“Can I blame it on the closet?”
She tossed down her brush and grabbed a scarf from the chair. She pulled it through the air. Was it true what her mother had said to him—that she had no other friends?
Wasn’t that what he liked about her?
“It seems you wanted to find out about your mother, but I’m burying you in stuff about mine.” She was peering at him through the scarf. “I take it all for granted, and propose stupid theories.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you know anything about your father at all?”
“Nope.”
“Not even his name?”
He shook his head. “West is my mother’s name. Can I smoke on the balcony?”
“Be careful, it’s narrow.”
He edged out the French door, looking through the tree full of shoes. A delicate scent hung in the moist air. “The thing about the father stuff.” He felt as if he was speaking to the universe. “People over the years have said to me, ‘That must feel like a big hole’ or ‘How do you know who you are?’ But you accept it. You don’t fathom what you’re missing.”
“You really are alone.”
“Not that alone. My cousin’s like a sister.”
“Too bad I’m not going to see you for a week,” she said.
“A week! How come?” He flicked his half-smoked butt over the top of the tree.
“Because when school lets out in June, we take a trip to New York, and we’re going tomorrow.”
“Oh, man. Just say you’ll come back,” he said, and he reached out for her, and they began to kiss. “Sorry I taste like a cigarette.”
“For some reason I love that taste,” she said; then he worried his face was scratching her raw. They moved toward the rumpled bed.
As the evening came on, the light drifted through the high west windows, four moving prisms on the opposite wall. The light moved like a slow spotlight. As it crept up the wall, the smell of warm lacquer scented the room. Burnished the moment. Blue coolness came next as the daylight faded away. Her face went from warm to gray, languorous, then chilly like a fresco.
“I love the way you kiss,” she said, but she kept his hands out of her clothes. “I’m not quite . . . ready yet.” It didn’t stop the kisses from going long and deep, or his hands from going farther into her hair. And lying against her, he saw how she could easily become a hot sliver of meaning that he might cling to as if to a lifeboat. And that he would consume his lifeboat to keep his life. To become his own floating boat of life. To become someone again at all.
He sat up abruptly in the blue light and looked at Carolyn Ware. He said, “I can’t stand it anymore.” He tried to muster a smile.
“Why?”
“I’m about to explode.”
Did she glance at the nearby timepiece?
“In a good way,” he said. “Have to go somewhere?”
“We have a lot to do.”
“But I just got here.”
“I know. It’s all so unexpected.”
“I thought we could have dinner or maybe take a walk.”
“I wish I could. When I get back. Okay?”
He noticed the pile of books by her bed, the Decameron by Boccaccio on top. “Is that readable?”
“Very. It’s funny. It takes place during the black plague; everyone’s dying, and a group of noblemen and -women are hiding away at a villa, waiting for it to pass.” She proceeded to sum up a story from the hundred tales—about a band of cruel brothers who murder their sister’s lover, and how the sister takes his beautiful head and puts it in a pot and grows basil from it with her tears.
“That’s funny?” he said.
“That’s one of the sad ones.”
“Is my head going to end up in a pot?” he asked.
“I hope not.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a warning, just a story.”
“Will you tell me a new one every day?”
“I hope so.”
“I hope so, too.”
He thought a hundred days before he’d even had one with her sounded worth aiming for; but he also knew that a hundred days pass very, very quickly.
3
In the car, his tongue felt dry and his lips burned. He reached between the seats for old candies to dust off and suck. He wondered how long it would take before she realized he was a sewer rat. Balding sheepskins covered the seats in his car. The dashboard was cracked into deep canyons of foam. Garbage rattled from every corner of the floor.
With time on his hands, he stopped at a bookstore on Clement Street, plucked off the shelf a new edition of Tangier. He wanted to have something more of her, even distantly part of her, to make it through the week.
On the back cover:
Upon its publication nearly three decades ago, Charles Ware’s
classic novel defined what it meant to be young and dispossessed
in America, and it continues to enthrall readers today. In
this thinly disguised autobiography (based on Ware’s friendship
with publisher William Galeotto), Jim Bright, the privileged,
confused son of a San Francisco industrialist, meets free-spirited
Nick Macchiato and travels with him to North Africa, where
the two become street junkies, flirt with underworld characters,
and discover, by the time they return to the U.S., that they
can relate to no one but each other. . . .
The girl at the cash register had short pigtails sprouting from the top of her head like baby goat horns. “You like Ware?” she said, laying her hands on his pick.
“Not sure. Need to read it again.”
“He lives around here, you know.”
“So I hear,” Mac said.
“He comes in and buys his own books sometimes.”
“That’s weird,” Mac said.
“No matter how many times I see him, I’m always, like, ‘Wow, everyone, it’s him.’ ”
“Ever talked to him?”
“I can’t talk to people that smart,” she said, which annoyed Mac a little because she was talking to him. I’m actually enormously gifted myself, but when people don’t recognize it on account of my lowly clerkdom, I feel so angry I could snap was what she seemed to be thinking.
“It’s good to work in a bookstore,” he offered.
“Yeah, we get to borrow whatever we want.”
“Cool.”
“And interesting people come in. Let me know what you think of Ware,” she said.
“All right, see you around.”
Carrying Carolyn’s father’s book out to his car, Mac felt a little ashamed for buying it when Carolyn had clearly asked to be known for herself. It was almost as if he’d bought porn. Well, curiosity was inevitable. No harm done.
And for the first time in ages, his loneliness felt less fatal as he wound off the highway into Redwood City, still radiating heat like a pit of embers, to his cousin’s little house. Hard to believe it was going on thirteen years since he’d arrived at the Los Angeles airport on a hot June afternoon like this one.
It was supposed to be a short vacation, that trip away from his mother. Not a whole new life. Aunt Helen, his mother’s twin, greeted him with hugs and kisses, while Uncle Richard said, “I’m putting you to work, young man.” They all waited together at the luggage carousel, and Mac wondered why it was that his cousin Fran was looking at him with the serene, conciliatory look most often seen on the faces of social workers and nuns. What had she been told? His California cousin was short and a bit rotund, wore pleated plaid shorts and a white blouse with a small pin on the pocket, of a poodle carrying a school satchel.
They drove to Tres Osos that summer evening, late sun glimmering all the way. Where was the water? Why were the hills dead? He came to like that golden color, by the way. He hoped his mother would have a good time in Paris—she needed it. He knew he was a burden. He knew that when he got to jabbering (he was fascinated by military invasions, from ancient
times through World War II, and liked to draw decisive battles, cavalry and infantry going this way and that, then analyze and conjecture) he was driving her nuts. All his needs seemed to drive her nuts, come to think of it. Having friends over, making too much noise. Gilt with guilt he was, a boy unsure what rightfully was his.
All the way back, Fran and Helen chatted cheerfully about the fun things Fran and Mac could do together. Soak envelopes for a stamp collection, build Father Serra’s missions with Popsicle sticks. If that was how they had fun in California, he’d give it a try. Glancing up at Helen, he almost called her Mom every time he let down his vigilant grip on the moment. And continually, for years, he’d bluster into a room and start talking to her that way; there was no doubt in his mind that faces were there to mock and deceive.
Uncle Richard, a large man with tiny white hands and a surprisingly narrow head, gave him all kinds of special instructions as they neared Tres Osos about how to interact with his homestead. The Solder house was like a grounded intergalactic space station. First they entered the detox chamber, in which they took off their shoes, set down the bags, and breathed the modified air. Then they were ready to enter the life-support system. Uncle Richard opened a second door, which emitted the whooshing sound of a broken seal. One socked foot at a time, they crossed the white shag wall-to-wall carpet that cost something like fifty dollars a square yard, as Richard often reminded everyone. “No interior decorator did this,” he liked to say. “Picked out everything myself.”
Mac looked around. The couches and chairs were all huge, bulging and unwrinkled, and looked as though not a particle of dust, let alone a human being, had ever lit upon them. There were a few stock pictures on the walls, of ships and fruit and hunting; nothing like his mother’s manic scribblings. Then he noticed a low hum: this was the System, a massive conditioner that purified and circulated the air in the house and maintained each atom at the proper temperature as well. “We don’t open windows here,” Uncle Richard said. “Keep the good things in, the bad things out.”
Mac was led to his bedroom. It was bigger, brighter by far, than any room he’d ever had. An oak headboard dignified a real mattress, and on the mattress were sheets, pillow, and comforter, all matching, with launching rockets on them. The curtains had rockets on them, too. About twenty rubber-coated hangers waited in the closet for his unhangworthy clothes, and there was a small desk and a new reading lamp, and a clean shelf for his books and microscope. “I hope you like it,” Helen said modestly. “We’ve never made up a room for a boy before.”
“It’s really great,” Mac said.
As for their first dinner together, Mac completed their square table. He’d never seen napkin rings before. They had a whole drawer of them—brass, wooden, shell, bamboo. Putting them on the table was Fran’s job, one thing she did to earn her allowance. Helen served roast beef, potatoes, and green beans—it was delicious. Mac was tired of the headcheese, dill pickles, liverwurst, and the rest of the delicatessen staples his mother swiped at work and brought home.
“So,” Richard said. “What do you think of the place?”
“Mac hasn’t seen the town yet, how can he answer that?” Helen objected.
“He’s full of opinions. I’m sure he’s got one already.”
Mac was trying to pry a flattened wafer of dinner roll from the roof of his mouth. He sensed the man didn’t want a lengthy analysis. “It’s practically Umbria,” he finally answered.
“This is the best piece of land around. And you won’t find a better-built house in this area—”
What was wrong with Aunt Helen and Fran? His mother never let blowhards like this prattle on—she’d laugh at a few of their jokes, then send them packing. Here, it seemed as if Uncle Richard really believed he was the head of the household. Mac’s mother had told him petroleum hunters had found oil on the Solders’ grazing land one generation before, turning a farm boy into a Little Lord Fauntleroy right before the town’s eyes.
By the end of the month, Mac was raring to get home, and by mid-July, he was feverish frantic. He’d soaked stamps and glued Popsicle sticks until he felt as if he was in day care at an asylum, had burned out his best daydreams, and had nowhere new to turn in his mind. The day before his scheduled flight home, Helen said it was off. Cecille had not called. “I’m not sending you to Boston without a note or a call,” she said. “Unless we hear from her by morning, we’re keeping you here. Which is fine, we’d love to have you.”
That night he stayed awake, listening for the phone, which he was sure would ring at some deep hour because his mother would have forgotten how to calculate the time zones. What a terrible night it was! He sat up in his bed and wished on stars. He even knelt beside his bed and prayed. With bleary eyes at dawn, he concluded she’d missed the flight or forgotten the date, and every hour from then on became nothing more than an aching wait.
In later years, he would have trouble remembering what came next. Helen made calls, while he felt an unspoken shame and disgrace. To hide from it, he decided to check out every book from the pygmy Tres Osos library. He read a good one about Scipio and Hannibal and the Punic Wars that summer; punic became his slang for everything bad, especially Uncle Richard. He had been used to having his own schedule, coming and going as he pleased, in a city with places to go and people to see, and suddenly, he was plunked in the middle of nowhere under the thumb of Dick-Dick, who acted as if he owned the place. Actually, he did own the place.
By the middle of August, the wait was tearing him apart. Mac missed his mother every hour, all the craziness, all the stops and starts. He just wanted to get home. He was starting to overhear Dick-Dick say things like “We shouldn’t be too surprised, right? How can she be responsible, she’s a nutcase.”
“I’m not surprised, but I’m worried,” Helen replied.
“If she hadn’t been reckless in the past, I wouldn’t say it.”
“Finding a few oil wells sure helped make you responsible,” Mac shouted, running into the room.
“Hey!” Dick-Dick said. “Now you’re eavesdropping?”
“At least I’m not all punic, like you are!”
“Now I’m punic ?”
One afternoon, bursting into the cool house and whipping Fran with a towel, Mac found Helen hanging up the phone, looking as if she’d received bad news.
“What’s wrong?” he cried.
“I’ve just been speaking with the State Department. Your mother—last month—she left her things in an unpaid room, and hasn’t retrieved them,” Helen said.
She left her things in an unpaid room. “I want to go home. Uncle Richard hates me.”
“Of course he doesn’t hate you!”
“I miss my mom. I need to go home!” She left her things in an unpaid room.
“Mac, until we find her, you can’t go, and it’s much better for you here—”
“No, it’s not better for me, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not!”
“I am sorry. I just mean for now it’s better.”
“It’s not better, it’s not, it’s not—”
“Calm down,” she said, and tried to hug him, but he broke from her and ran to his room and locked the door. He’d never do anything they asked him again. He’d turn to stone!
“Mac, let me in!”
“No,” he moaned into his pillow, “it’s not better, it’s not better, it’s not better, it’s not better, it’s not.”
Ires Osos. Nine hundred people. Hills the color of lion fur, and cottonwoods growing like scanty pubic hairs around a few dry creeks. Off across the valley, the oil derricks bowed up and down, up and down, the way Aunt Helen and Fran bowed to Richard. His mother never did write, and an investigation was opened, and Helen was devastated but did not want it to show; and Mac’s mind soon blackened with squid’s ink whenever he thought of her, so that when he celebrated Christmas with the Solders that year and they presented him with a gift they pretended was from Cecille, he pulled apart the wrapping as if it was the s
hell on a very poisonous nut.
The present was a leather jacket of the coolest kind. Adolescent greed eclipsed his feelings, and he wore the jacket until it looked like a rotten hide on a buffalo carcass; a buffalo that had died without its herd and become a sinewy mound somewhere on the Great Plains. (Which wasn’t far from his self-image at the time.) Sometimes Mac wondered if feelings also rotted and died, or if they existed in a terrible vacuum, unkissed by gravity and water and air, full-bodied and grievous forever.
It wasn’t until spring that the State Department phoned them again, with the news.
Yes. By now, Mac had adjusted to the idea that a kindly cousin could come in handy. Frances Solder Bixby. A quadrate presence if ever there was one. In her veins ran a bracing blend of impatience and solicitude, and a deep furrow was always undulating her brow. She hovered. She nagged. But no one took better care of him when he was sick, or worried about him more when he took plunges off the map.
When he arrived home that evening, it was not surprising to find her in the kitchen. “Hey, Ho,” she said. The nickname she’d given him as a kid, short for Ho-ho, short for “Laugh a little. Cheer up. We’ll work it out!” In her arms was a lumpy object, bundled in a dish towel.
“Hey, Fran.”
“What did you get?” she asked, zeroing in on his purchase. As if he were real all of a sudden for having bought something. When he pulled it from the bag, she said, “I remember that book! It was one of the only things you had when you came out from Boston.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, that and Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie.”
“Mom and Dad thought it was weird. I snuck in your room to read it sometimes, but it seemed kind of homoerotic.”
“It’s a classic! It’s youthful exuberance. I’d say it’s more pansexual.”
“No wonder they thought it was weird.”
It wouldn’t hurt her to loosen up, but he was trying to be nice. “I met the guy’s daughter,” Mac slipped in. “In fact—”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 5