The brutal pressure of his gaze squeezes out of me what I haven’t yet confessed to anyone: “I’m going to write a book . . .”
“A book!” Though Conrad takes such outsize satisfaction in inhabiting a world in which he can predict virtually everything, he manages to sound utterly flabbergasted. “A book about what, for Christ’s sake?”
“A book about my father . . .”
“But Wes never read a book!” Conrad snaps back.
“Not for him. About him.”
“A book about Wes? A book about Wes?” And now it appears Conrad isn’t so much incredulous as indignant. He leans forward and his rage—if that is what it is—threatens to break over my head.
“Yes, I am going to write a novel,” I answer him. And to loose these words into the open air—to set them fluttering around our heads like an uncaged bird, as though Rusty had gotten free and were whipping and flapping around our ears—is somehow to clarify for myself just how unreally, preposterously colossal is this, my innermost ambition. I’m going to write a novel? You mean, I’m going to write a novel? Based on characters like Wes, and Adelle, and Conrad? Why not declare instead, I’m going to construct an interplanetary space probe in my apartment or I’m going to locate King Solomon’s mines . . . ? It’s an all-but-insurmountable undertaking, isn’t it? Because (so I’ve come to see) in order really to write a novel, I would have to do something only people in novels ever seem to do: remake my life. Not merely change my job, uproot my every routine, replot my ambitions—but dig down into the very soil of my life and reconfigure the fixed roots of my thinking.
Conrad calls me back to reality: “A novel about Wes!”
And I hear the hurt in old Conrad’s voice—and all at once it’s apparent that what’s irking him isn’t a sense of family privacies breached, of confidences betrayed. No. No, what vexes him is in fact a sensation of being shortchanged. Yes, it strikes Conrad as unfair . . .
A novel about Wes? What in the world had Wes accomplished to merit being the Sultan brother selected as the subject for a book? Had Wes been captain of the wrestling team? Had Wes set the school hundred-yard-dash record?
A new idea dawns upon him: “A novel about Wes,” Conrad marvels. “But then—but then I would be one of the characters.”
“Well it’s not as though I’d be taking every literal detail and—”
“It’s impossible to write a novel about Wes without making me one of the characters. That’s impossible,” Conrad unbudgeably declares.
“I’ll change your name of course,” I grandly, glibly announce, sweeping my hands through the air just as though I were waving a wand.
“Change my name?”
“I’ll make you—I’ll make all the characters a composite.”
“Change my name!” And—yes—Conrad has turned indignant once more, more so than ever. “If you change my name, Luke, I’ll come at you with a crew oar and break your silly-looking nose. Change my name! Why, the very idea is absurd. It’s ridiculous, it ought to be illegal. It probably is illegal. I’m sure it’s libel, not to use the legal name of who you’re talking about.
“Jesus, don’t you see anything? Luke, you’ve got to get me down exactly! Otherwise, what’s the point? What good’s a Conrad who’s only half a Conrad, who’s merely obnoxious instead of insufferable? If you’re going to do it, do it, baby. Just say the hell with them all and do it. And I want you to get down the little speech I just made, about men looking for nothing but a daily miracle, and I also want you to insert into your novel my big TOE, which I consider one of the most profound contributions to philosophy in the twentieth century. Remember it: Every time an idiot’s born, I’m a little better o f. And you must get down exactly how fat I am—” And Conrad lifts his shirt, lifts it high to expose a tremendous slumping mountain of white belly—and only now do I realize just how drunk he must be.
“And I want you to make sure you don’t skimp over what an absolute slob I was, especially when I was eating . . .” And Conrad with a sweeping athletic flourish of one of his big hands scoops a dollop of guacamole onto his index finger and smears it across the bridge of his nose.
“Get in goddamned all of it. You’ve got to go the whole hog, Luke—you’ve got to do the whole big fat barbecued pig. It’s all life’s cruel-humored ingenuity you’ve got to get in, its love of really sick jokes—I’ll never forgive you if you don’t do my situation justice.”
Conrad grandly empties his cognac and returns the glass to the table with a bang. A green dab of guacamole hangs on its rim, where it has edged up against the bridge of his nose.
He eyes me squarely and says, “Goddamn it, you know what the bitch of it is, Luke? The goddamn bitch of it is this: I probably won’t still be around by the time you actually get around to publishing your book . . .”
(Was it painful to utter those words? It’s painful to transcribe them. Oh, it’s all too painfully ironic for words, isn’t it, Conrad? That you—you who were forever throwing off confident, wrong-headed predictions—should somehow manage to get things right on the one most vital question confronting both of us . . . Old friend, dear silver-ponytailed friend, I wish I could ask you now, Have I done right by you? Have I done your situation justice? Clearly I haven’t, if I neglect to mention how in the end you outfoxed me one last time. You had prepared a final surprise, hadn’t you? And I failed utterly to foresee the closing twist, lurking in your last will and testament, the one stipulation lying just beyond your Restoration gravesite, with its view in the distance of the winding Michicabanabee . . . All your money, your apartment, your belongings, even Rusty and your aquarium and Michigan Avenue in the Rain— whom else would you choose to leave your entire estate to but to . . . to the rich widow whose extravagances you deplored, the one who inevitably would, or so you always with such bitter satisfaction speculated, wind up with all the chips? Doesn’t it, as you used to say, make perfect sense? What more gratifying final stroke was there than this vindication of all your own gloomy, merry prognostications? Whom else must all your possessions go to, in the end, but to your brother’s wronged wife?)
“Justice!” cries the impossible, irreplaceable man with a war-paint stripe of guacamole on his nose. “Luke, I demand you do me justice!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“It was some sort of weird homing impulse. I don’t know how otherwise to describe it. A little voice in my head saying I had to be back with my family for Christmas.”
“I’d’ve been happy to go out there.”
“Oh I knew you would, and wouldn’t that have been enchanting—Christmas in Mare aux Cerfs? No, my feeling wasn’t logical. It was simply an irresistible impulse, ordering me back to my family for Christmas, and never mind that you’re my family and you were willing to fly out there to meet me. And that’s how it happens that I’ve come back to this.”
This this of Sally’s is a heavy wet blanket of winter slop, irregularly heaped on the lawns and sidewalks and streets of Grosse Pointe. Additional slop is coming down. The flakes are wet and adhesive, clumping into gummy gray-white wedges on each wiper blade. I’m driving my mother’s big boat of a Buick. We’re on the way to what must be, she promises me, the world’s largest video store.
It’s late afternoon on a winter day in the Detroit suburbs and it seems I’ve journeyed a great distance from those lucent afternoons in Mare aux Cerfs when the light felt more magical than any light in years—afternoons when your eyes long for arms that could embrace the world whole. Since then, it’s as if skies keep getting darker, thicker. This one’s a wall of cement. You’d need a jackhammer to break through it—to break through into that other, otherworldly light which, even today, may have gently deposited itself upon the slopes of Mare aux Cerfs.
Christmas has come and gone. Christmas was yesterday, and doubtless today ought to be a day for remaining indoors, grateful for shelter and family. But not even freezing rain and snow can keep Detroiters house-bound today. The roads are clogged with cars, all f
leeing the hearth, the dining room, the embrace of the family circle. The turnoff to the Hopewell Mall is backed up for what must be a quarter mile.
The Buick’s heater purrs, the wipers cut their languid arcs, traffic starts and stops. Ahead of me stretches a thronging sea of red lights (brake lights, taillights), reflected off the dripping sides of cars, off the snowy puddled pavements. It’s not much past noon, but already night appears to be falling. “You’ll be back in the sun in three days,” I remind her. Sally is flying to Miami to see Conrad.
“I had such a peculiar conversation with him a few nights ago.”
“Tell me.”
“He must have been more in his cups than usual. It’s the only thing I can conclude. It was a different Conrad from the one I’m used to.”
“Tell me.”
“For one thing, he was apologetic.”
“That doesn’t sound like Conrad. Apologetic about what?”
“About practically everything. About our entire history of dealings. I do mean our entire dealings—he literally went back to the first time Wes escorted me to the old Sultan home on Scully Street and I met a skinny sandy-haired college boy named Conrad. Also he was very self-pitying.”
“That doesn’t sound like Conrad.”
“I mentioned the New Year and do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘It’s weird to know...’” Sally pauses and I understand I’m once again being appraised: She’s wondering whether to shield me from some demonstration of life’s harshness or cruelty— from some “unpleasantness.” Of course I know as well as she does that Conrad’s dying, and if over the last few years she has lost a husband and an ex-husband, I’ve lost an adoptive father and a biological father. No matter. In a sector of Sally’s mind forever impervious to logic or experience, a vestigial parental superstition continues to operate, telling her, What is not spoken before your child will not touch him . . . “Well, he said to me, ‘It’s weird to know you’re seeing the last New Year of your life rung in.’”
“Really?”
It’s not the sort of line I’d expect from Conrad. If anything, it’s a pronouncement Sally herself might deliver (in her characteristic tone of proud meditativeness, of rational wistfulness—careful words overlying a reservoir of hurt and fear). And all at once it seems the prospect the two of us are obliquely confronting, as we drive to the world’s biggest video store on the day after Christmas, is that of her own passing . . .
It’s many years away, surely, yet even so there’s no question that before she goes Sally would like to see my own life more settled. As long as she’s on the planet, it’s her duty to see me placed somewhere—and aren’t my joblessness and my childlessness and the collapse of my marriage persuasive evidence of some flaw or shortcoming in my upbringing? Oh, none of this is logical, but who could be logical on a gray day after Christmas in the Detroit suburbs, with sleety snow falling, and talk of another death in an already-dwindled family?
Sally’s upset about Conrad, she isn’t altogether happy to be home, she’s getting inklings that the upcoming year will be a hard one, and I’m sorry to be adding to her worries. Things were different for her when I was jetting over for visits in France. Now we’ve both returned to the town where I grew up, and how exactly is she to explain to her neighbors and friends this divorced and unemployed son of hers? As we drive along, both of us are grimly sensing that reality has returned (reality at bottom often consisting, for a Michigander, of a handful of sleet tossed at you out of a darkening sky).
Reality returns, too, in the guise of a blazing video store the size of a small French village. I say, “Hey you weren’t kidding—it must be the biggest in the world.”
We stroll through aisles and aisles and aisles of entertainment, and you might think it would be easy to locate something we want to watch tonight. But it isn’t. Somewhere along the line, as year by year Hollywood’s movies turned bloodier and bloodier, Sally made a resolution to quit sitting through anything “too gruesome or queasiness-inducing”—which seems to rule out half the new movies. And neither of us wants to sit through anything “too soupy”—which pretty much eliminates the other half. It’s a depressingly familiar story: What do you prefer tonight—the murderous, or the maudlin?
We wander round the store. Dozens and dozens of televisions are clamped to the ceiling, so that wherever you stand you’re in sight of a screen—on each of which, when I look up at one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to beat up a robot.
As it happens, at that moment I find myself halted right beside an eight-foot-tall cardboard stand-up likeness of Arnold. If he’s larger-than-life in real life, in this celluloid supermarket he’s bigger yet, he’s larger-than-larger-than-life: he’s a godlike figure in this environment where little folks—dwindled folks, like Sally and me— shuffle about in an uneasy search for some un-unappealing diversion.
We finally settle on a BBC Sherlock Holmes episode, “The Return of Holmes,” one in which (according to the back of the box) Conan Doyle, having killed off his most famous creation in a previous story, resurrects him in response to popular demand. When we’re seated in the car once more, watching the windshield wipers go about their steady business of clarifying, clarifying (the sleet is still coming down), Sally says, “The oddest thing happened after your last trip to France. The day after you flew home, I was visited, I guess you might say, by some sort of overwhelming spell of gloom. Or depression? Maybe self-doubt . . .”
“Well I’m sorry.”
“It was the oddest thing ever: I could hardly move. I could hardly bring myself to get up from that chair in the study and make myself a cup of tea.”
“I certainly hope I wasn’t in any way the cause.”
Sally’s reply surprises me: “But I think you were. Indirectly, Luke. And I mention it now only because no lasting injury was done, after twenty-four hours the spell essentially lifted. I say ‘you were,’ because I’d spent so much time during your visit raking over the past—Wes and Conrad and crazy Dora and beautiful glowing-haired Klara and Momma and Poppa and Gordon. That sort of retrospection may occasionally be a good thing for the soul, even a necessary thing, but obviously it stirs everything up, and who among us can look back on the whole of their lives without real pangs?
“Anyway, you’ll recall that that’s when I finally ’fessed up to you about lending Wes all the money. (And it seems I’ll never quite square that with my conscience. There’s a good argument to be made that I betrayed not only you but also Gordon and I suppose Tiffany—I was interfering in their marriage, wasn’t I?) And I got to thinking, in a very methodical way, a cataloguing sort of way, about all the people I’d betrayed or deceived over the years. And maybe sometimes my behavior was justified (like not telling Poppa I’d signed up for a French class in college) and maybe sometimes it wasn’t (like not telling Gordon I’d lent Wes money), but the point was just what a maze I’d created. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave . . . ,’ as the poem says. Deceiving Gordon about how often Wes and I were in contact. And then deceiving Tiffany likewise. And later deceiving Wes after Tiffany started calling me for advice. And deceiving you on a number of fronts, trying to protect Wes I suppose. And I began to wonder: Were Wes and I really all that different? Am I much less fundamentally deceptive than he was? And had his habits simply rubbed off on me? Or did it all run a little deeper: Was a taste for deception one of those shared traits initially drawing us together?”
“Oh come on, you’ve got to be kidding.”
“And yet I’m not, or at least that’s truly how I was feeling, but I don’t think I’ve quite made my point, which is: Even if the rest of us don’t practice deception on the grand level that Wes occasionally did, don’t we all wind up, even the so-called truthful people, living inside a very tangled web?”
Oh, I see it exactly, the observation Sally in her modesty hesitates to voice explicitly. She can’t quite permit herself to say, I think I’m a basically honest person—a boast that, touching as it does on th
e condition of the soul itself, would strike her as even more unseemly than I’m intelligent or I’m charming or I’m good-looking. Honest of course she is, and the point she’s making hinges on her core honesty. You begin with a few discreet silences, you add a couple of deliberate ambivalences, you toss in a scatter of white lies—and before long even the person of firm integrity has created a labyrinth of deceptions.
Later, when we’re settled at the dining room table over cups of milky tea and lemon cookies, I take up the conversation again: “You said Conrad was apologetic . . .”
“About his whole life. He said he was sorry he’d been so barbed with me.”
“With you? With everybody. He must have been soused.”
“You know what he said? He said he’d never forgiven me for remaining loyal to Wes. Now isn’t that odd? Don’t you think that’s odd? He said that given the way Wes treated me, I should have remained furious forever. (And isn’t it funny just how moralistic Conrad can be on the subject of Wes’s philandering?) But anyway, he said he couldn’t forgive me for forgiving Wes, for remaining his loyal wife. And you know what I said? I said, ‘But I’ve remained loyal to you, too, Conrad.’ And you know what he did?”
The reddening of her own eyes announces in advance the— stupendous—thing that Conrad did next. And if Sally’s feeling taxed and embarrassed, there’s triumph too in her voice as she declares, “Well: Conrad started to cry.”
“Good God, that’s something I can’t picture.”
“But Luke, I’m struck by a sense—I don’t know how to put this without sounding grandiose, and possibly lugubrious—a sense of a vanishing world. Honey, Wes’s death—I’m only now realizing—hit me far, far harder even than I would have imagined. Maybe that’s not so surprising (after all, he was my first great love), but I do feel what I’m talking about is larger than Wes: as though an entire world’s vanishing.” She helps herself to another lemon cookie— her fourth—and says: “And you can remind me that that busy little world centered in Restoration, Michigan, was impoverished and uncultured. Or you can show me just how impoverished and uncultured it was, you can set me down in Arles, whose Roman ruins and every historic cobblestone are a weighty indictment of my upbringing. But in the end I can only reply to you, It doesn’t feel like an impoverished world. Oh, no: It felt as complete as anywhere on the globe and perhaps that’s what being young really is: the gift of taking with you, wherever you go, a sense that the possibilities of the place you’re in are infinite. I keep thinking of Toledo Heights Park, in Restoration, which as you recall is on a sort of hill, so the whole town—such as it is—lies outspread below you, and I used to meet Wes there when we were courting. (And you can see what an old woman I’ve become that I employ a word like courting, but that’s what it was, I assure you.)
A Few Corrections Page 24
