“This guy I used to know died.”
The guy, Aras Kopka, was an acclaimed cellist who had studied with Pablo Casals in Vermont. Alice and Aras met when their families rented adjacent cabins one July on a lake in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Aras had been onstage at a music festival in Interlochen, Michigan, when he was struck by lightning. Maybe you remember when that happened. He was twenty-eight.
The cellist stayed dead for several years, and then I found a letter (that maybe I was intended to find) on the kitchen counter, a letter that Alice was writing to some woman she knew from yoga class, a mother of a four-year-old, apparently, who had recently lost her husband to leukemia. In the letter Alice explained that she had also lost the love of her life, Aras, her betrothed, and when he died, a part of her did, too. She had to learn to breathe again.
After supper that night, while Alice and I were doing the dishes, I told her that I’d read her disturbing letter, and frankly, I said, I was worried about her. “Maybe you should see someone, a professional.”
She rinsed a dinner plate and handed it to me. We had this heavy Franciscan Ware china, tan flowers on brown, that always made me think of torch-lit medieval dining halls. She said, “I know a hawk from a handsaw, buddy. I don’t need to see anyone. I know what’s what.”
“You’re writing this insane letter to a person you hardly know. I don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t.”
Alice wouldn’t see a counselor, so I did. The night before my first and, as it turned out, my only session, I wrote out and memorized what I was going to say. I told Dr. Madonna how Alice’s bizarre lying or fantasizing or whatever it was, was driving me crazy. I read him the Aras letter and explained that Alice had only known him casually.
He said, “She does seem to be in mourning, but not for the cellist.”
“It’s a total fabrication.”
“But the emotion isn’t.”
“Mourning for whom, then?”
He shrugged. “Any theories?”
“Maybe for the person she never was.” I felt terribly insightful.
“Tell me why you’re here today.”
“I’m trying to understand what’s going on with her.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know what to do. I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“What would you like to happen?”
“I want Alice to get back to her lighthearted self.”
“Why?”
“Well, she wouldn’t be in pain.”
“And?”
“She’d be happy again.”
“And?”
“And I wouldn’t have to put up with her self-absorbed bullshit.”
He smiled. “We seem to be getting somewhere.”
I sat back in my seat and apologized.
“Sometimes we say the most when we don’t say anything.”
What hadn’t I said?
“You haven’t mentioned the future of the marriage. Does it have one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“Maybe I’m not in love with her.”
“And that would make you a bastard. How could you live with yourself, walking out on a woman so emotionally in need?”
“She is needy right now.”
“She’s certainly not manipulative and selfish.”
“Listen, I’m no day at the beach. She’s put up with a lot.”
“What did she do to you?”
“She’s not to blame.”
“You’re angry, and you’re not just angry with Alice.”
So that’s my story. Alice opened the door with her lies, or whatever they were, and I walked way. I couldn’t take it anymore. She’d become unreachable. Turns out that she wasn’t crazy. Last report I got, she was married, teaching, and a mom. She could not have been telling the truth or at least not the whole truth or at least not nothing but the truth.
Her take on the marriage would be different, of course, something like, she was in pain, and I did not comfort her; she was out of control, and I let her drift away; she needed me, and I ignored her. She liked making up stories, that’s who she was, and what did it matter, no one was hurt, but I couldn’t deal with it. I walked my lazy ass out of her life at the first sign of trouble. Guilty as charged. I didn’t try very hard, did I? In my silence I may have encouraged the lies, made them necessary, even. When I think of her now I don’t see her trying to shock the guests at dinner, I see her sitting in bed, eating an orange, and reading Charlotte Brontë.
There’s a third way to think about the marriage: This was a story of two people who mistook charm for love, who believed that they were in love and inviolable, but who found out that they were not in love and were, in fact, forsaken by love and by each other. At any rate, the marriage was over, and so began the lost years, about which the less said the better.
Living with Herself
WE MOVED UP to O’Connell Street on Harp Hill a month before Arthur was not born. We’d been living in the Jonas Rice Housing Project out by Purgatory Lake, and I had to ride the school bus across town to St. Simeon’s. I was in the first grade, and everyone else on the bus was more interesting than I was. Donald Hoey could whistle with his fingers in his mouth, a whistle so shrill and piercing it could break glass. Jeremiah Fitzgerald swore he saw Donald crack the windshield on his uncle Obie’s Studebaker. When Donald whistled in Doody Mero’s ear, Doody’s ear started bleeding. Robert Roy could, and on most days did, recite the entire texts of Marvel comics, and while I found the stories themselves witless and dreary, I admired Robert’s unbounded enthusiasm and wished I’d had some equally zealous and quixotic obsession. Robert wore black chinos with a cloth belt sewn in the back with a silver buckle. I loved that useless belt. Huey Moran had enormous hands and feet, tiny blue eyes, and never spoke to anyone on the bus, didn’t read, didn’t look out the window, stared at the back of the seat in front of him, his face as blank as an egg. His nickname was “Vacancy,” but no one said it while Huey was around. Years later—I was in college—Huey was shot in that great empty face as he walked along an Oregon highway minding his own business. A man in a pickup truck pulled alongside Huey and leveled a rifle out the window. Huey’s brother Moonie told me at the wake that “Huey was somewhere he didn’t belong. Stay with your own, Johnny. They’re the only ones who give two shits. Capisce?”
One morning, I had been watching two girls in the seat across the aisle braiding gum-wrapper belts when I heard Rosalee Acciardi tell someone who wasn’t there to fuck himself, and I looked over to see her hold her hand in the flame of a lit match without flinching. Rosalee was a high school girl, and every morning she bummed a Lucky Strike off our morning driver, Mr. Wells, who was either sweet on Rosalee or afraid of her or both. Mr. Wells got sick that year and wasted away before our eyes. He grew so gaunt in his last weeks that he frightened some of the little kindergartners, who slumped in their seats and cried. Mr. Wells was all teeth and eyes and angles at the end. And then one day he was gone. Our new driver, a burly man named Mr. Shortsleeve, intimated that we kids had killed Mr. Wells. Mr. Shortsleeve said he knew all about project trash like us and said he didn’t want any guff from any of us, wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. Got it? He walked down the aisle and back, eying each of us and nodding slowly. Okay, then, he said. We understand each other. He clapped his hands and took his seat. He fired the engine and ground the gears.
This particular bitter and blustery day in January was so cold that even the cool kids wore balaclavas and ski pants or else wrapped scarves around their faces and stuffed newspapers in their galoshes. But I had no mittens because I had lost them like I lost everything else, and Mom was sick of my irresponsibility and was going to see that I learned my lesson. My fingers hurt so much that I cried. In the bus, I sat on my hands, but when the hands got warmer, the fingers throbbed even more. I was frightened by the stabbing pain. On the line from the bus stop to the school, Rosalee
Acciardi took my school bag from me, draped it over her shoulder, and took off one of her woolen mittens and slipped it over both of my hands. She took me to the girls’ lavatory and ran cold water over my hands at the sink. She told me sometimes you need the opposite of what you think you need. Then she brought me to my classroom and told Sister Polyxena that she’d “like to muckleize the kid’s old lady.” Sister rubbed my hands in hers and told me to offer my suffering up to the Sacred Heart. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t move my fingers. My hands were on fire. I wanted to sleep. Sister put my hands under her arms and sang “Salve Regina” over and over. Sister Superior showed up with a pair of unmatched gloves, a suede right and a knit left, and gave them to me. She told Sister Polyxena (Pretty Polly-O, we called her) that she’d certainly speak with my mother.
When I got home that afternoon, the back door was locked. The extra key under the mat was missing. I buzzed the bell and Mom came to the door. “Can I help you?” she said.
“It’s me.”
“Me?”
“Johnny.”
“You do look an awful lot like my Johnny, but he’s not a baby like you are.” And she stepped back and closed the door.
I banged on it. “This isn’t funny!” I heard Audrey calling my name.
This pretense of nonacquaintance soon became Mom’s favorite little game, one she would spring on me in department stores, on crowded elevators, at bus stops. And when I would eventually and inevitably cry, then Mom would say, Oh, yes, you are my little crybaby; I recognize the whine. And she’d hold me, pat my shoulder, and kiss my head, say, There, there! She tried this game on Audrey, too, but Audrey was all too happy to be someone else. She’d say, Actually, madam, you don’t look at all like my beautiful mother, and if you touch me, I’ll scream. And with that she’d walk off, and I’d fetch her back.
I also cried whenever Mom sang “Hush, Little Baby.” The song made me sad and still does. I think the message that depressed me was that nothing was ever going to turn out happily. Whatever I had, it wouldn’t sing or shine or pull or bark. It would turn to brass, break apart, or fall to pieces. So Mom would sing it to me at bedtime. She loved the song, I think, loved the idea of Mom replacing all that fails, and she wanted me to overcome my morose and silly aversion to its sentiments. And then I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie in bed and listen to the voices from Caeli’s apartment above me. She and Nunzie talking and then not talking. I couldn’t hear their words, just the music of their voices, but I didn’t need to. I could tell from the pitch and tone of their speech what they were saying. That’s how cats and dogs know what you mean. Those nights I felt like a dog.
My belabored point is that I had grown used to Mom’s games and had long since stopped crying over them, so when she told me, after Dad had left for Dallas, “As soon as I get my real kids back, you two are right out the door,” I didn’t pay much attention. Funny as a crutch, Mom. But then her joke grew more elaborate. She told me during Carson’s monologue that she couldn’t take much more of this, of playing along with our treacherous dumb show, and she hoped that I would carry that message to my puppet masters. She slumped back in the easy chair, said she was growing weary with it all—the constant stress and everything. She swished her feet around in the plastic basin—she was soaking them in Epsom salts. She gave us credit for doing our homework—we clearly understood the intensity of a mother’s love. I told her to just stop it, okay? What she wanted to know, she said, was why. I told her I was going to bed. What have you done with my children? she said.
So I could either believe she was being cruel or I could believe, what? That she was coming unglued? I spoke very calmly. “Mom, I wish you would stop telling Audrey that you’re not her mother.”
“I am Audrey’s mother.”
“And Audrey’s asleep in her room right now?”
“As far as I know.”
“So who did you call an imposter at the supper table?”
“Your assistant, partner, whatever she is.”
“And where’s Johnny?”
“You tell me.”
“They’re going to take us away from you.”
“Your overseers?”
“The Welfare.”
She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and massaged her temples. “Maybe then I’ll get some peace and quiet.”
“And then what’ll happen to us?”
She opened her eyes and spoke to the ceiling. “They’ll recycle your parts.” She lifted a foot from the basin and dried it with a dish towel. Then the other.
“Do you know how this makes me feel?”
“Feel?” She lifted her sarcastic left eyebrow.
“Sad.”
“Should I play my little violin?” She leaned forward in her chair. “Look, I know you’re only doing your job, but this has gone on too long. I miss my babies.”
I FOUND out accidentally that Mom’s delusions did not extend to the telephone, that they were somehow triggered by our physi- cal presence. I called her from Caeli’s to tell her that Audrey and I would be staying over at the Sandilands’ to watch Steve and Eydie while the Captain accepted a lifetime achievement award at a regional dental convention.
She told me about my inscrutable replacement, how he had disturbed her footbath the night before. When I asked her how she knew I wasn’t the replacement, she said she’d know me anywhere. I said, “Is he there now?”
“If he is, he’s being very quiet.”
I told her I’d be home shortly to pick up our overnight bags—always packed and under my bed.
“Be careful, honey. You’re being monitored.”
“No, I’m not.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
THERE ARE times I can look at a smooth wall and see a textured pattern, shut my eyes, look again, and the crosshatching has become herringbone, so I know the eyes play tricks. Just last week I was in Austin for a writers’ conference and ran into Sharon, an old friend, in the vestibule of the convention center. Her previously blond hair was now a light raspberry shade of red, and I wondered why she’d tinted it. She told me she was getting married again, and I figured, new house, new name, new dreams, new hair, new person. I went to her panel the next morning, “The Eyes Don’t Have It: Blind Authors from Homer to Borges.” (Sometimes you just have to accept coincidence, as lame and unconvincing as it may seem.) And her hair was blond. So had she been wearing a wig when I first saw her or had she re-dyed her hair back to its natural color, or had I made the whole color change up?
That’s what I thought then—well, not really what I thought, I suppose, what I hoped then—that Mom’s eyes were not always, but were sometimes, unreliable. Maybe all she needed was a trip to a good eye doctor to find out what was garbling the visual message. When I went downstairs to fetch the overnight bags, Mom was poised and alert. She was dry-mopping the floor and told me she was going to use her free night to catch up on her sewing. I didn’t say, What on earth are you talking about? You’ve never sewn in your life. I smiled. She told me not to forget our toothbrushes.
I said, “I’m not an imposter, you know.”
She said, “That’s a funny thing to say.”
“Sometimes you think I am. Someone else, I mean.”
She leaned the mop against the stove, opened the fridge, and took out a bowl of broken glass, this dessert she liked with cubes of Jell-O, crumbled graham crackers, and whipped cream. She got herself a spoon and sat at the table.
I said, “Is there something I could do to see it doesn’t happen again?”
“What would be nice,” she said, “what would be nice is if you would listen to me the way my therapist does.”
“Dr. Reininger is odd, don’t you think?”
“Is he?”
“He’s always washing his hands.”
“Germs are spread by way of filthy hands.”
“There’s a sink in his office.”
“It wouldn’t make much sense for him to walk out during a
session, now, would it? The man’s a professional.”
“There are no replacements, Mom. Just me. Just Audrey.”
She held out her arms. I leaned in for a hug. “You really splashed on the Jean Naté this morning.”
She held me at arm’s length. “You’re shimmering.”
All right, maybe not an eye doctor. I had another theory. When we were not in Mom’s presence, when she had to imagine us, she imagined us perfectly. And the real Audrey and I could not live up to the ideal.
PRECIOUS MEMORIES was a game Caeli invented where you pretend to know some famous person, and you recount the time that you and this celebrity, Marlon Brando, let’s say, went cross-country skiing in the French Alps, and you came upon an injured and unconscious skier, and you saved his life, and that skier turned out to be Prince Albert, and later at the lodge, over hot toddies by the crackling fire, long after Marlon has gone off to bed or to wherever it is he goes, the prince confides in you that all is not peaches and cream between him and Princess Grace, and you can see that maybe he has eyes for you, but your heart belongs to Nunzie, and you let the prince know that, and he is grateful for your forthrightness, and the two of you become fast friends, and you still exchange holiday greetings and the occasional breezy chronicle. Or maybe you were on safari in Kenya with the Mutual of Omaha guy on the trail of the elusive white rhino when you came to a clearing, and you looked up, and there were Elvis Presley and Tuesday Weld clinched in a smoldering yet snowy embrace—you’ve stumbled onto the set of Bwana Wanna Rock, and the two of them very much want you in their movie. You’d be perfect as Tuesday’s younger, lovelier sister.
You can be older than you are in your memory. You can remember the future—you and Tommy Sands at your oldest daughter’s Vegas wedding—because when you take your last breath, you realize—and this realization is all the heaven you get—you realize, Caeli said, that everything that ever happened, happened in an instant—she snapped her fingers—and not just what happened in your own little life, but the entire beginning, middle, and end of existence, of the universe, the whole megillah. Time, she said, we made it up. Like we made up God. We needed God because we have to have someone to talk to when we’re alone and desperate.
Requiem, Mass. Page 10
