“No, you’re just short,” said Medders. “I ought to know, I’m shorter. That’s why you never flaunt me.”
“You’re going to scare him away,” Ware said. “This is the rude room.”
“I’ll control myself,” Medders said blandly, and lifted his glass. “Here’s to Galeotto House. Long may it prosper. Long may it never take a risk on my work.”
“Is Carolyn in love?” Marci interrupted. “I think she is. I think she must be!”
“That’s what they’re saying,” said Groom. “Everywhere she goes.”
“Tell us about him!” Marci said.
“Oh, come on,” Carolyn said. “You’re going to make him sick!”
“Here,” Ware said dryly, passing on an empty glass. “Be sick in here and keep it for your scrapbook.”
“Did you hear that?” Marci said. “You said ‘crap book’ instead of ‘scrapbook.’ ”
“For those who believe doomed attachments are all that count,” Ware said.
“My God, anything helps!” Marci exclaimed. “How’s Bill, anyway?” When no one answered, she said, “Carolyn?” She began to laugh. “You’ve given up riding his leg and calling him Daddy, haven’t you? I don’t think MacGregor would understand.”
“Marci, you’re a disgusting drunk,” Carolyn said, though Mac felt his hair stand on end.
“I was never sure how healthy that was, Charles,” continued Marci.
“Vigilance,” Medders roared. “Keep her on the straight and narrow!”
Ware interrupted. “Tell us, Carolyn, is it true, have you found happiness the old-fashioned way?”
Everyone turned and awaited her reply. Mac wanted to hear more about Galeotto. Just then Craig stuck his head into the warren. “It’s time for the toasts, sir,” he said. “They’re demanding you!”
“Do they always get what they want?” Ware shouted. “Yes, I guess they do!”
“Nice show,” Marci said.
“Bravo,” said Medders.
Ware was first out. Passing Mac on his way, he gave him a thump on the back that could have passed for a blow. Mac stumbled.
Marci came next and said, “I think you showed up just in time.” And Carolyn said, “Get a move on, Marci.” After the room had cleared, she went to the table and filled her glass again, knocked it back in a few seconds flat.
“Why did we come in here?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, I kind of hate these people. They’re blithering idiots! Don’t pay any attention to them. Dad used to have a literary group that would meet—every week or two—at our place. I’d sit in. Marci and John were part of it. I’d practice all week in my room, memorizing verse or prose to recite, like it was my big break or something. For people like them! How stupid of me.”
“Show me,” Mac said.
“You mean, what I did?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said. “Something like this.” Without further ado, she kicked off a shoe the way her mother had in the kitchen a while back and climbed up on the table. She paced a moment, getting into character. She punted an empty bottle off the table, and it flew against the wall. The neck broke off.
“Come, you spirits, unsex me here!
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse!
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’”
“Jesus,” Mac said, chilled by her murderous intensity. There was something damned authentic about it. He had the immediate thought they should make love on the table. When she climbed down, his hand slid into her sweater.
“You’re quite an actress.”
“A great one,” she said, collapsing into a chair.
“So what’s the story with you and Bill Galeotto—was that a joke?”
“Of course it’s a joke.” She dropped her head on the slab. “A huge joke, a joke the size of the world. Fill me another glass.”
He didn’t mind having more himself. The wall was littered with memorabilia, with clippings and photos and awards, theater tickets, and other tokens of obscure significance, tacked one over the other into a collage the size of a highway billboard. Studying one upper corner of it, he noticed a fading print of Carolyn leaning against a tree, her lovely brown hair as long as a yardstick. The photograph was wedged between postcards and book reviews and profiles of William Galeotto, who in his younger years stood well over six feet, head high like an emperor’s. He had favored tailored Italian shirts with large cuff links, and had worn an enormous ring. His black hair had been thick and unruly.
“Let’s go listen to the toasts,” Mac said.
“Blah blah blah,” she said from the table.
“Herrre’s to thirrrrrty years of fine publishing!” he slurred, lifting his glass. A portrait of Galeotto and the woman Mac assumed was Chloe caught his eye. Chloe had been, not surprisingly, a beauty. A black-and-white shot of Galeotto and Charles Ware, buddy-buddy, in front of what might have been a Moroccan marketplace. Chickens in the road. Galeotto and Ware balancing on a train trestle who knew where. A valuable dust jacket from the first edition of Tangier.
Mac drew up closer to examine a shot of a younger Ware family standing on a beach somewhere. Isabel Porter was there. Charles Ware posed in the foreground. Carolyn, her breasts larger then than now, wore a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt attached to it, barely disguising a tubbiness he’d never ascribed to her. Adela showed up a knockout figure in a bikini. Isabel held up the dark-haired baby girl.
Then his eyes drifted to another dated print. He inched closer to it, made a noise like a laugh, then felt as if the room had detonated in his face.
“Mom” was what he said.
8
Brittle and cracked, the black-and-white surface flaking in tiny shards, the snapshot was mostly of Galeotto, who sat posed before a stone wall. But Mac’s mother was right behind him. She had her arms around his neck, and Mac could see her hair and her eyes peeking out over the top of Galeotto’s head. He could see the striped scarf around her neck, and that her hair poured over the scarf and was caught in it, bulging out in bumps. Just like her. She always looked a little bedraggled.
“Carolyn, come here,” he said. He gently peeled the photo off the corkboard. The tape on its back side was yellow and powdery. Nothing written on it.
“Why’d you take it down?” she said, lifting it off his hand.
“See this woman?” His heart was galloping against his ribs.
“Barely.”
“There’s a woman here.” Just plain unbelievable, what he was about to say. “It’s my mom.”
Carolyn did something then that he would turn over in his mind for a long time to come. As if on guard lest she say the wrong thing, she cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Are you sure about that?” she said with some pique.
“Am I sure?”
“You can’t see much.”
“I see enough. There’s no doubt.”
“Well, great, but she may not have known him.”
He looked into Carolyn’s face. “Are you kidding?” He took the print back from her.
“It’s just, they went through a lot of people. They were basically on a mission to meet everyone on earth.”
“They?”
“Dad and Bill.”
“They weren’t Siamese fucking twins, were they? What’s the matter, are you jealous she knew Galeotto?”
“Hardly.”
“You said you had a crush on him.”
“I told you it was a vehicle—to my father’s earthly love.”
“Okay, whatever. I still want to talk to him, see what he says.
”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said.
“Why the hell not?”
“He doesn’t see anybody.”
True, Galeotto wasn’t attending his own party. “Not even your father?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“He just doesn’t, okay?”
“What’s wrong with the guy, anyway?”
“He’s sick, I told you! Diabetic.”
Mac was annoyed that she was annoyed. “That’s it? Lots of people are diabetic.”
“He’s diabetic and eccentric!” she said.
Mac felt that lots of people were probably diabetic and eccentric yet still saw visitors. “Okay. What should I do? Call him?”
“Definitely not.”
“Write him a letter?”
“Do what you must.” Carolyn shrugged.
“You’ll give me the address?”
“Write it, I’ll mail it for you.”
“Wait a minute, how come you’re the gatekeeper?”
“It’s unlisted. God, it’s not my fault!”
“It’s your fault you’re not giving me special privileges.”
And he didn’t want to dredge up his hateful sob story for nothing, but maybe this was the time. Maybe she didn’t understand, never had.
“Carolyn. Come on. This is a huge moment for me.” He began to itch, and sweat had sprouted all over his head, and his hair felt damp, and his throat felt dry, and his eyes were raw and stinging. He caught his voice before it cracked. “You know, I found the file they had on her case, which took weeks because, believe me, the red tape in France is thicker than blood. From the State Department I had the name of the lieutenant who handled it, so I track him down, he agrees to meet with me in this little room, he looks in the skimpy file, and you know what the jerk says? Something about how this was the fate of une teile personne—someone like her. That’s the response I got looking for my dead mother. I’m going to take this, if it’s okay,” he said.
“What were you hoping for?” Carolyn asked, glaring at him.
“Just—whatever they had. I mean, he’d interviewed a few people on a party boat,” Mac said quietly. “The last people who saw her alive were a bunch of coldhearted strangers.”
She was polite enough not to speak for a moment, but then she said: “I’m sure this is another dead end, and I’m only trying to warn you, that’s all. Now I’m going home.”
“Now? No dinner, nothing, that’s it?”
“I drank too much,” she said, adding, “and it’s out of your way. You can just go from here to the freeway.”
“What, are you mad about this?”
“No, I’m just— I want to go home.”
He fought to contain his irritation as they emerged from the back office and returned to the thick of the party. Moving through the crowd, they ran into Daniel LaPlante. He was holding a flat parcel. He grabbed Carolyn’s arm and implored her with haunted eyes.
“Tom has been completely ignored; I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. Could you give this to your father?”
Carolyn laughed and said, “Oh, don’t give it to me! The Controller is over there.”
“The Controller?”
“That’s right, he’s out there!”
Mac looked around the room for Adela Ware; he thought she might shed light on the photo. But he didn’t see her.
“I’m going to throw up soon,” Carolyn said.
“Here, sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down. Sitting down’s the last thing I want to do.”
“Okay, Carolyn, then I’ll say good night.” And with that, he summoned the elevator, and she moved out of his sight. If she’d been callous about his discovery, perhaps it was because she didn’t respect his search for someone who had abandoned him. Perhaps Carolyn was his greatest advocate yet! But after he joined the scrimmage on the streets, tasted the garlic and sewage in the air, something big was stirring in him, some long-forgotten sadness, and all at once a poignant image crossed his mind. He saw a pretty girl up on a table telling some jaded, mauling group a story for her life. It was in Boston: the girl wasn’t Carolyn but his mother. How easily they seemed to come together in his mind right then; he quickly put the strange, sad comparison to rest.
When he arrived home that evening, his cousin was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal in her russet-colored pumps.
“You just get home?”
“Staff development meeting.”
“I’m glad you’re up. Look.” He produced the little miracle.
“It’s—” She peered closer. “That’s Cecille back there, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
She looked at Mac with wonder. “Because she always wore her hair straight! Mom used curlers. Where’d you find it?”
He told her the whole story. And she said, “It’s amazing. I have to call Mom and tell her.”
“The guy may not remember her,” he said, echoing Carolyn. He was trying to keep his hopes in check. “I’m going to write him and see what he says.”
“So she was getting letters from Charles Ware, but here she’s with his best friend? What do you make of it?”
“Enough to keep me busy.”
“How’s everything going with Carolyn?”
“She’s moody and irrational—I can’t get enough of her.”
“Melinda Kobayashi likes you.”
“As a boy or as a man?”
“Isn’t the boy within the man?”
Mac pictured a collapsing telescope, each segment of life disappearing inside the next. “The squalling infant’s in the man, that’s for certain.”
Fran was gazing down at the picture again. “Look how young she is here. It must be right after she ran away from home, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. And I’m thinking this is France. Look at the wall.”
“Mac, this guy looks an awful lot like you.”
“No—you think so?”
“Look at the brow, look at the jawline.”
“This guy’s really well known, he’s Ware’s best friend, he’s practically—”
“Dad?” Fran said, gritting her teeth.
“We’re getting carried away,” Mac said. “Forget it.”
He retreated to his room and looked at the picture and then in the mirror at himself. Then he pawed again through the box of the things Helen had given him. He pulled from it this time a little drawing he’d done as a kid—when and where he could not remember. A vast willow weeping over a stunted house. In his own thick and childish scrawl at the bottom, it said: I LOVE TO LIVE IN SUMMER!
To love to live in summer—that was the height. To be a child again in summer, to truly be alive in summer. That was something to love, all right.
Once, at a yard sale in Medford, Mac’s mother had spotted a tribal kilim spread out upon the grass, on sale, with various items also up for grabs scattered haphazardly on its surface. So excited was she by the carpet, into which had been woven the crude figures of birds and goats, and best, bearing a price tag of twenty-five dollars, that she single-handedly pulled the thing out from under everything on top of it, a feat of uniquely focused strength.
“Hey, lady, whatcha doing?” the man conducting the sale yelled.
“Buying your rug,” she said.
“You just made a disaster area outta my yard sale!” the man barked. Cups, saucers, and kitchenware, and all kinds of junk rolled into the ragged summer weeds. She gathered up the rug and hauled it to their car like a leopard with its kill, then carried on about it for weeks. She checked a book out of the library to identify it. She proudly showed it to everyone who came by. She washed it on the hot sidewalk with nothing more than a hose, had seen rugs cleaned this way on her travels, before he was born.
Mac carried on the tradition. No matter where he was, he always noticed the rugs. He felt attracted to carpets in a way he wasn’t attracted to any other material thing. Along with the box, Helen had recently g
iven him the rug, and he was considering bestowing it on Carolyn. It was rolled, standing on end in the corner of his room, sagging and leaning like a midget at a bus stop.
He’d been poring all night through the pages of Tangier, examining the parts about William Galeotto. The midget image was a steal from the final chapter. Jim Bright (Ware) puts Nick Macchiato (Galeotto) on a bus in Chicago bound for California and has a skewed chat with a suicidal little person as the great Macchiato disappears into the sunset. Macchiato is hope, possibility, life; the dwarf, quite unfairly, stands for the reduced options Jim Bright feels he is left behind with.
William Galeotto as Nick Macchiato was the hero of this cult favorite; it could be said that Ware’s character didn’t exist without Galeotto’s. It could be said that Jim Bright was a complete cipher. In criticism, it was said. (The opposite of what Ware had pronounced to the sycophants.) This new edition had a modish cover; and it included a lengthy introduction by P. G. Blackman on precisely that subject. The novel “glorifies the narcotic effect of one young man on another,” Blackman said. But Blackman pointed out that Bright, too, had a charming façade, an allure. “Bright’s education and moneyed refinement empower him; Bright alone enables the never obviously acquisitive Macchiato to indulge in his fabulous desires and dreams.”
Mac was agitated, his mind crawling with ideas. He was departing from the track he was on with Carolyn and it would feel like a betrayal. It was like clubbing your guide in the catacombs and charging off into darkened, untraveled, possibly even dangerous passages alone. It was a betrayal because Carolyn had allowed him in in the first place.
But it was his mother, after all, who had given him his first copy of Tangier. Not stolen from a library, or picked up for a quarter at a yard sale. She’d bought him a brand-new copy, before he could even read.
“Someday, maybe, you’ll understand.”
Oh, the things he’d endured, on account of her! That time in the bathroom, how old was he? It still caused him discomfort, remembering it. He had needed to take a leak while she was in the shower, and he couldn’t wait. “Mom, can I come in?” The tub had a thick old shower curtain, so mottled with mildew it looked like a street map. “Yes, come in,” came her siren call.
MacGregor Tells the World Page 12