Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

by Brock Clarke

  “Your Dawn knew,” my aunt said, and I remembered she was standing right next to me in the Boston airport when I told Dawn on the phone where Aunt Beatrice and I were going on our trip. She’d said, “Your Dawn knew” in her usual bright voice, but still I felt like there was an accusation in it, which made me want to defend myself, and this was another thing I learned from my aunt: Never defend yourself. Never say you’re sorry. Never admit you’ve done anything wrong, especially when it’s obvious that you have.

  “Why would Dawn leave a copy of my mother’s book in my hotel room?” I asked, and then immediately sensed that this was the wrong tack. Because I knew why Dawn would do such a thing: to torment me. “Besides, how would she have known the hotel we were staying in?”

  My aunt looked at me, adjusted her glasses, adjusted her glasses, then reached into her purse, and pulled out her phone. I hadn’t seen it since the Boston airport. By now I’d stopped being surprised by anything my aunt did or said or had done. But still, the phone did something strange to me. It made me want to own it so I could then worship it. John Calvin once wrote, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols,” and I think he was right about that.

  My aunt pressed her right thumb to the phone surface, and it read her thumbprint and then made a zipping sound to indicate that she’d successfully unlocked it. My aunt said into the phone “Calvin,” looked at the screen for a second longer, then handed it to me. I held the phone like it was something delicate and precious—a robin’s egg, a newborn baby, a human soul, or something of that sort.

  On the phone was my blog, its history. I had to go through only the two recent posts to understand what my aunt was trying to show me. I’d mentioned her in the post written right after my mother’s funeral. And I’d mentioned that Aunt Beatrice and I were staying at the hotel in Stockholm, too.

  I handed her back the phone, feeling guilty, feeling even more justly accused. My aunt seemed serene enough. Still, I had the sense that she thought me pitiful, that she was disappointed in me. But that was the thing about my aunt: she was sometimes difficult to read, and so you were forced to assume that she was feeling about you what you were feeling about yourself.

  “You did lie, Calvin,” my aunt said, and it was true: in both blog posts I had lied—about my aunt staying with me in Congress and about our hotel being equipped with Lingonnaire stoves—and I knew how fond she was of lies and thought that perhaps I hadn’t disappointed her as much as I’d thought.

  “A woman from Lingonnaire even came to the hotel,” I said. “She called me a liar, too.” But my aunt didn’t react to this news, and I wondered if she already knew. The hotel lobby had been full of marble pillars, and I could picture my aunt hiding behind one, watching me trying to convince the woman from Lingonnaire that my lie was a joke.

  “But you lied very poorly,” Aunt Beatrice continued. “Perhaps you should stop mentioning me in your blog, or writing it at all, until you learn to become a better liar.” My aunt took off her glasses. Her blue eyes looked dangerous and murky, like radioactive rocks at the bottom of a pond. “Learn to become a better liar. You should write that down, too, Calvin.”

  I did not write that down. Instead, I said that I had to use the bathroom and went below deck. But instead of going to the bathroom, I sat on a bench against the wall. Everyone around me was sleeping. The ferry fell and rose in the waves, and the gray metal walls dripped with condensation. There was something sticking into my back. I reached around and pulled the gerbil DVD out of the back of my pants. I must have stuck it there, like a waiter does his pad, when I boarded the ferry. That gerbil, with his whiskers and his steady little eyes: I wanted to say to him, You shouldn’t judge me, Gerbie. And for the first time since I’d gotten on the plane from Boston to Stockholm I wanted to be home, wanted to be in my parents’ house, which was now my house, in Congress, alone.

  78.

  Why did I become a blogger for the pellet stove industry? Because of moments like these. These terrible, inward, unwanted idle moments. If you are a blogger, then there are no unwanted idle moments. If you are a blogger, then you can fill them, at any time, from any place, by just doing your job, by just being who you are. And because that is so, then there is no need or reason or chance to wonder who you are or to wonder whether you should be someone else.

  So I sat down to write my blog. But I found that if I couldn’t mention my aunt, then I had nothing much to say. I couldn’t think of a lie, not even a bad one. I may have been Calvin Bledsoe, but for perhaps the first time ever I wondered what it meant to be him.

  But this is why blogs exist. Even if you don’t know who you are, then you can get on someone else’s blog to see how they know who they are.

  79.

  Readers Vote!

  Good Monday morning, dear readers! The days grow longer, and the nights grow warmer. Sad, sad times for those of us who love our pellet stoves! But be grateful at least that you are not your backward neighbors, with their “conventional woodstoves.” Because for them spring means not the arrival of flowers but instead the arrival of a fat slob driving a dump truck who dumps several hundred pounds of firewood onto their driveways, where it then sits to “season” until September, which is when your neighbors spend days and days dealing with spiders and splinters while they stack the wood, which will then barely heat their homes and cost them a small fortune until, come next May, when these poor saps will have to do it all over again!

  Anyway, I know my pellet stove posse looks forward to my Monday stories of weekend parties. But I didn’t really feel like “partying” this weekend. Posse, I’ll get right to it: I’m being ignored, deceived, lied to. By whom? Oh, you know him. Do I love him? I want to. Does he love me? I thought so. What do I do now? Give him one last chance? Or leave him and take my revenge? I’ll be doing my dealer-recommended annual easy three-step owners’ maintenance of my Dingus XX while I’m waiting for your votes!

  80.

  Dawn’s posse was as large as mine, and so there was no doubt that the blog was meant to be read by me, not them. I knew why she was mad: by now, she’d discovered that there was no such thing as Admiralty Realty and that my house was not under contract. No doubt she’d assumed that that was why I hadn’t texted her back. I didn’t really believe that she’d left the copy, or was somehow responsible for someone else leaving the copy, of my mother’s famous book in my hotel room. But I wondered about the revenge, in what form it would come, if it would come. Mostly, though, I wondered why the blog made me feel the way it did: it made me feel lonely, for her and for me. This is why we’d gotten married in the first place: because we were lonely. I said earlier that we got divorced because Dawn wanted me to move to Charlotte and I wouldn’t. But really, we got divorced because we were still lonely and Dawn thought Charlotte would change that and I thought that it wouldn’t. And I wondered if this was true for other people: that they got married and divorced for the very same reason.

  81.

  The ferry’s horn sounded and its engines made a new noise, and so I stood and tucked the gerbil DVD into the back of my pants and then went back up top to join my aunt. She was where I left her, leaning against the railing.

  “Stockholm is justifiably proud of its light,” my aunt said to me, and I thought of the light streaming into our hotel room windows and also of her son, my cousin, and the overhead klieg lights shining on his DVDs, “but in general I prefer the gloom.”

  I knew why she was saying this. We were just now pulling into Copenhagen harbor. It was nine in the morning, the sun was up, but we could not see it. Everything was gray. The clouds, the water, the docks and slips. On the other side of water, opposite the port, there were row houses, pink and green and yellow, but somehow they were gray, too, as though they’d been dusted with soot. A raw wind tossed my aunt’s hair and goose-bumped my bald head. We had traveled south, but the weather had gone north.

  82.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were standing in a pla
za, a round cobblestone plaza, eating hot dogs. Traffic was whizzing around us. My head felt thick from the travel and from the lack of sleep and from the liquor I’d consumed the night before. But my aunt Beatrice seemed energized. She was on her third hot dog. She was also drinking Carlsberg out of a large paper cup. I was already becoming wary of her appetites. By this, I mean that I was worried that she would insist on making them my appetites, too. When I’d said that it was too early for me to be drinking a beer and that two hot dogs were plenty for me, she’d replied with these words by John Calvin: “We are insatiable pits, monsters in spite of nature.”

  I knew the quote. My mother had used it herself, in many a sermon, usually around the major holidays. For my mother, they were words of caution. But my aunt had said them in her usual happy way, as though being an insatiable pit were a preferred state.

  83.

  I mentioned the traffic. The traffic was almost no cars, almost all bicycles. It was as though the Great Jailer had released all the beautiful people in northern Europe at once and told them that the conditions of their parole mandated that they go to Copenhagen and put on their most stylish, form-fitting but still water-resistant clothes and ride three-speed bicycles.

  And for the second time in the last hour, I felt that I’d made the wrong choice coming with my aunt. It was the beauty of the cyclists that made me feel that way. It can be very demeaning being among beautiful people. I suddenly missed Congress, where no adults rode bicycles unless they’d lost their licenses from drunk driving and where it was seen as acceptable to wear bulky lined flannel shirts all year-round (I was wearing a lined flannel shirt), even to church, and where I was only one of many men whose best idea of self-improvement was to shave his head and grow out his beard.

  Meanwhile, the beautiful people pedaled and pedaled by, and I felt their clothes were judging me, and I also wanted badly to see what was underneath them.

  “Flesh,” my aunt said, as though reading my mind. We were now walking along the water, which was no longer an ocean, a bay, or a harbor, but was narrower: a river or a canal. Those yellow, blue, and pink row homes were even closer now, even dirtier looking in the murk.

  “They’re all right,” I admitted, thinking my aunt was talking about the beautiful cyclists. They were still among us, so many of them that I felt like I was being swarmed, although swarmed in orderly way, as they never seemed to leave their designated lanes.

  “Who are?” my aunt said. I gestured toward the bicyclists, and she frowned and said, “Adults should not be allowed to ride bikes unless they happen to be very fat adults.”

  I waited to hear more. Without explanation, it seemed only like an arbitrarily mean thing to say about fat people. But of course my aunt never explained anything. Which meant the comment could only be understood as meanness. And so I repeated something I’d heard my mother say many times—at home, at church, in the car, and, of course, in her famous book: “John Calvin says we should honor everyone and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate.”

  Aunt Beatrice nodded. “I had sex with your father on a chaise lounge in the picnic area of the public beach on Lake Congress,” she said as though in response to my mother saying that John Calvin said that we should honor everyone.

  “You did what?” I said.

  “Copenhagen always makes me think of flesh,” my aunt said wistfully, and I thought of her son and his DVDs, and now of my father, and I wondered if there was a place that didn’t make my aunt think of flesh. We were at another roundabout. There was a don’t-walk light in front of us and a button that we were supposed to push in order to change the sign, but my aunt ignored both and walked out into the street. I trotted after her, apologizing to the bikers, who dinged their bells at us. By the time I got to the other side of the street, I was so angry at the bikers and their bells, and of course I was also angry at my aunt and at my father.

  “I thought you said my father was a good guy,” I said to my aunt.

  “He was a good guy,” my aunt said. “Which is why he eventually told your mother.” She paused to take a drink from her paper cup and then continued. “This was on a Sunday. Your mother was at church, leading her service. This was before she’d written her famous book, but already she was thinking about it. She had always been on fire for John Calvin. I liked to tease her about it. I sometimes would try to shame her into talking about Martin Luther in one of her sermons. ‘At least mention the name of the most important man in Protestant Christendom,’ I once told her, and she assured me that, as always, for the love of John Calvin, she would pretend that Martin Luther didn’t exist. Your mother pretended that she was teasing me back. But in fact, she was serious about ignoring Luther out of love for Calvin. If you love someone, you must pretend that someone else other people love doesn’t exist. That was your mother’s theory, although I don’t believe she mentioned it in her famous book. Your father and I had sex because we wanted to, Calvin. The chaise lounge was merely the nearest bedlike surface. It was September and the beach was deserted. It may have been officially closed, but I like being in places that are officially closed. It was eleven in the morning, and your father and I had already been drinking. All the best and worst things happen when you’ve been drinking during the morning.” She paused again, this time to toast me with her paper cup of beer, which she then drank down, crumpled the cup, dropped it onto the cobblestones, and finished her story. “The lake was full of sailboats. I remember their colorful sheets. It was very windy. Your father had some hair then, and it, like the boats, was in full sail. I doubt the sailors noticed your father and me, so consumed were they by their jibs and their tacking and their constant coming about. The sex was very sweet, Calvin, but also very sad. We both knew what it meant. That your father would eventually tell your mother and that your mother would tell me that she never wanted to see me again. And that was exactly what happened: your father told her, not long after you were born, and your mother said she never wanted to see me again. And except for one time, she never did.”

  84.

  I’ve often thought of what it must have been like for my father to tell my mother that he’d had sex with her sister and what it must have been like for my mother to hear that, and then what it must have been like for my mother to tell my aunt to go away forever and for my aunt to hear that. It must have felt like the end. But what does the end feel like? As John Calvin says, “The mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it be previously imbued with contempt for the present life.”

  85.

  And in any case, it wasn’t the end, not for any of them, not for a while at least, and it still wasn’t the end for my aunt because there I was, with her, in Copenhagen.

  “Honor everyone how?” my aunt was saying. This, I realized, was in response to John Calvin, and then my mother, and then me, claiming that we should honor everyone. “Should we honor everyone the same way? In what way should we honor them? Is there only one way to honor? Can one not honor through dishonor? Look! ” she said loudly, with emphasis. “A very fat woman on a bicycle!” Aunt Beatrice pointed to my right, and there, as she’d announced, was a very fat woman riding a bicycle. The bicycle was too small for the woman. It looked as though she were crushing it: its tires were dangerously deflated, and the chain complained as the woman shifted gears, and the woman’s knees stuck out to the sides as she pedaled. She wore flapping gray sweatpants, and an enormous orange hooded sweatshirt that seemed to ripple over her torso like lava, and a helmet that was much too small and sat on the top of her head like a dollop of something. Her face was red. From her pedaling certainly but also because of what my aunt had said. I’m sure the woman heard it. Her cheeks were red and huge and mostly swallowed up her tiny black eyes, but still, I could see them well enough, I can still see them well enough, can still see them burning as she stared at us and then at the beautiful sleek cyclists of Copenhagen as they so effortlessly passed her by.

 
; 86.

  My aunt took a right turn, away from the water and toward a complex of ancient-looking fortress- or castle- or palace-type buildings. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific about what the buildings looked like. It can be overwhelming having to describe a place, especially if you haven’t been to many places yet and especially if you don’t know what the place is called or what you’re doing there. My aunt looked at the building, adjusted her glasses, adjusted them again, then took out her cell phone and typed something into it. The phone hummed as information passed out of it. It was rumored that the humming was supposed to replicate the sound we humans make as we pass through time and that the phone makers had known that was the sound we human beings make as we pass through time because they had created a phone omniscient enough to tell them so. A moment later the phone hummed again as it received information. My aunt put the phone back in her purse and walked up to the building. The building had front doors, of course, which were enormous, heavy looking, gilt around the edges. But we went instead around the side of the building, where there was a much smaller door, windowless, made of dark, splintered wood. My aunt was serious when she claimed to like being in places that were officially closed. But if she had to be in a place that was officially open, then it made her feel better to at least enter the building through an unauthorized entrance. I heard a dull thump, as though something heavy were being raised and then lowered. We waited a moment, several moments, and then my aunt opened the door and we walked in.

  There was no one on the other side of this door. My aunt held it open, then closed it behind me. We were in a dark room—a cellar, it seemed, with a dim light somewhere in front of us. We walked toward the light. The floor was uneven in places, and several times I tripped over something hard—bricks or stones or human bones, all those seemed possible, it was too dark to see what they were, and in any case, my aunt was moving fast, clearly not interested in what was at our feet. Finally, we got to the light. It was an overhead light but barely overhead: the ceiling was no more than six feet high. My aunt had gotten to the area first and was leaning over a Plexiglas barrier. I joined her there, looked at what she was looking at. It looked like ruins: a crumbled stone wall or foundation, the footprint and remains of a cobblestone road, several pillars that broke off halfway to the ceilings. The barrier went away from us, I couldn’t tell how far; only the part in front of us was lit. But clearly we were looking at the remains of something, some city, some world, very old, and long gone. There is something humbling about seeing something ruined. Once, when walking in the woods as a child, I came across a brick chimney, just the chimney, the ruins of a house or cabin at its feet. I felt very humbled then, and very small, and when I got home, I told my mother about what I saw and what I had felt, and she nodded and said, quoting John Calvin, “Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility.”