“Hey,” he said. “You can sing.”
“Maybe if I were still Julie Smoke, we’d have a brother-sister act.”
“Maybe we would,” he said. “Go ahead. Sing something.”
She hesitated. But why? She realized she was hesitating to appear shy and modest. What she really wanted to do was accommodate him. Maybe impress him. She launched into “Matilda.” She billabonged, she tucker-bagged, she jumbucked.
He hugged her when she was done. He pulled her toward him, kissed the top of her head. “That’s going into the act,” he said when he released her.
They fell into silence. “What’s your position on fate?” she said after a while.
“Whoa,” he said.
“No, really. Do you believe in it? Do you believe in God? Or when strange things happen, do you just chalk them up to happenstance?”
He had his mother’s smirk. He was not nearly as much a Smoke as he thought. “I’m just curious,” he said. “How did we get from ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to do I believe in God?”
“The three of us—my sisters and me—we were just living our lives,” Delph said. “We had certain plans, right? A certain game plan all mapped out. And just as we were coming close to putting our plans into action, your mother shows up. In the middle of a hurricane. And now I, at least, am reconsidering those plans.”
“What plans?”
“Nothing. Moving. We were thinking about moving.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere else. It’s complicated. It’s not important. The point is that we were making these plans, and then, before we could carry them out, there’s your mother in our front hall making us—well, at least making me—rethink everything.”
“They couldn’t have been very firm plans if that’s all it took to change your mind.”
“The point is that there’s something so predetermined about the way she popped up. More than predetermined. It’s overdetermined, I think. Coincidental but beyond coincidental. Like the hand of God at work. If you believe in God.”
“If you believe God has hands.”
“I’m serious. Do you think the timing of these things are sheer coincidence? Or do you think God or the gods or whatever you want to call it manipulated events, sent your mother to us, made sure we knew we had family here before we packed up and left?”
He laughed. “I’m just picturing God trying to convince my mother to do something she doesn’t want to do. It wouldn’t turn out well for God, I’m betting.” He took a swig from the flask. He grew serious. “I don’t know,” he said. “Does it matter why it happened?”
“The why always matters,” she said. “Look at me. I have all my life believed that our family was cursed. All those terrible lives. All those suicides. Now we find out that Violet escaped the curse. And you escaped. And your sisters escaped. What does it mean?”
“You believed the family was cursed? Seriously believed it?”
“People think it’s absurd to believe in curses, and then they tell you they believe in karma. Or God. Or angels.”
“Well, I don’t believe in God or angels.”
“But karma?”
“Well, karma is real.”
She laughed. “Look at this,” she said. It wasn’t easy, showing him her tattoo. She rolled up the leg of her jeans, contorted so he could see her calf in the smudge of moon. He couldn’t make the words out; she had to tell him what they said. “From the Bible,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Except all that those words mean is try not to be a complete asshole or the next few generations of your family are going to die of embarrassment every time your name is mentioned. It doesn’t mean the generations will literally be punished.”
“Hunh,” she said. “Tell that to John-John Kennedy.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ve understood what you’re getting at for a good five minutes now.”
She wasn’t sure what she was saying either—they had that in common. But she knew what she was thinking about, and what she was thinking about was living, and that she was thinking about living shocked her in a way that thinking about dying never had. It was as if all this time her attachment to life had been lurking beneath her willingness to die, like an impervious base metal beneath cheap gold plating.
“Hey,” Danny said, “let’s not just sit here and talk. Let’s do something. Let’s go inside.”
“You mean break in?”
“You wanted to know what I do after gigs. That’s what I do. I break into the Walt Whitman Birthplace and serenade his ghost.”
“There,” she said. “I knew that ghost was going to show up.”
He took a guitar and a blanket from the back of the van. He used the side of a credit card to open the front door to the house. The Smokes, Delph thought. So good at barging into homes that aren’t their own.
He led her into the birthing room. They sat on the blanket, which did nothing to cushion them from the hard, wide, warped slats of the pine floor. The walls were bowed horsehair, mildewed.
He tuned the guitar, strummed, his head close to the strings.
“How do you know this is the birthing room?” she said.
“Everyone knows it’s the birthing room.”
He began to play. She watched the strings vibrate, noted the optical illusion, the way there appeared to be many more strings than just the six. He sang a verse from “Goodnight Irene,” this time with more heart, more pain. He changed the name of the girl in the song. “Goodnight Delphine.”
“You think of me as Delphine?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” he admitted, “but now I do. It’s like, Julie’s dead; long live Delphine.”
It upset her, the death of poor Julie. She didn’t want to let Julie go. She said, “If I’d never stopped being Julie Smoke, what would my life be like now?”
“You’re the one who said we’d have a brother-sister act. So I guess you’d have been onstage with me tonight.”
He was strumming the guitar again, but for the first time she didn’t recognize the tune. One of his own compositions, she supposed. Or maybe something he was making up on the spot. Sweet, she thought, but forgettable. Later, though, she’d remember, if not the tune, then the chorus:
Now her man’s dead at sea, and her son’s dead from war,
And her fire’s died out ’long with mem’ries of yore,
So she raises her glass and she sings her last toasts:
Here’s to heavenly death and reunions of ghosts.
When he finished, he stopped the vibrating strings with the flat of his palm. He put down the guitar and picked up what he’d been saying. “Then we’d have hung out at the bar for a while with Freddie,” he said. “Like we did. Then we’d have stopped here to decompress with a little nature and a little booze. Like we did. Then I’d have said, ‘Hey, let’s break in.’ Like we did. So, I guess if you’d lived this other life, you’d be sitting right here, where you’re sitting now.”
“Both roads would have led to this very place at this very time?”
“They’d converge at this very moment,” he agreed. He took a beat: very theatrical, very effective. “And then,” he said, “now, in this moment, they’d diverge again.”
He came closer. He was doing that movie thing where a face moves toward another face, then back away, then forward again, a way of asking a question and, at the same time, making a declaration, but each approach less questioning than the last, and now the two faces tilting this way, then that way, until the noses finally bump. The bumping of noses: the first touching, so silly and clumsy.
Everything she knew about sex came from the movies, and from tame movies at that, where kissing led to sex under sheets and fade out till morning.
“God,” he said as he tried to maneuver them into a position that would avoid elbows and knees banging against the unyielding floor, “when was the last time you did this someplace other than a bed?”
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“I’ve never done it—” She took her own beat, far less effective than his. She was aching, not only with longing but from the press of the flooring through the blanket. The dominant emotion she felt was embarrassment. She longed to confess: I’ve never done it, and accordingly I will be inadequate, I will be inexpert, I will be horrifyingly bad at this. She wanted to ask for a second chance even before the first chance had been taken. She wanted to ask if he believed in second chances—if, literally, he believed there were such things as second chances, that there were times when people could start all over again, different parents, different childhood, different fate. Is that ever possible? she wanted to ask him. And she wanted to apologize: Forgive me, Danny, for I have never sinned. Nor have I shaved my legs anytime recently.
Most of all she wanted to ask him about his motivations, about what it was that made him decide he wanted to do this with her, of all people, the only acceptable response to that question being, “Because I’m shitfaced and you’re shitfaced and I’m here and you’re here.” That, after all, was the only reason she was not saying no. Also because at that point in her life—how much of it was left, a day? maybe two?—why wouldn’t she?
But she had enough sense and had read enough advice to the lovelorn columns—she liked thinking of herself that way, as lovelorn—to know that you did not ask a guy why, exactly, he was trying to remove your clothes. Nor was this the time to call his attention to the fact that you were first cousins, and that once, briefly, you were more than cousins, although not officially, not on paper. All you could do at a time like this was make sure the beat you’d taken after the words you’d just spoken was a short one. All you could do was finish your sentence:
“I’ve never done it—on a floor this hard.”
Afterward, rising to dress, she felt sad. Also sticky, sore, wet. She tugged her jeans on. Semen continued to leak from her. She was annoyed that no one had ever mentioned this unpleasant seeping when speaking of afterglow, and she was struck by the hypocrisy: gay men got all kinds of grief about body parts ill-suited to receive other body parts; but how was the female body designed any better? The imperfect vessel that was her body turned out to contain a second and even more imperfect vessel.
Danny was dressed again too. He lay back down on the blanket, hands behind his head. “Come here,” he said, and she lay down, using one of his flanged arms as a pillow. She warmed her nose in his armpit. They lay in that position without speaking. At times she thought she was sleeping. She was only certain she wasn’t when he broke the silence.
“Jerry Lee Lewis,” he said.
She knew right away why he’d said it. “Albert Einstein too,” she said, “although I think Elsa may have been his second cousin, not his first. And of course, our great-great-grandparents.”
“Our great-great-grandparents were cousins?” he said, at first aghast, then abashed, finally amused. “Wow,” he said. “So I guess we come by incest honestly.”
Outside the sky buzzed gray like a 1950s TV screen after the networks signed off. “Who’s what’s-her-face?” she asked.
“What’s-her-face? She’s no one. Or the only one. Or the one that got away. Really, I’m past her now. You must have a string of no ones you’ve left in your wake.”
“I do,” she said. “A long string of no ones.”
“We’ve both been unlucky in love,” Danny said.
She said, “I don’t know that I believe in love.”
“You believe in curses, but not love?”
The answer was yes, but she didn’t want to say so. She wanted him to like her for at least a little bit longer. They lay quietly until the air horn of a semi wailed as if to assert its dominance over the owls and foxes and the two of them, as if to demonstrate the rightful order of things in this modern world.
She said, “I think I want to tell you something.”
“Shoot,” he said, and she told him about the horizontal light.
This was what she liked about him: he tried to understand. “Like weft as opposed to warp?” he asked.
She weighed that, envisioning the small plastic loom we had as children, the woven potholders we made for our mother. What had happened to those potholders? When had our mother thrown them away? “Maybe. But more like the empty spaces between the warp threads that the weft passes through. And when those empty spaces open up, it’s all I can do to resist passing into them.”
“But you have resisted. Right? You’re here.”
Now was the time for full confession, but full confession brought the possibility of rescue or, at least, intervention or a call to a suicide hotline. She even had the phone number on a card in her pocket.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.” She was trying to sound as though her interest were mostly clinical. “But the impulse has run through the family. They called it political dissent or shame or loneliness. And those things were real, and maybe they made the light even brighter for them, but for me, that’s all there is, just this change in the light. For me, there’s just this moment every day when I’m invited to leave and I want to leave and I have to make myself stay.” She could hear her voice shake. So much, she thought, for clinical.
“Do you see that light now?” he asked.
“Right now? No. I can’t imagine I’d ever see it when I’m with you.”
She didn’t mean it to sound romantic. She just meant she was typically alone when the light came upon her. But he seemed flattered and touched and pleased. He held her now, tightly. It made her want to sleep with him—just sleep. If she still didn’t understand the pleasure in physical coupling, she did understand the pleasure of sleeping with a warm male body. Eddie. Joshua.
He yawned. He wondered how late it was. Getting to his feet, he offered her a hand, tugged her upright. They folded the blanket together. He took his guitar.
“You have an interesting approach to pillow talk,” he said as they left the house.
She laughed, cuffing him on the shoulder. “Next time bring me an actual pillow and I’ll do better.” She could feel the semen continuing to drip down the inside of her thigh. How quickly human fluids, once expelled, turned cold. “Anyway, who are you to criticize? You’re the one who brought up incest. Talk about turnoffs.”
He grinned. “Are we having our first fight?” he said, hugging her close, knocking her off balance. “Are we breaking up?” It was a joke. It was teasing banter. She blamed the tears on the hour and the bourbon and the screaming trucks.
The next morning, Violet slumped like a bag of laundry in the passenger seat of the Toyota, Danny dropped us off at Pinelawn Station. There were hugs and kisses. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. He left to return Violet to the best shack in the tent city.
We waved until we could no longer see the car. We were the only ones at the station. The small waiting room was padlocked as the cemetery had been the day before. It was slightly cooler than it had been yesterday. Vee, too tired to stand, sat on the cold-blooded concrete, leaning against a wooden post. She shivered. Above her, Lady and Delph were talking.
“I would hate to be in Violet’s shoes,” Lady said. “No real home in the world.”
“If we moved out here, she could stay in her real home,” Delph said. “We could take turns caring for her.”
From the vicinity of their ankles, Vee said, “No.”
“Vee’s right,” Lady said. “We don’t even know these people. They’re total strangers when you get right down to it. And honestly, Delph, if I had to stay up one more night with Violet, I swear it would have killed me.”
“Death by Aunt Violet,” Delph said.
When the train arrived, Vee struggled to her feet, using Lady as a steadying device. We boarded through the rear door of the last car and took the first seat we came to, a bench seat, room enough for all three of us. There was another bench seat facing it. Room enough for us to rest our feet on. Or for Vee to lie down on, which, after a moment, before the train was even in motion, she did.
From her new vantage point Vee could see a metal-framed poster on the wall above Lady and Delph. The poster, black letters, white background, said:
Treat every day that dawns for you as the last.
The unhoped-for hour’s ever welcome when it comes.
—HORACE
She pointed the sign out, and Lady and Delph swiveled in their seats to read it. We couldn’t help ourselves: we went through the familiar debate. Was it merely a coincidence that we’d situated ourselves beneath a message trumpeting the joy of living just one more day, or had the gods directed us to these seats? Had some poetically inclined member of the Long Island Railroad’s marketing team hung the sign there, or was it God’s way of suggesting we reevaluate our plans?
“I wish those cockamamie gods of yours would make up their minds,” Lady said to Delph, and Vee groaned. “We’ve made up our minds,” she said. “Can we please stop seeking the universe’s opinion every five minutes?”
She’d had trouble sleeping the night before. She’d drifted off early, only to wake to a strange house dark and silent. She didn’t recognize any of the shadows. Gradually it came back to her—we’d left the apartment, were spending the night at Violet’s. It had seemed the right thing to do that morning. But now it seemed she’d been left alone.
She got up and wobbled through the hall until she found the bathroom. She knelt before the toilet and got sick. She sat on the toilet and got sicker. Everything she’d eaten the day before. So desperately humiliating, to be at someone else’s home when the body decided to be at its most repulsive. She wanted to cry. She held her face in her hands.
When she felt emptied—she could barely abide being in the small room now—and had cleaned herself, she opened the medicine cabinet and drank from a bottle of Pepto. She read the labels of all the prescription vials. They all seemed to be for Violet; they all seemed quite old. One, its label pruney and faded, contained diazepam. She poured four pills into her palm and swallowed them with another swig of the Pepto.
The pills had done what they were supposed to do, knocked her out for the rest of the night, but it hadn’t been what she’d call sleep. It was more a kind of dozy paralysis. And now she couldn’t shake the pills off. She twisted and turned on her narrow seat, fidgety and fetal. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I can’t keep my eyes open, but I can’t fall asleep either. This is a nightmare.”
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 31