Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel

by Julia Pierpont

  “Hello, Jack.”

  The old man in the foyer, holding a canvas bag up high against his chest so that it seemed a schoolboy’s lunch, or a hat he’d taken off to be polite, this man lived here.

  “Hi,” Jack answered, the hard h hurling observable crumbs through the air. He stood and shook Charles’s hand. “Guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here.”

  “I suppose those are your longhorns outside the house.” Charles was a few years younger than Phyllis, seventy-two, seventy-three—Jack didn’t know exactly—but he seemed older than everyone, than Father Time. His questions weren’t questions but assessments he’d made, data to confirm, grimly. God could make a man that way. Put God behind a man and he thinks he knows everything.

  “I guess you’re surprised to see me,” Jack tried again.

  “Your mother phoned up at the church.”

  “Did she?” Jack imagined his mother upstairs, frenzied over her adult son, calling her new old husband, the Prophet. No, Charles, she’d have whispered, I have no idea what for. “I hope I’m not a bother to you two.”

  “It isn’t that, that you would be a bother.” If it were possible to have taut jowls, that was what Charles had. They were broad and smooth, like Droopy Dog’s. His skin was pink and looked impossible to shave, it was so dry. Skin that cut easily, would bleed a lot, if Charles weren’t drained already.

  “Well, I’m sure you all have your routine that I’m upsetting.”

  “Suppose we sit down after dinner and have a talk.”

  Jack didn’t suppose he could say no.

  From the plain and spoon-shaped, Kay sifted out the kind that looked like fish, with wide-open eyes and painted scales. Also the feathered ones, hot pink and yellow, which felt soft skimming her cheek. (“Gross,” said Simon.) She’d been sitting, hunched, beside the cooler at the front of the boat, cataloging Gary’s lures as they rode further into the blurred blue. She arranged them by type, by color, by which would make the best dangly earring.

  Simon pressed his finger against one of the silver barbs, umbrellaed into three points. “I thought we were using worms.”

  “Oh, yucko,” Deb said, yawning from under Gary’s hat. “Be glad we aren’t.”

  “Clouds are high today.” Gary, at the motor, had begun to broadcast mysterious things about the weather, casting his words across the water.

  Kay looked up, hands shading her eyes. It still looked like sky, but she could see how high clouds might be preferable to lower, hanging ones. Because, if it rained, the drops would not reach them, or would not hit so hard when they did. Or because high clouds left more room for the air, for it to blow around.

  —

  When the lines were cast there was nothing to do, the rods even rigged to hold themselves up over the water. Gary produced a barrel of pretzels, his fingers wide spinning off the ridged red lid, and they ate gathered around it, backs to the sun, heads huddled against the wind. Crunching into each other’s ears.

  Gulls shrilled. Kay searched the sky for them but brought her face down again quickly, to the deck and their passing shadows, swelling and shrinking and sharpening at the edges.

  “Baby, you okay?” Deb touched her shoulder. “She gets a little carsick.”

  “Yeah.” Simon laughed. “A little.”

  Kay leaned her head against the side of the boat. The water below kept up in little bursts, frothy and fizzing. The boat’s edge was hot in a good, painful way.

  —

  Kay had forgotten the last thing about fishing—that there would be fish. Mostly they caught bluefish and stripers, too small, that had to be pulled off the hook and thrown back. Then a splash as the fish rejoined the water and Gary cried, “Good as new!” which seemed unlikely.

  Simon got the real first catch. Shouted, “Holy crap holy crap!” At the other end of the line, the fish thrashed silver bodied through the air. In the excitement Ayn Rand fell overboard. She bobbed along for a few waves before disappearing under the boat. (“What a shame,” said Deb, faintly smiling.)

  Gary collected the fish with a long-handled net, the kind for butterflies or scooping leaves out of pools. “He really hit.” Captive, the fish held very still. Only when he took it in his hand did it come to life again, wanting to wag itself away.

  “Yeah!” Simon shouted. “I’m the man!” His face filled with the kind of thrilled alarm Kay had seen on him only during chase scenes and the bloodier parts of movies.

  “If he’d of hit any deeper, we’d have been cut off this way,” Gary was saying. Kay folded all the way forward and gripped her sneakers, wishing to close her ears. “Because those teeth are sharp.”

  “Sick,” Simon said. “Mom, isn’t that sick?”

  “Very impressed.”

  Suddenly Kay didn’t like Gary, how he looked cut from stone and how his toothbrush could have touched hers in the bathroom. How her mother looked in his hat. He went on, “Now, this would be a darker meat, which I like, but some people don’t because it’s oilier. Okay, now see where I’ve got him here? I’m just going to reach in there, all right? One, two—”

  “Siiiick.”

  —

  Kay was hooking and unhooking lures from her laces when Simon’s bottom half stepped into view. He flipped the lid to the cooler, pulling out the last of the soda cans two by two and lining them up along the boat floor as Gary planted the fish, white plastic bagged, into the watery ice.

  A few minutes later, she heard it. A crinkle. Might have been only the plastic bag settling. Then she heard it again, louder. Crinkle. Crinkle.

  For Kay, the day fell mostly away after that. The waves rolled the boat, and the boat rolled the cans, and parts of her rolled too. She had to pee. Simon had had to go earlier, and Gary had shown him where he could do it off the side. “The burden of our sex,” her mother said. Kay hadn’t been around boys peeing before, except maybe when they were small and she didn’t remember. Not like she saw anything, only the way Simon stood with his back to her and didn’t talk while he was going. Then Gary went too, and the sound of his pee stream was louder than her brother’s.

  She had to go so bad. The boat lurched. All of her lurched. The plastic bag crinkled. She wondered, because she hadn’t seen, which lure the fish had chosen, feeling it was more her fault if he’d liked her earring. She could hear him, twitching, through the quarter-inch space below the lifted lid.

  Nothing of the day would stay with her as much as that cooler and its faint but awful rustling sound. It was the sound she’d hear, the small coffin she’d think of, whenever she saw another of these blue-and-white coolers, packed with ice and glinting soda cans, at picnics, at field hockey, the whole next year at school.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. God our Father, thank you for your love and favor. Thank you for bringing a member of our family to share with us today.”

  In the restaurant, Jack was peeking. Or, no, Jack was plainly watching, his chin not even lowered, his hands folded on the table but not in prayer, not pressed at the palms like his mother’s or Charles’s. Here is the church; here is the steeple. Charles said the words, and they both were holding their eyes closed, not that Jack believed it. Who closes their eyes, really, in the middle of a restaurant—praying, as with kissing, who keeps their eyes really closed? Jack smiled, watching. Go ahead, call me out. Both of you, either of you, pretending not to see.

  “Bless our loved ones who are near us and keep safe those that are far away. May we always be mindful of the needs of others, for Jesus’s sake, amen.”

  Open the doors, and here are the people. Phyllis and Charles returned to the room, to the middle of the mostly empty Shining Star Tavern where his mother’s chief worldly concern had been getting a table.

  The restaurant was Charles’s idea, to save Phyllis from having to unwrap or defrost an extra meal. They took the Lincoln there, his stepfather driving, his mother on her special ass pillow, Jack in back like a little boy.

&nb
sp; “This is our son,” Phyllis said on the way in, addressing herself to the hostess, the waitress, the busboy, to everyone but the signed photographs on the walls, George Foreman and Walter Cronkite. The best use of family was having it in front of other people. Jack won them fewer points than a grandchild, and Wade, the seventeen-year-old kid who poured their water, didn’t bear much witness, but it was something.

  “They’ve redone the menu,” Phyllis told him when they were seated, flapping her heavy napkin out of its fleur-de-lis fold.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Redone the prices too.”

  His mother got her tonic with a garden salad, lots of pepper and dressing on the side. “And one of your chops,” she said, patting Charles on the hand. “I never eat enough to make it worth ordering my own. Just one of his chops, that’ll do me.”

  Jack got the ahi tuna, which came with wasabi molded into the shape of a leaf, outer Houston’s soft stab at the urbane. Charles’s chops turned out to be lamb, with sprigs of rosemary and a porcelain vat of electric-green jelly center plate. Phyllis made a show of choosing the smallest and most well-done piece of meat.

  “Falls off the bone. He likes ’em bloody. Don’t you, Charles?”

  “Still saying baa.”

  “Jackie, I don’t know how you eat that. I just cannot stand the smell of fish.”

  “It’s very good, Mother. Good for you too. You should try it.”

  “Jack, how’s work?”

  “Now, is that going to smell up everything?” his mother asked. “Because we don’t eat fish.”

  “You eat shrimp.”

  “I do not.”

  “Charles’s jambalaya.”

  “Tell us about the art world, Jack.”

  “That isn’t—that’s not fish. Is it, Charles? Shrimp’s not fish.”

  Jack wished he could order a drink, just a beer. Phyllis went through three sodas because what’s that they say, about old habits. She guzzled tonic like it was wine, and wasn’t she fooling herself with everything, not just the drink but the man, with Charles? Who the hell is this guy? Jack wanted to say. Who invited him. Simon’s first Christmas in Houston, the boy not yet two, Phyllis’s special friend had been an extra place setting at the table. The first time they said grace before dinner, the first time the holiday had seemed to have anything to do with Jesus.

  “Shrimp’s a crustacean,” Charles said now and nodded.

  “That’s right. It’s a prawn.” Phyllis tapped her glass with a long, ovaled nail.

  The drink is no drink and Charles is no John—Jack’s father, John. John Shanley wouldn’t know her now, the woman he’d married, she who’d bronzed poolside for hours, who’d held her liquor and herself in mink stoles. She who’d said shit under her breath and goddamn and who’d believed in, what? Not God. You traded in your silver Cadillac for a maroon town car and you let your anger atrophy, but it is not gone.

  “Jack, I believe you were about to tell us how work is going,” Charles said.

  “It’s all right. Don’t know how much you’ve followed.”

  “You tell us about it.” Charles dabbed a chop in mint jelly. “Any new developments?”

  “Here and there.” His mother’s husband didn’t read the Times. His mother’s husband read the Chronicle. Still, there were always old friends someplace clipping newsprint with scissors from the junk drawer, dating the back and sending it, paper clipped and envelope tucked, out into the world. In case you missed it! Hope you and yours are well. Hope you and yours are still kicking. “Can’t please everyone, but, you try to please a few people.”

  Phyllis was scraping her plate with a butter knife.

  “Now how about those Yankees?” Charles said. “How are your Yankees doing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they’re doing well.”

  Charles smiled. “Not what I’ve heard.”

  —

  The ride back existed in only two moments, the first as they came slow around a long bend, Charles up front saying, “We get some deer crossing, this area.” Jack knew that they did. Even in the dark this road was familiar to him. Then, the sudden light bouncing off the garage door, the blank page that had snuck up on him.

  Inside, Charles got down on the living-room floor in front of the hearth.

  “I don’t see why you need to bother with that thing, honey.” Phyllis sat on the sofa, stockinged feet slipped out of her soft brown loafers. “In high summer.”

  “I’ve put on the AC, you won’t cook.” Charles clicked on the gas fire. “Jack should see how this works. Heck of a lot better than the logs you all used to use.”

  “Much better,” Jack said. His mother and Charles had redone the whole fireplace and flue the first fall after they married. This was back eight or nine years ago—no, Jesus, eleven years: Kay had just been born. A chimney sweep had come and taken a steel brush to the insides, scrubbing off years of soot from the kindling they’d burned when Jack’s father was alive. Now they got the chimney sweep in annually. There was some reason for it, a fire that caught once when Charles was younger—Jack didn’t know the details—something like that had made him careful. One of those perfect-fit stories that make you say people aren’t all that hard to figure out. Maybe it’s true.

  —

  Phyllis went up to bed after the fire show, citing and reciting instructions for the clock in Jack’s bedroom, how it ran a little slow and how the alarm got set, and Jack went with his stepfather to the dim and woodsy study, Charles’s brown-Bible world, a cave apart from the fringed rugs and white wire baskets. When Jack lived there, it had been a sewing room and always empty. Now a gold-plated cross hung nailed to the wall, mixed with Charles’s diplomas, degrees in business. A years-old cactus sat inert on the windowsill.

  From his shirt pocket Charles produced the key to a cabinet behind his desk, and from there he pulled a half-emptied bottle of port. The only fermented thing let into the house, residents aside. “So, take a seat.” The cork came out with a hollow pop, like an echo of the real sound. “It’s a wonderful thing, you know, having children.”

  Jack stayed staring at the shelves, the embossed spines, discards from the local library. “How’s this?” he asked, holding up a Reagan biography, its edges woolly with dust.

  “You may borrow it. I want to tell you, it is a very powerful thing for Phyllis, seeing you grown. A man, with a family of his own. Please.”

  Jack took the glass, the measly pour of port, and sat.

  “I know how proud she is of you. You should see the way she talks—about her son out in New York, how you’ve got yourself all this acclaim, about how there’s the prestige—”

  “It isn’t—”

  “Well all right, all right but that’s what she likes to say to people. She likes to tell them all that, and about the kids and how you’re married and how it’s two kids, a boy grandson and a girl grandchild, and she says if she died now, she’d be complete. That she has everything. Now, I know a lot of that has to do with how proud she is of you, this life she sees you leading.” Charles paused for a sip of garnet wine, but he must also have considered this a good breaking point, thought that even if the whole mountain of his argument was not yet visible, at least the mist had begun to clear.

  For Jack, fog. “Thank you. That’s always, it’s nice to hear those things.”

  “Here’s where we have our problem. Here’s where I’m a little worried. You say things are all right at home.”

  “I do.”

  “And work, your career.”

  “Still do.” Jack followed Charles’s gaze to where it dropped on the desk between them, to the sand timer with the heavy marble bottom and brass casing. Phyllis used to keep it in the sun-room with what curios she deemed nautical. Called an hourglass, though it measured only thirty minutes. The upper half was empty now and for a bad moment Charles looked about to flip it over.

  “Where I’m worried is where a grown man comes, flies, by himself—a married father—to
stay with his mother on no notice—”

  “I would have called—”

  “—and behaves as though he were asked to come. And I don’t just mean that he’d been invited. I mean unhappy to be here. As though it were not a matter of his own free, human volition.”

  “I thought we had a nice time tonight.” Of course it hadn’t been a nice time, but it was unlike Charles to say so, or to notice. Dinner had been grim because their lives were like that, grim. Jack had been, he thought, only a fly on the wall. “The restaurant was a good idea. Thank you for choosing that.”

  “All right.” Charles took another sip of port, set the glass down and turned it. It was a nervous thing to do, again not what Jack would have expected of him. He was working toward something, the old man. “Jack, now, I’m not your father. Never was one. God didn’t bless my first wife and myself with children. Instead he saw fit to take her away, I’ll never know why. But he blessed you, and Deborah, and I don’t suppose it isn’t trying. In ways I can’t imagine.”

  “Okeydokey, Charles.”

  “I can’t tell you how to be a parent, except to tell you words from one wiser than I. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’ ”

  Jack stood and turned back toward the bookcase. Books on theology, golf, the theology of golf. “That’s a lovely sentiment.” Rubbing his neck, he realized it hurt.

  “You should be with your family.”

  Jack spun around. “Why is it so hard to conceive that maybe I wanted to check up on her, see how she was doing? My own mother.”

  “We seem to be missing each other.”

  “It’s not like she hasn’t had her problems. It’s not like there couldn’t be any cause for concern.”