They never discussed the abortion again.
Chapter 17
Day Eight
It is the evening of Day Eight. They are in the TV room watching cartoons again. Everyone but Anna is eating ice cream from the mismatched ceramic bowls Buzzy made years ago.
“Mom needs to get back to work,” Anna says. “She needs to write and to paint and there’s no way she can do it in that giant, stinky, cat-shit box of a studio.”
“It’s starting to smell upstairs,” Alejandro says.
“What do you mean it smells upstairs?” Buzzy asks. He holds his empty spoon in the air as if he’s conducting an orchestra.
“It smells like cat piss upstairs,” Emery says. “The stink is rising.” He had noticed but didn’t think Alejandro had. Now that Alejandro smells it, too, the stink bothers him.
“She’ll hate it if you go through her stuff. She doesn’t like anyone in there.” Buzzy lowers his spoon and shovels up some butter pecan.
“She never did,” Portia says.
“Fuck her,” Anna says. “She’s in the hospital, her studio is a shithole, and we’re going to fix it for her before she gets home.”
“She has been wanting to paint it ever since we moved in,” Buzzy says.
“Good,” Anna says. “We’ll paint it. And then if you ever have to sell the house, the studio will be ready.”
“Don’t talk about selling the house!” Portia says. “Mom’s not going to die, there’s no need to sell the house!”
“You know she threw out all the good stuff from the old house: photos, furniture, things we really could have saved. And she kept every piece of junk from her studio. It was like I paid movers to haul a goddamned dumpster.” Buzzy’s nodding his head, working up to one of his fits.
“We’ll clean it out then,” Emery says. He is flipping through the three hundred satellite television channels, looking for a different cartoon. He does not think his mother will die. His biggest worry right now is how to create a cartoon that’s even better than Pickle Man-Boy.
“Do you know she got rid of the melodeon? That beautiful antique melodeon that she and Lucy spent months repairing when we lived in Ann Arbor. She gave it away to this pimple-faced kid who was loading the moving truck! Gave it to him! That thing was probably worth . . . I don’t know, it was worth a lot!” Buzzy stands up, holding his empty bowl in one hand. He’s so irritated now that he can’t sit still. When Buzzy rants, his entire body becomes part of the process.
“I would have taken the melodeon!” Anna speaks with a piece of dental floss hanging from her mouth like two flaccid tusks. She looks furious. Emery wonders if she ever feels she has enough: money, things, men.
“We could have donated it and taken a tax credit!” Buzzy is pacing behind the couch. He steps over the golden lab, Gumba, who lies in the pathway. Gumba is splayed like he’s been hit by a car. Emery gets up, crouches down beside the dog, and turns its head toward himself. Gumba licks Emery’s fingers and he knows the dog’s okay. He puts his empty ice cream bowl in front of Gumba’s mouth so he can lick it. Gumba cleans the bowl without lifting his head. It is the laziest eating Emery has ever seen.
“Come on,” Portia says, “let’s go clean the barn. I’m so sick of cartoons.”
Emery believes that there are two types of people in the world: workers and nonworkers. Workers work. They get things done. Nonworkers don’t. It’s quite simple. All of these people get along splendidly unless they’re in a relationship, in which case the worker loathes the nonworker for not helping out and the nonworker loathes the worker for nagging and pestering the nonworker into working. Everyone in the family is a worker. Sure, Buzzy and Louise never worked on the house or the yard when Emery and his sisters were growing up, but they were both working on other things. They were always in the process of doing something. Emery and Alejandro are workers—together they retiled the bathroom in their apartment in New York, built a closet, and sanded all the floors. Patrick and Portia are both workers. Emery is surprised by their separation. He figured that two workers who are both calm and generally happy could keep going for a long, long time. Anna is a worker but her husband, Brian, doesn’t seem to be. But Anna works faster and harder than most people, so maybe another worker would get in her way.
Emery explains his worker theory to Portia while they’re in the garage searching for the paint and brushes to use on the barn.
“I wonder if Daphne Frank is a worker?” Portia says, and Emery feels bad for having brought it up.
“Probably not,” he says. “So I’m sure they’ll be miserable really quickly. There’s no way it could last if she’s not a worker.” Emery thinks his brother-in-law was really, really shitty to his sister. He’s glad he’s not straight and doesn’t have to deal with the whole affair business. It’s different when you’re gay. You might be slightly jealous, and there may be insecurities or issues of fidelity, but it’s nothing compared to the earthquakes that are created by heterosexual affairs. Emery doesn’t know why it is, but most gay couples he knows have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. It’s as if both sides get the purely sexual impulse of an affair, how the urge for otherness often has nothing to do with how you feel about your boyfriend. But in hetero marriages, Emery understands, these things are cruel, one-sided attacks that sever the victim’s heart with the swift, clean cut of a wire thread.
Each person claims his or her job. Alejandro wants to paint, so he is given the white paint Portia and Emery found. There is enough paint to cover every wall in the studio and maybe even the ceiling. But there are rafters in the ceiling, and after much debate, everyone agrees that the ceiling should remain unpainted. Emery is organizing the art section of the studio—the canvases, paints, rags, brushes. He likes creating order. He likes lining things up. Anna and Portia are going through the writing area where Louise’s desk is, along with files, bookshelves, and piles and stacks of papers, photos, and scraps that need to be identified. Buzzy is getting rid of the cat shit and the cats. One by one, he takes the three cats to the giant walk-in toolshed that is up the gravel road beyond the barn. With two scratched, old dustpans he picks up the shit. The rancid smell in the barn is so strong that they have all tied T-shirts and scarves around their faces. Emery thinks they look like bandits. It occurs to him they might be good cartoon characters: the Bandito Family, a bunch of weirdos who all disguise their faces with scarves. Maybe they’d live on another planet where exposing your face is like exposing your penis.
Alejandro has found a radio station that plays pop music: Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Salt-N-Pepa. He and Emery know the words to every song. Portia knows some of the songs. Anna knows one or two. Buzzy has never heard any of them, but when they’re all singing together he stops what he’s doing and plays the bongos on his thighs with his head tilted up the way you’d imagine a cat dancing. There is something sweet about Buzzy’s bongo/dancing. When Emery watches him, he guesses that this is probably what he’ll picture when he thinks about his father after he’s died. He’s not sure what single thing about his mother would encapsulate her. But there’s no need to worry about that now; Louise will be around to meet the baby he’s going to have. Emery finds it strange to connect the living with the not-yet-conceived. It’s odd how this child who isn’t here yet pulses with the same power as the dead: an idea of a person, an image of a person, but not a person.
At one-thirty in the morning they are still at it. Buzzy has been hauling out the bags of trash, then arranging them in what is becoming a small hill behind the toolshed. He says he knows someone who can pick it all up in a truck and carry it away.
“Dad,” Portia says, “you must call this guy tomorrow. If Mom comes home she’ll start digging though all that shit and pulling stuff out. So it has to be done right away.”
Emery looks at his sister and wonders if she has any idea the condition their mother is in. When she does come home, she will be no more able to sift and sort through a heap of garbage than Ma
ggie Bucks could with her paws.
Emery has finished organizing the art supplies and is now shuffling through papers in Louise’s desk, trying to arrange them in a logical order: bills, letters, receipts. He has made three tidy piles in his mother’s desk drawer and is straightening them so that none of the piles touch. Emery reaches under the letter pile to scoot it down to the bottom edge of the drawer when he notices a corner of frayed red ribbon sticking out, as if caught between the bottom of the drawer and front of the drawer where the pull is. He yanks at the ribbon and the bottom of the drawer lifts up. A whole mess of letters lies in a secret compartment, swirled on top of each other as if they have landed there after a tornado. Emery looks up to see if Buzzy is nearby, but his father isn’t even in the barn. He wonders if Buzzy knows about this secret drawer and then quickly decides he won’t tell him in case Louise doesn’t want him to know.
Emery unfolds one letter. It is written on nearly transparent onion paper, the stuff people used to use for airmail. There is no envelope. The small tight writing slants toward the right and looks, at a glance, like a series of shrunken bobby pins. It wasn’t until Emery was around twelve years old that he was able to decipher his father’s handwriting, and here it is.
My dearest darling love, the letter starts.
“Portia,” Emery says, and he gets up and hands the letter to his sister, who sits where he was at the desk. Emery knows Portia will be interested in this. She is interested in everything having to do with emotions, relationships, love, people. Emery leans over her shoulder and they read the letter together.
Emery can’t get much further than the first sentence. Reading a love letter from his father to his mother is almost as bad as catching them having sex. He scans the page, reads the date: August 10, 1990. His eyes alight on certain words: breasts, tongue, ass, fuck, love. Portia puts the letter face down on her lap. Emery goes to the ladder and helps Alejandro paint the window frames. He looks down at Anna, on her knees, scrubbing the cement floor, trying to wash away the sour, oaty cat-piss scent that remains so strong it beats through the smell of wet paint. Anna and Alejandro still have the T-shirts tied in front of their faces, though he and Portia have removed theirs.
Buzzy walks into the barn carrying a rolled-up rug on his shoulder. The batik-print scarf he had been using as a mask sits around his neck making him look like a foreigner, Moroccan maybe. Buzzy hoists down the rug, grunting a little. Portia folds the letter up, sticks it back with the pile, replaces the false bottom that was sitting angled on the drawer, and shuts the drawer. Emery hopes she doesn’t say anything about the letters.
“Dad,” Portia says. “How could you possibly have a Stinky?” Emery is confused. The love letter was from Buzzy to Louise. Does Portia somehow not understand that?
Anna stops scrubbing, tugs down her face scarf and looks up. “Will you leave Dad alone, please.” And Emery feels a small jolt in his body as he realizes both his sisters know something that he does not know. He shouldn’t be surprised, he thinks. That’s the way it’s been his whole life.
Emery climbs down the ladder, still holding a paintbrush, turns, and faces Buzzy. He cradles his left hand under the brush to catch any drips.
“Dad?” Emery says. “You have a Stinky?” He understands now the connection Portia made between the letters and the Stinky. Are the letters bullshit? Cover-up?
“I’m not seeing her right now,” Buzzy says. “I haven’t seen her since your mother went into the hospital.” He unrolls the carpet on the part of the floor that’s already been cleaned.
“Jesus Christ,” Emery mumbles. He looks down at the ground. His sister is practically disassembled from her husband’s Stinky. How could his mother, who’s been with his father for decades and had three children with him, support the idea of a Stinky?
Alejandro has stopped what he’s doing and is looking at each of them in turn. He slips his face scarf-down so it sits around his neck.
“I’m sorry, kids.” Buzzy sits on the rug and drops his head into his hands.
“You didn’t know she was going to have a heart attack,” Anna says, and she sits beside Buzzy.
“Dad, you really fucking better not be seeing your Stinky while Mom’s in the hospital. Really. That would just be so shitty. So, so shitty.” Emery’s voice quavers. It only shakes like that when he is bone-deep angry. He has never been in a fistfight before, has never punched anyone. But he wants to punch his father right now. In the heart.
“I love your mother,” Buzzy says. “I love her more than I’ve ever loved any woman in my life.”
“You’ve been with her since you were twenty,” Emery says. “So how many women could you have loved?”
“Oy yoy yoy,” Buzzy says.
“How long have you had a Stinky?” Emery rests his paintbrush along the rolling pan. “Does Mom know?” Maybe his father does overly romantic things like write love letters to his mother to compensate for his infidelities, to fill in the blank spots where he has removed emotion in order to give it to someone else. Emery has never written Alejandro a love letter. But he truly loves him. Emery knows that Alejandro is the right person for him. When they have a baby together they probably won’t even fight about who changed the last shitty diaper or who was the last person to wake up and give the kid a bottle. Or maybe they will, but it won’t really matter.
“No, she doesn’t know,” Buzzy says. “Don’t tell her. It would kill her.”
“She should kill you,” Emery says. He is surprised by his sudden allegiance to his mother. He never thought of himself as attached to her, as it was his sisters whose presence he felt as he grew up. But here he is, willing to do battle for Louise. Feeling ferocious in her defense.
“I love your mother,” Buzzy says, again. He huffs out a breath.
Anna puts an arm around Buzzy, then looks down at the rug. “This is a nice rug,” she says. “Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it for the guest quarters but it was too big, so it’s been sitting rolled up in the garage.”
“Is it real?” Alejandro asks. “It looks Persian.”
“Yeah,” Buzzy says. “Cost a fortune.”
“Don’t let the cats back in here,” Portia says.
“I can’t believe you have a Stinky,” Emery says. He sits on the rug. He feels like he’s exhaling blood. Everything is draining out of him.
“Emery.” Buzzy looks at Emery, but says nothing more.
“Patrick doesn’t love me.” Portia leaves the desk and sits on the rug between her father and her brother. They are forming a half-circle.
“Of course he does,” Buzzy says.
“No, he doesn’t,” Portia says. “It’s not like you and Mom. It’s not like we loved each other and then he fucked up and then I fucked up or we both fucked up. I loved him, and he never quite loved me, and that’s how it went down.” Portia seems calm, clear, certain.
“I’m sure it wasn’t like that,” Buzzy says.
“His Stinky’s not the same as yours,” Portia says. “He’s not conflicted.” Emery is surprised she’s not crying. This seems so much worse than the Speedo fiasco at the club.
“He’s an asshole,” Anna says. She rolls onto her side so she is lying on the rug. Her folded arm is a pillow beneath her head. Emery thinks that Anna doesn’t love Brian enough. This is why she is always having affairs. The difference between Brian and Portia is that Brian is willing to settle for someone whose love isn’t equal to his.
Alejandro moves to the rug and sits beside Emery. Emery feels like his thoughts are splattering in his brain like spin art: his father’s Stinky, his one sister’s cheating husband, his other sister who cheats, his love for Alejandro, his sisters’ eggs.
“It’s weird, but I feel like maybe Patrick was only with me because I wanted to be with him. Like he went along with it until someone he really loved came along.”
“Who wouldn’t love you!?” Buzzy asks. He seems genuinely offended by the idea of someone’s not loving Port
ia.
“He’s like that,” Portia says. “He doesn’t make decisions, so things get decided for him. He didn’t love me, he just never decided to do anything else. And when we got married, it simply happened. Or maybe I pushed it, and he didn’t say no. Same thing with Esmé. He didn’t decide with me that we’d have a baby; I told him I went off the pill, and he said okay.” Emery thinks of his sister as a cored apple. Some center of her has been ripped out, leaving behind a hollow, tattered mess.
“Sometimes I think I don’t love Brian,” Anna says. No duh, Emery almost says aloud, but doesn’t.
“There was never a time when I didn’t think I loved Patrick,” Portia says. “And I don’t think there ever was a time when he was sure that he loved me. He never once wrote me a love letter. He didn’t even sign refrigerator notes with ‘I love you.’ I always signed them with ‘I love you.’ Even if the note said, Pick up vitamin C, or We’re out of organic skim milk.” Emery looks at his sister and sees how sad she is. He puts his hand on her back. Alejandro lies down and puts his head on Emery’s lap. Emery looks down and feels lucky to have Alejandro. He knows that their love is equal.
“My love goes in and out all the time,” Anna says. “A burning flame and then nothing. And then it lights up again.”
“You’re a revolving lighthouse,” Portia says.
“Alejandro and I are going to have a baby,” Emery says.
Portia looks at her brother and tears up. She’s smiling.
“That’s great,” Anna says. She sounds like she doesn’t believe it, like it’s dreamy chatter.
“You adopting?” Buzzy asks.
“We’ve found this amazing woman who will carry an embryo,” Emery says. Alejandro sits up and stares at Emery. Emery can feel Alejandro’s anticipation on his own skin. He is catching it like a yawn.
Drinking Closer to Home Page 22
