Life Lessons
Page 5
A half-hour later, you were all sauntering back up the dirt road, the weak flicker of your cheap flashlights casting skittish halos over dust and cacti. “Goodness. It’s already nine thirty,” Ma told Rebekkah. “Probably close to your curfew, no?”
“Huh,” she said. “I guess.”
“Well, then, we’d best get you home.”
“We’d best,” Rebekkah said, and Ma nodded, walking ahead to set a swifter pace. For just a second, you turned to look at Rebekkah. The moon was rising now, and you watched as the thinness of her lips bent into a smile. You smiled in reply. But you were a boy who had developed a nearly anaphylactic aversion to prolonged eye contact, and you looked away, gaped up awkwardly at the sky: a poor decision. Before you could understand what had happened, the intense penny smell of blood had already filled your nose. Your boot toe had caught a rock, sent you sprawling on the path.
“Woot!” your brother hollered. “There he goes again!”
“Oliver!” Ma yelped. “Your nose!”
“It’s fine,” you said.
“It’s not. It’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know.”
As you sat up, you watched your brother hopping from foot to foot, doing what he did with your frequent teenage-klutzy tumbles, turning it into some slapstick act for his entertainment. “I can’t believe it! Your best spill yet! Gold medal! Classic!”
“Oh my God,” Rebekkah murmured.
must have been less than six inches from her now; you felt the warmth that her skin radiated. Your fingers took the land’s measure, stood, and began the final march. A sudden streak of brightness cut the deep purple above. “Oh! Look look look!” Charlie shouted.
“So, Rebekkah, tell us about you,” your mother said, her voice at the edge of that tone she used with strangers, the one she called skeptical and your brother called mean. “You’re new here, right?”
“We’ve been here for a little more than a year now. My father works for an oil company. Fracking. Never in one place long.”
“Poor girl,” Ma said. “I know how that goes. We moved around so much when I was a kid, I’d gone to eight schools before I was fifteen.”
“It’s hard,” Rebekkah said.
“I have to admit,” Pa said, “I saw a little thing about your father in the paper, something about the surveys his company’s been doing around Alpine. Fingers crossed they strike it rich, Lord knows we could use the business.”
Rebekkah shrugged. “He never tells me much about it,” she said. “Just lets me know when it’s time to move again.”
“Our family has lived here for about a million years!” Charlie piped. “We never go anywhere! It’s not always such a picnic, let me tell you.”
“Charlie.”
“Sorry.” Charlie giggled.
Even setting aside the miraculous identity of your guest, it was very strange to witness your family perform itself for an outsider. You couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Zion’s Pastures. A couple of years before, your mother had cured the grandfather clock of its mildew infestation by setting it for two days in the front yard. “Just needs a little sunlight to heal,” she had explained. A seventeen-year-old boy, unkissed, could be forgiven for already beginning to conceive of Rebekkah like that healing sun upon his whole lonesome, mildewed life at Zion’s Pastures.
“So how you liking it?” Pa said. “School going okay so far this year?”
“It’s good. I sure miss your art class.” You noticed that as she spoke she gestured with her left hand, but kept the other lying there, unbudging in the darkness.
“You know,” Rebekkah said. “All this star talk is reminding me of that song. They call me on and on across the universe—”
All four of you tuneless Lovings lay there, stunned, as Rebekkah sang a line of that Beatles tune.
“Crikey,” Charlie said.
“Beautiful.” Pa whistled. “Got some serious pipes on you, good Lord.”
“I don’t know about that,” Rebekkah said. “I just like to sing sometimes.”
After a time, Pa resumed his astronomy lesson. “Of course you know that falling stars is not really accurate. What you are looking at are just minor asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, but it is remarkable . . .” You were no longer listening. Because your hand understood that it didn’t have forever. And so, in one brave and reckless act, your hand called upon the support of wrist and forearm. It crouched low, and then it sprang. And there would perhaps never be a joy as acute as the joy of Rebekkah’s downy, warm-soft fingers when they did not stray from the point of contact. Your hands remained there, for whole seconds, their backsides pressed together, turning red hot, generating the atomic material of the future. But your hand was no fool. It understood that the snakeskin had been a kind of sign; if you lingered too long, the delicate thing would crumble.
A half-hour later, you were all sauntering back up the dirt road, the weak flicker of your cheap flashlights casting skittish halos over dust and cacti. “Goodness. It’s already nine thirty,” Ma told Rebekkah. “Probably close to your curfew, no?”
“Huh,” she said. “I guess.”
“Well, then, we’d best get you home.”
“We’d best,” Rebekkah said, and Ma nodded, walking ahead to set a swifter pace. For just a second, you turned to look at Rebekkah. The moon was rising now, and you watched as the thinness of her lips bent into a smile. You smiled in reply. But you were a boy who had developed a nearly anaphylactic aversion to prolonged eye contact, and you looked away, gaped up awkwardly at the sky: a poor decision. Before you could understand what had happened, the intense penny smell of blood had already filled your nose. Your boot toe had caught a rock, sent you sprawling on the path.
“Woot!” your brother hollered. “There he goes again!”
“Oliver!” Ma yelped. “Your nose!”
“It’s fine,” you said.
“It’s not. It’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know.”
As you sat up, you watched your brother hopping from foot to foot, doing what he did with your frequent teenage-klutzy tumbles, turning it into some slapstick act for his entertainment. “I can’t believe it! Your best spill yet! Gold medal! Classic!”
“Oh my God,” Rebekkah murmured.
“Keep it pinched,” your mother said. “Here, use one of the napkins. You need to lie down! Stay here and we’ll come pick you up with the car. Or, wait, Jed, what about the couch in your studio?”
“My studio?” Pa said, and paused. “Right. I guess come on then.”
The shame of this scene was not inconsiderable, but it was little next to the astonishment you now had to stifle. You were going to Pa’s studio? Your father’s so-called art studio was a tumbledown cabin, a half mile up the dirt road from the big house, and it was strictly off-limits to his family. And in the past few months, Pa himself often seemed off-limits, too. He occasionally dragged his body to the dinner table, but always his mind remained out there, latched behind a cabin door, in a hazy cloud of Pall Mall smoke and whiskey vapors. This latest absence was longer than his previous ones, but throughout your childhood Pa had disappeared to his painting shed most weekends. Like a controlled experiment to refute the old Texan belief in the direct relationship between perseverance and reward, Pa’s countless painting hours had never summed to anything very successful. He spurned the locally ubiquitous landscape art—those shattered canyons and Comanche dragoons in hot pursuit of their bison—that might have fetched him real money in favor of his “true work,” which amounted to artful knockoffs of a number of dead masters who piled the bright paint thickly. Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Munch, Chagall.
In his whole stymied, self-poisoning career, you had seen your father sell just a single painting. This
was at the start of your freshman year, when Bliss Township threw its fund-raising jamboree on the school’s front lawn. Amid booths jammed with foil-wrapped brownies, tinplated pies, and clunky granny needlepoints, Pa set up a stand to sell his students’ work. Of course, nearly all those bleeding watercolors and fingerprint-smudged charcoals sold at asking price—to the artists’ own parents. But, late into that Saturday afternoon, a single piece remained unsold. The same oil painting Pa had unveiled at your last Good Things Monday, his wind-whirled rendition of Bliss Township School, the mass of children out front just a bright yellow suggestion, the schoolhouse’s cupolas and cornices warping into the shapes of the jolly clouds above. For his own asking price, Pa had affixed a blue sticker that said, $250.
As the pies vanished from the booths, as the Bliss Township Marching Band began to fold away their gear, Pa’s painting still languished there, unpurchased. Your brother tugged at Ma and you to huddle with him behind the art booth. “We have to buy his painting,” Charlie said. “We have to!” Ma touched his cheek. “You are the sweetest boy in the world,” she told him. Not to be bested, you felt your pockets for your saved allowance, showing Ma twenty-four dollars. Charlie could contribute only six, and your mother had just eighty-five dollars in her pocketbook. She clutched the gathered money in her fist, worked a finger into one of her curls. “Wait here,” she said, and when she came back, five minutes later, she was smiling so widely you could see her back fillings.
“Just watch.” She pointed in the direction of your father, whom your school principal, Doyle Dixon, was approaching with an outstretched palm. Principal Dixon showed Pa a stack of crumpled money, and you watched your father fight back a lunging impulse to hug the man. Instead, he pocketed the cash, nodded, and presented the painting to his boss.
“Now listen,” Ma said. “Doyle put in the rest himself, and I made him promise he’d never mention our own little contribution. Do you promise you won’t say a thing?”
“You—” Charlie was saying, but by that point Pa had practically skipped his way through the crowd.
“Doyle bought the damn thing,” Pa said. “Told me he’s going to hang it at school. Guess it wasn’t the wreck I was fretting, huh?”
“What have I been telling you?” Ma said, working her grin into submission. “It’s a beauty.”
The sale of this painting, however, had done little for his confidence. “Going through labor,” Pa liked to call his long studio sessions, but as for the results of all those painful gestations? He tossed most of his canvases onto the frequent bonfires he’d make in the fire pit. “Have you heard of installation art?” Pa liked to quip. “Well, I make incineration art.” It had been a very long time since you had seen his work.
But now you were going to Pa’s studio—with Rebekkah Sterling! In huaraches, your father walked on ahead into the desert night, leading the way for a grim, dirgelike march, the hard grind of stones under your feet, bats calling invisibly through the air. You let your family lead you, like a blind man, the blood in your nose beginning to congeal.
At the cabin, you settled yourself on the stain-spangled divan in the darkness, and Pa lit two camphor lanterns. Though you felt the blood pooling back into your nostrils you couldn’t bear to keep your head tilted away from this rare view. Arranged among the stubchoked ashtrays and empty bottles of George Dickel whiskey, his latest paintings, you were sorry to see, were an immediate disappointment. To your eyes, they just looked like a continuation of his artistic thievery.
Rebekkah, however, walked right up to these canvases and paused, as if she had some silent greeting to make to each one. Pa pushed the blunt end of a paintbrush against his lip as he nervously observed her. “They are a little crude,” he at last said. “I know it. I’m having some trouble with my brushes, and I think—”
“No.” Rebekkah spoke to the thickly slathered cerulean sky a few inches from her face. “They are beautiful.”
“Think so?” Pa watched the back of Rebekkah’s head nod slowly. “Is that us?” Charlie asked. Your brother had noticed something you had not. Near the edge of each frame—beneath the swirling paisleys of a van Goghian starscape, at the periphery of a throbbing field of expressionist colors, amid the animalistic swipes and slashes of abstract brushwork—were four unmistakable figures: your parents, your brother, and you.
“It’s a series,” he said. “Or that’s how I think of them. Actually, it’s based on what I was telling you earlier, about the multiverse. If that’s true about the other universes, then somewhere there must be a whole universe that takes place inside of Vincent van Gogh paintings, right? Another inside of Munch. Kandinsky. And then I thought, what would it be like to live in those other places?”
At the time, you took this cosmological explanation for more of his knockoff canvases as fanciful, sentimental, a little drunken. The whole concept reminded you of the stories that your brother and you, as younger boys, had liked to tell each other about secret passageways, portals to hidden worlds buried in the land, fantasies that you had both outgrown. These paintings embarrassed you a little, on your father’s behalf. In this so-called series of paintings, you saw that Pa had married his life’s two great failures: the confines of his thwarted artistic imagination and his increasingly silent relationship with his family here on this planet. It seemed a little pathetic, Pa’s painting these other universes for his family members when the simpler solution would be just to have actual conversations with you.
“But if there are all these other universes, where are they?” Your brother was always the more credulous, cheery son, untroubled by dark implications. “How do you get there?”
“Don’t know,” Pa slurred in a grave register, as if this were a question that had been troubling him. “Maybe a black hole.”
“A black hole?” Charlie asked. “I thought it was all just dark in black holes.”
“No one knows for sure. Could be blackness or could be that it’s a wormhole. To another universe. The thing about black holes, I read this, is that the science of them is unknowable. To get close enough for a good look, the gravity in there would tear you apart.”
Less than three months later a black hole would open in West Texas, and you would come to see that there was something to your father’s naive cosmology after all. His theory held true of the black hole that would dissolve the floor beneath your feet on the night of November fifteenth: you would only begin to understand the truth—about Rebekkah, your own part in that night’s horrors—just as you lost the ability to describe it. A terrible brightness would break through you. What would make it so terrifying is that it wouldn’t hurt at all.
A beam of light trembled over the thick oils of Pa’s impressionist multiverse, a flashlight shaking in his alcoholic hands. “Anyway,” you told Pa, “Rebekkah is right. They are very pretty.”
And as he grinned, you were grinning, too. Maybe, you were thinking, you didn’t need to perform your unhappiness for Rebekkah, maybe she didn’t want your own sad stories. Maybe it was the possibility of witnessing a better family that had brought her to you? Tomorrow, you had just decided, you would at last spill the secret of Pa’s schoolhouse painting. Despite whatever disappointment you knew looking at his latest output, you were very glad for the promise of this story to tell her, how the three of you had huddled there behind a carnival booth, pooling what little you had to write that day a happier ending for your father.
Oh, of course it would be easy to pity that kid you were then, just a boy feeling the miracle of a freshly touched hand, practicing how to tell his best example of what made his family a family. A boy doomed to a future he could never have guessed. And yet maybe somehow, that night, you were already beginning to rehearse your part in this story? Soon the black hole would open, you would fall to one side, and your family would remain on the other. And after reading all those childhood epics—all those sci-fi, fantasy, survivalist, and tall tales that you so loved, and after all Pa’s talk of parall
el universes, too—how not to believe that somehow your own otherworldly bed-bound epic really was foretold? How else to explain that unlikeliest sorrow you and your family were made to endure, the mythological transformations you were made to undergo? How not to believe, even still, that you were chosen?
No, you wouldn’t be able to pity yourself for long. You might have fallen through a black hole, but your family’s fate was equally desperate. They had to stay behind, on Planet Earth.
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