Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  111.

  What remained of those lost days of fire were books. We continued to read. We said to each other, “This is good, this is extraordinary, you should read this.” We said, “This is very bad, what a faker, what a fraud.”

  It’s easy for me to recall those years. Even if they blend. Even if I confuse the shops, the streets, the shelves, the authors, the weather, the months, the years, the lines we loved.

  Even if I confuse poems for prose, prose for lyrics.

  Tess Wolff hidden away in a good corner of one bookstore or another, the rain beating down outside as always. I’m bringing her something from some other section, a book I wonder if she’s read, or one I think she should, or a line I want her to see. I’m coming through the store in a hurry.

  “Wait,” she says, holding her hand out to me. “Come here,” she says.

  I come and take it and she whispers.

  Sometimes the line, sometimes the whole poem.

  Tess, I am here in the present praying and you are out there in the past whispering:

  And if it happens that you cannot

  go on or turn back

  and you find yourself

  where you will be at the end,

  tell yourself

  in that final flowing of cold through

  your limbs

  that you love what you are.

  I have her book on the table. I have all her brackets and stars. I do not remember when she found it. Or where. There is just the poem and a building which may no longer exist.

  There are lines at the corners of her eyes. She has lost something in her cheeks. Her skin appears thinner, drawn tighter over her bones.

  She is no longer young.

  That’s all it is.

  Just that she is no longer young when I find her tucked in, secreted away.

  She says, “Here, come here.”

  She whispers.

  She hated loud people.

  “Will you please shut the fuck up, please,” she said to a man chattering to his wife. Not said. I should say, asked him. “Will you?” As if she truly wanted to know the answer, so that she could decide whether to stay or go.

  The man and his wife stared. Affronted. And then left.

  You see? It wasn’t that she’d gone totally cold. It wasn’t that she was dead. She was still a fighter. There was still some shit she would not eat. It’s just that it wasn’t the same. It’s just that she was unhappy the way people are when they fail so completely to do what they expected they would.

  You might say, yes, like anyone, like every single one.

  But no, I cannot see it the same. It was different with her. It was more. It was worse.

  The afternoon that Tess found this poem, after she whispered those lines, it was toward the end of our life in Seattle.

  Yes, I’m certain of it.

  And after she’d finished reading, she looked at me, shook her head and said, “But I don’t, Joe. Goddamn it, I don’t.”

  112.

  Once, years ago on a city bus in Seattle, a lunatic woman turned to me and whispered right into my ear, “You want to know what it’s like? It’s like a furnace between your legs. All your life it’s burning, burning, and then, snap, it goes out. So now you know, asshole.”

  I’ve never forgotten it. Her breath on my ear.

  A thing possesses you and then it’s gone. There’s so much pain in that desertion. It’s not, as you get older, that you miss your young body, your smooth skin, your strong back, your lean legs.

  It’s that you miss desire.

  Better to be a hideous man on fire than a handsome man drowning.

  What am I saying? That it’s difficult for all of us—growing older, time, all the rest. But for Tess it is different. It is worse.

  Truth be told, I have found the feeling of desire slipping away to be a relief. When I was young it was tyrannical. I wanted everything always. A generic and scorching desire for more. Sex above all. But later, when it subsided, that blazing furnace beneath my skirts, I was grateful. I was at peace.

  All I want to say is that while it’s difficult for any one of us, for Tess it was harder, it was unbearable.

  And I understand.

  Because of my bad filters. Because of the way I am inundated by sound and light, I believe I know what it was for a thing to hurt more than it should. For it to overwhelm and submerge and drown a person. And because I know, and because I love her as I do, I am tolerant in ways many others could not be. Or so I insist, so I have convinced myself.

  Listen, Tess is a pain in the ass. Let us not pretend she is otherwise. Petulant, impatient, selfish, erratic, arrogant, unhappy. For all my shifting selves, my precious longing, my pathetic nostalgia, let me please say, Tess was a terrible pain in the ass, and it would have been so much simpler, so much easier to go off in search of someone else.

  But it wasn’t what I wanted. Never. It wasn’t that I was sticking it out, either. I want no prize for hanging in there.

  It’s just that in spite of it all, I loved her.

  It’s just that I do.

  113.

  It was six years between leaving White Pine and seeing my father again. Six years to the day, and a year before his death, when he appeared in the afternoon. He knew a bar’s drowsy hours of calm—after lunch, after closing—and so, with his great passion for ceremony, timed his entrance accordingly.

  He is pacing the sidewalk.

  He is waiting until precisely three o’clock.

  He is striding through the door.

  In those six years we spoke only a few times, and that was early on. Tess and I often called, but after a while he wouldn’t answer and wouldn’t call back.

  But he sent letters. He wrote of his deepening love of God. He was thinking of us. He hoped we were well, that we were happy.

  We wrote in return that we hoped the same for him.

  We sent our sanitized news.

  He wrote to say he missed us at the meetinghouse.

  He wrote that he and Hank Fletcher went each Sunday, and afterwards they walked for hours along the beach like two old friends. Well, we are friends, and we are old. He said that he was reading more and more about the Quakers. He would include lines from those books, carefully copied out for us. Often they had to do with violence and pacifism.

  He didn’t understand that Tess and I had surrendered. Laid down our weapons. He believed we were still out there with hammers in our belts, balaclavas hidden in our coats.

  We still have the letters, a neat stack of them in a blue Adidas shoebox, which once contained a pair of Tess’s running shoes. Size nine and a half.

  This morning I put on my parka, sat outside in the sun and read through them.

  The clearing is covered in a thin sheet of fresh snow.

  There are more than I remembered. Twice a month he wrote. Like paychecks, each is dated the first or the fifteenth. My father and his patterns. He seems to write slowly and not in his carpenter’s scratch. The words are printed, composed of small open characters. Many of them are written on college-ruled paper, which strikes me as so sad. I see him alone at his kitchen table, writing in some notebook he’s found in a bottom drawer, carefully tearing the perforated paper. Probably it’s to do with my own notebooks. My father at his table, me at mine. The impressions our pens make on those deeper pages.

  Later, he graduates to stationery. Not with his name printed on it or anything so fancy, just smaller, higher quality sheets of paper bordered in grey, folded and sealed into matching envelopes.

  Each letter begins, Dear Tess and Dear Joey.

  I think of my father as a boy. The photograph of him sitting in the bed of a pickup, tailgate down, legs dangling over the edge, his chin up, trying to look tough, but grinning anyway. Old jeans and muddied boots. I think of that boy in
school learning to write letters. Learning the word salutation. His teacher passing through the classroom handing each student a stamp. The taste of glue on his tongue.

  Dear Mom and Dad, They’re making us write letters today. How are you? I hope you are good. I am fine.

  Each of his letters, of these here in the shoebox, are perfectly organized. Just as he learned when he was young, his father’s truck in a California onion field. When his own father was alive to elicit a grin from his son, to point a camera and release its shutter.

  Each the same: date, two spaces, our names, our full address, two spaces and then Dear Tess and Dear Joey.

  I have been thinking of you both, he often writes. He tells of his walks, of his growing friendship with Hank. I am building furniture for Jon Brockett, who owns Lester’s now. An inlaid walnut dining table. He writes of a desk he’s made from a good piece of oak. I’m making cabinets for our mailman. A storm came through and lasted three days. I thought the waves would take the meetinghouse, but in the end just a few cracked windows. You should have seen the sky the next day. A woman from work is giving puppies away. I’m thinking about it. Strangest things you’ve ever seen. Australian shepherd mixed with chimp. Maybe I’ll keep one. They’ll surely be the ugliest dogs to walk the planet! He adds that exclamation point, which strikes me now as such a gentle gesture. So much of that little boy still in him. It’s difficult for me not to cry when I see it there. Did you know James Dean was a Quaker? Went to see Mom. Wasn’t very talkative. Went to see Mom. She didn’t look well, I’m sorry to tell you both. She’s lost more weight. I’ve spoken to Seymour. He says he’ll check in on her. Says he’ll make sure she’s eating. But what can he do? What can any of us? There is only faith and prayer and kindness. And forgiveness, too. Some kids from Emerson opened a coffee place down on the boardwalk. It’s nice. There’s a little stage and they have live music sometimes. I went with Hank the other day. We’re far too old, but no one seemed to mind. They were very nice. Hank brought a flask and made our coffees Irish. I hope it survives. It’ll be rough for them in winter. You two could have done something like that. Hung around. I read this the other day, “The meeting house is not a consecrated edifice, and if there is anything holy about it, it must be the lives of the people who meet there.” William Wistar Comfort said that and I thought it was so beautiful, and that you two might as well. It’s people who make a place sacred, not the opposite. Something to remember.

  And so it went. The local news. The weather. Hank. My mother always in decline, quieter, thinner. Her slow remove. And often a line or two from something he’d read. There was never any mention of Sam Young, or what we’d done, but I know that he knew. I know he’d heard it all from Seymour, whose confession, I imagined him believing, was a kind of absolution.

  My father his priest.

  My father who had twice lost his own family.

  My father, then father to us all.

  114.

  Dear Joey,

  I’m writing to say that we miss you here in White Pine, and have since you left so suddenly. I hope you won’t mind me writing. I hope you won’t think I’m crossing the line. Sometimes I start to feel like a stepfather only partially accepted into this uncommon band of yours. Not, of course, that your father and I are in love! Wouldn’t that be something? No, but you must understand what I mean. We’ve become such close friends, your father and I, and I can’t imagine what that must be like for you. I do worry that you see me as an intruder or, at the very least, look upon me with some suspicion. I understand and I’d do the same. So I’m writing to say that I come in peace and that you needn’t worry. My friendship with your dad has been a great blessing. The fact is that men our age (and I’m being generous to myself here given that I’ve got your pop by nearly ten years) don’t often make new friends, or know much about friendship at all. It’s lucky then that us two lonely old guys found each other when we did. I hope that it’s some comfort to you to know that we look after each other. I’ve wanted to say that for a while now, and I missed my chance to do it in person. Or maybe I just chickened out. Well, whatever the case may be, I wanted to tell you that I’m here in peace and that I’ve come to care about your dad a whole lot.

  The other thing is that I know you’ve been calling and that it must be very difficult not to have him pick up, or call you back. I want to tell you that I’ve encouraged him to do it. And I’ve encouraged him to visit you both there in Seattle. The problem is that he knows about your adventure, what happened before you left. He and Seymour had a few beers together up at Lester’s and as far as I can tell Seymour told the whole thing. So knowing what he does, he’s been struggling. That’s what he tells me. He just can’t stomach it. He says it has to do with being a Quaker, but I think just as much it has to do with your Mom and all that. I hope I’m not speaking out of turn. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe this isn’t my place. What do I know? But really I think he’s just frightened, Joe. He’s afraid of all sorts of things. If you look at it from his side, you’ll see. What with his wife where she is, his daughter too, and you and Tess, of course. Everyone gone, and everyone in danger. That’s how he sees it, anyway.

  I guess that’s all I’ve got. I wanted you to know that I’m working on him. I’m trying to get him to pick up the phone, or better yet just drive up to see you. More than anything at all, I want you to keep in mind how much he loves you. I don’t know if you can imagine it until you have a son of your own, but I hope you’ll try, and I hope you’ll believe me.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hank Fletcher

  115.

  I sent Hank a warm letter in return. I said that I’d try my best to do what he suggested.

  I saw my father at his kitchen table looking out at all of us: Claire disappeared across the ocean, my mother in her cell, barely speaking, barely eating, me and Tess in Seattle rampaging in the dark, in basements, building our bombs, sharpening our knives, in secret communion with his deadly wife.

  So when he appeared all those years later at our bar at three o’clock in the afternoon, the old army duffel slung over his shoulder, I looked up from my lunch and saw him, perhaps for the first time in my life: a tall man, nearly sixty, short hair still thick, but gone entirely grey, slim, strong, handsome, brown eyes somehow too large, and too gentle for his worn carpenter’s face.

  When Tess saw who it was, this man standing in the entrance like Steve McQueen silhouetted in a saloon doorway, she screamed and ran and jumped on him. He dropped the duffel to the floor and held onto her with his eyes closed.

  When she let him go and turned to me she was crying.

  I embraced him as fully as I could, without the usual hesitation and my immediate desire to be free of it.

  We walked him through the bar, which I should tell you was flawless. We had taste, Tess and I. Whatever our problems then, we were proud of that place—of its style and success—and it made us both happy to show it to him. He loved to see our lives, our life together. And I know that he was relieved to discover its normalcy, its distinct absence of weapons.

  It makes me smile now to think of what he’d imagined—some grimy dive with an anarchist’s laboratory in the back room.

  Always polite, he’d arranged to stay at a hotel, but we insisted that he spend the week with us. Even if we all knew the city well, and he better than either of us, we played tourists. We went to see a Mariners game, to Elliott Bay where he found a copy of The Journal of George Fox, to Left Bank Books where Tess introduced him to her friends. We went down to the fish market, and walked along the water. We showed him our first apartment, a building that was by then condemned to become a tasteless glass-and-steel complex called Alabaster Court or The Ivory Lofts or some other bullshit. We went to the top of the Space Needle, where he told Tess about the March family’s first trip to the San Juans. He came to the bar in the evenings to eat and watch us work.

  On the day he left we cr
ossed the park from our apartment and found our old house on Auburn Place. This pilgrimage was something I’d always avoided, and when my father suggested it, I wanted very much to refuse. But there had been a change: in me, in him, in time, something I’m not sure I can identify. Maybe it was just that I was older, or that I was under the illusion of having become an adult, or that my father had begun to appear to me as a child.

  The grass in the park was wet, from dew or from rain, I can’t remember, but I see us three walking side by side, my father in the middle, his arm around Tess. There are a few people out there running their dogs, but otherwise we’re alone in the quiet morning.

  It is one of those scenes, a perfect image so fixed in my memory that it must be wrong.

  Could it have been so silent and empty?

  Weren’t there children chasing each other between the swings?

  Trucks driving past?

  Yet, I sit here at our table, and I look into this clearing and I see us: father, son, Tess, sweeping through Volunteer Park. I hear our footsteps. A German shepherd galloping past.

  We are so sharp there in this clearing that I don’t need to close my eyes.

  We are on the other side now, on 15th, walking along Highland.

  I am dizzy.

  Then. Now.

  I feel a strange lightness behind my eyes.

  This tripling remove, this my childhood neighborhood, where once we lived, where Claire and I were kids. This very corner, Highland and 16th, where my mother once protected me from the Carlson brothers. There in the clearing she is standing in the middle of the street. Hair whipping around her shoulders, across her face, twisting at her throat. Eyes wide and those boys in front of her, straddling their bikes. She is screaming, Look at me. She is moving toward them. There is that car behind her now. See that fat chrome bumper. If you ever, she says, touch him again. She is bent at the waist, her hands on their handlebars—a red fist on each—the wind is blowing harder, her hair is snapping at their cheeks. So help me God. You touch him again. Her eyes unlike anything they’ve ever been. The driver blows his horn. She faces the car. The Carlson boys pedaling fast as they can. They’re gone and still she is standing in the street. The wind at her back now. She stares at the driver. Mom, I say. Mom. She turns. Comes, bends to me looking up to her from the curb. The man rolls down his window. Crazy whore, he spits, driving past. Crazy fucking bitch, he screams.