MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  “Can I?” he asked clumsily, because he actually had a Trojan thin-skin in his pocket.

  “I want to, but not yet.”

  “Please, my darling.”

  “I know it would be nice. Oh, I love your face!”

  She kissed him. He wanted to go inside her more than anything.

  “Are you enjoying the earth?” he asked.

  “Earth is our mother planet.”

  “Oh my God, this is very difficult.”

  “Then look at the moon.”

  He had his back to it.

  “Come on, get up, look,” she said.

  And with that he said, “All right. Moon.” Approximately fifteen thousand more chances to see it, but fine. He sat up all in a mess. The lunar face was hanging over the eastern hills. Up on his knees, to his feet. He held her hands.

  They were at the edge of an industrial-size field of gladiolus flowers. The special thing was, now they were all in bloom. Union City was the glad capital of the U.S.A. While driving around on one of his solitary expeditions, his first few months in the Bay Area, Mac had stumbled on this, acre upon acre of the luminous bayonets.

  “You said you liked flowers.”

  But her reaction wasn’t what he’d imagined. “They’re blooming,” she said. “Once they bloom, it’s too late; it means no one will sell them.”

  “It’s okay, they’re not for selling cut. They’re for the bulbs.”

  She tripped down the furrows, spangling in the silvery light. He followed her, found her snapping off the stalks one after another. She had an entire armload of them. The moon cast a colorless sheen on everything. To his surprise, her cheeks were glistening with tears.

  “They’re wasted,” she was saying. “No one will ever see how pretty they are. No one will ever know!”

  He said, “But hey, Carolyn, we will. We know.” He stopped her and brought his mouth to hers, and took her down on the ground right then, and tried to chase away this strange feeling she was having, and this time, she made no call to wait for what he wanted from her, and the flowers slipped all around them like a soft bed; nothing from then on was only in his head.

  PART TWO

  W.G.

  Let me come back again to the

  waking state. I have no choice but

  to consider it a phenomenon

  of interference.

  —André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism

  5

  He dreamt Carolyn was giving birth to huge, ripe strawberries and feeding them to him straight from between her legs. He woke with a pang so hard it surprised him.

  He had a hard-won respect for the place he’d come to live. California. Mighty from bottom to top. He even liked the shape of it on a map, a burly sailor’s forearm, holding back the sea. Before he bought his car, he used to ride Tim’s bike up to the summit of the coast mountains and shoot them north and south. He honored the existence of Ansel Adams but wished the camera-crazy pest had never been born so that he, with his trusty lens, could have been the one plastering the world with calendars. The redwoods, those old, hairy trunks, had once shaded all the peninsula, “Redwood City” becoming a scathing oxymoron as the township had devoured its namesake.

  Thanks in part to the camp Molly had gone off to, Mac was getting to know San Francisco, and Carolyn, faster than he could have hoped. They walked arm in arm around North Beach, slurping espressos in crowded cafés, and they attended the opera, because her family had excess tickets, which otherwise went to waste. The music Mac heard in that hall came instead from the braiding of their arms and legs and the reception in her long hair, pressed against his, picking up all the electricity in the room. There were cavernous, popcorn-crunching movie matinees, and at night, martinis in clubs. Mac wasn’t much of a dancer, but Carolyn could throw back some drinks and let loose on the floor. What a difference with her sister off at camp! Late at night they’d sneak into her room, and she seemed to want him more—and again and again—than he could even keep up with. But he managed somehow. They made love seven times one night.

  The hitch to hanging around with Carolyn Ware, he discovered, was that she threw money everywhere—she threw it like crumbs for the birds. For cabs, for tips, at musicians; for every movie, in every restaurant they went to. And while he’d fumble with his tired wallet stuffed with a few twenties and ones, she’d open her change purse and pull out her magic platinum card.

  Mostly, however, she was extravagant for herself or her sister, to whom she was sending care packages at Four Winds. Once they were out on one of the piers, and she stopped at the table of a jewelry vendor, picked up three bracelets at a hundred dollars apiece. Two for Molly and one for herself. Just like that. Nothing to it. Five minutes later and she was putting a twenty-dollar bill into the hat of one of those human statues, and that cracked his silver spray-painted concentration fast. She picked up bouquets whenever they came upon them—roses and daisies and stock and lilies and irises and dahlias—she wanted to own every flower. When she saw a new hat in a window, a pretty scarf around a mannequin’s neck, an old-fashioned brooch, or an antique valentine, she bought it for herself or for Molly. When she saw a book or a CD she liked the cover of, it was quickly snapped up. If she saw something apropos of penguins, which Molly collected, she didn’t hesitate—she’d purchase the item on the spot. Her purse was an eternal spring, which he gradually came to look at with cautious eyes.

  “Ever dream of having a job?” Mac asked her once.

  “I have one. I do freelance editing for the press.”

  “For Galeotto House?”

  “They’re reorganizing right now; there’s a new office opening in New York. I’m taking the summer off.”

  “Oh.” He couldn’t believe she’d never mentioned this. The privilege of having such a job was nothing to her.

  But how about this for a reprieve—during the time Molly was away at camp, Charles took off for New York and Adela went with Isabel Porter to Carmel to visit a friend. Mac and Carolyn had the house to themselves!

  Those days, his only sense of time came from an old clock on her shelf. Could use the fog as an excuse and never go out. They weren’t much hungry, though he yanked some lemons from the tree by the path. Slipped a segment into Carolyn’s mouth—she laughed and spat it out. In the evening the light dimmed the windowpanes while the low drone of foghorns reached them from the bridge. At night the room was damp and dark, and they fogged up the windows near her low-lying, unfoldable bed.

  By day he roamed the place. Examined every painting and artifact downstairs, found it a qualified museum. She gave him a tour of the parents’ wing—big rooms, separate lives. Adela’s was like a starlet’s bedroom in a black-and-white movie—vanity table, tortoise-shell combs lined up in a row. Charles’s room looked east to the downtown skyline but was drafty and cold. A number of suits were strewn on his bed, as if it mattered so much what he wore.

  Dressing, Carolyn tore through her closet and tried on different clothes. One blouse, one sweater, one skirt down. Nothing for that day right. Another wrap of silk and linen down. She had her clothes made by a tailor on Greenwich Street. An Italian woman who knew just what to do. She had simply to drop off a few yards of fabric there. So the fabric cut to cover Carolyn thundered down from her hangers to the floor. And Mac lay back in her bed, watching. When she found what she wanted, she undressed and ironed it on an old board by her closet door.

  Sometimes he thought about the episode in her closet and all the abandoned things beyond the little door, but not for long. And sometimes he thought about Charles Ware and his curt response to the envelopes addressed to his mother, but not for too long. Paranoia was the weed of the psyche, too easy to sprout and grow.

  And he thought, during that time, about Carolyns apparent isolation—her age, her lack of friends, her house, protecting her from the world. He wanted to ask but felt it was delicate and not to be talked about. Even with him, there came a time when she wanted to be alone, and she’d drift away
inside herself, cease to be company. He would pull back, too. He knew the signals without watching for them, for he’d been alert to his mother’s every day of his life as a child.

  Very little dampened his happiness now. Especially not the fog, which could begin anywhere just north of Redwood City. He felt as if he was on the inside. Of something big. He was making promises to himself by the drove. One was to re-create himself into someone she would always want to know. He interviewed at an art supply store, a gym, and the bar association (mail room). He cleaned his nails more. He got a haircut and was doing chin-ups and push-ups, and had even taken up fooling around with Tim’s power tools, with which he was hoping to turn a pile of scraps into a rustic drafting table she could make use of, for becoming indispensable to Carolyn was at the forefront of his plans.

  “Want to hear something endearing about the great general and two-term president Ulysses S. Grant?” Mac asked her one day.

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant, but it embarrassed him so much, the thought of having his initials put on his trunk, that when he went off to West Point, he changed his name.”

  “HUG?”

  “He was a very modest guy. He always had to change his clothes in his tent.”

  “I can understand this very well—my middle name torments me.”

  “What’s your middle name?”

  “I’ve never told anyone before.”

  “How bad can it be?”

  “You won’t laugh?”

  “I can’t promise.”

  “Gee, this is a milestone—it’s Ophelia.”

  “Carolyn Ophelia Ware—COW?”

  “Moo.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “We’ll never speak of it again. What’s your father’s middle name?”

  “Owen.”

  Mac said, “Same initials—that’s mean. He knew!”

  She said, “That’s him. He knows but does it anyway.”

  “What’s Molly’s middle name?”

  “Doesn’t have one,” she said briskly

  Her parents would be back tomorrow. On that last foggy evening, Carolyn stood by the window; he saw her silhouette in the fading light, like a ghost. To snap out of it, he did a push-up on the floor. He did some more. Carolyn? She joined him. A bowl of scented leaves and crumbled flowers by the bed made everything smell nice. And her statuettes, rabbits and geese and bears, gathered around the window to watch. When they made love, they forgot the hard floor.

  The dream he had that night was harrowing: he was standing on a dark riverbank, searching the water for his mother, who could not swim. All at once she came on the current, bobbing and rotating like a log. Quite dead. He called out to her anyway, and woke rigid as a board in Carolyn’s bed.

  It was typically chilly one afternoon when they met on dating terms again—the clouds and the waves were high. They had decided to take a walk on the beach where Golden Gate Park ends; she wore a red beret pulled over her ears against the wind. Around her neck were her pearls. Always. On the sidewalk by the sand, they came upon an improvised arcade of old mechanical games of the type that used to reside under the Cliff House. In a spangling circus jacket and with a gray, unshaven face, the proprietor had run a power cord from his van, parked nearby, to the machines and now sat slumped on the seawall. Mac would have walked on by, but Carolyn lingered and said, “Oh, Mac, look at this one! It’s from Dante.”

  Mac gazed with her into a bell jar. It contained a turn-of-the-century Love Meter and had a slate jutting out from beneath it on which the hands of a man and woman were to be placed. Inside the glass was a delicate garden filled with cracked trees and fruits. A porcelain woman and a waxen man sat on the tawdry grass, clasping a book together, all the while gazing into each other’s eyes. In gold script on the glass were the names Paolo and Francesca.

  “Have you read the Inferno?” she asked.

  Another lesson in medieval literature. “No,” said Mac, feeling paltry and uneducated. “Should I?”

  “Yes. This is from Canto V. Dante’s going through Hell with his teacher, Virgil, and they’re in the second circle—they meet Paolo and Francesca, who tell them about how they fell in love and are doomed to be together forever just for wanting to be together.

  Which is kind of a sad metaphor for marriage, if you think about it. See that book?” When he nodded, she said, “The book was their excuse. They pretended to read it when all they really wanted was to jump each other. Know what it’s called?”

  “No again,” said Mac.

  “It’s a Galeotto!” she said, transported to some special delight in her knowledge. “The name appears in Canto V. It’s a very famous name. In French it’s Gallehault, which has come to have its own meaning—kind of a panderer, or go-between. See, Paolo and Francesca are reading about Lancelot, who fell in love with Arthur’s Guinevere. Gallehault, or Galahad, was the character who encouraged Guinevere to fall in love unsuitably, so the book is ‘a Gallehault indeed,’ because it also works for Paolo and Francesca as a go-between.”

  He couldn’t help noticing how much of a charge these specifics carried for her. “Neato.”

  “The whole thing goes on,” she said. “It was such an interior part of Boccaccio’s connection to Dante, he gave the Decameron an alternate name, which was ‘Prince Galeotto.’ ”

  “Is that so.”

  She said, “Do you like hearing about this, or is it boring?”

  He flashed on something he’d spotted in the crawl space inside the closet that time—hadn’t he seen an old, leathery copy of the Divine Comedy ripped to shreds? “How come you’re so into this stuff? I thought Galeotto was your father’s obsession, not yours.”

  She appeared to blush. “No— I mean, he was a charismatic person. It’s true, I had a girlish fascination with him—for all the same reasons my father did.”

  “A go-between,” Mac said quietly. “Kind of like swallowing the pen all over again.”

  “You’re right. It was about connecting with my father, in the long run.”

  He was about to say “What else did you swallow?” but stopped himself. Just as she was ready to put the quarters into the machine, he said, “Let’s not do it.”

  “How come?”

  “It might say something cryptic that’ll freak us out and change the course of everything natural and decent between us.” He was joking, but he meant it. The machine suddenly seemed evil. Panderers, go-betweens, go to hell.

  “It’s just a game,” she said.

  “Not to me.”

  The day’s silvery light flickered on the breaks in the waves. “Okay, never mind.” The coins rang as she dropped them back in her bag, and she pulled on his arm, bringing him up the hill like an irritable child to the next amusement. There they found the home of the camera obscura. Before he knew it she had paid their admission to a hunched man in the glass booth and entered, past a display of holograms, which followed their progress into the dark chamber. Mac couldn’t tell how many other people were inside waiting for the demonstration, but he smelled warm breath and felt the heat of bodies. From one corner of the room, girls giggled and hissed like little geysers; from his right came some heavy wheezing. Across the darkness, a small child asked his mother if “it” was happening yet. Inexplicably, the child began to cry. And then the voice of the barker crackled from a public-address system on high.

  Mac listened at first. The camera obscura is a glass lens so deep and so cut that it pulls in—as a periscope does with mirrors—the panorama above the viewer. But unlike a periscope, this thing actually projects the image onto a convex screen. A living movie. They were told to imagine the wonder of this in the fifteenth century, when da Vinci designed it. This was the kind of presentation he normally enjoyed. But he felt the sudden, intense presence of uncharted depths in Carolyn’s life, and uneasiness got hold of him. And she had dropped his arm. All at once, the light poured into the dish at the center of the room, where they could see a wide a
rc of sea and gulls and waves foaming and crashing, and small human figures climbing the rocks.

  He looked through the faces hovering over the dish—no sign of her. Had she left him? He lost his breath, began moving along the wall toward the promise of an exit sign. The room was packed; he thought the ticket taker had malevolently jammed them in beyond the limit. “Excuse me, pardon me.” He accidentally pushed someone. “I need to get out.” But then Carolyn was beside him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders.

  “Too stuffy?” she whispered.

  Like some kind of underworld queen, she managed to glide easily through the throng, pulling him toward the bright image of the world up above. All the puny people, doing puny little things. They looked like game board pieces—frail, and ready to be knocked on their sides. He held on to Carolyn, held on tight. He didn’t want to spend his life guarding himself and mistrusting people; he’d wasted enough time already at that. “Amazing,” he agreed. “Absolutely . . . amazing.” The lens now swept the exact spot where they had been standing only minutes before, and he was sure he saw, as if by tape delay, the two of them, holding hands.

  “Look, isn’t that us?” he said.

  Us?The precious word fell from his lips like ripe fruit, sure to rot on the spot where it fell.

  6

  “Hey, babe, I’m real now.” Mac was washing his car out in the front yard in Redwood City, a universally approved activity. Neighbors he’d never seen before were coming out and waving at him. You're not the malevolent pervert we were thinking. Welcome to the neighborhood! “I got a job.”