Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

by Brock Clarke

  Expect more from me soon! In the meantime, keep your correspondences coming!

  50.

  After I wrote and posted, I crawled into my own bed. My aunt’s conscience might not have tortured her, but mine tortured me: when I closed my eyes I saw her sitting in the driver’s seat of her stolen truck. Her hair was gray, short. She was wearing her sunglasses. The truck’s driver’s-side window was open. Suddenly, as though someone had called her name, Aunt Beatrice turned toward the open window, and through the open window came a fist, a gloved fist, and it smashed into my aunt Beatrice’s face. I opened my eyes and I was in my hotel room. The curtains were open. It was the middle of the day and the sun blasted in. I got up, closed the curtains, stared at the ceiling. There was a chandelier above my bed, and at the base of the chandelier was a circle of raised yellow-and-white molding that reminded me of a wedding cake. I closed my eyes again, and again there was my aunt, and she was once again facing forward in her forward-facing truck, and then once again she turned toward the open window, as though someone had called her name, but this time she said, “You shouldn’t judge me, Calvin.” When she opened her mouth I could see her missing tooth, and then I said quickly, “I won’t!” and then willed myself to sleep before the gloved fist once again came through the open window and found its mark.

  Six

  51.

  My dream (if you can call the vision before you fall asleep a dream) seemed to suggest that there was a connection between my aunt’s missing tooth and her business in Ohio. But in fact there was not a connection, and in fact that was not how she lost her tooth. But I didn’t find that out until later.

  52.

  I realize that I keep saying that I did not find this out and that out until later. But eventually I did, and eventually, I promise, I will tell you all about it. As John Calvin himself says, “Whenever the Lord holds us in suspense and delays his aid, he is not therefore asleep, but, on the contrary, regulates all His works in such a manner that he does nothing but at the proper time.”

  53.

  Anyway, I woke up what seemed like many hours later, feeling as though I’d been struck on the head with the world’s most enormous hammer. Where am I? I wondered, and then I did what most of us—professional bloggers or not—would do: I consulted my phone to orient myself.

  54.

  I had two texts waiting for me.

  One was from Dawn: You haven’t texted me from Stockholm. I’m really pissed off, Calvin.

  And one was from the pellet stove industry. I could tell never tell who exactly from the industry was texting me. I’d worked for the industry for more than ten years and had gotten thousands of texts from the industry, and not once had the industry texter mentioned his or her name. The industry had hired me to blog because the industry thought the industry needed to be a little more personal, and the industry was probably right about that. The text said: Dead ma = traffic!!!

  Well, I knew what “dead ma” meant. It took me a few seconds to understand how it, or she, equaled traffic. Traffic meant that someone had commented on my blog post. Maybe that’s why I didn’t register the term “traffic” at first: because I’d never had any.

  55.

  The traffic was in the form of the people at Lingonnaire, the Swedish pellet stove company, the first among firsts. “So wonderful that you and your relative are in our wonderful country,” the comment on my blog said. I noticed the lack of exclamation points. A very rare thing, in our country, to see, in a blog, a claim of happiness not followed by enthusiastic punctuation. But I thought that maybe this was an example of the famous Scandinavian reserve. “And that you’re enjoying our stoves,” the comment went on to say. “In what hotel are you staying?”

  I ended up learning so many things from my aunt. And one of those things was to always wait three seconds before responding to anything that might be important. This was why she so often adjusted her glasses. To buy her those three seconds. So that she’d make sure to take the time to decide whether the first thing she’d wanted to say was the right thing.

  “Hello! We’re staying at the Admiral Sonnenberg,” I immediately wrote, and that famous Scandinavian reserve must have already rubbed off on me—you’ll notice I only used one exclamation point before I hit Send—but make no mistake: I was excited. Not just that someone had responded to my post but also that it was someone from the pellet stove industry. As my aunt had said—and she was right—one should always welcome the wisdom, the experience, of a fellow professional.

  56.

  My aunt called my name from her room a moment or two after I’d hit Send. Although at first I thought it was not my aunt’s voice: it was sharp, a cry more than a call. When I walked through the connecting door she was standing at the window, leaning forward, her hands on the sill, which was waist high. My aunt’s posture reminded me of someone who’d just been punched in the stomach. The morning light was rushing through the windows: the light was harsh, and not for the first or last time I wished I had my aunt’s glasses.

  “Are you all right?” I asked my aunt. She didn’t say anything at first. She took one hand off the sill and with it adjusted her glasses, and then adjusted them again. The sun was so powerful that it made her look as though she were lit from within.

  57.

  I do not like to remember this moment, my aunt bent over as though in pain. You could say it’s foreshadowing, but if you read John Calvin as a child, then you know that it’s all foreshadowing. Except the end isn’t coming, it’s already here.

  58.

  My aunt didn’t answer. She pushed herself back from the sill and, with obvious effort, straightened up. For the first time since I’d met her, she seemed her age. Physically, but also mentally. Clearly, the trip had taken something out of her. For instance, she said, “Dinner,” meaning, I suppose, that she wanted some. Except it was morning: the sun coming through the window clearly said so.

  “You mean breakfast,” I said.

  “I’m not all right, Calvin,” my aunt said in that same suspiciously wheedling tone she’d used when she’d convinced me to accompany her into the Boston airport. She turned to face me, at full height now. And in her more cheerful, normal voice she said, “And I mean dinner.”

  59.

  My mind kept returning to my aunt’s description of my house in Congress: “the house of horrors,” she’d called it. That was surely an exaggeration. But it was true that I often felt lonely in that house, and never lonelier than at dinner. My father’s teams usually practiced or played their games during dinnertime, so mostly it was just my mother and me in the dining room, sitting across from each other at one end of a very long table. And mostly we ate root vegetables. My favorite was spaghetti squash. Although perhaps that’s not a root vegetable. In any case, the spaghetti squash was not my mother’s favorite. She would cook it because it was my favorite, and that is to her credit. But I think my mother regarded the spaghetti squash as an especially frivolous vegetable. As I got older I became aware that whenever I scraped at the body of the squash and then twirled them with my fork, my mother would look away, as though I were doing something that should only be done in private.

  60.

  My aunt was right. It was dinnertime. I’d woken up feeling so stunned, and with the light so bright, that I’d assumed that we’d slept through the day and night and all the way until morning. In fact, I’d seen the time on my phone but had not paid attention to the a.m. or p.m. I’d just assumed it was morning. But no, it was seven o’clock at night. I looked at my phone again and saw that it was so. The sun hadn’t set and wouldn’t set for another three hours.

  We left our rooms, took the elevator to the lobby—which, like our rooms, seemed to have been hollowed out of an enormous block of yellow marble—and walked to the front doors. As we passed the front desk, the man working behind it noticed me and pointed in my direction, and the woman he was talking to turned and walked toward me.

  She was at least six feet tall, taller
than my aunt, taller than me. She was wearing a tan trench coat, and her straight, shoulder-length hair was so blonde it was almost white. Her skin was even fairer than her hair, and she wore large round red-framed glasses. The red looked like neon against her pale cheeks and forehead.

  “Mr. Calvin Bledsoe,” she said, and the way she said it made me wonder if I’d done something wrong. She sounded like a machine, an accusatory one, although really she sounded like a Swede speaking a very careful, halting English.

  I said yes, that was my name, and she said, “It was a lie,” and I felt even more accused.

  “What was?”

  “There are precisely none of our stoves in any of the guest rooms in this particular special hotel.” I realized then who she was: she was someone from Lingonnaire, the famous Swedish pellet stove company. The company, I knew, had its headquarters right here in Stockholm. Earlier I’d been so happy to hear from them on my blog, but now I was filled with dread. People often fill professional bloggers with dread, especially when we’re forced to meet them. Still, I stuck out my hand, which the woman ignored. “Why did you lie?” she still wanted to know.

  This time I paused before answering. The truth was, of course, that that was part of my job as a blogger for the pellet stove industry: we lied, and then we lied to ourselves about what to call and how to think about the lying, and in any case we told ourselves that the lie was harmless, which was yet another lie. But I wasn’t sure I could communicate that to someone who didn’t speak English as a first language, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to even if I could. And so I said, “It was a joke.”

  “A joke?”

  “An American pellet stove industry joke,” I said. “The joke is that those of us in the American pellet stove industry see pellet stoves everywhere.”

  The woman considered that. There was something very fuzzy about her. I didn’t know why I thought that, or what the thought meant, but there seemed to be a kind of a haze around her, although maybe it was just that I was still jet-lagged. “It is not very funny,” she finally said, and I admitted no, I guess it wasn’t. “Is your aunt a joke, too?” she asked, and I laughed, which may have given her a false impression because her blue eyes seemed to sparkle behind her glasses, as though she, too, was preparing to laugh, possibly for the first time.

  “No,” I said. “She’s not a joke. She’s right—” And here I looked to my left, where my aunt had been, but she wasn’t there. I spun around, looking toward all the lobby’s compass points, but there was no sign of my aunt. When I spun back to the woman, her eyes weren’t sparkling anymore. “An unfunny joke is a lie,” she said, and that sounded like another accusation. But before I could defend myself, she walked away from me—without telling me her name; without telling me whether she’d complain about my lie, or my joke, to my superiors in the pellet stove industry; without telling me much of anything. Still, I was happy to see her go. I’d only known the woman for a minute, and yet I really hoped I would never see her again.

  “Where have you been?” my aunt said, coming up from behind me. That, of course, was the question I wanted to ask her. I turned. There was nothing fuzzy about her: she appeared, as she had two days earlier at my mother’s funeral, in sharp focus. Her massive head of dark hair, her baked face, her enormous sunglasses, her primary-colored clothes, her white white sneakers. I was happy to see her again. She’d only been gone a minute, and yet I’d really missed her.

  “I was right here,” I said. My aunt didn’t respond to that, but I could I could sense her disappointment in my answer, crackling like electricity in the air between us. So I tried again. “An unfunny joke is a lie,” I said.

  “Very good, Calvin,” Aunt Beatrice said. She’d obviously thought I’d come up with the saying on my own, and I didn’t bother to correct her misimpression.

  61.

  The sun may have been bright, but it couldn’t have been warmer than fifty degrees outside. Still, most of the outdoor seats at all the restaurants were full. Full of people drinking Carlsberg beer, sitting under awnings with wool blankets on their laps. Meanwhile, the heat lamps were doing their best to burn away the chill. The world smelled like salt and toast, and I found myself, automatically, lowering my head and clasping my hands underneath the table, as though someone—not me—were about to say grace.

  62.

  The world is remarkable. This was the title of one of my mother’s sermons, and it was also the title of another of the chapters in her famous book, and this was what she said for grace before we ate dinner, and this in fact was what she said for grace during her dinner with the president. “The world is remarkable,” my mother said, “and we are grateful to be given a chance to live in it.” Some people, when they said grace, asked for things, but not my mother: she said grace as though there would be no denying her. The first lady and the cabinet members and even the president himself seemed scared of her: they kept their heads down long after my mother had said her piece, and the waiters began to swirl with their plates and their platters and their covered dishes.

  My aunt didn’t say grace. She simply ordered our food, which started coming all at once, and then regularly. Everything was open faced. Pickles, herring, salmon, meats of some kind, cucumbers, dark bread speckled with something large and corn kernelly or nut looking. No root vegetables. Nothing I ever would have eaten at home with my mother. We drank Carlsberg, my one for my aunt’s every two. I asked my aunt to teach me the language, and she made me say thank you—tack, tack—until I made it sound less like the thing you do with your mouth, or what you use to pin something to a board, and more like the sound a clock makes. The waitress brought over two small glasses with clear liquid in it, and I said to her, “Tack, tack,” and she said, in excellent English, “Don’t thank me quite yet.” I soon discovered what she meant. “Drink that all at once, Calvin,” my aunt suggested, and I did that. It was like I’d swallowed sweet kerosene, and I closed my eyes against the taste. But even after the taste mostly went away, I kept my eyes closed, because I liked hearing the sound of people’s voices, and with my eyes closed I could pretend that I knew them. And since I didn’t know the language, I could pretend they were talking to me. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw that my aunt was laughing at me. “Or sip it if you’d rather,” she said. That’s what she was doing. The reflection of the overhead lights sparkled in her dark lenses. “What are you thinking, Calvin?” she asked. No one had ever asked me that question before. No one! That I’m happy—that’s what I wanted to say. But then I thought of one of the chapters in my mother’s famous book. It was called “Against Happiness,” and in it she argued that our culture’s pursuit of happiness ran counter to John Calvin’s insistence that we seek holiness, even though we were fated to never find it. I knew what my mother would have said had I told her that I was happy (I had never told her that I was happy), and just thinking about my mother, I felt much less happy and much more like a child again, and so I said to my aunt, “I was thinking about my mother. I wonder what she’d say if she saw the two of us together right now.”

  My aunt frowned, tossed back the rest of her aquavit, and said, “You’re never going to grow up, Calvin, until you start saying the things you want to say and not what your mother would say. Or what she’d want you to say.”

  What do I want to say? is what I almost asked, but that would have just proved that I was never going to grow up. And besides, I knew what I wanted to say, at least right at that moment.

  “I’m happy,” I told my aunt, who nodded.

  “That’s a decent start,” she said, and then ordered another round of aquavit.

  63.

  Already, I loved my aunt, and I believe she already loved me. This seems as good a time as any to say that. To love someone is to eventually create the conditions for betraying them. This seems as good a time as any to say that, too. Because this is a story about the things my aunt taught me, and that is one of the things she taught me.

  64.

  Dinner
took several hours. Only when the restaurant began closing around us did we get up and begin walking. We walked by the water, and then we walked over it, on a series of stone bridges. On one of the stone bridges there was a white sock. It was darker now, and the sock seemed to glow in the dusk. Aunt Beatrice nudged the sock with her foot and said, “Whenever I see a stray piece of clothing on the street, I think that someone has been raped.”

  65.

  I believed our walk was aimless. It felt aimless. Maybe because we kept drinking: my aunt bought two more large cans of Carlsberg and we drank them as we walked. The sun was almost down by now; the stone streets were absent of shadows, the water rippling black.

  We were walking side by side, very close to each other. As was true after the funeral, I wondered if my aunt was going to loop her arm in mine. I wanted her to. No one ever had, not Dawn, not my mother. I don’t mean to sound pathetic, and in fact I don’t think I’d ever wanted Dawn or my mother to loop her arm through mine. But I wanted my aunt to. I felt embarrassed when she didn’t. So I began asking her questions. This is why people talk so much, I believe: not because they want to know something but because they don’t want to feel the thing they did before they started talking.