Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  And though so many of my memories of George A. are from his illnesses, the next, though bittersweet, is from a good time. After his last break, he’s picked up where he left off with his clients and been promoted to VP in the office. He and Colleen have a second son now, and in 1990 when I fly home for a visit, George A. picks me up at the airport and says he has something to show me and refuses to say what but seems pleased about his secret. We drive to Winston and snake back through quiet leafy streets in Buena Vista, and then George A. pulls into the driveway of a big brick Georgian house that for all the world resembles George A. and Mary Rose’s house on Woodland Road in Henderson.

  –What’s this? I ask, and he pulls out a key and jingles it the way he did once at the DKE House.

  –Come on, I’ll show you.

  This house is the real thing, not the ersatz version Jack and Margaret purchased in the pasture out in Clemmons. It’s seventy-five or eighty years old, with a front hall ample enough to host a small reception, a beautiful staircase and the heavy, ornate moldings characteristic of affluent homes in the 1910s and ’20s. He and Colleen have made a bid and it’s just been accepted, George A. tells me.

  –You own this?

  –I’m the owner, he says, beaming.

  –You motherfucker, I say. Congratulations.

  George A. leads me on a tour that’s like a trip in time back to Henderson and our first world, and I remember in particular the backyard, which we reached by a dim, amber-colored corridor that must once have been a servants’ entrance. Through a gate, onto a square of sunny, well-kept lawn, and there was a modest statue and a fountain, and the place was ringed with boxwoods, luxuriant and old, and there were children next door on a swing set, and their laughter rang, though through the leaves we couldn’t see them. And the chief beauty of the place, its crowning glory, was a garden rioting with summer roses.

  He and Colleen were starting renovations, he told me, and it seemed to me this is where George A. had been headed all along, and would soon live, in the house that we all dream about and work a life for, that place we’re trying to get back to where everything was good and right and whole that he remembered—and I remember—though it never actually existed. And I think George A. took me there to show me he’d finally made it and done it his way, by the path laid out by others in our family, by following the traditions I’d broken and did not believe in, and by honoring the wisdom of our forebears, and there was pride and maybe some comeuppance in his attitude the way there was the day he beat me in the run to Avalon, but I think George A. mainly wanted me to see he’d won his own race. That’s the sweetness in the memory, and the bitterness is that we locked the door and drove away and George A. never lived there.

  In Vermont in 1991, I’m purchasing appliances and picking out my paint chips when I get the call from Margaret. George A.’s back at Mandala. In the middle of a raging manic episode, seeing genius chess moves in the market that his clients are too conservative to go with, George A. makes the trades himself, unauthorized. As I understand it, some of these go right and make money, some lose, but all represent fiduciary violations. Suits are brought against him and Dean Witter. George A.’s forced to leave Dean Witter. It’s over for him as a broker. Though he’s psychotic when he does it, at thirty-three he’s foreclosed his future options in the business and can never again do what he’s been passionate about since his teens and twenties when he started telling me the stories about Baruch and Livermore and the old Wall Street traders.

  He and Colleen have to sell the new house half renovated, and Colleen stays with the children in their old one, and she tells Margaret that when George A.’s released this time she doesn’t want him back home. Though once upon a time she said she loved him so much his illness didn’t matter, it does matter in the end, and who can really blame her?

  And perhaps there’s no connection, but I can’t help thinking of Bill’s actions in the end phase of his marriage, the social suicide he committed through the theft of Mary Rose’s timber and the explosion in Boston where he made himself an outcast. Our father’s actions were those you’d take against your enemies when you burn their houses to the ground and lay waste their country, a place you never mean to return to and would be unable to even if you wished it, and in a way George A.’s actions are terminal like Bill’s were before he disappeared up those washouts in the Shenandoah.

  What’s it like for George A. now, I wonder, as his levels stabilize at Mandala and he makes the slow return from wherever he’s been? What’s it like to return to Earth and find the second world you’ve built has sunk beneath the ocean like the first one, his marriage and the house in Buena Vista gone, gone, the job he loved and can never return to, what’s it like to look around and realize that what you’ve done in your insanity is done and can’t be undone in sanity?

  So in the fall of 1991, George A. goes back home to Margaret’s for a little—by then, her marriage to Jack has also ended—just until he gets back on this feet, so goes the story. And I believe it, too, believe he’ll find his feet this time the way he always has before. Give him eight weeks, ten, and watch—he’ll suit back up and trot back out to practice. Margaret takes him in and tries to make him comfortable, and she takes his guns, the Fox together with the Browning, and stores them at a friend’s house. And Colleen files for a divorce and, because she’s Catholic, applies to Rome for an annulment, denying the marriage that produced their children. And still George A., every weekend, picks his boys up and brings them to Margaret’s and takes them to their practices and games and to Four Roses in the summer and holds their hands and never lets them go though his hands now begin to have a tremor from the medications, which he takes in ever-increasing dosages, and it’s hard for him to wake up in the mornings and his affect is a little duller. Still, his intelligence seems unimpaired and it never occurs to me that there won’t be a next act, a new and better chapter. This time, I tell myself, it’s just going to take a little longer.

  Me, I’m two years deep into the next book now, I call it Ruin Creek for a real place and it’s about real people for the first time, about Who We Were, Bill and Margaret and George A. and David, in that gray-shingled house when we were still a family and believed that family love is stronger than time or death except it isn’t, love is strong but time and death are stronger and the dark force that stayed hidden in the underwater portion of the iceberg grew and grew until it surfaced and destroyed us.

  Why, though, why? What happened to us, what is the nature of the dark force? For me this has always been the overwhelming question, and I set out to tell the story not because I understand it but because I don’t and want to, want to understand it for the first time, and when I ask Margaret, the family storyteller shares her reminiscences, and when I write Bill, he says, I am an Indian, this is my sacred burial ground, don’t rattle the bones. But if he’s an Indian, aren’t I another like him, isn’t George A., isn’t Bennett, aren’t our bones buried in that sacred mound beside his, beside theirs, don’t I have a right to claim them, to go and get them, to go and get me? So, at least, I think, and right or wrong, no part of me isn’t going to write it.

  Looking back, though, it seems to me Bill’s worries weren’t unfounded. Though I set out to be neutral, and though I still find my portrait of the “Bill” character loving, in Ruin Creek I missed the fact that the first blow was struck by Margaret, who trapped him into marriage the way I tried to trap Nell when I plotted out our future without bothering to consult her. Because it was in my interest not to see it, I missed that my life was extracted from my young father, and Bill’s last message to me in his will—It is my intention that my son, David Payne, take nothing—is the same one I see in his expression on the chapel steps in Bennettsville at the beginning, and perhaps because I miss this in my novel I’ll have to live out in real life with Stacy what happened between Bill and Margaret long ago over her accidental pregnancy and my conception.

 
In 1993 I publish Ruin Creek to the best reviews of my career and sign a new book contract even better than the life-changing one that preceded it, and in 1994, when I come back from tour, I propose to Stacy a second time and she says yes ten years after the first time. Whatever foiled us in the past is in the past now, we’re all grown up and everything is different, and as a sign and token of that difference, I say I want to finance her until she completes her screenplay. She seems pleased and says she thinks she’ll need about three months to finish. So we tell our families and friends and start to plan the wedding, still a year off.

  In that year, though, while we’re living separately, I have an affair. Since there’s no serious emotional attachment on either side and it’s over in a month, I file it as an indiscretion and feel guilty but fail to take it as a warning. And then the week before the wedding, Stacy calls me from New York, some issue with the caterer, and sends me to her planner in the bedside table drawer for the number. There, mixed in with bills, I find what seems to be a recent letter to the old boyfriend, the one she was seeing ten years before in Winston, saying he’s the one, she loves him more than she loves me and never should have left him. Outside the window, the meadows seem to darken as I read it. When I confront her, Stacy says it was an exercise assigned her by her therapist to unearth and exorcise old feelings. I fret and pace and in the end I do what I did the first time, I tell her I love her and don’t want to lose her, and Stacy says she loves me and the feelings in the letter aren’t her real ones, and I believe her or I want to. So I’m warned, too. And maybe our assurances and I love yous mean we want it to be true because it will be so hard if it isn’t. We’re so close now to a stable real-world life with a partner who’s good and decent and attractive, with whom we’ve been through so much already and have worked and wanted it and waited.

  And down in Winston George A.’s been at home for three years almost four now, and though his sojourn with Margaret is still considered temporary, by now I don’t think I or anyone believes he’ll ever leave there. And since he’s done it all the times before this, I don’t really understand why George A. can’t or won’t get up this time. He’s made a stab at becoming an electrician, but in his first week, he falls off a ladder, hurts himself and never goes back. And Margaret’s set him up in an apartment of his own, but after a month the fridge is like a toxic weapons lab again the way it once was in Atlanta, and George A.’s gone off his meds and Margaret has to go and get him and the doctors once more ratchet up his dosages.

  Yet when he’s back home with her and has the cash, he still makes short sales and trades options. And occasionally he buys a vintage pickup truck and restores it beautifully, only George A. gets so emotionally invested he either doesn’t want to sell it when he’s done or he puts so much into the restoration he barely manages to break even. Still, these efforts show initiative and diligence. How much of his incapacitation is bipolar I disorder, and how much is the old family sickness, hostile dependency, by which the weak and sick and injured depend upon and hold the strong ones hostage, and the strong ones, in the name of goodness and self-sacrifice, help the weak and disable them entirely? I can’t parse it, and I’m so sorry for George A. and somewhere deep down I think he could try harder, do something if he wanted—volunteer at the library or a soup kitchen, work in an office, become a paralegal, anything except sit at home day after day watching the black crawl of the ticker tape across the screen of the financial channel. It isn’t up to me, but I find it hard to look at, so it’s in this era that I stop visiting Winston or go less often.

  And I suspect all this contributes to my urgency with Stacy, my desire to press forward despite the warning signs, and not to miss it, living. And all our friends and family are coming up and already calling, offering us congratulations for growing up and hanging in, what a good and brave thing, how many would or could have done it, and if it’s not good or brave, if we’re just afraid or I am, it would be shaming to admit it, above all to ourselves and to each other. And Stacy’s thirty-five, I’m forty, the years went helling by so quickly and I spent so much of mine flipping and spinning underwater in the dream worlds I created and I developed my big claw and only came up for air occasionally in the real world, when I had to. What if Stacy’s my last chance at a real life and I’m Stacy’s? And it’s so much easier for me to say to Stacy, How could you do this? than to tell her, This is what I did.

  So there we are, me and Stacy, a hot July afternoon in 1995, finally exchanging our I dos, our for-better-and-for-worses in the village church in Wells ten years after I asked her to marry me the first time.

  George A.’s here to celebrate the day with us. He and Margaret have flown up together. There’s a picture of him from the rehearsal dinner. It’s taken at the house in Wells the night before the wedding, a July evening, with seventy-five or eighty people milling underneath the tent and strolling out into the meadows. It’s hot as hell and my cousin Louis and I are sitting on the right side of the porch against the tan clapboards, and George A., on the left, in a wicker chair, is closer to the edge and has the sky behind him with that big view to the Adirondacks. He’s wearing a polo shirt, cerulean or azure, and his plaid Bermudas pick up the blue and weave it with a green over a ground of ivory. He’s in his DKE House mode and wearing DKE House colors, and the photo’s taken looking up by someone sitting on the steps, and George A. has his left hand on his knee and the way he holds it is not like Louis or I do. Our hands are soft and curled, but George A.’s fingers are bent at ninety degrees and unusually long and rigid as a rake’s tines, which makes me wonder if George A. has begun to hold himself that way a lot. As we go forward relaxed in our encounters, George A. holds himself in vigilance, never knowing when it might strike again, the mystic consequence that’s laid him low so many times already. And though he’s grinning at the camera, a flash of white teeth under black mustache, in his warm eyes there’s something uncertain, slightly pleading now that isn’t in the early photo on the beach. But what makes the hair rise on my forearms is the sky behind George A. out there in the gap toward the Adirondacks. The direction is due west, and it’s dusk and the sky in that direction is an apocalypse of blood and fire, wave after wave of sun-tinged black-and-orange cloud, like a violent aureole around a stricken angel. If the photo on the beach is the Before shot, this is the one I think about as After.

  When the honeymoon is over, Stacy returns to the city and works out the year to collect her year-end bonus and we visit weekends and she moves up after New Year’s, and we’re happy there in the beginning. I plow the road and vacuum up the fireplace ashes and spread them on the lilacs, and Stacy orders starter dough from San Francisco and the house is redolent of fresh bread. We chat over coffee in the mornings and she goes upstairs to the loft to write and I write downstairs in the guest room. At 5 P.M. we reassemble and start dinner and I pour my drink—a single jigger does it—and we regale each other with the day’s adventures, mainly I do, I recount for her whatever treasures I’ve discovered on the underwater shoals I’ve visited. Stacy’s generous with her attention, but more reticent about her own work. I don’t pry, but over time I gather that her script concerns two sisters, North Carolina girls living in the city. Both get pregnant accidentally at around the same time by their respective boyfriends, each decides to have her baby. One boyfriend is new, the other immature and insufficiently supportive, so the girls head back to North Carolina to a farmhouse an old maiden aunt has left them. There, they rehabilitate the beehives and begin a thriving business, standing up against the disapproval of their parents and the ­narrow-minded townsfolk. And around the time the sisters go into labor, the boyfriends show up, humbled and repentant, the sisters take them back, and the movie ends with a big double wedding.

  And if my first novel acted out my search for the powerful, magic father I never had and longed for, it seems to me—though this is just my inference—that Stacy’s script acts out a wish for a grown-up family much like the one she
knew in childhood, composed primarily of women, where sisters band together to make art and raise children, where men are provisionally admitted but nonessential. And looking back I wonder if in her heart of hearts Stacy married me and came to Vermont hoping and expecting to find in me a helpmeet and a partner more like Ginger or the sisters in her movie.

  But it’s good in the beginning. Though the three months Stacy said she thought she needed have turned to four and five and six, this is our best time. Spring comes, a beaver moves into our pond, we get a rescue dog from the pound, a brindled Plott Hound pup, and name him Leon and raise him like a human infant. At 5, we assemble on the porch, and I sip my drink and toss the tennis ball into the lower meadow, where Leon streaks to fetch it, ten times, twenty, fifty if I’d let him. Stacy weaves him daisy chains and snaps his picture for our Christmas card, and I tell her we’re like those parents, you know the ones, who send the dressed-up photos of their children every season, and Stacy laughs and says we aren’t, we aren’t a bit like that, and has fifty copies printed and a card that says Joy in bright gold letters, and I sign my name and take them to the post office in the village.

  I don’t recall us talking about children. I know we did before the wedding. Stacy says she wants a family, and I say, Sure, I’d like to someday, but I say it lightly, the way you say you’d like to visit Rome one day and wear white clothes and watch the birds fly up above the Coliseum walls at sunset. Mainly, I want to work, to keep on writing, getting in my hours in the lap lane. And I see Stacy as another like me, an artist engaging in the practice. In a phase of plenty now, I, who haven’t always been generous, get to help her.