All My Relations

by Christopher McIlroy

  “I’m happy,” Julia said.

  Linda, who missed the large family left behind with a past marriage, adopted Julia. Accompanied by Linda, Tim dropped by as often as twice a week. Without complaint he replaced a leaky faucet washer and soldered a loose connection in the stereo. “Need anything from Target?” he said. “I’m right there.” A haunter of swap meets, Linda brought ceramic owl salt-and-pepper shakers, a touching, unusable gift.

  “What do you do,” Julia asked Philip, “on those weekends when I don’t see you?”

  “My survivalist cadre holds its potlucks.”

  “O.K.” Julia held up her hands. “No questions.”

  “You know what would be lovely?” Julia said. A joint dinner for Philip, Tim, and Linda.

  Philip was noncommittal.

  After a few days Julia mentioned the idea again.

  “My interest is in you,” Philip said.

  “But they are me, Tim is.”

  “That’s an overpopulated armful for me.” Philip smiled.

  “Don’t put me in a position where I have to have all these little drawers, ‘Tim,’ ‘Philip’… Please.”

  “I like my drawer.”

  Though she hadn’t disbelieved him, the tangible evidence of Philip’s literary accomplishments stunned Julia. She turned over in her hands the hard-paper quarterlies with their austere cover designs, to read his name on the contributors’ lists. The most recent was ten years old.

  She borrowed them. Rhymed but metrically unpredictable, his poems, even the youngest, were predominantly elegaic. One conjured a circus from its abandoned grounds, overgrown with thorns. In another two friends discoursed ironically on love amid the fleshpile of a public beach.

  Always a reader, Julia now studied literature systematically, analyzing texts in a notebook, to prepare for talks with Philip. For his birthday she composed a poem.

  “Poetry isn’t your forte,” he said, adding hurriedly, “but you are definitely in this poem. The sentiment is quite affecting.”

  When a rancher friend presented her with veal steaks, Julia again proposed the family dinner.

  “Our balance is delicate,” Philip said. “Let’s not tip it.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” she said. “I thought we were quite robust. Tim and Linda keep asking to meet you.”

  Philip was adamant. “You haven’t made Tim sound like the greatest company.”

  “How can you care for me and not want to know him?” Tightening vocal chords made Julia’s voice strident. “You can’t squirm away from them indefinitely. It’s absurd.”

  “Why not? I’ll credit them with going cheerfully about their business, content without stalking me.”

  Citing a need for “heart gossip,” Linda brought lunch. So eager was she that Julia confessed, yes, she and Philip were “intimate.”

  “All right!” Linda pumped her fist.

  Frankly, Julia said, the intervals between dinners were lengthening. Weekends, especially, were canceled. “A person doesn’t need sex. For nine years I did without. I didn’t join a nunnery or the Communist Party. I wasn’t bulemic. Flying penises didn’t flock the skies.”

  Linda rolled onto her back, feet kicking. “You didn’t grow a beard. You didn’t put ice cubes in your undies.”

  “How come I feel like I’m going nuts?” She’d awaken fighting to breathe, as if steel bound her chest. The cough, when it came, was a relief.

  “I never know when Tim’s going to show up either, two days, a week, three in the morning.”

  “How do you stand it?”

  “Here’s me,” Linda said, semicrouching. “I can go this way, that.” She pivoted left, right. “I never see Tim again, I’m sad, I’ll live. Meanwhile I have a helluva lot of fun. Take it day by day. Tim zips me off to a ballgame, or picnicking in the mountains. One night we made masks and grass skirts from newspaper and called the house ‘Hawaiian Zone.’ And then …” Linda whistled, drumming her fingers.

  “Good for you. I don’t see that side of Tim.”

  “I should hope not.” Linda laughed.

  “My idea of heaven,” Julia said, “is two people giving recklessly to each other, world without end. Amen.”

  “Why do I always initiate our lovemaking now?” Julia asked Philip.

  “You’re the one who holds back sometimes. So I let you choose.”

  “Don’t you think maybe I’d like to be compelled by you, for that to make my choice?”

  “I’m not much for coercion.”

  “It’s persuasion I’m asking for,” Julia said. “I don’t want it to be all the same to you whether I say yes or no.”

  Philip prepared an evening of tantra, “a true yoga, serenity in motionless sexual union.” He positioned himself on the mat, the half lotus. Setting Julia on his lap, hooking her feet around his back, he entered her. Within minutes his breathing had subsided to a dilation of the nostrils, sigh. His eyes shut, the blue-veined lids unclenching. The forehead smoothed.

  Julia’s skin burst with excitement and frustration. When finally he stirred, she choked her limbs around him, mauled his chest with her teeth. Quick-quick-quick she moved, bouncing her rear on his ankles, beating against him.

  “I have to beg off tonight,” Philip said over the phone. “My feet won’t get me down the stairs.” He’d been complaining.

  Julia covered the hot dishes in foil and drove them over. “This place may have had its day,” she said. “If you were closer at hand, I’d be more available.”

  “Is that a suggestion that I move in?”

  “I suppose it is. The shambles is charming”—she gestured around the apartment—“but why not live graciously for a change?”

  “Can you imagine us rattling around each other twenty-four hours a day?”

  “It’s not so outlandish,” Julia said. She’d keep the top floor, he’d have the bottom, more territory than he was used to.

  “Julia, your forays tire me.”

  “Me, too, Philip, I couldn’t agree with you more. Please do me the one favor. Meet Tim.”

  A day later Philip said, “A concession on my part is called for. I’ll come.”

  Philip was due at six. Tim and Linda arrived an hour early to help set up. Linda, diminutively voluptuous in a tight sheath, hair coiled, arranged the snack tray. Acting out family stories, she revealed a flair for mimicry. Tim had prepped for the evening to the extent of dredging up college lit notes. He discoursed on symbolism in The Mill on the Floss. Dusting the London broil with garlic, he quoted verbatim passages from Anna Karenina in the dog’s point of view.

  “Sweetheart,” Julia said. “I’m really moved by this support.” Tim kissed her.

  A glass of sherry, intended to calm, made them giddier. Picking at the hors d’oeuvres, they had nearly emptied the tray when, at six sharp, the phone rang.

  “I’m sorry, it’s wrong. I feel coerced. We need to talk,” Philip said.

  Julia turned to Linda and Tim. “You guessed it.”

  “Shit,” Tim said. The explosive “t” made the word particularly ugly.

  Julia and Philip stood at his kitchen counter half an hour, as if sitting hadn’t occurred to them. They conversed with a distracted fluency, statements already thought through that they now borrowed from themselves. Neither referred to a purpose for the meeting.

  Julia asked why Philip no longer wrote.

  He did, but rarely, nothing to keep. “I won’t write depressed,” he said. “That’s ego, not poetry. I have no affinity with the vogue of inflicting one’s every hidden recess upon 80 million readers.”

  Why so depressed? “Your feet,” she joked.

  “Yes.” He laughed. “And my wife.”

  “Your ex-wife.”

  “I’ve resumed with her.”

  Julia rejected the attempt to believe she had mis-heard.

  Vera was fifty, Philip said, still beautiful, copper hair and cream skin.

  “Where do you go?” Julia asked numbly, as if interviewing.


  “Here in town. Unfortunately, she’s hopelessly unstable.” After leaving him, Vera had jumped off a bandshell roof during a rock concert. “I moved her back in the house, and I left. I knew she’d be more at peace there.”

  Driving home Julia awaited the inevitable cough. Like the braying of an onager, it came, accompanied by runny nose. She screamed in the closet, muffled by coats.

  By phone she broke off with Philip. “I can’t think of words to despise you enough,” she said.

  To expand the newsletter Julia recruited correspondents. The sun bear drive cracked its goal, and construction began. Member of a YWCA with indoor pool since fall set in, she slogged through laps when the cough allowed. Sunglasses hid the dark circles around her eyes.

  The following weeks Tim was so peevish and erratic—most often Julia entertained Linda alone—that Julia considered imposing a once-a-month quota on him. Despite the persistent cough she again bought cigarettes. Linda berated her.

  “At a certain age, character becomes simplified,” she told Linda. “Julia plus Philip equals Tim minus smoking. Julia minus Philip equals smoking minus Tim.”

  Bundled in a quilt against the damp chill, feet to the electric heater, Julia thought of Easter, herself in the ambulance, a gray stick, tassel of brownish hair, the oxygen mask a malignant flower covering her face. The cough boomed.

  Napping, Julia dreamed of Philip in the form of a joke. The prototype she’d actually heard, a series of exchanges, increasingly damning accusations culminating in a punch line that was, as usual, all she could remember. In the dream the words were enormous stone monuments, unreadable from her perspective. Among the letters Philip scurried, a gnome with hairy rump and tail, mischievously peeking. Some of the joke’s lines, rather than words, were film clips of him—striding naked, leaning back from the table wiping his beard, among trees, tinted green from their leaves.

  At the punch line—“Well, nobody’s perfect”—Julia awoke laughing.

  Through the church grapevine Julia learned that foot surgery had confined Philip to his apartment, his wheelchair unable to navigate the stairs. She assembled a CARE package of deli items, fresh fruit, and a bottle of Dry Sack, along with mundane necessities.

  Grinning, Philip held out his arms. Even seated he was huge.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” Julia said.

  “Moscarpone! Smoked oysters!” He twisted the sherry cork and poured two glasses.

  Lit only by a gap in the Venetian blinds, the disheveled room showed no sign of outside intervention—a wife’s, for instance.

  Philip’s bandages were cloddy white blocks. “The idea of someone cutting,” he said. The wince bared his teeth. “I keep imagining them stepping into an egg slicer.” For another two months he mustn’t walk.

  Julia did some picking up. “Today’s man on wheels needs room to roll,” she said, shoving books against the walls.

  Philip beamed, sipping. “You are dear,” he said. “Now we have a dance floor.” He put on Vivaldi. Grasping Julia’s hands, he lilted her to and fro. From behind, she lumbered him through figure eights. A hub caught books, loosing an avalanche. Deliberately Philip rammed another tower, toppling books and a broom, spilling the wastebasket. Flouncing her onto his lap with a thick arm, he said, “Have you ever made boom-boom with a mechanical centaur?”

  “Philip,” she said, “I love you, but that aspect of our relationship is past.”

  “My regret.” Stretching for their glasses, he clinked. “And deepest apology.”

  Leaving, Julia demanded a key, and they argued. “What if you called for help and couldn’t get to the door?” she said.

  “All right.” He slapped the key on the counter. “Not because I need it, but because you deserve it.”

  “Thank you thank you.” Julia curtseyed. “I shall wear it like a diadem on my forehead.”

  “I’m an ass,” Philip said. “Please take the key.”

  The morning of Christmas Eve, a dressed goose under her arm, Julia unlocked Philip’s apartment and stepped into a glow like played-out neon, candles in red glass chimneys. “Boo,” said the black hulk in the corner. “Happy Halloween.”

  Julia set the bird in the refrigerator and poured herself wine. “I apologize,” Philip said. “I’m undergoing a seizure of reminiscence.”

  “You can talk about Vera,” Julia said.

  As if continuing an interrupted monologue, Philip said, “We were trekking in Nepal, our honeymoon. The sun fell toward the peaks”—his head dropped to one side and his voice thinned—“which went molten orange, as if just pulled from the fire by the glazier’s tongs. Then we were rising, forced apart, until we found ourselves on separate peaks. The burnished ice fell away in all directions. We regarded each other across great distance, yet in perfect awareness and sympathy.”

  Philip’s hands pressed together. “I steered our lives by that vision for years. So what if we were miserably incompatible. I willed us a couple, and now she can’t live without me.”

  “I married my husband for his sadness,” Julia said. “A mistake I undid. You’re not bound to this lunatic!” she exclaimed.

  “I become loquacious,” Philip said, toneless. “I’m imposing on you.”

  “No, Philip. Wrong. This is what people do. They talk to each other.” Her arm wrapped around his head, fingers in his beard.

  Philip jerked back. “Ah, yes, the orgy of ‘sharing’:

  ‘I have cancer of the bowels, and your breath stinks.’

  ‘Thank you for sharing that with me.’”

  “Call me when you are yourself,” Julia said and ran out the door.

  From a pay phone she retracted “lunatic.” Until ambulatory, Philip said, he was unfit for company. They should limit contact to the telephone.

  Obsessively Julia pictured Vera, red hair billowing, filmy dress clinging to her white limbs, bouncing on the pavement. Appalled at herself, she researched outings for Vera—chamber music, gallery openings, the botanical gardens, a bird sanctuary an hour’s drive away. Reporting these to Philip, she added recommendations for therapeutic books and magazine articles.

  “How is Vera today?” she asked him.

  “Buzzing off the wall.”

  In this proxy existence, through Vera, Julia felt disconnected, as if there were no footing beneath her.

  “Julia,” Philip said, “our material is stale. My topics are few.” He would be responsible for calls, which stabilized at two a week. Tacitly the phone arrangement remained in force even after his first gingerly steps, on crutches.

  Linda commiserated over the passing of Julia’s sex life.

  “It’s not even the sex,” Julia said. “When he calls, I feel the same as when we used to make love. When he doesn’t, it’s just as maddening. Suffocating.” In fact, she was resorting to a Bronch-Aid inhaler frequently for shortness of breath. Coughing fits had ended the swims. Mornings, swinging her legs out of bed, she’d fall back, dizzy. Her limbs always were cold, her legs felt leaden, two minutes’ walk tired them.

  The inability to smoke enraged Julia. To outwit her lungs she puffed while limp in a hot bath, or nearly asleep, over bourbon or steaming tea. Her lungs convulsed.

  “I’m glad to see you and Linda working out,” Julia said.

  “I’m in a holding pattern,” Tim said. “Eventually we’ll break up.”

  “You were a sweet boy, Tim. There, I’m Generic Mom. But it’s true. I have every card you hand-made for me, birthday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s, for twelve years. Our first visit to the Grand Canyon,” she said, “we stepped to the edge, and the ground was broken in pieces as far as we could see. We grabbed hands, clasping so tight I think we both believed we could have floated down together. “And you know what? That boy still exists, as much as you do.”

  “You mean in your head. These guys are thirty-one.” Tim wiggled his fingers.

  She’d depended on him for a sense of future, Julia thought, not happy, simply tangibl
e. But he defeated her like a TV after sign-off, a gray static buzz.

  Philip sent a letter. “Our phone calls have outlived their usefulness. Increasingly they are an obligation.”

  Julia laughed out loud at herself, pacing the floor until she gained the equanimity to sit and type:

  You will be happy to read that this letter relieves you of your duties. Please don’t call. Don’t write. The books I’ve lent you, you may keep. Their meaning to me henceforth would be deformed.

  You probably consider withholding yourself as manly, a guarding of old virtues. It is not. It is monstrous selfishness. Caring people share themselves. I feel sorry for you. The loss is to us both.

  For the record, those burdensome phone calls, as our entire association, were delightfully stimulating to me.

  Philip wore a loose gray shirt outside his pants, loafers sans socks. “Come in.” He beckoned like a hotelier. The room was unchanged, though brighter, blinds open.

  Julia handed him the envelope, which he laid on the counter.

  “Don’t put it aside. Read it.”

  “Not under this scrutiny.”

  Julia slit the envelope with her fingernail and read the letter aloud.

  Philip rubbed his face. “Quite fair,” he said. “Points well taken.” Off to the house, he said, for a packet of old manuscripts. Come with? He hadn’t invited Julia to his home before.

  “Will she be there?”

  “No. At the shrink.”

  Driving, Philip was expansive, head dipping toward her, hand flashing. In fantasy Julia had made this journey repeatedly—rescuing Vera from another suicide attempt, supporting Philip across the threshold after her death, tipsily dousing him with champagne after Vera’s divorce. That she was actually rounding Philip’s corner she attributed to two factors. One, without a more satisfying resolution, which she would not get, she could not give up this final moment. Two, in Philip’s view she no longer existed.

  Tidiness shielded the interior of the solid brick house. Amazed at her detached curiosity, Julia searched for clues, nothing so obvious as a photo presenting itself. A pleasant scent, spicy, lingered. Philip rummaged in another room, drawers slamming. By the open French doors a curtain stirred.