by John Lennon
I thought I could sneak up on her, reach over the menu and pluck the glasses off. I pictured her astonished, laughing face as she looked up and saw that it was me. Instead, she turned her head and my hand brushed her ear, and she jumped back as if I had zapped her with an electric prod.
“You!”
“Hi.”
She sighed, shaking her head at the carpet.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to surprise you. By taking off your glasses.”
“Glasses?” She brought her hand to her face and removed them. “Ah. Yes.” She let me have a thin smile, and said, “Dare I ask what brings you here?”
“Scrumptious Chinese takeout.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.”
We ordered food and it was brought to us. “No napkins, no fork, no chopsticks,” she told the clerk. We carried out our bags, and since she hadn’t told me to go elsewhere, I walked alongside her. We didn’t talk. She squinted, having forgotten to put the sunglasses back on. I followed her into her building, a scabby brownstone with a cat on the stoop, and up the steps. She held the door for me.
Her place was what I’d expected. Largely tidy, the furniture covered with pieces of damp clean laundry. Some movie posters and an old formica dinner table, where we sat and opened our bags.
“You got my letter?” I said.
She held up a hand. “Tim. Lunch first.”
We took chopsticks from the china mug at the center of the table. I watched her eat. She watched her plate, occasionally fixing me with a wary, slightly hostile glance. But I could tell she pitied me a little—her face, exerting itself in the act of eating, betrayed a crude, practical sort of mercy—and I let myself hope.
I finished first. When she was done, she reached out, took my hand, and pulled me to the couch, where she placed us at opposite ends (I was reminded of my talk with Rose). She said, “I do not want to be the girl you’re hanging around with while you’re sorting out your various issues.”
This took a moment to sink in. “Which is to say forget it?” It sounded true as I said it, and my heart listed.
“Which is to say forget it, if that’s all I am to you, or will be.”
“I don’t think that’s all you are to me.”
“You don’t think.”
I chose my words carefully. “I can’t tell you that I’m absolutely certain of anything. I am pretty sure I don’t want you just because I’m desperate for somebody to talk to.”
I was surprised to hear myself say this. She sighed.
“That came out wrong,” I said.
“No, it didn’t. It was the truth.”
“I guess.”
“Move closer,” she said. “Just a little.” I gave her several feet of space, and she took my hand in both of hers. They were cold. “I was watching Rear Window,” she said. “Get it rolling, would you?”
With my free hand I picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned on the set. It took a moment to find PLAY in the parking lot of buttons, and then I hit it.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
We watched it straight through without speaking. Jimmy Stewart had just started spying on the glum songwriter. The taste of Hunan beef still simmered on my tongue. At some point Susan’s hands began to move over mine, and our fingers entwined and pulled apart, tested each other while we watched.
When it was over, I picked up the remote and turned off the TV. I could hear her breathing. She slid into my arms and I lay back, and then she lay back, half-on, half-off me on the thin cushions. We kissed, and kissed again.
“If you break my heart, Mix,” she told me, the ends of our noses flattened against each other, “I swear I’ll beat the living shit out of you.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
More kissing. My hand found her back, the place where her T-shirt had pulled from her shorts and exposed a bare inch of skin. She let out a breath.
“Bedtime,” she said.
Delighted, I said, “Right.”
twenty-nine
Afterward we seemed far from finished. We stayed very close, saying nothing, finally sleeping, then waking, then trying it all again, and despite the typical trappings of pleasure, I didn’t feel like what we’d done had resolved anything. We had crossed over into something new, and though the border patrols hadn’t gotten us there were still miles of rough terrain left to navigate. Lying in Susan’s arms, I extended the metaphor, adding rattlesnakes and scorpions, undercover immigration agents and idle rednecks with sawed-off shotguns, until Susan absently began stroking my hair and I let my brain shut mercifully down.
It was too late to take the bus home, so I stayed. We went out to eat, and came back to Susan’s apartment exhausted and happy, two things I had not been simultaneously for a long time. It was strange trying to fall asleep on a new bed, with a new and unfamiliar presence, and we stretched and rolled and yanked on the sheets until I felt raw. At some point we simply gave in and stopped moving, almost too tired to speak.
Almost. “Tim,” she said. “There’s a reason I haven’t been calling you. Besides this, I mean.”
I made an encouraging sound. In my half-dream, her words took on shapes and bobbed in the haze of sleep.
“It’s Ray Burn. Your meeting with Ray Burn.”
“Whaboutit?”
“He tried to back out. He said he didn’t want to see you, but I talked him back into it. You’re meeting next Wednesday.”
I pulled myself out of the haze and sat up. Moonlight spilled across the bed. The clock radio quietly buzzed beside me. “Why didn’t he want to see me?”
“He said there was no reason to bother you until you were completely ready.” She was lying on her back, watching the ceiling, which was cracked and bubbled from years of leaks. “But I think…I think he was thinking it would be easier to pull the rug out from under you if he never actually met you. He didn’t say that; that’s just my impression.”
I could feel it all falling apart. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. I mean…the thing is, Burn is a very bland guy, not too smart, and he doesn’t need to be doing this cartoon thing. He’s got old money. He just does this for a hoot. So he is very impressionable when it comes to cartoons. If somebody shows him something or tells him about someone, and the person doing the showing or telling is…confident, you know, has a little spark, then he’ll start believing everything that person says.” She sat up too, and put her hand on my knee. “He’s, you know, tabula rasa.”
“I saw Ken Dorn at the conference. He told me he’d met with Burn.”
“Yeah, well, Ron Burn, the old boss, liked Dorn. He thought Dorn was a wit. So Ray sees Dorn if Dorn wants to be seen.”
“And Dorn has a ‘little spark’?” I said, incredulous.
“Well, no. But Dorn has gotten to him, and Dorn also is trying to make you look bad. Besides, Dorn is the bargain cartoonist, so…”
“So I’m history.”
“No. You’re meeting with Burn, remember?” She turned to me and took both my hands with hers. “Tim, if you want this, you can go into the meeting and wow him. I know you can.”
I shook my head, wondering if it was all even worth it. “Did you hear about what happened at the conference?”
“Your panel discussion? Yeah.”
“Dorn set me up, you know.” I told her about the overalled hayseed and the transaction out by the dumpster. “If he really wants it, he’s going to get it.”
“Not if you don’t want him to. Remember, you’re the one who’s supposed to get it. As far as I know, the lawyers haven’t been able to get around that.”
I pulled my hands away and lay back. “I didn’t want any of this to begin with.”
She waited a long time before saying, “Including me.”
“No, not including you.”
It was hard to cheer up again after that. We slept, and in the morning ate breakfast together, but there hung betwee
n us some general dissatisfaction, something both of us felt but were powerless to repair, either in ourselves or in the other. Susan offered to drive me home, but I refused. “It’s your day off. You should enjoy it however you want.”
She said, “Will you call me?”
“And vice versa.”
“Sure.” We hugged. “Did we do the right thing?” she asked me, from over my shoulder.
I brought her face around to mine, looked her in the eyes, and said “Twice,” which was, thank God, exactly what was needed for a change.
* * *
I tried to do two days’ work in one afternoon. It didn’t go so well. I figured if I pushed myself I could be finished by the time I got hungry, but instead my dinner—a Custard’s Last Hot Dog and an A&W float—proved to be a dinner break, and I was back in the studio by six-thirty, the hot dog still somersaulting inside me. Despite my best efforts, the FF characters would not yield to the pen. I took half an hour to add to my pool of gags and replaced a few of the old, half-assed ones with the new. I was supposed to have six roughs for Wurster by tomorrow morning, and it was pretty clear I wouldn’t accomplish this with any degree of technical mastery.
It was well after dark when Pierce got home. I heard the car pull in, then his footsteps across the driveway gravel and the grass. The studio door was wide open, but he knocked on it as if it were shut. “Tim?”
“Hey,” I said, looking up. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the middle distance, a sign I was too tired to be working.
He stepped in. He was dressed in a T-shirt of mine and a pair of shorts cut off from our father’s pants, and he hugged himself against the cool of the night. “I’m back.”
“No kidding?”
He smiled. “Huh huh huh.”
“How’s the lady?”
“Gilly’s cool. We picked cranberries. She’s a real green thumb.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Tim,” he said. “I was wondering if, if you thought about what I suggested. About Mom.”
I put my pen down. “Actually, yes. Actually I went to New York and talked to Rose about it.”
He flinched as if I’d taken a swing at him. “You talked to Rose?”
“I think she thinks it’s the way to go. I tried to convince her to come down a day a week. To help.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Right. She won’t get near me.”
“I don’t know that I understand that.”
“She doesn’t like thinking other people’s problems are as bad as hers.” He looked out the door now, as if the answer to this riddle was hiding in the yard somewhere. It reminded me strongly of Rose, the way she was looking out the window when I left her.
“I think it’s a go,” I said. “I think we should bring her home.”
“You do?” His eyes were pleading, as if he thought I might still change my mind.
“Yeah. We’ll manage.”
I could see the relief washing over him. He passed a hand over his face. “Oh, man, yeah. Yeah, we’ll manage okay.” He shook his head. “I really miss her, man.”
“You know she’ll probably never come back, I mean all the way back.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll know she’s home.”
* * *
But it was not as easy as we thought. We had expected to walk in there and roll her out in a wheelchair. A few phone calls proved this impracticable, if not impossible: the fund my father had established to provide for her was difficult to crack. Pierce called Uncle Mal and told him what we wanted, and he said he would get on it. “He’s really glad,” Pierce told me. “He thinks we’re doing the right thing.”
Meanwhile, my mother herself grew blurrier and more confused, though her physical health remained stable. I began visiting her more often, trying to get used to the idea of having her around, but it was hard; like a baby, she had difficulty making her needs known, and the subtleties of expression left in place of her voice were beyond me. Several times during the next week, a nurse scolded me for not noticing when she was thirsty or had to be brought to the bathroom, and I was consumed with shame.
The nurses didn’t want us to take her away. They seemed to consider our ineptitude a sign of carelessness, and our plan to bring her home a selfish scheme to alleviate our own guilt. None of this was spoken. Maybe it was all in my frenzied imagination. But it was on my mind, and it gave me a lot of food for thought when I noticed what could have been a glimmer of recognition in her eyes, or a sensible sentence that may or may not have been directed at me. I brought Susan in twice. The first time, my mother cooed and fussed over her as if she were a newborn, much to Susan’s embarrassment. The second time she cursed at her like a shock jock. We didn’t talk so much, Susan and I, about these visits or about how they played into our relationship. It seemed too soon. Susan did get along well with Pierce, though, and one Saturday morning in Mixville the two of them woke before me and made a stack of pancakes together. I was astonished. Pierce didn’t even like conversations with other people, let alone complex activities like cooking.
For what it was worth, I felt increasingly like Susan was someone I could be with, even as my doubts about myself were escalating. I held myself back from her, and sensing this, she did the same. What were my motives, with my mother, with Susan, with the Family Funnies? Why was I doing what I was doing? These were the things I overworked myself in order not to think about, in order not to talk to Susan about. I realized this was a stopgap measure, and that something would have to give, but I didn’t know which something, and when it would give. So I drew, and waited.
The Monday night before I was to meet with Ray Burn, Pierce and I drove down to Trenton to meet with Mal about Mom’s move. I was not thinking about our mother, only about reworking several cartoons after the meeting, and I found myself uncharacteristically silent for the entire trip. We bought sandwiches at a deli downtown and brought one to Mal, and we ate at the same boardroom table where our father’s will was read. Mal looked sloppy and haggard, and I wondered about his private life, if he had lady friends or friends of any kind. He had never married.
Pierce was picking up the slack for me, throwing himself into these meetings like his life depended on it, and before his sandwich was even gone he convinced Mal to get out his papers and begin going over our options. The two of them bent over the documents, nodding, speaking in low tones as if I were asleep and they didn’t want to wake me.
It was then that I noticed, from across the table, the similar way their ears stuck out, pointed at the back and strangely facile, like a cat’s. I remembered watching Pierce wiggle his ears when we were kids, and being frustrated with myself because I couldn’t do it. And their thin heads of hair: Mal’s yellow-white at the roots, more brittle-looking, but both whorled off at the right, around a little bald spot. For almost a full minute I looked at this curious symmetry without judgment, contemplating it as I might a yin-yang or a Rorschach blot, and then I remembered Rose’s cryptic pronouncements and the pieces fell into place. I must have made a sound because both of them looked up.
“Tim?” Mal said. “What is it?”
I swallowed the bite of sandwich that had been sitting, half-chewed, in my mouth the whole time. “Nothing,” I said.
* * *
We were halfway home in the car when I said, “He’s your father, isn’t he.”
Pierce didn’t turn to me. After a while he said, “I’ve always wondered if you knew and just never said anything.”
“I just figured it out.”
“Just now?”
I nodded. “You have the same ears. And something Rose said. I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time.”
“Well, now you know.” He sounded angry.
“Have you always known?”
“No. Mom told me when I was something like ten. She was drunk.” He leaned against the passenger window, and it fogged up where his breath met it. “I don’t know why she told me. Mad at Dad, I guess.”
I considered this, and his plan for bringing her home, and marveled for a moment at the power of his forgiveness, the way it sustained him. I said, “Does Mal know you know?”
“Yeah.”
Trying to reassemble our childhood from this new perspective would be futile, like unlearning a language. I gave up before I even started. “I suppose I’m the last one to find out.”
“Rose says she knew when I was born, and suspected it even before. I told Bitty. I don’t think Bobby knows. He wouldn’t want to, anyway.” I signaled and turned onto Route 29. “I don’t suppose you’ll be hating me too, now, will you?” He said this with studied nonchalance, as if he’d been practicing it for years, but I could tell he was truly scared.
I said, “Of course not.”
“Rose hates me, you know that. And Bitty…”
“Bitty doesn’t hate you,” I said.
“She doesn’t think she does,” he said. “But she does. She hasn’t said boo to me since I told her. I remember we were sitting in my bedroom and I told her, and she walked out. I thought she’d tell Dad I knew, but she didn’t. She just stopped…sistering.”
“I don’t think Bitty or Rose hates you. Especially Bitty.”
“With all due respect, Tim, I don’t think you actually know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said after a while.
“Me too.”
Getting home was like coming to an entirely new house. I saw my father, in an inkstained oxford shirt, cracking his knuckles at dinner, offering Uncle Mal another helping. I saw Pierce opening the gifts Mal gave him, always better than the ones he gave the rest of us. I saw my mother hugging Mal at the door. All of it brand new.
“I should go to the studio,” I said.
Pierce’s lips pressed themselves together. “I should go in the house.”
I opened my arms and he stepped into them, and we held each other there in the driveway. He pulled away, crying. “It would have been better if it was Mal,” he said. “With us.”