by Brock Clarke
203.
One was a fugitive from international justice and the other a small-animal pornographer, but the Sociologist and João seemed shy with Dawn in the room: they’d already gotten her a glass of wine, and the Sociologist had already replaced and filled a new one for himself, and he and his son sipped their wine and mostly studied the contents of their glasses as though the future were written there. Once in a while they looked up at Dawn quickly, furtively, as though they couldn’t believe she was in the same room with them. I wondered when the last time was that either of them had really talked with a woman. I had the distinct feeling that for them, there was no other woman in their minds and hearts than my aunt.
Dawn walked over to me. She was short, shorter than my aunt or Caroline. Her head came only up to my chest. But there was something massive about her. Her presence. Her will. Her determination. “I thought I lost you,” she said, and then she produced and showed me her phone. On it was a blue dot superimposed over Lisbon. That was she. And there was a red dot over Marseille. That had been me. So that’s how she’d known where I was: she was using her phone to track mine. “You left your phone in Marseilles,” she said, again accusingly. As though that were my major crime. Not that I’d left her or lied to her, but by leaving my phone, I’d left her without a way of following me. She had followed me across an ocean and then through several countries. To do what? I suppose to tell me that she hated me. Or that she loved me. I suppose it was the latter. And I suppose her capacity for love was massive, too. I mean, it must have been, for her to come all that way. I should have seen that. But there was always something between the two of us: it was Dawn’s capacity for producing scorn, and my capacity for absorbing it. And I thought I’d reached capacity and so was ready to say another thing I wanted to say.
“You fucking bitch, you burned down my house,” I said, and I was not at all surprised to hear how much of my aunt’s bright voice was in my own.
204.
Divorce, much more so than marriage, is made of the illusion that you know someone. Strangers get married all the time, but people are rarely strangers by the time they divorce. Dawn divorced me because she knew me, and I wanted her to divorce me because I knew her.
But Dawn did something surprising after I called her. Well, I’m not going to repeat it. It’s enough I said it the first time. First, she looked at me, the way I must have looked at the people on this trip who spoke in Swedish, Danish, German, French, Portuguese. Then Dawn opened her mouth, started and stopped herself from saying something several times. Finally, she bit her lower lip, hard: the skin went white from the teeth. And then she began crying. Turned her head and cried, softly, into her shoulder. I’d never seen Dawn cry before. There was something demoralizing about it. Like seeing a divine being act like a mortal. Like walking into a room and catching John Calvin sniffing a dirty sock to see if he could put off doing some laundry for one more day.
“That was wrong, Calvin,” the Sociologist said. This was a man who’d smuggled weapons and humans, who’d betrayed my aunt and been betrayed by her and had spent years hiding in who knows what kind of awful places, and yet from his voice I could tell he thought he’d never seen someone act so despicably. Meanwhile, João shoved me out of the way, the small-animal pornographer casting me a dirty look as he went up to Dawn, put his arm around her, and said in a gentle shushing voice, “He didn’t mean it.”
But I had. And Dawn knew that. And by her crying, I knew that I’d been wrong: Dawn hadn’t been the one who’d burned down my house. But had I been so ridiculous in thinking so? After all, my aunt had thought the same thing. Except that I then remembered that I was the one who’d said on the drive from Paris to Geneva that Dawn had burned down my house, and my aunt had said that that made sense but not that it was true. Because that was another thing about my aunt: despite her fondness for lying, she herself rarely lied. But neither did she necessarily bother to correct you when you lied to yourself.
205.
Dawn shrugged off João’s arm, walked right up to me. She pushed her wild hair out of her face, held it against her forehead with her left hand. Dawn was looking at me closely now: my half-healed head wound, my sparsely budding hair, my overgrown beard, my clothes that might have looked okay on someone else, my ridiculous shirt open ridiculously to my sternum. “You look like hell, Calvin,” Dawn said.
And then she punched me, right in the mouth. I dropped my broom and pan and staggered back with my hand over my mouth, tasting blood and feeling the dislodged tooth go back into my mouth, over my tongue, and halfway down my throat before I gagged and spit it out into my hand. I looked at the tooth. Felt the space it had left with my tongue. It was my left front tooth. I did not complain or moan or anything. After all, I remembered one of my aunt’s commandments: “Thou shall expect to get punched in the face for thine inappropriate acts.” Instead, I thought how funny my aunt would find it to see me with my own missing tooth. I hoped, when she showed up, that someone would take a picture of us together.
João consulted his watch and said to me, “Eight fifty-one post meridiem,” which meant that at least he’d learned something from his mother when she was getting paid to slap women during their long years of exile in Ohio.
206.
Many parties end with violence, but this party began with violence, too. Immediately after Dawn hit me people started arriving. Most of them I didn’t know. Among them were old friends of the Sociologist’s, and I suppose my aunt’s, too. Men with gray beards and bald heads, women straight from the hairdresser with hair dyed almost all the way to the roots. Criminals, I guessed. They looked at the Sociologist sideways, and he at them, but soon enough they were laughing loudly over their glasses of wine, enjoying one another’s long-lost untrustworthy company. Whenever the front door opened, they, as a group, looked to it, as though expecting the police, or maybe it was just the Admiral they were expecting. I noticed the Sociologist and João closely monitoring the door, too, and of course so was I.
207.
There were almost as many pellet stove bloggers as criminals at the party. They were mostly men, mostly younger than I; they were wearing clothes like mine except that they wore them better, and many of their heads were shaved, but that seemed to speak of efficiency and self-determination and not desperation. They seemed not to be disappointed that there were no pellet stoves in the hotel; they, like the aged criminals, seemed just happy to be there and to have a chance to come in out of the shadows. They were Portuguese, and their English was good, but they mostly wanted to talk about pellet stoves, and after a while I found that I had run out of things to say about that, and to them, and so I left them to themselves.
208.
Dawn didn’t seem to have much to say to her fellow industry bloggers either. She didn’t have much to say to anyone other than João. They were in the corner, leaning against the wall, deep in conversation. Dawn was holding a bottle of wine, and periodically she would refill João’s glass and then refill her own. Dawn smiled, often. I stood on the far side of the room, tongued the gap where my tooth had been (the tooth itself I’d put in the pocket of my shiny shirt), and wondered what João was saying (Was it pornographic? If so, what kind? Animal or strictly human?) to make Dawn smile like that. But seeing them together didn’t hurt. I wasn’t jealous or sad, and I didn’t have second thoughts or mourn our missed opportunities. Dawn and I had known each other for five years, had been married for two, divorced for one, and I’d thought we would never be rid of each other, and now we were rid of each other and I’d lost a tooth, but otherwise felt like I’d gotten off easy, and I was right about that.
209.
Around eleven o’clock the Reverend John Lawrence showed up. He, like me, was still wearing the same clothes as when we’d talked in Hamburg, the same clothes as when I’d unleashed my mother’s fans on him in Geneva, and he, like me, seemed much the worse for wear. There were scabbed-over cuts around his eyes and on his forehead, his left suit leg was
torn at the knee, he’d lost his hat, and he looked even more stooped than before. He saw me see him walk through the door, and his expression should have been triumphant, or hopeful, or angry, but he just looked diminished, like he’d lost something essential just getting there.
I grabbed a wineglass, filled it, walked it over to him. As I crossed the room, the Reverend John Lawrence’s face grew angry, and he stuffed his right hand into the jacket pocket of his shabby suit as though he had a weapon in there. But then he must have seen that I was coming in peace. Because he withdrew the hand, and it was empty, not even in the form of a fist, but open, and into the hand I placed the glass of red wine. “I’m not lying to you,” I said to him. “I’m not hiding anything from you. My mother really is dead.”
His shoulders slumped, and I knew that he knew I was right. Maybe he’d known all along and was only now able to admit it to himself.
“I read your blog,” he said, like he couldn’t believe he’d actually uttered that made-up word.
“My ex-wife just knocked out my tooth,” I said, and showed him the space. He seemed to be contemplating it, and I wondered if he was trying to think of a John Calvin quote to commemorate the event.
“I’m glad,” he said instead, and he drained his glass of wine and then headed over to the table where all the bottles were.
210.
The party had evolved by this point. The pellet stove bloggers had taken over the music, had banished the Sociologist’s croaky singer-songwriters, had circumvented his DVD player, his receiver, his speakers: they’d synced all their phones with one another so that from wherever they stood, all around that huge room, the same songs emanated from their pockets. I say “songs,” but it might have been one song that played and looped endlessly, with a deep bass and a singer who did not croak like a human but who instead sang like a robot, an automated singer, and once again I was reminded of the Unknown Caller. I wondered if I would ever find out who he was. I wondered if my aunt would ever show up to tell me if she knew who he was.
211.
Dawn, meanwhile, had turned into the kind of person who, having run into her ex at a party, wants to time travel so as to get to the bottom of how it had all gone so wrong.
“Why did you think I burned down your house, Calvin?” she asked, her voice slurry and sweet with wine.
“Because you wanted revenge,” I said, the words whistling through my missing front tooth.
“But why would I want revenge?”
“Because I’d left you and gone to Europe.”
“But why did you leave me and go to Europe?”
“I went to Europe because my aunt wanted me to.” Dawn frowned at that, and I knew she wasn’t going to accept that answer, and so I gave her another true one. “I went to Europe because you wouldn’t leave me alone even though we were divorced.”
“Why did we get divorced, Calvin?”
“Because I wouldn’t move to Charlotte with you.”
“But why wouldn’t you move to Charlotte with me?”
“Because I didn’t love you enough to move to Charlotte.”
“Yes, but why didn’t you love me enough?”
“Because,” and I was about to say, again, that she was a bitch except that I was acutely aware that I was already missing a tooth and I didn’t want to lose another one, and so I said instead, “you didn’t love me enough to stay in Congress.”
“Yes, but why didn’t I love you enough?”
“Because you thought I was a big pussy.”
“Yes, but why did I think you were a big pussy?”
“Because I was afraid of my mother, who was a lot like you, who I was also afraid of.”
“That’s right,” Dawn said, her eyes flickering over to João, who was standing on the stairs with a bottle of wine. Dawn waved at him, then punched me on the upper arm, but gently, as though to tell me that there was no more real violence between us, before leaving me and following João upstairs.
212.
Not long after that, Wrong Way Connie arrived.
I’d been half watching the Sociologist the entire time. He seemed happy in the company of his fellow partners in crime. I saw him hug those who were leaving, clink glasses with those who stayed. But still, there was something superior about him. Maybe it was his height, his bearing, but even when he smiled, the Sociologist seemed as though he were smiling over everyone’s heads.
That changed when his sister showed up. And when I say “showed up,” I don’t mean that I saw her walk through the door. I mean that she appeared, in the middle of that large room, among a group of drunken dancing bloggers. I saw her whisper something to one of those bloggers, and he looked over his shoulder, and I watched her snake his cell phone out of his pocket, watched her turn off the volume, watched her return it to the man’s pocket. By the time the blogger had turned back to face her, she’d moved on.
To her brother. Who’d moved on to her. When the Sociologist saw Wrong Way Connie he bounded over to her. There was nothing superior about him now. He was less like a Sociologist and more like a dog, a pooch, who, happy to see his mistress, stops bashfully a few feet away from her as though remembering he that he’d done something wrong and wasn’t sure if he was yet forgiven.
Wrong Way Connie took a step forward and hugged her brother, and he hugged her back. I watched him. His eyes were closed, and remained closed until they finally stopped hugging and took a step back from each other, and I saw that the Sociologist and Wrong Way Connie had hugged so hard that they’d mangled his glasses. They hung from his neck on the string, frame bent, lenses cracked, totally useless.
I’d never wanted a sibling before. But watching those two hug, I thought it might be a good thing. I looked upstairs, where João and Dawn had gone. I assumed they were in one of those bedrooms, having sex. And Wrong Way Connie’s entrance had made me so hopeful that I didn’t think about João, He’s sleeping with my ex-wife, but rather, I’ll have to go find my brother when our mother shows up.
The Reverend John Lawrence sidled up to me.“Who’s that?” he wanted to know. He was talking about the Sociologist. The Reverend had drunk only a couple of glasses of red wine, but his flat voice was already thick.
“The Sociologist,” I said. I saw that the nickname didn’t register for the Reverend John Lawrence, the way my mother’s nickname hadn’t registered for me. “The Admiral’s ex-husband. She betrayed him after he’d had sex with the Conductor.”
I used the nicknames intentionally. They helped me put some distance between myself and the real people and their real names. They helped me forgive, and also forget. Although it’s important to recognize—and I did not recognize this—that nicknames, like alcohol, don’t affect absolutely everyone in the exactly the same way.
213.
Wrong Way Connie’s arrival seemed to predict other arrivals, other reunions, but then it was two in the morning, and still, Aunt Beatrice hadn’t shown up. The mood of the party had changed. The young people had become aggressively drunk; the old people, wearily so. The wine had seemed infinite before, but now I could count the full bottles on two hands. The song playing on the bloggers’ phones was finally over, and no one had bothered to play a new one. A few of the old people checked their watches, and indeed, it was as though the whole party had started to hear the ticking of the clock.
Dawn and João came downstairs briefly. João went over to say hello to his aunt Connie, and Dawn came over to me, hair tussled, and said (and I could tell she’d sobered up because she’d lost her slur and found her scowl), “This reminds me of one of those weekend parties.” Then she looked at the Reverend John Lawrence, who was standing next to me, and said, still scowling, “Who are you supposed to be?”
I’m your ex-husband’s dead mother’s forsaken secret lover. That’s what I wished he’d said. That would have been honest. Had he said that, he would have had nothing left to defend, nothing left to hold on to. “I’m the Reverend John Lawrence of Hebron, Iowa,” he said ins
tead. As though that still meant something. It clearly didn’t mean anything to Dawn. She didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken, just grabbed a bottle of that wine and then went upstairs, and a minute later João followed her.
I said earlier that I wasn’t sad about them, but I felt sad now. Not because João and Dawn were together but because I was still alone. Caroline: she probably thought I’d stood her up in Marseille, and she’d also probably read that pornographic blog post and thought I’d written it. I knew that even if my aunt showed up, Caroline would not.
“Who is that guy?” the Reverend John Lawrence wanted to know. He was still talking about the Sociologist, who seemed to be arguing with his sister on the far side of the ballroom. “She’s not coming,” I heard Connie say, and then the Sociologist said, “Don’t say that.” Meanwhile, the Reverend John Lawrence still wanted to know, “Who is that guy?” It was clear that alcohol made the Reverend John Lawrence aggrieved, repetitive, dumb. It had been three hours since I’d first told him who the Sociologist was, and still he wanted to know.
“He had sex with my mother, who was also your lover,” I told him. “All those other men who I said slept with my mother didn’t. I made all that up. But the Sociologist, Morten, he really did it. Because she really wanted him to.” We both looked at the Sociologist: even as he leaned over to argue with his sister, he seemed tall, straight backed and shouldered, detached, superior. The exact opposite, in other words, of the Reverend John Lawrence. “If he bothered to think of you,” I said, “he would think he was better than you.” I paused to let that sink in and then added, “But he doesn’t think of you. He doesn’t even know you exist.”