Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  After our first conversation, Angus kept showing up like a toe fungus. My strategy shifted from ignoring to insulting him, but he was relentlessly ingratiating, always there to say, Nicely done, Addison. Nicely done. Once or twice, I saw Ian roll his eyes, but by then Ian was wearing a yarmulke as well as eye shadow, so it was hard to take him seriously. Drinking made it all sublimely comic or tragic, depending. But through my art, I was able to project my pathos onto film.

  “You should call it ‘Dreaming of Kafka,’” Angus said of my ten-minute film of a girl running through a train station. I had shot footage at Grand Central of a professor’s child who was about the age I’d been when we took the Super Chief to Michigan. The camera I used was a 35mm Hasselblad with a 200mm lens to be discreet. Over and over, I filmed her running through the crowd. Ian played the father figure turning toward the child, reaching down in a denouement of rapidly edited hands clasping, unclasping, being wrenched away. The result was a grainy image with an off-kilter angle resulting from being jostled.

  “It’s so Dr. Caligari,” said Angus, leaving the theater after the critique. “It’s so oedipal. Is it memoir?”

  Ian tagged along beside us. “More referential than oedipal, I’d say. At least, I’m hoping that was your intention.” When I said nothing, he went on. “The Lumière Brothers in 1895? One of the first films ever made…ever…was about a train.”

  “Thank you, Moshe Dayan,” said Angus.

  “Really?” said I.

  Ian sighed. “And you should have used Super 8. But I liked that thing you did with the handheld. It was like a home movie, you know. That’s what memory’s like. For me, anyway. Just one drawn-out home movie.”

  The yarmulke looked ridiculous on Ian. I tried to see the resemblance to Marlon Brando, but his blue-shadowed eyes, sunken cheeks, and wispy, straw-colored hair spoke more of the heroin-addicted mother than the famous movie star. “And what are your memories, Ian?”

  Ian gave me a blank, sad stare. Even then—before I knew about the Percodan and the alcohol and the smack, the joyless, relentlessly religious upbringing, the townies who violated him and left him in a field to die—I knew there was something creepy and brilliant about Ian. What caught my attention, however—more than his alleged relationship to Marlon Brando or his quixotic conversion to Judaism—was his ostentatious sobriety. I had never met anyone so resolutely abstemious as Ian. His latest Last Supper had been staged in a cafeteria in the Bowery, his camera lingering on half-eaten plates of chipped beef and mashed potatoes, the can of soda in Christ’s hands. A hooker stood in for Judas. Had I known he would someday become my best friend, I might have asked Ian more about why he didn’t drink, but Angus had locked his arm with mine and was pulling me away.

  It was a week before graduation. I had put the final touches on my version of the girl in the train station. Most of my classmates were interviewing for jobs either in New York or Los Angeles, though a few were considering Canada. Angus was moving out west and pestering me to come with him.

  “You’re a California gal,” he said, the word gal sounding particularly odious when coupled with his accent.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  That evening I headed across Washington Square. It was late spring, and the streetlights had yet to come on. A flock of pigeons flew up, then radically and without apparent reason switched directions.

  “Maddie?”

  The voice came from behind. My hair bristled even before I identified the source. It was as though a chill wind had broken through the warmth and revelry of a city emerging from a too-long winter. I turned.

  He wore a jacket with a hood. His shadowed face looked altered, but what struck me first were his tobacco-stained teeth. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he had always been reasonably fastidious. My mother told me that he’d gone back into the military, the implication being that he was involved in covert operations in obscure and nameless countries.

  “Edward,” I said.

  He took a step toward me, and I moved away. He removed his hood. Fine, livid lines were tattooed from the edges of his hairline, down across his cheeks, meeting at his mouth. It was the eighties and New York City, and I was accustomed to grommets, tattoos, artistically shaved heads. But nothing I’d seen outside of National Geographic resembled this fierce topography of self-vandalism. I could see where he’d cut deep—with a razor, perhaps—the scarred skin waxy and florid. Involuntarily, my hand flew up to my own cheek as if the same wounds marked my flesh. There was much to ask, and nothing to say other than, “God, Edward.”

  “You don’t look so good,” he said, and then, seeing my expression, Edward smiled one of his utterly rare smiles. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted that someone this damaged was commenting on my own disturbed appearance. Maybe I had been sitting too long in dark theaters, analyzing edits, the cutting of scenes, but all of Washington Square took on a surreal, filmlike quality, as if Technicolor had faded to black. A passing couple glanced our way in slow motion, their deep, bottom-of-the-ocean voices indecipherable. A juggler next to a park bench stopped spinning his pins and mimed for me to come away. I could feel corpuscles throbbing in every capillary, nerve endings winnowing for air. Edward spoke, but his words sounded like “ta, ta, ta.” I shook my head to clear it.

  My urge to flee was overcome by curiosity. “Edward, where have you been?”

  Edward jerked his head. Reluctantly, I agreed to sit with him at one of the tables where the old men play chess. As Edward talked, I watched his hands jumping from the table to his knees to the side of his face.

  “It’s hard to keep traction,” he said.

  After Vietnam, it had not been unusual to find Edward combing through wastebaskets or taking photographs off the wall, running his fingers along the back. He now reached into his pocket and pulled out a container of pills, spread them on the table, carefully placing them in the white squares of the checkerboard. As he hopped one pill diagonally over another, I wondered if he felt, as I did, a lingering sense of mortification. But Edward seemed to have no memory of what had passed between us. Again, I asked him where he’d been all these years. Like the glacier receding from the cornfields, Edward had ebbed out of our world, leaving a rubble-strewn gash. At any mention of his name, the family grew silent. Even my mother didn’t express her opinion anymore.

  “I’ve been out of commission,” he said. “Locked up. Lassoed. Lavaliered.”

  “What does this one do?” I said, pushing the pink pill across the table. “And this?”

  “This one’s for anxiety,” he said. “This one’s for the voices. You got any money?”

  I gave him what cash I had. He kicked back the pills, one by one, got up, and turned to leave. Remembering how he’d grunted and heaved with nothing between us but our clothes and a sheet, my mind tumbled back to an earlier summer.

  “Edward,” I said, “what happened to Chippy?”

  “Chippy?” he said, turning back. “Chippy? Look”—he threw up his hands—“I’m not even here.”

  And with that, my chipmunk’s fate was left, as it had always been, to my imagination, The other question—the bigger question—remained unspoken.

  “Where are you going?” I said to his back.

  Making the motion of a golf swing, he said, “Beneath the surface,” and walked away.

  It was dark when I found Angus with a group of friends in the bar. I walked straight to their table, where Angus’s laughter rang louder and more braying than the rest. “Angus?” I said, and he turned. The look he gave me was of appraisal. It was a look I would come to know well. What state of mind is she in? Has she been drinking?

  “Sit down, Addison,” he said, jumping up from his seat, pulling out a chair with perverse gallantry. “You don’t look so good.” It was the second time I’d heard it that day.

  I ordered brandy—not my usual drink—but I wanted something to scald and sear as it traveled down my throat. The conversation around us
had stopped. Everyone was staring. If Ian Gruler had been there, perhaps he would have stopped me. As it was, I was on my own. Downing the snifter in two gulps, I turned to Angus and said, “Let’s go.”

  FOURTEEN

  I went to California with Angus Farley because I was scared. Scared when I woke up in the morning, scared when I looked into the mirror, scared I was losing my mind. I was drinking too much, and seeing Edward in that condition had rattled me. We drove to California in Angus’s beat-up red Alfa, checking off the state-line signs like numbers on a bingo card. Ohio—where my father grew up; Missouri—the floodplain of my mother’s youth; Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico—where we had once traveled by train. Somewhere in Arizona, a swirling dust devil moved toward the car and pounced, making us jump two lanes. After that, it took Angus half an hour to calm me down.

  While we drove I started talking. It seemed to bubble up out of nowhere in the parched, Southwestern sun. Perhaps it was because we were so far from Michigan, but Angus was the first person I told about what had happened in the summer of 1974.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Your cousin?”

  I sucked on my cigarette, turned away, and looked out the window. “I knew you’d understand.”

  “I mean, did he do it with you? Did you actually fuck?”

  “Jesus, Angus.”

  “Well?”

  That night, we reached Nevada and checked into a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Angus was keen on saving money, and what we spent was mine. I wouldn’t let him touch me; it was a condition of my companionship. I would go with him to L.A., see if we could get jobs, provide financing for the duration of the trip. In exchange, he was to keep me company and his hands to himself. The week had been a series of sterile motel rooms with Saran Wrapped glasses, grilled cheese sandwiches, and the local news talking about head-on collisions and drought. Angus flipped the remote control. Motel 6 had cable and air-conditioning and beds that vibrated when you put quarters into them. We always got two queens.

  Angus had played the slots in the lobby, yielding about two dollars in quarters that he was now using to make his bed swerve and buck. MTV appeared, and Angus hummed along to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like a Wolf” above the din of his whirring bed. “So what you’re saying is he diddled…or tried to diddle…his cousin.”

  I began to wish I hadn’t confided in Angus. I knew he’d misconstrue the information and hoard it away like a coin. I picked up a map, using the scale in the legend to calculate the miles left to go. Angus reached over from his bed and took the container of fries, went back to humming. He changed the channel. The news came on to say there was a hurricane heading toward Georgia. It was almost June, the season of packing trunks. I licked some ketchup from my fingers, snapped the Styrofoam container of french fries shut.

  “Tell me,” Angus said. He chewed on a fry, his stare fixed on the television, but I knew his concentration was totally on me.

  “Screw you,” I said. Angus laughed; french fries flew.

  Angus was going to stay with friends from New York when we got to Los Angeles, I at my sister’s house. As he drove off, Dana looked at me and said, “He’s kind of cute. What’s the story with him?”

  By then, Dana and Philip had been married ten years. Marrying Philip seemed like the most spontaneous thing that Dana had ever done. They had dated for less than six months when Philip proposed, checking first with my father to get his blessing. Everyone thought it was a rebound from her tennis player, but Dana seemed to put Bruce Digby behind her like yesterday’s bell-bottoms. Her earnest conversion to Catholicism coincided with her schedule of bridal showers and luncheons, and by the time they married in December of 1975—halfway through her junior year—Dana was confirmed into “the one true faith.” They moved to La Cañada while Philip went to business school, moved into a bigger house when they adopted Jessica.

  “Love the accent,” Dana said as Angus drove away.

  “It’s always thicker when he wants something,” I said.

  Dana picked a dead head off the azalea bush by her door. She’d cut her long hair shoulder length and pulled it back in a headband. The perfect widow’s peak she shared with my mother gave her forehead a deceptive serenity. “What are your plans?”

  The question begged a number of answers. Did she mean my plans for the next few hours or the next few days? Or was she asking for something more existential regarding my purpose—something she could hang on to, like a railing or a guidepost, a concrete assurance that everything would be all right?

  Ignoring her, I went into the house to find my niece.

  “MaddieAunt! MaddieAunt!” Jessica screamed when she saw me. She was six years old, her straight, dark hair in pigtails, her brown eyes saucer-wide. In her plaid jumper—the uniform of her school—she looked precious as a China doll.

  “Ma petite choute!” I said, scooping her up. Dana’s house was so tidy it made me want to cry. The kitchen gleamed, the fabrics matched, her clothes were folded and hung. In the front hall were footlockers that she was packing for Sand Isle. It was an oasis, this house—so clean and safe and sane.

  “How was your trip?” asked Dana.

  Outside of Bakersfield, Angus had reached over and stroked the inside of my thigh. I hadn’t responded, but I hadn’t made him stop.

  “Long,” I said, burying my nose in Jessica, smelling her delicious, foreign skin.

  Angus Farley was nobody’s fool. He knew enough to leave me alone and maintain the pretense of detachment. And he had a knack for finding great situations for himself. Not surprisingly, he found a place to stay in Bel-Air, a suburb even more upscale than neighboring Beverly Hills. Now Angus was living in an acquaintance’s pool house with a wet bar and a view of downtown.

  He called me every other day to report on his job status or, more specifically, everyone else’s. Who was working as a grip, who was an assistant editor. Ian Gruler was doing okay. And two of our classmates had headed to the Bay Area to work on an animated film combining real actors and cartoons. “The technological implications,” said Angus, “are staggering.”

  Angus was more equivocal regarding his own prospects. He had, it seemed, landed a series of interviews involving long lunches at restaurants with valet parking.

  “I’ve got to get a better buggy,” he told me.

  I twirled the phone cord in my fingers, scanned Dana’s list of items to be packed. She and Philip had left the day before, saying I could remain at their house, but Dana had urged me to come to Sand Isle for the summer.

  It’s not like you have a job, she had said.

  “Why don’t you downscale to a bicycle?” I said to Angus. He had bought his Alfa-Romeo Spyder, he told me, because it was the car Dustin Hoffman drove in The Graduate.

  “A bicycle?”

  “People will think you’re eccentric.”

  Angus scoffed at the notion, but I could practically hear his thought processes as he weighed the pros and cons.

  “And you, Addison? What’s up?”

  Tra-la-la, I wanted to say. What’s the hurry? But the truth was I was paralyzed. School, at least, had provided structure. I knew where to go, what was expected of me. But this business of having to line up interviews and sell oneself like a hygiene product was problematic. To tout one’s own abilities and skills seemed presumptuous and brazen, totally contrary to the notion of modesty I had acquired from my parents. One doesn’t brag or swagger, but one could hope that one’s talents might be noticed without one’s having to point them out.

  “I’m writing my résumé,” I told him.

  “Forget the résumé,” said Angus. “I’m having lunch with a producer who knows Spielberg. Why don’t you join us? Bring your train film?”

  It was two in the afternoon. The morning fog had not so much burned off as morphed into a forbidding brownish haze. My sister’s house looked north toward the mountains. It had been a dry spring, and the hillsides looked eerily combustible. I had never stayed in L.A. for t
he summer; now every cell in my body was longing for the deep, dewy greens and the clear blue waters of Michigan.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  After hanging up on Angus, I pulled out a bottle of tequila and Triple Sec, some Rose’s Lime Juice, poured them into the blender with a scoop of ice. It was scorched here, uninhabitable. Dana and Philip’s swimming pool and patio were built into a hill that was held back by a tall bougainvillea-covered wall. I sat on the Brown Jordan with my margarita, wondered if there were rattlesnakes in the wild dirt beyond. Purple petals from the jacaranda tree littered the ground, and at one point, I got up to sweep, then poured another drink. Lying on the chaise longue, I thought vaguely about my life as the heady poison of smog filled my lungs. The pitcher soon was empty. I must have slept. When the sun went down, the sky became the livid crimson of bloodstained cloth.

  So lovely, I thought, seeing it through filmmakers’ eyes.

  Angus took me to a party somewhere in the hills. Down the street on Wilshire Boulevard, a Saudi prince had painted the statuary in front of his house in obscenely realistic colors. It had been a scandal in the early eighties. A year before, the house had burned to the ground.

  “Arson,” someone told me as I leaned against the column of the pool pavilion, scrutinizing the horizon for a glimpse of ocean. The house was sprawling, and all the walls were glass. There were young women like myself standing by the pool in cocktail dresses, scanning everyone who came in to the party to see if they were someone. I’m no one, I wanted to tell them.

  I downed my glass of wine, and went to look for another. The June night screamed with sirens and crickets. A man grabbed my arm and pulled me into his conversation. “Where’s Blue Jay Way?” he asked me urgently.

  “Above Penny Lane,” I said, tossing off the answer, but I had no idea. The man pointed at his friends and said, “See? See?” Angus had drifted off, and the pool lights were making the pretty young women look alien and sickly. I had difficulty breathing. There was a sense of closing in.