“About three minutes, I think.” Wes referred to the cookbook, which was splayed open to the appropriate page. “Three to five minutes.”
Lucy consulted her watch, a surprisingly childlike Swatch with stars on the face and some sort of animal, a cat or a raccoon dressed like a superhero, on the strap. It was an ambiguous gesture that successfully suggested that she was both timing the sweetbread and running out of patience. “But what does ‘three to five minutes’ really mean? Is it three minutes that feel like five when you’re bored? If there’s 120 seconds between three minutes and five minutes, does it actually have 120 different meanings?”
She was making fun of him, and Wes liked that, he liked it a lot. Delia never made fun of him, and rarely made fun of anyone else for that matter, and Wes harbored the suspicion that people who forebear from mocking you secretly hold you in contempt. Of course, he understood that you can also make fun of those whom you hold in the highest contempt, but they are usually politicians or family members. He did not feel for one instant that Lucy held him in any kind of contempt, but the sensation of being caught dead in the crosshairs of someone who may be genuinely fond of you and might actually wish you well was delicious and dizzying, and Wes paused in the midst of whatever it was that he was trying to do to fix her with a frank gaze of admiration. At the same time, he was also aware that smiling at her warmly and gazing at her were ways of masking his failure to come up with a spontaneous, witty retort. Instead, he performed a gesture in her general direction, half-nod, half-bow, that was meant to convey humble recognition of a superior intellect momentarily bested. It was one in a lexicon of semaphoric markers that he had perfected in Delia’s company, and had served him well in a variety of delicate situations. They returned to watching the pot boil, and shortly thereafter Lucy looked at her watch and announced the passage of three to five minutes. Wes donned the glove and walked the saucepan to the sink, where he removed the lid and subjected the sweetbread to a stream of cold water from the faucet.
Again, Lucy stood at his side and closely followed his performance. Now, of course, her proximity had an entirely different flavor, but still she was an odd person, the way she hung about him yet forcefully resisted being patronized. Wes was tempted to feel flattered, yet he was so baffled by her that he wasn’t sure that that was an appropriate reaction, and now a sort of sense memory returned to him from the evening before, when he had been equally confused by the way she had behaved aggressively at junctures where others might have demurred, and passively just when he had expected her to demonstrate leadership. Again, he could not quite fix a visual recall to it; it remained a sort of vague, free-floating insight, like a familiar quotation from a book you had forgotten that you’d read.
The sweetbread had been transformed by its poaching into a more compact, paler and altogether more rubbery version of itself, the world’s ugliest dog toy. The surface had been cooled by the tap water, but Wes could still feel a weak warmth pulsing from within. The slimy, stringy parts—what the cookbook referred to as “connective membranes”—were now rubbery, amorphic appendages, while the unsightly bulges appeared to have been inflated from within, like flawed inner tubes. The whole thing had turned a kind of autopsy gray. Wes cradled the mass in his two upturned palms, holding it low in the sink as if it might try to escape.
“That doesn’t look very crispy to me, Wes.”
“It’s not cooked yet. I still have to press it and fry it.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“Hand me those scissors, please.”
Wes trimmed off the fat and membranes, and placed the sweetbread between two clean plates.
“We need something heavy to weigh them down. Try the fridge.”
“How about a quart of milk?”
“Not heavy enough.”
Wes scrounged through the cupboards, but the pickings were slim. There were a few cans of chickpeas, a bag of French green lentils, and a liter of extra-virgin olive oil from Sicily, which all together might just do the trick, but it would all somehow have to be balanced in a pyramid atop the wobbly organ. There was nothing else would do the trick. Wes glanced around the room helplessly. The dog staggered in, attracted by the smell of boiling offal, and Lucy squatted down and scratched her between the ears.
“Who’s this?”
“That’s Crispy.”
“How funny. She’s really sweet.”
“Come with me. I’ve got an idea.” Wes led Lucy from the kitchen, down the stairs to the garden apartment, through the French doors and out into the back yard, where his father, in shorts and sagging white tee shirt, looked up from his laptop at the old school desk under the sycamore, smiled and waved.
“Hello again. Found the Wes-man, I see.”
“Yes.”
“Dad, this is Lucy.”
“Lucy and I already met.”
“We’re doing some school work together.”
“Wes, I happen to know that Lucy is not in your grade.”
“I’m tutoring her.”
“Okay. What can I do for you two?”
“Nothing. We need some bricks.”
“What for?”
“Oh for whatever. Come on, Lucy.”
Wes pushed past his father and the tree to a heap of old building materials that had once been a brick oven meant for bread and pizzas, or had nearly been until family inertia and lack of interest had brought construction to a halt. The top of the dome had collapsed, and a pile of loose bricks was conveniently at hand through the arched door. Wes brushed away some cobwebs, which clung to his fingers, and reached in.
“Grab two. That should be enough.”
As they turned back towards the house, burdens in hand, Wes paused at a lyrical call and chatter, and looked up through the branches of the sycamore. It took him a while, but finally he spotted the bird about half-way up the tree, on an outer bough.
“What is it?”
“An oriole, a male. See the orange belly? It’s late in the year for him to be hanging around. That’s global warming for you.”
“You study birds?”
“Not really. I just like to know what’s going on in my neighborhood.”
Back in the kitchen, the bricks stacked neatly on the plate, two on two, and the sweetbread compressed with a satisfying exhalation. Wes returned them to the refrigerator and wiped his soiled hands on his jeans with a sigh. Crispy, who had stayed behind to keep guard, scrambled to her feet and wagged her tail in tentative expectation.
“I suppose I should walk her. Wanna come?”
“Honestly? I’d rather just hang, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh well, sure. I can walk her later. Let’s go up to my room.”
Lucy led the way up the stairs, and Wes found his eyes level with her ass, tightly clad and well defined by her jeans, though partially concealed by the tails of her shirt. He wondered if she could sense the delicacy with which he averted his eyes, or whether she would appreciate it if she could. Without actually looking at it, he tried to remember what it looked like, naked, but found nothing. Was it possible that he had not looked at it the night before, or even seen it? Was it possible that he had not paid it its due attention? Well, yes, he was forced to acknowledge, it was perfectly possible, given the attention he would have lavished on all those parts of her that he assumed other teenage boys would overlook and which, by making them the subject of tender caresses and light-as-air butterfly kisses, would earn him the admiration and gratitude of someone unused to such mature restraint and thoughtful generosity. He couldn’t actually remember doing any of these things, but he had imagined it often enough to assume that he had, in fact, drawn concentric circles with his fingertips on her lower back, or kissed her behind the knees, or licked her armpits, or other things that girls would enjoy but never get from most boys. It was what separated boys from men, actually; Wes wouldn’t have dreamed of grabbing her ass, or rubbing his face between her tits, or pounding at her like a jackhammer. Wasn’t
she here, now, at least in part because he had treated her like a woman, and not like an object? But still, as the tail of Lucy’s shirt danced before him, he found himself wishing that he had taken a moment to explore the more obvious bits as well. It was a little like going to view the Mona Lisa and only looking at the landscape in the background. At the top of the stairs, Lucy turned and questioned Wes with a look, and he put his finger to his lips, made the universal gesture to indicate someone asleep, and pointed straight up. She tiptoed silently past his mother’s door.
In Wes’s room, Lucy made a beeline for the bed and flopped down onto it, her ankles dangling over the edge and back propped against the wall, as if she had been doing so her entire life. Wes went straight to his desk, where he grabbed the moleskin-bound daybook and a pen and began to enter the Fitzgerald line before he forgot it.
“What are you doing?”
“I keep my favorite quotes in here.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.” He tossed it to her across the room, and she caught it flat-handed. He watched her leaf through the notebook calmly, her eyes lowered, abstractedly twisting her ponytail around the fingers of her left hand.
“That’s a lot of quotes. How long have you been doing this?”
“I don’t know—four, five years?”
“I like this one: ‘I cannot accept myself as I am but, ultimately, I am resigned to accepting this inability to accept myself as I am.’ Is that you?”
“It’s a British writer named Geoff Dyer.”
“I mean, did you put it down because it reminds you of yourself?”
“I don’t think so. It was a while ago, but I think I put it down as a warning to myself not to become like my dad.”
“What’s wrong with your dad? He seems nice to me.”
“He’s not cruel or anything. He’s just sort of weak and . . . lost. He had this one moment of glory twenty-five years ago and he can’t get over it. I guess things didn’t happen the way he planned, but he can’t move on. He’s been working on the same book for twenty years, I think, but he’ll never finish it. It’s pretty pathetic actually.”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t sound so terrible to me. Human frailty and all that.”
“You sound like Delia.”
“I do?”
“Anyway, he and my mom, they’re not, like . . . together. He only lives here ‘cause he can’t afford his own place. And to ‘take care’ of me and my sister, quote unquote.”
“That’s weird.”
“No kidding. Especially when he’s got some grad chick staying the night to finish her homework.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“Yeah. Great role model for his daughter.”
“That’s fucked up. It’s kind of funny, you following in his footsteps and all. I’d have thought the last thing you’d want to be is a writer.”
“What makes you think I’m going to be a writer?”
“Just look at these quotes. ‘A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.’ Or this one: ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale.’ Practically every single one is about writing. I mean, if you’re so worried about becoming like your dad, shouldn’t you be a lawyer or a doctor or something?”
“Sometimes I think that’s all I ever think about. Think of all the times you’ve heard your friends say that they never want to turn out like their parents, right? Now don’t you think that must have been the same things their parents said about their own parents, and yet the world is still just as filled with people doing the same old shit? Somewhere along the line, everywhere and at every moment, there must be a lot of people in the process of becoming the very thing they swore they would never become. Obviously, you think it will never happen to you, but what’s the trick to it? I mean, I always wondered why some people react to their parents by becoming them, and others react by becoming the opposite.”
“So all you have to do is figure out what’s the exact opposite of your dad, and become that?”
“See, I’m not so sure anymore, it could be too late for me already. I mean, I have all these fantasies about escaping to some quiet, isolated place where I can be alone to think and write, you know? Just figure out who I am, like D.H. Lawrence or someone. But then at some point I realized that I’ve heard it all before. Maybe it’s my father who wants to run away and not me. I think, shit, even my own feelings are borrowed from someone else. What do you do when you can’t even trust your own desires? Maybe I don’t want these things I think I want at all.”
“‘To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.’ Marcus Aurelius.”
“Smart guy.”
“You’re a smart guy, too. You’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah, well.”
Wes thought of Brave New World, of the hateful Bernard Marx and how hard he had tried to seduce Lenina Crowne, when she didn’t need or want to be seduced. Bernard could have had her anytime he wished for the price of a game of obstacle golf, or less, but he had insisted on making a whole, dismal show of it, to force his dishonest morality down her throat before he fucked her just like anyone else would have. Lenina had no use for any of that—she just wanted what she wanted, for better or for worse. It occurred to Wes that Lucy was a little like that—not about sex, and certainly not stupid or conventional like Lenina, but she was someone who didn’t seem to need to be seduced in any way, she would have no use for pretension and would not pander to someone’s insecurities. Wes didn’t know why he should sense this about her, since he barely knew her, but there was something about the way she had smiled at him when she’d called him a smart guy that was not at all about encouraging him, or bolstering a fragile ego, or flattery, but that merely urged him to acknowledge something of which he was already well aware. Well it was true, for all his faults he did know himself to be smart, sometimes, about certain things, but it was very easy for some people to make him forget that. Lucy had not as yet so much as hinted at why she’d been so insistent on seeing him, but Wes was beginning to get the idea. He heard the bell ring in his mother’s room.
“That’s my mom. She probably needs my help. I won’t be long.”
“Can I meet her?”
“You want to meet my mom?”
“Sure, why not?”
“She’s pretty sick. I’m not sure it’d be much fun for you.”
“To the wise, fun is a problem; to the fool, a solution.”
“Okay then. Let’s go.”
Even as he stepped into the sick room, with Lucy close behind, Wes saw it as if for the first time, the impression it must make on a stranger—the gloom, the slightly offensive if indefinable odor, the hulking gun-metal scaffolding over the bed, the whispered intimacies of PBS, the yellow scarecrow enthroned in her sanctum—and he decided that, all in all, it wasn’t actually that bad. If you described it in a book, you could amp up the hyperbole and make it pretty Dickensian, but the fact was, given his mother’s dire condition and the general household dilapidation, it could be a lot worse, or so Wes thought. Maybe it was impossible for him to see it through truly fresh eyes, but it struck him now as just barely more seedy and oppressive than the rest of the house and, by extension, than Wes himself. The smell for now was balanced, precariously, in favor of bleached cotton over stale urine; the carpet was worn but neither dank nor dusty; the window treatments were closed but hardly Havershamian; the muted gargle of Bob Ross’s patter settled over the furnishings like a fine mist of scented fog; and his mother herself wore a sincere if fragile attempt at a smile over the lacy collar of her housecoat. It was a place you could bring a school friend, at least a certain kind of school friend, with some confidence of eliciting pity, compassion even, without dread or revulsion. Delia had never been in this room or met his mother.
“Mom, this is my friend Lucy. Do you mind if she comes in to say hi?”
“Come in, come in Lucy. A little closer, sweetie, please.”
Lucy approached th
e bed and without hesitation grasped Wes’s mom’s outstretched hand and looked her straight in the eye—her one good eye, which was no longer much good.
“You’re so young, my goodness.”
“Yes I am. I’m sixteen.”
“I thought you were younger. Are you and Leslie classmates?”
“He’s a grade above me. What are you watching?”
“Bob Ross. Have you ever seen him?”
“I’ve never even heard of him. Is it good?”
“I watch him all the time. I don’t have much patience for anything else. Would you like to watch?”
“Sure.”
Lucy sat on the edge of the bed and twisted so that she could watch Bob Ross paint a cabin in the northern woods without turning her back on Wes’s mother. The two of them watched the television, during which Bob Ross proved his worth by saying “It’s your world” twice in the space of three minutes. Wes watched Lucy, the way she was instantly absorbed by the show, her face twitching and scrunching in bafflement. At first, Wes thought she might be putting it on for his benefit, the way children open their eyes wide and perform surprise and delight upon opening a disappointing present, but if it was an act it was a very polished one. If there had ever been any truth to the rumors of her precocious promiscuity, she certainly wasn’t living up to them tonight: Natasha at the piano could not have been more childlike and unaware. Just as this thought crossed Wes’s mind, Lucy turned towards him with a vaguely wicked smile on her face and said, “What a freak.”
“What did Lucy say?”
“She said Bob Ross is a freak.”
“She’s right. He is a total freak. But right now I need your help, Leslie.”
“Okay mom. Why don’t you go back to my room, Lucy? I’ll be up in a sec.”
Lucy stood and squeezed Wes’s mom’s hand. “It was very nice to meet you, ma’am. And I love Bob Ross. He could be a real cult icon.”
“My name is Marion.”
“Goodbye, Marion. Thanks again.”
When Lucy was gone, Wes moved to the far side of the bed, pulled back the counterpane and sheets, and leaned down to squeeze his arm behind his mother’s back and around her waist. The smell of urine was stronger at this proximity, but not overpowering, which meant that she had not had an accident but merely a few minor lapses, probably in her sleep. That, too, was a good sign that augured absolutely nothing. With his free hand, he pulled on her shins to pivot her body, then urged her forward until her bare feet touched the carpet.
Everything Happens Today Page 14