Sailors? Out beyond the last swimmers, a few dwindled polycolored boats are drawing designs upon a sea like a pale chalkboard. Their little triangular sails are the symbols of a special kind of math—the geometry of the sensualist—and the curves they trace are a record of a pure pursuit of pleasure. Meanwhile, overhead, the sky’s another sort of chalkboard. Employing another sort of chalk, a silver jet trails a feathery white line. Good Lord, it’s a beautiful day . . .
I say: “I’ve been mulling over a remark of Conrad’s, about you, which didn’t make much sense to me at the time. He said you couldn’t really do what you’re doing now, couldn’t move to France for months at a stretch, until Wes died. That you felt you had to be there for him.”
“You know how Conrad overstates things . . .” Sally pauses, though, pulls reflectively on her cigarette, and changes her tack: “But I suppose I did feel somewhat solicitous. Toward Wes. Particularly as his marriage came undone.”
“So just how close were you and Wes at that point? How often did you talk to him after Gordon died?”
“It varied, honey, it depended on Wes. He always contacted me—or he’d just show up, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, and was I going to throw the man out without a cup of coffee? I worried of course about Tiffany, about the suitability of my having tête-à-têtes with another woman’s husband. That may sound ludicrously narcissistic, given that I’m not far from being a senior citizen and Tiffany is still a very attractive girl. But I certainly don’t want to sound like Nancy Reagan at Charles and Diana’s wedding, explaining that she chose her outfit so as not to upstage the bride!”
“You’ve got a ways to go before you sound like Nancy Reagan.”
“The truth is Wes needed to talk. I used to pray—I’d pray nightly—that that marriage would hold together . . . And then things got still more complicated when Tiffany started telephoning me.”
“Really? Often?”
“Often enough. Poor girl, I think she felt I might have useful insights into Wes’s character—I might be able to help.” Sally reaches too late for the ashtray. Her cigarette drops an exploding load of gray powder on the tabletop. “The fact is, I wanted nothing more in the world than to help her—to help them both. She was so young, she couldn’t understand Wes’s vulnerability. Of course I had to wonder how much good I’d done either one when they separated—”
“I gather she threw him out.”
Sally winces, pulls again on her cigarette, then faces the truth straight on: “All right, when she threw him out.”
“She says she had good cause. She . . .”
But this time I’m the one who hesitates. Does Sally know that Wes, even at the end, was propositioning his wife’s friends? Perhaps she does. In any case, she cuts me off: “I’m sure she had good cause.”
I break the ensuing silence. “Eighty thousand dollars.”
“Honey, I can’t tell you how ashamed I feel.”
“You shouldn’t. You were trying to help him.”
“But I couldn’t say no.”
“Exactly. You couldn’t say no.”
Sally corrects me: “No, I mean I couldn’t say no. I lacked the willpower. Do you see what I’m saying? I loved Wes.”
“Of course you did.”
“No, I mean I loved him. I mean I went on loving him. I mean, oh honey”—and the urgent raw exploratory look in her blue eyes tests me, and pleads with me—“I mean I was in love with him. I mean I was in love with that man until the day he died.”
And now it seems the two of us have arrived at the last admission, the one situated even beyond her employment of a long-forbidden word: For we’re speaking now of that variety of love which lies on the other side of fucking.
Until the day he died . . . My eyes drift over the pale chalkboard of the sea. Two things—it seems I recognize two things simultaneously. (But in actual fact one probably follows the other in rapid succession.)
I realize first that this woman, whom I consider the wisest person I’ve ever known, with all of her bookish wit and her endless measured qualifications and her great calm ironic but unbitter amusement at life, has always been a fool for love—a fool for the man with the picturesque ears and the marvelously good-looking tonsils.
And I realize that it’s been precisely in her recognition of her essential nature, and her accommodation to it, that much of her wisdom resides.
Still staring out over the sea, I say to my mother: “So Conrad was mostly right. You wouldn’t have felt free to move here while Wes was alive.”
“All right: Yes, there’s a good deal of truth in it. I couldn’t let Wes stray too far away. I had to be nearby. Yet there’s another impulse at work here. You must understand—this has been something of a lifelong dream of mine: someday I’d move to France and study French. You know the story of my studying French in high school.”
“Your father wouldn’t allow it.”
“He disliked the French, who were a frivolous people. But we had a neighbor who was French, Delphine Queffelec, a war bride, who was willing to teach me. So I sneaked around; I learned it all catch-as-catch-can. And from the start, I dreamed of going back to the source, of learning things right.”
She signals to the waiter. We’re each going to have a third kir.
“The reason I go into it all again, Luke, is to show you that I’ve always had a sense of obstacles in my pursuit of French. Yes, right up until Wes’s death there was always some reason why this aspiration of mine, this vision of myself sitting right here, in a little café on the beach near the town where I live—why it wasn’t practicable.
“And I can’t tell you how odd it is suddenly to be able to say to myself, I can move to France if I want to. Honey, I can’t tell you how odd it is to have the obstacles at last removed.
“And why are they removed? It’s because Poppa’s dead, twenty years now, and Gordon is dead, whose practice kept him too busy for extended vacations in France, and Wes is dead, who may not actually have needed me around but who convinced me he needed me around, and whom I learned to keep at a distance but whom I couldn’t bear to be too distant from, and my son is long grown and living on the East Coast, and it looks as though Conrad is dying. Let me tell you something: If you find the landscape of your life is open and clear, it’s because it’s unpeopled.”
And how am I to reply to Sally, who looks so crestfallen and forlorn? I say, “Unpeopled? You have more friends than anyone I know . . .”
“You know who I miss? It occurred to me the other day: I miss God. I miss the fierce, fulminating, frightening Lord Almighty of my childhood. Not that I’ve joined the ‘scoffers and naysayers,’ as Momma used to call them, and yet at that Unitarian church I selected because it seemed so enlightened and so appealingly life-embracing I can’t seem to locate a God who frets one way or another about what I or anyone else does. This is a God whose motto seems to be I’m okay, you’re okay. And one more stern presence is subtracted from my life . . . No, the only deeply disapproving, censorious force left in my cosmos is Conrad, bless his prickly heart, and when he dies that will be one more obstacle, one more curb on my behavior subtracted. He’ll no longer be there to chide me for my extravagance, or for daring to outlive my husbands, or for any of twenty other offenses. Heavens, I’ll miss him. When he dies, I’ll be one step closer to freedom—only think of the cost involved. The truth is, I’d give anything to have Wes materialize once more on my doorstep with one of his absurd get-rich schemes. It was all so gorgeous and seductive—those golden, dreamy plans for his new life. Honey, I’d love to let him let me toss another eighty grand down the drain . . .”
When I get back to the States, a strange envelope awaits me. After a moment I recognize the haphazard blend of capitals and lowercase, cursive and printing:
Dear Mister Luke Planter,
That first letter of yours got me to thinking and before long it got me doing some of what you call research of my own. Nothing much came of it until I went to an Aunt of m
ine here. She may be getting on in years, as they say, but she knows a lot more about a lot more than she lets on.
It seems there’s been a good deal of lies being spread around here on all sides over the years but nobody did more of the Lying and the Spreading than old Wesley Sultan.
Though to judge from your last letter maybe you’re just as big a liar as good ol’ Wes ever was.
By the way if you’re looking for your halfbrothers and halfsisters I hope you understand, the list doesn’t stop with me.
I already wished you luck with your research. When you’re all finished with it I hope you’ll print it up in a great big deluxe HEAVY book. Then I hope you’ll tie it all up with a gold ribbon, and tie the other end to the end of your dick, and go toss it over the side of the nearest bridge.
Wesley Giardina
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Just outside Restoration there’s a popular diner, O’Donnell’s, located beside the Michicabanabee River. The restaurant’s builders had two constructions to think about—the restaurant itself and its parking lot—and you might suppose, mathematically, that they had a 50 percent chance of getting it right: of setting the restaurant beside the scenic river. But, predictably, they did it the other way round, placed the parking lot next to the Michicabanabee and the restaurant beside the parking lot, so that diners have a view not of the river wending down through pine and birch and hemlock, but of large, hungry people unpacking themselves from their minivans and pickups, marching purposefully toward great platters of chicken-fried steak and beer-batter onion rings and Hawaiian macadamia hot-fudge sundaes . . .
I breakfast at O’Donnell’s and head west across the state to Battle Creek. It’s a discouraging, billboard-plastered drive. Given a fifty-fifty chance of getting things right, here were my fellow Michiganders consistently getting them wrong. Oh my home state! I’m thinking as I cross into Pheasant Ridge, surely one of the ugliest housing developments on God’s green earth. Things don’t have to be this dismal! is the thought uppermost in my mind as I pull into Adelle and Bernie’s driveway. This is weather to accentuate the unsightliness in anything and everything. It’s a dark leafless November day and the lusterless sky looks like a painted backdrop of coat after coat of leaden gray. Sunlight, moonlight, starlight— no hint of a glint could ever pierce such a color. Having passed literally hundreds of TV satellite dishes on my drive, I find it only fitting that I wind up parking underneath one, and discover Bernie watching a football game.
Bernie is so often the butt of family jokes (not only from Conrad, who is dependably ferocious, but even sometimes from Sally) that it isn’t easy to regard him fully as a person in his own right . . . He seems placed on the Sultan family stage purely as a provider of comic relief. Bernie’s a big slope-shouldered man in his fifties, with a baggy sagging face and a haircut that belongs on a little boy: a full head of downy sandy-brown hair forever springing up in unruly cowlicks. It creates a constant impression—often accurate—that he has just risen from bed.
We shake hands in the living room, I talk a little about the drive. Bernie asks me about New York, about my mother’s stay in France, about Conrad’s health . . . but all the while his gaze keeps stealing to the TV screen. Adelle repeats an offer, already extended a number of times over the phone, that I stay on here in Pheasant Ridge for Thanksgiving dinner, now only two days away. “Our guest room is just crying out for visitors”—she squeezes my arm— “and we’d adore having you, wouldn’t we? Bernie?” And Bernie, perhaps sensing that freedom’s to be won through a conscientious attention to hostly responsibilities, tears his gaze from the television and declares, “We would be just thrilled, Luke. Truly, indeed we would.”
I follow Adelle out to the kitchen, leaving Bernie to his game. I sit at the kitchen table, taking the same chair I occupied a few months ago, beneath the framed sampler proclaiming HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTBURN IS. This time, instead of breakfast cereal / marshmallow / chocolate chip / butterscotch chip squares, Adelle offers me pumpkin cookies, maple pecan cookies, and another pile of charred gingerbread men.
“You need to rest a moment,” she tells me. “Then we’ll be off.”
She and Bernie have promised me a “tour of the town.”
She points out the two postcards on the refrigerator from my mother and nods in a dazed, respectful manner as I explain about Sally’s French classes. Adelle is visibly in awe of this woman who divides her time between Detroit and North Carolina, who jets around the world by herself, and who (perhaps most to the point) may be the only woman in the world whom Wes could never put fully behind him.
Adelle sees my glance drift over to the needlepoint sampler and says, “I suppose you think it’s kitsch, don’t you?” and the truth is kitsch isn’t a word, or a concept, I would have expected Adelle to come up with. “But I like kitsch, ” she goes on, and the point is obvious, isn’t it? That even here, in the De Vries household in Pheasant Ridge, a suburb of Battle Creek, life is being lived in an atmosphere of self-conscious irony. Even the woman who lives beside the needlepoint sampler that says HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTBURN IS sees herself as gently lampooning the sort of woman who lives beside a needlepoint sampler that says HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTBURN IS.
“Actually, if it’s all right with you—” Adelle begins, and the expression on her face is so dire, it’s as if she’s about to confess to something calamitous. But it turns out her news is simply that Bernie won’t be coming with us. He hardly slept a wink last night. And she’s pretty sure he’s coming down with a cold.
So Adelle and I climb into my rented car. It has begun to drizzle. She guides me through the wet streets. She also tells me about her neighbors the Crumleys, Herb and Bev, whom I would be meeting if only I were able to accept the Thanksgiving invitation. And about the raccoons that made a home in the neighboring elementary school. And about the son of the local police chief, recently arrested in Chicago for shoplifting more than three hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise from a place called Delilah’s Closet. Women’s lingerie—do you believe it? And about the flooding in the basement. And about her neighbors the Donaldsons’ poodle, Buckles, hit by a firetruck (although Adelle herself believes it wasn’t really an accident but a kind of suicide, the Donaldsons treated Buckles so shabbily). I make no effort to steer the conversation. Though I scarcely know this woman—my aunt from a marriage that ended a few years after my birth—I know her well enough to understand that any conversation must circle round to Wes before long.
It turns out that I’m visiting the “best-known city of its size in the world” (a determination probably arrived at by the local chamber of commerce). Of course it owes its renown to the Kellogg brothers, John and Will Keith, who a hundred years ago made Battle Creek a health center to the nation. The word sanitarium was coined by John, Adelle tells me. It’s a shame—she goes on—that tours are no longer given at the Kellogg’s factory. In its place is Kellogg’s Cereal City USA, our destination.
Cereal City turns out to be a closely guarded, security-conscious land, wary of kidnappers and hostage-takers. Specifically, it frets about its three favorite sons, those little rascals Snap! Crackle! and Pop!, who never go anywhere without the constant bodyguard of a trademark symbol. In the museum’s prose, this makes for an odd mixture of whimsy and legalese: “At the top of every hour, Snap!™ Crackle!™ and Pop!™ race around the silo with Tony the Tiger™ announcing the winner.” Adelle and I watch a film in which Sunny the Sun and the Sweetheart of the Corn introduce us to the Kellogg brothers. We wander through the museum, peering at old photographs, old cereal boxes, and old black-and-white televisions that have reached that previously only theoretical limit of program-free programming: They show nothing but commercials.
Dr. John Kellogg was, it turns out, an evangelist, touring the country on behalf of his meat-free, smoke-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free, alcohol-free vision of “biologic living.” He wanted nothing less than to reform the nation’s diet. Doubtless it’s no one’s fault—it’s si
mply the way of the world—that the doctor’s original mission was lost. The town that once tried to market lima bean flakes, as a boon to national health, now traffics in Cocoa Frosted Flakes and Sugar Pops.
We don’t stay long in Cereal City USA™. We drive to downtown Battle Creek, such as it is, and slip into a cavernous bar/microbrewery, where we both order amber beer.
“You were talking about Thanksgiving,” Adelle says, but of course it’s she who has been talking of Thanksgiving, she who has been doing nearly all the talking today.
“Right.” The beer turns out to be delicious.
“Well, I found something that might interest you.”
And what she unearths from her purse indeed interests me very much. It’s a color snapshot of Wes. I suppose he must be at least sixteen, although he doesn’t look it. His double-breasted suit is presumably one of those inherited from his father—one which his mother allowed him to alter when he turned sixteen. He is standing before a colossal Thanksgiving turkey, wielding outsize carving utensils. He is very much the man of the house—or such is his aspiration. The photograph suggests a daunted clumsiness. This bird’s splendid carcass is too much for Wes. Doubtless the task would be better taken in hand by Conrad (by the skinny little kid with the crew cut, staring so intently, so acquisitively at the plump golden bird), whose athlete’s general confidence of movement has already, in his early teens, declared itself.
“Oh, I like this,” I tell her. “It’s a very appealing picture. Isn’t it amazing how much the young Wes resembles little Jessie? You know I went to see Tiffany since I saw you last.”
A Few Corrections Page 20
