“Cecille West was my mother.”
“My father’s name is Charles Ware,” she said.
“The writer? Your father is Charles Ware?” Mac let out a groan.
“You do know.”
“Well, yeah—I read Tangier when I was a kid. But that has nothing to do with—”
Or did it? His mind was all over the information, and it seemed potent, and suddenly he was scared stiff.
“What’s this about?” she demanded.
“You’re— This sucks! I’m not going to blurt it out if you’re upset.”
She stopped pacing. “I am so sick of people—especially smart, good-looking guys—stopping by here, wanting nothing more in their putrid, empty lives than to meet him.”
“Hey, listen, I didn’t know it when I came.” His voice faltered. “My mother took a little trip when I was nine, and I came out to visit my aunt and cousin, and I was pacing around making little key chains waiting for her to come back, but that turned out to be impossible, because—ha ha ha!—she never came back. That’s my story. My aunt gave me a box of her junk a few weeks ago, and I’ve been checking out the stuff inside because—hell, because I don’t have anything else to do. How’s that?”
Now would come the variety of response he despised—false pity, a maudlin sigh. But not from this person. She was still wrapped up in her own reaction and said, “If you think they were exchanging steamy love letters, forget about it.”
“Gladly.”
“You should have said something about why you were here. Right away.”
“This is right away.”
“No. Before you even came in. I feel misled—”
Mac said, “Okay, big mistake.” Somewhere, deep down, he was choking out, Don’t you care about what I just told you? But in realizing this, he felt humiliated. “Sorry to put you out. Thanks for the ice.” He started out past the dark aperture of the gallery.
“But wait!” she called. “You don’t understand—”
He headed to the entryway and reached for the door. Beside it, rumpled and abandoned, was the fold-up bed, the mattress squashed and akimbo within. A sad and empty feeling washed over him. “Nope. Guess not. See you.” And with that, he let himself out, pulling the door tight behind him.
His feet cut like pickaxes down the sidewalk littered with cast-off seedpods from the trees. He crossed to Lyon, found his matches and cigarettes in the gravelly pocket of his coat. He noticed an ancient burn hole on the sleeve. The garment probably looked Edwardian from the wear he’d given it. Down went the hot air to each lobe of his lungs. Think not, think not. To have is to lose. To lose is to die. Again and again. He had mottos for every occasion. Most of them stank, like his life. He smoked the cigarette nearly down to the filter in a few long pulls.
He was twenty-two years old. The duck, among animals, aroused in him the most sympathy (an aircraft and boat that walked). He was six foot two and rangy, and his feet were size thirteen; his dark hair grew shaggy and fast. When his socks weren’t right, he felt restless and cursed. When miserable, he festered with images of people drowning, of oil spills spreading in the seas, of serial killers squatting under railway trestles, and of the disappearance of wild, galloping herds off the face of the earth. He worried that some form of recklessness or depravity lay sleeping like a wolf in every cell of his body. His mother had all but told him so. He’d had nightmares of all kinds since he was a kid. When he woke in the night, he grabbed books, felt the spines yield, latched on like an orphan at a borrowed and bristly teat. (His own image, the result of some careful self-scrutiny.) By now he’d drunk up a small library. He’s gone through a series of fascinations, with figures such as Julius Caesar and U. S. Grant and Rasputin, to name only a few. He had plenty of “inner” resources, few outer ones for balance. Sometimes it seemed his one goal in life was to love extravagantly; but against that impulse he struggled with all his might. In dreams his mother appeared to tell him things. He had an internal conversation with her that always began “See, what I was thinking was that—” and then he’d draw an unholy blank.
He heard the steps rushing up, in advance of the voice.
“Wait, wait,” she called.
He turned and beheld her, Carolyn Ware, in a red cape trimmed with fur. Flying from her body like bat wings.
“Now what?”
“I need to get milk for the girls,” she said.
“How good of you.”
“And I want to talk to you more,” she said, ducking a wave of his smoke.
“I’m leaving your neighborhood.”
“Why in such a hurry?”
He threw his cigarette into the storm drain. “Too many animals in sweaters.”
“My fault again,” she said.
“Why?”
She said, “Well, I—I gave those dogs—those.”
He said, “You gave dogs sweaters? Damn.”
She tried to keep his pace. Down from the hilltop, past Union to Lombard, back with the bright lights and motels and liquor stores.
He entered the first such store they came upon. The man behind the counter had a sharp nose with a ridge of short, coarse hairs growing up the bridge. They grew straight into his eyebrows, which were thick and arched, and gave the man a look of perpetual surprise. He said, “How can I help you?” Though I barely eke out a profit in this miserable little shop, I’m always cheerful and willing to come to the aid of my customers, no matter how callous they are to the chains of my toil.
He’s right, Mac thought. He had this little game he’d played, ever since he first experienced trauma. I take it for granted he’s open and sacrificing his life, sitting here.
The man telegraphed to him next: I see that you are one who defies the trends in order to set his own course, in order to justify that deep rift in your soul which makes you feel apart from others. With this beautiful woman, perhaps you can heal yourself. But you’ll need a little help. Spirits can drown a man’s sorrows, but they are also the starting point for half the human race!
“Give me a half-pint of George Dickel,” Mac concurred. Carolyn purchased milk. Out on the sidewalk, their hair and jowls were whipped by cars racing to cross the bridge, and the fog was thinning over the broad, full face of the moon, and the briny smell of the Marina was mixing with all his instincts to flee. He gulped bourbon instead.
“So tell me more,” she said. “About your mother.”
“You were listening?”
She didn’t say a thing but grabbed the bottle from him and took a swig, too. “What happened—if you want to talk about it.”
“Nobody knows, nobody cares,” Mac said.
“What about your father?”
“How would I know?”
“You don’t know him? You’re estranged?”
“You could say that. Estranged from birth.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Fathers are overrated,” Mac proposed.
She took another gulp, and her cheeks turned red. “They are. So you never found out what happened to your mother?”
Mac said, “We know some of it. She drowned in the Seine, in Paris.”
“How horrible!”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Puts people on edge.”
“Yes, a bit.”
“I can’t rest with it. Plus—” Should he tell her about the voice in his head, and what it had said about the cache of envelopes in the box? “Avenge me, and these will help you do so.” Probably not.
“So—what are you trying to find out, exactly?”
“I’m rebuilding,” Mac said, with some conviction. “Do you happen to know the story of the Colossus of Rhodes?”
“Remind me.”
“Okay, you probably know it’s one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, right? A bronze statue of Apollo, and more or less the world’s first skyscraper, a hundred and ten feet tall, for the purpose of welcoming ships into the harbor at Rhodes. Imagine a monolith like that at a time when, granted, a lot of
great things were going on but people were otherwise chomping on dormice and thrashing their slaves. About fifty years after it went up, there was an earthquake, and the Colossus fell over and cracked apart. Superstition ruled the day, so no one dared put it back together—they figured the gods were jealous and angry. But to the credit of the Colossus, for years after, even the pieces on the ground brought in the crowds like nothing else. The fingers especially were considered awesome. Poets waxed on, honeymooners carved their names, runof-the-mill gawkers chipped out chunks for souvenirs. Then followed eight hundred years of studied ruin, until some enterprising Syrian brought in nine hundred camels and hauled it away for scrap.”
She nodded. “Your mother is one of the wonders of the world to you. And you want to put it—her—back together.”
“I think you’ve got it.”
“This is a noble thing. You’ll need to talk to my father,” she concluded.
“Might get me somewhere, who knows?”
“He’s on a trip. When he gets home, why don’t you come back?”
“All right, thanks. I’m sorry if this touches on a sore spot.”
“I’m sorry I overreacted. It sounds like this is something different. Now I’d better get this back,” she added, shaking her carton of two-percent. “Want a piece of cake? It’s devil’s food with chocolate frosting—I made it this afternoon.”
Mac loved chocolate cake more than any foodstuff, so he could not refuse. He used to buy such cakes at bakeries and eat them whole at a sitting. He wouldn’t mention that. Carolyn stumbled once on a bump in the sidewalk, and he lent his arm, and the look on her face when they touched made his gut flutter.
At last they reached her most unhomey of homes. “Thanks for offering cake, but I think I’d better split,” he said. He was trying to douse his eagerness. As glossy and polished as a porcelain sculpture, a perfect lemon tree grew in front. Mac pulled a lemon off and began to peel it.
“Ooh—plain?” she said. “How sour.”
She watched him tear off the first segment, slide it into his mouth. He knew he was doing it to seem interesting and eccentric, though he loved lemons and ate them when alone, too. This one was deceptive: plump and waxy outside, desiccated within. He wanted to spit it out.
“Wait, come see our yard before you go,” she said.
“Okay.”
He followed her down the side of the house, through a fence covered with tangled honeysuckle. There was a thick, sweet smell hanging in the mist. An old, tended garden in California, Mac had discovered, could be as close to Eden as he ever hoped to see.
In the foggy spray, she stumbled ahead through the brambles. And then turned, as though she were truly his Eve and had a new world to offer him. Beneath a canopy of tall, elegant cypresses was a circle of old citrus trees, laden with large, wrinkled fruit. On stony paths weaving through the trees, gnarled jade plants leaned top-heavy out of terra-cotta urns. And pots crowded with absurd cacti, a circus of prickly, twisted dwarfs, ringed a pool thick with silent carp. Crumbling stone faces, like a group portrait from Hades, hung on the back wall of the house; ivy choked them all. Ivy strung everything together; it grew over decaying statuettes of goblins and geese, a fragile roaring lion, and a tall California bear.
“Here’s my world,” she said. The milk went down in the grass. “You should see it in the day. Really crazy and strange. What would I do without it?”
Over her head a moth danced, as if she were a slow-burning flame. “Maybe you’ll find something else crazy and strange,” Mac said.
There was no doubt what would happen next. They moved toward each other in the dim light that bounces down from a ceiling of weather, and he realized how much thicker the air feels at night. Their first kiss was seasoned with drops of moisture from the sky. “I can’t believe this. You’re very beautiful.” Then, loud and clear, he said, “Hear that? You’re very beautiful.”
Indeed, she showed no recognition of his words, as if she were as hardened as those old statues, crumbling all around them in the grass.
2
Between long kisses, feet deep in the weeds, knees pressing between knees, holding bunches of her hair in his hands, he said, “I didn’t expect this.”
“What’s your name again?” They laughed. Inside, the girls were shrieking and rampaging, and a light suddenly went on that lit up all the yard.
“Carolyn!” a girl called.
“Help,” she said.
“Everyone wants you,” he said, kissing her temples, which were endearing in a way temples had never been before.
“Can’t I have a little fun?” The edge in her voice surprised him.
“I’d like to help.”
“And now the milk’s warm.”
“It’ll make them fall asleep,” he said.
“What?”
“Warm milk,” he said.
“But after cake, we rented Psycho,” she said.
“Ooh—the stuffed mother. Maybe I should stick around.”
“Carolyn! ” screamed the sister from the door.
“Okay, maybe not.” He laughed.
She went from sheepish to burdened in the blink of an eye. “I mean—what about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is great.”
“Here?” she said. “Say around three?”
“We want cake!” yelled the girls.
“I’ll be here,” he said. He kissed her again and ran out of there, tripping on his own legs.
He joined the anonymous clog of cars and trucks pushing through the streets of the city, barely trusted his driving. He smiled and then frowned and then smiled. He let out a demonic yodel. Had he really been holding in his arms that adorable and beautiful woman? She was a princess! No—not just a princess, since they are often pasty and angular from generations of inbreeding. Her legs were slender and tapered like roots, the roots of the mandrake; and if he were to go mad from unearthing them, he’d be no worse off than ever. Could it really be happening? The daughter of Charles Ware? And had he forged a link between his mother and the known world?
In the morning he was back in the city, but on Mission Street. Ablaze in every fiber of his being, muscles flooded with sap. A slightly uncomfortable, shifting incline in his groin. Laughter expelled like a cough. Nowhere to park, but he left his pocked orange Cavalier halfway into a bus stop because he was feeling lucky. This was the first part of the city he had gotten to know, and he felt comfortable here. For a while, through his cousin Fran’s connections, he’d had a part-time job at a small neighborhood library; one slow afternoon he found a roly-poly kid hunched over in the restroom, staring intently at the wall.
“Whatcha looking at?” he said.
“Come over here.”
The old blue tiles were rimmed with wizened caulk. A soldierly line of ants marched along them to the sink, but they appeared to be materializing from thin air. “Look right there,” the boy said. Mac squatted beside him. From a tiny spot between the tiles, he saw the caulk begin to darken, then bulge. All at once the black head of an ant poked through the surface of the thin membrane and, with a quick struggle, the ant hauled the rest of its body out of the minuscule crevice. There was something almost shocking about it. For minutes they watched as ant after ant pushed through and joined the line.
“They’re so, so . . .” The boy searched for the word.
“Desperate it’s repulsive?” Mac supplied.
“Something.”
“Maybe I’m just projecting. Were you thinking something else?”
“I don’t know. So desperate it’s repulsive. Yeah, pretty much.”
Mac felt as if he’d put a dark thought in the boy’s head. He had a protective feeling for him from then on, and in the weeks that followed, he took note of the boy’s arrival in the afternoon and would have a book picked out and ready for him, and when the boy turned up the next time, he’d have questions, and they’d crouch beside the shelving truck and go through the text. Filipo had come up with his mother from El
Salvador only three years before, but his English was excellent; Mac was so caught up in his pupil’s progress, he failed to listen to the head librarian’s warnings and was called into her office one day and let go.
“But he’s super smart! He’s going places,” said Mac indignantly.
“Three times I’ve told you that’s not your job. I’m sure your intentions are good.”
“You really want to fire me from a library because I’m helping a kid who loves to read?”
“You’re supposed to be shelving and dusting!”
“Shelving and dusting? Get your priorities straight and fire me,” Mac said.
“I just did.”
Fran had pulled some strings to get Mac in there. She was mad.
“Couldn’t you just shelve and dust and tutor the boy later?”
“You’ve missed the point, as is your wont.”
“You have to learn how to fit in, Mac.”
“That’s not fitting in, that’s being a mindless drone.”
“You have to be a drone before you can be anything else. Just swallow your pride and stick with something for a change!”
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?”
“We’ll be having it on our deathbeds.”
“Our skeletons will probably be having it,” he said. “Our dust will, and someone at the library will be dusting us while we’re having it.”
Wind coursed down Mission Street, a canal of nasty air. Newspapers and food wrappers scuttled along, catching around ankles and legs. The sidewalk was crowded with women bundled in down jackets over tank tops and shorts, their faces bearing the strain of the heavy sacks they carried; with baggy-panted, red-nosed old men; with strollers pushed by young mothers wearing their harsh, bright barrettes against the wind.
Many signs were hand-painted—PANADERíA, JUGOS Y LíQUIDOS, SNAKES, OPTIMO CIGARS, KEYS MADE, CHECKS CASHED, NOTARY, MI
PUEBLO, and Mac’s favorite: BAYVIEW MENTAL HEALTH—in fading letters on a second-floor window over a liquor store. Loading ramps clattered from the rear ends of trucks, dollies thundered down with their loads. And here and there were quick deals handled right on the street: a pickup full of green bananas, twenty-two cents a pound;
MacGregor Tells the World Page 2