Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  He finds lucid moments again during his first day, but he is always on the edge of that marble vastness she nearly abandoned him to. She finds the place where peppermint ice cream cones can be procured on University Way, takes him to her favorite bakery for a Danish, buys him a cup of black coffee from the country’s second Starbucks, and orders him foods she knows he’ll like at the restaurant where she waitresses part-time. The other waitresses all make a fuss over him and of course he likes that. He likes women, he likes restaurants, all that is fine.

  Aunt Celia packed carefully laundered pajamas and undergarments in the small suitcase, and with a fresh shirt he’ll be all set for the weekend in the sage-colored leisure suit he wore for the journey, an unfortunate purchase he made on his own shortly after the divorce. The suits he was born to wear, had always worn on Sundays, are a deep navy serge. Growing up, she thought he looked like a movie star in them, a cross between Rock Hudson and Gregory Peck, though the suits came off the rack at Penney’s. But he likes to keep up-to-date, no moss growing on him, so now it is the leisure suit, shirt collar open, and he also wears his still-dark hair a little longer in back, touching the collar.

  Her studio is tiny; they will manage by taking turns in the bathroom tiled in small black-and-white diamonds from the twenties—his heyday. The apartment’s one luxurious feature is the roomy walk-in closet. She regrets that she has only a futon to offer him—a man of his age should have more comfortable arrangements—but he doesn’t complain. For herself, she sets up a foam pad and sleeping bag on the floor beside him. Not only has she never had enough money to buy more than the futon, desk, and metal bistro table, she knows that Seattle is but one stopping point on her forward trajectory, and sees no reason to accumulate unnecessary objects she will only have to tow after her.

  The day has been full, he has been rescued once and not lost sight of after that, and they are due for a good night’s sleep. No special itinerary needs to be planned for the next day: He is so easy, really, a man satisfied with walks, frequent coffees, newspapers, and a hot meal. The point, as she sees it, is simply to be together.

  The bedtime routine goes smoothly at first. If his pupils are contracting, she doesn’t see. If the meds haven’t been swallowed, she forgets to check. It’s true, and she might have made a note to remember, that nighttime is a sticking point, the time of voices, etc.

  Lights are out, neighbors are not mumbling through walls, no shadows or headlights are insinuating themselves through the vinyl shades. What precipitates his agitation, then, is wholly internal, an avatar, perhaps, of the self lost in the wide marble hall.

  “It’s not really hard yet,” he says to her, sitting up, his Cary Grant wagon-wheel pajamas buttoned neatly to the top button.

  “What?”

  “Not really hard. Not yet.” His tone is rueful, apologetic.

  It takes her a moment to understand that he is talking about his penis, held semierect in his hand, as he pulls back the covers to show her.

  “Dad, it’s me.”

  She comes to understand that he can’t understand that it is her, not one of the wives, or girlfriends, or even, she begins to suspect he thinks, a prostitute into whose lair he’s stumbled. He told a boyfriend of hers once, man to man, about the cathouses. There were out-of-town jobs, opportunities.

  “Dad, it’s me”—the only girl who had a working model of the solar system in seventh-grade science because you went to the hardware store and got the crank, the gear, the dowels for the Styrofoam balls. Knew how to make it work.

  He doesn’t move from his futon, doesn’t protest when she covers him up. Blinks at her. Lets a small, embarrassed, lascivious smile play about his lips while he watches her pace the length of her twelve-foot apartment.

  Who can she call? Not deaf, lame Aunt Celia in Portland, obviously. Not her mother, who will only get angry and hysterical, until Samantha will have to take care of her on top of this.

  She dials Steve in Los Angeles. Explains the inconceivable. Hands her father the phone.

  “Hello?” He is puzzled. Who does this hooker want him to chat with?

  Carl listens for some seconds. The pupils may have widened a millimeter. Then he looks at her. Sees her. Hits his open palm to his forehead. Again. Not the sitcom slap of the plum preserves—What a dummy—but really hits. As if he is trying to hurt, maybe kill, the pale, jellylike brain inside.

  “Dad, stop. It’s okay now.”

  He can’t reply to this remark, can’t look at her after that single moment of recognition. Can only pound and pound his unrelenting skull.

  Earlier that day she thought, as they strolled University Way, that the next stop after Aunt Celia’s might be to live with her. An apartment with two bedrooms, his social security check to cover things, some square meals for the two of them. She’ll fix oatmeal, fry up little cutlets, nothing complicated, but things he likes. He’ll read the paper, doze, take short walks when she’s in classes. She pictures him riding sidecar with her as she zooms down the interstate of her future—goggles firmly attached, silk scarf flying. He loves road trips.

  In fact, the stops after his sister’s detail a sadder litany. First, foster care, though who even knew that they have this in reverse, for the elderly. Foster care, by definition, makes her and her brother the failed or incompetent guardians who relinquished responsibility, but she manages to put that thought away in the little mental drawer she keeps for the purpose. Romanian immigrants, favoring plastic flowers and clear, crackling slipcovers over the furniture, make him one of their family in exchange for a not unreasonable monthly stipend, the whole of his social security check. They feed him nourishing meals, accomplish the dressing and the grooming, see to the meds, accompany him on walks, hand him the channel changer and sit beside him for the evening news. Their big, strapping adult son seems genuinely fond of her father, seems not to be lying when he grinningly puts his arm around the old man’s shoulders and squeezes. The grandfather we were missing! It is harder to tell if her father likes him back. He bears the arrangement. Eats seconds of the home-cooked meals. Doesn’t confuse his surroundings with a brothel.

  Then one day, after taking a roundhouse swing at the strapping son’s pregnant wife, her father is dispatched to a Senior Living Environment, but has trouble remembering which buttons to push in the elevator to find the dining hall. After he is discovered in another resident’s apartment donning a strange hat and unfamiliar trousers, he is shuttled to his next stop, the nursing home. When Samantha flies in to visit from Boston, where she now lives and has a job, it embarrasses her that none of the nurses or aides ever know her. She isn’t there often enough to be known, though it is true that they experience high staff turnover. Since her father doesn’t recognize her, either, she makes repeated trips to a place where she has to introduce herself again and again. Still, he grows fond of her on every visit, expresses regret that they didn’t meet sooner.

  Once, she brings a cassette player with a tape she’s mixed of his big-band favorites. She doesn’t know what she expected. A little jitterbugging, maybe? He sits in a wheelchair, though she is pretty sure he doesn’t have to. It’s the meds; they make him feel like not using his legs.

  Inexplicably, the sound of Count Basie enrages him to the point of shouting. The nurses, who do not know her, do not know what she might be inflicting on the old man confined to the wheelchair, look on with stern attention as she shushes him up, presses the STOP button, stashes the player and tape in her tote bag. Evidently, there is to be no more “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.”

  But before they pass through these stages of his disappearance, he is still a traveler on a weekend visit to Seattle. Has tired himself out walking up and down University Way. He lies still and abashed on her futon, perhaps staring at movies on the ceiling, she doesn’t know. She moved her sleeping bag into the walk-in closet, where she has hours until morning to play through scenes of her childhood, review the many competent repairs her father made to
the house, whose leaky faucets and leaning fences her mother had to hire someone to fix after the divorce. There is time before morning to mentally rearrange her possessions on the wide shelves he built and varnished for her, time to wax skis on the worktable he made and set up in the garage. Time even, before dusk takes over the backyard, to attempt the always tricky cartwheel on the balance beam he constructed, and on which she was good at doing forward and backward rolls, letting her individual vertebrae search for the beam, though for the cartwheels she was always too tentative, always afraid of a heel slipping off, even knowing that there was grass below to catch her.

  Curled up in the walk-in closet with all that time, she takes herself point by point through her floor and beam routines, repeating them if she misses an element. She actually hated gymnastics, though it took her years to realize it. A tenth of a point off for the slightest insufficient or incorrect gesture. Unrelenting disapproval of the unpointed toe, the crooked arm. You could do everything else right and then not stick the dismount, sway a bit as you internally scanned for the center. A further deduction for not smiling as they judged you.

  She lies awake, forced to relive the impossibility of it all, while her father, who went to sleep knowing her name, who wished her a good night, breathes steadily in the next room, then snores. She doesn’t know how much she sleeps; whatever dreams she has are an uneasy mix of heels slipping and landings unstuck—though in her father’s backyard, falling off her father’s honed and sanded beam, there is always the forgiveness of his tended grass. She lies perfectly still, waiting for morning to bring a modicum of gray to her closet, surrounded by her entire dark hanging wardrobe, beheaded flat figures that resemble her.

  GRAVITY

  Boston, 1999

  The summer before the Millennium, Samantha is worried about the city’s recommended list of things to assemble for the crash. She has not yet collected jugs of water, canned goods, flashlights, firewood, sterno cells, first-aid kit, or stores of cash in small bills. But she and Mark and the boys do have, only half-jokingly, a “Y2K” room to put it all in when she does: a fifteen-by-fifteen concrete space added on to the basement when they constructed a family room upstairs. They hadn’t yet figured out what to do with its bleak, prison-like interior—model train table? arts and crafts? treadmill?—when Mark jokingly dubbed it the Y2K room and that’s what it became. It has small windows at the top that can be easily sheeted with plastic and duct-taped, should there be a need for that. Her mind fails to supply her with the scenario that would require living in a bunker—missiles firing themselves? neighbors fighting in the street over cans of baked beans?—but the city has sent a list and she has always been a person to follow instructions.

  That is one preoccupation. Another is the coming baby, which she knows, without sonogram documentation, will be a boy. She and Mark only make boys. The baby is due, unnervingly and momentously, on January 2, which could also mean a bunch of other days including January 1, the day of the four-digit changeover. Michael and Christopher were each relatively punctual in their arrivals, one two days early, the other two days late. She worries more about the city list because of this.

  But on the July day that JFK Jr.’s plane disappears into the sea, Samantha stops thinking about all of that. Mark is the one to tell her about the plane disappearing—Samantha never learns important things before he does. He reads the two papers in the morning that come to the house, sometimes buys a third on his train commute to work, and now carries a pager that feeds him continuous headlines from CNN at the touch of a button. She’ll come upon him standing in the middle of a room huddled over the pager’s miniature green screen, as if warming himself at a tiny campfire.

  Samantha hasn’t thought of John-John since his wedding to that impossibly gorgeous woman he married in secret on some island off the Georgia coast. The wife was in the plane that went down. It shouldn’t matter to her that those two were so stunningly beautiful together. It shouldn’t make her any more sad for their loss, their disappeared plane.

  But it does. When the boys are down for naps, Samantha lies on the bed upstairs with Mark, watching the divers hunt. It is like watching nothing, because the divers are under the sea, and there are only the stationary rescue and coast guard ships to stare at. The reporters have to do something with this space of nothing, so they fill it by making up social theories about John’s “generation,” and although they are just blathering, Samantha is one of the people they are talking about, she and Mark. She was only four, but she can remember watching her mother get that November phone call, the one that shattered her into strange and sudden weeping. Thereafter the commemorative issue of Life occupied a center position on the coffee table. Many afternoons Samantha would sprawl on her stomach on the rug, browsing pictures she soon memorized: the pink suit, the convertible in blinding, metallic sunlight, then the pages and pages of people in black. There he was, the boy younger than she, but looking like a small grown-up standing there on the curb, saluting. His father’s funeral was on his third birthday, one of the facts that made young Samantha feel the sorriest for him.

  It’s hard to turn off the television, even after they’ve heard the same few sketchy reports recited over and over. They click through all the networks and are soon so boned-up on the coverage that they catch the reporters making careless mistakes—one reports John’s age as thirty-nine, instead of thirty-eight. Another keeps mispronouncing his wife, Carolyn’s name for his sister, Caroline’s. Some are still reporting Carolyn’s father as the doctor in Greenwich, Connecticut. She and Mark know better—that’s the stepfather. They know that the Cessna on which John got his pilot’s license was N529JK (for his father’s birthday). What Samantha doesn’t know is why she’s unable to turn away. It’s pretty certain that they’re all dead—John, Carolyn, the wife’s sister who was flying with them. Searchers have recovered a luggage tag, a woman’s shoe, a prescription bottle. They’re down there, all right.

  She should get up, but it feels good to have a reason to take to her bed. She has just entered her second trimester, the one with all the supposed extra energy to facilitate the nesting instinct, but she is bone tired. This is her chance to get ready, to get organized, since the boys’ three days of care continue through the summer, her time off from teaching college. She has a short story that she’s working on, of a mother-daughter pair with a Demeter and Persephone undercurrent. She can’t seem to end it—the mother’s unending lament of abandonment, all the ways the daughter tries to shake her mother off but can’t, even from the arms of the ultimate bad boyfriend. She should put it aside and move on, but that one story line has her by the throat.

  It’s very nice just to lie here in the heat, not trying to get through a checklist during the boys’ naps, letting Mark make sandwiches for them and bring them upstairs for lazy eating in bed.

  By now the networks all have a signature “Tragedy at Sea” graphic and soundtrack to cut away to when they take their station or commercial breaks, and she is appalled by the way the plane crash has been immediately packaged into a made-for-TV movie. In the last few hours, stations have also edited the film clips of JFK Jr.’s childhood into a smoothly repeating loop that keeps insisting on a certain, fixed narrative, a pressing inevitability that begins like a wholesome pastel dream and ends with the crack of an unseen rifle.

  John Kennedy Jr. is speaking now from the television, on a tape of course, saying that he remembers barely anything of those White House years apart from the pictures themselves, which are not actual memories, but became the memories he has. Samantha knows what he means. How does anyone know what happened to him, to her, at the beginning, apart from a story you’ve been told? The only memories you can be sure you own completely are the ones that come from a place so inner that no one else has ever had access to them, like the mysterious little grains lining the bottoms of pockets.

  She is two or three, sitting on her knees on the bathroom counter, which she reached by climbing from a step
stool. It is the time before the new Formica. She is about to look for the orange baby aspirin in the medicine chest, which, she remembers, tastes good. She is suddenly transfixed by her image in the cabinet mirror, inches away, making her forget the orange pills. There is only the swooning collapse and then the expanding distance between the outside Samantha and the inside Samantha. That is perhaps her first wholly owned memory, the discovery of herself.

  Michael bounds in after waking up and snuggles between them, liking the boats on the television and not paying attention to the announcer’s words. After the boats disappoint by failing to move, he wants to play a game they do when they’re all in the big bed: Let’s Be Wolves in a Den (plunge down beneath the covers and growl); Let’s Be Mice in a Tunnel (plunge down beneath the covers and squeak). Sometimes they are manatees, or lizards, or crows, but they are always creatures in a family, and it always ends with a plunge into togetherness and shelter. Soon Christopher wanders in with his blanket. He’s just gotten his real bed and now can release himself at will from naps just like his brother. They all have a few more rounds of Let’s Be Bunnies, Let’s Be Dolphins, Let’s Be Ladybugs, then Samantha gets up. They barely all fit anymore, the boys are getting so rangy and long.

  She remembers a crying jag a few weeks after Michael was born because every day, every hour, he looked different and was turning into someone new, but at the cost of losing a previous version of himself—the little starfish hands of the startle reflex, the grimaces and fantastic expressions as he tried to focus his early gazing. It was hormone-suffused grief, and had nothing to do with her gratitude that he was healthy and growing, but it was grief nonetheless. At weigh-ins she would ridiculously keep track of whether he could still be carried within her. It comforted her in an odd way that at nine and a half pounds it was still imaginatively possible to tuck him inside herself. Also, barely, at eleven pounds. By, say, thirteen pounds, her body mourned that her son belonged utterly to the outside world.