by Isla Morley
“You forgive it, Greg. You get on with your business of forgiving sinners and playing God.”
“It’s better than playing the fool,” he mutters, turning away, spent.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?” he replies without looking back. I realize neither of our questions, the ones that started this exchange in the first place, has been answered.
THE THREE-STORY OFFICE COMPLEX of Kahako Publishing Inc. is fronted with date palm trees and orange bougainvillea, which bloom despite persistent negligence on the part of the occupants, who never look out their blinds-drawn windows. Today the cluster of bums whose belongings are normally piled in the corner of the front entrance are being shooed down the road lined with black film crew trucks by two security guards. A starched-looking woman with horn-rimmed spectacles blocks the entrance to the lobby with a sign that reads QUIET PLEASE! FILMING. I look beyond her to the cameraman and the faux reception desk to which he is aimed. The sign hanging beneath it says CARSON P. FULLER ASYLUM. Someone in a beret (who wears a beret in Hawaii, for Pete’s sake!) shouts “Action!” and suddenly a man in a white coat tries to placate a very large, hairy fellow who apparently has not noticed that the gap in his hospital gown affords a rather unflattering view of his derriere. Just as he begins foaming at the mouth, Beret Man shouts, “Cut! Is it too much trouble, ladies and gentlemen, to find a hospital gown that wasn’t made for a GODDAMN MIDGET?”
I slip past the chaos and enter through the door whose sign above it I still recognize: PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” exclaims Buella with a little applause when I stand in front of her desk. After being enveloped by layers of burgundy scarves, I suffer through her scrutiny of my outfit, which today is jeans and a T-shirt. Judging from her expression, as though she has caught a whiff of something unpleasant, I know that Buella is disappointed to find not even one adornment.
“Fitting that I should return to work on the day it’s become a loony bin,” I say, hoping to distract her.
“Oh, darling, it’s all very exciting! They’re filming the season premiere of Across the Border. Did you see Roan Mitchell? He has raised the estrogen level in this place by a few hundred pints. He’s beautiful, but my God, the man has an ego—he had the nerve to ask me if I wanted his autograph!”
“Did you get it?”
“Of course not! I asked him if he wanted mine!”
“Jean in?” I ask, looking at the closed door.
“Yes, but she’s meeting with the printers at the moment. I’ll buzz you when she’s out. Abbe, it’s wonderful to have you back.” As a postscript, she adds, “Oooh, you are going to make the Italian Stallion’s day!”
Seeing my face, she laughs and waves her hand dismissively, “Oh fergodsake, everyone knows the man is sweet on you. It’s not a chargeable offense.”
My office smells like my grandmother’s old closets, of decay, of neglect. Tying back the curtains so that the light can dispel some of the gloom, I watch the suspended sparkles of dust. Someone has stacked my work into orderly piles and the desk calendar is still on February. After wiping the dust from my desk and the file cabinets, I take my potted plant—its Valentine’s Day ribbon garish compared to the starkness of its brittle branches—and head for the large trash can next to the Xerox machine. But Sal is suddenly planted in my doorway. “Buella said you were in,” he says, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder.
“Come in,” I say. “Have a seat.”
“I remember that,” he says, glancing at the deceased plant. It appeared on my desk the morning of the fourteenth with a card signed simply “Your not-so-secret admirer.”
“Didn’t hold up as well as the locket,” I remark, showing him the single adornment tucked under the crew neck of my T-shirt. He seems pleased, yet struggles to find a comfortable note nonetheless.
“Well, I won’t stay. I just wanted to say . . . well . . . What I was going to say was, ‘Welcome back,’ but what I really wanted to say was—”
“Please, Sal. Don’t,” I interrupt before he goes on.
“You’re right. It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about that day and I know things are different for you now. But how I feel about it—about you—is still the same.”
“Let’s pretend it never happened, okay?”
“Yes, but it did happen.”
“Please, Sal. I just can’t.”
The same dogged expression returns to his face. “I feel like I’ve lost you even before I had you.”
“You never had me, Sal. It was just a kiss.”
In the old days, before Cleo died, it might have taken something as small as a kiss to change things, but now that’s not how it works. Death changes things, not carbonated kisses and fingers sticky with want.
“If it was just a kiss, then why did it feel like a promise?” he asks.
“Maybe it was—I don’t know.”
“Maybe you just need some time. I didn’t come here to rush you or pressure you, I—”
I shake my head. “Sal . . .”
“I see,” he says, and instead of waiting for my apology, he stands up and walks out of the office, the sparkles of dust colliding in his wake.
I turn around and look out my window to the courtyard below, where the film crew is gathering. Men with tool belts are laying tracks for the camera while the man in the white coat signs the autograph of a drooling teenage girl. Behind them, Buella is pilfering something from the crew’s concession stand.
“Temporary insanity,” I say, although there is nobody to hear my confession. There couldn’t be a more suitable place for filming a segment for a fantastical TV show, for manufacturing artifice and dressing up unreality so only the desperate are willing to think it’s real. It is what Kahako Publishing pays us to do each issue, by whatever means necessary. Which has led to moments of insanity, at different times, for each of us. Was the moment with Sal my moment of insanity? Had my mother become insane when she fell for the man on the other end of the phone? Wasn’t it insane to act as though another man could kiss away the bruises of an abrading marriage?
Buella buzzes me. “Jean’s free for a minute.”
“A story a week, that’s the deal,” Jean says when I enter. Not “Welcome back,” “We missed you,” “It must be tough,” but “Come in for the editorial meetings and long enough to catch up on e-mails or calls. Or don’t. I don’t care. Just make sure Peter gets his five hundred words Tuesday before noon so he doesn’t come in and give me hell.”
“Thank you, Jean,” I tell her.
“Pff,” she grunts, and waves away my gratitude as though it were a bad smell. “You’re a good writer, Abbe. Just glad we’re not going to see that talent go to waste.”
I turn to leave.
“One more thing . . .” she says.
“Yes?”
“You have anything to do with Sal quitting?”
“What?”
“He quit. Five minutes ago. His resignation—such as it is—is scrawled on the back of this,” she says, holding up a postcard. I don’t need to look closer to know it is a picture of Raphael’s Transfiguration. “Now, what the hell is this supposed to mean?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” I lie.
THE WALK UP THE HILL takes twenty minutes, half the time it takes to wait for the next bus. Tomorrow I will take the car and Greg can ride the bus! By the time I turn onto our street, my heart is pounding from the exertion and puddles have collected all over my T-shirt. The ambulance is parked the wrong way in the street, between Mrs. Chung’s house and ours, and my first thought is, Cleo! and the ancient voice reminds me gently no. Mrs. Chung’s door, always closed, is now open so that her house seems like a discarded cardboard box. Suddenly two men rush out carrying a stretcher while a woman in uniform rushes to get in the driver’s seat of the ambulance. Mrs. Chung stands in the empty doorway wringing her dish towel as though it were a neck.
&n
bsp; After the ambulance skids down the street and around the bend, I consider walking quickly to our gate, pretending not to have intruded on a very private moment. But then she turns my way and her old turtle face, pinched perpetually in a grimace, now looks punctured and afraid. I walk down her path.
“Mrs. Chung?” She seems not to notice me, casting a long shadow that reaches her before I do. “Mrs. Chung, it’s me, Abbe Deighton from next door. Are you okay?”
“Ronnie fell off the ladder. He fell,” she says, as though explaining to herself.
“Mrs. Chung, I think you should sit down. Here, let me help you . . . May I come in?”
Mrs. Chung’s home has the odor of bitter things—petroleum floor polish, almonds, hospital wards. The parquet wood floors and the ball-and-claw furniture in her living room compete in their luster. The shelves on the west walls are bare save for a few framed photos and a cloisonné vase with no flowers. The dining room table, with its crisp crocheted white tablecloth, is laid for dinner although it is only barely past three. I might as well have walked into my parents’ house.
Mrs. Chung sits down at the setting closest to the kitchen. “My son always wants to do things himself. I told him we should have hired a painter,” she explains. There is a kettle on the stove but no dishes in the sink. The kitchen looks as if it has never been used.
“Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?” I ask.
She nods and points to the cupboard in the corner. “Ronnie said it’s cheaper to do it yourself than hire someone else who is only going to cut corners.”
There is a box of green tea among the shelves of assorted pill bottles.
“His father,” she says, glancing at the ceiling above her, “is always telling him he’s no good, and that is why poor Ronnie always tries too hard. And now he’s gone and broken his neck.”
It has often been a source of speculation between Greg and me why a middle-aged man would be living at home with his parents, apparently unemployed. A mental case, I thought, given his gene pool. I even looked up Ronnie’s name on the sex offender watch site to see if it was listed, just in case. It wasn’t.
“Doctors can do amazing things these days; they can fix anything,” I say, the words ringing false even to my own ears.
“He’s going to be scared,” she says. “Ronnie has never liked hospitals.” I hand her a cup of microwaved urine-colored tea.
“Do you need a ride down there?”
“I can’t leave my husband till five, after he’s taken his pills. I’ll be okay to drive, and by then Mrs. Beech will be home from church and she can ride with me.” I try not to feel offended by this. After a few sips, she seems to regain her focus and looks around, at me in her house, as though she has awoken from a dream. “I think I will call the hospital now,” she says.
As she ushers me to the front door, I notice the pictures hanging on her hallway wall. One is of a much younger Ronnie, smiling in such a way so his teeth don’t show. The other picture, obviously taken at the same time in the same studio, is of a young woman with Down syndrome features. “Who is this?” I ask.
“That’s Mai,” she replies. “My youngest.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”
“No. She died many years ago.”
“I didn’t know . . . I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t ever get over losing a child,” she says, staring at Mai’s picture. “But losing them both would kill me.”
“I am sure Ronnie is going to be fine,” I say.
Standing in the foyer of her house, I see that Death makes skeletons of the ones left alive, and when I look down to take her hand, I notice it is identical to mine. Related we are, by our dead children.
“Thank you, Mrs. Deighton. And goodbye,” she says, the cool lid of cordiality snapping back firmly into place.
All I can think of in reply is, “Remember to eat.”
MY MOTHER STOPPED EATING after Mary Marshall and Lilian Austin were flattened by my father’s truck. She set the dinner table with three places each evening, cooked macaroni and cheese or shepherd’s pie, but never took her place. If she ate at all, it was a diet of Mint Imperials and apricots from our tree. Soon all her housedresses hung like Halloween costumes and she took to wearing leggings and baggy sweaters that came to her knees. She seldom went anywhere, and when she did we would have to call the neighbor’s gardener to help jump-start the car.
My father mocked her about eating like a bird, and I stopped going to Cindy’s house for sleepovers because I was dead scared she was either going to croak or fly the coop. To torture us both I tried convincing her to eat. Not once did I call my grandmother or our family doctor or write to Rhiaan about what books called “anorexia.” And I certainly never mentioned it to my father. Insanity elicited from each of us an unspoken agreement, a complicity—We are all in this together, just as long as nobody involves an outsider. Only once did I try to tell Cindy what was going on, and when she said things couldn’t be “that bad,” I thought she must be right.
The other thing about which none of us spoke was the matter of my mother’s indiscretion. It had been almost a year since my father had yelled down the phone to my mother’s lover and still I was curious: Who had he been? Had my mother forgotten him? Had he forgotten her? Had it really happened or had I dreamed the whole thing up?
“I’m going to run away!” I told my mother one Sunday afternoon when my father left for the pub. “I’m going to run away if you don’t start eating, Mom!”
“I do eat, Abbe,” she replied, clearing the table. “Besides, where are you going to run that I won’t find you?”
“I know some places, I do! Maybe I’ll run away to America, like Rhiaan!” She stopped in her tracks then, and came over to where I sat pouting on the couch. Hugging me in her sharp, bony-bird arms, she cried, “Oh, baby, now don’t go saying that; please don’t go saying that.” She rocked me as someone might worry a stake till it is set firmly in the ground.
“Mom?” I finally said. “Did you love that man?”
She didn’t say “Who?” or “Hush up” or anything I imagined she would say. So long was her answer in coming that I knew she had chosen her words with the greatest of care. “I love you and I love your brother; that’s all that really matters.”
I FIDDLE WITH THE LOCKET, running it back and forth across its chain. It could not have been Sal’s dark looks or his height that reminded me of the blue gum trees lining the street on which I grew up that did it. That made me kiss him, that made him feel that he’d extracted a promise. It could not have been his baritone laugh or his chivalrous manners or his freshly pressed scent. Something else, something beyond appearances, something quite invisible, pulled me to Sal. Something on him that smelled of misery, or loneliness. Of kinship. Of someone who was waiting to be delivered from his own brand of insanity and introduced to something—anything—else. Even if it just turned about to be my insanity. There is no escaping unhappiness, there is only sharing it. If I had promised Sal anything, then, in that kiss, it was only to make him a witness to my same-same existence. Same-same as his, as Mrs. Chung’s, as my mother’s. All same-same.
“I said something nice to Petal today,” I tell Greg when his head pokes in the door, tentatively, as though a brick might be launched his way.
“Excuse me?”
“I called her this afternoon to see how she is doing.”
“And?”
“I told her she reminded me of an E. E. Cummings poem, courageously breaking all the rules.” What I didn’t tell her was there would come a time when she would be forced to move along in brisk, neat sentences with the punctuation marks all in place. That there might even come a time, God forbid, when the cruelty of life would strip her, as it had Mrs. Chung, to a haiku poem. Lean and tucked in tight, and smelling of almonds. “You said I couldn’t say something kind to her.”
“I shouldn’t have said a lot of things, Abbe.”
When I don’t reply, he turns
to head out of the room.
“I didn’t sleep with him,” I announce hastily.
Greg moves back into the doorway.
“I wanted to. I would have.” Greg lifts his hand for me to stop, but I ignore it. “I wasn’t playing the fool, Greg. I was unhappy. I know you don’t think this is any kind of solution, but I wasn’t thinking about you or church or even Cleo. I kissed him because I wanted to find out if there was something that could make me happy, even when I knew ten-to-one it wouldn’t. Do you understand?”
Greg’s sigh of a million lonely nights echoes through the room. “I met Mr. Nguyen for coffee after he called the house that night. I thought it would help me. I never expected that it would help him or that there would be more meetings.”
“How many times have you met with him?” I ask.
“Several.”
“How many?”
There is a beat. “Several.”
There are five names I want to call Greg, but I remain silent.
“I swear, Abbe, I never intended it to turn out this way. It just sort of happened.” After the words are out I realize I might have said them to him about Sal.
We stare out the sliding glass door beyond the deck and today’s droppings from the birds to the sun, a small orange orb landing on the ocean. The sun is sinking, Cleo said once, panicked that it might never come up again. And we laughed at her furrowed concern. But it seems tonight, with the clouds streaked with pink flares, that she might just be right.
Greg is the first one to break the silence. “Did you love him?”
“I don’t think it matters anymore.” And what is left of my deceit goes the way of the sun.
ELEVEN
I am awake when the phone rings at 5:10, having wormed my way through only five lines of mediocrity, the noon deadline chasing my heels. Kelsey Oliver, crisp and curt as though he has been up longer than God, is down to business before I can finish my greeting.
