by Carol Anshaw
“But you’re finishing the thesis,” Carmen prompted.
“Sort of. The thing is, I have way too much stuff. I’ve got to start pruning. Tons of new information is rolling in. By the time you find something and pin it down, something more has been discovered. Not just theoretical stuff, but stuff we can actually see. We have better scopes, and more ways of looking. Radio scopes, of course. Also X-ray scopes. They’re getting ready to send a big reflector scope into space, to get clear views from outside our atmosphere. The bang put a lot into motion and now we have more ways to watch the action.”
“I love the big bang,” Carmen said.
“Yeah.” He exhaled wearily. “Everyone loves it. It’s very lovable.”
From Nick, she knew that the bigness started very, very, very small. But extremely compressed. In the moments before the bang happened, the whole universe was the size of a dime. And Nick didn’t really let you say “happened”; there wasn’t any space or time for it to happen in. Back then—although he didn’t let you say “then” either—space-time and matter and energy were all just rolled into something incredibly dense and hot.
Carmen had to flex her mind to accommodate stuff like this. Astronomy was not her strong suit. It took Nick three demonstrations with a tilted apple Earth circling a peach Sun to get her to understand the seasons.
“Probably lots happening on the alien front.” Space aliens and astrology were his least favorite subjects. Really, he didn’t even consider them subjects.
So he didn’t say anything.
So she didn’t say anything either.
Finally he said, “If they come for a visit, it probably won’t be with friendly intentions. And they won’t be little green men. The distances are too great for any sort of humanoid creatures to make it all the way here. Even traveling at the speed of light—and you know what’s faster than the speed of light?”
“Something,” she guessed.
“Nothing. To get here they will have to be more advanced than us. Which probably means they’ll have evolved into artificial intelligence.” He stopped and looked at Carmen with well-founded suspicion.
“But I just read somewhere another farm wife said she was taken onboard a saucer by very smooth creatures with short horns. And, of course, she was measured and anally probed.”
“It would take so long for images of Earth to reach those green guys that they’d be watching dinosaurs. Based on their information, when they came for a visit, they’d bring very large anal probes. Which would be useless on us.”
“You’re so much fun,” Carmen said.
He pulled her toward him to kiss her hair at the temple. Aside from his irresponsibility, he was a very sweet person. You just couldn’t count on him for anything. Anything. Nor could you believe anything he said about himself or his life. Ultimately, this made him a tiresome person to talk with. Carmen had scaled back her expectations. She was just thankful that he was sitting next to her on this sofa, to all appearances sober. Before Olivia came out of prison and he straightened up to get her back, there was a scary stretch. Detox, then rehab, then retox, then back through the cycle again. Two days after they put him on a plane to a boot camp rehab in Minnesota, the baggage claim in Minneapolis called to say he had never picked up his suitcase. He hadn’t been able to make it past a bar in the Twin Cities airport. Then a month later, on his way out, back at the airport, he got snagged by the same bar.
“Airports are hard for him” was Alice’s analysis.
“Right,” Carmen said, “Airports are the problem.”
Olivia came through the door in a pea coat and a Mongolian hat with earflaps. She looked great in a flinty, soviet way. Whatever blandness there was to her before, prison had cut away. Horace seemed to be giving her a big welcome, putting an arm around her shoulder. Out of her presence and Nick’s, he referred to her as Butch. As she disappeared into the back of the apartment to get rid of her jacket, Horace glanced in Nick and Carmen’s direction. He bowed like a butler, then lumbered across the room toward them. Nick started humming the theme from Jaws. Horace still projected a hearty image, although some of his former, evenly distributed bulk had slipped off his shoulders to form a gut that hung over his belt. His craggy features had lumped up a little. Carmen hadn’t figured on this, that age would make him more sympathetic. As he approached them, he opened his arms in a giant air hug.
“Glad you could make it,” he said, then to Nick, “I just ran into your lovely bride at the door.” There was something off about the way he said this, but nothing to respond to directly. Something about Olivia, maybe her indifference to his charms, bugged Horace.
“You know, I think I might go look for her,” Nick said. “She doesn’t know many people here.” Nick pinched Carmen’s arm to signal that he was leaving Horace all to her, then got up and slipped off sideways through the crowd.
“I hate this party,” Horace said. “Every year I hate it. I just go along with it to please your mother.” He was lying. He loved this party. He adored it. So Carmen called his bluff.
“Join the club. Really, we could have a party for all the people who hate this party.”
Eventually Horace was given his due with a falling-apart rendition of “Happy Birthday,” then a moment to blow out the candles on Carmen’s prune cake, then an opportunity to hold forth about the length and breadth of life, the importance of work, and of course, the compulsory jokes about getting older—like how he needed the prunes now more than the cake.
Gabe, fresh from a headlong run across the room, screeched to a halt in front of his grandfather.
“Hey, boy.” Horace ran a hand through Gabe’s hair, then tugged on his cape. “How’s the magic business these days? How’s tricks?”
Horace was fascinated by Gabe, or more accurately had found in him someone he’d like to be a little fascinating for. Maybe he was looking for a kid with whom he could do it better. Maybe. Carmen tried to be optimistic, but at the same time she kept an eye out for so much as the first sign of sabotage, the first discouraging word. She would yank Gabe out of Horace’s reach before the old man could blink.
“I brought you something.” Gabe handed Horace a cardboard tube purporting to hold
Horace opened it gamely and laughed in an explosive, bogus way when a cloth-and-coil snake leapt out. Although Gabe was older than his years in many ways, his sense of humor was squarely that of a six-year-old—although perhaps a six-year-old from an earlier generation—and for the past year or so he had been fascinated by practical jokes. He was abetted by Alice and Nick, and now had a collection of mischief that also included a little pad of plastic vomit, a rubber spiral of dog poop, an ink bottle with its accompanying spill, a whoopee cushion, a tube of blackening toothpaste and a squirting lapel flower. Everyone braced a little when greeting him.
Now Horace folded his free arm around Alice’s narrow shoulders. Alice currently had a drastic look to her. Her hair was short and gelled straight back off her face.
“Sharon Stone wore her hair like this when I painted her,” Horace informed anyone listening. A while back he had a stretch of painting celebrity portraits. Carmen noticed that lately he was more than ever into puffing himself up. She supposed this must be a hard time for him. Alice had had a solo show in October. A new Kenney was stepping into the art world. Of course he came to the opening, full of praise and paternal pride. But then Alice got terrific notices, particularly in the New York Times and Artforum. Horace would have read these, also would have noticed that only the local reviews mentioned that she was his daughter. He bided his time until she had some new paintings. Then praised them to her as “technically interesting.”
Alice stood inside the circle of his arm, not bothering to listen. She was extremely adept at dealing with him, taking neither his charms nor his malice very seriously. Carmen admired this self-protection. She couldn’t quite muster it herself. She could still (and hated herself when she did) fall for her father’s faint praise, and be stung by his wi
thheld approval. But Alice hadn’t gotten off scot-free. She came to the party to please Loretta, to whom she would always be in thrall. Basically, she was still bouncing up and down, waiting for her mother to watch her jump off the diving board. But Loretta was and always would be too distracted to turn her head to see.
For a few years after she came out, Alice essentially got dumped by Loretta, who couldn’t see the point of being a lesbian. In her scheme of things where men were everything, if you weren’t one, or attached to one, what was your value? Alice took the rejection on the chin. She stayed away. It was Horace who mended the break. He put pressure on Loretta, invited Alice home for dinner. Although he could be vicious—a sniper, a setter of hidden traps—he did reach out to Alice. Carmen had to give him that. Her Jungian analyst had helped Carmen look at people as holograms, see through and around to all their sides. Horace and Loretta were fairly terrible, narcissistic parents, there was no arguing that, but they weren’t Pol Pot, they weren’t Idi Amin. Or at least they were confined to a smaller stage.
“Come with me for a smoke,” Carmen said to Alice, tugging her out of the circle of Horace’s well-wishers.
Alice went for their coats while Carmen made sure Gabe was happy enough in the company of the two other kids at the party—somebody’s grandchildren—a fat girl and a boy who looked as if he was going to teach the other two how to play doctor. She found Walter curled up, sacked out on the Indian-print pillows on her parents’ bed, enjoying a lull in his socializing.
“Come on,” she said, scratching his head. “Let’s go outside. Have a pee.”
The day had warmed up unseasonably in the afternoon, but now that the sun was down, it was too cold to be sitting outdoors. Even swaddled in sweaters and wool coats, Carmen and Alice sat with their feet up, arms wrapped around their calves. The building’s backyard garden was still in a state of abandonment from the fall—oilcloth cushions on the wrought iron furniture puddled with damp, matted leaves, the limp arteries of Loretta’s tuberous begonias draped over the edges of painted clay pots. Walter lifted a leg to pee on one of them, then went off to sniff the perimeter of the patio an inch at a time.
On one of the low tables, Alice found an ashtray half-filled with soaked and shredded cigarette stubs.
“Butts of yesteryear,” she said, then gave them a closer look. “They might even be ours.” She dumped them onto the soil surrounding a small, extremely dead bush, then lit up fresh smokes for them both.
“Technically, I’m eight minutes early for this one.” She was on a quitting program. She could have cigarettes, but only at precise intervals. This was supposed to break down links between smoking and certain daily activities like being on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. Or conversations like this one, where smoking seemed integral to the discourse. The program also involved movies of lung cancer surgeries and gasping cowboys. She had to keep a jam jar with her, filled with water and the butts of all the cigarettes she had smoked that day.
“It’s supposed to repulse me.”
“How’s that going?”
“Actually, it’s more just embarrassing. I mean, when I’m out I either have to explain the jar, or worse, look like I’m someone who saves my wet butts.”
Carmen, who was in no place to quit just now, inhaled deeply, then exhaled and said, “I’ll bet some cigarettes are harder to resist than others.”
“Oh yes. I think about that—how it’ll be after I’ve totally quit. Like, say, after years and years of being a heterosexual, Sigourney Weaver suddenly decides she needs to have a queer experience, or maybe she needs to practice for some movie role, and anyway she decides to do it with me. And it’s great of course, and afterward she lights up and offers me one.”
“Yeah,” Carmen said, mulling this over. “That cigarette Sigourney passes across the bed would be a tough one to say no to.”
They smoked in silence a while.
“Well, I guess we’ve done the Sloans,” Alice said. Carmen had told her about the breakup with Matt. This, of course, was no surprise to Alice, who’d seen him and the babysitter months ago in the 7-Eleven lot. Maude, the other absent Sloan, had moved from Chicago to L.A., from modeling to acting. Based on what little Carmen had seen of Maude on TV—in a miniseries in which she played a bored housewife who was secretly a drug-addicted call girl, and a movie about a troop of alien girl scouts—she was a terrible actress, wooden. Often she appeared stunned by the other actor’s line. Really, it was a testament to how great looking she was that she got any parts at all. She was living with a cameraman, although in the People article, he looked pretty gay to Carmen, so what was that about?
“Why do I feel she’s not really, truly gone?” Carmen said. “Why do I feel her hovering above this conversation?” Carmen considered Maude an addiction—a boring one like an addiction to Afrin, or bingo, but one that had nonetheless arrested Alice’s emotional development.
“Who cares where she is, whether she’s coming or going? It doesn’t matter. I’m done,” Alice said.
Carmen liked this firm tone, although, of course, she didn’t trust it at all.
“She’ll try to come back,” Alice said. “She can try all the men she wants. She’ll come back to women. She’s a bloodhound who’s been given the scent on the glove.”
Carmen was always a little startled (and titillated) when Alice said things like this. She wasn’t sure if this was her sister’s way of being shocking, or if lesbians all talked this way among themselves. It always tripped her up. She used to imagine love between women as a languid extension of friendship. Something Virginia Woolf-ish involving tea and conversation and sofas and afternoon eliding into evening, a small lamp needing to be turned on, but left unlit. And so she was brought up short by Alice’s exhausting—even just to witness—passion for Maude, her desolation since Maude walked out of her life. This cynicism was a new element, maybe a further phase.
“Fuck,” Alice said, as though Carmen had been interrogating her and her story had been shattered. She took Carmen’s cigarette and from it lit a fresh one for herself—way off the schedule; the butt jar sat far away on one of the lawn chairs. “I’m just a blockhead. I’ll get over her; I just need a little more time.”
Carmen watched Walter suddenly digging furiously in a corner of the yard. He probably smelled a critter.
“You and Matt,” Alice said, “your thing was so much weirder. He didn’t seem like an affair type and you guys seemed to really like each other. It’s like somebody misheard something. Like meet me under the big clock at noon on Wednesday, but the other person heard one p.m. on Thursday.”
“I know. But what could I do once Paula was in place, when they were already off and running? They have common goals, he told me. They want to become missionaries. Basically all I could do was step aside and let them get on with their plans.”
“That would be way too civilized for me. Too saints and martyrs. I’d be ready for some hair pulling about now. Some driving my pickup broadside into her trailer.”
Carmen had heard—from Jean—that Alice was pretty dramatic around her “final” breakup with Maude. Bad phone calls. Public scenes. A car was keyed.
Carmen said, “I guess I was looking at everything from the wrong angle. I didn’t think we were breaking up. I thought he and I were just having this interesting conversation about how to be married in the late twentieth century. And how to go forward, together. It was kind of like when I had all those parking tickets I was contesting with the city. I thought that was a lively back-and-forth, too, and then I came out of the house one day and my car was booted.”
Alice tried to help, but all she had to offer was a pageant of less-than-helpful suggestions. She made divorce sound like a breeze, like enrolling in a night school class in Portuguese, or organizing a closet. Some minor reassignment of Carmen’s time and interest. She didn’t understand that, beyond the humiliation and sorrow, Carmen would be left with no credit in her name, and a skimpy salary from Hearth/Home. These
were the sorts of details that bored Alice.
“Let’s go prowl around a little,” Carmen said, meaning in Horace’s studio. She made a little chich-chich sound to call Walter over. “Let’s see what the old guy has percolating in there.”
They would have attracted attention by turning on the lights, so they poked around in semidarkness, silent except for Walter’s slight wheeze, the small clink of his tags. Their father was present even in his absence. This was his territory. Here he could be the center of his universe, lathering up his overscaled paintings. Long days with Puccini blaring over the huge speakers and Loretta slipping in and out with lunch or tea on a tray as though Horace was the “Van Gogh of the Prairie,” as some fawning exhibition catalog described him some years ago, and not just a lucky, self-inflated hack.
Tonight they hit pay dirt—two huge new paintings tilted against the wall, ready to be packed up and shipped off to the corporate client that had commissioned them. They were titled on small brass plates nailed at the bottom of their frames. Both were on a racing theme. Sunrise at Santa Anita and Dusk in the Paddock. Everything was muted, colors subdued, action suspended, a benevolent dusting of sunshine brought to bear on the equine subjects.
“We probably shouldn’t make fun of him anymore,” Carmen said, “now that he’s started getting old with the hip surgery and the pasty, skinny-chest thing.”
“The skinny-chest thing and the white-hair-creeping-out thing,” Alice said.
“Yes, creeping out because he still leaves his shirt unbuttoned. His velour shirt. He looks like someone who hung out with Frank Sinatra. Someone who kept Frank amused in the limo.”
When Horace was still making his own gestural paintings, he could hang on to the illusion that he ranked somewhere in the world of artists. Now all his work was subdued, representational, and commissioned, the subject matter and canvas sizes specified in advance, color schemes suggested. He was a dancing bear now, a bear in a hat and frilly skirt. This, Carmen suspected, had given him a deeper, more covert sort of meanness, as opposed to the light, capricious version he used to practice.
