Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  When I got to our bedroom I found Meg asleep with the light on. Her pixie haircut was still damp like a duck’s tail from her shower, and she looked fresh and innocent on the cotton sheets. She was almost a child again in my eyes, except for that one troubled blue vein that was slightly raised on her forehead. I stood there wondering how she could still go on loving me when I seemed to be doing all I could to drive her away.

  It was a miracle, but I was able to sleep the whole night through, and even woke in the morning to one glorious moment of forgetfulness when only the delicious sensation of being wrapped in those cotton sheets was real. Then the panic set in again as all the crazy images of India, Ladakh, and Amsterdam swept over me. As soon as I felt that anxious bale-of-wire feeling in my legs, I thought the best thing for me to do was get into the pool and work it out.

  Dad and Babs had already been up for a long time, puttering and muttering. “Hi-ho, hi-ho!” Dad cried in his pretend faraway voice. Babs was, as ever, in the kitchen, rinsing the breakfast dishes by hand as she stared out over the still blue pool, then stacking them, completely clean, into the dishwasher.

  “Good morning, Brew,” she said in her Rhode Island twang. I said good morning back to the both of them and staggered out to the pool, still slightly hung over and half asleep. Dad followed me out, asking, did I have the right towel? How did I sleep? What did I want for breakfast? Were Meg and I going to eat breakfast together? And did we want Babs to fix it for us? Did we want the bacon already made, in the warmer? This was followed by a numerical rundown of the morning readings of all the gauges in the house: air temperature, barometric pressure, wind velocity, and the temperature of the pool. Never once did he ask me what it was like to travel all the way to India and back. In fact, as I stood poised, about to dive, I realized that Dad and Babs still had not asked me one question about India.

  A big splash and I was in the pool again, and for a moment I was also in the moment again. It was all just water and motion, and something I called “me” in motion in it. This was the only time I ever understood my boundaries, because the thing outside of me was so apparently different, so liquid, so other, so unlike those solid things, those people and lawns and cars and mountains and buildings and trees. It was such a great curative, this thrashing and splashing, and I wondered as I swam back and forth from one end of the pool to the other how would I survive back in New York City without a swimming pool.

  The swim woke me up and brought me back to life and I managed to get through Dad’s living room interrogations about water temperature without much problem. In the bedroom I peeled off my wet swimsuit, dried myself with one of Babs’s prize fluffy pool towels, and slipped naked into bed beside Meg, who rolled over smiling, but when she saw my face hers took on a kind of worried look. She wanted to know what was wrong. I told her I’d just had a swim and felt fine; but she knew that I was wired and hungry for relief through what she called manic sex.

  “Please, Brewster,” Meg begged, “I just don’t feel turned on in your father’s house. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you noticed that by now? Let’s get up and do something productive. Let’s go wash and simonize the van before we go to the beach.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said, groaning slightly, as I reluctantly dragged myself, semierect, out of the bed. “We can wash the car, but we can’t go to the beach because it’s the Fourth of July and I don’t want to see it. I just want to pretend this whole weekend doesn’t exist.”

  Meg was in better spirits over breakfast, but I was groaning more. I was groaning between bites of toast and swallows of Babs’s dreadful instant coffee and Dad was hovering around me, washing and drying every utensil I’d put down on the table for more than ten seconds. I’d pick it up again and find it to my surprise all clean. Meg was reading the paper, oblivious (she had a way of falling into the news). After all of this, and a couple of Babs’s Camel regulars which made me cough and wheeze, Meg and I at last went out to try to wash and simonize the van.

  Dad was out there, running the flag up the flagpole, and I knew what was driving me nuts. On holidays you were supposed to have a good time, and I felt under so much pressure to have one; but I didn’t know how. I never had a good time on holidays. People were supposed to let loose and laugh, and they usually did, but I usually heard them at a distance, and it drove me nuts. Sure, they had been working real hard in jobs they hated, so they had something to unwind from. I was just some sort of postadolescent searcher-drifter, going from job to job, then falling through cracks into anxiety when I wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to have fun.

  After the van was all simonized and clean and shiny, we stood back and looked at it. Meg smiled, enjoying the pleasure not only of a job well done, but also of the transformation of that van into something like a smiling green truck in a storybook. I stood and looked at Meg’s face, enjoying her enjoyment; Meg, my go-between. The van was like a green toy on the black, slightly mud-stained asphalt, framed by a perfect green lawn under a luffing red, white, and blue American flag, and for a moment it all held together like some physical poem of itself, a poem of the real world captured. But that vision gave way to my internal films again: me in Bali hanging out in some expatriate hippie commune, me just hanging out in timeless splendor with some great interconnected unspoken agreement between man and woman. Doing what, I couldn’t tell; just lying there stoned, looking up into the not-at-all-meaningful palm trees. And yet, I thought, in the face of meaningless death, it must take great courage to do nothing, to just do nothing at all.

  The rest of the day was spent out by the pool waiting for the end of the day to come, waiting for cocktail hour. Meg and I lay in the white hot noonday limbo light, Meg reading Dad and Babs’s endless collection of glossy magazines. She thumbed through them, seeming content to read almost anything. She could switch from The Magic Mountain to House and Garden without that concentrated expression on her face ever changing once. She concentrated on everything she did and I loved her and hated her for it. When I wasn’t watching her concentrate, I was trying to concentrate, but I never was able to find the right object.

  I was definitely stuck in what is called discursive mind, bouncing from association to association, reduced to moving in a triangle, going from reading and underlining Life Against Death to fantasies of Bali to my new obsession with saving drowning bugs from my father’s swimming pool. By midday, my obsession with saving the drowning bugs had taken over.

  Dad and Babs stayed indoors. They didn’t lie in the sun for fear of skin cancer. From where I sat watching all those struggling bugs, I could hear Dad and Babs in their endless inane putterings: comforting background sounds, like white noise. Occasionally the puttering sounds would be broken by little flare-ups between them, when their random orbits collided or when Dad would need help finding the ice-cream maker that he had most likely hidden from himself in some boozy haze, and now, too ashamed to admit it, he was turning on Babs to accuse her of hiding it.

  Meg was lost in Yankee magazine as I got up and discovered to my horror just how many different kinds of bugs were drowning in Dad’s pool. I’d never seen so many and in such different stages of panic. I didn’t know the names of most of them, but I was able to identify one or two big, repulsive June bugs, some grasshoppers, a few Japanese beetles, houseflies, and, most important, one or two good-luck lady-bugs. At first I went after them with a broken branch I found at the edge of the house near Babs’s rose garden; then I shifted to the pool-cleaning net in order to rescue more in one sweep. I spent most of the day pulling each and every bug out and placing it in a safe little dry place to dry out on the rubber edge of the AstroTurf. It gave me such a feeling of accomplishment to watch them dry off, slowly come back to life, and creep away over that green AstroTurf into the rose garden. And yes, a sense of meaning gradually crept over me as I thought, All those bugs were saved today because I didn’t go to Bali. When I finally looked up from that siege of drowning bugs, I saw Meg asleep in the sun. Except for that raised b
lue vein in the center of her forehead, she looked at peace. I noticed that the sound of puttering in the house had come to a halt, capped off by Babs calling out the kitchen window, “Aren’t you kids hungry for some lunch?”

  I wanted a beer more than I wanted lunch, but I figured if I had lunch I could have the beer with it. Dad had nothing but those damned Miller Lites around, so I had four to relax me after all those traumatic bug rescues. All the time I was eating my tuna salad sandwich, though, I kept seeing more and more bugs step off that giant edge of the pool and fall in and struggle on their backs, until I had to put my sandwich down and go rescue them. I never got back to Life Against Death that day. I spent the day saving bugs.

  At last for one glorious moment the pool was free of bugs, and I plunged in to refresh myself. I felt that fluid, liquid feeling, and in no time at all it was blessed cocktail hour again. We’d almost gotten through that day without the sound of a parade or one firecracker. What a blessing, I thought, as I did my frantic laps from one end of the blue pool to the other.

  We showered and dressed. Both Meg and I dressed in white, me in my white cotton Indian pants, Meg in a white cotton dress, and we went back out to sit by the pool. We drank there together with Dad and Babs as the evening brought a coolness to our suntanned bodies under the white cotton. After I’d had many drinks—Lite beers with scotch poured in to beef them up—and bunches of light peanuts that tasted like Styrofoam, Dad lit the coals and brought out his bloody bicentennial slab of raw meat, which I could see was attracting small swarms of mosquitoes and flies. As soon as Babs noticed the flies and mosquitoes, she suggested that we eat indoors. That became the new overriding topic: should we eat out or in? Was it too cold out? Was it too hot in? Were there too many bugs? The sizzling steak smoke rose up like a cowboy’s campfire, and Dad said that the steak smoke rising straight up like that was a sign of continuing good weather. As if it mattered: how would we all act any differently if it rained?

  Dad and Babs got in a panic every time Meg or I opened the screen door, because they said we were letting the flies in. I kept thinking of all the flies in India and all the flies I had saved from drowning that very afternoon, which were probably the ones following me into the house to celebrate being saved.

  In the middle of this holiday bedlam of steak smoke and flies, Babs, after about three and a half martinis, got out her antique fly gun and went after them. It was this old tin gun that was supposed to have once belonged to Roger Williams, and it was worth, I was sure, a small fortune. There was nothing to this little gun. It looked like a toy tin handgun painted barn red with a spatulalike device that bent back and hitched on to the little trigger, which, when pulled, released the spatula; and if you were at the proper distance from the fly, it smacked the bug dead. It was such a funny, simple, stupid little thing, but no one was laughing. Everyone was dead serious, and I wanted so much to laugh. But I couldn’t laugh, I guess because I kept thinking, Gee, this is funny—I saved all these drowning flies just so they could be mashed by an antique fly gun that once belonged to Roger Williams. Dad didn’t think it was funny. He kept yelling, “Put that damned thing down, Babs, and get yourself a proper fly swatter!” By now Meg was off reading a brief history of Providence Plantation in the last of the fading light.

  The steak on our plates was rare, definitely rare. It was very, very rare, and the blood from that meat attracted the mosquitoes in droves. Finally, Dad got out his big bug bomb and set it off around our feet and we sat there with the poison steaming up around our ankles as we tore into our raw meat. I bit into my steak and all the juice and the blood immediately put me into a state of desire. The more I chewed, the more I wanted. The more I ate, the less satisfied I felt. It was all chew, chew, chew, angry chew, and then big gulps, swallow, wash down with more and more Lite beer. Meg couldn’t eat it. It was too rare for her. She asked for a charred end piece with all the toasted fat on it. Dad drank the steak blood from a serving spoon. Babs killed flies. Meg rolled her eyes and I went back to Bali in my mind. I was lying naked in a hammock stretched between two palm trees under the stars and there were no bugs anywhere.

  After dinner I tried to introduce something new by offering to give Babs and Dad a slide show of our trip to India, and to my amazement they were not completely closed to the idea. So while Babs and Meg cleared the dishes, I helped Dad set up the screen and slide projector. We set it up in the living room, which was a major project, and Dad was now groaning louder than I was groaning. For both of us, it seemed a joyless task. Then Meg got out the slides, which we were both very proud of, and we showed them, alternating our random comments as we traced our trip from Delhi to Kashmir up to Ladakh and back to Delhi again. It looked like a story of someone else’s life. Meg and I looked like characters in someone else’s movie.

  Babs and Dad hardly reacted at all, and after the slide show was over, Babs said, “Well, you kids really had some trip, and you’re lucky to be back, aren’t you?” Neither Meg nor I responded to her rhetorical question. We just got up and made motions like Dad and Babs as they got ready for bed.

  Everyone went to bed and I stayed in the den drinking Lite beer to ease me down from all the hectic relaxation of that day. Then I dug out the old family album and pored over those idyllic photos of Mom and Dad’s courtship, those old pictures of them on a moose hunt in Maine, with Gramma North and her boyfriend, all of them standing on a big log with guns in hand, smiling. They looked like they were having such a great time. None of the faces in those photographs had the existential, puzzled, troubled look that my face had in our India slides. No, those moose-hunt photos radiated smiling, innocent hope and anticipation of a new bright world to come.

  I went on slowly turning the pages, following Mom and Dad’s life through to me, their second son, who in early photos looked like a sour, disgruntled little prunehead. Why was I so sour so early on? I wondered. Was I born into the world that way? I got up to fetch another beer, but there were no more beers in the kitchen refrigerator. I would have to go into the basement to bring up a new six-pack from Dad’s basement refrigerator. Switching on the basement light, I started down the stairs. Halfway down, I was seized with fear. At first I could not get an image of what was frightening me. And then I realized it was the fear that Mom’s ghost was about to haunt me. I stood paralyzed on the stairs, afraid that I would see Mom in some semicremated state, the way they say an incinerating body looks as it sits up from the extreme heat, popping up and twisting like cooking slabs of bacon. I was afraid I would see her body now in my uncontrolled imagination the way I saw it in that vision in Mexico, when she appeared in the flames in Olaf’s fireplace around the time that she had actually been cremated.

  I didn’t want to go into that basement, but I wanted, and really needed, another beer; so I moved fast. I felt Mom’s deadly, yawning, dripping, burned, disturbed presence in every corner, and as I ran up the basement stairs with that six-pack of Miller Lite in my hand, I could feel her hissing demon breath tearing at my backside. I could feel the dark, charred spirit of Mom that had never, at least by me, been properly laid to rest.

  By the time I got upstairs I was so upset that I had to drink three more beers just to calm down, and as I drank them I remembered another ghost of Mom, less fearful, but more depressing, more banal. It came to me in a recurring dream I had of Babs and Dad with Mom moving like an unseen ghost between them. Those dreams came just after Babs and Dad got married and moved into their new house. In the dream I would see Babs and Dad walking around their new kitchen trying out all their new electrical gadgets and appliances. In the middle of it all was Mom, a less substantial figure, dressed in a summer smock, drifting like a transparent ghost or hologram of herself through Babs and Dad, who didn’t see her and just went on filling the dishwasher with already clean dishes and turning on the trash masher and the electric can opener.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK to New York I asked Meg to take some photos of me so I would have a decent eight-by-ten black-and-white gl
ossy to help me get into the movies. In addition to her other talents, Meg was also a good photographer. She had a great eye. I knew she’d do a good job. And she seemed enthusiastic about my new focus. When I became focused she became even more focused, as she moved the camera in on my face. She had almost stopped judging me and my crazy whims. Now she was happy if I could get through the day with five minutes’ worth of focused time. And I think I did focus on her taking my picture. We spent a long time doing it. We shot all around Barney’s loft. I noticed every time Meg aimed the camera at me, it seemed to calm me down, like in the old days when I used to do my modeling. Maybe that was why I was trying to break into films. It wasn’t that I was trying to own the perfect swimming pool. If being in front of a camera was a calming event, then I wanted to be in front of a camera all the time.

  But when Meg developed the film, I didn’t like the face I saw. In fact, I was frightened by it. There was far too much sadness in it. I had no idea that I was that skinny and that sad. The cheekbones I inherited from Mom were starting to push through. There was no way I could be cast in a film with a face reflecting that much pain and sadness. When I saw those photos I saw the truth of something I couldn’t face. I couldn’t face my face, and that’s when the rolling and groaning began again. All that crazy indecision began again.

  I’ve lost the linear order of my memory, and so I’m assuming that I must have been very confused in that bicentennial summer. Up until now I’ve been telling you the events of that great fall from the top of the world to the bottom pretty much in the order I think they happened. But my memory gets muddled. I remember the trip to Rhode Island as a little break, the slightest respite from the continuous motion of hurtling down from the Himalayas to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.