“What? Have sex? Thanks. I’m flattered.”
“I meant that you and I—look, I didn’t mean for this to happen. I really did ask you back here to talk.” It was so stupid to be having sex with him. I wanted to tell him how it was that things were different, that I still liked him, that I did care about him. When we talked, he actually made an effort to understand me. Travis never even tried.
“Okay, so talk,” he said.
“I just thought we should talk about what we should do when the baby comes.”
“You know what I want to do.”
“So, if I won’t talk about that, you’re just not going to talk about anything practical?”
“I promise I’m not trying to harass you about this, but if you would tell me why you don’t want to marry me, I’m willing to work on it. Fuck it, I’ll go back to therapy if you want.”
“Because I don’t know if I’ll like being married.” It was the easiest answer because it didn’t involve things he probably couldn’t change. That was where he was after ten years of therapy.
“Your people know how to get divorced, don’t they? If you didn’t like it, you could always divorce me.”
It was like I had a broken toe and, after all that time trying to keep it from getting hurt again, Bernie stepped right on it. Before I could stop myself, it all came out.
“I can’t marry you because you—you—you are so messed up. I can’t deal with that, with you being so messed up and so depressed. And that you don’t care about anything and that awful smiling dog look of yours. You can’t even sleep with me and I’m not spending the next fifty years sleeping in a different bedroom. I can’t stand the idea of waiting around for you to go off, always worrying that something I say is going to upset you. Wondering if maybe someday you’re going to kill yourself. I don’t even know the half of what’s wrong with you. And besides all of your problems, I’m not ever going to be your mother or your aunt.
“Look at my grandmother and my mother, that’s what you’re going to wake up married to someday, if you marry me. And I don’t want to wake up married to your grandfather. For the record, you sound like him. I worked a couple of summers ago for Aunt Bryant and met him, and when you’re in there yelling at Celeste, you sound just like him. And it won’t work. I’m tired of having to be the only practical one here. Have some sense.”
When I stopped, Bernie got up and put his clothes on. I wanted to take it back, but I couldn’t make myself. Just because it was mean didn’t stop it from being true.
“I thought you were going to tell me to have some pride,” he said.
“But you don’t.”
“No, I don’t. I…never mind, I can’t remember what I was going to say anyway. If you need anything while I’m gone, ask Celeste.”
“Bernie, are you okay?” I couldn’t help thinking about him going home and being alone.
“You don’t have to worry about me trying to kill myself again. I guess my aunt told you about that. It was a long time ago, but I understand. You do something like that and nobody ever lets you forget.” He didn’t seem upset anymore, just done.
Bernie Gets It
After my less-than-stellar performance at the shareholder’s meeting, I went to Pennsylvania to tour a rural, low-income clinic that was recommended to me as a model of what I wanted the Raleigh Foundation to do. I deputized Celeste to take care of things for me while I was gone. After Pennsylvania, I had a stop in New York, and as a result I was going to visit my mother, because of the supposed proximity of Boston. It was a mutual bluff gone awry. When Celeste was making travel arrangements, I expected my mother to back down, and she expected me to back down.
The visit to the clinic was fruitful, at least for the lawyers, accountants, and prospective board members I took with me. I spent most of the trip trying to reconcile the two feelings I had about Meda in my head. On the one hand, I loved her. I wanted to marry her, as far as I understood why most people get married. I wanted to be with her, live with her, raise children with her. On the other hand, and this was not a polar opposite of feeling, I was afraid of the power she had over me. When she was done detailing all my failures as a human being, I thought she easily could have snapped me in two. I had dated other girls who liked to exert a little power, but I’d always been fairly sure I was going to walk away from the experience. I didn’t have that confidence with Meda. If she decided to break me, she would.
It wasn’t anything as paltry as her beauty. It was that I loved her and she was that headstrong. Would she have been so headstrong without the grace of her physical appearance? There was no way to know. Would I have loved her? It depended entirely on how interrelated the two things were. If her strength was formed by her beauty, I loved her because she was beautiful. If her will was something altogether separate, she could have been as ugly as a post and I would have adored her. I reconsidered Tilda’s Germanic immovability from that angle.
My mother’s immediate solution to my visit was to involve third parties. On that first evening we went to dinner with her Uncle Rafe, who was quite old. His was the other funeral my mother and I would see each other at in the near future. I guess my mother hoped the presence of someone else would make the visit go more smoothly, but she made a miscalculation with Uncle Rafe.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Robby, haven’t you grown,” was the first thing Uncle Rafe said to me. My mother corrected him, but to no avail. For the entire evening, Uncle Rafe called me by my brother’s name, and I could see my mother going from bad to worse. At first I corrected him, too, but as the evening progressed, the darkest part of my heart began to enjoy watching my mother struggle with her temper.
“It’s Bernie. Bernie. Not Robby,” my mother snapped at one point. Uncle Rafe blinked in confusion and apologized. I was barely able to stifle my diabolical laughter.
At the end of the evening, I put Uncle Rafe in a cab. He shook my hand and said, “It was good to see you again, Robby.” My mother nearly bit through her bottom lip in fury.
Out to lunch on the second day of my visit, my mother’s tag team consisted of her friend Evelyn and Evelyn’s daughter, Danielle. Through a failure of communication or utter perversity on the part of my mother, I believe they were match-making. My mother started out by complimenting Danielle’s hair and clothes, perhaps draw my attention to them. Then she began quizzing Danielle about her interests and her marital status in some bizarre cross-examination. Clearly she already knew the answers she was eliciting.
“Danielle, didn’t you sing in the production of Othello? I was sure I remembered that you were cast for it,” my mother said, after she’d maneuvered the conversation to the topic of opera.
“Yes, for the chorus. It’s a large chorus, so they have auditions for amateurs to fill it,” Danielle said. “When they do Aida next spring, I’m hoping to get another part in the chorus. It was so much fun.” She seemed like a nice girl, but she didn’t have the sense to be embarrassed about what our mothers were doing. Helpfully, she said, “Are you interested in opera, Bernie?”
“I really prefer musicals.” I was still trying to be polite. “I saw the Cabaret revival when I was in New York.” Danielle blinked and made some non-committal sound. In a flash I realized how my mother saw me. I burst out laughing and clapped my mother on her shoulder. “I get it now, Mom. I get it!”
“What?” my mother said with an annoyed smile.
“Son of a bitch, I just figured out why you think I’m queer.”
That was the last thing she let me contribute to the lunch conversation.
Jewelry
Meda
You’d think I hadn’t done anything wrong the way Bernie’s aunt acted. I wondered if I would have been as nice to somebody like me. I was expecting her to be a little cold, but when she opened the door, she said, “Meda, dear, it’s so good to see you. Come in, come in.”
“I wanted to thank you for sending Ron Grabling over to give me a ride yesterday.” I hadn’t expected that wo
uld be Celeste’s solution to my having car trouble.
“Oh, I wasn’t going anywhere. Anytime you need a ride, you should feel free to call him. I’m so glad you came.” She hugged me and pulled me onto the couch next to her.
She was so sweet I didn’t really want to do what I’d come there for, but I took the jewelry box out of my purse and put it on her coffee table.
“I tried to give this back to Bernie, but he wouldn’t take it.”
“If he gave it to you, you shouldn’t try to give it back,” she said.
“I don’t think I should keep it now. He said it was worth several hundred thousand dollars.”
Mrs. Raleigh raised her eyebrows at me, so I hoped she understood. She opened the box and nodded.
“I don’t want to alarm you, dear, but I believe this is worth a great deal more than that. That’s a thirty-carat stone. It’s an Indian diamond from what I remember and very nearly flawless.” She touched the big diamond in the middle and I thought, so that’s what thirty carats looks like. “Pen gave it to his wife for their thirtieth anniversary.”
“You ought to try it on,” I said. “It would look perfect on you. You always look so elegant.”
“I never wear jewelry, except for my engagement ring. I sold it all.”
“Why would you sell your jewelry?”
“It was nonsense. My late husband and I were trying to raise ransom money, of all things.” She said it like she was telling a funny story, but she looked sad.
“Bernie told me they didn’t even pay the ransom. He pretends he doesn’t mind.”
“Rob, Bernie’s father, would have paid the money, I’m sure.” She went on playing with the diamond, tilting it under the lights. “It was so little they were asking for, only $250,000. But Pen kept us like children.”
“Why didn’t he pay it, if it was only that much?”
“Rob was at Pen’s mercy. We were all at his mercy to make the decisions that affected our lives, and Pen wouldn’t pay. It infuriated him. It wasn’t that he minded about the money, but he had such a great fear of being made a fool of. All he could see was that it was the inevitable outcome of paying the ransom. I hate to say it or think it, but if it had been Robby, Pen would have paid. And there’s this diamond. It would have paid the ransom several times over.”
“That makes me want it even less.”
“Oh, Meda, I wish you and Bernie could work things out.” She wasn’t mad at me, because he hadn’t told her anything. “I know I’m not supposed to ask about this. Bernie told me before I went to the party that I wasn’t to ask, but he didn’t say whether it was his rule or yours. Now if it’s yours, I won’t say another word, but if it’s his little dictatorship, I’d like to ask about the wedding.”
“Mrs. Raleigh.”
“So it is your rule that I’m not allowed to talk about it?”
“Yes.” I figured that would make her mad, but she patted me on the leg.
“Please, don’t ‘Mrs. Raleigh’ me, and we’ll talk about Annadore. I want her to think of me as her aunt. I want to be her aunt, exactly as I will be for Bernie’s baby.”
She looked sad, but she went on being nice to me. I couldn’t pick my own relatives, but I could pick Annadore’s, so I said yes.
CHAPTER TEN
FUGUE
If my mother had kept a gun in her apartment, I would have shot myself within the first twenty-four hours of my visit, and then every hour on the hour thereafter.
“If she doesn’t want to marry you, there’s no sense in making a heroic effort to convince her,” my mother said. “There are plenty of other girls out there who would suit you better. Danielle is very nice. And pretty. And she’s more our kind of people.”
Children are like computers. They do what you program them to do, and for the first time it occurred to me that I’d been programmed to fail. Lacking a gun, my three day visit turned into a six day fugue that was only broken when Celeste called.
“Lionel Petrie called to talk about scheduling for them to shoot you,” she said, but she was only talking about the stupid commercial. “He said they’re doing it here at the house?”
“Yes, put it on the calendar.”
“When will you be back?” she said. According to Celeste’s calendar I was already back. Reality was starting to scare her with its unpredictability. “There are a lot of things that need your signature. Should I overnight them to Boston?”
“No, I’m coming back.”
“Oh, and only because you said I should let you know if anything came up, Meda called yesterday looking for you. I thought she knew you were away.”
“I don’t know.”
“She had car trouble, so I called Ron Grabling for her. I hope that’s okay, since you pay his salary.”
“Sure, whatever.” I deserved to be shot for that. “Look, take this afternoon and go buy her a car.”
“Buy her a car? What kind of car?”
“Something practical, reliable. Something nice.” I wished I had better guidance to offer her, but what I knew about cars wasn’t worth mentioning. Then because she didn’t say anything else, I filled in the blanks for her: “You’re a signer on the household account. Honestly, it’s not that hard to walk into a dealership and buy a car. Tag and title. Put it in her name. Then call the insurance agent.”
“Okay,” Celeste said in a careful voice. She thought I was off my rocker. “Mr. Cantrell called to say that the mausoleum is completed, so as soon as you’d like, they can schedule the re-interments.”
“Whenever is fine.”
“I think he thinks that you’ll want to be there.”
“I don’t.”
I ended the call, hating myself, mostly for saying things that weren’t true. I wasn’t indifferent about Meda. I wasn’t indifferent about my family being moved from their graves. I didn’t know why indifference had to be my default setting. In a sane world, in a world where I wasn’t pathetic, in a world where I didn’t deserve to be shot, that call would at least have gotten me out of bed, but it took my mother’s sinister machinations to get me up two days later.
“Bernie, I called Dr. Rosenwasser this morning to come see you. You remember him? It was a mistake going off your medication. I’m going to have him prescribe something for you. You’re not well,” she said.
I opened my eyes to see her frowning down at me. Her look of concern, the one that masked her indifference, got me out of bed. I started putting on my clothes.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the airport.”
“But you don’t have a flight booked. You missed your flight.”
I knew it was her intention to wear me down, that she was in fact wearing me down. I was so weak I couldn’t imagine how I was going to resist her, until I remembered that awful summer before I moved to Atlanta, and how she’d convinced me to check into the clinic. If I hadn’t done it myself, she would have done it for me. To me. I wondered if she would send Dr. Rosenwasser’s minions to the airport after me.
“There are other flights. I’ll get one,” I said.
“But you haven’t showered in days. You look terrible.” Standing there, trying to figure out how to put everything into my suitcase, I felt panicked, but I didn’t dare let her see it. Instead, I opened my carryon bag and put in some clean clothes and my shaving kit.
“I’m going to send for my suitcase later, if you can have Mrs. Vasquez pack it up for me,” I said.
“What do you mean, you’ll send for it?” There was an edge of hysteria to her voice that produced an eerie calm in me. I could see the horizon of the moment and feel the curvature of the earth under me. For the first time, the unspeakable weight of her disappointment steadied me.
“I don’t want to mess with it right now.” I don’t know if she thought about stopping me, but she made a moue of distaste when I hugged her. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom.”
The doorman got me a cab and held the door for me like there was nothing amiss. I didn’t get the same reservation of judgment at the airport, and in an effort not to terrorize my fellow passengers, I took advantage of the three hours before my flight to shave and to brush my teeth. The scar on my cheekbone was a fading apostrophe that nagged me like a clichéd string tied around my finger as a reminder of…something. What was I supposed to remember?
Storm
Meda
The rain turned into sleet in the afternoon and I hoped Loren and her friends wouldn’t come because of the weather, but they did. Loren couldn’t make up her mind if she hated me or if I was her best friend. I was starting to figure out that was how money worked. Maybe it wasn’t what Bernie intended, but he told me to spend the money on whatever I wanted, so I bought a new TV with some of the money he gave me. All of a sudden Loren liked me enough to want to bring her roommate and boyfriend over to watch TV.
Loren’s boyfriend said. “Straight six, right? Four liter? What, it’ll do 130, 140? Sweet ride.”
It was the first thing I’d ever heard him say, and I didn’t have any idea what it meant.
“Her boyfriend bought it for her,” Loren said.
“I wish I had a boyfriend who’d buy me a BMW,” Loren’s roommate said. They started talking about what they’d do if they had a rich boyfriend, and it wasn’t what I was doing with Bernie.
When somebody knocked at the door halfway through the movie, I thought it was another one of Loren’s friends, but it was Bernie. If he was looking for pity, he could have mine, because he looked terrible. His hair was dripping wet, and he looked dead on his feet, with dark circles under his eyes.
“I’m sorry it’s so late. I just wanted to see you,” he said. That’s what he wanted, I guess, because all he did was look at me.
“You want to come in?” I said.
He looked surprised. He’d really come out there just to see me and get sent on his way.
“Hey, Bernie, will you buy me a new car?” Loren said.
“Shut up and watch your movie,” I said. Bernie didn’t look like he was up to fighting with Loren, so I took him into the bedroom.
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