by Brock Clarke
“You never had any intention of reuniting with the Sociologist,” I said to my aunt. And she agreed that, indeed, she’d never had that intention.
“You let Connie believe that you thought the Sociologist was still alive,” I said. I waited for Aunt Beatrice to ask me how I knew that, and then I would tell her that I’d recorded and translated their conversation in Copenhagen. But she didn’t ask, and so I added, “You let her believe you were looking for him.” Still, my aunt didn’t respond. “You lied to her.”
“I let her lie to herself,” Aunt Beatrice corrected. “Which is what you do, Calvin, when you don’t want someone you care about to know the truth.”
“What was the truth?”
“That after we’d betrayed each other, I didn’t love the Sociologist enough anymore to care whether he was alive or dead.” And then, before I could respond, my aunt said, “You shouldn’t judge me, Calvin.”
But of course I’d long ago stopped judging Aunt Beatrice. And in any case, I knew exactly what she meant: because in the end, I hadn’t loved Dawn enough to care either.
223.
Aunt Beatrice closed her eyes against the rising sun, which was shining directly in our faces. There was something holy looking about her. I wanted to take her picture, but of course by this point my camera, which was also my cell phone, was long gone.
“I just have one more question,” I said. “And I want you to answer it directly.” Aunt Beatrice opened her eyes. As I said, she wasn’t wearing her dark glasses anymore, but her milky-blue eyes served the same function: I could not see anything in them, and they would not tell me what I wanted to know.
What I wanted to know, of course, was that she was my mother. And I wanted her to tell me so herself. I did not want to have to ask her. Because I knew she would not respond directly, and then it would take several minutes, maybe hours, maybe days, for her to finally answer, and in the interim I would feel humiliated, and in the end, depending on the answer, I might feel even more humiliated. But then, life had been humiliating, right up until I’d met my aunt, whereupon she’d introduced the promise that life for me might yet be something else. And in order for it to actually be that something else, I would have do things the way Aunt Beatrice wanted them done. For as John Calvin said about his own conversion, “I judged nothing more necessary to me after having condemned with groaning and tears my past manner of life, than to give myself up and to betake myself to Thy way.”
“Are you my mother?” I asked her, and then felt the humiliation, and the hope, rising in my throat.
My aunt immediately reached up to fiddle with her glasses, but of course they weren’t there. She was denied that crutch, that aid. When she realized that there were no glasses to help her buy some time, she smiled, smiled so broadly that if her face were actually made of clay, it would have surely cracked. “Oh, Calvin,” she said, and I said, “Mom,” and then she began laughing. A ringing sort of laugh. It was the sort of sound that drew people to it. Like the bell in my old mother’s church, telling her congregation that it was time to come hear her talk about John Calvin. I wished that analogy occurred to me then, at that moment, because if it had, then it would have been perfectly on cue.
224.
“What’s so funny?” my mother said from behind me.
I turned around, and there she was. Very much alive. Wearing a yellow sundress, and barefoot. I’d never seen her shoeless, let alone sockless. My mother’s feet were broad and block toed, like a cavewoman’s. And she was tan, too: I wondered if she’d spent the entire time since she’d supposedly died on this very beach.
I should have been shocked to see her. But I wasn’t. After all, I’d thought, believed, that my mother was dead. I’d wanted her to be dead. And it was very much like my mother to be alive just to show me that what I had thought, believed, wanted, was wrong. “If you desperately want something,” my mother wrote in her famous book, “then that is surely proof that you don’t deserve to get what you want.”
Meanwhile Aunt Beatrice was trying so hard to stop laughing, making breathless hoo-ing sounds, like an owl. “Oh, Calvin,” she said, finally getting control of herself. “I’m sorry, but no, I’m not your mother. I just wanted to spend some time with you and your mother before I died. That’s all.”
225.
“So you actually did it,” I said to my mother, my real mother, the still-living world-famous expert on John Calvin, Nola Bledsoe. “You actually faked your death and disappeared. Why?”
“Because I was sick of John Calvin, and sick of Congress, and sick of America, and sick of my famous book, and sick of the people who read it, and sick at the thought of trying to write another one, and sick of poor John Lawrence and his talking about that cruise, and sick of myself and sick of you, too, Calvin,” my mother said. And I didn’t take any offense at this last part. Because I understood what she was saying: for so long, I’d been sick of me, and of her, too.
226.
My mother had been responsible for everything. She was the Unknown Caller. The Otises had always worked for her, and not my aunt; it was on my mother’s behalf, and not my aunt’s, that they’d watched over me. It was with the Otises’ help that she’d faked her own death; she’d been communicating with them, and my aunt, regularly in ________. She’d had Leland Otis burn down our house in Congress so I wouldn’t be tempted to return to it. She’d had Charles Otis follow Aunt Beatrice and me to Europe; she’d had Charles leave a copy of her famous book in my hotel room in Stockholm as a way of telling my aunt to hurry up, that my mother was waiting for us; and then, after Charles had lost me in Marseille, my mother had read the Sociologist’s party invitation on my blog, and she’d sent him to Lisbon to bring me to her, to them. She’d had my aunt set up that fake real estate company website, the one that had tricked Dawn into thinking my house was under contract. She’d even had my aunt bug my phone and record my having sex with Caroline, and then my mother had written and published that pornographic post in my name.
“That was wrong of you, Nola,” my aunt said. There was nothing ironic in her tone, and I wondered if it was a relief for her to be able to disapprove of someone else’s bad behavior.
“I never got to have any fun,” my mother said, and I was surprised to hear how childish she sounded.
“Well, your fun got Calvin fired,” my aunt said, and I was surprised to hear how adult she sounded.
“I’m glad I got fired,” I said, and now it was their turn to be surprised at me. All the panic and fear I’d felt on the train to Marseille—about losing my job, about losing my blog, about losing Caroline, about losing everything—was gone, and in its place . . . well, nothing yet. Which still was better than the things I’d lost. “I would rather have had the sex than kept the job,” I admitted.
“Good for you,” my aunt said. She stood up on my left, and I did to her what I’d been waiting for her to do to me: I looped my arm through hers. My mother was on my right, and I did what I’d not been waiting for her to do to me: I looped my other arm through hers. And then together the three of us walked back to the house.
227.
“They were for your mother,” Aunt Beatrice said. She was talking about the stolen items on the table. She and I were alone in the house. My mother had left in the car with Charles on an errand. “I knew your mother was here the entire time. But I didn’t want to come without gifts.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking: that except for John Calvin’s chair, these gifts seemed better suited for my aunt than my mother. But then I remembered all the birthday gifts my mother had given me over the years, and they’d all had something to do with John Calvin, and for that matter my father’s gifts to me all had something to do with sports.
“Except for this,” my aunt said, and she used both arms to gather those small plastic bags of marijuana to her. “These are mine.” She produced a squat wooden pipe from her pants pocket, took some of the pot out of the bag, stuffed the pipe’s bowl, lit it with a matc
h, drew, and held a deep breath, then exhaled, smoke pouring out of her nose. “It’s medicinal. Helps ease the pain,” she said in that familiar pathetic voice, the one that was difficult for me to believe. I once again thought of the recording I’d made of the Butcher, the one I’d not listened to before the Sociologist’s hired muscle had destroyed my phone. When I mentioned that—that I’d recorded what the Butcher had said to her but that I’d not gotten a chance to translate and listen to it before the phone was destroyed—I expected my aunt to be surprised by my sneakiness. Instead, she took her phone out of her pocket, fidgeted with it, then handed the phone to me. I knew, before I’d even put the thing to my ear, what it was: my aunt had recorded that particular moment with the Butcher also. Because not only does an old lady like being accompanied to the doctor’s office, but an old lady also likes to record what the doctor says to her, so difficult is it for an old lady to pay close attention to the doctor’s diagnosis at the time of its delivery, especially if the diagnosis is a bad one.
228.
“The conventional treatment is almost certainly going to fail, Admiral,” the Butcher said in her clear, cold voice, translated by my aunt’s phone into English. “And you will die. But I do want you to seriously consider the radical treatment. It has a smaller chance of failing, we think, we don’t really know, we’ve done only a few, but the treatment is promising, which means that the people who’ve had the treatment haven’t had it long enough ago to know whether the treatment will live up to its promise, but hey, you have to do everything, it’s your life, let’s go for this is my feeling.” I was struck by how much the Butcher’s voice changed over the course of her speech. If she’d begun speaking like a doctor calmly delivering bad news, she’d ended by sounding like a saleswoman at the car dealership across the street from her office, trying to talk my aunt into buying the newest model Renault. “Oh yeah,” the Butcher said, in closing to my aunt, “you gotta go with the radical.”
229.
“What are you dying of?” I asked my aunt. Even then, I hoped she’d say, Nothing, or at least not answer my question directly.
“Cancer,” Aunt Beatrice said in that same sad, pathetic voice, and I realized now that that was the voice she used not when she was lying but when she was telling a particular kind of truth.
“We need to go back to Paris,” I said to my aunt.
She didn’t say anything to that. She packed another bowl, smoked it, exhaled into the room. And the room changed with it: before it had been filled with death, and after it was still filled with death, but it seemed further away. Or rather there was something—a curtain of smoke—between it and us. But still, I persisted.
“To the Butcher,” I said.
Aunt Beatrice didn’t respond to that either. She’d packed yet another bowl and handed it to me. “No,” I said, but I’d already accepted the bowl. I put it to my lips. Aunt Beatrice lit the bowl, and then I inhaled. It was my first time, and I did it poorly, and my hacking broke the spell and her death drew close again. My aunt reached out, and I gave her the bowl and said through my coughing, “So you can have the radical.”
Still, my aunt didn’t say anything. She’d knocked the remnants of the bowl onto the table, brushed ashes to the floor, returned the bowl to the pocket of her white summer pants. Then she leaned back in her chair—it was John Calvin’s chair—and stared deeply at the stucco ceiling as though it were the night’s sky.
“Say something,” I said.
“It’s too late for the radical, and very soon I’m going to die, Calvin,” my aunt said, and she said this in her normal bright voice, not her pathetic one, but that did not make what she said any less terrible to me, “but between now and when I die you and I will pretend that it is not too late and that soon I will go to Paris to get the radical and that I will not die. But I won’t, and I will.”
“Say something else,” I said.
230.
Aunt Beatrice didn’t say something else. She just sat there in John Calvin’s chair, head tipped back, eyes aimed at the ceiling, as though she’d already given up, as though she was already looking toward the afterlife. I hated to see that, and so I stumbled out of the room, out of the house, back toward the beach. There were a couple of surfers out there in the waves now, teenaged boys on what looked like homemade boards with chipped noses. I sat on the sand and stared at the surfers and then, after they left, stared at the waves themselves, stared at them for a long, long time, trying to organize my thoughts, trying to think of what to do or think or say next. Nothing especially original came to mind.
“I don’t want Aunt Beatrice to die,” is what I finally said—to the waves, I thought.
“Me neither,” a woman’s voice said from behind me. I turned and there was Caroline. Her blue blazer was gone, and her freckled skin looked pale against her white dress. The dress looked freckled, too—there were red flecks near the hem that I realized were spots of blood. I scrambled to my feet. “Even though your aunt has done some very bad things,” she added.
“But that doesn’t make her a bad person,” I said automatically.
“Of course it does, Calvin,” Caroline said, and it struck me that my aunt probably would have said the same thing.
231.
I was conscious of my aunt spying on us from the house, and so Caroline and I walked away from the house, down the beach. There was nothing in front of us that I could see, no people, no animals, just sand and water. It was the emptiest place I’d ever been, and also the hottest: I could feel my scalp prickle in the sun.
“How did you find me?” I asked her, and she put her right hand on my left shoulder, and that prickled, too. Then Caroline removed her hand and showed me a square piece of black mesh, barely visible, like a patch. It was a bug, a tracking device, I supposed, and I supposed she’d put it on my shoulder back in Lisbon. Weeks earlier I might have been surprised that such a thing existed, let alone that it had been attached to me. But now it seemed like just one of the many small wonders of the world. Caroline released the bug and it disappeared in the sand.
“Who are you really?” I asked her.
“Well, my name is Caroline,” Caroline said. “And can I tell you something funny?”
“No,” I said, but she once again ignored me.
“I am from Sheboygan.”
“So that much was true.”
“Just outside Sheboygan, actually.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” she said. “It’s unincorporated.”
I nodded, thinking of the other lies that she might have told me.
“Were you really divorced from a man named Ron?”
“I wasn’t even married to a man named Ron. Or anyone else.”
“Did you have sex with me because you wanted to or because you wanted something from me?”
“Both,” she said immediately, and I know now that she was telling the truth, that she was done lying to me, although at that moment I wasn’t yet ready to believe her.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Totally understandable,” Caroline said. Her eyes were as usual on the move—to the sand, the ocean, the sky, my face, the sand—and I thought that whatever kind of spy you were if you were Interpol, then she was the most nervous, most guilty-seeming spy ever.
“Was that really you in the hotel lobby in Sweden?” I asked, and she said in a robotic Swedish accent, “An unfunny joke is a lie.”
“But you were taller,” I said.
“There are high heels, Calvin.”
“Your hair was blonde.” I don’t know why I was so insistent on arguing against her truth. Maybe because I’d so recently learned mine. “Your face was so pale.”
“There are wigs. There is makeup.”
“You lied to me,” I said.
When I said that, Caroline’s eyes fixed on mine, really held them in place, the way my mother’s used to when she was making what she knew was an exc
ellent point about John Calvin. “And then your poor son died,” Caroline said, and I remembered how I’d lied to her on the train about having a son and about how he’d died.
“Well,” I said.
“Of kidney stones,” she said.
“All right,” I conceded.
“And after that,” Caroline said, smiling now, but not unkindly and maybe even with a little admiration, “after that, you and Dawn were never the same.”
232.
It was only after Caroline had admitted lying to me, and only after she’d made me admit that I’d lied to her, were we both fully ready to believe each other. To quote John Calvin one last time, “Not that they may believe against their wills (which would be impossible), but that they may be made willing to believe who were before unwilling to believe.”
233.
It turned out Interpol had wanted to arrest both the Sociologist and my aunt and that the only reason Caroline hadn’t arrested her on the train was that she’d hoped Aunt Beatrice would lead her to the Sociologist. And if she had, then Caroline had planned to arrest both of them.
“But she’s an old woman,” I said. “With terminal cancer.”
Caroline shrugged and said, “Interpol is rules,” and I said yes, I knew all about the rules.