Her voice was squeezing the air out of him.
“Well, it was absurd. Absurd because sophisticated people from Chicago were traveling up to Evanston just to see me perform. One night, the whole lot of us went out for drinks with another group from the U. of C; I was introduced to a young poet my wonderful professor Marcel DeSimone was acquainted with.
“I was told that this Charles Ware was a very promising writer, a young man at work on a novel that was reported to be very important. I looked at him—he looked young and shy and bland; later, that was what I told my friends. But Marcel and this Ware fellow had much to say to each other—after a few hours of listening to their overheated talk, I wished the poet would go away. I drank a few more glasses of wine, and next thing I knew, I was standing on the table. I began to sing a sultry torch song. They stared. Even the poet had shut up. I kicked off a shoe.”
She demonstrated by kicking off one of her slippers; Mac flinched. He felt irritated and uncomfortable, and he could hear Charles Ware now, bidding the young men farewell. The front door closed with a bang.
“The room howled. I kicked off the other and reached for my sash—dear Marcel swept me off the table and carried me to the car. I wrapped my arms around his neck and murmured something in his ear. I might have told him I loved him.
“It all caught up to me. A few days later he told me that his young friend Charles Ware had been mesmerized—by me. ‘Anyway, I think he’s brilliant. I’ve read most of his novel. It’s spectacular. I believe he’ll be quite famous,’ he told me. ‘Not that he needs the money, like the rest of us mortals. He’s extraordinarily wealthy. I hear his father owns a small city out west. Not as big as ours. It’s called San Francisco.’
“What matters next is that I was heartbroken that the love of my life wanted to pawn me off, no matter how promising or wealthy the fellow. I had a fundamental insecurity—”
Mac shifted his weight abruptly. “This is fascinating, Mrs. Ware, but—”
“It’s Adela.”
“All right, Adela.”
“Anyhow, that’s the story of how I met Carolyn’s father.”
“It’s—riveting. Thank you for telling me. See you around.” He took a stride.
“Did your parents meet in an interesting way?”
The unexpected query caused him to flash on his creation myth—a bunch of rancid drifters groping in a Parisian hostel. “Yeah. Probably.”
She followed him to the monk’s tower. The angel in the fresco hovered over them, as plump as a cloud. Ware had vanished! “I wish I could know everything about a person, just looking at them,” Adela said. “I wish I could lay my hands on you and know whether or not you were a good person. Still, I’m getting a good feeling about you all the same.”
“I’m not even trying,” Mac said.
“Nobody’s perfect.”
To Mac’s relief, Carolyn appeared at the top of the staircase then, in a girlish red tam-o’-shanter and a car coat with brass buttons. He smiled at the sight of her.
“You’re going out?” said Adela.
“Mother, Molly’s been a little sick. She’ll be fine, but she’s in bed now.”
“So am I to—”
“Just go check on her,” Carolyn said.
“Now?”
“She’s in bed,” said Carolyn. “You can figure out what to do.”
The creaking floorboards announced Charles Ware’s return. Mac looked overhead and beheld his descent. With his guests out the door, he had made a fast change into his bathrobe. He was up to his ankles in argyle socks, with holes at the toes carved by long, jagged nails.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
“Having my nightly bowl of vanilla ice milk, Daughter.”
She said, “Now that you’re here, my friend Mac has something to show you.”
“No rest for the wicked.”
Mac reached for his pocket. “Sorry to spring this on you. Just some old envelopes; I’m trying to find out if—”
In semispastic fashion, Mac delivered the bundle to Ware.
“His mother designed that film festival poster, the one on my wall, from the summer Tangier premiered in Paris,” Carolyn explained.
Her father produced his reading glasses and placed them atop the bridge of his nose. He peered closely at the flat pockets of paper. He looked up at Mac over the tops of his frames, then flipped through the envelopes quickly, like a bureaucrat. Mac could hear the breath coming out his nose.
“So what can I do for you?” Ware said officiously.
“Do you remember her?” Mac asked.
“No recollection,” swore Ware.
“Dad, it’s your writing.”
Ware looked witheringly at his daughter. “Have you given any thought to the quantity of correspondence I receive each week? And to how much of this stationery I’ve gone through over the years?”
“I’m—” Mac stopped. He pulled another item from his pocket— a picture of his mother on the stoop of a three-family house, Mac a toddler on her lap.
Ware took the picture, glanced at it, but dismissed it right away. “No, I’m sorry, nothing at all.”
He couldn’t say why, but he wondered if the man was lying. “Maybe she wrote you fan letters. She liked your book.”
“Ah. Many people did.”
“Dad, what about the poster?”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, both of you.”
“But would you have written a young woman so many times, Charles, and not remember?” Adela joined in.
“I feel as if I’m being grilled on the witness stand,” said Ware.
Carolyn said, “Maybe just lightly poached.”
“I hardly remember anything. Gossip has it I’m half senile.” He continued toward his frozen dessert. “Mr. West, good luck with your quest,” he said, and trudged on. Mac was chewing on his lower lip so hard it began to bleed.
“Oh, that’s too bad!” said Carolyn.
“Yeah.”
“He does get a lot of mail.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I wonder why she kept the envelopes but not the letters,” said Carolyn as she pulled open the door. The evening mist rushed in on them.
“This will be the first time she’s gone out in years!” Adela said, but Mac noticed that she was not saying it to anyone in particular. She was back in the mode of practicing for her show.
And yet surely, Mac thought, despite his suspicious nature, despite the swift and decisive letdown, nothing could be nicer than to spend the rest of his life plowing the fields between Redwood City and San Francisco, cultivating a relationship with Carolyn Ware. He had an escapade to impress her with now, steering across the Bay Bridge, with the lights of the city over his shoulder, the salt water sweeping beneath him full of whitecaps and frigates and freighters from everywhere in the world, with a girl in a car coat beside him, and not another thought of that troublemaking mother of his in his mind. This girl was there, she was sucking a cinnamon drop, probably so that when he kissed her, soon, she’d be proud of the way she tasted. Her green eyes were gleaming in the evening light. And he smiled a crooked smile.
“Now that you’ve talked to him, are you through with me?”
“Not quite,” said Mac. “Is it possible he was holding something back?”
“Very possible. He holds everything back. What else was in that box of your mother’s stuff?”
“Weird junk. Incense burners, things I made in school, some of her paintings and drawings, some snapshots—nothing else that looked too promising.”
“Don’t be discouraged, okay? You’ll put together your colossus somehow.”
“You think?”
“I do. I know it. So where are we going?”
“First stop, Oakland. I hope you like Indian food.”
“I love it, and I hardly ever have it.”
“There’s a place I discovered a while back. It has great naan, especially the onion kind.” He couldn’t let go of her hand.
“And I never go to Oakland, so that’ll be something new.”
His crummy car seemed like an asset all at once, a crazy but lovable old pal, and something to remember him by. Fran had borrowed it recently, when her car was in the shop, and left some brochures from her doctor’s office on the dashboard; Carolyn happened to pick one up entitled “Detecting Rectal Cancer.” “That’s not mine,” Mac said. Cans and bottles rattled in the back as they bumped over the joints in the bridge. “My cousin’s always looking for new things to worry about.”
“God! How old is she?”
“Just a few years older than me—your age—but she’s always been middle-aged at heart.”
“What’s she do?”
“Works in a library in Redwood City,” Mac said. “Know those rings cups make on things? She’s obsessed with those. She sees a beverage come into a room, and it’s like, Okay, we’ve got a situation here, find the coasters!And splinters, too. She’s really worried about splinters. It’s like she got a splinter once and it was the worst thing that ever happened to her.”
“You know what’s really terrible are glass splinters,” Carolyn said. “If they’re small, you can’t see them, so you’re digging around with the tweezers, and it’s excruciating.”
“Hmm,” Mac said, trying to superimpose Fran’s head onto Carolyn’s body. Didn’t quite fit. “Actually, my cousin’s very nice. I feel guilty casting aspersions on her character. How do you think it works—is being nice learned, or just a matter of brain chemistry?”
“Sometimes when people wake in the middle of the night,” Carolyn said, “they seem different, like they haven’t remembered they’re nice yet.”
He wondered, badly, who she had seen in the middle of the night. More to the point, what she was like. “Sounds like we’re saying no one has a genuine self,” he concluded.
“But I think you can trick a consciousness into forgetting things it’s learned. Such as old gripes and feuds.”
“Like, could an Armenian wake up forgetting he hates the Turks?” said Mac.
“Uh, do they still hate each other?”
“Good question.” He was mad that he didn’t know.
“And what about love?” she went on. “Do you wake up loving someone, or do you have to remind yourself?”
“I think you have to keep a cue card in your pocket, and look at it every five minutes,” said Mac. “Hey, it’s my favorite song!”
He turned up the radio.
I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh
What hijacked my world that night. . .
He felt wildly happy all of a sudden, ready to take on anything.
But first, he had to find the restaurant. It was on an obscure corner in Oakland, and he’d stumbled upon it almost by accident. From the outside it didn’t look like much. It was actually part restaurant, part movie rental store, part candy shop. Inside, on a TV mounted near the ceiling, music videos played: feckless maidens threw themselves at blubbery rajas, opening their mouths to emit erotic shrieks and yodels. Mac and Carolyn sat in a booth and ordered big, burning bowls of lamb vindaloo, salving their mouths with mango lassis and beer. “Of course,” Mac said, hoping to dazzle her, “I’ve traveled extensively on the subcontinent.”
“You have? Wow.”
“After I was in France, that was my big splurge. Got a few thousand dollars when my grandmother croaked. Ever been?”
“No.”
Making it to India was probably his life’s chief accomplishment to date. Even though he’d stayed in the country only three weeks, he had gotten a lot of mileage out of telling people about it. “It’s very intense—the colors, smells, faces, coming at you. If you’re alone and depressed, it can snap you out of it or push you over the edge. Or maybe a little of both. One day I was in some village, about to walk by this guy with no legs who was sitting on the hot sidewalk, and I was just thinking what a sad, horrible, reduced life he had, and how he was human misery incarnate—and right when I passed him I slipped on a banana peel, like in a cartoon, and I was lying on my back, and my eyes were, like, two inches from his stumps, all black and shriveled, and suddenly he reached over with these sinewy, powerful arms and lifted me up. Next thing I knew he was holding me like a baby.”
“A legless man picked up your whole body, without toppling over?”
“Yeah, no kidding. He kind of rocked, but then he regained his equilibrium.”
“What did you do then?”
“Tried to keep my cool, because I didn’t want him to feel like I was repulsed by him, and then I actually started to relax. It’s not too hard to regress to infancy, you know. And later, I realized the whole thing was a metaphor for Western hubris. I mean, here I’d been pitying him, when on some spiritual plane, that guy had it over me, ten to one.”
“Maybe so, but I like you more,” she said.
“Gee, thanks.”
He felt like pounding his chest like a male silverback anyway.
“By the way, how was New York?”
“Not as kaleidoscopic as India.”
After dinner he took a detour for the second part of his surprise, down the highway farther south, until they were beyond Hayward, in Union City, where he turned off the freeway and drove through an industrial zone, then went bumping over a dirt field behind a warehouse, agricultural fields rolling on to the salt flats and the bay. It was warmer there, and when he parked, an earthy smell drifted through the windows.
“What’s out there?” she asked.
“You’ll see. I think you’ll like it.”
“We’re getting out?”
“Here.”
He felt around in the backseat. The bourbon was nestled in a soft, rumpled bag, and he undid the top and offered it. She shuddered upon swallowing some. The crickets were raucous all around.
“Oh, and I brought these, too,” he said, reaching into the glove compartment. He had two U-No bars.
“These are hard to find, and I love them.”
“Whenever I see them, I buy a bunch,” he said.
“They’re very delicate.”
“Yeah, they melt easily.”
In the crickety, warm air they peeled the foil wrappers, and the aroma of chocolate supplanted the loaminess outside. For a while they simply nibbled on their bars.
Then she was fiddling with her seat belt, plucking it with her thumbs. “Can I admit something about myself?”
“Sure.”
“I think I’m sort of a square,” she said.
“You seem to lead a quiet life these days,” he granted her. “Baking cakes for your sister, stuff like that.”
“I think I can trace it back to a crucial moment with a dental hygienist,” she said, crumpling her wrapper.
“Go ahead, throw it anywhere.”
She looked into the backseat, then tossed it. “My hygienist was cleaning my teeth one day, nothing out of the ordinary, but I was gagging and ripping the tools out of my mouth. I needed to have total control. I was insisting that she let me hold the little spit vacuum myself. After a while, she set down her pick and took off her mask and said it was clear there was some reason I was so protective of my mouth, and that maybe I should get real and think about it.”
“You don’t seem all that guarded with your mouth,” he reminisced cheerfully.
“See, you’re helping me.” She flipped the mirror down from the visor and examined her teeth in the dark.
“So—did you come up with anything?”
“The whole thing bothered me. I started to feel like maybe I had a horrible secret. Like a repressed memory. And then—” She hiccuped. “Then one day, I got to talking about it with my mother. Know what she told me?”
“What?”
“She said that when I was about four, I actually tried to swallow one of my dad’s pens. It was lodged in my throat, and I went to the hospital.”
“Oh, man,” said Mac, nearly gagging. “So the hygienist became your guru.”
“Yes.
I bought her a parakeet to thank her.”
“That’s thanks?” Parakeets shrieked.
“It was a very pretty blue one, with a yellow head.”
“Did she dig it?”
“Yes, she loves that bird.”
“Swallowing your father’s pen,” Mac mused. “Sounds pretty Freudian.”
“It does. It was because it was so important to him. See, I always wanted his attention, and I never saw him without it. The psychiatrist I used to see called it triangulating.”
Mac batted at a mosquito. “You were triangulating with a pen?”
She laughed. “Among other things.”
“And you gave up having fun and started baking cakes?”
“I still have fun.”
Mac nodded. The past was deeper than the sea.
“You know what Molly said about you?” she asked.
“What?”
“That you seem really nice.”
“Nice?” Mac said. “That’s it?”
“I thought it was a nice thing to say.”
“Have you ever considered moving out of your family’s house?” Mac said.
“Someday I will.”
“Like I’m one to talk. Maybe we should move in together,” he said, which paved the way for a deathly silence.
“It’s hard to live with people,” she mused. “Let’s say I want to do something eccentric, like find a farm and raise animals. Let’s say miniature donkeys. That’s not every person’s dream.”
“No. But you could maybe find one person on earth who wants that.”
“What if it’s not the person I want?”
“By the way, how miniature?”
“Like this,” she said, indicating something so small Mac didn’t believe it.
“A donkey the size of a squirrel?”
She started to laugh. “You know what my biggest problem is? It’s that I always start to feel bad when I start to feel good. So don’t make me feel too good,” she said, kissing him.
Trapped behind the wheel of his car, Carolyn in the seat beside him, the insects rasping, flashing green lights passing in the sky on wings coming in to land by his bay, his San Francisco, here he was— Don’t ruin it—here was his new girlfriend, his. And they kissed, and then some more, and then some more, until he’d actually crawled over her and pushed her door open and they’d rolled out beside a row of flowers, bunting each other into the soil, hands and elbows in it, pollen flicking from the flower stalks onto their cheeks and chins.
MacGregor Tells the World Page 8