“Come on outside. There’s someone waiting to see you.”
“Woman named Danielle?”
“No, someone else.”
“I don’t want to meet anyone.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve met someone already.”
“You can stand to meet more than one person.”
“Okay. But I don’t want to meet someone, as in really meet them.”
“Just come out here.”
He was biding his time. He was driving to the city soon to see Carolyn and to meet, at last, Charles Ware. After he washed up, he looked out the window at the group of people Fran and Tim had invited, which included a few of the neighbors he liked (a friendly old woman who walked her trusty spaniel and waved at him as if he was arriving home after a journey across the tundra, no matter how many times a day she spotted him) and some of the ones he despised (a family who scolded him once for stepping on their lawn). Mostly, it was Fran’s librarian friends. He came outside and fished a piece of cauliflower off a tray, crunched it up.
Moments later, Fran brought over a tall, attractive woman in her thirties. “Mac, you remember Miss Kobayashi, don’t you?” He looked carefully at the woman and placed her all at once. No way! It was his fourth-grade teacher from Tres Osos.
“Call me Melinda,” she said with a laugh.
“We ran into each other in the library a few weeks ago,” Fran said. “I wanted to surprise you. Isn’t it amazing?”
“Yes, I left Tres Osos about eight years ago. I’m teaching high school now, here in Redwood City.”
“Wow,” said Mac. “You look the same, but—”
“You’ve grown about three feet,” she said. “So what are you doing with yourself now, Mac? You’re a teacher?”
“Is that what Fran said about me?” Mac snickered. “I guess she tries to hide the awful truth.”
“Tell me the awful truth. The awful truth, really, is that I can never get the awful truth from anyone.”
“I’m kind of between things.”
“I wish I were between things,” Miss Kobayashi said. “Actually, in the fall I’ll have six classes, and I’m already out of my mind about it. When I see all those faces, I stutter and drool.”
“You?”
“Yes. Someday I’m going to write a book called Classroom of Darkness. The instructor goes insane and dies, and they find a stack of her students’ papers, and across the top of the pile it says ‘Exterminate the brutes!’ ”
He laughed. “I didn’t know you were thinking things like that, back in fourth grade.”
“It was different with the younger kids,” she added. “I didn’t feel as self-conscious.”
“You were a good teacher,” he said, recalling the cheerful bungalow full of desks and art projects. “I still remember a lot about that year.”
“Oh, tell me! Like what?”
“You read out loud to us. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that! You’d do the voices. And you never got mad.”
“That makes me feel so good, like it counted! You were having such a hard time,” she added.
Her words startled him, and inside, he cringed. What, had he been pissing all over himself or something? Picking fights? Or just his nose? He didn’t remember not fitting in.
“Any sponsors yet?” An older woman joined them. “I’m up to twenty-five.”
“This is Marjorie, who teaches with me. We’re signed up for a limpathon,” Melinda said. “It’s a real thing, like a walkathon, but for people with knee injuries.”
“You have a knee injury?”
“Can’t you tell I’m kind of gimpy? It’s from running.”
“Miss Kobayashi—”
“Please, it’s Melinda. The age gap thing changes a lot, doesn’t it?”
Miss Kobayashi, his fourth-grade teacher, was smiling at him in a way that was very attractive. Was it okay to think so? He felt a little strange. Apparently he went for the gimpy type, for Carolyn had that strange walk, too. “Yeah.”
“Let’s have coffee sometime, and catch up, what do you say?”
When your teacher suggested you have coffee, you had to have coffee. What if she told him to do other things?
“Good idea,” he said.
He lifted his cup in cheers and now had the luxury of surveying Fran and Tim’s backyard and feeling nostalgic for the days (only a week ago) when he had nothing else but this. The fence into which he practiced throwing tomahawks—that was really fun. The lumpy vegetable patch Fran worked at like a dog, yielding its tough-skinned tomatoes, mildew-tipped zucchini, and anemic green beans, which crawled up bamboo poles to choke and die. The smell of backyard grass, the hulking form of Tim turning chicken backs over the billowing flames of his grill. Perhaps it was more special and fleeting than he had realized. He often stopped in a given moment and calculated how many more times he might experience similar moments in his lifetime. If they continued to have summer cookouts every year until they couldn’t move out of bed—what, say fifty or sixty more? Enough to spare. He skulked toward the house. So long, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye!
Back in his room, he flossed his teeth, picked up the pint bottle of George Dickel he’d purchased for the occasion, as well as the stack of envelopes in question, and, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed, stole out the front door and peeled away in his unsightly barge.
Driving out of Redwood City, past the neon martini sign and the do-it-yourself dog wash, past the shrill used-car lots and the diesel clouds of tractor trailers idling on side streets for the night, he happily joined the crowd going north on 101. He never tired of approaching the city. Everyone complained about the summer fog, but these were the complaints of proud parents apologizing with smiles for the brattish deeds of their children. Ultimately, San Francisco did no wrong in the eyes of the people who lived there, and it was true, the summer fog and chill had a charm all its own.
Driving across town, he followed Geary to Divisadero, climbed that 35 percent grade hill. The fog was coming like rivers down the streets. Nowhere to park, and he nosed his car into a fraudulent space at the corner. Then he was up to the porch and one buzz away from her. He pushed.
“Who calls?” The terse male voice on the intercom startled him; he felt pimply and adolescent.
“Um, hi, I’m looking for Carolyn,” he faltered.
“Who is this?”
Who should he say he was? No choice. “Mac West.”
The connection was severed while the cold air found every warm spot on his skin. And when the door opened, he found himself standing in the presence of the man himself, Charles Ware.
Mac recognized the sensitive face from the back of Tangier— a face that had helped create the mystique surrounding the book. The real Ware was now a man who looked rather like an aged boy, a pituitary case—a replica of his former self with too much skin. Puttied, old cheeks crowded his small features; blue gray slugs rested beneath his eyes; thin, monkey red hair sprouted from the roof of his immensely admired brain. The man didn’t look so bad, really, once Mac had cleared his mind of the initial comparison. Maybe even kind of dapper.
“And you are?”
“Friend of Carolyn’s.” Apparently Carolyn had not prepared her father for his visit. “MacGregor West.”
Ware looked as surprised to see a friend of Carolyn’s as his wife had, the week before.
“Is she expecting you?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Then come in.”
Two young men were shadowing Ware. One was tall, bearded, and wan, and looked like someone in an old daguerreotype from the Klondike. The other wore a brown velour suit and had a long goose neck with a flickering Adam’s apple at the center of it. He said, “Daniel LaPlante.” The tall, wan fellow said, “Tom Rothman.” And they eagerly held out their hands to shake Mac’s, and he had an impostor’s discomfort in shaking back.
“Any relation to the Green Street Wests?” Ware asked, motioning for Mac and the other
s to follow him back to the library and liquor shelf.
“Don’t think so,” Mac said.
“A very impressive family,” Ware said. “I went to school with Donald West in Chicago. Two of his brothers went to Yale. What do you suppose made all of us boys run east like that? And what in God’s name made me stop in a town known for its rail yards and slaughterhouses?”
“The Cubs?” Mac wondered where Carolyn was this time.
“Tom has written a marvelous novel,” Ware said. “I’ve just finished it; I’m sure it’s publishable.”
Rothman murmured something appreciative, and LaPlante said: “I knew it. I knew this would work out perfectly.”
“Congratulations,” said Mac.
“To San Francisco,” Ware said, handing them each a glass and raising his. “Home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs!”
“Manhattan is incredibly alive,” LaPlante blurted. “Tom, you’ll love it. You’ll meet great people.”
“I certainly hope he doesn’t have to meet ‘great’ people.” Ware chuckled, surveying his small audience. “When I left home for college, I was seventeen. We ran into bad weather, and I missed my connection in Denver. I believe my first trip to Chicago took twenty-two hours. But it felt like a miracle. When I saw Chicago, it was like coming out of a stupor.”
Ware seemed to have no intention of summoning Carolyn for him, and pulling out the envelopes didn’t seem like a great idea now, either. Mac gulped his drink instead.
“Poor, pink baby I was; I had to scour off that innocence! So did I throw myself onto the blackened streets? Hardly. I went right to the English Department at the university. I unpacked and planted myself for four years. And when I left, I was no longer pink. And not from looking under the skirts of experience, not from seeing its hairy legs and sniffing its musky smell! Instead, I met brilliant people; I was beaten and bruised, and by the best minds of my generation. Then I discovered some of the best minds. Do you know where I met Bill Galeotto? On break, not far from here; at the back of a restaurant, peeling the fatty skin off chicken in a tub of gray water. He had to work the knife so fast his hands were bleeding with cuts. I saw this mar-velously handsome boy and I started talking to him and I discovered that he was brilliant and ambitious and he no more knew what to do with himself than the poor plucked chicken in the tub.”
LaPlante laughed. Rothman said seriously, “ ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can barely endure—and every angel is terrible.’ What about Erlebnis, Mr. Ware, as in Rilke’s afternoon at Duino?”
Ware glowed. “To open to experience, to be receptive, is a far cry from buying the costume of a butterfly catcher before one has studied and knows which are rare and worth catching and which are as common as flies. When young writers set out on their safaris for this Erlebnis, as you say, they mostly catch flies!
“Now, in Chicago I wrote poetry first; as Williams put it, a poem is a small machine made of words. We were practical. We wanted to wind up our machines and march them over the world, armies of poetry, World War Three! Because what did we learn from the legions of muse-struck poets who destroyed themselves? We thought all that engineering, the steel girders of classical poetry, could best support our ideas. A little hocus-pocus, and each new contraption could be disguised as a mystical gem, a scarab. But I abandoned my group: I wrote a novel. And I was so successful at it I determined that I’d rather spend my life toying with the loose, baggy monster than scrubbing the scarab’s back. So there you have it.”
Daniel LaPlante actually sighed; Tom Rothman was too absorbed to generate noise.
“Tom asked me how I started out,” Ware said. “I’m afraid it’s a subject I can talk too much about.”
LaPlante said, “Of course you have a lot to talk about. You should be putting it all into a book.”
Rothman said, “Sir, it’s your responsibility to literary history to write that book.”
“Yes, a memoir’s long overdue,” LaPlante added.
“Mr. Ware, what are you working on now?”
Ware drew in his breath, in his quietly theatrical manner. “If you’d asked me a month ago, I might not have felt comfortable talking about it. But I’m so pleased with the work I’ve done so far that I will tell you. But please, it stops here. I’m planning a new novel about Jim Bright.”
He crossed his arms and legs, and left it there to be viewed and admired by all. It was as if the name Jim Bright should stand on its own, like Stephen Dedalus or Humbert Humbert. And for these two, Mac saw, it obviously did. LaPlante’s neck bobbed, and Roth-man shivered. Ware acted as if his character deserved the reception of a cult figure, an American hero making a long-awaited comeback. Deserved? Maybe. But instantly, Mac couldn’t help wondering whether Ware had always thought, during his career, If all else fails I can bring back Jim Bright.
“What about Nick Macchiato?” LaPlante said. “It’s impossible to imagine Jim without Nick. He’ll be in it, won’t he? He’s your tour de force!”
“That’s the simple view,” Ware said dryly. Mac thought LaPlante had complimented Carolyn’s father and was surprised by the fierceness of Ware’s reply. “Through Bright’s eyes, Macchiato comes alive. Bright creates him. Without Bright’s brilliant investment in Macchiato, you’d have nothing but an unplumbed cutout. You’d have nothing! This is an important literary distinction, and you must be aware of it,” Ware said.
“You’re absolutely right,” LaPlante said quickly. “Macchiato is only as fascinating as Bright makes him.”
“That’s right,” Ware went on quietly. “I haven’t made up my mind about putting Macchiato into this work.” Then he laughed. “I’ll have to see how he behaves!”
In motion, bodies make a certain sound. Mac heard Carolyn pushing her sister up from the basement, or whatever lay below the massive domicile. When they appeared in the doorway, Mac saw that the girl’s shirt was damp and matted to her chest, and the acrid smell of bile wafted through the room. Mac jumped up from his chair.
“She was in the sun all day,” Carolyn announced. “Roasting! How long have you been here?”
“Just arrived,” said Mac.
“It was the hamburger,” said Molly. “It smelled like horse broth.”
Mac watched Ware take a sip of brandy, not budging in the direction of his sick child. “ ‘A thing wherein we feel some hidden want,’ ” he intoned.
Carolyn said: “ ‘She wants a heart.’ ”
“ ‘Ah, the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart!’ ” Ware said, and Mac moved from their midst.
“Great meeting you all,” he said. “Mr. Ware, thanks.”
“Yes, you too, you too,” the young men echoed.
“One thing,” Ware said, following Mac out of the room.
“Yes?”
He pulled Mac aside, his breath and clothes as stale as the pages of an old book. “You’re a very nice person, aren’t you?”
“I guess I’m okay,” Mac said.
“I hope you’re a very nice person,” Ware said, and he reached over and brushed off Mac’s lapel.
“I do my best.”
“Yes, you’ll have to do your best,” Ware said. “Good evening!”
Mac followed Carolyn and her sister up the back stairs, trying to shake off the encounter. In the hexagonal chamber at the top, Carolyn leaned on the door frame of her sister’s room. “Sorry about this. I want to get her to the shower.”
“I can get in myself!” Molly said. She pushed Carolyn out of her way, closed the door.
“Don’t throw those clothes on the bed,” Carolyn called. “Put them on the bathroom floor. And wash your hair!”
“Okay” came the muffled response.
Carolyn hesitated a moment, then turned her radiant face on him; despite everything he found strange and ungainly about getting to know her, he felt grand again. “So—are you ready?” he said.
“You must dread coming here.”
“Carolyn?” called the sister.
; “What?”
“I still feel sick, and—”
“Just take a shower.”
“I’m sick, I’m really sick!”
“It’s her own fault,” Carolyn said. “I told her to stop gorging.”
“I never knew having a sibling was such a big responsibility,” Mac said.
“I need a break. My mother could be a lot more helpful. So could my dad.”
“You’re not kidding,” said Mac.
“Carolyn?” came the whine of Molly.
“This is awful.”
“Hey, don’t worry.”
“How about this? I’ll square her away and get my mother on board, and meet you downstairs.”
“Aye-aye,” said Mac. “Oh, and I brought the envelopes.” He patted his breast pocket. “Too bad those drips are here.”
“Maybe they’ll leave. I’ll be down soon.”
“I’ll be waiting,” said Mac.
Ware and the sycophants were still spouting off in the other room, but now Adela Ware was bungling about in a large pantry in the kitchen.
“You’ll be a stupid girl to do that,” she was saying with a lavish Germanic accent. “You’ll be taking over my business, soaking your hands in curing water when you’re fifty years old. Don’t you wish you’d had a father with a good living?”
He cleared his throat so as not to startle her. Something fell from a shelf, rolled across the floor. She peered out of the shadows.
“Hello, Mrs. Ware.” He scooped it up—a prescription for her, filled by Porter, Isabel, M.D. Xanax.
“Hello, MacGregor! I’m mining my memories for material,” she informed him. “I’m working on a one-woman show.”
“Best of luck,” he said, giving her a nod. Adela had probably been giving a one-woman show for some time.
“You see, I didn’t want to marry a.father.” Her voice came out indignantly. “Mother had high hopes. I was never quite as disciplined as my sister; but everything I touched I did naturally, with ease. With my sister, you saw the sweat.”
“Is that so.”
“I won a scholarship,” Adela said, “to Northwestern, and over the next three years developed myself as an actress. In fact, I walked away with the leads in every production the Theater Department put on during my time there. I became well known at the university. Still, from time to time, suddenly, just before I went onstage or spoke to someone important, I wondered if I smelled of brine!”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 7