My American Unhappiness

by Dean Bakopoulos

  "I'm not sure how much time your mother has," Phil Crawford said. "But Zeke, you're not even dating anybody, isn't that right? That's what your mother told me, just a few weeks ago."

  "If he gets married," Harmony continued, "by Christmas, say, then he is the legal guardian?"

  "Yes. That's right," Phil Crawford said. "If Violet is still alive when he gets married."

  Both Harmony and Phil looked at me.

  "Is there anybody?" Harmony asked. "You're not even dating anybody, am I right?"

  "I have a few prospects," I said. "Actually, there is somebody I plan to propose to, as soon as possible. My mother's illness, of course, sort of delayed things."

  "What if it's a sham marriage?" Harmony asked. "Then what?"

  "The will specifies a legal marriage," Phil Crawford said, "which must last for at least three years or custody rights will revert back to you, Harmony. Or at least you could contest them in a court of law. I suppose you could request that Zeke and his new bride sign an affidavit of sorts, affirming that they have a real marriage and that they plan to be married for a long time. I can add that language, if Violet agrees to it, to prevent a sham sort of situation."

  Harmony sighed.

  "He's a drunk!" she said. "He can't raise the girls alone!"

  "A drunk?" I said.

  "Zeke, here's what your mother told me," Phil Crawford said. "She worries about you raising the children alone. She thinks you are too introverted, too involved in your own intellectual pursuits to really raise a family, and, frankly, she also worries about your drinking, which she says is getting a bit, well, enthusiastic."

  I sit there in stunned silence for a moment, staring at my hands. And then I look up at the lawyer, who, after a minute of no reaction, finally purses his lips, nods his head, and says, "I'm afraid that sums it up, Zeke. Your mother thought a woman, a good woman who loved children, would help you. You'd change."

  "I see," I said.

  "Zeke," Harmony said, "it's not in question whether or not you love these girls, or, frankly, whether or not they love you. They do. It's simply a matter of providing them some stability in a life that's been full of overwhelming sadness and chaos."

  Harmony reaches over the table and squeezes my hand.

  "Of course," I said. "Sure."

  I asked Harmony to keep an eye on the roast in the oven that afternoon and went to the bookshop, beginning to weep in the middle of the new nonfiction display. Mack took me out back to the loading dock and made me a gin and tonic.

  But that evening, despite the tension of the custody rights hanging in the air above us, Harmony and I were civil. We made dinner for the girls together—macaroni and cheese and pot roast—and then I sat in the bathroom with April and May while they took a bath. They sort of liked an audience in there, though I knew they would soon outgrow that preference. Still, it was the one time of the day when they seemed to open up to me, to ask me honest questions or offer me honest expressions of feeling. We often talked about Grandma in there, about the fact that this cancer was something she might not get better from. It was in the bath where they heard me tell stories of their late father and mother. Frankly, I had made up many of the stories, especially some heroic stories about Cougar, but if there is anything I have learned in my years as a public humanities scholar, it is that narratives, fiction or non, have a remarkable capacity to simulate feelings of actual relationships. The more stories we hear about the people who have passed away before us, the more we believe we are still in relationships with them. They seem less ghostly, a real and tangible presence.

  Children, I have learned, have a remarkable intuition that is at once wholly credible and often baffling. As if they sensed the subtext in the air, that night April asked me where she and May would live once their grandmother died.

  "Well, sweetie, we're trying to figure that out," I said.

  "It think it will be fun to live with Aunt Harmony," April said.

  "It probably will," I said.

  "I think that's what we should do," May said. "You have work. And you're not even married. We'd rather go to Michigan."

  I swallowed hard, of course, upon hearing this. It gave me some reassurance, I suppose, to know the girls would be wholly comfortable with the course of action their grandmother had prescribed for them. It also, of course, hurt like hell to hear that the notion of leaving me behind could be so easily digested by them.

  That night, as I was finishing reading to them a rather uneventful book called What Happens on Wednesday, which they seem to love, perhaps because it is about the daily routines of an intact nuclear family, I had to resist the urge to cry. I kissed them both, and they kissed me, and I went into the hallway and down the stairs. Not five minutes later, April was standing in the living room and she said to me, "Uncle Zeke, the only reason May said all that stuff is because she heard what the lawyer said while we were in the playhouse. We were eavesdropping on you, and May said we should be really excited about moving to Michigan with Aunt Harmony so that you would feel better about it."

  With that April turned and ran up the steps before she could see me burst into tears. I sat down on the couch and thought, Only seven!

  And this is how the summer ended: with me learning that when I lost my mother, I would also lose the girls I had come to think of as my children—unless, of course, somehow, before all of this loss, I could gain a wife.

  I have accepted Harmony's role in our changing family and I have accepted it well. This evening, after I come home from a day's work, pleased with the way my fundraising letter turned out but upset over Lara's obvious lack of confidence in my leadership, Harmony and I make dinner together and I chat idly about my job, to which Harmony says, "I still have no idea what you actually do."

  Afterward, we wash dishes, bathe the girls, and tuck them in together. My mother has decided to sleep through dinner, though after we eat, I go into her room and wake her, making her take five sips of an Ensure chocolate shake.

  By the time it's dark, the girls are asleep and my mother is asleep and Harmony and I go downstairs and we pack the girls' lunches for the next morning. A rhythm has already emerged in our temporary domestic partnership, and we end each evening with a cocktail before Harmony goes up to bed, and before I retire to my mother's room, where I will sit in her bedside chair and read. If she wakes up, as she often does around ten or eleven at night, I will bring her a cool drink and small snack, and I will stay up talking with her.

  Tonight, however, it is a warm night for autumn, maybe one of the last warm evenings of the year, and Harmony and I take our cocktails out to the porch, and Harmony decides we should bring out the entire bottle of gin, the bottles of tonic, the limes, and the ice. She arranges all of this artfully on a tray and we sit down in the darkness.

  In the past few weeks, as the shock of my mother's decision has sort of worn off, I have allowed myself to admit that Harmony has always been a good aunt to the girls, having them to her house in Michigan at least two times a year: two weeks in summer, two weeks in January, and sometimes during Easter break as well. Harmony always flies out to Madison and escorts the twins back to the Detroit airport and then flies them back home. She and Malcolm pay for everything. The girls love their time there, and they love their aunt. I am certain they will be well cared for and adored if they stay there on a permanent basis.

  "So work was good?" Harmony asks me.

  "I think it was fine. Some days it's hard to focus, you know?"

  "I bet," she says.

  "Have you heard from Malcolm lately? How is he coping as a born-again bachelor?"

  "He's not big on the phone," she says. "He doesn't say much; he just sort of says, 'That's interesting' over and over until we're done."

  "That's interesting," I say.

  Harmony laughs. "He is sort of a workaholic when I am away. He just puts his head down and gets ahead at work."

  "Makes sense. I was certainly much more of a workaholic when I lived alone."

>   "Yeah, I can imagine. Your life has changed so much since everybody moved in, I bet. No more wild sex parties, for starters."

  "No, true. Those are now held at the office. For the children's sake."

  Harmony smiles.

  "I'm sorry it's working out this way. I do think it'll be fabulous for me. For the girls. Malcolm is excited too."

  "He is?"

  "Well, no. He's sort of horrified and excited. But he was crushed when it turned out we couldn't have kids. We've been trying to adopt."

  "Well, good," I say. "This will be so good for you."

  "Who knows?" Harmony says. "Maybe we will be able to adopt. Maybe the girls will have a baby brother or sister to take care of."

  I say, "How cool would that be?" though I am suppressing a torrent of envy. At that moment, I admit I am thinking, Not so fast, sister. Old Zeke might yet find a wife before it's too late.

  Harmony sighs into the cooling evening and stands to make us two more drinks. She is a beautiful woman, a spitting image of her dead twin sister, Melody, but thirty pounds lighter, with better hair and skin. We have been through an emotional storm together these last few weeks, as my mother's decline grows more obvious and rapid. We've been absolutely exhausted by grief. For Harmony, I suppose the exhausting part has been shepherding our nieces through that grief. All of the memories of dead siblings haunted us that summer, and we were emotionally and physically spent. Tonight, as she sits out on the porch in low-waisted jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that shows off her flat stomach and her navel accentuated by a small diamond stud, our conversational intimacy and her obvious attractiveness give rise to what I admit is more than minor lust in my heart. I feel almost impossibly close to her. I know it is no time for lust, but men are never able to avoid it, I suppose, especially when they are emotionally vulnerable.

  I also know that lust makes men say some terribly dumb things, which is exactly what I do this evening, though later it will become clear that perhaps it is not so dumb.

  "Are you happy with Malcolm?" I ask, sometime in the middle of my third gin and tonic, or, as Mack would say, at some point when I am "deep in my cups." In my opinion, Malcolm is sort of a bore, and I recall Cougar disliking him immensely. He is older than Harmony by twelve years, a physics professor at a community college, pudgy and unkempt and, based on my limited experience, fairly dismissive of women.

  "What?" she asks.

  "Are you happy with your life in Michigan?"

  "With Malcolm?"

  "With Malcolm, with everything."

  "What are you getting at, Zeke?"

  "You could leave him. You could leave him and marry me, for the girls' sake. We could have a family of sorts, a reconstructed sort of nuclear family for them. Right here, in Wisconsin."

  "Zeke!" Harmony says, and she twists her face into an expression that comes close to sorrow, and then, suddenly, her mouth twists itself again into a vast, white-toothed smile. I am not sure if she thinks I am kidding, a joke in bawdy poor taste, or if she is slyly pretending to consider my offer. "You're so twisted," she says.

  She was intending to laugh it off.

  "You're thinking about it!"

  "No!" she says. "Not at all. Zeke, I'm married to Malcolm. I love him."

  "No doubts?"

  "Not at all," she says.

  We sit in silence for a while. And then she reaches over and holds my hand for a moment, so that our joined hands are dangling in the air between us, between our red Adirondack chairs.

  "You love them so much," she says. "Don't you?"

  "I do," I say.

  "I think it's hard for other people to see," she says, "but you're a good man. You're an exceedingly good man."

  I am so moved by everything: her hand in mine, the onset of autumn, the lovely sweep of her short blond hair tucked carelessly behind her delicate ears. The slope of her calf, the swell of her breasts beneath her shirt. I begin to weep. One might, on looking back at, say, a hidden camera recording of the evening, protest and declare that my tears were forced and artificial. But they are real, those tears; I am genuinely moved by her and what she said. She kisses me on the cheek, and she goes up to bed. I check on my mother, sleeping a rattly and phlegmy sleep, and then go into my room.

  And I guess Harmony's tears, well, her tears are real too, that night when she comes into my bedroom, locks the door behind her, undresses before me, and climbs into my bed. We move in absolute silence, all breaths and buried moans. I can feel her tears on my chest and she puts her face there when she climaxes.

  Afterward, I flip the bedside lamp on and off a few times and she says, "Zeke? Is this crazy? I just wanted to comfort you."

  "I want to comfort you too," I say.

  "You did," she says, a smile taking over her face.

  The next morning, I wake early, hoping, before the cold glare of dawn makes things seem real, that she will do it again. But she is already out of bed, and I put on my sweatpants and a T-shirt and go downstairs and find that everybody is awake and pancakes sizzle on the stove.

  "Good morning," I say, to April and May, who are sitting on either side of my mother at the dining room table. My mother is in her robe and it looks as if Harmony has brushed her hair. April and May seem happy about this, and the trio returns my good morning.

  "You look good, Ma," I say, but I don't quite mean it and she smirks in a way that tells me she knows I don't mean it. What one should say, what one means to say in this situation, is "Hey! You look like you're still alive!"

  I excuse myself from the dining room. "I'm going to go and help your aunt cook breakfast," I say.

  In the kitchen, I come up behind Harmony at the stove, pressing into her just enough to suggest that I enjoyed our night. She whips around, spatula pointed menacingly at my midsection.

  "Please, don't ever mention this again," she says. "It's as if the rules were suspended for a night. It's as if all of the chaos, all of that tragedy, just sort of suspended reality for a while, okay? I think that's all that happened. We needed something."

  "You think?" I say.

  "It has to be this way, Zeke," she says.

  I am impressed that her voice is even and her eyes are dry. She seems to have made a very intellectual choice the night before and has assessed it with the clear eyes of a historian the morning after.

  "Fine," I say, brushing too close to her once again as I move toward the sink. Her hand touches my shoulder, a faint squeeze. As I go into the dining room, I play Van Morrison's "Comfort You" on my iPod dock, loudly. The twins complain. They don't care for the music. They want to talk to their grandmother. I turn off the music and sit down to breakfast, gorging myself on pancakes and sausage. I try and say goodbye to my mother after we eat, but she is asleep on the couch by the time we clear the dishes.

  Just as I am ready to usher the girls into the Honda so I can drop them off at school before I head to work, Harmony comes out of the kitchen, hands the girls their lunch, kisses them, and then watches them as they go out into the yard.

  Harmony looks over at my sleeping mother and then looks at me.

  "You understand why we can never admit that happened," Harmony says. "Don't you?"

  "Yes," I say. "And you understand that I may very well get married before my mother dies. Don't you?"

  Harmony is good at many things, as I have learned the night before, but she makes weak coffee, and hence, once the girls are at school, I go straight to Starbucks. I want to see Minn behind the counter, and for the first time in days I am not thinking about Harmony or the girls or my dying mother. It's odd: when a loved one is going through the horrors of terminal cancer, anybody who has no connection to your world of illness and oncology and imminent death seems incredibly vibrant and witty and beautiful. Though in Minn's case, I remember, I always considered her to be all of those things.

  She's not there.

  This summer, caught up in childcare and medical appointments and the logistics of household management and the looming rea
lity of death, I rarely went to Starbucks. If I did go, it was often late in the evening. Minn was never there. At one point, I inquired after her and a suspicious, goateed barista informed me that she was on a long vacation. I nodded and didn't tip my customary eighty-three cents.

  When I walk into the Starbucks today, a man back at work, a man with a mission to marry somebody worthy and lovely and capable of motherhood in the next few months, I can feel the air in my soles, as if I am about to begin floating a bit above everything.

  It is my favorite time of day at Starbucks, the midmorning, when the rush and mess of the before-work crowd have been tidied away, the after-lunch to-go crowd has not yet arrived, and the new slants of midmorning light give the windows a warm glow. A few students type away on laptops, a retiree reads a spy novel in a large armchair, and a familiar-looking white-haired man in a suit seems to be awaiting somebody at a corner table. The music is appropriate for autumn, yellow and grim—a female folk singer whose work I am unfamiliar with is singing about a move to Brooklyn. The man in the suit nods at me. I nod back. In a Walgreens or McDonald's, such a nod would never be exchanged, but in a Starbucks, such nodding makes perfect sense. This is community space, and I am glad to be part of it, though I'm unsettled by the sudden inkling that the man in the suit might be waiting for me. He begins to write, in tiny script, on the legal pad before him.

  It does not take me long to confirm that Minn is not at the counter. I look at my watch. She should be present. I casually order my beverage from Wallace, the fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses and a brush cut, and as I am adding a splash of cream to my Americano, I ask, casually, as if I don't care (one must be careful not to appear creepy when one has a major crush on a service industry professional): "Where's Minn?"

  "She transferred to another store," Wallace says.

  "She did," I say. "Really? I thought she liked this store."

  "She's managing the second shift at the Starbucks on the west side."