Marie believed in cosmic coincidences. Clairvoyance. Doppelgangers. She wanted Idaho Greg to be GJ, had believed it for seven rings. She didn’t have to say any of this to Greg for him to get it. He wanted to give her something in return.
“I went to a strip club last night.” The cat darted from the room, its tail in a hook, back arched.
“Of course you did,” Marie said.
“I didn’t want to come here,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t want to keep driving.” He meant driving toward anything, driving toward any kind of ending, the journey is the destination, he’d heard that from Marie on more than one occasion, sweet Jesus was there ever an end to his constant inward lava-hot rivers of bullshit? His middle felt as heavy as a trunk full of lead, slowly crushing his internal organs, allowing less and less oxygen into his lungs. But that’s exactly how fatasses die, right?
“I think you want me to feel surprised, but I’m not surprised,” she said. “You are a classic evader. That’s just your way. Don’t worry, now I know that it’s a man’s way. Most men, anyway.”
Again she was saying what he’d already said, what he’d already admitted, what he’d been admitting for years, and acting like it was a newsflash. Like they were playing cat’s cradle with razor wire. No wonder GJ got messed up, in the middle of all that.
“It was a waste of time,” Greg said. Marie had never remarried, didn’t have a partner to be alone but not lonely with, though she’d had serious boyfriends over the years, all soft-spoken, thin men who made eye contact like meeting Greg was the most important moment of their lives. All men the exact opposite of Greg. You both want the same thing. The sun was setting, though in Florida it could take hours to finally disappear. Rays the color of margarine were oozing through the mini-blinds, melting over the mini-jungle on the porch, making everything feel stilled, silent, already decided. Greg had finally stopped sweating. He felt the urge to say more, explain himself, fill the silence, since sitting quietly with his ex-wife, this woman who was the girl on the library steps, this woman who’d given birth to GJ, a sick man who was their son, was almost too much to bear. It felt odd, awkward, revealing, the way sex with a stranger feels. More intimate than anything else in the entire world at that very moment.
Instead he and Marie stayed quiet for a while, strangers in the waning daylight, he sunken into the couch and she perched in her chair and their son a subtle fume hovering between them, a tickle in their throats, a bruise, until the margarine changed to buttermilk and Marie finally spoke.
“I think we should get out of here,” she said, leaning forward. “I’ll pin your pants leg and then we should go to that area of town where he likes to hide.” She meant Orange Blossom Trail, a street name that evoked the sweet scent of the flowers on an orange tree, nothing more Floridian than that, but which housed cheap motels and threadbare shacks and which most likely smelled like crack, meth, sex, death. It was home for GJ; it was where he could get what he needed, be among others like him, hide out in rooms with walls blackened by fire or mold.
“Leave my pants leg,” Greg said. “I’ll fit in better.” He hadn’t meant to be funny, had actually meant it, but Marie hooted out of her nostrils at him, and it made him laugh, too, and soon they were laughing quiet helpless laughs and wiping fat tears away. They were idiots, and they were someone’s parents, and this wasn’t the first time they’d laughed when laughing was the farthest thing from appropriate. They were old. GJ was aging, too. And they were about to head down OBT in Marie’s grandmotherly Buick to search for him, like this was a movie starring some actors who’d also gotten old. Maybe they’d even fumble with a flashlight, or get scared when a homeless man approached and accidentally run over the man’s foot as they screeched away in fear. Nothing felt real, or maybe everything felt too real. Just gestures in the dark, no one knows how to work the flashlight. Or the movie projector. Or the sun was finally gone and the sky was a black wipe of nothingness. Or too muchness. Hard to see your son in all the black, count the tiles if you can find the seams, the disco ball is missing all its mirrored tiles and yet it spins and spins. Shut up! Marie was holding her hands out to pull him up from the couch, something Greg considered rejecting, but the lead trunk was what it was.
Her hands were still cold, still strong and icy. Together they pulled him off the couch. “You’re too big,” she said. She pointed at the hard drum of his belly. “You’re killing yourself.” In fact, his heart was beating, thundering around his chest in a rage. From her touch? From the exertions of standing? From both? He was pathetic, just a man who stopped at a strip club on the way to see his son, a man who thrilled at the touch of a woman he hated. A woman who’d just called him fat. But he was fat.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. The Band-Aid was clinging by one flesh-toned flap. He’d leave that, too. He’d go to OBT as himself, dragging along his own wounds and his own salt and sugar addictions. Everyone was just a lonely mouth, a mouth with teeth, a mouth with ventricles, a muddy hole of a mouth in the crook of someone’s elbow. He wanted to ask Marie for something to eat, something to tide him over on the drive, though he wasn’t hungry. Just something to do while they drove, something to focus on, something to devour. Something he could complete—ah, now he was getting somewhere! Every bite a triumph. But he’d have to wait until he was alone in the RV, alone with the RV, away from the wide all-seeing eyes of Marie and her cat.
“Let’s start at Liquor Garage,” Marie was saying. She put a small backpack on, tugged its straps until it was snug. “I can’t carry a purse anymore. It hurts my back. This distributes the weight evenly.” She said this last part with her palms down, like two plates of a scale; it was clearly something she’d heard the salesperson say. Marie always had some new gimmick, diet, gadget that made life make sense suddenly; then two months later she had a new thing. Trying to be young. Deb had carried the same purse for years, as far as Greg could remember. Again he felt thankful for Deb’s simplicity. It had been only twenty-four hours since he’d seen her, a single day. How could that be possible?
“GJ got kicked out of the Garage, I thought,” Greg said. It was a liquor store that had a small bar in the back, a place where you went solo and with a small stack of cash to pay for a blow job, or where you could go to watch such a thing take place. GJ had been arrested there for soliciting, though he’d told them that was a lie, he’d gone there to have a drink, not to suck someone off. He shouldn’t have been doing either. GJ protested vehemently when he was lying, and he always needed money. After that Greg looked for reasons to give him what he needed. Birthdays, Christmas, even Easter, the reasons more for his own justification than for GJ’s. Anything to keep him off his knees. Deb didn’t approve.
“Yes, but I’m sure he’s gone back since then. Or maybe someone there has seen him.” They both might have said, Well, we have to be doing something. Shrug. The whole idea felt like exactly that: an idea one of them had that the other was too bored or scared or tired to say was a bad one. But it was something. Marie was holding the door open now, waiting for him, and Greg tried not to hobble or limp as he passed her, but it hurt to put all of his weight on his busted knee. He practiced, gingerly leaning on that leg a bit more, and then a bit more, while Marie locked up. He could see her bra line pushing into the soft flesh of her back. Again it hit him that they were old now. It was stuffy in the hallway, the only access to fresh air was the opening on each end, and where they stood the air felt canned, hot, stale. Still, Greg shuddered. Someone’s walking over your grave, his mother used to say, her voice intrigued, suddenly excited, interested in him, now that he was dead.
A parent had called Greg at work. Greg almost didn’t take the call; it had been hard, back then, to shift focus from work to home. A matrix of numbers and hidden formulas was on his screen; a printout of something nearly identical was on the desk in front of him. He had been about to highlight a row in a bright unearthly green. Green was for improvements. The sickly pink was for mistakes. “There�
�s a woman on the line,” his secretary said. “She says she’s the parent of one of GJ’s friends.” Greg figured it was about a birthday party, or a field trip, or even a fight at school. He nearly said, Take a message and I’ll call them back, or Tell them to call Marie, but he didn’t. She was at one of her all-day conferences. He took the call.
“This is Greg,” he said. He cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could still use the highlighter.
“Did you know that your son gave my son alcohol?”
There were times throughout GJ’s childhood when a moment like this occurred, and Greg recognized it as an opportunity to lose his shit or to laugh at the predictability of growing up. GJ was fourteen years old, a little young to be drinking, but it was natural for a boy to be curious and hell, he’d been sipping from Greg’s beers and cocktails for a while.
“Did he, now?” He felt himself putting on the voice of a bemused parent, a father who understood, parent to parent, that kids make mistakes, a father who never lost his shit. He waited for the voice on the other end of the line to adopt the same voice, to say something like What are we going to do with these kids?
“My son has alcohol poisoning,” the voice said. “The doctor said if he hadn’t gotten his stomach pumped he could have died. They were drinking at your house.”
“Is this Doyle’s mother?” Doyle had been GJ’s buddy lately, a short boy with big pink ears and thick ankles. A funny boy. He’d once greeted Greg with What’s crappening?
“Of course this is Doyle’s mom. Who did you think you were speaking to?” Greg had never met her, but he felt the familiar ringing in his ears that always occurred when he didn’t like someone, particularly a woman someone. Particularly Marie. Maybe he should have met GJ’s friends’ parents. Wasn’t that something parents did? Doyle once tried to give Greg the few dollars he had from his pocket, on a night when he’d offered to order the boys pizza. He seemed like a good kid. Too good for GJ, he found himself thinking. These kinds of thoughts were happening more and more. He found himself internally balking at the idea that he could be proud of his boy. Too egotistical. To self-celebrating. Too Marie-ish. Nobody was perfect. What he meant was, love is not unconditional. What he meant was, Doyle was not as worldly as GJ. Doyle was still an innocent.
“I’m very sorry,” Greg said. He was still holding the highlighter; it was wet and slippery from his sweaty fingers. He had started sweating more and more lately, now that he’d put on a few pounds. Well, he was happy, and Deb was a good cook, and the divorce was almost final, and he would not be the one to end up alone. “What can I do? Are you at the hospital? Is GJ with you?”
“No, Mr. Reinart. This incident occurred yesterday. Doyle is already back at home. I told GJ I would wait for him to tell you, but I can see that he hasn’t yet.” GJ had called, Greg remembered. The night before, when he and Deb were eating dinner. He’d let it go to the answering machine. “I just thought you should know,” the woman said. “They were drinking whiskey. Fourteen-year-old boys, Mr. Reinart.”
Greg wanted, badly, to go back to the highlighting. To run the marker through the whole conversation, the whole afternoon, turning it all pink. The vertical blinds in his office window were moving gently, stirred by the air-conditioning; beyond that, the highway and the highway crossing it and the highway underneath that unfurled and invaded and grew like cement ivy, cars fleeing in either direction, the sun running its glinting diamonds across their hoods.
Yesterday had been a Monday. He’d dropped GJ off at school after his weekend with him. So GJ must have waited for his car to drive off, and then he and Doyle must have gone right back to the house to drink. Why his house, though? Why not Marie’s condo? He felt his face get warm. GJ was trying to make a statement. A fuck you, Dad kind of statement. If you don’t watch it, children will walk all over you. Greg’s mother, standing in the kitchen, talking to a weeping neighbor. You can’t let them get the upper hand. At the time, Greg had thought, Oh, bullshit. He didn’t walk all over his mother, because she was impervious. He could do something to make her proud or he could shit on her prized linoleum and her reaction would have been the same: eyes on him like they were trying to bring him into focus, like he was someone she recognized but couldn’t quite place, then a slow, accusing drag of her cigarette, and then he would break eye contact and it would be over. Her neighborly advice was bullshit, did not jibe with who she was as a mother, but now Greg felt his heart beat faster, that acidy flip in his stomach; was GJ trying to make a fool of him?
He had once gone too far, himself. There had been more than one incident, actually, but only one time when GJ saw it happen, when he was around eleven years old. They’d gone to Mick’s, had ordered burgers and fries and onion rings, one of Mick’s thin milkshakes for GJ and beer after beer for Greg. At some point he must have switched to whiskeys, neat, just that gorgeous caramelly slosh two fingers up the scratched glass, that warm bite in his throat. Then suddenly he’d been outside, flat on his back in the parking lot, looking up at a man who he first thought was trying to help him up before realizing it had been the man who’d put him down. His own blood was running into his mouth; his nose felt like a shattered coffee mug. The man who hit him had his hands on GJ’s shoulders, was bent over talking into the boy’s face, though GJ’s eyes were on Greg, watching him try to stand, try not to throw up, then throwing up as discreetly as he could, in between his dress shoes, each heave making his nose feel reshattered. It was Mick himself, the man who had hit him. Greg had celebrated birthdays, promotions, his divorce, all at Mick’s. He’d taken GJ there that night to celebrate the boy’s good report card. And now Greg had to watch, thick mucus on his chin, as Mick held his son by the shoulders to the earth. Had to allow his boy to lead him to a cab, to dab at his slacks with the white rag Mick had shoved at Greg for his nose. What did he tell you? Greg asked GJ, over and over. What did he say about me? Finally, GJ answered. He said sometimes people need their asses kicked. He said you’d been needing it a long time. The cabbie watched them in the rearview. Don’t stain my leather, he kept saying. Fifty bucks extra if you stain my leather. Greg held his head back, wiped the slowing blood into his own mouth so he wouldn’t stain the leather. He was suddenly sober, each beat of his heart a firework of pain in his nose. GJ watched out the window. When they got home, Greg gave GJ all the cash he had, a couple hundred dollars. He had wanted to give the boy something, for his report card, as an apology, as a way of thanking him for not crying, for not losing his shit. The next day they told Marie that Greg had been hit by a ball at the batting cages. He had wanted to ask GJ what he’d done, why he needed his ass kicked, but he couldn’t risk bringing it up again, not when it seemed as hazy as a dream, a nightmare, something they both woke up from and felt relieved was over.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Greg said. “I’m sorry about Doyle.”
“Your son is different than he used to be,” Doyle’s mother said. “He’s not the same.”
“Yes, I know what the word different means,” Greg said. He suddenly felt hot with anger at this woman, this woman who presumed to know anything about his son, who would not accept his apology.
“I’m glad that you do,” the woman said. “You know, Doyle’s father and I divorced when he was a baby, so he never had to be a part of … all that. It can be hard on a child.” She hung up the phone, so gently that Greg thought she was just taking a pause, until the dial tone kicked in, hollering loud and dull.
It was almost two-thirty; GJ would be getting out of school soon, getting on the bus, walking the three blocks to Marie’s condo. Greg capped both highlighters and put on his suit coat, which was getting tight in the shoulders. He took it off and slung it over his arm. He dinged his elbow on the doorjamb on his way out, his secretary yelling out a surprised “Oh!”
“I’m fine,” he said. And then in the elevator on the way down he said it again to his reflection in the gold mirrored walls: “I’m fine.” Since he was a boy, it had
felt good to say things out loud to himself. It made everything more real; it made him feel like he was transcending the shape-shifting unreality of the world by attempting to define it. Today is Tuesday. I work on the fourteenth floor, which is actually the thirteenth floor, but the superstitious idiots who designed the building refused to name it that. My son … He wasn’t sure how to complete the sentence. My son needs his ass kicked—there, that did the trick.
GJ was nearly home when Greg drove up, walking slowly along the curb since there was no sidewalk leading in to the condo, just marshy, wet grass. His face when he bent into the open window of Greg’s car was an alarming shade of red, his hair stuck to his forehead in wet points and the sweet smell of hot sweat coming off the boy in waves, like steam from a pot.
“Get in,” Greg said.
“It’s okay, I can walk.”
“You know why I’m here?”
“Of course.” GJ often came off like he knew the answer before anyone, had made his peace with it hours ago. He got that from his mother. Intuition sharp as a blade. It felt like mind reading sometimes. But sometimes he gave them both too much credit. Of course GJ knew why he was here; it had happened only the day before.
“Get in,” Greg said again. You have a scary mouth sometimes, Marie had told him once. It gets small and white. He felt his mouth doing that now. He had been terrified of his mother, had never talked back to her or crossed her in any way because of it. He hadn’t done a good enough job of making his son afraid of him. He’d wanted the boy to know him in a way he’d never known his mother. He waited for GJ to buckle up, and then he slapped the boy, the angle of his body and the closeness in the car making it more of a cuff on the ear.
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