillionaire, and just look at the crap he’s making!”
“Don’t you have to have ideals before you can sell out, dad?”
“He had ideals, this fucker, don’t think he didn’t. Of course he did! Everybody does. And now look at him. Making it harder on the rest of us.”
“How is he making it harder on you?”
“Think I wouldn’t sell out in a second if I could? In a second! But I can’t. I’m not selling widgets here. I can’t just crank it out—it’s got to mean something to me. It’s got to come from somewhere.”
“Well Bobby thinks he’s a very nice man. Bob Ross likes little animals like Bobby, and Bob Ross loves everybody in America. And he’s been dead for ten years.”
“Let me tell you something, Bobby. I don’t care if he’s dead. Bob Ross is a cunt. He’s a rich, pandering, talentless hack cunt.”
Nobody wanted to hear him say that word again, so they all went back to watching the show in chastened silence, but after that day making fun of Bob Ross seemed to have lost some of its luster, and they’d stopped watching the show en famille.
Bob Ross was putting the finishing touches on his landscape, using a palette knife to scrape a layer of snow down the mountainside. Wes’s mother took his hand in hers. It was always a defining moment of any show when Bob Ross applied the snow; with nothing but a knife, some white paint and a few spare sweeps of his hand, he brought the entire composition into three dimensions, creating boulders and crevasses and shadows and arcing slopes where a moment earlier there had been nothing but flat planes of color. His father was right—it was sleight of hand, nothing more—but irresistible for all that. Wes could definitely sympathize with anyone who’d rather watch and listen to Bob Ross than deal with reality. Wes’s mother squeezed his hand, and he looked down at her and smiled warmly.
“Pudding.”
“Oh yeah. Be right back.”
Nora was in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator and peeling the plastic off a mozzarella stick. She was wearing the stringy blue wig that they had bought Crispy for Halloween, but which had made Crispy look so reduced and defeated that no one had been able to bear seeing her in it. Nora smiled at Wes shyly, to which he responded with a deliberate glare, and the smile vanished. Unlike the other rooms of the house that faced the back, the kitchen had no curtains or blinds on the window, and the light from the yard, with no leaves on the tree to filter it, was unpleasantly bright and yet dead and thin at the same time. Wes pushed past Nora and slid the lower sash open with casual brutality.
“It’s too hot in here.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. Where’s Crisp?”
“I think she’s with dad. What’s wrong?”
“You sure you walked her?”
“I didn’t walk her. You asked, and I told you I didn’t walk her.”
“Anything else you didn’t do?”
“What didn’t I do?”
“Mom’s pudding? Like you said? Is it too fucking much around here to . . . ? Oh, fuck it. Just give me a fucking pudding. I’ll do it.”
Nora was already crying copiously by the time she reached the sink, her eyebrows reddening as the wig slipped partially down one side of her head. She reached into the sink.
“I did give it to her. Here’s the spoon, see? Here’s the cup, see? I told you.” She held up a dirty spoon, a few grains of white rice and a film of dried cream still clinging to it. “See? See? See?”
Wes’s anger instantly collapsed in on itself. Nora always looked five years younger when she cried; even as a helpless baby, her eyebrows had reddened just like that when Wes startled her with a sudden noise, such as deliberately dropping a fork on the metal tray of her high chair or sneaking up and clapping his hands just behind her head of silky blonde curls. What was worse, he knew that the moment he offered her words of regret and a gesture of comfort, she would accept it gratefully, without hesitation, and with all her great heart, as she had done as a baby. This was now twice in one day—in one morning—that he had made her cry, and the second time he had had to take her in his arms to staunch her tears. She was a better person than Wes would ever be, but he wasn’t sure how many more times he could get away with it before it stopped working.
“She told me you didn’t, Cookie. I’m sorry.”
“She doesn’t remember, Wes. She forgets everything.”
“I know, I know. I’m truly sorry.”
“Nyeh.”
“Is that ‘Nyeh, I forgive you’ or ‘Nyeh, you’re an asshole?’”
She giggled into his T-shirt but didn’t answer.
“Tell you what. I know you’re bored. Give me a little time—let me take this up to mom and get started on my homework—and I’ll take you out later.”
“Where will you take me?”
“Dog run?”
“Nyeh.”
“Museum?”
“Nyeh.”
“Movie?”
“What movie?”
“Taxi to the Dark Side?”
“Nyeh.”
“Your choice. Nothing too girlie. And walk the dog, please.”
“Nyeh.”
Wes rinsed the soiled spoon in the sink, shook off the excess water, and retrieved an individual-portion cup of rice pudding from the fridge. He took the stairs on his tiptoes, three steps at a time, and again paused outside his mother’s door before tapping. This time he entered without waiting. Bob Ross had started a new painting, a subdued forest scene with a winding path, shrubbery in full bloom, and a sunlit clearing just around the bend, but Wes’s mother seemed to have fallen asleep. Wes was not entirely sure, as she had not moved and she often closed her eyes even when she was awake, but there was something about the rhythm of her breathing that told him so. Just to be sure, he allowed the bowl of the spoon to make a light ping as he placed it on the glass tabletop. Her eyes opened momentarily then closed again. Wes could see them moving beneath the pinkish lids, blindly looking for something, as she licked her lips. She looked just like a lizard lazing on a rock, but in the darkened room the resemblance took on a sinister cast.
Occasionally Wes stumbled into wondering what things would be like when his mother was gone. When his mother was dead. Usually, he was able to suppress these thoughts, reminding himself that her disease was not fatal in itself, and that even in her weakened state she could easily survive another bout or two of pneumonia, as she had survived the last. But every so often the doubts would sneak in when he wasn’t paying attention and entertain themselves in his head, bouncing off each other and jockeying for dominance before he caught them and shut them down. And then, too, especially when he was too tired, fed up or depressed, he sometimes gave them free rein and listened, with a kind of detached, horrified fascination, to what they had to say. The first thing that would happen, without doubt, is that his father would move back into the master bedroom. All this—the sling, the carpeting, the heavy drapes, the television, the hospital bed—would go. And although his father never talked about it, Wes knew that, despite her inheritance and the medical insurance, his mother’s illness weighed heavy on the family finances, so when she died there would be money to pay for the redecoration. Wes was as sure as he could be that his father would want to make a new start. The kitchen would be the first thing to go—his dad was obsessed with the plans for the new kitchen, with its under-the-counter Sub-Zero freezer and six-burner Wolf cooking range—but the bedroom would come next, and there would be nothing left to remind anyone that she had spent years as a dying prisoner here. But he also knew that whenever he passed on the landing and heard the clicking of laptop keys instead of Bob Ross’s so
othing murmur, it wouldn’t make any difference. This room would always be haunted, even if his father never sensed it. As for Nora, his mother’s death would be a disaster. Already, Nora clung to the wreckage like a shipwreck victim hanging on to a floating timber, desperate to convince herself that it would keep her afloat indefinitely. It meant everything to Nora, being able to go to her mother, even when she was half incoherent from painkillers for her bedsores or had soiled the bed, and read to her or watch “Gossip Girl” together, or just lie by her side and suck her thumb. She treated her mother the way a lonely child treats her favorite doll, skilled at convincing herself that she was an equal partner in the conversation, that she could lift her own cup, that she could hear and respond to her worries and concerns. What would Nora do when all that was gone? What were the chances that their father would man-up and step in? Wes wanted to believe that he himself could make up some of the shortfall, at least until Nora was old enough to take responsibility for her own emotional welfare, but he knew that he would be at best a woefully inadequate substitute. And then what would happen? Would Nora just drift away? Would she start taking drugs, flunking school, sleeping around? Would she shut down, become remote and joyless and unreachable, or would she take all her wit and sparkle and use them as shields—the funny girl who always has a clever putdown for everything and a joke for every occasion, even the most intimate—so that Wes would have to stand by and watch that beautiful smile of hers stretch and twist itself into a hideous mask?
But even worse than lying around worrying about how everything would collapse after his mother’s death were the moments when Wes caught himself speculating about the ways in which life would become better, easier, less encumbered. Wes always squelched these thoughts the moment he found himself entertaining them, and was left with the nauseating stench of self-loathing, but it would be too late. The images conjured up in these fantasies remained, colorful and alive, to taunt him whenever he least expected it. It was the smallest inconveniences, rather than the cosmic implications, that he imagined he would be most grateful to be rid of. No more rice pudding in the refrigerator, no more spoon feedings, no more having to watch her try to feed herself, barely able to grip the spoon as it rode trembling to her dry lips and missed, so that she would then have to scrape the food off her cheeks or chin into a mouth sucking and gaping like a sea worm. No more late-night wake-up calls, no more adult diapers, no more waiting at the bathroom door having to listen to her grunts and whimpers. No more having to roll her over and wipe the shit smears off her lower back with a wet washcloth. No more rushing home on the weekends with that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that one of her vital supplies had run out during the day. No more sitting at her side dutifully telling her about his day when she was hardly aware of his presence, when he knew full well she was a thousand miles away. No more sneaking past her bedroom like a thief whenever he needed a moment to himself, and no more fretting, every time he took a moment for himself, that he was being selfish and inconsiderate. No more being embarrassed to bring friends home after school, and no more feeling ashamed and worthless for being embarrassed. No more hating himself for resenting her. No more being angry all the time, no more taking it out on Nora. No more feeling like a shallow, egocentric brute every time, despite all his efforts not to, he slipped into little dreams of freedom. No more pretending, to himself and to Nora, that she wasn’t going to die, and that it wouldn’t be a relief to everyone concerned, herself included, when she did. No More.
Wes crept from the room and closed the door with infinite care.
From the landing, Wes could hear the iPhone calling to him. He went into his room and was somehow surprised to find it just as he had left it, waiting like a faithful dog in its nest of dirty clothes. He threw himself down on the bed, intending to ignore it, but it was insistent and would not rest until he acknowledged its call. He rolled over and retrieved it from the floor. A text message, a voice message and an email. The text—“pls call”—was from Lucy. The email was from James: “Today you are a man, my son.” The voice mail was from Delia; her cell number was programmed into the phone, the call-back button said “Delia.” As Wes stared at the name his heart began to race and he felt his cheeks grow hot, and the letters on the display seemed to ripple and pulse. He pressed the delete button and dropped the phone to the floor.
Like the kitchen, the bedroom was now flooded with light that felt like a thin, noxious vapor. It was a wintery light, but it was a long way to winter; the days were still too long, too warm, too inviting. Wes longed for the winter, when it was safe to shut oneself away. He loved waking up and going to school and coming home in the dark, the privacy of walking alone in a twilit street in the cold, the lonely romance of winter sounds—wind whisking at the bare tree branches, dry leaves scudding along an unswept sidewalk, the muffling that descends before a snowfall. What he hated was the summer, things that were bright and open and shadowless. He hated waking up in the sunlight, the skimpy clothes, the endless hazy twilights that somehow made you feel less than wholesome if you wanted to crawl into bed with a book while there was still a warm, pastel glow in the sky. He hated the way the Village streets remained crowded deep into the evening with people wandering around aimlessly in cargo shorts and sports bras, joylessly anticipating their first drink, a walk along the river with the fam, some stupid night on the town, any number of dismal prefabricated pleasures. Summer turned every New Yorker into a Disneyland vacationer; unforgivably, it blurred the distinctions between city-dwellers and suburbanites—distinctions which Wes felt should be maintained crisp and unmistakable at all times.
Wes thought of Brave New World, a back-up candidate for his European lit paper, and the deep sense of kinship he’d felt with Helmholtz Watson as he rejoiced at being exiled to the Falklands. Helmholtz had been offered his choice of any island in the world—Hawaii, Tahiti, the Caribbean—but he asked to be sent somewhere with bad weather, somewhere with lots of wind and storms, just as Wes would have. Until that moment, Brave New World, even with its abundance of casual sex for people of all ages, had seemed to Wes to be the most idiotic of books. But it had been almost redeemed by Helmholtz’s request. A place where you could spend all winter holed up with your books, your notebooks, your thoughts. Wes suspected that this was not a normal desire for a seventeen-year old, but he couldn’t help himself. All he wanted was to be boxed in by howling winds and lowering skies in every shade of grey. For the same reason, whenever he played Risk with Nora he always made Kamchatka his home base and defended it to the end. It would help, he supposed, to have somebody, some body, pale-skinned and red-haired like Delia, to have sex with at odd hours, but then again that could just as easily be a liability, in the event that such a body turned out to have needs of its own. If he were ever to be a serious writer, Wes reasoned, he would have to learn to embrace solitude and silence, though he did not suppose that he would suffer from loneliness. All he’d ever wanted, as far back as he could remember, was to be left alone, like Helmholtz, where the mind can expand to fill the vast silence, where a man can find peace from chatter and temptation and opinion—a one-room stone cottage with small leaded windows and a large fireplace, glacial run-off to bathe in, unpolluted, unobstructed views for the eye to linger upon in those blank moments before inspiration strikes. In the morning, black coffee from a moka pot, and a solid wedge of black bread spread thick with creamery butter and lingonberry jam. At night, a roaring fire, a mutton chop charred in the brazier, a peaty single malt, a pipe, maybe an old radio for the dramas and sports scores. Where, Wes wondered, on that rocky volcanic plain would he find a steady supply of firewood? Or coffee, whiskey, tobacco, mutton? Helmholtz, because he was technically a ward of the state, would have all these delivered to him, free of charge, and maybe a girl every so often, because those people were so keen on the pacifying effects of extremely impersonal and uninhibited sexual encounters. But Wes would have to be realistic if he were to survive and work—after all, writers in the
real world do not have the luxury of being exiled by benevolent dictatorships, they have to survive by their own wits. Either you find a way to live on the cheap, or you sell yourself into lifelong drudgery and compromise in advertising or academia. Wes planned to pull a Helmholtz, but he thought that it might be better to start off somewhere more temperate to begin with, until he had honed his survival skills. Somewhere like Newfoundland or the highlands of Scotland, maybe, where he could trap grouse and grow winter barley and drive into the village once a week for supplies and a pint of bitter, whatever that was, at the local pub. And where he could roam the scented gorse in rubber boots with a fowling piece on his hip and a brown lab at his heels. But even then, where was he to get the money for rent, the car, the dog, the shotgun, the boots? How long would he have to work in the fallen world so that he could escape it? His father, after all, had pandered his entire life to a similar dream, and just look at where that had gotten him: loveless marriage, indifferent kids, a job he hated, exile to the basement. He couldn’t even afford to live in a place of his own, which would have suited everybody. It was no wonder he was such a loser. Wes was absolutely determined to avoid his dad’s fate, to foreswear all the entanglements—partly because it wasn’t so hard to see himself behaving exactly as his father behaved if he were in the same predicament—but it all seemed so impossibly far away, impossible to imagine maintaining the necessary purity of soul and thought while he waited and plotted his getaway.
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