Those two in love. Joey March young and afraid. His blood full of adrenaline. His heart full of dread. And Tess? What was her heart full of? Love? Perhaps. Fear? Maybe. But above all, fire and rage. No question about that. She is half a step ahead pulling Joey March’s wrist slightly on the offbeat.
They are walking in the sunlight across the shining wet asphalt until they have become VISITORS, until they are swallowed by the double doors.
We stand in line. Wait our turn. Sign our names. We are scanned and frisked. We are ushered by a stocky woman with her long hair drawn up beneath her cap. Long hair I know is there because I’ve seen her drinking at Lester’s. Seen her with the heel of a boot on the bench of a wooden booth. Seen her bent over a pool table, eye on the break, hair back in a loose ponytail. This woman in her civilian life.
I’ve seen her both ways.
All of us broken in half. Half at least. Most of us in quarters, or sixteenths, or thirty-seconds, or sixty-fourths. The woman at work, the woman at play, the woman in love, the woman at war, the woman at home, the woman alone and all combinations in between.
We’re following her down the long cinder-block corridor, along the green linoleum. We can’t hear our own footsteps. Or I can’t now. Just the sound of those guard boots leading us along. Her broad back like a swimmer’s. Back and boots showing us the visit room, with the benches and tables riveted to the floor, and the fluorescent lights and the vending machines. Cans of Dr. Pepper, bags of Combos, Funyons, Snickers, always Snickers. The boots gone, the door closes. And there we are, the two of us. Waiting.
Others, sure. Other visitors. Other prisoners. But they are vague color. They are general noise, general motion. The clarity, the clarity is in Tess. Hands on the table. Narrow eyes fixed on the PRISONERS door. The texture of the table. The rotten-fruit candy chemical smell. Bleach. Humming lights and human noise. Visitors and prisoners coughing and sniffling and throat-clearing. Shifting their weight on the creaking benches. Murmuring interspersed with sobbing, a raised voice quieted by the death look of a guard built like a squat furnace. One of Seymour Strout’s colleagues.
And above it all, above the smell and sound, above even the hope and dread and rot exists something else, some other thing.
And it is this thing that holds the true authority.
And it is this thing that kills.
Tess in contrast. Her very existence, a kind of protest against it all. Her intelligence. Her warmth. Her smell. Her skin. Her rage. Her youth. All of it at war with the prison. Do you see the way this woman, just by her very presence in a place, challenges it and its terrorizing government? Is a menace to that sinister thing impossible to describe.
46.
We waited sitting side by side. Holding hands. Tess in my father’s place. Me in mine. All the people around us, the door opening and closing, all those prisoners ushered into the room. Blue for peaceful. Green for suicide watch.
Until at last, my mother appears in orange.
“That’s her,” Tess said, as if I might not recognize her. As if it had been Tess all that time coming to visit, and I’d just arrived in town. Right from the start it was that way. The instant my mother arrives in the room. Like that famous brand of love: an immediate and shattering thing.
She came to us moving in her new way. I’d noticed it the last few visits. A kind of imperious gliding. A dancer’s affect—hands loose at her sides, chin high, a look of bemusement, the slightest smile. A joke she’s still thinking about. A sweet story she’s just recalled. The look she gave you: Relent. I know all. Her face so relaxed. Nothing tight, no lines, no furrows. She seemed to have become younger in prison, not older.
So, she came to us, moving through the room as if it were a stage, a ballroom. And this new quality about her grew more pronounced when she saw Tess. Her eyes lightened. The smile grew into something beyond what she reserved for her son and husband. It was something closer to an expression of pleasure.
“Joey,” she said, kissing my cheek. “And you are Tess.”
We have all seen some version of this. Two people meet and something is changed. In the air, in the room. Something is acknowledged. Around them we exchange knowing looks. Did you see that? Did you see? Often, it is someone’s husband, someone’s wife who catches it. That flicker. The terror it can cause. The implications. So often a signal that a marriage will shortly suffer great damage.
“You are Tess,” my mother said again, but this time her tone meaning, at long last. The one I’ve been hearing about, the one who has captured my son’s heart. The motherly mode, so different from the first.
“I am,” Tess said with her fullest smile. No restraint. No caution.
My mother asked all the questions our time would allow. And in her new style consistent with the smile, the gliding, the hands at peace.
“Who are you, Tess? Where do you come from? What do you want from your life? Where will you go next? What are your intentions with my son?” This last with a laugh. “What are you doing here? A gorgeous young woman in a prison town? In a prison? Young lady, I don’t approve.”
She went on like that, Tess hypnotized. Enchanted, in the most literal sense. A spell had been cast. The straight-spined queen of The Pine has magical powers. Tess Wolff, our knight errant, is beguiled. The dutiful son sits silent and waits.
When our time ends, when our audience with her is nearly over, Tess slides her small rectangular box across the table. Six balls of wax rolled in white cotton.
“Thank you,” she says. “The noise is awful. Thank you.”
She presses her lips to the back of Tess’s hand, leaving a red stain.
The queen has found lipstick in prison.
47.
This morning I dragged the ladder from the garage and pulled the satellite dish off the roof. I’d always hated the thing. That little billboard. Paying those people to advertise for them. Those white letters pronouncing to the world: We watch television!
I never liked the dish, and I didn’t like drilling a hole into our house, and I didn’t like their black wire worming in.
We’d lived with it for a long time, of course. Like most people do. We liked watching the Mariners. The news. Staying up late. Smoking a joint. Nowhere to go in the morning. Some college football too. Mostly, though, we watched a lot of movies. That was something we both loved. Good and bad. It didn’t much matter.
But now that Tess is gone, I don’t have the heart for them. And the news makes me want to kill someone. All that noise. All those chattering fools. And that kind of anger is no good for me.
Both my grandfathers died of heart attacks.
So did my father, as it happens.
I’m in the sludge today. There is no wide crystalline sky. No sharp edges, no florid poetry.
The fire does not appear cut from glass.
Today my eyes are smeared with Vaseline and I am thinking of my father’s .45.
Anyway, the television. I couldn’t stand to watch it. I wanted it out. That grey dish collecting all the trash of the universe and funneling it in through its insidious black wire. Something we’d paid for willingly. Eagerly. We’d invited the most hideous people into this house. All that cultivated outrage. All that ugliness. I should have put a bullet through our expensive screen, but instead I just wrapped it in an old blanket and propped it against the back wall of the garage.
Since then, I’ve started listening to more music. I don’t know a thing about it, just that I like some of it a lot. And I mean with an upsetting intensity. It could be anything, too. No particular genre. I treat music like paintings. I walk through a museum until I’m hit in the chest. I guess that doesn’t make me very sophisticated, but it suits me well. What do you expect from a guy with a subpar education?
Anyway, it’s the way I like to live when I like to live.
48.
You should have seen her. The
expression. The eyes. Walking to the truck you’d have thought we’d been to see the pope.
Tess’s eyes shone. With what? With ideas? No. With plans. With plans.
And I suppose that kind of sparkling look isn’t quite calm, is it? Isn’t quite peace. As we walked, Tess squeezing my hand tight, I couldn’t have imagined what she was planning. I’m not sure she knew herself. Not yet, not really. But that’s when it began. The seminal moment.
“I love her,” she said as I drove us up the prison road.
And this is what we want, is it not? The woman we love to love the first woman who ever loved us? Test passed. We may proceed. We may go on without difficulty. Or that kind of difficulty. So, why did it concern me? Why was I frightened by it?
This instant and severe consonance.
I think of Tess who had the future in her eyes as we rose out of the valley.
“I love her,” she said before the road cut the prison away.
It wasn’t peace. Peace wasn’t what she was after.
When we pulled up to the house and the engine was off, she said, “We should find our own place.”
Which meant many things. That she was staying, and so we were staying. That we would walk into my father’s house, and tell him so. And he would look at us with such happiness, and the three of us would get drunk together on a bottle of Smirnoff from his freezer.
It meant that Lester’s would deliver a pizza and we’d eat it together in celebration and Tess would tell the story of meeting my mother for the first time in the visitors’ room of the prison at White Pine.
What she would not do is tell either of us what she was constructing. Because she did not yet know. Or because she did not have language for it yet. Or perhaps, unlike my father and very much like my mother, she demanded her secrets.
49.
A two-bedroom house ten minutes’ walk up the hill from my father’s. Salt-blasted, storm-struck, weather-beaten, peeling navy well on its way to grey. Two white-trimmed windows facing the street. Two windows side by side beneath a pitched roof, cedar-shingled. A child’s drawing of a house. Redbrick chimney. A nice wide porch out front, and three steps down, a dead lawn and six cracked concrete pavers to the sidewalk, a sidewalk which takes you along a quiet street.
Ours was Mott. Named for who the fuck cares. Mott Street. 232. The house worse for wear, but not a dump. Room for improvement, which is what you want in a house. That’s what houses are for. What arrives finished is for people without souls, without imagination. I trust nothing finished. Nothing that doesn’t leave me some room for work.
Two bedrooms upstairs, windows on the street, and a bathroom in between. Downstairs a living room with a brick fireplace and brick mantle painted coats and coats of white, darts of char shooting up from within. A dining room. An old porcelain light fixture pointing at the floor, a white warhead at the end of a brass rod. Radiators that spoke in tongues. Beat-up wooden floors everywhere, except the kitchen, which was all yellow linoleum. White Formica counters edged in aluminum straight out of a 50s diner. Wood cabinetry painted yellow, a gas range—oven and burners, splintered enamel both, and a clock in the console, the old saw, telling perfect time twice a day. An angry fridge.
There was a yellow yard out back, home to two good apple trees, both behind a tall pine fence many years newer than the house itself.
All to say, we were happy.
The two of us at the Salvation Army, at Goodwill.
See Tess moving backwards up our porch steps? See the expression on her face? You ask her if she wants to trade places, if she wants a rest. I’ve learned my lesson. She takes no shortcuts. She takes no shit. She will not be helped. She is the bravest, toughest, fiercest. Strongest. Look at her face. Watch while that horrible green corduroy (the people’s fabric of White Pine) couch slowly slips out of her hands. While she loses her grip, inch by inch. The sharp end of a wayward staple cuts the soft skin of the inside of her right arm. See the blood there? You tell her to drop it. You tell her to take a break. It’s a single minute in a life, Tess. But she will not let go until the couch is inside and facing the fireplace.
It fits just right, just so. Like it was bench built for our new little world. The front door wide open and, outside, the tailgate down. Our brand-new plastic-wrapped mattress is piled with boxes of the cheapest shit the great town of White Pine has to offer. Tess’s jacket left on the lawn, flung off in frustration. How dare it inhibit her. How dare it keep her warm when she wants to be cool.
The middle of the afternoon. Warm despite the season. All the windows open. All the doors. House and truck. Our lives exposed to the world. And Tess, sitting on our corduroy, has me on my knees. One leg in her jeans, one leg out. One side bare, one side not. Her hands on the back of my head, she holds on tight. My fingers curling inside her—ring and middle—with my tongue pressed hard against her, no soft flicking, no light touch today. Today it’s hard pressure, and her fingers tightening, tightening, she comes quickly the way she does. She comes hard. And after, she pulls me up, pulls me to her and kisses my mouth and says my name the way she did then, more than once and in all its variations. Sometimes Joey, sometimes Joseph, sometimes Joe.
“We’re home, my love,” she says. “You and me.”
She laughs and returns her slender naked leg back to her jeans and runs into the sunlight singing to me one song or another.
And I am happy. The two of us, day after day filling that place, making it ours. Making it fortress and nest, stronghold and citadel.
50.
After we finished our work that first week, when nearly everything was in place, my father came for dinner. He arrived with a bottle of champagne and a half-cord of firewood in the back of his Wagoneer. Tess made chili.
“To your mother,” she said to me. “To your wife,” she said to him. “May she come home soon.”
We all raised our glasses and drank.
So it was like old times. Like the beginning in Cannon Beach. Me behind the bar, Tess out on the floor.
She picked up shifts at The Owl. Kerry, or Julie, or Amy, got pregnant, or flunked Marine Biology, or got arrested for selling Ecstasy, or just pitched it in and left town, or whatever happened, and like that, the way things go in the past, with such simplicity and ease, Tess was working right there alongside me just like in the good old days.
In that time of joy, we woke in our new bed, upon our new mattress, in our new sheets, in our new home, with sunlight in the trees. In my memory, in those mornings we made love always. And after, always, one of us would go downstairs to our new kitchen and make coffee. I can feel it. Standing still, looking out the kitchen window at our scruffy yard, waiting for the machine to do its work, listening to the ranting refrigerator, my feet against the cool linoleum.
Reaching through the cold air for the White Pine Witness. Red rubber band. Cardinal in the tree.
Paper under my arm, a mug in each hand as I climb the stairs. Our stairs. Those mornings, those days, that house, the seed of a dream perhaps only I maintained. Tess in bed sleepy and naked. The two of us reading that terrible paper, the crime blotter our favorite page. Tossing it and turning to the books we collected, which were everywhere. Which grew up from the floor in stacks, and extended along the shelves we built with cinder blocks and planks of pine my father cut for free. What else did we have to do those mornings but read, and make love, and drink coffee and fall back to sleep?
My father came by some afternoons to help with one project or another. In the evenings we went down to The Owl in my truck to provide alcohol to those who wanted it. To pay for our new life together, to earn our living.
Perform some task in return for currency, use that currency to wrap ourselves in clean white sheets, to keep ourselves warm and sheltered and fed. All we had to do was show up on time, pour alcohol into glasses, distribute those glasses. Do it fast. Keep things clean. Keep things organized
.
In return, you may have this life. You may have your time of joy.
The problem is that we want other things. Some of us more than others, and after a while, after the castle has been built, fortified, and polished, we begin to look out the windows. We are restless. There are holes. There are desires we may only sense, a humming, a chill, a sensation impossible to understand, impossible to disregard.
Then there are two choices: bury it or change.
And it should be clear by now that Tess would bury nothing. So as those days passed, glorious in memory, glorious despite my mother, mornings in bed, nights at The Owl, dinners with my father, walks on the cold beach, all the desperate, savage, tender sex, through all those early days (infinite as they feel, how many were there really? Twenty? Thirty?), Tess had an eye to the window. And perhaps I did as well, knowing that the tar would return. Winter coming, days shortening, Tess drifting, nothing left to do with the house until spring, but sit and work and wait. With everything in its place there was nothing left to do but look outside. And we found that outside it was not like Cannon Beach.
In Cannon Beach there were no wars, no winter storms.
There my mother was not in prison.
After the home has been built, the firewood stacked, the bed made, the animal dressed, regardless of place and culture, whatever the quality of our food and shelter, in the quietest moments of our minds, relative as they may be, do we all look elsewhere?
51.
In the beginning, on nights we didn’t work, Tess and I stayed home. We lit a fire, we made dinner. And then on one of those nights, after we’d eaten, Tess poured us glasses of bourbon, and we went out onto the porch. This simple change, this was the beginning, the true beginning. The simplest thing. Tess carried the drinks, and I brought the blanket we kept on the couch. Some generic Navajo pattern. Green diamonds inside of diamonds inside of diamonds on white wool. A gift from my father, which we loved and which was part of our early life in the way that stuffed animals are in the lives of children.
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