MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  Ware examined his fingernails. “After all that trouble, what a letdown.”

  Freddie looked to Ware for his reaction. “Get out! It’s true?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Ware said.

  Mac said, “But you knew all along, right? From the first time I showed you the envelopes.”

  Ware shrugged and took a swill from his wineglass. “I knew the first moment I saw you. Don’t underestimate me! But I don’t know what you hope to gain from it.”

  “I don’t hope anything, you old pike.”

  “Be nice,” said Freddie. “Charles has been through the wringer with that man. He’s done more for Bill Galeotto than anyone. Subsidizing the press for years, providing him care. You should be very grateful.”

  Mac looked at his watch. “Yeah, I guess. Thanks a lot. But he told me it was his money you were sending us, not charity.”

  “Fate is very strange,” said Ware. “Did he bother to tell you anything about your mother? Like how she died? I think that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Mac was aware of a growing tightness in his chest. “What do you know about it?”

  “Surely you understand the havoc she wreaked and you must resent it, too. Look at what she did to you,” Ware said.

  “Tell me what you know about my mother’s death!”

  “I know that she was better at killing herself than making a nice life for her child. Bill was willing to do that, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Talk to him about it.”

  “You didn’t want me to meet him,” Mac said. “You like having him isolated and alone!”

  “Why, MacGregor? Tell me why.”

  “How would I know, you pretentious nitpicker!” Yet he could see the crazy logic all of a sudden. “Because if the world knew what he’d become—”

  “I’m on the verge of suggesting we leave,” said Ware.

  “You built him up with your book and your money and felt like you owned the guy. Then he tried to cut loose and you couldn’t deal with it! You felt you were nothing without him—you were terrified that your image and everything you’d based on it would collapse and go under for all time.”

  Mac stopped, breathless and triumphant. He looked back and forth from Ware to Freddie to Ware. But Ware looked unfazed. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke, the voice he produced was low and gravelly, like a growl. “In art we go to extremes,” Ware began. “In art we take all our training and socializing and throw it higgledy-piggledy into the thresher. The thresher? Our subconscious selves, our whole selves. And we sometimes come out with grotesque forms, men with pigs’ heads and goats’ feet and the tails of monkeys. Art is monstrous. Art isn’t tasteful. Art isn’t for decorating walls or filling the parlor with birdsong. Is a book to line a bookshelf, or is a book to haul you up on the hook like the pitiful lowing beasts in the stockyards before their viscera are sliced out? Art isn’t a parlor game. Jim Bright isn’t me with a blindfold, pinning the tail on the donkey. Jim Bright is me with a scythe. Jim Bright loves Nick Macchiato not because I was friends with Bill Galeotto but because in all of history and life there are men who have loved other men. There are men with power and men who are drawn to that power, and that’s the way it’s always been. In art we make experimental selves, selves that do things we never would; in art the newborn selves laugh like hyenas and prance wild around the fire! And we live more by watching them, and grabbing just a little spark of their life. That is art. My life is nothing next to it.”

  “Speech, speech!” Mac said, banging his glass with his spoon. “That’s a joke, since you just made a speech. No, seriously. Nice use of rhetorical devices. Anaphora and antithesis especially. But that last image, with the hyena, was confusing. I’d have suggested demons or maybe Satan’s minions.”

  “You would have, would you?”

  “I still think you’re holding on,” Mac said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Momentarily, the tall, rangy figure of Glen and the stark, blanched face of Maria appeared with the maître d’. They made it! Mac saw that they had dressed up to come to the city. Glen was wearing a red-checkered shirt, which, like his jeans, was crisply pressed. He’d even combed his hair back with water. Maria wore an immaculate orange jumpsuit that looked fresh from a highway-worker supply cabinet.

  “Welcome,” Mac said, gesturing to them.

  Maria toted an enormous bag.

  “We never met, but we hear you the man,” said Glen. “Thanks for taking the time.”

  “And you are . . . ?” said Ware.

  “I’m Glen, she’s Maria.”

  “You hired them to take care of Bill Galeotto and the property— your property—in Bolinas,” Mac said. “They have some concerns. Glen, tell him about your concerns.”

  Ware stood to go. Mac grabbed Ware by the wrist, which triggered Freddie to grab Mac, which triggered Mac to push in both directions. “These are the people who keep your old buddy going, make the whole thing possible. They’ve even had to enlist volunteers! They are expecting to have a talk with you.”

  “Thanks for listenin’. We just need a little more allowance to get by,” Glen said. “He eat a lot of meat, and meat’s real expensive these days. He likes the good cuts. Sometimes I pay for it outta my own pockets.”

  “Whatever they need they can have! This wasn’t necessary.”

  Glen said, “Oh, it’s necessary, ‘cause she only got one copy and it’s too expensive send it in the mail.”

  Ware looked terrified. “One copy of—”

  Maria said, “Feely book for neonates.”

  “Neonates,” Ware repeated slowly.

  “Oh yeah,” said Mac, removing the bulky book from Maria’s sack. He placed the handmade feely book on the table in front of

  Charles Ware. Mac was not mocking the feely book by having them bring it. He genuinely thought it was a superb feely book. “Wait, you’re the one we should show it to, since you’re the Controller,” he said to Freddie. “Here.” The feely book was held together with three stainless steel rings and made of carpet squares and cardboard and linoleum. “It’s not like any feely book on the market.”

  “We don’t have a children’s list,” said Freddie.

  “Not yet,” Mac said.

  “It’s important for neonates to use all five senses,” said Maria. She turned the pages of her book, giving them the pitch. “Here’s bear, dog, lion, cat, and crocodile. We used linoleum for crocodile.”

  “ The crocodile,” Mac reminded her.

  Ware said, “Do newborn infants even have five senses?”

  Glen said, “He says you print Maria’s book, maybe we get some insurance. I need some teeth, and Maria can’t hear too good.”

  Freddie was examining the book, trying to catch Ware’s eye. “We’ll see. I’m afraid this would cost a fortune to produce!”

  Maria said, “No, it’s produced for free. At back of Carpet One scraps are left out.”

  All at once, Mac saw three of the men who had been hanging around the barbecue pit pacing in the lobby. “The guys, they’re here, too?”

  Glen said, “They gave us a ride to town. Volvo shot a valve. Impala’s a real nice car. And it got those hydraulics! Man—”

  “Excuse me a minute. Nobody move.” Mac left Glen telling Ware about the pleasures to be had from a good set of hydraulics and leapt up from the table and spoke to the maître d’ and then to the men. They shrugged and followed him back to the table, wearing their white T-shirts and black pants. The man on his feet closest to Ware had a gnarly scar down his forearm.

  “These are the guys I was telling you about, who help,” Mac said.

  “I was thinking you might want to treat them all to lunch to thank them, so I’ve taken the liberty of asking for a much larger table.”

  “Frederick?” said Ware.

  “Maybe if this lunch goes well and there are some changes up in Bolinas, I could be persuaded to cancel my meeting with your biogra
phers, at which time I was planning to taint their view of you.” Mac pointed to the contents in his head. “Considerably.”

  “We’re making deals?” cried Ware.

  “I think we can work with those terms,” said Freddie in a decisive and manly fashion.

  “And teeth, and a hearing aid,” Mac said.

  Ware said, “Bloody hell!” But he was looking at the nearest scarred forearm with curiosity.

  “ Wait up,” Glen said, flagging Mac down on the crowded sidewalk a block from the restaurant. “I forgot—the big man give me a message for you.”

  “He did?”

  Glen caught up with him but grabbed his side. “That cook, his sauce too rich. Unh! I got a stitch. Big man tell me to tell you he’s a coward.”

  “Forget it,” Mac said, walking on.

  “No, wait up. He want you to know your mother and him made plans for a ron-day-vu in France after his wife was dead. He said he had big hopes. He said they saw some yelling little French kid in a restaurant, then have a fight over it. “I would do this.” “No, I would do that.” She was mad, she stomped off! You know how a woman is. Maria gets that way sometime. Anyway, big man spent a week looking ‘round Paris, all torn up. Couldn’t find her. He wrote letters where you-all lived, they come back, ‘Return to Center.’ ”

  “Sender.”

  “He decides to hell with her! And later he finds out she is dead, and he is hit hard. Then he finds out you with your aunt, he decides to leave you alone.”

  “He said all that?” Mac asked, slightly perplexed.

  “Wasn’t easy. You know how hard it is for him. He wrote this down,” Glen said, handing him a small note from Galeotto’s pad.

  I’M NOT PERFECT BUT I HOPE I DID THE RIGHT THING. THIS WILL SOUND PRESUMPTUOUS, BUT

  YOUR FATHER

  “I see,” said Mac, cradling the note in his hands. “Thanks, Glen.” He felt the fog alight on his eyes. “Can you give him a message back?”

  “Sure thing, we’re goin’ home to make dinner.”

  “Tell him he was right, my life’s worked out for me. Tell him he did the right thing.”

  “Big man did the right thing,” said Glen. “You got it.”

  Later that afternoon, Mac had a weary laugh sprinkled with tears. Tears because in all this there was no Carolyn anywhere. Carolyn was in New York starting a new life while he was having lunch with her father and guys from the Center, and now driving zigzag through the city, cursing red lights and cement mixers and changing destinations before he reached them; with a weird message from his father in his pocket; with a stomach full of food ordered at Charles Ware’s expense. He berated himself. Why hadn’t he just punched Charles Ware in the soft middle? He always left everything half done. It was time to make a move from Redwood City, he could decide that much. He checked out neighborhoods around the Haight, and made a stop at the bookstore on Clement Street where he’d picked up Tangier, one of those early nights of summer when his heart was fresh and naïve. The girl with the pigtails like little horns was on her shift. She wore a purple choker dotted with ladybugs.

  “Help you find anything?”

  Mac said, “Yeah. A few months ago I bought Charles Ware’s book here, Tangier, and you said to come back and tell you how I liked it.”

  She looked him over. “I know I’m supposed to be cool and pretend I don’t remember, but I do. What did you think?”

  Mac nodded and said, “All right, I’ll tell you.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t like it.”

  She leaned closer. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I thought you were going to give me a dissertation.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, I just think it stinks like rotten eggs. Maybe you should discourage sales.”

  She twisted her tongue. “Could I recommend something else?”

  “That would be great. I need something to get lost in.”

  “In that case.”

  What was he doing? He wasn’t ready to flirt with anyone. But don’t be a fool, buy a book and file this one away for later.

  The Complete Kama Sutra.

  “Are you familiar with it?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s interesting, from a gender issues perspective. Come back and tell me what you think.”

  “Gender issues. Yes. I’ll do that.”

  Ho ho ho. He drove into the Mission, found a place to park for a change, bought a pineapple drink, and wandered on through the neighborhood where Filipo lived, finally reaching the sloping dead end of the road, and, from there, climbed up the rocky path into the open grassland at the top of Bernal Heights. He passed various walkers and dogs, the dry grass thick with the ringing of insects, and at last, when he reached a spot near the top, he turned and sat on a depression in the hill.

  This was what he liked about San Francisco. The way it mounded right in the middle of town and gave you a place to sit in the weeds like this when you felt down. Sure, the marshes had been filled, the slow, trickling rivulets pushed underground, the wild beasts sent into hiding. This was a righteous city here, by God, not a nature preserve. But the force of nature could still be seen and felt everywhere, like if you put an animal in a suit—fur popping out every buttonhole and sleeve.

  By now it was late afternoon, and he saw the heightened buzz of activity all over from his perch. The thickening fog blew in from the west in ghostly sheets up the hill.

  All that he’d been through that day, and the recklessness with which he’d approached Ware, had been motivated by a single piece of paper, burnished with platitudes and vagaries, wadded up now in his pocket. A few days before, he’d received the first piece of personal mail that had come to him at Fran and Tim’s, and when he found it sitting on his bed, he felt a pain in his chest that had still not quite left him.

  Dearest Mac,

  I have stopped over the past days thinking of your attributes as something part of me. Is that human nature? Is love a substitute for God? Kneel before God and stop thinking about that tall, handsome boy.

  But that will be impossible. I’ll think of all we did together the rest of my life, and I don’t deserve to have memories like those.

  Sometimes I’m afraid of what I can become. This is the truth. There is a hole I can easily disappear into and probably soon will. And I’m sure I’m going to be too proud to be old. People aren’t knowable. Even after you’ve given them your heart and soul. I won’t put us through that. You don’t know how much suffering it would take to know.

  —C.

  He stuffed it back down and let the fog tousle his hair.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” a voice asked. He was on a talk show all of a sudden, and the host was Carolyn.

  “Funny you ask,” he replied. The set was shaping up around him, the city below, his audience. “Sometimes I hear my mother speaking to me. Not right in my ear, but sort of distantly, like a wind gathering at the mouth of a canyon. It’s tempting when you lose someone to think they’re still watching over you. Except when you’re jerking off or something like that.”

  The talk show on the hill.

  “Mostly it happens in dreams,” he went on, seeing Carolyn’s face, the intensity of her concentration whenever she listened, as though listening well was her greatest gift to bestow. “I was living in this dive in Boston, near Allston, a couple years ago, where people on the street got mugged all the time, and the place smelled like gas, and I could hear people at night trying to pick my lock— anyway, I went to bed and had a dream my mother was shaking me, trying to wake me up. It was very convincing. I woke up confused, trying to figure out what she was telling me, and then some- thing compelled me to go open my front door, and sure enough, I saw I’d left my keys in the lock.”

  The interview crashed because some deep-seated anguish overtook him.

  MY MOM IS SPECIAL BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME VERY MUCH AND SHE

  TELLS ME STORIES,he’d printed on a plate in first grade.
A Mother’s Day present, obediently brought home in tissue paper they painted in class with sponges. He had the plate now in the box from Helen, and he wondered if he might go home and smash his wasted proclamation to smithereens.

  He could see it before him, in his wet gaze at the city below, the boat full of men and women drinking under the night sky as it left the quay along the Seine; and this is where Cecille drank herself smashed that last night of her life, her toes pinched in her shoes, her tongue rubbing against the back of her teeth because of her having neglected a certain medication, and her feelings about herself dark as the moving water. A stranger on the boat staring at her had offered to take her back to his hotel. He looked slightly cruel. She could outdo him on that count, knew how to turn the tables and frighten a man and give him a night to remember as long as he lived. Right, Mom? Mac had seen these men leaving the house, never to return.

  She imbibed some more. She’d come on this trip to try to make a match with her son’s father, William Galeotto, but she couldn’t prevent herself from quarreling with him. She had an insurmountable flaw. Tired of the stranger’s gaze, she lurched to the back and sat like a schoolgirl, dangling her feet. She watched the wake and hoped for some relief from her constant anger and confusion, and the boat jolted and she slipped. The water received her, heavy and cold.

  She was struck with the horror of her predicament and flailed. She tried to swim after the boat, but her stroke was as slurred as her cry. A slimy rope moved between her legs, catching her. I must not die. I must not die! Because. Because. Because. She cried out to the people she had been sharing the night with, but not one face turned her way. What am I doing? What have I done to my son? she thought, preserving her breath for only a brief moment before the flood rushed her throat and left her life undone.

  The colossus of the Sutro Tower was winking at him through the fog pouring over Twin Peaks, and for all his rebuilding he’d never, ever have someone who’d love him as a mother could, who’d treat him with the special warmth he’d once known. Never. Carolyn proffered most of her kindnesses to her sister. It wasn’t her job for him. That was sicko and weenie time, looking for a mother in your girlfriend. That was land of the fools. Yet it wasn’t a job for a sister, either, now, was it? And all at once, without being told, he could see what he’d been butting up against all along.