As the sun dropped lazily in the sky, Jane stood and removed her sunglasses. She brushed the sand from her legs. Her eyes were swollen with crying. She stepped across the warm beach down to the water where her daughters were huddled.
When they saw her coming, they made a space and she sat between them—excited and afraid to tell them how the very best and the very worst of life will come from their ability to love strangers.
And they would think she was talking about Dad, about Walter, who grew up in a Gypsy caravan on a cliff, and who every Christmas without fail gives their mother a dozen eggs which he cleans in the sink on Christmas Eve, while they—his two daughters—talk to their friends on the phone, help string the tree with tinsel, or stare out the window at fading shadows, at the happy sadness of yesterday, the promise of tomorrow.
The City of Windy Trees
I
ONE DAY, GEORGE FRACK received a letter. It was from very far away. The stamp had a bird on it. Its wings were wide and still. The bird was soaring high above a forest, its body flecked with red sparks. George wondered if the bird was flying to a place or away from it.
At first, George thought the letter had been delivered to him by mistake, but the name on the envelope was his name and the address was where he lived.
Then he opened it and found a page of blue handwriting and a photograph of a little girl with brown hair. The girl was wearing a navy polyester dress dotted with small red hearts. She also had a pink clip in her hair. Her hands were tiny.
The handwriting was full of loops, as if each letter were a cup held fast upon the page by the heaviness of each small intention.
When George read the page, his mouth fell open and a low groaning resounded from his throat.
He held the paper very close to his eyes and read it again several times.
Then he dropped the page and looked around his apartment as though people were watching him from every dusty corner.
On the mantelpiece was the only photograph of his great uncle, Monsieur Saboné, who like George had lived alone in a quiet part of the city where he was born.
George wandered from room to room without knowing why, balancing the words of the letter in his mind; trying to make sense of them.
When George found himself standing in the kitchen, he automatically reached for the teapot. Perhaps because he wasn’t himself, he somehow managed to knock it to the floor. When George tried to pick up the pieces, he realized he could not control his shaking hands and he cut his fingers in several places.
Blood dripped onto the broken pieces of china; large spots fell upon the white sink.
George sat on the edge of the bathtub and wrapped his hands in old bandages. He imagined writing out the story of his life across each length of white. What words would he choose; would there be things he wrote that weren’t true; would there be spaces for things he wished he had done, people he wanted to meet, but who never came?
George sat on his toilet with the lid down. He remained there for two hours looking at his bandaged hands. When he felt faint, George removed his clothes and slipped into bed. Blood soaked through the bandage and left spots on the sheets.
Outside, a fire engine wailed, changing pitch as it passed: one sound for coming and one for going—the moment in between, indistinguishable.
George was asleep by the time it was dark. Lights went on in kitchens across the city as people arrived home. As George entered his first dream, the unknown world carried on. Men in heavy coats walked dogs outside his front door. Women fell asleep in front of television sets; others stayed up without any good reason. And as in every city, a handful of children gazed gently from windows upon the roads and passageways of their childhood, small questions falling in their minds like a rain that disappears by morning.
When George opened his eyes the next day, they were wet. His body was also very stiff. He unfurled his limbs as though waking from hibernation.
The sky outside his window was very bright. Yellow light fell through holes in the curtain and made patterns on the bed. The patterns came and went with the journey of clouds.
George’s first thought was that the whole thing was a dream, but life soon poured over him. On the desk he noticed the tip of the envelope. The photograph of the little girl would be lying next to the letter.
Along the rim of the kitchen sink, George’s blood had dried in crimson circles. Pieces of broken teapot on the floor had not moved, like small ruins of an ancient civilization.
George didn’t go to work and no one telephoned to see if he was ill.
Every so often he checked the address on the letter to make sure it had been delivered to the right person. Then he looked at the photograph. Then he read the letter again.
He stayed in bed until it was dark and did the very same thing the next day, swallowing mild sleeping pills every few hours and drifting in and out of a slumber heavy with memories from childhood.
In the middle of the night, George woke up sweating and gasping for air. For a few moments, the residue of the dream convinced George he had died and was reliving life all over again—but with the memory of everything that had happened before and all that was going to happen. What would it be like to know every detail of every event that would ever happen? The thought carried him in its arms to another dream.
When George finally woke at noon the next day, he sat up for an hour trying to piece his thoughts together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles.
When he lay back down and drifted into a snooze, pieces came together by themselves, and the book of his childhood blew open. George heard the sound of his father’s key churn the lock of the front door. Home from the office. His suit would be creased from the office chair. A small George sat very still in a room that glowed with the spell of television. He wanted to be found. He wanted to be scooped up like a rock from a river and found precious. And every evening his father returned home, George held his breath, like an understudy watching from the wings. George lived always on the verge of his greatest performance.
Then in the dream, George felt himself reaching for the television, turning up the volume as the shouting got worse. If only they had got divorced. Children at school ripped to pieces by their parents’ lack of love, shells of their former selves—and George burning with shame, wanting only to have his parents by themselves in the park on dull afternoons at the duck pond.
Instead, George spent his childhood like a small satellite orbiting their unhappy world.
Then he left home. His parents remained together, until one day his father jumped off the office building where he worked. George imagined his raincoat flapping, then the impact; strangely bent limbs; people circling in disbelief; somebody’s ruined day.
George wept at the funeral, not because his father was dead but because he’d never known him. If grief has levels, this was the one below guilt.
On the third day after receiving the letter, George lay on his back and followed the cracks in the bedroom ceiling with his eyes. He imagined he was on a journey across a tiny Arctic plain.
And then he fell asleep and dreamed it.
At the end of his journey across the snow was the little girl from the photograph, waiting for him in the dress with hearts on it. In the dream, all the hearts were beating. When George drew close, he noticed she had butterfly wings. Whenever he tried to reach her, she fluttered away laughing. The sound of her laughing filled him with joy. George managed to cup the feeling and hold on to it for a few seconds after waking up. In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn’t happened would lodge.
In the afternoon George drank tea in the quiet of his bedroom. He wiped away his blood and took a series of showers, concentrating on a different body part each time. He swept his apartment and threw out many things that at one time had been valuable to him.
On the fifth day, George stared through his bedroom window into backyards of bare trees, children’s toys, and half-filled plant pots.
Although he lived on a city
avenue, the back room where George spent his evening hours was very quiet. Sometimes a neighbor’s dog could be heard barking and scratching weakly at a back door. For some reason, George found these to be comforting sounds—while the mean grinding buses that passed his front room irritated and depressed him.
After graduating from university about ten years ago, George had gradually lost interest in the lives of his friends. He dreaded the blinking red light on his telephone that indicated messages waiting to be heard. He stayed away from gatherings, and he purposefully forgot birthdays. Life had not turned out the way he thought. He had not stayed with the woman he truly loved (she was married and living in Connecticut). His mother died one day at the kitchen table before she could drink her tea. He developed a mysterious pain in his hands. His sister became a single mother to a boy (Dominic) with Down syndrome. His job was uninteresting and he felt that his life was nothing more than a light that would blink once in the history of the universe and then be forgotten.
George had lived for several years without a television. Television made him feel lost and lonely. George’s local post office had recently attached one to the wall—an attempt to calm people confined to wait in massive queues. George bought his stamps elsewhere and avoided the voice he felt knew absolutely nothing but refused to stop talking.
George’s neighbors were very fond of him, however. His apartment was situated on the top floor of the Greenpoint Home for the Agéd, and George occupied the only dwelling that wasn’t part of the “home.” It had, of course, originally been built for a live-in nurse, but thanks to a cocktail of modern drugs, the residents had little need for any professional assistance. George could even hear them being intimate, and sometimes the occasional fight, and sometimes sobbing—if he listened with a glass against the wall.
The previous tenant—still discussed in the hallway from time to time when a letter came for him—was a Polish carpenter who punched holes in his walls, then spent half the night repairing them with cutting, sawing, and sanding.
George Frack was not without interests. He liked:
Large Chinese kites
Sitting beside the window in his bathrobe with a box of Raisinets
New-wave European films (viewed only at Eric and Burt’s small movie house in Greenpoint)
Horoscopes
Velvet loafers
Drinking coffee in the park from a thermos when nobody was around
His collection of world Snoopy figures (Chinese Snoopy, Arctic Snoopy, Russian Snoopy, Aussie Snoopy, etc. etc.)
David Bowie songs
A cat called Goddard (pronounced God-AR) now deceased
A heavy fall of snow that ruins everyone’s plans
George’s last serious relationship was with Goddard, a stray cat who one day appeared outside the building and threw himself at everyone who passed. They slept together under the same blanket, and George sometimes awoke to Goddard’s paw upon his hand. After almost a year at the Greenpoint Home for the Agéd, Goddard escaped one Sunday morning while George was out buying oranges and sardines. He had squeezed through an open window and carefully stepped down the fire escape.
A few minutes later Goddard lay squashed under a bus. Someone put him in a shoe box; his limp body was like a sack of broken parts.
The evening Goddard died, George stood naked on the edge of his fire escape until it got dark and lights came on one square at a time. Then some neighbor spotted a bare human figure on a fire escape and shouted. Suicide was one thing—but confrontation was out of the question. George climbed back inside. Then he went to bed. His usual supper of Raisinets went untouched. The oranges lay on the floor where they had rolled.
George held the letter and the photograph of the little girl in his hand and sat very quietly in a wooden chair beside his bedroom window. He remembered the feeling of Goddard’s head brushing his legs.
After almost a week in his apartment without any human contact, a storm built slowly on the edge of the city and then broke open. George watched from his window as a seamless band of clouds rolled toward him. Trees bent, as if leaned on by invisible hands. The streetlight fell in perfect columns of raindrops.
Cars pulled to the sides of the road. Umbrellas blew out like escaping squid.
George got up from his chair and went to the closet for a blanket. The kitchen light felt good against the darkness of the afternoon. He walked halfway into the kitchen, but then decided against making tea and went back into his bedroom, where he planned on settling down for the night. It was six o’clock.
He sat down and spread the blanket across his legs. He was wearing his velvet loafers and a bathrobe. The rain tapped gently against the window, magnifying the backyards in long watery lines. The roofs of the buildings glistened black, and a tiny alphabet of birds hung motionless in the sky.
George looked at the photograph. The girl in it would smile forever. Every photograph is a lie, he thought—a splinter from the tree of what happened. Clouds moved from one side of the sky to the other. The darkness would be upon them sooner than ever. George pressed the photograph of the girl to his cheek. In his mind, he could feel her gentle fantasies. Then her heart began to beat within his and he was suddenly full of yearning for this child, a daughter who came in the mail—in a dress of tiny hearts, from a city of windy trees: a place where he had been conjured ten thousand times from a pillow of alternating hope and disappointment.
II
AFTER THE STORM, NIGHT filled the wet city.
George had been still for such a very long time that evening had etched his face into the window before him. It was a face through which city lights twinkled in the windy distance. George leaned forward. The figure before him also leaned, as if ready to hear the whispering of a secret. George imagined his daughter’s hands upon his face, like someone blind trying to feel his way around. He wondered what she would make of it.
Would she touch it?
Would she wonder what stories swirled behind the eyes?
Would she find it handsome?
Perhaps she might see herself.
And, then, perhaps in time, it might be a face that she cared for, that she was pleased to see, that gave her comfort in the night when she surfaced on the back of a nightmare.
George ripped open a box of Raisinets and chewed each one carefully. He decided to write a letter to his sister. Since he’d received the photograph of the little girl in the mail, the old love for his sister had stirred; a love that had become buried under the rubble of his life. Growing up, they hadn’t said much to one another but sometimes held hands in the car and sometimes cooked together listening to David Bowie after their mother had passed out on the couch, still clutching the neck of a bottle.
One Easter, George left several drawings of rabbits outside her bedroom door. When he found them in the trash can in the kitchen that afternoon, George stormed into her room, grabbed the egg that she was decorating, and stamped on it.
Not until she was a woman did George’s sister realize how much her younger brother had looked up to her, and how lonely his life must have been without her friendship. But by that time George had disappeared from her life completely.
George wondered what he would say to her in the letter. He found a pen and some paper from a drawer and sat down at his desk. He went to switch on his lamp, but there was no bulb in it. Then he remembered two boxes of bulbs in the cupboard under the stairs. He went to fetch one.
Several weeks ago, while walking home from work, George passed what he thought was a shop. In the window were packs of diapers, dusty toys in sun-bleached boxes, a pile of women’s clothes, and three dirty boxes of lightbulbs, which reminded George that he needed some.
When he tried to enter the shop, however, he found the door locked. As he stepped back to see if the opening times had been posted, a panel opened in the door and a face appeared.
“Yeah?” the face said.
“How much are those lightbulbs?” George asked.
The face
eyed him suspiciously.
“What lightbulbs?” the face said.
“The lightbulbs in the window—how much are they?”
The face tightened as if agitated and then disappeared, leaving the panel open.
A moment later, the face returned. It stared curiously at George Frack.
“So how much are they?” George asked.
The face laughed.
“A dollar,” the face said.
“Each or for the pack?”
“For the pack.”
“Great,” George said. “I’ll take two packs.”
“Okay,” the face said, “that’s two dollars.”
“What about tax?” George asked.
“Okay, that’s two dollars and nineteen cents,” the face said, and laughed again.
A week later, the shop was raided by the police and then boarded up by city workers with cigarettes in their mouths.
George found the two boxes of lightbulbs in his closet under the stairs where he had set them. He put one in the lamp on his desk.
It came to life before he had finished screwing it in.
Then he began the letter to his sister.
She was a single mother to a boy named Dominic with Down syndrome. George had not spoken to her since Dominic was born. All George knew was that his nephew was conceived one night on a skiing holiday in Canada with a man who had another family. As George wrote his sister’s name, he realized that Dominic would have no idea who he was.
Then George crossed out his name, and wrote “Major Tom.”
A few days later, Human Resources from George’s office called. They kept calling him Mr. Frack. George asked them to call him George, but they wouldn’t. There were two people talking on the same line, and at various points in the conversation, nobody knew who was talking to whom. George kept looking down at his velvet loafers. After ten minutes, George’s boss came on the line. It sounded like he was chewing. He was a boorish man from the suburbs who picked his nose when he didn’t think anyone was looking.
Love Begins in Winter Page 12