Robert didn’t like the look of him. In the semidark his white face was puffy under the orange fuzz of hair, the chin line loose. Why, he’s middle-aged, Robert thought. A middle-aged drinker. All this—pretending to be a boy. He’s as tired as I am.
Martine sat rocking back and forth in the little chair and shaking her head, holding her knees up against her chest with her thin, tanned arms.
Alan jumped up, sloshed wine into a mug, chugged it at the counter and poured again.
“Why not go back to bed?” Robert said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where are you going?” Martine said.
“Back out. Might have a midnight swim.” Alan leaned around the screen door to wave at them.
“But he does not swim, of course,” Martine said to Robert when the screen slammed.
“I know that and I expect he does too.” Robert had been a swimmer in college; he had a lot of stamina in the lap pool even now. Everybody in physical therapy commented on it. To his lasting chagrin neither of the boys had even learned to swim: both of them clingers to the side, refusers to jump. In high school Alan had come out of the silence that had descended on him with his mother’s death; that was when he seized hold of his eccentricities, and turned funny and scornful. “If God meant us to get into the water he would not have given us clothes.”
“You know Alan wants to divorce me,” Martine said. How would Robert have known this? Though he had noticed her eyes seeking his all evening with some grievance. “So that he can live with his friend for a while, his friend, vous savez.”
“His friend,” Robert said, bringing up a deep sigh.
“He has brought him here, that boy. That is his choice, n’estce pas? But I do not want to divorce him for this reason. I don’t see why I must do this, I don’t see why why why.” She banged her dark knees together with her palms, and then wrapped her legs in her arms. “Where is the family he promised to me?” Her lower lip stuck out and trembled.
Ah. And these were people, four of them, whom Robert hardly knew. Not his sons any more—though Ann might have known them, somehow made them familiar. Two strange couples who had driven for days and ridden ferries, not to console him for what had happened to him, not to cook soup for him, but to perform thus at midnight, with stances and gestures. I don’t want to hear, he thought. I’ve come away.
“I will not do it. I will not let a little shit come into our house because Alan is the actor, the artist that this boy will never be, and eat the food we cook, and spoil life.” A strange thought. Could Alan really be an actor? “I don’t care about this in love, I don’t care! I am his wife! I don’t want to hear about in love! Where is his work now he is in love? That is what I want to know! Where is it if he can be so imbecile?”
“I would think if you sit tight it would all blow over.”
Martine gave an angry, impatient moan and glared out the window.
Billy and Lupe had rounded the point and were working their way along the second tier of rocks. They waved, but not at the house. They must be able to see Alan. They had stopped to fumble, both of them, with the crutches. “What are they up to?”
“I can’t see exactly.”
Robert opened the screen door and went out. The rain had let up and the moon had gone behind thin sailing clouds. When it reappeared Robert could see Billy and Lupe struggling with each other. “What on earth are they doing? Where’s Alan?” Wind blew his voice away.
“Attendez!” Martine, close behind him, whispered so fiercely it raised the hair on his neck. She jumped off the porch and started to run, scrambling and sliding on the rocks. Robert started after her. “No, no, mon dieu! Billy!” Billy crouched alone, waving a crutch over the water. “No! She is down there! How did she get in? Alan! Alan is in there! Billy! Don’t let him! He can’t swim!”
“Billy can’t either!” Robert yelled, teetering to pull off his shoes. He sank a foot into the icy water and lost his balance. He went in half toppling, half skidding on the kelp and the barnacles underneath it, which felt like saws. Cold fire stabbed to the center of each bone, where it seemed his fainting self had been living undetected. Martine was in the water, slugs of black hair down over her face, and she caught him, tried in the quakes of shivering between them to pull him forward. “Save him!” she cried.
A little way out a head was bobbing rhythmically, like a dog bringing in a stick. Two heads. Alan had gone in after Lupe.
Billy had dropped onto his stomach in the sloshing water on the rock and lay groaning, dipping the crutch in the reflections like an oar. Alan reached for it. But no, it was Lupe—she was reaching. She was towing Alan.
Martine too groaned. “Mon dieu, mon dieu. Look at her. I knew it, Alan, I knew you have gone crazy.”
“Come on!” Billy shouted. “Get out, get out, get outta the way, they’re coming up! Lupe!”
Martine went on wading out but Robert obeyed. He had no feeling in his fingers and he used his wrists to haul himself back onto the rocks, the chattering of his teeth making his head nod with a kind of wild approval.
Lupe had Alan under the chin, as if she were bringing in just his head. She was barely above the water, barely swimming, just the one arm turning like a wheel with one spoke. How could she swim at all? Her left arm came slowly out of the water and up and around, out and up and around, and finally her hand grasped the hand-piece of the crutch. She rolled onto her back and passed the head to Billy. Martine got under the shoulders and Billy strained backward, whereupon Alan’s long body came sliding and bumping up out of the water onto the kelp, as if they had rehearsed, as a team, just this ponderous transmission—Martine and Billy shoving and pulling cruelly, as though they didn’t care if parts tore off—of something like a rolled-up rug. Alan’s only role was to breathe rasping, speechless chords. Blood was leaking along his forehead.
Then Lupe came up out of the water like a seal, on her elbows, and Billy took her under the arms as he would have a child and hoisted her onto the rock. He wrapped her in his arms as if he could soak her into himself.
“Alan jumped in!” he croaked finally, letting go of her. “Alan, you idiot! He jumped in! We saw him! We saw him do it!” Staggering on his knees back to Alan he lifted him by the shoulders and shook him so hard his head made the kelp splash. “God damn it. God damn it, if you’re gonna kill yourself do a better fucking job of it. You risked Lupe’s life.” Alan said something unintelligible, blinking watery blood and letting his head roll with abandon, as if he were acting the part of a victim.
“Yes, go ahead. Kill him,” Martine said through her hair. “That is what you should do. I think so. Put him out of his misery. Smash his head. Kill him.”
THEY were dressed for bed, each wrapped in a blanket, but they didn’t go to bed. Martine had lit candles and spread the towels on the clothes rack. They steamed by the woodstove. Lupe had actually gathered more of the orange material onto her lap and was pinning on pattern in the half-dark. Alan lay on the glider under Ann’s old cross-stitched quilt, with a pillowcase tied around his head. “I’m sorry,” he said every now and then. He accepted the mug of coffee Martine held out at arm’s length.
“We will have wine, but not you, Alan, you are drunk,” she said, and Robert experienced a small relief because she used a voice of unshocked exasperation, the voice a schoolteacher might use to deny a troublemaker his moment, his having achieved any disruption worth noticing.
“Lupe? Billy? I’m sorry.”
“No shit,” said Billy.
“He is sorry,” Lupe said.
“I don’t know why you did that, Lupe, or how,” Alan said, bowing with folded hands.
Lupe said brightly, “I went to camp. I was the lifeguard.”
“Martine?” Alan said, turning his big eyes, now full of tears, on his wife. He was an actor. But Martine stood over him with the malignant look of a child who is going to kick another child.
“You could be dead,” she began. “We could be pulling the s
eaweed out of your pretty teeth. Here”—she stamped her foot—“we would have a puddle. A smelling puddle.”
“Stinking,” said Alan. Something boyish crept into his face, something abashed and foolish and at the same time sly.
“Don’t dare to look at me like that!” Martine stamped her foot again.
Gazing up at her, Alan allowed a smile to appear. He touched the turban. “I must be the sheik,” he said.
The turban was coming untied, exposing a red seam in his skin, running into the hairline, with white edges curled back like a snail’s foot.
For a minute Martine stood over him as they watched. When she moved, it was to swish the skirt of her dark red robe with a knee. “I wonder why we did not go to look for a doctor who will sew his brain back into his head. Perhaps we do not care about him very much.” She folded her arms. “Why should we? Just because he is charming, and a sheik? When we know all about them, these sheiks. How they are. Why should we save him at all?” She sat down and put her face in her hands.
“But why not?” Lupe got up and swung forward, breasts swimming under the yoke of her flannel nightgown, to lean over and half embrace Martine, who sat up suddenly and hissed at Alan, “And did you thank this child?”
“Hey, I’m twenty-nine,” Lupe said.
Alan said, “Lupe, I thank you a thousand times. I am yours. I mean it. I have become yours. I am now your responsibility. I’m absolutely serious. Don’t you think she should have to take care of me, Martine? Of both of us, in fact?”
“I will take care of him for you,” Martine said to Lupe, snatching up a wine bottle by the neck.
Lupe said, “Spare him! If you kill him we will have to bury him. How will I get these dresses done in time for the wedding?”
“Well, now,” Robert said. “The wedding. What do you say we go back and start all over again? What if I said . . . oh, what if I said I’ve been giving some thought to getting married myself?”
“My God,” said Alan. “That is to say, who?”
“Who?” cried Martine and Lupe together.
“I’m kidding you.”
“I do not think so,” said Martine.
What made him go on? “But there is a woman in the office right at the moment.”
“Who?”
“Well, my secretary.”
“Your secretary!”
Loretta! As if Loretta would marry him!
Loretta talked on the telephone every day. She talked to a man; he could tell that. Her voice sank and her chair creaked as she ran it idly back and forth on the acrylic runner. “Oh no you will not! Nossir! Not at my place! You know I have grandkids! Stop that right now!” If Robert came in she rolled her eyes and turned her thumb down on the man on the phone, but she did not hang up.
Loretta might kiss Robert, as she had when he came out of the hospital. She might tie balloons to his chair, and bring in a cake she had made herself, but that didn’t mean she would marry him.
Nevertheless he was flooded with relief at the thought of Loretta and of his office. He would be back in less than three weeks. “It went all right,” he would say. “I got the seawall rebuilt. Of course, I had to do it without a blueprint.”
“What’s her name?” Lupe had pulled herself close to his chair. He told her. “So, and it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” he added in a whisper, “but who is Lee Ann?” He was safe, momentarily, in a vacuum of calm at the thought that it was so, it didn’t matter to him; whatever his earlier suspicions, he had lost interest in them. But if that was so why ask the question at all? Why? And it was too late. Lupe had veiled the lower part of her face with the blanket from her shoulders, and above it the eyes studying him were black, unreadable without the rest of the face. It might be they were sharp with curiosity and mischief, but agreeable, as they had been. They might as easily be sad, as sad as the eyes of the gaping fish on the book cover, for they had set off a sadness in him that spread, warm and bitter. “Lee Ann. That’s Darren’s sister. My sister-in-law,” Lupe said behind the blanket.
He couldn’t understand what she said next. It might have been a language of Guatemala. An Indian language. It might have been the language of horses.
“I am sorry, Robert . . . your fiancée . . . I want to know . . . but now I am so tired.” Martine was pulling the red robe around her, closing her eyes. “Move the towels so they will not burn, will you, somebody? Merci, and wax is melting, I think. I smell it. And keep us warm.”
Billy moved the towels back from the stove, blew out the guttering candles, opened the grate and began stirring up the coals with the poker. Alan limped over and hunched beside his brother. In the firelight they made hoods of their blankets and waved the heat at themselves. With their backs to him Robert couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed they were conferring rather soberly and officially. They seemed to have something in common that he had not suspected. They seemed to be men, men who had appeared while he slept a hundred years. He supposed they were doing their best to form an idea of a woman who might marry him. A woman pleasant and elderly, settled in her habits but having her reasons. Thinking, no doubt, all of them, of his secretary Rose Fitch.
All but Lupe, who sighed, “Loretta! And look! The moon is back! It’s yellow! Who wants to go out before we go to bed? Come on!” She clambered to her feet with the energy in which Robert recognized an old, put-away, restless woe. In a few minutes she had them all outside, standing on the bluff wrapped in blankets, like figures who had made their way down out of the highlands and reached the sea.
The Stabbed Boy
THE summer of the stabbing, he attended Vacation Bible School. Who took him there, along with his sister, who did not survive? His teacher, Mrs. Rao, from the Methodist church where the Bible school was held. How did she know them? Had anyone in his family ever been to a service there? That was for his biographers to answer.
His sister was in a class down the hall, with the kids who were already in school and reading. She was seven years old; he was five.
Because there was polio then, on the first day the teacher handed out a note for them to take home and after that each kid came with a thermos or a jar of his or her own juice. For him, Mrs. Rao brought a clean glass and poured out juice from her own thermos. She did it for his sister too, because he and his sister were her helpers and the three of them got there early. Sometimes she used the time to play the piano, always telling the two of them that it was out of tune. He came to think he could hear what she meant.
One day Mrs. Rao took him upstairs into the ladies restroom, past the open doors of the still room of wooden rows for which he did not have the word sanctuary, and she combed his hair with a little water. Another day she washed his hands. In their workbooks they were doing Put On the Full Armor of God, which he would find later to be words of the Apostle Paul, about whom he would write a poem when he was in his fifties. They were pasting silver and gold breastplates and helmets on an outline of a man with bulges in his arms and legs. “A giant,” he said. Then and afterward, he spoke in bursts of one or two words. “No face.” “It’s a silhouette,” said Mrs. Rao. Silhouette. It sounded like a bird, not a giant. He had been careful not to get paste on his hands, but she washed them anyway, leaving him with a clear memory of gray water with bubbles in it going down the drain of the church sink.
Now that he is famous he sometimes brings up Mrs. Rao in interviews. His story is not known; it is not in his poems. He’s in L.A. now, and in his adult life and travels, he has never even met anyone familiar with the small once-industrial city in the Midwest where he was born. So it is not unusual for him to be asked about his youth, urged to recall something that might have set him on his path as a poet. One of these interviews in which he gave credit to Mrs. Rao’s attention, her eyes, piano, black hair in a sort of coil—for this hairdo he had yet to find a word—resulted in the phone call that led to his third marriage.
“Oh my goodness, it is you! It’s Lisa! I was Lisa Rao. Lisa!
The Raos’s daughter! I’m visiting my daughter here in town and I just had to call you up. You’re right there in the phone book!” He had a little speech for deflecting this kind of admirer. But what a coincidence! She was sitting at the breakfast table and just happened to open the entertainment section of her daughter’s paper and there was the interview, and there, her mother’s name! “I was in Vacation Bible School with you! I can see you now, that little plaid shirt you had on every day!” Tactless reminder, and what could have possessed him, that he invited her to meet him for a drink? He must have seen her as coming at him straight out of a church basement in Michigan, from a table of paste and scissors, a woman who would say grace before drinking her juice and never come upon the life-altering taste of alcohol.
He wouldn’t have recognized Lisa Rao, or seen in her any of the Indian reds and golds and graces he had added to her mother over the years, but in the bar she walked right up to him. He had chosen the place to send her on her way, a dark bar with hunched permanent occupants and a smell of beer in the floorboards. Quickly she drank two rum and cokes. Like him, she had had two marriages. She said Frank, her favorite, had died three years ago and while they had had their rough years, there were things she missed a great deal. She suggested he come to the motel where she was staying. Her daughter had too many children to allow for a guestroom. He went with her and nothing came of it because although her way of lowering her eyes in the grip of her own imaginings had not escaped him in the dark bar, she was much too old for him, his own age. But they met again the next day, and over time and her persistent phone calls and visits to L.A. they became friends, and finally he married her. It was his one good marriage. She cleaned up his house and banned his drinking friends in favor of a private rite for occasions ending in the bedroom.
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