by Paul Monette
"Gray," said Brian politely, and the brushing stopped as Gray looked around. "Thanks for putting us all up."
Gray blushed. "Don't be silly. You'll come in the summer sometime. Daniel can sail."
Brian nodded, another of those necessary fictions. Then he crooked a thumb over his shoulder. "And keep an eye on this guy, huh? He's a terror."
"Oh, don't worry. He's on a very short leash, that one."
We all laughed. Gray had to restrain himself mightily not to leap up and shake Brian's hand. But he understood his place exactly in this business of saying good-bye, and so contented himself with a nodding smile. My brother and I turned away in relief and made our way through the dining room. Almost there, and no thin ice in sight. The will to get on with it—he to his life, I to mine—superseded all.
The kitchen door stood wide, the rumble of idling engines echoing in from the yard. The counters were bare of food, no muffins to tuck in his backpack. Brian stepped outside, and I almost followed but pulled up short, deciding to leave it there. The two cars were waiting in caravan, a stone's throw off. Please—no last words in front of the agents.
I put both hands to the doorframe, leaning out. "So... some Tuesday, huh?"
He half turned, the light from the kitchen throwing a glint in his eye. "Yeah. And tell Miss Jesus I'll see her in church."
He winked. Then we made a gesture toward each other, something between a nod and a bow, both at the same time, but not another word. Brian strode through the grass to the lead car and climbed in front next to Evans. I stayed in the doorway—I even waved. It wasn't breaking the rules as long as it went unspoken. I waved in the dark where no one could see me, the two cars trundling away down the drive, till the red lights turned on the coast road. Waved at the blue night sky like a wild man, wishing my brother safe passage wherever it took him, as long as it brought him home.
I WONDER IF MY MOTHER EVER DREAMS OF WEST HILL ROAD. Though she lives in the house at 210 still, her waking life these days is a fog of untouched soup and too many pills and a grim cushion of geriatric diapers. Mostly she lives nowhere now, following the sharp commands of Mary Alice Lynch, probably thinking, if she thinks at all, that she's a boarder in the nurse/companion's house.
But when she dreams, does some corner of her lost self ever open the door of 210 as it was? My father brawling at the kitchen table on his umpteenth rye-and-ginger. Brian wolfing supper in his baseball whites, nine innings to play before dusk. For her sake I hope she dreams of us, a flash of old footage knifing the dark with memory. For the house is nothing without that dream.
I will not be dreaming it myself anymore. That much I know already, and my brother hardly gone a week. I'm too busy playing over and over the days of our reunion. Somewhere in there the old world of West Hill Road has died at last of irrelevance. Or perhaps the gunfire and the rain of blood have left me with a nice amnesia. In any case the final bit of evidence departed here in the gold-tooled box with Daniel. No one will ever connect that solitary drunken snapshot of my dad's with me and Brian, because we have finally outgrown it. Good-bye and good riddance.
Gray says it all happened too fast for him. He hardly got to know anyone, too polite to ask what any of it meant, by which time the cyclone had blown in and out. But then, he's never been in a rush to get over his own ancient history, mirrored as it is in the Merlin presence of Foo. Besides, he still lives quite comfortably, thank you, on the West Hill Road of his childhood. All it lacked was me. And he managed to move me in without shifting so much as an end table. Violent change was not required, the very drama I'd been waiting for all my life.
He's right about one thing, though. The whole upheaval has been and gone without a trace. Monday and Tuesday, the first days after, I felt a certain shiver—thrill—whenever I passed the fireplace. Despite Gray's elbow grease the hearthstone seemed to bear a scarlet sheen, the parlor air thick with the fetor of rust and rotten fruit. For me the lingering spoor of Jerry Curran's blood was like a tonic, a breath of purest ozone.
Yet even that had faded by midweek, and the house on the bluff was as before, playing out its own tattered dream of summer. The stair hall reverberated not with the racing feet of my nephew or his mother's carping self-defeat, but the faint strings of the old musicales, flimsy as the gauze curtains that billow at the upstairs windows.
Not that I didn't have to endure a certain amount of hovering, especially from Mona. Once we'd told her the whole bloody tale next evening over pizza, her solicitude was relentless. "Are you okay?" she'd ask me again and again, the first day or so with a certainty that I couldn't be. By Wednesday she told herself I was in shock, and the question grew more aggressive, like trying to slap a hysteric. Except I remained so stubbornly unhysterical, till by Friday it was Mona who was in shock, especially when I announced my benefit gig for Sister Kathleen would be the following Monday.
"Girl, listen," I declared with rigor, chaise to chaise in the twilight, nursing mugs of cocoa, "Jerry Curran is over. What we have to work with here is Tom happy and Tom dying. Can you do those two at the same time? Because I'm definitely not happy dying. Maybe alternate days would work. You solve this one, Donna, and I'll take my hot chocolate I.V."
Meanwhile Gray had stayed over every night since, but to be my lover, not my nurse. Though he did toss out one morning, very offhanded, "You miss your brother?"
We were cutting back the bougainvillea from the cloistered arch by the fountain, our arms clawed like lion tamers'. I thought for a moment and then said, "Not really." And that was the end of it, as far as Gray was concerned. I suppose he wanted me to have my brother all to myself, whatever the feelings were. Maybe he even understood that, having gotten it right with my brother, I'm not missing anything anymore.
Whatever else my brother's sojourn in my life has left me with, I find myself possessed with having a whole summer here. The last Alaska storm was the end of the rainy season. Everyone says so—especially Merle, who squints at the midday blue of the sky and knows in his Malibu bones that we will be cloudless till November.
And that means a thousand chores to get us ready. An actual list in Cora's birdy longhand, several numbered sheets of Baldwin notepaper sporting the family crest. Second week of April, it says at the top of the page. We read our instructions, already days behind because of the turmoil of Brian's visit.
Half-ton crushed shells for the drive. No clams.
Strip the eucalyptus.
New rat-traps in the attic.
Cut bougainvillea to the bone.
What the list did not make plain, Foo was there to elucidate. It wasn't that clam shells were vulgar, but the shards too sharp for bare feet. Husking the bark of the eucalyptus left the trunks white and sleek as marble, not an arborial choice so much as an aesthetic one, giving the line of trees at the top of the hill the look of columns on a temple. Readiness for summer invoked a spectrum of details unique to the house on the bluff, and the chores had evolved over sixty years to a state approaching tribal law.
Who would've guessed there were slipcovers tissued in the attic, enough for every upholstered chair to wear a tight-fitting summer dress gaudy with pink and white peonies? No task was too obscure, though I was handed the thankless brush with which to repaint the rose trellises along the garage. A two-day piece of work made brutal by the challenge of getting no paint on the bushes themselves, which twisted in and out of the diamond-slatted wood.
I did a tremendous job, but don't go by me. Foo came down every other morning with Merle, to check on our progress and oversee the fine points. She assured me I had far outdone her sister Nonny in trellis-painting, who always ended up blotching the rosebuds cruelly. In the old days, says Foo, most of the heavy work was done by ranch hands from up the hill, dispatched by Gray's grandfather to take care of his curious sisters.
"A house at the beach is a losing battle," she declares from beneath a straw hat, so frayed it looks fit for a donkey. "Unless you have an army working, Cora used to say, three good rai
ny seasons'll bring it right to the ground."
She delivers this flinty proverb from a kitchen chair we've carted out onto the back lawn so she can watch me at the trellis. Meanwhile Gray and Merle are spidering over the roof, checking the mortar between the brick-red tiles. Foo's been given a cup of bouillon to sip, but she's let it cool and spiked it with a shot of airline vodka smuggled in in her purse.
"So you don't have to make it perfect," she pronounces with a wag of her crooked forefinger. "Just patch and freshen, you hear? What do we care if the whole cliff breaks off next winter? All we want is one more summer. Am I right, Tom?"
Exactly. And for this summer I'm preparing, I try to think what I want for Gray and what for me. Days, mostly, unencumbered end to end except by the business of living here. They say you make bargains as things get tighter—a birthday, one more Christmas. As for me and my summer, I find that I'm writing a sort of continuous living will in my head. I want to go quick but not too quick, as little demented as possible. Already it breaks my heart to think of Gray watching me shrivel and lose the thread, blank as my mother on West Hill Road. Just this summer, please, April to October. Already a second bargain there, since a proper California summer goes on way past Labor Day.
Merle joins us for lunch at the dining room table, all of us still in our work clothes, Foo in her donkey hat. The burly Native American has dropped me from the Custer rolls, silently accepting me into the circle of the Baldwin tribe. Perhaps he sees how inevitable is the connection between Gray and me, but I think it's more, a warrior's nod of honor for my late blood conquest. Gray swears he's breathed no word of the killing to Merle or Foo, but somehow the Indian senses, a bear's nose for the spill of blood. All unconscious, since his twelve-step program hardly gives him leave to glorify a killer. But a shaman's blessing is in the air as we break bread and pass cold cuts. I am an honorary something, Malibu/ Chumash, just like Gray and Foo.
Mona arrives in time for dessert, laden with hothouse peaches and champagne grapes and melon, a goose to summer at four dollars a pound. She has also stopped to pick up the mail at the cubbyhole Trancas P.O. "Card from your brother," she announces casually, flipping it to me across the table. It goes without saying she's read it. "Oklahoma," she observes with a grimace to the table at large, as she doles out the fruit.
On the face is an oil well gushing, an old hand-tinted photograph. The prairie around it is flat and dead as a nuclear waste dump. On the reverse the printed legend proclaims: We're rich! Then in the message space below, a brief scribble: Tommy—Reno went fine. Package delivered. Tulsa's the pits. Are you eating? Go for some overtime! XXX Ace.
"What's overtime?" I ask the group.
"When's the last time you worked nine to five, bunkie?" Mona drawls, slurping a slice of peach. "It's what they pay you for working extra."
"No...in sports."
A general frown around the table. Not exactly a roomful of jocks. "I think you get more innings," Gray offers tentatively. "If there's a tie or something."
"Uh-uh." Merle shakes his barrel head. "It's like in football, they give you more time at the end. After the clock."
We all nod sagely, even Foo, though I fear the concept remains a philosophical mystery. Nevertheless I'm flushed with pleasure to have the card at all. No return address of course, but he wrote me. I feel terrifically indulged and thrilled to be overruled—that our fast good-bye that bloody night wasn't the final word.
"Field hockey," Foo announces, a beat after everyone else. She nibbles at a bunch of champagne grapes like a tiny, gaunt Bacchanalian. "The Catherine Downing Academy in San Marino," the name unfurling like a banner. "I got a goal in overtime once. But I don't remember how you play. Some damn fool stick." Her spindle arm makes a vague wave at the air.
"You're all set for Monday at seven," Mona confirms to me. "She's only bringing about twenty. Field trip for her I-and-A girls. Incest and abused," she explains to the others, as I run my fingertips over the ball-point script of my brother's card. Mona sees I'm half-distracted, so she slips in casually, practically yawning, "I hate to let eighty seats go empty."
"Don't even think it," I retort automatically, fanning myself with the postcard. If I can't write back and we're both phoneless, how exactly do I get through?
"I'm going to be there," Foo puts in, with a brief imperious glare that cuts off any incipient protest from Merle or her nephew, let alone me.
I snap my fingers. "Kid needs a CD player." I point to Mona. "Can you get to Adray's before they close?" She groans and checks her watch. On Saturday afternoon the traffic into Hollywood is a killer crawl. "If they Fed Ex it today, he'll get it Monday morning." Mona's eyes roll, gimme-a-break. It's not like I need a blood transfusion. I toss the carrot. "Do it, and you can have twenty more bodies on Monday night."
She grins, on her feet already. As she hustles after me up the stairs, I'm laying down the conditions. Only friends and angels of the theater to be invited. No press—no public at large—no Daphne. Mona agrees to everything before I finish. To her it's all a wedge and a start, prying open the shell of my stubbornness.
She waits while I count out three hundred and fifty from the drawer in the nightstand, tucked in the flyleaf of Emma. It's the whole of my winter savings from my state disability, unsquandered on the Colonel and Big Macs because I've been living on Baldwin groceries. From the mirror's frame I grab the square of paper on which Susan has printed their Minneapolis address. Then I shoo Mona out to her mission, kissing the air by her parrot earring.
Things have to be done like this, speedy and on the spur. I dance four bars of a jig in celebration, having solved the ache of getting back to Brian with a bank shot off my nephew. All week I've been wanting to send something off to Daniel, but not an empty letter. Instead I have this mad urge to send him presents: skis, a racing bike, a pair of golden pups. Only my terminal poverty reins me in.
Speeding things up.Racing to get the place in summer shape. Am I really at the end stage, or is it all just the work of a drama queen wired from the acceleration of the last two weeks?
Depends on the time of day.When we're out there scraping barnacles, bleaching the grout in the fountain tiles, or up in the Chinese garden hauling glop from the lily pond, I'm boundless and inexhaustible, never sick a day in my life. If it's denial, it's got the wollop of Popeye's spinach. The smallest win over dirt and dry-rot sets the summer more firmly in stone. I feel like I'm buying time with hard labor. Even the oceanic naps that lay me out at the end of the day are a mark of my well-being, sleep like a long drink of water.
Night is something else entirely, waking up in a sweat next to Gray, and no more beasts to kill. I towel the drench from my hair and switch to a dry pillow. But the busywork doesn't distract me from the broken dream of my dying body. My waterlogged knee is horribly stiff, so I limp like Long John Silver. I'm trembly and slightly frantic, my lesions twinging like rat bites. I know I'm as likely to die by morning as Gray is to wake. As he sleeps and I cling to the bedpost, I might as well be a ghoul already, haunting the ground of my too-brief joy.
I slip out onto the balcony, a blanket caped about my shoulders. We're between moons, so the dome of the sky is awash with stars and the ocean a black gleam of patent leather. The night breeze ripples over me with a near-tropical sweetness, ripe as Hawaii, a summer that never ends. But my ghostliness won't go away. From both ends of my body, last week's spells of blank and my gimp knee, the message is grimly the same: Who am I kidding?
Once it's hit the nervous system, the game is all in overtime.
Still, I mustn't be dead yet, or how would I have the wherewithal to stumble in and back to bed? It's the ghost who's somehow got to be put to sleep, or how will I ever make it through to daylight? I snuggle up close to the warmth of Gray, holding my breath, fearful he'll wake with a scream at the touch of my icy flesh. I try not to grip him too tight. This is what haunting is, to hover in the place of love. The dead never sleep for a minute.
And yet, almost de
spite myself, I can feel the easy rhythm of Gray's breathing—like catching a wave to bodysurf. I swoon under before I know it, and happy wins out over dying for one more night.
Sunday we do windows. I'm on the inside, Gray is out, and Merle floats above us on the ladder doing the upstairs. We go through a gallon of ammonia and a mile of paper towels, scrubbing a half inch of grime from the sills as we go. "I always thought the sea air was so clean," I observe with some dismay, eliciting from the shaman on the ladder a grunt that sounds like "Dirt's dirt."
As I ease open one of the dining room casements, I send a nest of red-cross spiders scurrying. I shudder involuntarily, a terrible sissy when it comes to crawling things. And Gray turns sharp from the next window over. I see the flash of emergency in his eyes, thinking the look on my face is a stroke.
An instant later he knows he's wrong, no explanation necessary beyond my squinch of buggy distaste. He laughs and leans in at my window, kissing me square on the mouth. He's so grateful the world didn't crack in half, but clearly expects it any minute. In that one small opening I see what he holds in for my sake.
By midafternoon we're finished fenestrating. As I buff the final pane, I'm swooning from the hothouse beat of the sun in the tower. Gray and Merle have already moved on to the awnings. Below on the grass the swags of faded blue canvas are spread out like sails, Gray hosing them down while Merle tightens the awning struts above the parlor doors. I call down that we're out of ammonia, and I'll make the run to the Chevron. Gray looks up with a grin and squirts the hose at me, but it stops short, drumming the side of the house.
I give a last glance round the lighthouse room, where no trace of Daniel remains, any more than Nonny who lived here fifty summers. It's just an attic again, no overnight guests expected, no reason at all in fact to have its windows clean. Except we do things top to bottom around here, no corners cut, or else who knows what door we might leave open to an early winter?