by Lewis Shiner
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Cole laughed. “Susan’s got nothing to worry about. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
Ava took a sip of the beer. It wasn’t like she’d never had one before or anything, but it felt grown up to be so casual about it. “So…” she said. “What are the rules?”
“No smoking!” Cole said in a mock-stern voice and they both laughed.
“No, I mean, what am I allowed to ask questions about?”
“You can ask anything you want. If I feel too uncomfortable, I may not answer. I won’t lie to you and I won’t set any limits on what we talk about. Okay?”
“Okay. What I really want to know is, why did you run out on my mom?”
“The gloves are off already,” Cole said with a smile. “Which time, in sixty-nine, or after you were conceived? The first one, I’ll take a big share of the blame. The second one, she threw me out.”
“Start with the first.”
Cole was quiet for a long time. “I guess the best way to explain it is that it’s possible to be in love with somebody that you don’t have that much in common with. Maybe you love them because you want to be more like them. Smarter, more sophisticated. Maybe the things that you do have in common, like a certain kind of intensity, maybe that can be as hard to live with on a daily basis as it is attractive in certain situations.”
“What did she see in you?”
“Man, you are ruthless. Beyond my incredible good looks and irresistible charm, you mean?”
“Yeah, besides all that stuff.”
“I think I was not the kind of guy she expected to end up with. She could have had her pick of brainy English majors with trust funds, but for a guy like me to want her, I think it made her feel like a different person than she’d been raised to be. It was exciting and a little dangerous. It also didn’t fit her in the long run.”
Ava kept after him for a while, not sure herself what she was looking for. He was sort of kidding about the irresistible charm and also sort of not. Cole wanted other people to like him and he gave that easy affection back. Pretty quickly he turned things around and started asking her questions, what did she want to do with herself, what were her favorite classes, did she like music, movies, sports?
By this point the beer was gone and Ava had that feeling she got sometimes, that there was something missing from her life, and the absence was like a wound that hurt so much it made her eyes burn. She’d always believed it was her father that was missing, and yet here she was, in the same room with him at last, liking him, even, but the wound was still there.
“Hey,” Cole said gently. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know what I want to be. It feels like everything’s already been done. They’ve walked on the moon, they’ve put safety pins in their ears, they’ve invented the atom bomb and granola. Money’s not the answer, drugs are not the answer, sex is not the answer.”
“Love is the answer,” Cole said.
“Then what’s the question?”
“It’s all part of the same question. What’s it all about? Why get up in the morning? Where did I leave my keys?”
“I love my mom. That doesn’t make the feeling go away.”
“It helps, though. Loving other people is really important, and the other part of it is loving what you do. It doesn’t matter what it is if you love doing it. When I saw Bob Dylan playing guitar, I knew what I wanted to do.”
“You’re lucky.”
“There are days I might argue with you, but today is not one of them. Today I got to meet you and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.”
*
If the first hour was any indication, Madelyn was not going to make it through five days of leaving Ava with Cole. She was twisted up inside like a wrung-out washcloth, imagining all the things that could go wrong. What if Cole thought it would be funny to get her drunk on mescal or stoned on peyote? What if Cole left her alone so he could go have sex with Susan and Ava got kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery in Mogadishu? It could happen.
After Félix dropped her at the hotel, she went to the bar for one more glass of wine, knowing she would not get to sleep without it. The first glass went down far too quickly; over the second she took out a Moleskine notebook and made a list on the soothing blue grid of the page.
1. Ava is loyal. So if Cole started trashing Madelyn, or suggesting things that she knew Madelyn would disapprove of, she wouldn’t put up with it.
2. Ava is responsible. She had expressed a healthy nervousness about being in a strange country and she wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
3. Cole has changed. This one made her pause with her pen hovering over the paper. Admittedly, most of Cole’s adult life had passed since she had seen him; still, there was something calm and steady about him that she hadn’t seen before. Part of it had to be the sobriety. Part of it also seemed to be Susan Montoya.
4. It’s the oldest trick in the book. She stared at the page. Where had that come from? She was completely losing the thread. Oh, yes. Susan Montoya. All these years of Cole wanting Madelyn and her wishing he would just go away, and now here he was, not interested in her anymore, and now she was asking herself what had happened. Had she lost her looks? Had she gone so long without sex that she was now putting out dried-up spinster vibes?
5. Don’t go there. She was exhausted and worried sick and yes, finally, drunk. She tore the page out of the notebook and crumpled it up and threw it in her purse. Bedtime.
Ava called at nine the next morning. Madelyn had been up since seven, moderately hung over, starving, pretending to reread Sometimes a Great Notion, waiting for the phone to ring and unwilling to leave the room until it did.
Ava was fine. Cole had let her have one beer. Susan had gone to her mother’s house when Cole wouldn’t let her smoke. They’d talked. “You know. About stuff.” In Ava’s defensiveness she saw the one catastrophe she had failed to prepare herself for: father and daughter had bonded.
Dear God, now what?
She spent the next four days seeing the sights of Guanajuato: the Mummy Museum, the Diego Rivera house, the Alhondiga, the People’s Museum, the silversmith’s shops, the cathedrals, the University. Enough Spanish returned to her for her to function. Ava phoned in every morning with a report. She and Cole had been to the Mummy Museum too; they’d gone to a folkloric festival at the plaza by the Don Quixote statue; Cole had taught her the words to some Mexican songs and she’d sat in with Cole and Félix at an upscale restaurant and made 17 US dollars in tips. They’d walked to the reservoir and did Madelyn know that people swam in the city’s drinking water? They’d climbed to the Pipila statue and wandered the twisting streets for hours.
Madelyn joined them for dinner on the last night. Susan had reingratiated herself, and she and Ava had evidently made peace. Seeing Ava and Cole together was revelatory. Already they had private jokes that excluded both Madelyn and Susan, and Ava looked at Cole with something very like love, or at least infatuation, and Madelyn fought not to be jealous, or angry at Cole for not having been someone she could stay married to, or critical of herself for having raised Ava without the father she so clearly wanted. Well, there had been Paul, though Ava had never responded to him the way she did to Cole, and Madelyn and Cole were simply not possible. Because, she told herself. Because of lots of reasons. Because, for one thing, though he had matured in some ways, he had not grown up to the point of having a steady job or a stable life, the things that would have allowed him to be a contributing parent and to meet Ava long ago.
It was a difficult evening, and she needed, for Ava’s sake, to act as if it weren’t. She limited herself to two glasses of wine. She smiled at Susan when she came back from her cigarette breaks. She let the conversation find its own way.
They had an early flight in the morning. Félix and Cole picked them up at six am and Susan sent her apologies. At the airport, Cole and Félix both hugged Ava, so Madelyn thought what the hell and hugged
both of them. Cole didn’t hold on any longer than strictly appropriate, and he was the first to let go.
At dfw she got another surprise; instead of her parents, Alex and Gwyn were waiting with Ethan in tow. “Gwyn was in town for the week,” Alex explained. “It seemed like an opportunity.”
Ethan ran to Ava first and hugged Madelyn as an afterthought. “Lord,” Madelyn said to Gwyn, “I haven’t seen you since you got up on two feet.” Gwyn was five-eight and slim. She wore no makeup and her dark hair was cut in a shag that was as casual as her flannel shirt and jeans. She had a hawkish nose, a wide mouth, and deep, dark eyes.
“Me either,” Ava said, and stepped up to awkwardly shake her hand, still holding on to Ethan with her left. Madelyn watched them check each other out, pen pals mapping reality to expectations.
Madelyn also needed to update her mental image of Alex. He’d gained some weight and lost some hair, but looked good in spite of it. Cole had not been the only one with demons; between his father and Callie and his non-specific rebelliousness, Alex too had been haunted, and he looked like he was at last finding some stillness.
They drove to Madelyn’s parents’ house and took two cars from there to La Madeleine near smu. Her father kept insisting that the restaurant was named after her, though the joke failed to catch hold. At 68, his sense of humor was more insular and obscure every year and his vision bad enough that he could no longer drive at night. Madelyn could not look at him without being afraid of losing him.
At her parents’ house afterward, Ethan crashed first, and her parents shortly thereafter. Gwyn and Ava decided to watch Cocteau’s Orpheus on videotape, which Gwyn had already seen three times. Alex and Madelyn withdrew to the couch in her father’s study.
Alex wanted to hear about Cole and Ava, “the straight dope, the stuff you couldn’t say at dinner.”
Madelyn told him what she knew, then asked about Gwyn.
“She’s brilliant. She’s going to a private school in San Antonio, Incarnate Word, and making straight As.”
“Isn’t that a Catholic school?”
Alex looked embarrassed. “Yeah, that part is weird. What could I do? She wasn’t going to get challenged in the Marfa Independent School District and Callie wouldn’t let me bring her to Dallas.”
“Girls only? Cole always complained about having to go to a boys-only school.”
Alex dropped his voice to a whisper. “Yeah, well, I’m not entirely sure Gwyn is exactly, uh, interested in boys. Or girls either, for that matter.”
“Are you worried, or relieved?”
“Both, probably. I don’t really care, I just want her to be happy and have a good life. And whether Cole wants to admit it or not, we got a hell of an education.”
“Academically, sure. But a lot of the St. Mark’s boys I’ve known—present company excepted for the sake of argument—could have used a bit more social development.”
“You mean like learning how to talk to girls before putting the moves on them?”
Alex’s eyes held something more than a smile. A dare, perhaps. His arm was on the back of the couch and he was sitting so close that their thighs almost touched. Madelyn’s breathing sped up.
“Speaking of which,” Alex said, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about for years.”
Madelyn thought perhaps she should look away. Instead she said, “What’s that?” Now she was whispering too.
Alex leaned in and kissed her. It was gentle at first, then Madelyn’s lips opened and it got more intense. She lost track of things for a minute or two and then abruptly she remembered where she was, that their kids were in the next room and her parents down the hall, that Alex was Cole’s best friend and that she lived two thousand miles away. She turned her head away and put a hand against Alex’s chest.
“I’m not complaining,” she said, “but I think I need some time to get used to this idea.”
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I think I could get used to it pretty quickly.”
Madelyn massaged her temples, trying to get her intellect to kick back in. “It’s been an exhausting week. I should get to bed. I’ve got a long flight tomorrow.”
Alex put a hand on her thigh. “Why don’t you change your reservation? Stay a few more days. Let’s see where this goes.”
“Oh, I know where this goes. What I don’t know is whether I can go there right now.” She picked up his hand and put it on the couch. “Let me think about this. We’re not kids anymore. There’s time.”
“Okay,” Alex said. He wasn’t cranky or impatient and she thought, Alex has changed too.
Alex gathered up Gwyn, and Madelyn hugged him at the front door. Ava said, “I’m going to stay up and finish watching this.”
“Okay,” Madelyn said. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.” She said it without looking up.
Madelyn put on sweat pants and a T-shirt and brushed her teeth, checked on Ethan and got into bed. In the last moment before she closed her eyes, she touched two fingers to her lips.
*
It was early October and the crabgrass was the last green thing in the lawn. Somehow the damned stuff could hold dew right into the afternoon, and Steve Cole knew it was going to be a bitch to mow.
Betty saw him changing into his yard clothes and said, “What are you doing?”
“Last cut of the year. Going to get it over with.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way to stop you. The Boone boy down the street would do it for twenty dollars.”
“He doesn’t overlap his rows far enough, leaves those seed stems standing. I’d be looking at them all winter.”
As usual, the mower was balky about starting. Betty had said that if he was going to insist on cutting the grass himself, he should at least get one of those riding mowers, and maybe next spring he would.
The air was chilly but the sky was clear and he felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, the way the sun was boring into him. He cut the little strip on the far side of the driveway and then started on the main lawn. It was going pretty well until about halfway through he hit a patch of crabgrass that was particularly thick and wet and the damned mower died on him. He jerked the starter rope and the engine sputtered. He set the choke and tried again, and then the third time, in his frustration, he really gave it a yank, and at first he thought the mower had jumped back and hit him in the chest, but no, the damned thing was still stalled and now he was on his back in the damp lawn, struggling to breathe, and he thought, you have really done it this time.
He saw the cold blue sky through the branches of the mimosa tree. It was rushing away, like he was falling down a well, and his last thought was that there was something he had forgotten, something he had been meaning to do, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.
*
When his mother called with the news, Cole immediately went numb. Then, once he was off the phone, he spent the next few hours alternating between relief and guilt. And a sense of possibilities now lost forever.
Alex picked him and Susan up at the airport in his new Lexus. They didn’t talk much. Cole saw that Alex was only setting aside his displeasure because of the circumstances. Then Susan surprised him by telling Alex that she wanted to stay at the Montoya house, that Cole needed time alone with his mother. Cole thought that he and Susan might have talked about it first, but he kept the thought to himself, like most of his thoughts these days.
Alex and Susan came in only long enough to say hello and offer hasty condolences. Cole hadn’t been in his parents’ house since 1966, 24 years ago, more than half his life. The smell of the place, of ripe fruit and scented soap and furniture wax, instantly brought back feelings of oppression and anger and loneliness. As bad as things had been with Susan lately, he wanted her there, if only to surround him with her familiar fragrance of smoke and Obsession.
The last time Cole had seen his mother had been the weekend of the drug bust, 13 years ago, and though he’d tal
ked to her regularly on the phone, he was not prepared for how fragile she’d become. She’d gained weight, yet the bones of her wrists and forehead pressed hard against her translucent skin. Her hair, dyed an odd yellow-brown color, was thinning, and arthritis shortened her steps.
Cole followed her into the living room. Here was the chair his father had been sitting in when he told Cole his guitar was forfeit for his Russian History exam. The couch where he and Janet had made love once when his parents were out at a dinner party. The patch of carpet where he’d lain to watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on Monday nights. He wondered if he had any memories that weren’t painful.
“How are you holding up?” he asked his mother.
“Mostly okay. Only I get so angry, sometimes. I try to tell myself that if it hadn’t been this one stupid thing it would have been another. He was so stubborn.”
She looked at Cole. “I wish—”
“I know, Mom.”
“I wish you two could have worked things out before he died.”
“I know, Mom.” He struggled to not put all the blame on his father. “There just wasn’t any common ground.”
Later he took his suitcase to his old room, which his father had turned into an office. He still saw it the way it had been. The window he’d lowered his guitar out of on the night he ran away, the closet where he’d sung along with his green reel-to-reel. They’d replaced his old bed, the one where he’d tried to fall asleep by fantasizing about sex night after night, with a daybed that his mother had made up for him.
He was supposed to be here to comfort his mother and deal with his father’s death, yet all he could think about was his adolescence and the promise that had failed to materialize. He had been so sure, lying in bed and playing “I Can’t Let Go” or “Do You Believe in Magic,” over and over, so convinced of his own importance, of his destiny. Where had that gone?
