“Bummer.”
“It’s more than a bummer. I’m like a hose! I have to carry a towel around, or gnawing on an apple helps.”
“Hmm. Well, I have some surprising news. I just met a man who may be my father.”
“Your real one?”
“Almost too real.” And then he told all—almost all. With his free hand, he grasped and shook the steering wheel as he described what he’d seen.
Fran listened, shrieked a few times. “I have to call Mom!”
“No, I want to tell her!”
“Call her now, because I can’t wait. What does it mean, Mac?”
“That my gene pool is highly suspect.”
“What a crazy story!”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“You’re not going to get all buddied up with him now and forget about us, are you?”
“Huh?”
“I’m kidding. Urgh, I’d better go, I need my towel.”
“You get it, then.”
He was experiencing a major rush, having news to report about himself. Didn’t happen too often. On the bridge, he looked ahead to the bank of fog settling on the city like a mitt. The lights of downtown trying to burn through. He lit a cigarette and phoned Aunt Helen in Tres Osos—pleased to hear the range of emotions in her voice, just about parallel to those he’d been having himself.
“Oh, Mac, what a milestone. But he should be shot.”
“He’s already shot, believe me.”
“He knew about you, he did nothing?”
“It’s complicated. It sounds like Mom, or maybe Charles Ware, kept him at bay.”
“Could be,” agreed Helen.
“I still have a lot of questions.”
“I would think so. I’d think you’d have many feelings to sort out.”
“He’s incredibly obese and bedridden,” Mac said. “Plus, he’s bragging about all the chicks he used to do!”
“The past is all that’s left for him.”
“Oh, and get this, he wants me to get him a camper.”
“You mean a truck with a little unit on the back? Those are dreadful. It’s much nicer to camp in a tent.”
“I’m not getting him a camper!” Mac yelled. “He should get me a camper!”
“Mac, just because he’s your biological father doesn’t mean you have to love him.”
“I’m glad to have your permission not to love him.”
“Was this a result of the things in the box?”
“It was. Thanks a lot, Helen.”
“I had no idea.”
“You know what’s the weird part? Carolyn knew him and—” It exhausted him before he’d even started, the idea of explaining his girlfriend’s behavior. “Never mind. I’m on the bridge, and I gotta find five bucks. Say hi to Uncle Richard.”
“I think this will help you in many ways, Mac.”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
Fully into the fog now, he took the turnoff for the Marina instead of continuing down 19th, as if considering a stop at Carolyn’s. Dolt might be his middle name. He pulled over on Lombard next to a hamburger shack and put in a call to her. No answer. Modest motel signs and gas stations glowed down the avenue. He saw ahead another block the liquor store he’d stopped in with Carolyn the night they met. Milk for the girls.
The same man sat upon his stool behind the counter, with his arching brow and look of surprise. I see you are alone again, as a result of the deep rift in your soul, which makes you unbearable to others dealing with deep rifts in their own souls. I am kept afloat by the likes of you!
“Pack of Camels.” He thought maybe he would quit soon. He chucked his beer on the counter. “You knew it all along, didn’t you?”
“I can usually tell,” said the man, ringing him up.
And then. And then. In his car there were various loops around the Marina and up and down the hills overlooking the bay, and at last, with reason overruled, there came a trip into her neighborhood, a parking job across the street, and a wait in a dark car with cigarettes and beer. And finally her car pulling up and the garage door rising, Molly running ahead to the house and providing him with his moment
to move in on her in the dark. She was pulling things from the backseat, and he didn’t want to frighten her.
“Carolyn, heads up.”
She had changed from her riding clothes into a sweater and skirt, and when she pulled her head out of the car he saw her hair was washed and damp: this revealed a level of comfort with Galeotto’s facilities that deepened his unease.
“Mac.”
“You can’t be too surprised to see me.”
She shrugged, but her mouth curled into the half-moon of a smile.
“He’s a self-centered person with nothing to give, so I feel sorry for you,” she said then, closing the car door with a kick.
“Did you know, all along?”
“I should have. No wonder—” She let out a scornful huff, then bit down on her lip. “I realize how much you look like him.”
“Great,” he muttered, envisioning the blimp. “No wonder what?”
Carolyn didn’t answer right away. She had a far-off look in her eyes, as if playing a tape in her mind of all that had happened between them and determining its worth. “Oh, that I felt like I knew you,” she said at last.
Mac was dumbfounded by the implication. “You know me now” was his strangled reply. “Why couldn’t you tell me you and Molly go up there?”
“It’s depressing, obviously,” she said, trying to move past him.
“Yes, it is. But still!”
“He has nothing to offer you, or anyone in the world,” Carolyn went on, her voice wobbling slightly. “And I wanted you to myself. Was that wrong?”
He was still blocking her way, and he took the bags from her arms and dropped them on the ground, and held her hands.
“It’s okay, Carolyn, we should be glad—we wouldn’t have met without him.”
“It’s all very unlucky,” she said.
“It’s the best luck I’ve ever had,” he replied.
So there came, in place of further accusations and demands, an outpouring expressed in kisses and embraces and “Come with me” and “No, I can’t” and “We need to talk” and “Not right now” and “Come with me” and “No, no, no,” but then she yielded, suddenly, as if planning to all along, as if she saw a way to make things right, even if only for the night, into his car without even a glance back at the house, down the hill to a motel off Lombard, where he went in and booked a room with his old wallet, his way, and in the room with the cheap flowered bedspread and the thin blankets and the stained rug there was an attempt between them to connect forever in a new way, where talk would be like saying uncle, so neither of them said a thing, and he would nail her down and make her his own and she was there for that, which meant there was a chance, for thus nailed, she wouldn’t fall off, the raft, the boat, the love, it could happen, it could really happen, it could be so.
Just don’t. Please. Don’t fall off.
14
“Ihope they’re not garbled,” Adela Ware was saying to Mac on a warm afternoon in September. Not a wisp of fog to be seen in the city, and not a cloud in the sky, nor an angel anywhere wishing him well. Her voice sounded different that day, almost bashful. “No hurry, exactly.”
Coming to pick up Adela’s tapes, he thought it showed dogged determination that she had made such recordings and that it was strange she wanted to give them over to him. But making sense of the Ware family had eluded him all along. When he pulled up in front of the big house, he could hardly make the walk to the door, and wasn’t sure he could go through with this new gambit of his. But before he had the chance to escape, she spotted him from one of the front windows and met him on the curb with her clattering box of memories.
“I’ll see how it goes,” Mac said. “Is your husband here today?”
“I thought you were here to see me.”
“I am. Just a
sking.”
“Friday’s when he usually drops in at the press, Mac.”
“And Carolyn. I guess she made it to New York okay.”
“The house is terribly empty. Isabel’s changed my pills. She says I’ll have to get busy.”
“Learn Inuit or something.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m kidding. I’ll be in touch, Mrs. Ware.”
“Adela, Mac.”
“Adela.”
“Will you let me know if it’s any good?”
“Sure, of course.”
He took the tapes home and began to listen to them, for bringing meaning to Carolyn’s life was now his work, and he had to devote many hours to it. Next came a marathon of transcription, setting up the table in his room and using some old equipment Fran found for him in a back room at the library. He wore clunky, outdated earphones as big as donuts, and ran the machine with a foot pedal, typing away onto Fran’s laptop, filling ashtrays and piling up soda cans hour after hour and day after day. It was a sure recipe for madness.
The tapes were depressing and chilling in the picture they painted of the poor woman, who, in recounting her life story, seemed almost indifferent to all its ruined pieces.
“Their birthdays were only eight days apart,” Adela said of Charles and Bill. “So who would have the party? Chloe and I used to throw it for them together. Until one year, when they fought over the cake! Brawling over a cake on the table, and Charles cried like a child, and Bill threw a lamp at the wall. …” Mac felt he heard very little that was unrelated to this theme.
Finally, much of the tape was taken up with monologues from various dramatic works, and Mac notated these but didn’t transcribe them. He’d expected a lot more, and was learning about Carolyn if only by her omission from most of the babble of her mother’s life.
Rare mentions of her would cause him to shake. Had he been searching for news of Molly, he would have found not a shred.
He was making coffee one morning in the midst of it; Fran stood cleaning purple figs from the backyard tree to take in a basket to work.
“You used to sing that when you came to live with us, and we thought it was sad,” she remarked.
“What?”
“What you were just singing.”
“What was I singing?” He didn’t know he was singing.
“ ‘There’s a place in France where the alligators dance, and the dance they do costs a dollar ninety-two!’ ” Fran vocalized.
“Oh, yeah, that’s been droning in my head lately. Why was it sad?”
“You know how Mom analyzes everything. She said it seemed like a subliminal lament. The real one goes something like ‘There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,’ but we were thinking you changed the words to nix the negative associations.”
“Interesting.”
The brain was a crazy, mysterious blob, the way it sang to you to deliver a message, or threw together a dream better than a big-budget film.
“Have you heard from Carolyn yet?” she asked.
“No.”
“Isn’t she supposed to call you?”
“We didn’t make a plan.”
“Her sister must be in school now, it’s late September.”
“I know what day it is.”
“Is she staying out there or what?”
“Fran, drop it.”
“Have you tried calling?”
“I’ve left a few messages, but she’s busy.”
“Mac! This is horrible, it reminds me of—”
“Of what?”
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I was going to say it reminds me of when you were waiting for your mother, but that seemed hurtful.”
“This conversation is hurting me.”
“You’ve never taken to advice, have you?”
“Giving advice can be a vice,” Mac said.
Two weeks later, completely fried by the transcription ordeal, he parked in a garage next to the police department in North Beach. They had once parked there together, that’s all, but the garage would ever after bite him on the ankle when he passed it. The hounds of memory would yelp from every street corner, from every table in every restaurant, from every patch of grass in the park that had needled their backs under the fogbound sky.
This day he jostled his way through the crowds to the office on Jackson; on the wall by the elevator, the name Galeotto House had new appeal. For after all, he could adopt the name, couldn’t he? MacGregor Galeotto—man of action. Well, it didn’t suit him. But what it could buy! No one seemed to know the man was splayed out like a beached whale in a garbage dump. He took the elevator ride and wandered into the offices and recognized the golden-haired receptionist as the one he’d submitted his beefed-up résumé to a year back. Mac Galeotto here. Get down on all fours.
“Hi there, I’m looking for Charles Ware.”
“I think he and Mr. Heald went out to lunch. Were you supposed to meet them?”
“That’s right. At the restaurant.” She was being nice to him without knowing he was Galeotto’s progeny. Ah, nothing like looking around with a little entitlement. Should he insist on a corner office, senior editor to start? She told him where she thought they’d gone, and because he had contacted Glen and Maria and suggested they meet him at the office, he asked the comely employee to refer the odd couple to Mario’s as well. “Appreciate it,” he said. Isn’t it time for a promotion? Let’s see what I can do. . . .
He found the restaurant on Columbus, an old-fashioned, heavily curtained place with flocked wallpaper and career waiters. Charles Ware had a reservation but had not yet arrived. Mac sat at the bar. At a buffet table, an ice statue of Venus stood on the half shell, dripping onto a bed of scattered salmon and cold peas. “As a kid back east I used to make ice sculptures,” he said to a woman sitting there. She wore shiny stockings and had shoes so pointy it seemed impossible any human foot could fit in them. A cassowary foot probably could. “I’d dig the mold outside in the ground, but it was hard to get the details right. And whatever I made had rocks and frozen worms stuck into it.”
She moved to the next stool.
Ah, the refuge of spirits. He gulped.
He thought of something that made him smile.
Once he and his mother were sharing a pizza in an empty diner in Brighton when a guy wandered in, moseyed up to the front, gave the cook his order, and—voilà!—opened his fly and began to piss against the order counter. Mac’s mother flipped. She said she’d seen one too many public urinations. “Cut it out, buddy!” she screamed.
“Oh yeah?” the guy said, wagging himself off.
“You’re a pig!”
“Yeah?” he said.
“Whatsa matter?” the cook said.
“He’s peeing!” Mac’s mother said, pointing at the puddle.
The peeing man came over and pushed his mother, and because she was clumsy, she fell down. “Shut up, lady, or I’ll crap in your face!”
Mac jumped to the rescue. His mother went on this kind of crusade often, but usually he didn’t want any part of it. She was also on a mission to put an end to all nose picking, and whenever they were in a car and she saw someone at it, she’d honk the horn and wave her fist at the culprit. Mac would duck. “Stop it, Mom!” he’d scream. “What’s it to us?” However, having his mother pushed to the ground was a different matter, and though he was only about seven, he ran up to the guy and jumped on his back and sank his teeth through his filthy shirt into his flesh. The man squealed. Mac bit harder. Meanwhile, Mac’s mother was up, punching the guy in the gut while he tried to get Mac off his back.
For the first time in a good while, a memory involving his mother made Mac laugh, and the woman with the pointy shoes glared. “Hey, just be glad I’m not pissing on the counter,” he mumbled. He started giggling to himself with his bourbon on the rocks, then looked up and saw, in the diluted light, Charles Ware and Freddie Heald sitting down for lunch.
Mac watched
them awhile, knocked back another drink. Was this a business lunch? Freddie kept touching Ware’s arm.
Finally Mac gathered his remaining wits and bumbled to their table.
“Gentlemen!”
The two were enmeshed in a quiet discussion when they looked up and saw his approach. Morsels of untouched food laced their plates. “Mr. West,” said Ware. “What brings you here?”
“Hello!” said the collegial Freddie, pulling over another chair.
“Have you met?” said Ware.
“The big party,” Freddie reminded him.
“Ah, the big ordeal,” said Ware. “Yes.”
“Waiter!” called Freddie. “You’ll join us, won’t you? Bring him one of what we’re having.” He lifted a glass of red wine.
Mac was already smashed, because the first thing he spewed at Freddie was “You— So you’re the ex?”
“The ex, the ex?”
“You’ve never heard of the ex?”
“Carolyn’s?” said Freddie.
Maybe the joke was on Mac—he was now the ex.
“I’ve known her forever,” Freddie said.
Ware said, “I take it things have cooled off some.”
“I was delighted she’d met you,” Freddie said. “She’s the greatest, isn’t she? Now that she’s in New York, I’m going to have her work on Naomi Spender’s memoirs. It’ll be fabulous for both of them.”
“By the way, am I interrupting anything?” Mac said.
Ware said, “We do have some business. How can I help you?”
What if he threw a glass of wine into the man’s face, what then?
“All right, let’s start,” Mac said. He took the floor. “It was, um, pretty rude, what you said about my mother, that time on the boat.”
Ware sighed. “Yes, it was. My daughter told me off. My apologies.”
“He said, ‘Your mama’s a whore,’ ” Mac informed Freddie.
“Oh! I see,” said Freddie.
“Kind of wrecked that day for me. Then we could go back to my childhood. I think you should have told your friend Bill to come see me, instead of meddling. Were you afraid he’d get away from you? That he’d get his own life or something horrible like that? See, in the final desperate hours of my recent life, I met Mr. Galeotto,” Mac said. He watched Ware’s face. “And he’s— Well, you already know. My father.”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 21