Vincent Kahn has been up for hours when he arrives. It’s he who has the appearance of someone showing up for a new job, not Sammy, whose breath in the morning is so strange that puffs of it feel textured, mossy with a liquid underside. Not Sammy whose sleep is so beautiful he thinks of returning to it all day.
To his credit, he is on time. “Coffee in the pot,” says Vincent Kahn, but when he goes to it there is little and it is heatless. Eight A.M. and the coffee already cold. Vincent Kahn has reimagined the living room in service of the work ahead and he moves around it gesturing, Sammy following him the two steps toward the window or bending to something on the coffee table. There is a cup of sharpened pencils, weighed down at its bottom by a rock from the garden. A new box of paper clips, a stamp that says READ, a stamp with a scrolling date, a spiral-bound notebook that is already labeled. In view of the front lawn is a tawny armchair, overstuffed with an antimacassar, and Vincent Kahn gestures to this.
“I thought you could read there. Of course, anywhere is fine.”
This Sammy does not believe for a second. If he understands anything about this man, if he knows anything already, it is that his ideas about how things should go are precious and flinty, inflexible.
“Any questions?”
Sammy knows he wants there to be questions so he scrapes at the edges of his mind, past the gold of a dream that is still the heft of it, to find one.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
The first man on the moon slaps one hand to his jaw and points the other down the hall. “First door on the right.”
THE DAYS PASS WITHOUT HIS acknowledgment, never discrete enough, one intruding on the next. The work is always the same, the markings on the graph paper, the way he bends to retrieve a letter from the box on the floor next to him. The silent phone, the darkened television, the few sounds of Vincent Kahn from the bedroom or garden. The voices from these letters are the only variable, snapping as though in opposition to each other, paeans and polemics, angry capitals and schoolmaster cursive.
Professor, he writes. Barbershop owner. Secretary in a doctor’s office, Kansas, Florida, Yes, Yes, No, Yes. There are many hours when the work feels like a fool’s errand, when he feels the frustration of a son toward his father, bored by some lecture on a tedious, obsolescing process. In many of the letters these people offer Vincent Kahn their thoughts on what he should say when he steps down from the command module, and in others they call him a blasphemer, treading on heavens not meant for him. The futility of this gives Sam a dull ache, just the decade-old dates at the top of the page enough to put a pearling of sweat on his body. Why now, why at all. He comes to believe it is possibly worse, what Vincent Kahn is doing, delegating someone else to sift through the praise and blame rather than just leaving it alone. Opening the letters to Sammy feels criminal, breaking the seal pressed there by very specific lips and hands. All his mother can speak about, when he comes home, is the weight he is losing, and it is true that there seems to be a secret body emerging from the one that has always held him. His hipbones are evil little jewels now. His teeth are more apparent in his face.
There is a fear when he opens a certain kind of envelope, one on which the lettering seems inconsistent. He comes to know it as a sign the author is possibly unhinged. Within a week on the job, he can identify a suffering or proselytizing person’s g or f from two feet away. He stops making any plans with Stephanie, because he does not know how the letters will make him feel, and becomes instead the kind of person who only shows up late and without a call, whatever he’s dealing with already partially mitigated by three to five Miller High Lifes. In his dark car alone he speaks the slogan aloud. The Champagne of Beers.
There is one letter that he reads and has to leave early. He pulls it thinking it will be an easy one, mistaking the lettering for a kid’s, maybe because he thinks the name on the return address, Sweety, could not possibly belong to a person who has cleared eleven. It’s a boy who is his age, or who was his age, or who maybe never got any older than his age. Sammy picks up the letter from the soldier and smells it, thinking somehow the essence of the country would have saturated it, a place that to him is just a word, a war too recent to have entered his history book, three syllables muttered by much older brothers and sometimes men outside bars but never by teachers or parents. Vietnam. There is no smell, anymore, though he checks.
Sweety tells Vincent Kahn his footsteps were the last television he watched before he enlisted. Once, on leave from training, he smuggled a brick to the public pool so he could sink with it to the bottom and stay there and pretend to walk on that surface. Also that someone in his company notched some holes in a corpse’s back and shoved its eyes there, that he, Sweety, took a photo of this, he didn’t know why, but when the print came back from the Army processing center in Saigon it had been censored with thick black lines, as if this were too gruesome a thing to be seen.
It is only eleven A.M. Sam leaves a note for Vincent Kahn next to the daily log he’s meant to keep on the kitchen table, time in, time out, the number of letters processed, the year of the last he’s read. Summer is unrecognizable as what it once was, dives from rocks and naps as close as possible to an open window. Now it is just this warm, awful room, all the time that surrounds it either the dread or consequence of what happens inside it. The only disruptions are small and tireless, moths that don’t seem to fly but fall, the sounds of chained dogs barking. I am feeling incredibly ill, his note says. That night he masturbates to thoughts of dying, his own death, then others’, why he doesn’t know, perhaps to replace fear of it with something else. Hours later, the only noises in his parents’ house the hum of appliances continuing, he is outside the bedroom where they sleep, sitting by their door, his face wet, his snot green.
August waxing, one day he shows up to find more letters have been read than remain. He is hurtling through the end of the seventies, cheating sometimes and just skimming, but anyway they have become more placid, the letter writers, as time has passed since the landing. They are enthusiasts who quote data, they are lonely people who would like to put a memory down on paper. Nobody believes, in 1979, that Vincent Kahn is a part of the vanguard they must persuade of something. He is to them like the light contained by an old photo. They are grateful to him. They hope he is well. Sam, in the chair where he has sat all summer, can feel the next part of his life sidling up to him and waiting. He drinks enormous glasses of water from forty-two-ounce promotional plastic cups Vincent Kahn has mysteriously kept, tokens of summer blockbusters and minor-league openers, and pulls from his pocket a drumstick with which he practices while he reads. Pink Floyd’s “Fearless.” You pick the place and I’ll choose the time. He has it way up, past his shoulder and over the imagined high hat, when he opens the first letter, one of many from the same person.
As he reads he has a clear idea of how he’ll be noting it, using that category Vincent Kahn created in a move of prescience, circling the Y by Unstable, but as he gets farther down the page he feels less certainty about that assessment. It feels too elaborate, on top of that too sad, to be a hoax. In a lie there’s the hope for an outcome, there’s a shortcoming being stretched around, but here there’s only an admission, tired and without flourish.
He decides to put off its categorization and sticks it down the craw between the arm and the cushion, feeling some crumbs there and then some satisfaction at this human oversight, for Vincent Kahn’s is a home without dust and stray coins. The next letter is a denier’s, ragged with exclamation marks and worked over with underlines in another color of ink, and then another from the same writer, the accusation deepening in scope. Sam does a scan of the box at hand and the one that’s next up, shuffling the dates as he pulls. There is sweat in the pocket between his palm and first knuckles, there is what he can only describe as an itch in his molars. Vincent Kahn is gone again, out flying one of the ancient planes for rent at the run-down airport at the edge of town. When he is home, when he does see Sammy, he doesn�
�t ask about the work or anything else. He treats the kid like someone managing a laborious repair, an act that requires a specified field of knowledge and total silence.
There’s a minute, less, in between the idea and the moment he follows it. He doesn’t log out in the designated notebook. The letters, ten in total, he slips down the small of his back, and they fan out accordion-style as he rides his bike home. At every faded stop sign he checks with a hand. His bike felled on the front lawn, his backpack limp and unzipped in the foyer of their split-level, he makes his way to his room and he stays there. There is no sound of his life leaking under the door, the radio or the record player or the handheld gaming console.
In the morning, for the first time that summer, he shows up early, eighteen minutes to eight. He goes around back where the rosebushes and tomato vines are dripping, the galoshes Kahn wears to water them warm by the screen door. For the first time Sam uses his name, calls it out into the dustless house. The letters are ziplocked now: in his kitchen after midnight, he pressed the blue and red together to make the purple seal.
“Vincent.”
He emerges from the hall still damp from a shower. There’s something about the fragility of it, the volume of the hair killed by water and the mottled pink of the scalp revealed, that upsets Sam.
“Early,” Vincent Kahn says, the surprise in his voice making it softer.
“There’s something you need to see.”
9.
Vincent let the teenager go after that, not saying why although of course he knew. Something you should read, he’d said, with an earnestness Vincent found endearing at first, Sammy with the holes in his jeans and a mouth always damp at the corners. The letters smelled like malt liquor and nag champa and had been refolded along slightly different lines. It was clear he’d taken them home and then who knows where—a party, some beer-blotted afternoon at the quarry. Just this was enough to fire him. Later, Sammy had said, letting the screen door bang.
He’d been amused. Why’s that, why should I, an uncharacteristic joviality, hands spread by his ears. The idea that there were any shoulds in the life of this boy was appealing—Sammy who just let weather happen to him, never bothering with a raincoat in the summer storms, never turning on the fan.
Because there’s somebody who’s been trying to reach you a long time. Did you know Fay Fern?
Just hearing the name in his house was an incursion, an event that made him want to check the locks, back door, side door, front.
That’ll be all I need from you this summer, he said finally, drawing what cash he had from his wallet, more than the boy was owed, fifty-seven dollars, and turning down the hall. Good luck at university.
HE PUT OFF READING THEM for forty-eight hours. He sent away the housekeeper from her usual appointment, something that baffled her from where she stood at the door. She could see stray items of clothing on the arms of chairs, she could smell the garbage he hadn’t taken out and held up the feather duster like it was a possession of his he’d lost. He shook his head again.
Fay Fern. It was possible he had never spoken her name. She had been babe, rosebud, she had been darling, she had been a smell and a time of day and something he refused to title. He told himself a well-tooled lie about that, how something real between two people needed no classification or observance, maybe suffered under it. It was a way of treating her as he did, tugging down her overalls on some gravel shoulder and pulling her onto him in the driver’s seat but not always stopping when he knew she was hungry.
Vincent scanned them in one sitting, early in the morning on the back porch, wearing the red drugstore reading glasses it had been a humiliation to buy, possibly a crisis. His eyesight had been remarkable, offering gifts in color and distance that were the envy of the other men in the program.
He spent an hour denying the possibility of it, a son, then two believing it totally, remembering something of how gentle she’d been the last time he saw her, unusually docile. She didn’t pick at one thought of his, didn’t make light of one annoyance.
By the next afternoon he had swung around again. Surely, her parents being who they were, they would have demanded some recompense. The Ferns had been famous even to him, a family whose parties you heard about once you were anybody. They had once flown two members of the San Francisco Ballet company down to perform directly on the long garden table that sat twenty, a surprise for guests after dessert. The story went that the plates had not been cleared, a small humiliation the dancers were meant to incorporate as a constraint. Claudette and James Fern would not have allowed their daughter, however far she had strayed, to raise a child alone. No.
Say they hadn’t learned, he reasoned, believing, the more he remembered her, who she insisted she was despite where she had come from, that she would never have let that information reach them. Her sister would have had the number of three different doctors. Hadn’t her first reliable punch line been the misfortune of conventional life? Once, in the aisle of a grocery store near Yosemite, an overnight trip they’d taken without a toothbrush between them, they’d been stuck on either side of a couple arguing viciously over types of bread, ignoring the bawling child in the seat of the grocery cart. She’d enacted an elaborate mime, stepping up some invisible steps and saluting the executioner, checking the imaginary noose around her neck with a vigorous thumbs-up. He had pelted her with grapes from their basket to get her to stop, had turned away to keep the family from seeing his laughter.
He decided the letters were inconsistent, sad and wild, entreating and then hateful, the handwriting gone jagged with accusations, the leaves of paper sometimes inflamed where the pen had pressed too hard.
They were not the thoughts of someone in mastery of them.
In terms of years it lined up.
A resemblance might be hard to argue with, he thought, or it could be chalked up to the reliable and boring hopes of most people. The last time he’d seen her she’d asked a strange favor, to drive her awhile to buy some dental floss. Her sister had taken the truck. There was something in her teeth she kept pushing at with her tongue. In the sand parking lot of the pharmacy she had stood with her back to him where he sat in the driver’s seat, standing in a balance while she flossed, her peachy foot flat on her thigh. When she was done she waved the strand like a little lasso in the sun and let it drop with a mannered flick of the wrist, some private joke with herself. A small moment in the scope of things, meaningless, but hadn’t she done everything that way, alone, her life an elaborate expression that admitted or needed little of the world around it? He couldn’t say what had happened to her in the years before she’d built that bomb and killed that man, except that he was sure it was what she wanted. She had not lived her life, her life had lived her.
In the highness of afternoon he began to write, just out of reach of the sprinkler he’d turned on, a legal pad on his failing gray knee, starlings and warblers calling from the trees that shadowed him. Dear Mr. Fern, he wrote, aware the boy had only ever used his first name. He started the letter but didn’t finish it, not that day or the next.
10.
Their apartment filled with poster board, thick markers and glitter glue and stencil templates. That Wright was unmoved by them, the things used in the service of shouting and marching—that he goose-stepped over them where they lay in the hall and pushed them aside to make room on the coffee table—became like a quality of the air, something both of them woke to and were relieved to forget once they left the house. In the beginning Braden had been tender about it, brotherly. A group of us, he would say, are going door-to-door to get signatures, are meeting to write postcards to congressmen. Wright would nod and say Today isn’t but, would say Definitely next time, and after a few months Braden stopped asking. They never shared shifts anymore. At home and work they were circling each other, confronted with reminders but never voice or touch. Envelopes of tips with a name scrawled in capitals, a still-wet toothbrush left out on the sink, smudged water glasses baking in the k
itchen sun. On the television Madonna danced backward through Venice, far from virginal, and a news anchor declared, one shoulder dug slightly forward, that under the current administration the NASA budget was projected to double.
Wright was out every night again, his hair long enough that someone was always moved to pull at it. As he was standing in the shower one Tuesday a condom he could not remember losing appeared by the drain.
There was a morning when it turned. The boy Wright had brought home, too young and with eyes the color of cactus, was slipping out when Braden emerged from his room. From the kitchen Wright heard the greeting, flat and vicious. He was sitting in the bay window with a bowl of cereal, a foot hooked around the opposite ankle, when Braden appeared.
“Where’d you find him?”
“Oh, him? He was doing my taxes.”
“Are you protecting yourself?”
Wright kept his mouth on the spoon so that he could shape his lips around it, register no reaction to Braden’s voice. He said it again.
“Are you protecting yourself?”
“Yes, okay? Now can I enjoy my breakfast?”
“Sure. You can enjoy your breakfast, and you can enjoy your walk to work, and you can enjoy your favorite jeans, and later you can enjoy knowing your friends were dying and you did nothing about it. But I want to know why.”
He made an exasperated gesture with his spoon, a vague lift, as if indicating some structural deficit that couldn’t be helped, a crack in the wall that let in a draft. There was no way to begin talking about it, he thought, to begin explaining, because he suspected if he did he would never stop. It would have to be a part of anything he ever said. He did not believe that there was enough of him that he could add his voice to an angry cause and not give himself over to it, not become that sound. What he wanted was to transplant into Braden certain memories of his mother, wait for his friend to understand how she had taken on injustice after injustice until there was nothing else on her face, no bending for love or memory. He wanted to give Braden the smell of that brownstone in the Village, sweat and mold at war, in the days before the bomb went off and killed the sleeping neighbor, or the way his mother had moved the last few years, always with her chin clipped to a shoulder, always with the curtain of hair pushed too far into the lines of her eyes. How for the rest of her short life she lived as though entitled to pure silence, insulted and undone by the slightest sound. He remembered his mother, of whom there had been so much before Shelter absorbed her—well-tooled anecdotes and geometric neck scarves and a way of silencing a foolish comment with just a look—and what followed was that he, comparatively so little, so malleable and unformed, a person made only by the people around him, would vanish completely under any act of resistance. He couldn’t go with Braden to the protest. There would be no way back to any normal life, grapefruit for breakfast or the click of a camera or the small, sharp possibility of love in any room he entered.
America Was Hard to Find Page 28
