Calling Home

by Michael Cadnum

  She looked so much like my father I was disturbed. It was like he had searched the entire world and found someone who looked exactly like he would look if he changed his sex. She did not look like his sister so much as she looked like his twin. And yet she was pretty, in a way, a softer version of his gaunt quickness. She was slower-moving, and had a smile that made me look down at the brown rug. I murmured that I was happy to meet her, too. She said that I should call her Linda.

  “Let’s have a drink before we go out, shall we?”

  “Reservations at seven,” said my father.

  “Oh, why then we have a few minutes. What would you like, Peter?”

  I wanted a tall bourbon, but modesty stiffened my tongue and made my countenance that of a very badly made wax dummy.

  “A Coke?” she suggested.

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  My father asked for a Bloody Mary, and joined Linda in the kitchen for some sotto voce love chatter, and when they both emerged I understood that she had said that I was so charming, and so handsome. I saw that my father was proud of me, and proud of Linda, and saw his future ahead of him, ahead of all of us, a fertile, happy country.

  Although I wanted to tell him about Mead the way a drowning man wants to kick his way out of the trunk at the bottom of a river.

  19

  My father was witty throughout dinner, sipping a dark pinot noir that I was allowed to taste, too, a wine so smooth and full that it was like sitting in a magnificent church full of plush, wine-colored carpets, with little points of light reflecting the candles. Linda listened to him. I watched her listening, and realized as she sat chewing and smiling at my father’s jokes that my mother was a terrible listener. She wouldn’t even pretend to listen; as soon as she got even a little bit bored, she would give gigantic stage yawns and begin to give little hints like “For Christ’s sake, shut up.”

  My father was happy. Linda was happy. “We’d make a nice family, don’t you think?” my father said, undoing his tie when we had returned home.

  It was a trap, a friendly trap, but I stood away from it. I formulated several stupid replies, but I could not make any of them.

  “Of course, you don’t have to decide anything now. It’s not fair for me to back you against the ropes.” He moved the brush on the dresser. “Did you like her?”

  He said it like a man who was sure of himself, knowing perfectly well that anyone would like this woman, and that the question had only one, very obvious answer. But he was vulnerable, too, and wanted to make some sort of point by asking the question. Like maybe to demonstrate to me how deficient my mother was compared with Linda. I did not want to say anything that might be understood to be a criticism of my mother, although why I wanted to protect her I have no idea.

  “Of course I like her,” I said, but my answer came so late that bad feeling had slipped into the room. My father unbuttoned his shirt with quick movements. He examined his face in the mirror like it was a recent purchase.

  “Anyone would like her,” I added, implying that she was too likeable.

  “She’s a painter, you know.” My father lifted his jaw at me as he said this, and his eyes were bright. He looked like he wanted me to take a punch at him. I had about as much fight in me as an old potato, one with bone-colored sprouts fanging out of it.

  “What does she paint?” I said in a stupid voice.

  “Scenes.” He was on his toes, practically dancing like a boxer, and I saw that my father was really in pretty good condition for a bony, wrinkled guy. He didn’t look strong, but he looked like he had a lot of stamina, and I wouldn’t want to fight my father with fists or with anything else.

  “What kind of scenes?” I asked in the same dull voice.

  “Trees and meadows. Flowers. And seascapes.”

  “Seascapes.”

  “That’s right,” my father said, stepping forward. “She paints pictures of things that she finds beautiful.” He said the word “beautiful” like it was a word from a foreign language. “Oils, and acrylics, too. She’s taken classes.”

  I nodded, wanting to agree, but how could I agree? What did I know about anything? I didn’t know. My father snapped the shoes off his feet and threw them into the closet where they hit the back wall with a bang. I sensed that he would have loved to throw the shoes at my head. Maybe my father was hoping I would heave a jar of mustard at him so he could go for my throat.

  “I can see that she’s a quality person.” I didn’t like the phrase “quality person”; it reminded me of the “quality meats” signs you see in grocery stores, but I was not very brilliant sitting there on my father’s bed. “She’s very nice.”

  “Look,” my father said, stepping into the closet. “She gave me this painting for my birthday. I got it framed as a surprise.”

  It was terrible. A murky, greenish mess that was supposed to be a forest scene. A brown skeleton at the edge of a turd-colored smear depicted a deer at the edge of a clearing. If I had painted a picture like that I would have destroyed it, or at least kept it to myself. I definitely would never have given it to anyone as a birthday present, except as a joke. I was ashamed of my father’s eager smile, and of his girlfriend’s incompetence, and I knew I would have great trouble organizing my face into an expression of courtesy, much less of appreciation.

  “What a pretty frame,” I said. “Such a big picture, too. Quite a lot of work.”

  “Yes,” my father said, beaming down at it like it was studded with diamonds and rubies and he had never even dreamed of possessing such an item of beauty. “She copied a snapshot I took. The real picture didn’t have the deer. She added that. Of course,” he added, guiding the picture into the closet, “she has a lot to learn. She’s taking classes. I think people should develop their talents as far as they can. And, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “She sells her paintings. One just like this fetched one hundred and fifty dollars at an art show.”

  I stood up, feeling that I was completely encased in hardened plaster. “That’s really great,” I said, and explained my tremendous fatigue.

  I drank the rest of the rum, swallowing long slugs of it as I sat by the open window listening to the surf. I was about to slip out the bedroom window, but I let myself out the front door, instead, reasoning that I had nothing to be ashamed of. It was ten-thirty, but I was carrying the bottle in my stomach, and I felt it was worth the risk to stand at the edge of the surf and smell the air.

  There was no light on the water this time. The water was black, with only a curl of phosphorescence as it broke. The rum had made me clumsy, and I sat down heavily. I was not drunk so much as drugged, and as I lay down, the world turned around me, not quickly, but slowly, like an old, badly trained elephant chugging around and around on one huge leg.

  The headlights leaped over the sand again, but this time I lay flat. The sound of the engine grew loud, and the spurt of static from the radio froze me as I wondered if perhaps it might be a mistake to play around with these people. It was too late, however. The jeep slowed near me and nearly stopped. Gears clucked, and the jeep eased down the slope just beyond me and drove along the edge of the foam, its taillights the brightest thing around, so bright that my hand glowed red.

  The next day, my father got into the car but held the keys in his hand. He shook open a pair of dark sunglasses and when they were hooked over his ears it made his lean face look dangerous. He put the keys into the ignition, but still did nothing but wait, like he wanted me to say something. I did, finally, although I would have said it anyway, later on, at the airport. “Thank you for having me down,” I said. “I really appeciate it.”

  He nodded sharply, and smiled and, just as quickly, did not smile. “Think about it,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it. You can live here. My life is your life.”

  He looked into his open palm like he was reading his own future, and not quite sure he liked what he saw. “You should decide
before too long,” he said. “In just a few months, it will be summer. That will be the perfect time to move.”

  Tears burned me for a moment and he put his hand to my shoulder. His fingers were strong, and worked my shoulder joint so that it emitted a creak. My shoulder hurt and I wanted to shake his hand away, but I didn’t for fear of offending him. So I sat there grinning back my tears, enduring his hand.

  20

  My mother did not talk much as she drove the freeway. I watched the factories and the rotting wooden houses roll by, dazed that I could have flown all the way from Orange County in an hour. The sun was going down and the warehouses looked gigantic and utterly empty in the pink light.

  She had made meat loaf, and we sat eating together for the first time in weeks. “So you had a good time,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Don’t be so noncommittal. You either liked it or you didn’t.”

  “He’s getting married.”

  She masked her face, but I glimpsed a flash of feeling there. A nostril flared, a wave of red swept her cheeks, then she was stone-faced. She pursed her lips. “I’m not surprised.”

  She tried to squeeze information out of me without actually asking. She pushed her plate aside and leaned on her elbows. Her face formed itself into a question, a sarcastic, elaborate expression of curiosity. “Do tell me, Peter, what this new maiden is like.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “A fountain of info.”

  “That’s all. We only met once. We didn’t say much to each other.”

  “What’s her name?”

  I savored my meat loat, which was, in fact, bland and disintegrated easily on the tongue. “Linda.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, as if the name told her a great deal and all she had to do was roll the name around in her mouth and she could picture the very woman, in all her shame. “What’s she like?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “It’s not hard to say. What does she look like?” She was mottled red, now, and her hands were fists.

  “Brunette.”

  “How old?”

  My face floated into an expression of deep idiocy. I frowned. “Hard to say.”

  “Estimate,” she spat.

  “I’m terrible at guessing ages.”

  “Younger than he is, or the same age, or what?”

  “About the same age, I think,” I said, truthfully. I was tired of the game and I wanted my mother to see that I really did not know and that I was being honest in my ignorance.

  She stared at me, an expression like contempt making her ugly. She got up slowly and turned to the sink. She leaned on the sink and stared into it and began to shake. She wept.

  I put down my fork, feeling clumsy and stupid.

  “You like her!” She spun, and her voice was fierce. “She’ll be your new mother!”

  “I’m practically a grown-up. I don’t need a new mother.”

  I had forgotten how jealous she could be, and how much she still felt for my father. And how much she cared about me.

  “I bet you think you don’t need me anymore.”

  “Well, in a way, I don’t.”

  She picked up my plate and flung it like a Frisbee at the wall. The plate bounced off the wall, and hovered like a miracle, a UFO covered with food. It clattered to the floor without breaking. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes speckled the wall.

  “Wait a minute,” I croaked. “That mess was my dinner.”

  “I guess you don’t like seeing your dinner all over the place.” She was red and had yellow spotches in her cheeks.

  For a furious moment, I wanted to hurt her badly. I wanted to drag her into Mead’s cellar to show her what her growing boy could do; I wanted her to realize that I had done terrible things. I wanted her to feel terrible about them, and I wanted her to see how little I cared about who married whom and how old anyone was or what color hair they had hanging on their head. Instead, I sat down and cleared my throat. “I’m not cleaning that up,” I said quietly.

  She picked up her plate and was going to shove the meal into my face, but the passion had gone out of her. The obvious mess she had made was sobering to her, and perhaps she felt a little regret at being so bad-tempered. She sighed, and put the plate down like she was a waitress, carefully, and just so. “I wonder if she dyes her hair,” she murmured.

  I was dumbfounded at the irrelevance of the statement, and wondered if I was expected to provide my views on the subject. “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “I wonder how they met.”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “At work, maybe.”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sat, like we were both very weary. She crossed her arms. “Does this new wife want you to come live with both of them?”

  “Dad says so.”

  “What do you think?” Her tone was so reasonable I felt, for a moment, that I was talking to a normal person.

  “I think she might, if it makes him happy.”

  “Do you know what I think?”

  I made an expression that said, “No, I don’t, and I don’t really care.”

  “I think he doesn’t really want you to come live with him. He wants to invite you down, but he wants you to see how impossible it would be for the three of you to start a new life together. You’re supposed to say thanks but no, thanks. That way he can feel like he did the right thing, without actually having to do anything. She can, too.”

  There might have been a little truth to what she was saying, but my tendency for feeling pity toward my parents had made me feel that they should not be taken seriously. I smiled in a kindly manner.

  “Is she pretty?”

  I felt like someone taking a very difficult exam in a subject he had studied a couple of years ago and could hardly remember. “Pretty?”

  “Yes. You know. Big tits.”

  “Really, Mother.”

  “I’m just trying to think like your father. He would have turned himself into a snake so he could look up women’s dresses.”

  “You don’t have to talk like that. He never says anything against you.”

  Her mouth hung open in a caricature of shock. “Never?”

  She picked up her plate and I flinched, but she marched it to the sink and sprayed the food from it under the tap and turned on the garbage disposal with such gusto that I knew she wanted me or my father, or both of us, to be down there with the meat loaf getting whipped into sewage.

  When she turned to me, she was icy. “Please go away now so I can clean up.”

  “She paints,” I said.

  She got out a mop, and leaned it against the refrigerator. She stood looking down at the chunks of meat loaf like she didn’t know where to begin. I picked up one of the larger hunks and tossed it into the sink.

  “What does she paint?” she asked as she worked.

  “Trees. Forests. Things like that.”

  “Is she any good?”

  “She’s horrible.”

  The garbage disposal growled again, a sound that made me, for just an instant, shiver.

  21

  My drawings weren’t especially good. I realized that, turning the pages of my sketchbooks early the next morning. I hadn’t been sleeping, and the sight of all my scribbles was sickening, as sickening as the smell of decay I seemed to wear like an aura whenever I was in the bedroom.

  Empty paper shows promise. It can be anything. And the pencil makes a few turns, a pirouette, and it can still be anything—almost. But as the pencil scratches the silence, and the paper, and turns it into definite failure, the paper becomes trash. Another botch.

  Lani asked how my trip had gone, and I told her that the beach was beautiful. I knew she would understand that.

  “You should come with me to meet Mr. Farrar today,” she said.

  I turned away. “I don’t want to bother him.”

  “He won’t mind at all. He’s a gentleman.” I resented this “gentleman” for mak
ing such a good impression on her.

  We walked up Lake Boulevard after school. Lani reassured me that my drawings showed promise. “Believe me—you’d be very foolish not to make it your profession.”

  “Probably a million people my age can draw.”

  “It’s not simply that you can draw. You see things in an original way. I don’t think there are a million original people your age. And anyway, there’s only one of you.”

  “You have this view of the world that’s wonderful, Lani, but I don’t think it has anything to do with reality. I admire the way you think, I even love it.” “Love” is such a potent word I stopped myself for a moment. “But things just seem like so much junk to me. Including my drawings.”

  She looked at me with cheerful disdain. “You don’t have much faith in yourself, do you?”

  “Faith has nothing to do with it.”

  “Faith has almost everything to do with it. Here we are.”

  It was a stucco duplex with a lawn baked yellow. A green hose snaked among weeds. A screen door had been clawed by a cat, and sagged, starred with tiny, irregular holes.

  “I should have worn something different,” I said, brushing at my Levi’s.

  “Like what. A toga?” She pressed the doorbell.

  The door opened, and I could see the ghost of a person, a pale shadow, someone nearly not there. “Lani, come in. And a friend of yours. How do you do?”

  A very old voice, and a very old hand. I shook it, and we were inside the darkness. The room smelled of wax, of lemon and old books. Musty, but good must, leather and furniture polish.

  Lani had introduced me, but I was hardly listening as my eyes adjusted to the book-lined shelves, and a dark, glistening cavern—the piano. It was so big it filled the room, the living room so overpowered by the piano that chairs were pressed against the wall.

  “Mr. Farrar played a carillon for the Queen’s Coronation,” said Lani. “It was a great honor.”