by Lewis Shiner
“Are we breaking up?”
“I think maybe yes.”
“This pisses me off a little. I was going to break up with you, and now you’ve gone and done it first.”
It didn’t exactly call for an apology so I didn’t say anything at all.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, Ray. But I’ve got the feeling I haven’t really been there in bed as far as you’re concerned. Not who I am now. Just some nineteen-year-old Annette Shipley that you want to prove yourself with. You’re not fucking me, you’re trying to fuck your own past.”
“I feel shitty about this. I feel like I’ve let you down.”
“Of course you do. You were the same way in high school. You wanted everybody to like you. Well, Ray, I’m going to let you in on a secret. We all like you anyway. You can quit trying so hard. So go do what you have to do. I’ll skip dinner, if it’s all the same. Call me up sometime if you want to get to know me. We don’t have to fuck or anything.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to kiss her good-bye but she pushed me away.
“Just go,” she said. “You’ve been real good about not playing games or trying to bullshit me, so don’t start now.”
I drove to Dallas for Thanksgiving, went up there a week early so I would be with my mother on the night of the sixteenth, the anniversary of my father’s death. “I’m fine,” she assured me. “Yesterday was rough, dreading it, you know, but today is fine.”
In other words, I thought, you’ve handled it. These bad times will always happen some time or some place when I’m not around to see them. She didn’t ask about me and I didn’t have anything to offer. As I lay in my familiar bed in the guest room that night I waited for some kind of emotion to come, but it didn’t.
I had my guitar with me that week and when I felt claustrophobic I would take it to my room and practice. I also spent a few hours every day knocking down the rest of the fishpond.
Thanksgiving dinner was chicken and rice and canned green beans, cooked to death just like my father liked them. Donna from next door and her husband ate with us, and my mother was her usual brave and slightly overcheerful self. She had a little wine and seemed happy to be the center of everyone’s attention and concern.
She knew I was in therapy. I had a few questions, and my mother’s answers were apologetic, even defensive. There was nothing they could do about all the moves; it was bad luck that landlords had broken lease after lease. My father, she said, had quit the Park Service so he wouldn’t have to spend another summer in the field. I had to understand that they’d done everything they could.
I saw her with new eyes. For the first time I knew that I could live through her disapproval, that I could give as good as I got. It kept me from being quite as angry, and when I did get mad there was always the sledgehammer and the fishpond. She cried when I left and I reminded her that Christmas was only a month away, that I would see her then.
Christmas came before I was ready. I bought a tree the day before my mother arrived, which took all my willpower. It was something Elizabeth and I had always done together, on her birthday. It was seventy degrees outside and I was devoid of goodwill and charity. I remembered again all those Christmas vacations and birthdays on the road.
We had Christmas dinner with Pete and his wife, Cindy. My mother had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and decided to tell the story of me at Indian Bible School. This was the summer when I was ten, at Chaco Canyon National Park. I guess it’s the thing I’m most ashamed of in my life. My parents decided to send me to the Vacation Bible School with the Navajo kids. On the first day, in church, I announced in a loud voice that the pew I was sitting in was reserved for white people.
Pete and Cindy looked at their plates, embarrassed for me, and I saw red. “And where the hell do you think I learned that?” I said. “I wasn’t an adult, no matter how hard you worked to turn me into one, to never let me have a childhood. I was a mirror of you two. You taught me how I was supposed to feel about Indians. You taught me to sit off by myself. You made me into that scared, lonely, knotted-up little kid. You and nobody else. And if you want to brag about it, you can do it somewhere else.”
We didn’t stay long after dinner. On the drive home my mother said, “I think I should see if I can get a flight out in the morning. I just remembered I was supposed to look after Donna’s mail, and I’m worried about this leak in the back outside faucet.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to run away. We’ve been running from things in this family as long as I can remember. You fucked up, okay? You embarrassed me in front of my friends, for no good reason. So I embarrassed you back, and now it’s over. And we’re going to go on.”
She stayed through the twenty-ninth. We played games and watched TV and she even came up one afternoon to learn a little about what I do for a living.
The day after she left was my thirty-ninth birthday. I spent it at the movies, four of them in a row. It took all day. I got home about ten o’clock. There were a lot of birthday messages on the machine, from Joan and a couple other customers, from Pete and my mother and even Elizabeth. I was listening to them when the phone rang.
“Will you accept a collect call from Lori?”
“Yes.” I was instantly wound up. “Yes, please.”
“Hi,” Lori said.
“Hi yourself.”
“I thought I’d say Merry Christmas and see if you were okay.”
“You sound so close.”
“No, I’m not in Austin.” There was a short pause. “I kind of wish I was.”
“Is Tom there?”
“No.”
“Then you can wish me happy birthday, too.”
“I knew it was your birthday. I just didn’t know if I should say anything. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I think so.”
“Are you…did you have to spend the day alone?”
“I don’t guess I had to. But I did.”
“So you’re not…”
“Seeing anybody? No. I…I was for a couple weeks last month. It didn’t work out. There’s not much to say.”
“Yes there is. There’s lots to say. Because your relationships with women have a lot to do with anything that might happen between you and me.”
“I didn’t think anything was going to happen between you and me.”
“Nobody ever said that. I have to get my life sorted out. And I have to know you’re sorting yours out too.”
So I told her about Annette, everything I could think of. I can’t imagine she got any pleasure from details of my sex with another woman. I was as honest as I could manage. “I was lonely,” I said. “I need a relationship. I need to be touched. You said it yourself, how you get weird living alone.”
“How do you think that makes me feel? Is that all you want from me? To plug me into some slot labeled ‘Relationship’ in your life? Am I that interchangeable?”
“No,” I said. “But you’re taken.”
There was a long silence. “I’ve left Tom. Finally.”
“Jesus Christ. Where are you?”
“I’m in Mexico City right now, but I’m coming to the States.”
“I want to see you.”
“No.”
“Lori—”
“I mean it, Ray. I’m not ready. I need some time to put myself back together.”
“Are you hurt? Did that son of a bitch—”
“No, there’s no physical damage. It’s all on the inside. Right now I don’t feel like there’s a real person for you to see.”
“I can help.”
“You’re doing it again. Stop trying to rescue the world and work on yourself.” A second later she said, “You’re sighing again.”
“Breathing. I’m breathing. Will you let me know where you end up? Write me or call or send a telegram? You have my address with you?”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
New
Year’s Eve, 1989/90. I went to a party at Pete’s and danced with a number of women and collected a few kisses and then came home for a good night’s sleep. The Berlin Wall was down, Lori was free, it was the nineties. It was something to get up for in the morning.
Take a broken stereo, where only one channel comes through, or where the sound cuts out without any warning except a tiny click, or where there’s all bass and the speakers just hum and fuzz. You take it apart and you isolate the circuits and you track the problem down. Sometimes it seems hopeless, that there is no possible explanation. Then you figure out that you’ve taken something for granted that you shouldn’t have, that there’s one more question you should have asked. And there’s your answer. Maybe you have to order a part, maybe you can rig a fix there in the shop. Either way, you end up with a stereo that plays again, the music as clear and clean and pure as you can make it, and it’s there whenever you ask for it.
That’s what I did through January and February and the first half of March.
There were times when I thought about making a pass at Joan, about calling Annette again, about trying to lure Alex away from her family. I learned that impulses go away if you ignore them long enough, at least the stupid ones do.
One Tuesday in February I found myself finally telling Georgene about my near-death experience. When I came to the part about what my father said, the part where he said, “Let go,” it made me cry pretty hard.
She thought it was important. She said I’d started to grieve for him. I don’t know if it’s true, but that Thursday I took the box and the bottle of ashes into her office. That was where I finally dumped them out into the box. We made a little ceremony out of it, I guess the way I would like to have done with my mother.
I’ve heard it’s possible to go your whole life with, say, the muscles in your back completely tense. It’s only if somebody tries to massage them that you start to feel the pain. And then, slowly, gradually, maybe you can get them to relax. To let go.
I got Lori’s letter on March sixteenth.
It said she was in Houston, taking a Master’s in Social Work at Rice. She wasn’t sure what she would do with it. There were hospitals, there was family counseling, she didn’t know. The work was hard and she was long out of practice at being a student. She thought of me a lot but she wasn’t ready to see me yet.
There was a return address on the envelope.
I was in Houston by late afternoon. The address matched an apartment in a slightly run-down neighborhood east of River Oaks. A beat-up yellow Chevy Nova was parked in front of her door.
My hands shook as I got out of the car. I walked across the street and rang her doorbell. After a few seconds I heard footsteps. My throat swelled shut. I knew she was looking at me through the peephole in the door. A muffled voice said, “Oh shit.”
“Lori, it’s me. Are you going to let me in?”
“I’m thinking.”
“You put your address on the envelope. What did you think I’d do?”
“Respect my wishes and leave me alone.”
“Okay,” I said. I turned around and walked toward the car. Part of me had known this would happen and was saying I told you so. I had this masochistic image of myself going home and closing all the blinds and licking my wounds in the darkness. Better off alone, it said.
I heard the door open behind me. “Ray,” she said. “Wait.”
I turned around. She was wearing an Aztec calendar T-shirt that came to her knees and fuzzy pink socks on her feet. Her hair was darker than I remembered it, her tan faded. Her eyes were just the same.
There was a lot we had to talk about. We didn’t talk. I kissed her there on the doorstep and we backed into the apartment without letting go of each other. I didn’t see the furniture or the color of the walls. All I saw was her, her eyes, her mouth. She pulled at my shirt and then we were both naked, and I was inside her there on the cheap shag carpet.
Eventually we made it to the bedroom and we didn’t come out until the next morning. During the night we finally talked.
“You should have told me you were here,” I said.
“I wasn’t ready,” she said. She lay in my arms, her head on my chest.
“I just think about the weeks we lost.”
“We’ve got time. We’ve got years. If that’s what you want.”
“You know it is. Why don’t you come to Austin? You can transfer to UT. I’ve got the house, you wouldn’t have to worry about rent…”
“No. I’m sorry, but there’s no way. Austin doesn’t have a teaching hospital, and I think that’s where I want to work. I’m already halfway through the semester here. It’s not fair to ask me to drop that.”
“No,” I said. “You’re right.” I saw where we were headed and felt a moment of panic in my guts. “Whereas I can do what I do anywhere. I can fix stereos in Houston as well as in Austin.”
“I can’t ask you to do that either. To leave your house…”
“You didn’t ask.” I took a deep breath, and in that long second let myself feel everything that was tied up in that house. The house where I’d lived longer—by a factor of two or three—than anywhere else in my life. Where my father had stayed and Elizabeth and I had spent most of our marriage. Where I’d planted shrubs and mowed the lawn and raked the leaves, where I’d finally started my own business.
None of that mattered as much as the woman that lay next to me.
“You didn’t ask,” I said. “I offered.”
For the rest of March and all of April I spent two days a week in Austin, finishing the repairs I was committed to there, making arrangements to rent out the house, packing. Lori and I found a four bedroom house a few blocks from her apartment and signed a year’s lease. I put our new phone number in my first ad in the Houston Press.
Lori was not that crazy about moving so quickly from one long-term relationship to another. I was prickly, despite all my best intentions, about leaving Austin. Sometimes we’re up until two or three arguing it out. It’s so different from the long, lonely silences of my marriage to Elizabeth. The fights are part of something alive and growing, something the two of us are building together, using the pieces of our broken lives as material.
I tried to get Georgene to continue our sessions by phone, but it wasn’t her way. She gave me a list of people in Houston. I wasn’t prepared for how much it hurt to say good-bye to her.
I was still there in Austin, loading the last of my possessions into a U-Haul, when the phone rang. It was unnaturally loud in the empty house.
“This is Dr. Ling in Dallas,” the voice said, and I knew it meant my mother.
“How bad?” I said.
“Your mother’s had a stroke. We don’t know how serious it’s going to be yet.”
“What hospital?”
“St. Paul’s.”
“I’m on my way.”
Lori was in class the first time I called. I called again from Dallas and this time she was in. She made sure I was all right before she asked about my mother.
“She’s asleep,” I told her. It was dusk and the blinds were closed in the hospital room. My mother’s breath was ragged from asthma. “She was awake when I got here and she recognized me and everything. She’s numb all down her right side and she has trouble talking. They think she’s going to be okay.”
“Good.”
“Well. It means she can’t go back to living alone. She’s going to have to go into some kind of nursing home.”
There was a long silence, and then Lori said, “No. She’s staying with us.”
And so it came to be that I live in Houston in a big house with my mother and the woman I love. Lori works at M. D. Anderson Hospital as part of her degree, counseling female cancer patients and their families. Most of her patients die. She tells people it’s okay, that she’s always been good at short-term relationships. Behind the humor something else is working itself out. Her job is healing her, and she is healing me.
My mother is anot
her story. When she gets Lori alone she talks endlessly about my father, about what a great sex life they had, about how he was as warm and expressive in private as he was cold in public. She’s staked out her own personal, private memories, memories that exclude me. Someday I’ll accept that, and I’ll grieve for my father, and for the wasted years of my marriage, and the childhood I never had. I get closer to it every day, and one day it will simply happen.
Life is quiet. My mother is teaching me to play bridge. Sometimes it’s hard for her to hold her cards, but her mind remains sharp. Her memories, real or imagined, seem to get more vivid every day as the present recedes. We have a cat named Herbert and some beautiful art deco furniture from the antique shops along Westheimer. Graham says he’s tired of L.A. and thinks it’s time to move Carnival Dog to Texas. He wants to get away from oldies and give some new young bands a start. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him here by New Year’s.
We listen to Smile now and then, even though it makes me lonesome for Brian. I tried Celebration of the Lizard the other night and enjoyed it, but what can I say? It’s not me.
It’s still too painful to listen to Hendrix.
Last night I dreamed about my father again. It wasn’t much of a dream. He and my mother and I are staying in some kind of beach house, maybe in the Caribbean. We have lunch together and my father tells the halibut joke. I take a towel and go down to the ocean by myself to swim. The water is clear and beautiful.
When I woke up Lori was nestled behind me, with her arms around my chest.
I guess that’s about it. Business is great, and I like to think that it’s because of the quality of the work I do, that it’s because I really care how the music sounds. If you’re ever in Houston and need your stereo fixed, you should give me a call. I’m in the book.
