The beer was warmish and I couldn’t get it down. I was still a little queasy. None of us said much while the skyrockets took off, straight into red and blue bursts, exploding into invisible walls. Robin had her head on my shoulder—I was just the right height for her to lean on when she got like this.
“Let’s catch the rest of it down there, in our spot,” Max said to me and Robin.
“I’d rather not.” It seemed like too much of a trip. “And besides,” I whispered over Robin’s head. “She’s in no condition.”
He put his arm around her and carefully led her to a chair. “Just till the show’s over. Come on,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and take your college friends out for some real food.”
We walked down the wobbly staircase to the beach. Max left his sandals by the wall. Drew and the pixie girl had moved down onto the sand. Iridescent greens like an immense bowl of sequins spilled above us. As we got farther from the house, the party noise was replaced by the sound of the ocean.
Max had that familiar look on his face that said ‘alone at last.’ I could tell he was gearing up for one of my stories, circling my lower back with the palm of his hand as we walked, but I just wasn’t up for it. When it came to memories, I was the sole giver—I scraped up everything in me and never got one tidbit in return.
“You never told me one story about your mother, Max, you know that? Not one.”
“That’s because I’ve only got one and I’ve been saving it. When you’re ready, of course.”
“Make it worth my while.” I had a vision of Robin passed out on the deck and people stepping over her.
“You sure you want to hear it? It’s not much, but it’s my one and only.”
“Bring her to me.”
Max turned away and faced the Atlantic, as if he preferred it to me. Perhaps the expanse of water led to a door, and he wasn’t sure what was on the other side. He stood there, unaware of my presence. It was the only time I remembered being forgotten by Max, and it was an eerie feeling.
He was already talking, and I was afraid I had missed something.
“I remember her head hanging over the sink. I could see her eyes upside down, and she was talking to me as she did it to herself. I was on the edge of the bathtub.”
“Did what?” I interrupted him and took his hands. He had to let go of me and stare out at the ocean before he could continue.
“She worked with a plastic bottle full of a thick, dark purple solution, and she was sticking the spout in her hair, hard, rubbing it in rows, back to front, front to back, and the slimy shit stank like a skunk—she used to say that—all mashed in the roots of her hair, and she kept going until her scalp was completely covered. ‘Max, hand me the powder. Get me the towel. Max, stamp out the cigarette, will ya? Max, get lost.’ I could never figure out what she was doing, in her black underwear and bra with her tits spilling out, her head upside down in the pint-sized sink.”
“I know, Max.” I tried to kiss him on the cheek. “It was just peroxide.”
“Yeah, I know. She was a blonde, all right. Hotter than hot. ‘Touch me and you’ll burn like hell.’ She said that, too.” He was laughing at this point. “And, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. That’s all I remember about my mother—her squinty eyes, upside down, the butt from her Pall Mall burning in the top of a bottle cap. Oh yeah, the most memorable, Kath, I can still see them. The white plastic gloves she wore that made her hands look dead.”
He shut his book. I knew I’d never hear it again. This one story, the only story, was mine now, too.
At least now I could finally see Max as a toddler, with shiny black hair, on the edge of a bathtub with a Matchbox car in his hand, watching his mother.
“I think this is exactly where we were before,” he said as he stood there.
I started to get down on the sand, and he stopped me.
“Wait.” He took his large handkerchief out of his pocket. I began to realize how much like a magician he was, something stuffed in each pocket for the most opportune times. He yanked it through the air, waving it around, draping it into a perfect square and laid it on the sand. “For you.”
I sat on it, pretending to be an old-fashioned lady with a gentleman who has just laid his coat over the mud so she could enjoy the royal fireworks.
We were under the grand finale now. Cannons were being shot off out of order like a pirate ship not too far out in the distance. Handel’s “Overture” had been cranked up from wherever Drew did that sort of thing. Reds and blues were dripping so low in the sky that I imagined warm sulphur washing over us, getting into our mouths.
Max made me lift my butt, and I thought he was going to put his hand under me, but he swiped the handkerchief, stealing back his prop.
The fireworks display was over. There was no difference between the horizon and what was above or below it. White foamy edges of the waves inched closer. Max took the handkerchief and started to wrap my head, turban style, the kind people wear after they’ve had brain surgery.
“Oh, no, please Max, not this. Let’s go back,” I said.
He continued carefully making a roll around my head, as if he hadn’t heard me. He studied me, his hands on each side of my head.
I traced his eyebrows with my fingers. Thin arches that looked drawn on with charcoal pencil on a man I guess I didn’t know after all.
“So,” he said, in the gentlest of Max voices, “Tell me again, about the last surgery, after it spread to the brain and you…”
“Let me lie down.” I don’t know why I wanted to lie down, maybe from a certain kind of exhaustion. Max adjusted the turban so it was low on my forehead. I closed my eyes and saw Mom, who was saying no to what Max was doing, like it was hurting her, too.
“Max, I can’t. I can’t do this. Please.” I rolled over to my side and felt Max’s hands pulling me over on my back again, looking for that spot, his fingers searching my stomach. I brushed his hands away.
I slipped off the turban and got up. Max was jacked up on his elbow. He began writing in the sand with a broken shell.
I walked along the water’s edge toward the house. The moonlight made a zigzag path that shimmered on the surface of the ocean. The icy water numbed my feet, and my bones felt as though they were going to crack. I kept walking, relieved I had never told Max about my very last moment with Mom. I’d saved that one. The bubbly raspy sound. The water in Mom’s lungs that drowned her. The pressure that passed right through me.
I was afraid to look back, so sure that Max was walking behind me. But when I got further away, and finally turned to look, Max was still where I’d left him, lying on the sand, flat on his back, throwing his large white handkerchief in the air and letting it float down, until it fell neatly over his face.
NOT THAT KIND OF VIEW
Gray and Shauna Pope stood outside their old apartment door, wiggling their key in the lock, trying to get it open just the way they used to. “Here, let me,” Gray said, gently nudging his wife to the side. “I’ve got the touch.” Click. He pushed the door open and heard the familiar squeak in the hinges, which sounded like hee-haw-hee. They hadn’t been there in six months, since before the baby was born. Shauna’s father left the apartment to her in his will. They used to live there full-time; now it was a vacation spot.
“Gray—everything’s the exact same.” Shauna walked into the stuffiness and stood in front of the six-foot oil painting, her hands at her sides in a little girl stance. The painting hung on a wall you could see from the hallway. It was a painting of a man, standing, with a bird in his palm, and a fish out of water at his feet. His shorts poofed out in the thigh. He wore maroon stockings, velvet shoes that curled up in the toe, and his hair in a pageboy cut. “There he is, Gray. Our Monk Man hasn’t changed one bit.” Satisfied, Shauna headed into the kitchen.
“He’s not a monk—but tell him to shut his reverent eye
s in about fifteen minutes,” Gray said, snooping around, breathing in the old excitement. “He’s the medieval type—bathed once a month. Probably liked his women that way, too,” he added to himself.
“He is a monk. He just shed his robe. No more twelve rules to live by. He’s got his own rules.”
“I don’t want to hear his rules right now.” Gray was used to this—his wife, her fictional add-ons. An odd strain ran in her family. He was finally learning to shrug it off.
The first thing Gray did was stand in the bedroom doorway and check out the familiar space under the bed, partially covered by a shag rug, the one he’d carried up twenty-one flights in a roll that had felt as heavy as his future. They had one of those high, country beds, the kind you need a little two-step to get up on—even though it really didn’t fit in size or style in their bedroom. Shauna had wanted a completely new look so she wouldn’t be reminded of the way it had been when her father had lived here.
Gray took the dust mop from the supply closet and pushed it under the bed, near the woodwork and around the rug. “Yep,” he yelled out to his wife, giving the mop a shake. “Everything is A-OK.”
Gray walked into the bathroom and started running the water in the sink and bathtub at full force, until it went from watery brown to pure, Grade A, New York City water. The best. He flushed the rusty bowl once to fill it with water, and then flushed one, two, three times, until the water flowed anxious and responsive once again.
“Oh my God, Gray, why now!” Shauna yelled from the kitchen.
It was funny how without their baby, Audra, around, Shauna turned into her old baby self, with that munchkin voice, the one that needed Gray for everything. He found Shauna in the kitchen. A smell was coming from the refrigerator, but why did Gray have to deal with that now?
“Please, Gray, we can’t have this smell while we’re here. You know,” she said, looking down at herself as if she was envisioning their time alone later. “Please,” she said, clipping her nose with her fingers. Bravely, she looked for the offender.
Shauna was brave, about so many unfortunate circumstances in her fortunate life—the suicide of her muckity
-muck father, a drunk mother who had increasingly lost interest in her, an older brother who had cut himself off from her after their father’s death. Although to look at Shauna, you’d never suspect she’d been cheated out of the basics. Her facial expression was always hopeful.
The perpetrator in the fridge was obviously the green, lumpy, previously orange block of cheese. It was the only type of cheese Shauna ever cooked with—American. Gray got the industrial garbage bag from the hall closet, swaddled his hands in dishtowels, removed the cheese, threw it into the bag, and quickly secured it with extra-long twist-ties. He ran the bag out the front door, holding it out in front of him, directly to the garbage room down the hall. (One of the old ladies must have been cooking bacon.) This was something he would have enjoyed as a kid. He saw himself playing an FBI agent, black windbreaker billowing out a bit as he ran down the hall of an Upper East Side apartment building, wearing a serious, putrid-cheese expression on his face. Trim and medium, he was light on his feet, but, he admitted, a little too good-looking for undercover.
When Gray returned, the kitchen window was open, and Shauna, now in Playtex gloves, was spraying Lysol. He jogged around the apartment, a few steps backward and a few steps forward, checking behind things, pulling books off the shelf and letting them fall on the floor—still in agent form—and called out to his wife, “Found it!” His hand fingered the bag behind all those issues of Business Week, where Shauna’s father had been listed “Best CEO of the Year” for several years, the gold bookmarks sticking out of the tops. The articles highlighted his philanthropic generosity, accompanied by photos of him with inner-city children and board members of the older New York charities. As Gray’s fingers walked over the magazines, he tapped his father-in-law’s photos and thought, Hey, asshole, you had everything to live for.
Gray waved the sandwich-sized Ziploc—not even a quarter-filled with pot, about two joints’ worth. He stuck his nose in the bag and sniffed for freshness. “We’ll make do,” he said. He knocked the six-month-old magazines off the cocktail table while Shauna dipped her sponge in a bucket of Mr. Clean.
The moment Shauna infused the kitchen with a mountainy fresh smell, Gray made a decision that would affect them for the rest of their married lives. He decided this is what they would use this place for—to keep themselves intact. The kid (he realized Audra was too young to call a kid, but pretty soon she’d have that long, wavy hair, and drift around him the way her mother did) would never see the inside of this place.
Gray picked up a Parents Magazine, opened to a random page, and dumped the pot onto a picture of a blue-eyed, cue-balled, double-chinned infant. He was surprised they even had this magazine, but the mailing label said Lenox Hill Hospital, where Shauna had worked before Audra was born. He sifted out the seeds and let them fall in the seam of the magazine; he covered the baby’s drool with the usable leaves as he tilted it up next to the article, “Is Too Much Fantasy a No-No?”
He sat on the leather couch—the place had a completely different look from their new, old house in Larchmont with the wrap-around porch—and let the view do to him what it always did. He was relieved about so many things today; one, he had his wife all to himself, without Audra sucking on her every minute; two, it was simply a day off from the trade floor. Shauna was always afraid being a trader downtown would turn him dirty and volatile. He had almost turned dirty when his boss’s girlfriend came on to him the other night—it would have been easy. And, volatile—well, he had his moments.
They couldn’t see the water that encircled Manhattan from their living room window—it wasn’t that kind of place—but the surrounding apartment buildings made a strong jagged fortress, their windows were a switchboard pattern of yellow against the black night. While Shauna fawned over the Monk Man, Gray had this painting—his blinked with life. He never felt mentally claustrophobic here the way he did in the suburbs, shying away from guys his age that, he felt, were parochial, playing poker in the basements of golf clubs. Their cigars—not one Cohiba among them—were emblems of what they thought was style. Here, the buildings were a beautiful distance from Gray and Shauna’s apartment—there seemed to be fields and fields of open space outside the windows of the twenty-first floor, a long fluent ride to the next co-op, according to his mind’s rail system.
Gray could point their standing astral telescope into any one of those windows and dip into a kitchen or a bedroom. The windows in the stairwells were good tidbits also. He wasn’t looking for sex, not really. It was like flipping through every satellite channel, only the sound was on mute: a Confederate Flag substituting as a curtain (that was his center marker); the roommates who were re-building the Twin Towers out of beer cans on the table in their kitchenette; the woman with the balcony who never slept—and he would be back to check on her that night. Once, when skimming, he believed he saw two priests.
While he finished rolling, Shauna stood very still by the kitchen window, in one of her trances. She had dewy ethereal looks, as if she walked on a vapor fresh from a myth. She must have been thinking of her father, and Gray didn’t intrude. In one of Shauna’s rare, open moments, she had told him that as a little girl she used to sit by her father’s bed when he was unable to get up—during his on-again-off-again depression—hold his hand, sneak a puff of his cigarette, and tell him Monk Man stories. Sometimes, she would hide under his bed and stay there until he fell asleep.
How many years ago did all that happen? Gray was beginning to wonder if Shauna was hiding something. The way he saw it, the poor Irish bastard had been sick—while his wife had been in the kitchen, he’d walked down the hallway from this very same apartment, up the stairwell and onto the flat roof. Gray found himself imagining the scene, the focused and humble look he must have had on his face, much li
ke Shauna’s. When they moved in after the wedding, Gray scraped the paint off every wall, hoping to get rid of any residue of mental instability his father-in-law may have left in the air.
Gray watched his wife from where he sat in the living room. He missed that close proximity in their house. The longest strands of her hair in the back reached the pockets of her jeans. The first time he’d met her at a party in a loft downtown, she’d reminded him of a woman with a flower crown, hiding in a mossy glen. The see-through skin. He’d had to lure her out of the woods and into a conversation. Now, Gray wondered if she was simply having baby withdrawals. If so, he was doomed.
He was admiring his work, holding up two even joints so his wife could see. Not the freshest, but the smell would destroy any trace of cheese. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Hello, hello, are you there?” Gray asked. Granted, his wife was a head-in-the-clouds type—an English lit major—but there was plenty going on. He just couldn’t figure it out. Shauna claimed she couldn’t understand him, especially when he partied all night with his friends, sometimes over at the bar in The St. Regis, and didn’t call to say he was in no condition.
“Oh, Gray, I don’t believe it,” she said, looking out the window. “He’s still here.”
Gray knew exactly whom his wife was talking about. The arm, the hand, the cigarette, whatever. Shauna called him The Smoker. Their other neighbors on the floor were old women who never seemed to die off, probably because of rent control.
“His wife can’t take it,” she said. “The wife is an ex-smoker, and the smell is intoxicating to her. But he doesn’t have the willpower to quit, of course. He is actually pretty thoughtful. He hangs his hand out the window, so as not to tempt her. Later, she smells his fingers.”
This Side of Water Page 9
