Down the Garden Path
At the airport Danny was wearing a suit and tie, and I almost didn’t recognize him. He had cut the hair and the hostile little beard he had worn ever since I had known him, since I met and married his mother.
“Hey, Thomas,” he said, when he turned and found me looking uncertainly at him, frowning, standing just outside the screening area. He stuck out his hand and I shook it and threw my arm around his shoulder, stiffly. Danny looked like his father, square-jawed, clean shaven, with that noncommittal smile which was all in his eyes. His father had been a hero, of a sort of obvious sort.
Without all the extra hair he seemed somehow less formidable, wide-eyed, a little childish, innocent, even though he was twenty-six, even though eight years earlier he had killed another boy with his hands in a fight and whenever I was around him that was what I thought of, no matter what he looked like. It was impossible not to see it when I looked at him. They had both been deep into drugs, but the other kid had attacked him and it happened out of state and the circumstances were muddy in other ways. After thirty thousand dollars in lawyers, finally he was no-billed. I remember the lawyers charged us four thousand dollars for Xeroxing. None of it seemed to chasten or change him much, but Laura never really recovered.
He had been in college when she and I married, and my acquaintance with him which was always strained was also always only a passing one, so it didn’t much matter. After college he played music, went to live in Hawaii, then California, and later in Tucson, and periodically we would send him money. Now, Laura was dead, and he had come home to bury her.
We were standing out on the main concourse and Danny was talking but I was disoriented, having trouble paying attention. On the drive to the airport, alone, and later trying to walk away the time until the plane got in, I had been talking to myself, not quite making sense. The place felt odd, otherworldly. I hadn’t been to the airport in years. I was not in good shape, but it would be better now with someone to talk to, even if it was Danny.
I had been, for several years, involved with a woman, a friend of ours named Marianne, and she had been helping me take care of Laura, as much as we could care for her at the hospital. In the last month or so I had become completely dependent on Marianne for my psychological balance. Left alone, in an hour or so I would start to come unraveled. But having now another person to deal with forced me to regain some composure, a sort of cure by etiquette.
Danny curled a magazine in his hands like it was a baseball bat, looked quickly up and down the blue-carpeted concourse, and said, “You want to wait up here?”
I shook my head and we started toward the escalators. The terminal was oddly empty on the upper floor. He walked fast, as if we could do something about his mother if we could only get there in time. We rode down to the lower floor to pick up his bag. Downstairs, there were a lot more people.
“So, how are you doing?” Danny said, while we were waiting next to the empty conveyor belt. He was leaning against a big two-foot square white column, ill at ease, not used to wearing a suit coat. It was an expensive coat, but ill-fitting and more rumpled than an airplane flight was likely to cause. The tie, red and yellow and so short it seemed like a gag gift, made me oddly angry.
“I’m okay,” I said. “A little weird, maybe. You all right?”
He pushed away from the square column, a stage pause to give me this theatrical, questioning look. “My mother is dead.”
I sighed. I stood with my arms crossed, staring, trying to remember what twenty-six was like, trying to think of anything we had in common, beside loving the same dead woman. Trying not to hate him. I looked around at the other people, a lot of them dressed up, good-looking women, men with money, old people. They looked intensely healthy. The difference, I thought, is that I’ve already asked all these questions and now he has to ask them. We’re out of phase, is all. “Danny, they tried everything they could,” I said. “I told you on the—”
“You told me they said—”
“She’s dead, Danny. I’m sorry. Everything I told you was stuff they told me, and none of it ever quite scanned. The last four days she was in a coma. Only they wouldn’t call it a coma. They—”
I looked at him, then walked away, past a fat guy in a uniform checking baggage tags, and over to a bench by the front windows where I sat down. I had told him what they told me on Monday which was that she had one chance in ten, and that chance was for another month or two. That was Monday. The Friday before, surgery was impossible but a special chemotherapy might arrest it, and the Friday before that it was an “aggressive approach” combining surgery with chemotherapy, as soon as they got the calcium down, might buy as much as a year. They had gotten the calcium down, and she’d stopped hallucinating. On the third Friday she died. They talk all this talk with you, like they’re letting you in, like it’s shoptalk, and you forget that you don’t know what they’re talking about and that they’re just guessing, that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Danny walked up with his suitcase. “Let’s get out of here.”
I stood up, and pointed toward a sort of hallway. “It’s that way.” We started on our way to the parking. The hallway narrowed and then opened into a long space with a series of glass doors to the outside. The doors were framed in brass which looked hammered or patterned like the doors to an old downtown hotel. This was weird, because the rest of the airport looked like it had a thin coat of sci-fi movie. “You’ll stay at the house, won’t you?” I said, as I followed him out.
“Yeah, okay,” Danny said.
By the time we got onto the freeway into the city it was just after dark, the lights from strip centers on either side of the six-lane road creating a false twilight. Lightning flashed along the horizon, a distant thunderstorm. Danny was quiet. He punched the car radio on, then punched it off. I thought about driving back and forth to the hospital, the last few weeks, two or three times a day. They wouldn’t say she was in a “coma,” just “unconscious”; there was some difference.
Then one day last week the doctor I liked, Thompson, a heavyset, gently graying, quiet guy took me down a hall, up a floor, and into some odd room that seemed to be directly behind a nurses’ station. There were shelves and a lot of white stuff, packaging, it was some kind of supply room. He said they had now done everything they could. I was in a chair; he was half-sitting against a table or a desk. When he said she was “comfortable,” I started shaking and shouting, “She’s fucking comatose, how the fuck do you know?” but he just stood watching me, until I felt stupid. I apologized.
Danny watched the city pass by outside the car window. He wouldn’t look at me. He was blaming me for letting his mother die. I shook my head, to lose the thought.
He was a nice-looking kid, six one, dark brows, with brown eyes set wide apart and an odd un-aimed stare that used to be a mannerism of movie stars, a vulnerable or stunned look. Montgomery Clift, James Dean. The look was surly, too, sometimes. When I first knew him, the anger he broadcast unsettled me, but now it annoyed me more than anything else. Yeah, I’m angry, too, I thought.
I had worked with Laura for some years before her divorce and a couple years after it we started seeing each other. When I met Danny he was already fifteen, already a petty criminal. With her gone, I felt no obligation to pretend to like him.
We had never gotten along very well, anyway, but I thought we could go through the motions of this and get it done. It was only two days, the official part. When someone you love dies, your father, your mother, it’s not something that happens on one particular day so much as something that settles in, over a long time, so two years later you’re still talking to her, in your head, and the sadness kind of grows over her absence.
“Is there any money?” Danny said, finally, after we were off the freeway, and I had turned onto the street the house was on.
“Can we bury her first?” I said, then lifted my hands away from the steering wheel. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that
. I was thinking about something else.”
He frowned. “I just meant, what happens? She had a rent house, in Austin, and some other stuff, government bonds or something, from grandpa, before she married you. My dad didn’t leave her anything. I just wondered what happens to it.”
“She left it all to me, Danny.” When I saw his shocked look in the light from the streetlights, I said, “I’m supposed to look out for you, that was the idea. It’s your money. It amounts to about seventy thousand dollars.” I turned into the driveway, pulled the car up to the garage doors, and shut it off. “But we can talk about it. Later. I’ll write you a check or something, after the legalities are settled. And after your lecture, after I speak sternly to you about husbandry.”
He frowned. “I thought husbandry was farming,” he said, shrugged, and leaned back in the seat. “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You’re not.” He’s just a kid, I thought, and his mother just died. His father had died when Danny was about eleven. His father, the legend, the hell-raiser with the big Harley and the big dogs, malamutes, who in all his photographs looks like he’s lying. Killed himself on the motorcycle, about a year after their divorce.
We got out of the car and walked in through the kitchen door. I had no reason to dislike him, really, other than that he disliked me.
“I want some things,” he said, setting his suitcase down and looking around the kitchen. He wandered over to the table and pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. “Sentimental things. We can talk about it later,” he said.
“Okay.”
“It’s stuff we used to have,” he said, “when we lived on Weston, in that little apartment. And there’s some jewelry, too. She had this necklace she used to let me play with, when I was a kid. It was sapphires, for God’s sake, and she used to let me play with it. My dad probably stole it, burglary or something.” He looked at me. “It was beautiful.”
“I know the necklace,” I said, and walked over to the refrigerator, swung it open. “You want a beer? You can’t have it.”
He was staring at me and he was sort of smiling, as if he thought we were in a contest and he was winning. The smile probably worked real well for him in bars or wherever he hung out.
“You want a beer? Orange juice? Diet Pepsi?” I reached in and took a bottle of beer. When I tried to twist off the top, it tore my hand, so I shuffled around in a drawer until I found an opener.
“You have any liquor?”
I pointed to a cabinet below the counter. He got up to get himself a drink and I carried my beer over to the table and sat down. “Where’d you get that fancy coat?”
“Goodwill,” Danny said, adding water from the tap to his glass. “Can I get it pressed tomorrow? On Sunday?” He got some ice from the freezer and stirred with his fingers. “What is this stuff, bourbon? Maybe I could press it myself,” he said. “We got an iron?”
“You could wear one of mine, maybe.”
“This’ll do,” Danny said. “Mom won’t care. You could loan me a tie. She probably won’t recognize me, wherever she is.” He took a big drink from his glass and grimaced. “Nasty,” he said. “Sheez. Think I’ll take a beer after all. He looked at the liquor in his glass, glanced at me, and then poured it into the sink.
I stood up. “I’ve got a couple telephone calls. Could you put some beer in the freezer? There’re only four or five cold ones. Put a whole six-pack up there. There’s food, some ham and some leftover Popeye’s chicken. Carrots and applesauce. Your room is at the end of the hall.” He looked at me. “Right,” I said. “You know where the room is. I’ll be upstairs.”
“Okay,” Danny said.
As I started away, the front doorbell rang, and Danny looked at me in a peculiar sort of way. Maybe I just imagined it. It would be Marianne at the door, and introducing her to Danny made me paranoid. Marianne was already angry, and there was a lot I didn’t want to explain to Danny. Marianne had been my lover for about two years, and even been Laura’s lover for a few months at the beginning. She’d spent every day with me most of the last two weeks. She had wanted to come to the airport with me and gotten angry and walked out when I insisted not.
I headed for the door through the dim living room, lit only by a small lamp at a desk against the far wall. Just something else to do, to get through. Something else to postpone sadness for. This is why some people sob and scream, have their grief on time and at the top of their lungs. But the truth was that I was glad she was there. Being with Danny was too close to being alone.
“Is it okay?” she said, when I opened the door.
I nodded, leaned forward to kiss her long dark hair, and then stepped out of the way. “I’m glad you came,” I said. We stood in the entryway. And then I laughed. “He’s not going to understand,” I said. “He’s a little simple.”
“That’ll be unpleasant,” she said. “But it’s not a big thing.”
“It feels bad. Hating him.”
Danny came to the door at the other end of the living room and stood looking at us with a new beer in his hand. He can’t have finished that that quickly, I thought. I felt, of course, caught, like he was the girl’s father, but I put my hand to Marianne’s back and we started over to him.
“Marianne,” I said, “this is my stepson, Danny. Danny, Marianne.”
“Hello,” Danny said, blankly, and he shook her hand.
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Marianne said. “She was about my best friend in the world.” She looked at me.
“Marianne took care of us the last seven months,” I said. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”
“No, I think I want to stay in here,” Danny said and he let his body fall onto one of the couches.
I had started for the kitchen. “Suit yourself,” I said. He was staring at Marianne in the dim light, and when I looked at her I saw her again as if for the first time, beautiful hair, long sad face, shining eyes.
“No,” she said, “let’s sit in here.” And she settled in the armchair between the two couches.
“Whatever,” I said. “Do you want something?” I waved toward the kitchen. “I have a beer.”
She shook her head. I went into the kitchen and threw ice in a glass and poured the rest of my beer into it, got another from the refrigerator. They didn’t speak. I walked back in and sat on a couch opposite my stepson, set the glass and the beer on the low table.
“Danny’s been living in Arizona,” I said. “Did you ever put out that EP or whatever it was, Danny?”
“Smells like pussy in here,” he said, looking at me with that empty stare of his.
“Okay, you little motherfucker,” I said, “I’m not—”
“That would be me,” Marianne said. She hadn’t moved, but there was the slightest smile on her lips. “And your point is?”
“My point is that you guys were screwing your way to bliss while my mother—and his wife—was dying and puking her guts out in a hospital by herself. And now you sit in her house like you own the place. You fuck on that couch?”
She laughed. “So you’re like the Holy Ghost?” she said. “This is a great country where the utterly ignorant get to have opinions on everything, and usually do. Actually, Laura was almost never alone because he was there, pretty much all the time, and so was I. ‘Please go home, both of you. Eat a hot fudge sundae for me.’ I don’t recall seeing you. Did you hear me tell you she was the best friend I ever had?”
“Sure. Yeah, I heard that.” He smirked.
Marianne sat forward in the armchair. “Do you know what a friend is?”
“No, no, no, no,” I said. “That’s enough of this.” When he started to say something, I held my hand up, shook my head. “No, don’t. You can think anything you want, but you’ve said enough. I’m sorry that you’ve lost your mama, that must be terrible. I have a sense of how that is.” I took out my wallet, took out a credit card. “Here, go get your bag, get yourself a motel room, call a cab.”
He stood u
p, looked at me. “It’s my house,” he said, feebly.
“You know that’s not so,” I said. “You’ve got your grief, that’s all you’ve got. I’ve got mine.” I shook my head again. “And I don’t want your dirt on it, no matter how bad you feel. So go on.”
When he was gone, we sat in the living room for a while. I wanted a cigarette, even though I had quit smoking fifteen years before. It was ten minutes before either one of us said anything.
“I’m sorry,” Marianne said. “You were right, though. You can’t share grief.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” I smiled at her. “You know, the funny thing is that when he was trying to be so ugly, I felt horribly sad for him. It was the first time all day I didn’t just hate his guts. I’m sorry you had to listen to it, though. Poor little fuck.”
She shrugged, kicked her fingers through her hair, settled back into the chair. It reminded me of Laura a little bit. I remembered once a long time ago, lying around with her on another Sunday, and I must have been reading the classifieds because for some reason I was reading her a Lost and Found ad for a dog which said something like “German Shepherd, 19 months, standard black and tan, choke collar, XQ181714 tattooed inside right ear …” and it went on like that for a while, and Laura laughed and said, “That dog’s not lost. That dog just left.” Not the sort of thing you remember about your beloved after they die, but there it is. And I thought, the kid didn’t get that stunned look from the movies, and he didn’t get it from his father. That was her look. He got it from her.
Tahiti
Lucas looked up, squinting into the black guts of the MG, watching his fingers guide a bolt into place. “You’re pretty,” he said. “Pretty—But dumb.” He reached back over his shoulder, turned his head to the side, caught the sweat on his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “You know how much time I spent looking for you last night? Half hour. You may just be the dumbest bolt on this whole goddamn car, you know that? That’s right, that’s a sweet child, just one second now, that’s right—” He reached back again, his fingers a spider across the concrete, closing around a socket, bringing it back and pushing it onto the ratchet, one-handed, his other hand on the bolt up beside the timing chain cover. He reached up with the ratchet. “One more second, and you’re home. Tick, tick, tickety, tick. Tick. There. You know, I knew a bolt on a combine once that was just almost as dumb as you are. A farm bolt. You’re dumber than a farm bolt.” He let his shoulders settle on the concrete, took a long, slow breath, stretched his neck out.
Hush Hush Page 15
