Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  He considered, but not for long, telling her the truth. That he had come here to seek shelter from the world. Had, in fact, come just to see her. But he was afraid to tell her this.

  And so, instead, he told her that he was on his way to Los Angeles. And as these things have a way of doing, as soon as he told her where he was going, he knew that he would go there.

  “Business of some kind?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Movies?”

  “Yes.”

  In the semipause that followed and threatened to expand into a fullfledged silence, they both turned their attention to the snowstorm outside as seen through the windows of the dining room.

  “It just keeps coming down,” he said.

  “Shows no signs of stopping,” she pitched in gamely.

  But the silence, like some age-old malady for which there was still no cure, returned and settled upon them.

  They tried to shake it off, but their combined efforts fell short.

  “I guess I better go unpack,” he said, sighing as he rose to his feet, as if unpacking were a full day’s job waiting for him.

  “Where do you want to sleep?” she asked, as she always did.

  “In the den,” he answered, as he always answered.

  “The sheets are clean. They’ve been on the bed for some time, but they’re clean. I’ll get you some towels.”

  On his way down the stairs to the den in the basement, suitcase in one hand, towels in the other, his mother’s voice followed him from the top of the landing. The farther away he went, the louder she talked so that his impression of the volume of her voice was of something constant, like the speed of light.

  “I already ate. I have dinner early these days. I didn’t know you were coming, otherwise I would have waited. But I’ll warm up some stew for you. Or I can make you something else if you don’t want stew. It’s lamb stew. It’s very good. But I can make you something else if you want. I have some …”

  “Stew sounds great,” he shouted back. “I’ll be right up.”

  6

  In the wood-paneled (knotty pine) den in the basement, which went by the name of “guest room,” Saul went through the charade of unpacking.

  Charade, because he never unpacked when he came here. He unzipped the long zipper of his suitcase and laid open its contents, but that was as far as he ever got.

  He stared at the contents of his suitcase as if both the contents and suitcase belonged to someone else.

  In his sudden decision to flee form New York, he had thrown things inside it without thinking. He had no idea what he needed because he had (at the time) no idea where he was going.

  Shorts. Socks. Shirts. He fumbled with these items without removing them, taking inventory. A sweater. He had brought along a copy of the magazine with Leila’s story, his thinking being that if he took it with him, it meant he wasn’t really running away from it. The magazine lay inside the folded sweater.

  In addition, and as a kind of counterweight to the story, he had also brought along a copy of the videocassette of the Old Man’s film, the Old Man’s version.

  Saul had kept the cassette hidden in the closet of the spare bedroom in his apartment, so that when Leila was there she would not stumble upon it accidentally.

  Why had he taken it along with him?

  He had no idea. Maybe he was afraid that in his absence his apartment building might catch on fire and the videocassette would perish. For all he knew, it was the only copy left of the film as it was when it was a work of art.

  The cassette lay there among his shorts and socks.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed on which the wide-open suitcase lay and was suddenly tempted to lie down himself and go to sleep.

  But the lamb stew was being reheated upstairs. The acoustics of the house were such that he could hear his mother’s footsteps drumming a beat on the kitchen floor above his head.

  He couldn’t understand it. His mother had become a shriveled-up sparrow of a woman, but her feet landed like bricks when she walked. Judging from the sound, you’d think she was dropping her feet from the height of her waist. Something to do with old age, perhaps. Lack of muscular control, or something like that. Or maybe the result of living alone in a big house and wanting to hear herself passing through.

  This thought and the memory of the way she looked when she opened the door, with the snow falling on her head, looking up at him, and the thought that in all probability this would be the last time he saw her alive, the last time he heard her footsteps pounding patterns on the kitchen floor, all this, and something else too, which he could not put into words, caused him to breathe a long-imprisoned sentimental sigh and to say softly, but out loud, “Oh, Mother. Oh, Mother of mine.”

  She called him from the landing.

  “Saul. Stew’s ready.”

  “Coming,” he replied.

  7

  Saul sits at the dining room table, eating his lamb stew out of a deep soup bowl. His mother stands not far away and watches him eat.

  It was still light when he arrived and now it’s dark. Through the windows of the dining room, illuminated by streetlamps and the headlights of passing cars, he can see the snow falling, swirling, accumulating.

  “It’s really coming down,” his mother says, which is what he was going to say.

  “Looks like it’s going to snow all night,” he says instead.

  “You think so?”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  The TV, which had been on in the living room when he arrived, is still on. He knows if he weren’t here, his mother would be there watching it.

  The lamb stew is terrible. He can’t figure out what makes it so terrible, its tastelessness, or some subtle taste that it has. But something is terribly wrong with it.

  She goes back from looking out the window to watching him eat.

  “How is it?”

  “The lamb stew? It’s wonderful.”

  “There’s plenty more.”

  There was a time, Saul thinks, when his mother was a wonderful cook and an immaculate housekeeper and a woman who took great pride in her appearance.

  Now she is no longer any of those things.

  Saul wonders, as he eats his lamb stew, if she is aware of this decline or not.

  Signs of neglect are everywhere. You don’t have to look for them to see them. You have to keep looking away in order not to.

  His silverware and his soup bowl contain remnants of former meals upon them.

  The dishtowel his mother is now worrying with her hands as if it were a rosary is filthy. The furnace keeps coming on and each time it does, the air out of the registers blows little clumps of lint across the floor. Little lint creatures scurrying about like mice.

  The House of Karoo, Saul thinks to himself.

  He drains the dirty glass of water and his mother, eager for an activity, almost snatches it out of his hands and heads toward the kitchen sink to refill it.

  Although he has enough unresolved problems in his life to last him several lifetimes, he casts a scholarly glance at his mother’s departing feet and attempts yet again to figure out how it is possible for this wisp of an old woman to make such a racket when she walks. And on slippered feet.

  The closest he can come to an explanation is that his mother snaps her feet downward at the last split second prior to contact with the floor, the way a baseball slugger snaps his wrists to crush a grand slam home run. Impossible to see with the naked human eye.

  She stands by the sink, glass in hand, and lets the water run, feeling it with her finger.

  Saul looks at her, at his mother, in profile.

  At the dirty bathrobe she is wearing. Bought in some tourist shop in Santa Fe during a trip she and his father took over a decade ago. Geometric Indian pattern on it. The patterns and the colors were once distinct. Now they are a smudge. It fit her once. Way too big now.

  Her hair, dyed black, has no discernible style but is instead a collecti
on of several different hairdos on a single head. Parts of it were Afro. Part looks like a black beret.

  And still she stands there, letting the water run. Has probably forgotten what she came there to do. Mesmerized by the sound of the running water. Thinking her thoughts, the nature of which he will never know.

  The sounds of the house go on around them. The furnace comes on, first the whoosh of the flame, then the whine of the fan. The fridge kicks in. The sump pump in the basement comes on. The TV set in the living room drones, the water in the kitchen sink drips.

  And then, suddenly, his mother comes back to herself. Shudders a little as if waking up from a daydream and recollects what it was she came to the sink to accomplish.

  She fills the glass with water, turns off the tap, and heads back toward him.

  Maybe it’s the gesture, leading with the glass of water and holding it out toward him long before he’s in position to take it, that brings back the memory.

  The memory of the finger she carried toward him with a splinter inside it.

  The way she looked.

  The way he responded.

  It all comes back.

  “Thank you,” he tells her and takes the glass of water from her hand. “Thanks, Mom.”

  He uses the word “Mom” cautiously, mumbling it, as if testing the waters of its meaning, if any, for him.

  In a surprise move, having stood while he ate, she now sits down at the table next to him. It’s as if she forgot herself, as if she sat down by mistake, but having done so feels she had to remain there for some obligatory minimum amount of time.

  He eats his lamb stew and wonders if she’s looking at him. Since his arrival, the longest sustained eye contact between them was out there in the falling snow when they both failed to recognize each other.

  He washes his lamb stew down with the water she brought him and feels both the temptation and the terror to look at her.

  Her proximity is paralyzing.

  With the proximity of her body, he detects the scent of her old unwashed flesh, but it’s not disgust he feels at the nearness of her, it’s terror.

  The cause of which is?

  He doesn’t know. Who knows what he would see in her wrinkle-wrapped eyes if he dared to take a really good look at them?

  The temptation to look persists, like some physical pain that the proximity of her body brings into being. But he conquers the temptation, though not the terror, and does not look.

  He finishes his lamb stew.

  “Would you like some more?”

  “No, no, thank you,” he says, puffing out his cheeks and patting his stomach. “I’m stuffed. It was great.”

  She snatches up his soup bowl and his silverware and his empty glass and goes to the kitchen sink to wash them.

  8

  He remains seated in his chair. His mother, having washed the dishes, is now standing next to the kitchen countertop, her hands upon it, her fingers softly drumming.

  They talk, making brief eye contact every now and then, because at this distance they’re safely out of the range of each other’s eyes.

  The talk, initiated by his mother, is of teeth. Hers. His. His father’s.

  “I just can’t get used to my dentures. I’ve had new ones made several times. The ones I have now were adjusted by experts, but they still don’t feel right.”

  He’s afraid she plans to take them out and show them to him, but she doesn’t.

  “Some people are lucky,” she goes on. “Your father, for example. The first pair he got was all he needed. That was that. Forgot he was wearing them half the time. I had to remind him to take them out at night, or else he would have slept with them. I know of plenty others like that. But not me.”

  She shakes her head, defiantly proud of her trouble, as if, in her opinion, the better class of people never gets used to wearing dentures.

  “They just don’t feel right. Never did. And never will. I’m wearing horseshoes in my mouth. That’s what it feels like.”

  They both smile.

  “What happened to you?” she asks him.

  He’s puzzled by the question.

  “To your teeth,” she asks, alluding to his broken teeth by running a finger over her own.

  “Oh.” He nods, understanding now. “These here. I chipped them while eating something.” Then shrugs, as if to minimize the importance of the event.

  She seems to know nothing about the fatal car crash. The story from which he’s fleeing doesn’t seem to be a story she has heard, and he’s not about to tell it to her.

  “They have bonding now,” she tells him. “I hear it’s real simple and easy and doesn’t hurt. You should get your teeth bonded.”

  “I will.”

  “Got to take care of your teeth while you have them.”

  “I know. I will.”

  In the ensuing silence, he sees a tense alertness taking hold of his mother’s entire little body. She hears something. Some signal. Some call. And, as if in response to it, she starts to lean forward, poised for departure.

  He quickly comprehends the nature of the call.

  Theme music is playing on the TV in the living room, for a show she wants to watch. She has probably been looking forward to it for hours.

  The least he can do is to let her watch it in peace, he thinks.

  “I better turn in. I’m tired,” he says and heads toward the door leading down to the basement. His mother heads toward the living room and the TV set. They pass each other.

  “Good night, Mom.”

  “Sleep well.”

  He catches a look in his mother’s eyes as she goes past him. The TV show is pulling her toward it, as if it were an irresistible lover, and her old eyes seem to shine brighter in anticipation of the tryst.

  9

  He took a shower in the basement, using the same little surfboard-shaped piece of soap that was in the soap dish the last time he was here … almost three years ago. The soap was hard as a little river rock and he had to work a lot to get it to lather.

  No brilliant thoughts came to him in the shower except for the vague realization that he should have been further along by now.

  Further along in what?

  In his life? In his dealing with his mother? In something? In everything?

  All of the above.

  Further along in general.

  Standing totally naked in the half-finished basement, he dried himself with the towel his mother had given him.

  He observed the various pieces of furniture and the appliances that had once been upstairs and were moved down over the years.

  The old upstairs fridge and the old gas range were down here now. As were the old upstairs dining room table and chairs. Along with the old upstairs living room rug.

  Like some government in exile, he thought, walking barefoot to the den, carrying his shoes and socks in one hand, his clothes in the other.

  There was a small bookcase in the den (made of knotty pine, like the paneling) with about thirty old hardback volumes in it. Sinclair Lewis. Upton Sinclair. Booth Tarkington. Carl Sandburg. Others. The Great Books of the Midwestern World, his father had called this collection in a moment of rare humor.

  Saul considered doing a little reading in bed, but he couldn’t think of what he wanted to read, so he turned off the lights and felt his way in the darkness toward the bed.

  No, the darkness of the den was not haunted by the ghost of his father. The den, the whole house, in fact, was haunted by an absence of ghosts.

  The queen-size bed with the too-soft mattress had once been the upstairs bed of his parents. He crawled under the covers only to realize that he had left his suitcase on the bed. It stayed there like the presence of another body next to his.

  The layout of the basement was such that the living room where his mother now sat watching TV was right above his head. He could hear the laugh track of the show she was watching.

  In the darkness of the den, the sound of that laugh track acquired t
he quality of some deity, or a chorus of deities, responding in an aloof but uproarious fashion to the private thoughts he was thinking.

  His thoughts were about stories. Stories in the plural. And stories in the singular. Stories in general. Specific stories.

  The story of Leila and Billy and him.

  (Laugh, laugh, laugh, the soundtrack laughed above his head.)

  Leila’s whole life was there. In the magazine in the suitcase next to him.

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author had interviewed not just her mother but her old friends and relatives in Charleston and her friends in Venice. Saul, who knew her, knew none of these people. The writer who didn’t know her and had never seen her knew more about her than he did.

  The same seemed true of Billy. The writer had gone to Harvard and talked to Billy’s friends (Saul knew none of them) and the resulting profile of Billy was more coherent and detailed than the Billy Saul had known.

  And although the writer had never met Saul, the character of Saul that emerged in the story, supported by opinions and quotes from numerous sources, was far more satisfying and made much more sense than the character he knew.

  (Laugh, laugh, laugh.)

  The story of the three of them (right there in the magazine in the suitcase next to him) was a marvel of simplicity and grace and was made to seem somehow inevitable, as all good tragedies are.

  A girl of fourteen gives up her child for adoption. Almost twenty years later, the man who adopted her child, now separated from his wife, meets her in Venice. The man is an almost legendary rewriter of flawed screenplays and fixer of flawed films. He has come to Hollywood to work on a film directed by Arthur Houseman who, because of ill health, was unable to finish the job himself. Leila, after years of struggling to make it as an actress, is the star of the film Saul has come to fix. He falls in love with her. Eventually, he introduces her to his adopted son Billy, a freshman at Harvard. Neither the woman nor the boy, nor Saul himself, know that they are mother and son. Leila and Billy fall in love. They have an affair that they keep secret from Saul. On their way to the premiere of her movie in Pittsburgh …

  (Laugh, laugh, laugh.)

  What Saul loved about this story of their story, as written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, was the absence of any unresolved mess in either the story line or in the principal characters the story portrayed. An almost architectural sense of proportion permeated the entire magazine piece, everything balanced by something else and nothing left hanging in midair.