“OK. Point taken. What did Lewis say?”
“The usual. He nagged me about what school I’m going to try to get Ramona into. He insinuated that I’m wasting my time—which I may be. I certainly spend enough time thinking about the subject.”
Jay kept talking, but Stephen was only half-listening. Lewis simply never let up. He probed his daughter’s weaknesses, projecting his own pain and uncertainty onto her—thus ensuring that she remained in a state of rattled defense. Lacan’s jouissance was defined as unbearable suffering that produced satisfaction to unconscious drives—perversity, as Stephen saw it, and Lewis had it in spades.
Stephen pulled back from himself. Of course on some primal level he resented Lewis for being alive. That was the price Lewis had to pay for being the father of the girl Stephen felt illegitimate about fucking. Stephen knew it would serve him best to stay on high ground and not let himself get too drawn into the lunacy of this (go ahead, admit it) messed-up and semicrazy family.
But his loyalties were solidly with Jay. There were higher regions of thought, and in them Stephen simply loved her. If they were going to have a future together, she was going to have to get her head together and escape Lewis’s suffocating mishigas.
“It’s the same old stuff,” Stephen said, watching the clumsy ballet on the basketball court. “You just need space from him.”
“I know,” Jay replied. Stephen detected the exhaustion in her voice. This was the same conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was starting to become difficult to find new ways to formulate old sentiments. Stephen felt his mind begin to multitrack. He was due in a committee meeting in about thirty minutes, followed by office hours. That night he had to review a batch of papers graded by a scatterbrained T.A. whose frequently bleary eyes may or may not have been evidence of a pot habit. And then there was the book Stephen was supposed to be writing, which at the moment was little more than twenty pages of disparate notes and a half-assed outline on his hard drive.
He asked Jay an innocuous question about Ramona, buying time while his mind worked. It took just a moment to shift his consciousness sideways and to utterly objectify his own motives. He occupied a unique position in these people’s lives—as a latecomer, he was unencumbered by any prevailing sentiment other than his love/lust for Jay (intertwined, as was healthy) and his affection for her daughter. He wasn’t caught up in things and now, thinking hard about it, he suspected that he was an ideal catalyst for positively affecting the family dynamic.
But there was a blockage . . . a vague, diffuse fear: on some level he was frightened of Lewis. And so was Jay. Lewis was physically and mentally strong, and he was utterly self-absorbed even by contemporary standards. Lewis was creepy and a little scary. Well, the point of fear, beyond its utility as a warning system, was that overcoming it was educational.
Which meant that Stephen was going to finally deal with his girlfriend’s crazy dad.
“Stephen?” Jay said. “Still there?”
The game was breaking up. Another group was waiting by the side of the court to begin their allotted sign-up period. If there were two things students and professors knew how to do, it was signing forms and waiting for things to begin.
“I’m still here,” Stephen replied. “Sorry, I was watching the game. It makes me wonder—have I always been so feeble, or am I really getting old?”
“My old man,” Jay said in that husky tone she took, the one that always surprised him. “Experience has been good for you. I’m glad I got the older Stephen. It saved me all the fumbling around.”
“Oh, and I did some fumbling.”
“You all do,” Jay told him. “Believe me. I’ve been fumbled plenty.”
“Hopefully I’m not fumbling anymore.”
“You are not fumbling, Dr. Grant.”
“That is so gratifying,” he said.
“It is for me, too,” said Jay.
A part of Stephen empathized with Lewis. Any father would be entranced to the point of obsession by such a daughter.
“I’m going to go,” Jay said. “We’ve wasted enough time.”
“Right.” He started getting his things together. He was going to have to hurry to get showered and dressed.
“And don’t worry so much about Lewis,” Jay added with uncharacteristic seriousness.
“I’m worried about you,” he replied.
“Just let it be,” she said. “All of this is like ripples in a pond. It’ll settle down before too long.”
“OK,” he said, unconvinced. “I’ll let you work it out.”
He knew he was lying to her. He was going to get involved.
“Dad needs me,” Jay said. “He thinks he has to protect me. It gives him something to think about other than . . . you know, his loneliness.”
Stephen wiped the sweat from his forehead and thought about what she had said.
“Take care of that soul of yours, Jaybird,” he said by way of good-bye.
INTERLUDE. SHE WOULD MAKE HERSELF DUMB AND SLEEPY FOREVER.
Ramona listened from around the corner. She stared for a long time at the white paint on Mama’s bedroom doorway, loving the way it had chipped and been painted overagain, making little valleys and craters in slightly different colors. She put her face to the surface and dared a lick, just a little one, before pulling her face away. Some paint had stuff in it that would make you dumb and sleepy forever. Ramona regretted what she had just done. She blinked, thinking she felt sleepy. Maybe it was starting.
“And don’t worry so much about Lewis,” Mama said on the phone. Mama was sitting on her bed and looking out the window.
Ramona knew she was talking to Stephen by the way she was laughing, a quiet but constant sound, as though everything he said was funny. A lot of the time Mama acted like nothing was funny, except now sometimes she laughed when Ramona said something that wasn’t meant to be funny—and now that she thought about it, that made Ramona feel kind of mad.
She licked the doorway again. Maybe she would make herself dumb and sleepy forever. Would everyone like her then? They could laugh all they wanted to, while Ramona would sit in the hospital and watch TV and get treats all day. It didn’t sound too bad.
Mama was talking about Grampa. His name was Lewis. When Mama and Stephen talked about him, they always sounded worried, or like they were arguing.
One time Ramona had called Mama “Jay,” just to see what it was like. Mama had gotten mad and told Ramona never to do it again.
The rules were always changing.
“Dad needs me,” Mama said. “He thinks he has to protect me.”
Ramona stuck her head around the doorway. Mama was sitting on the edge of the bed in her underpants and a T-shirt. Mama was twirling her hair in her fingers. She didn’t know Ramona was there.
Grampa thought he needed to protect Mama—well, that was true. Mama needed protecting. A lot of the time, Mama acted like she didn’t know what to do. That worried Ramona, because Mama was perfect and it didn’t make sense for Mama not to know it. Not perfect like God—that was different. Ramona knew God was perfect, but she didn’t talk about it much because Mama didn’t believe in God. Grampa didn’t, either. But someone had to be keeping the sun in the sky, and making sure the birds came back in the spring.
Grampa made Ramona worry. He came to the apartment the day before with some nice new presents, but when Ramona played with them she felt Grampa watching her. She felt his . . . stress. Grampa wanted something from her, and from Mama, that they couldn’t possibly give him. Maybe when God made Grandma Anna come back, she would tell them all what happened when she died and make everything better.
Mama hung up the phone and turned around. It happened so fast that Ramona didn’t have time to hide.
“Ramona, how long have you been standing there?” Mama asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You know what I told you about eavesdropping,” Mama said, kind of mad, kind of not.
“I know,” said the Pe
rfect Princess. She smiled at the Old Queen, who never stayed mad for long.
The Old Queen smiled back. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the Perfect Princess, who never did anything wrong, and who always made things right.
“Well, at least come give me a hug, you little spy,” said the Old Queen, for whom hugs were food, and for whom the Perfect Princess was always available to lend strength.
8. OF ALL THE THINGS HE NEEDED AT THIS STAGE OF HIS LIFE.
It was not Lewis’s favorite time of day—mid-morning, a compromise between the promise of the early hours and the gradual setbacks and accommodations leading to the end of his work shift. He stood by a rack of ties doing increasingly desperate math: he’d made about seventy-five dollars so far that morning, enough to almost cover the cable bill. If he skipped lunch every day that week, he might make enough in wages and commissions not to have to dip too far into his remaining savings.
Of course, that took for granted that he would continue to ignore the increasingly strident demands from the bill collectors that he make headway on Anna’s medical expenses.
Carew had woken Lewis at six for his trip to the park to void his bowels, nipping and straining at the leash, the poor damned thing seeming to feed off of Lewis’s anxiety. Lewis had popped his antidepressant and—who cared what he looked like—donned his winter coat and hat against the chill. He had shivered in the park while Carew did his thing, one hand on the cell phone in his pocket, fighting off the urge to call and wake Jay.
Lewis took a deep breath that caught in his chest. His heart lurched. He pretended to examine the rack of ties while listening to the soft piano music filtering through Men’s Wear. The pills made his mouth dry, made his teeth taste bitter. He couldn’t really say what effect they were having on his mood. He was not depressed per se. He sensed his heart drifting somewhere above the rest of him, which made him feel calmer than a month before.
His doctor wanted him to visit a therapist. She was a new doctor, packaged with the insurance that came with his job at the department store. She was young, thin, and strangely attractive for all her sternness and obvious anxiety over her legitimacy and authority. Lewis had acknowledged that getting his head examined wasn’t the worst idea in the world, but he’d mused out loud to the young doctor—a brunette in black jeans with an uncertain smile—that at this late date in his existence it might be better to leave things alone. He told her about his shortness of breath and the chest pains, and she’d assured him that “almost definitely” his symptoms had psychological origins.
Almost definitely.
The day of Anna’s diagnosis had coincided with the nadir of their marriage, from Lewis’s point of view. What Anna thought, Lewis couldn’t have said. She seemed content, but she had let herself get chubby, which had dulled Lewis’s desire for her as his own sexual powers continued their gradual slide. While he thought of sex continually, morning erections had become sporadic, and his ability to get it up wasn’t helped by the sight of Anna’s white cellulite-laden thighs and expanding waistline. Anna seemed content with whatever carnal attention Lewis could manage, however infrequent, and spent her days out on the sunporch painting—canvases of their garden, nothing else. Her painting was very good. Several of her oils were still propped against the walls of the sunporch. When Lewis looked at them, he saw flowers. He stared at them for long periods of time, as though the blurry images would give him some clue of what she thought, or felt.
For his part, Lewis had been seething with anger nearly all the time. He had mastered his job at American Express, and his daily life amounted to little more than tedious nuisance. When he came home, the place was always a mess—newspapers scattered everywhere, dishes in the sink, unwashed clothes stacked in the bathroom hamper. Anna would be on her daily walk around the lake when Lewis unlocked the door and let himself inside. There were times when Lewis hated her, for confining him and blithely consenting to make him what he had become—a man of routine, of moral timidity, of grasping uncertainty.
He even hated her for his affairs, such as they were.
She hadn’t felt well for some time. She had sharp pains in her abdomen. She finally started to lose weight, though not in an attractive way. Her eyes settled in caverns of darkness, and she slept twelve hours a night. After a while she started inexplicably vomiting after meals. Lewis suggested she get to the doctor.
The news came fast, all in one day. Anna went to the doctor in the morning, and by afternoon she was on the phone with Lewis.
“I think you’d better come home,” she told him.
“What’s wrong?” Lewis asked. He had a four o’clock meeting, he remembered, one that seemed very important.
“I’m . . . sick,” she said.
“How sick?” Lewis asked. He remembered looking out his corner-office window, peering down at the Foshay Tower and the Metrodome.
“Sick,” Anna said. “Sick for real.”
“Oh, Christ,” Lewis had said.
On the way home that day, Lewis steeled himself for the months to come. Driving down LaSalle through the Phillips neighborhood (brick apartment buildings giving way to run-down multitenant houses in the direction he wasn’t going) he realized he had known all along that this was going to happen. Anna had tethered him to a life he had never wanted, and now she was leaving him. The torpor, the lassitude, had been harbingers of her death. He thought he had hated her for what had become of him, but now he realized that he had hated her for her death.
He stopped hating her. By the time he pulled into the driveway he had been desperate to make amends. She met him at the door. They sat down and she described what the tests had revealed: a big, necrotic tumor right in the middle of her. They cried, they said all sorts of things. Lewis apologized for the way he had treated her, all the while trying to make peace with all the hateful thoughts. Anna told him she wanted to fight the cancer, but she knew she would lose. The doctor hadn’t wanted to say so, but she had seen it in his face.
When they pulled out of their tearful embrace, Lewis looked at her. In telescoping time, he saw all the ages of Anna at once—sexy young aesthete, devoted mother, detached middle-aged enigma. He was not in love with her, the years had taken care of that. But he understood the sheer weight of all they had put up with from each other, and the degree of devotion it had required. Lewis had cursed his cowardice for going into the twilight, and her for allowing it to happen. Now he saw that twilight as the form and texture of his own particular journey through life—as though, for all they had endured, they had been born for each other.
It was terribly ironic. Of course he was going to try to make amends before she died. Only a complete bastard wouldn’t. Wasn’t this singular epiphany of Anna’s worth to him merely what anyone would have felt? Was that how it worked—going through life resentful and petty, then loving it all just before it was snatched away? Was he merely going through a clichéd Stage One of Spousal Grieving, now that it was clear she was lost to him?
Lewis shivered in his antidepressant chill. As though there was a pill for dealing with this shit. He straightened a rack of sport coats. He felt his heart beating faster than it should. He had a momentary image of Carew dead, run down by a car, and remembered that he used to fantasize about Anna’s death, long before she took ill.
Someone said his name, and Lewis looked up. In this context, it took him a good five seconds to realize that he was looking into the charming green eyes of Stephen Grant.
“Stephen,” Lewis said. “Can I sell you a shirt?”
Stephen smiled indulgently and leaned against a counter. He was wearing a jacket and tie, both of pretty decent quality, and carrying a thick leather briefcase stuffed with papers. His hair was brushed rakishly off his forehead, and he looked almost exactly his age. Lewis felt a flush of jealousy.
“Maybe another time,” Stephen said. “I was hoping we could have a chat.”
“Have a chat,” Lewis repeate
d. He gestured around him. “Maybe you’re not aware of the setup here. Let me fill you in. This is a business. I am at my job.”
Stephen sighed as though he had known this was going to be difficult and now found himself in a scenario he had foreseen precisely.
Lewis felt his jaw clench involuntarily. He might have even liked this guy, if it hadn’t been for the knee-jerk condescension that emanated from him like smoke off a slow-burning fire.
“I thought it would be a good idea to talk on neutral ground,” Stephen said. “Look, I’m sorry for surprising you. I had a meeting that got canceled. Can you take a break or something?”
Lewis remembered that he had intended, several days ago, to instigate just such an encounter with Stephen. Whatever the hell was on Stephen’s mind, this was a perfect chance for Lewis to impart his concern for Jay and Ramona.
“Actually,” he said, “your timing is perfect. Let me get permission from Massa, and we’ll go get a cup of coffee.”
Lewis led Stephen down to the Starbucks adjacent to the big two-story Barnes & Noble down on street level, tucked beneath the skyways. This was an act of subtle aggression, since Lewis had sat through several dinners during which Stephen regaled his captive audience with his thoughts on corporations, globalism, and consumer consumption. Lewis’s tenure with American Express, naturally, loomed beneath the surface of Stephen’s crusade to edify the ignorant.
With an involuntary gasp, Lewis registered the chill in the air and folded his arms around himself as they crossed the street. Stephen pulled a face when Lewis headed for the revolving door.
“Uh, Lewis?” Stephen said. “You know, there’s a coffee shop half a block from here.”
Lewis knew the one Stephen meant—the one with the fashion-plate girls behind the counter and the murals on the wall—the one that was independently owned. Christ, the things people found to worry about. Even Jay, who couldn’t be bothered to dress like an adult even though she had a daughter about to start kindergarten.
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