Especially if we're smart, we think we're open to experience, to every new day's freshness.”
Clancy sat up and put his brandy snifter down on the side table next to the couch. This was not a bunch of superficial junk his father was saying to appease him and avoid dealing with truthfulness. This was real. He needed to pay attention.
“I led a charmed life,” Walt continued. “But I didn't know it, because there were plenty of things to bitch about—you know how cutthroat the university life can be. I'm not saying I was a complainer,” he added quickly. “I was a positive person, most of the time. You know me—I'm a full-bore extrovert, rehashing old slights has never been high up on my list.”
He paused for a moment to finish the dregs in his glass. Reaching for the Rémy, he poured himself another three fingers, held the bottle up. “Refill?”
Clancy shook his head. “I'm fine.”
Walt put the bottle down. “Help yourself when you want to. There's more.”
He keeps more than one bottle of hundred-dollar brandy in the house, Clancy thought. That's a rich man's indulgence.
“So here I was,” Walt went on. “Living. I had a great career, I had—still have, thank God—three wonderful sons, and most importantly, I had your mother. My wife. She was the ideal woman for me, and I knew it, right from the start. You know, Clancy,” he said, leaning forward to emphasize his point, “before I met your mom, I was doing okay. But after we took up, things changed. I grew—you know what I mean? As a man, as a conscious human being. Something about your mother's being my mate let me grow into a larger stature than I would have otherwise. I became the best I could be, and it was because of her. Because of her faith in me, and because of who she was. Her spirit.”
He paused for a moment to wet his whistle. Clancy was sitting up straight. All his antennae were quivering. He had never heard his father speak this way, so deeply and movingly personal, especially about his mother and what she had meant to him.
“I became a star in my constellation because of your mother,” Walt said. “She was the bedrock beneath my feet, and because of that, because I knew that, I could reach for the heights without fearing that if I fell I'd be shattered. Because she was always there to catch me.”
He looked down into his glass for a moment, as if looking at something in it besides cognac. His wife, Clancy thought, some sense memory of her.
“The way we were, that strength of hers, was so ingrained in us that I took it for granted. She was always going to be there until the day we both died, which wasn't going to be for a long time. Decades. Two old geezers in their rocking chairs on the front porch, their grandchildren sleeping in their laps. Norman Rockwell stuff.”
He stopped and drank.
“Except she died. And I got hit with a dose of reality that knocked me so sideways it almost blew me away.”
Without realizing it, Clancy had picked up and finished the contents of his glass. Pushing up from the deep cushions, he reached over for the bottle and poured himself another shot.
“In that one awful moment,” Walt continued, “everything changed, and I couldn't pretend that it hadn't. Which is why I'm not teaching at Wisconsin anymore, and why I'm living here instead of there, and why I've been acting like I've been.”
He reached over and touched Clancy on the forearm with his fingertips; a delicate gesture. “I didn't want to abandon you and your brothers,” Walt said. “But I had to go off and be alone.” He shook his head, like a lion shaking off a swarm of mosquitoes. “No, that's not it, that's a shuck. I had to not be with you guys. Can you understand that? I had to figure out how to keep on going, and being around you and your brothers wouldn't have let me, because I would be constantly seeing her, in you.” He paused. “Like I do now.”
He took a deep breath. “I had to learn how to live a new life. I couldn't survive if I didn't. And I had to do it myself. Which is why I've been the way I have. Do you understand?” he asked, almost beseechingly.
Clancy could feel tears welling at the corners of his eyes. He blinked, fighting to hold them in. He didn't want to break down in front of his father. It had taken a lot of courage for Walt to open up like this. He had confided in Clancy both as a father to a son and as a man to another man, equals. Tears would bring a maudlin sentimentality to Walt's honest outpouring, diminishing it.
“Yes, dad.” The tears stayed behind his eyeballs. “I do.”
They didn't go down to the wine cellar. They stayed in the low-lit room, slowly polishing off the bottle of expensive cognac. Clancy thought he heard, a few times, rustling sounds in another part of the house. That would be Emma, he assumed. Was she living here? She seemed to be, but he wasn't sure, and he didn't want to ask Walt about that, not now. He wasn't sure of anything at this moment, not after that extraordinary cathartic release of emotion from his father. All he knew was that he felt a hell of a lot better about him than he had for a year. Better, and overwhelmingly relieved. Walt hadn't fallen off the face of the earth, as they had feared.
“Walt?”
Clancy turned with a start. He hadn't heard Emma enter the room. She moves like a cat, he thought. On silent feet.
“What is it?” Walt asked. He was slouched down low in his chair, his legs spread out on the ottoman.
“Can we talk for a minute?” She glanced at Clancy, gave him a quick smile. “I'm not disturbing you, I hope.”
“Of course not.” Walt smiled at Clancy as he shambled to his feet. “We're all caught up here.”
Clancy watched her, watched her look at his father, watched Walt look back at her. There was an undeniable intimacy between them.
It took him a moment before he placed what was out of the ordinary about this woman, besides her obvious physical attractiveness. It was her scent, her female aroma. He hadn't noticed it earlier—all his senses had been channeled into his feelings about seeing and being with his father. But now, having gotten past that initial surge of emotion, he was more tuned in to the rest of his surroundings, particularly her.
She smelled feral, like an animal in heat. Even standing ten feet away, he could detect her essence drifting off her, permeating the room with erotic perfume. Emma Rawlings threw off an unmistakable smell of sex. It was subtle, but it was unmistakable.
“I'll be back in a minute,” Walt said.
He and Emma left the room. Clancy heard them walking through the house, their heels clicking on the tile floor. He crossed behind Walt's desk and picked up one of the kachina dolls from the shelf where it was lined up with the others.
“What kind of mojo do you bring?” he asked the doll, turning it in his hands as he examined it. “Good, or bad?”
The doll didn't answer.
Clancy stood in the backyard, which was a good vantage point to see the driveway. Emma's car was gone, so he assumed she had left. He hadn't heard a car driving away, but maybe from inside you couldn't.
He knocked back a big swallow of the cognac he'd brought outside with him. He was uncomfortable about standing here with this glass of spirits in his hand; a full glass, he'd poured it almost to the rim. Part of the discomfort was that he didn't want to get more of a buzz on. There was something in the air that could bend him in the wrong direction if he wasn't vigilant. He didn't subscribe to the notion of vibes anymore, but there was a presence hovering over all this. Like a fine mist you can feel on your skin.
The other part of his uneasiness, the big part, had to do with Emma. He had a queasy feeling about her. About her and his dad. This was his father's house (and maybe hers, he didn't know), but she felt like an intruder to him. Not a legitimate feeling for him to have, he knew, but there it was, anyway.
Maybe she doesn't live with him, he thought. It would be a relief if she didn't. Of course Walt was a free agent, and what he did with his life was nobody's business but his own; nonetheless, Clancy had a strong proprietary feeling toward his father, and an even stronger one for his mother—how could he not? He and his brothers were the keepe
rs of his mother's flame, and he wasn't ready to pass that torch on to another woman. He didn't expect his father to be in mourning forever—he didn't want him to be a life-widower, he wanted Walt to get out into the sunshine and find happiness again. But this relationship seemed to have ripened awfully fast. It was obvious, from the way Emma moved about the house and how she flitted around his dad, that they had been together for some time now; familiarity and ease like the two of them were openly showing takes time to grow. How much time, he thought? How long before his mother had been buried had his father taken up with this new woman?
He didn't want to think about stuff like this now. That would be real bad mojo. He and Walt were together again, father and son. For the moment, that was enough.
“One good thing about out here, we don't have to worry about getting eaten up by mosquitoes at night, like we did at home. One of the many blessings of the vaunted California life-style.”
Clancy turned. His father was standing on the back patio. How long has he been out here, Clancy thought, watching him? Shake it off, he scolded himself—that was his own stuff talking, his personal unease at being here. His father had come out to join him. There aren't always hidden agendas.
Walt waved; Clancy waved back and walked across the lawn, to where his father was waiting.
“I'm going to bed pretty soon,” Walt told him. “You need anything?”
Clancy shook his head. “I'm fine.”
“Emma laid out fresh towels for you in your bathroom. Toothpaste and whatever in the medicine cabinet. She put a pitcher of water on your bedside table before she left.”
So she wasn't here. “That was nice of her.”
“She's thoughtful that way.”
Clancy hesitated—he hadn't wanted to get into this now, but his father had opened a door. It might not be open again while he was here.
“She doesn't live here?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
Walt gave him a raised-eyebrow look. “Why would you think that?”
“No particular reason,” Clancy answered. Damn it. He shouldn't have opened his mouth about this. “The shopping, the cooking. Fixing up my bedroom. Lady-of-the-house kind of stuff.”
Walt shook his head. “She has her own place, close by. She does spend nights sometimes, but with you being here, she didn't feel right about staying over. She's old-fashioned that way.”
Emma Rawlings didn't feel old-fashioned in any way to Clancy, but he wasn't about to say so. Instead, he said, “This is a lot of house for one person.”
His father squinted at him, his eyes blinking against the light from the Chinese lantern that hung from a beam at the edge of the deck behind Clancy's head. “That's true,” he said, “but once I saw it, I couldn't resist it. I was about to buy a condo in Venice on one of the canals down there, but then this came available, and I went for it.”
Clancy gave a noncommittal nod/shrug. Where his father was living and the size of his house wasn't his business.
“The thing is,” Walt went on, “I got such a good deal it would've been criminal of me not to buy it.”
“Oh?” His father seemed to need to explain about the place, which was fine with him—he was curious, but he didn't want Walt to know that. This was his father's night for baring his soul. If he stayed patient, what he wanted to know would be revealed. Or so he hoped.
He was right, about the house, anyway. “It was Emma's doing,” Walt said.
“Emma's?”
Walt nodded. “She found it for me. She knows her way around, real estate agents, bankers. She heard about it.” With a sheepish smile, he added, “It was an inside deal, to he honest. Emma knows people in high places.”
That Emma knew her way around didn't surprise ( lancy; that his father told him so was a surprise. He would have thought his father wouldn't want to talk about his mother's replacement, given the choice.
“The bank owned it. The previous owner had died unexpectedly,” Walt explained. “He'd bought it fifteen years ago, before prices skyrocketed. He was a gay man with no family, no heirs, so the title reverted to the bank. I got it cheap.” He laughed. “Well, not cheap. Nothing in this area of L.A. is cheap. But considering how much it would have gone for if it had been put on the open market, I made out. Emma finagled it so the bank let me take over the existing loan. I had to make a down payment, of course, but it was within my price range.”
He said this smugly, as if he had pulled the wool over someone's eyes. Is he trying to do that to me, too? Clancy wondered.
“I made out dam well on our old house,” Walt continued. “We'd been living there since you were born, practically. It only cost us thirty-five grand back then. And I had my savings, plus my university pension. I retired on almost full pay—one of the perks of toiling in the university gulag for as long as I did. So …” He waved an arm expansively, taking in his new property. “Here I am.”
“Well, you did good, dad.”
“Thank you. After all the misery I've been through I think I deserved a few breaks, don't you?”
“For sure.”
They went inside. Walt picked up the bottle of Remy, held it to the light to see how much was left. “We did a number on this puppy, didn't we,” he said with the grin of a kid who's pulled one over on his parents.
“It wasn't full when we started, was it?” Clancy couldn't believe the two of them had drunk almost the entire bottle.
“Almost.” Walt snatched Clancy's glass out of his hand, poured some more cognac into it. Filling up his own glass emptied the bottle. “Hey, we're celebrating. You don't hold back when you're celebrating.”
“That's what my steadies at the bar tell me,” Clancy said. Walt clinked his snifter against his son's. “To our lives Clancy. To happiness.”
Clancy came out of the guest bathroom after brushing his teeth, washing up, and pissing a mighty stream from the wine, cognac, and the other libations they had consumed. He was ready to hit the bed. He didn't know how much sleep he'd get—his mind was awhirl with the events of the day.
“You have everything you need?”
Walt was in his boxers, bare-chested. His glass of cognac dangled from his fingers. He's still a specimen, Clancy thought, looking at his father as Walt stood in the hallway. He'll rage against the dying of the light until the day he dies, and in the after-life, too, if there is one.
“I'm fine. Thanks, dad. It's been a great day.”
“It has.” Walt hesitated. “About Emma …”
He stopped. Clancy waited for his father to continue. He was going to let this come to him, rather than force anything.
“I'm sure you must have mixed feelings about her, doubts, whatever,” Walt went on. “But I have to tell you, son—she's been a lifesaver for me.”
“That's good, dad. I'm glad.”
He was tired, emotionally as well as physically. He didn't want to talk anymore tonight. They could pick this conversation up in the morning, when his head would be clear.
“She's a bright woman. More importantly, she's a good woman.”
“I …” What could he say to that? That he knew that? He didn't.
“She's almost finished her Ph.D.,” Walt said, as if having an advanced degree made her a weightier person.
“That's good,” Clancy said. He knew that was what his father wanted to hear.
“I ran into her at a get-together one of my friends in the department was throwing. She knew who I was, of course, being involved in archaeology like she is. She'd even read some of my writing, which is more than I can say for most of my actual students over the years. We wound up leaving together and going for coffee, and it was instant rapport. I could talk to her. I hadn't talked to a woman like that since …” He trailed off.
He's snockered, Clancy realized. Not drunk, but his tongue is damn well lubricated. Maybe he needed that crutch, to open up the way he has.
“It was logical that we started seeing each other. I didn't know that many people, not any women. She'd b
een unhappy in a relationship she'd recently gotten out of, so we were both lonely. And then, over the course of a few months, we came to understand how much we cared for each other. It's not the perfect match—I had that, with your mother. Emma's much younger than me, for one thing. But somehow …” He trailed off.
“The heart knows what it knows,” Clancy said. He felt a sudden twang of compassion for his father. Who was he to judge this man?
Walt smiled. “That's good. Who said that?”
“Woody Allen, I think.”
“One of our great philosophers,” Walt commented wryly. He brought his glass to his mouth again, but it was empty now; he let his arm drop. “Emma doesn't need me. She has plenty of guys sniffing around her like dogs—you can see she's an extremely attractive woman. And she has her own money, she's not a gold digger,” he said, almost as if daring Clancy to argue the point.
“Of course not,” Clancy said; but he couldn't help thinking, Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
“And she has a great eye. She did the decorating. You know me, I'm not a style maven. But I like what she's clone here, don't you?”
“It's a great-looking place, dad,” Clancy agreed. He threw an arm over his father's shoulder. “I'm happy for you dad, all around. But I'm wiped. We'll talk more in the morning, okay?”
Walt blinked, as if he'd been in a dark room and the light had suddenly been turned on. “Sure. It's been a long day for both of us.”
He started to go. At the doorway, he turned back to face his son. “Don't judge Emma by her looks, or her age, or how she's different from your mom. Your mom was irreplaceable. We all know that. But you can try to accept Emma for who she is, can't you?”
The words stuck in Clancy's throat. He nodded instead.
“Someday I hope you'll understand,” Walt said, as he closed the door behind him.
Sleep came hard, tossing and mining, throwing off covers. Sometime in the middle of the night Clancy thought he heard a car pull up outside, but then he fell back asleep and didn't remember.
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