by Colin McAdam
“I ONLY WANTED to keep you away from my mother. You keep following us, Simon. Please, just, stay, away.”
So I SAID TO HER, I said, listen, I said, Kwyet, I said, Kwyet, I said (the eager chasseur), I want, I said, to run. My little humming Quiet, my little thread of Kwyet, a birdbreeze lower than a breath said Come, she said, or so I had imagined, Come she said, Here I am.
She said nothing, but I took her to mean much, as she ran more than walked, cowered more than curved up the stairs through the door by the window.
I want to run, I said, but None, I said, of this Come here. My goose was bumped all over from the breeze of disquieting breath; to run was my need, not my wish. I was prepared to get song-of-songsy, all hinds and harts and panting, to sing with her as we ran. But when I was there, when I was right there with her, there was nothing but quiet: an open window and an invitation. Come, she says, here I am.
SHE FELL ALL that way to the ground.
Part Six
1
THE LITTLE MONKEY smiling through my window. He ran away and I didn’t chase him. Flower in the snow. More than a f lower in the snow, my friend, it was a smile from the God of Yes, the God of White, the Man in Black, the shy, shy welcome of deep and dark and sweet, my friend, I don’t know, I tell you, I do not know what I mean, but look at that smile and hope.
I did not chase him, no, I went home, changed, had a beer for several months, I even, you know, dieted, exercised, got back to work, birth of a new world, patience, hope, light beer, moistening my bones, and then:
The doorbell rang and I thought Paperboy? and I opened the door to Jer. I told you this already.
“Jer!” I said.
“Hi, Dad,” he said, and came in.
I knew it was my job to be cool. “How are ya, Jer,” I said, cool.
And he said, “How are ya.”
And I said, “Beer?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And I went to the fridge and came back with a couple.
He was still standing there in front of the door, and we clinked them together, me and Jer, and no two beers in the history of man were sucked back faster, I tell you with no shame. We finished at the same time.
“Another!” I said.
And he said, “Yeah.” So I came back with two more.
“Come in. Sit down. Come in.”
He had a knapsack on his shoulder full of his father’s hope. I couldn’t ask if he was going to stay. He sat down over there, across from me.
“How are ya, Jer?” I said.
“OK,” sip of beer, “OK . . . You?”
“OK. Beer?” I said, and he said, “Yeah,” and I got another case from the basement and put it in the fridge.
“So, you’ve been OK, eh, Jer?”
“Yeah. OK enough.”
“You look thin.”
“Yeah.”
“Healthy?”
“Yeah.”
“You hungry?” Too early, too early.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“You look thin,” he said, after a while.
“I’ve been on a diet,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Twenty pounds.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep . . . I know the guy who makes this beer.”
And he said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” And there I was talking about yeast, a grandmother’s recipe, a guy named Buck who made one or two himself, and there was Jer, a familiar stranger, older, smaller, a growing man, and as he politely nodded himself to sleep I might have walked over and put my hand on his head.
NEXT MORNING, he’s in his bedroom, back in his bedroom, just down the hall there. Peek in the door you’ll see his big feet poking out from all those crazy Star Wars critters, the woolly one and whatnot.
“HEY, DAD, can I borrow the pickup!”
“You can drive now?”
“Yeah.”
“Catch.”
“HEY, JERRY, you know how I make you toast in the morning!”
“Yeah.”
“You like that?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve got . . . I’ve become pretty good at it.”
“Sure.”
“I like my toast.”
“OK.”
“HEY, DAD, can I borrow the pickup!”
“Sure. Catch.”
“JERRY, I’VE GOT a few jobs coming in. You know, rebuilding the McGuinty name and so on. You have any interest in helping me here and there?”
“With what?”
“This and that.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“I’m not working for free.”
“Fuckin A, my friend.”
“HEY, DAD, can I borrow the pickup?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s mine.”
LIVING WITH a teenager was hard. I’ve heard all you ladies say the same thing to your friends: “Living with a teenager is hard.” Fuckin A, ladies.
There was something about his feet. His goofy big feet were everywhere. He put them on every table, no matter how high the table was. He left his gigantic running shoes in my path, no matter where my path was. He owned more running shoes than he could ever possibly wear, but he wore them all and the smell was a unique and terrible thing. Mud on his boots . . . Yes, I could go on, oh yes.
But we love them anyway, don’t we, ladies? And he was stretching into those years when we can do anything, when he could do everything. He slouched and loafed, but when I watched him at work he was a beautiful sight— strong, an athlete, smooth, patient. He could have been a great builder if he had wanted. He learned new skills like that. He was like one of those lizards, you know, all slow—looking and sleepy except when a fly comes along and then FLEEM that secret tongue comes out and that fly is his.
I think I was even jealous of him sometimes. I knew that if he put his mind to it he could do anything better than I could, except plastering.
“NO, NO, JERRY, you’re moving the trowel like it’s a trowel. Move it like it’s a feather or a thought or like it’s absolutely nothing.”
“Plastering is dead, old man. Plastering is dead.”
I WISHED KATHLEEN could see him.
I told him once, I said, “I tried on a number of occasions to communicate with her, buddy, and introduce her to the spirit of Johnny Cash and everything solid and deep.”
“Well, you don’t have a clue, old man.”
And the fact is, I don’t. I have no idea at all what went on in my life, in Jerry’s life, in your life, in any life, no clue about anything but what happens in the space between me and my big white walls. I asked Jerry occasionally why it was that he hated his mother so much, but, between us, I never believed his answers and eventually we never talked about it. He never understood how pretty she was.
I started thinking about her more. I sometimes found myself driving around aimlessly and realizing that my aim was actually her.
“Don’t you miss her sometimes?” I asked him.
Maybe she would surprise us one day, “How are yiz,” at the door with a blink of an apology, or even an explanation, and a case of soda water. Maybe it would be nice. I suggested that to Jerry and that’s when he showed me a scar—said he got it while she was cutting his hair once.
I don’t know. I suppose he wouldn’t make up stories like that, but I don’t know. Kids don’t know any better than I do what is really happening around them. I don’t know.
TIME FOR ANOTHER move, my friend, a smaller place, this one here I’m sitting in. I believe, with a strong sense of justice, that it sits bright among my whitest creations. If you invite me over to your place to tell me a story I will fully expect an inferior building.
My son helped me with this one, my son and some of the old crew. It is true that McGuinty Construction was not what it used to be, but there were quite a few houses left in these arms when Jerry moved in with me and
this house was by no means my last.
We moved in as soon as we finished it. Jerry was desperate to get out of the old place. He even wanted new furniture. I decided that a good way to let Kathleen know secretly that we were keen to see her back was to give her the old furniture as a sort of message: “Remember your home?”
My bank manager said he had her address. I never asked him for it. He let the movers know where to leave the furniture, and as far as I know now Kathleen is sitting on our couch.
Don’t tell Jerry.
Come down the hall here and I’ll show you a feature I like. See, here: two studies. One there. One there. Father. Son. Jerry wanted a place where he could catch up with the years of school he missed. He said he had to be a sharper human being if he was going to be a pilot, so we made this room for him to hammer on his brain. His study is twelve square feet smaller than mine because I am his father.
What with work, school, dreaming about planes, he was even busier than I was at his age. He didn’t have all that much time to talk to me. But we worked in these rooms next to each other sometimes and those silent hours made us closer than any conversation could. We had coffee breaks and shared some solemn despair over how little I could help him with schoolwork.
I was very busy, of course, catching up with years of paperwork, figuring out what I was going to do, deciding which debts to pay first. On the advice of one of the angel demons I had invested in a few things that actually made me a fortune—no building, no skin off the hands. The paper in my office, the plaster in my houses, nothing’s real any more, I tell you: the world is made of numbers in the air. I paid my debts with a smile on my face and I tried to think what on earth I should build next.
Remember the golf-course idea?
2
I’VE SEARCHED FOR AN EVENT, a point in my life when it all went wrong. Can you see it here somewhere!
A lifetime getting to know myself has led to a fatal suppling of the truth. It languishes invalid somewhere in this buttered body of mine. With effort I can find it, but the older I get the more I hate effort.
I can walk to my wine downstairs, climb the stairs to my bedroom, but any quick movement, even a flash of my old desires, makes me ill. I have to take short breaths in my house, not just because there is so little air in my little life, but because I’m afraid of awakening myself. If I breathe deeply, move vigorously, I might start pretending again that I am young and remotely desirable.
I never admitted anything. I never went down to the lawn to see if she was all right. I simply went back to my hotel and wondered whether yearning for someone who never wanted me was actually the same as pushing. I’m sure I never pushed her.
This silly little city. If only I wasn’t . . . I can try telling you everything again—everything I really thought, everything I really said—but it would all seem even emptier. I would like to tell you a story about a man named Simon Struthers: servant of the public; giant; fiction; me. I would like to tell you where I am, but I have never really known. I believe it is somewhere between me and you. I know for certain that I was rarely in this body unless it was against someone else.
Lonely people pretend in public that they like their own company, but solitude is never comforting. It is just a heavy blanket that smothers, blocks out vision, feels safe but encourages fantasy. I am telling you, though—I assure you, that I was once perfectly likable.
Everything is new. How can I show you what it was once like for me if everything around me changes!
I have had a lot of time, far too much time. I was removed from the Division. We all were. Nothing to do with Kwyet. A simple change of taste, a new regime—even greener, thank God. For a while, anyway. The Greenbelt has become a feature of this city, no more contests around its edges; and there at one edge—believe me, I was responsible for that. But Leonard ruined me nonetheless. Never another high-ranking job because he put it about—I suspect it was Leonard—that I was hopeless, lazy, shifty, everything he thought I was. It was widely known that in all my years at the Division I accomplished only one minor project.
But he would never understand. None of you would understand unless you went inside.
One day, perhaps, I will go inside.
And I am not really ruined. No, no. Still plenty of my father’s money left, and three days a week I shuffle over to the National Archives, pretending to be old and stuffy, and I organize records, keep things in order, occasionally glance at long-dead plans, monuments of what this city might have been.
And I wander. If I have the energy I wander.
No one attractive ever visits the Archives. If I allow myself a breath of vitality, I wander around malls, generally. One in particular. I saw Kwyet there once.
You see, I tried to make amends.
I went to my hotel at first that night, but I returned to her residence later, to the lawn outside, and there was no one there. I was going to climb the stairs again, just to explain, but how could I possibly explain why I loved her so much? That is what I have been trying to do.
I tried to track her down at home, but I was afraid to get too close, afraid to give myself away, because no one would believe that I didn’t push her.
She must have known that I was following her again, because I received a note one day at my house. Stay away. Kwyet saying stay away or she would press charges.
Then I saw her, once, in this mall. I know it was her. I only saw her from behind.
So I come here, I keep watch.
Look at that, you see, that woman in the short white dress, face of Diana and hemline of Venus. There is a paradox I could wrestle with for weeks, if I should allow myself.
Mind you . . .
Look at that!
Mind you, I have no idea what she told people. She mustn’t have told Leonard. She mustn’t have been seriously hurt.
But I am in this mall to make amends.
I don’t understand why someone in a skirt that short would scruple to pull it down whenever it creeps up. Let it creep.
I have to sit down.
I did see you, Kwyet, I am sure of it. I need to explain, get back. After all, it wasn’t me. Do you understand? What I have to do, when I find her, is explain, even apologize, at least explain to her that it wasn’t me.
