Allyson’s eyes widened and she came to me. In some untroubled corner of my mind I could tell this was going to keep me laid. “You don’t have to apologize,” she said, sheet slipping. “That’s terrible, Joe. Do you feel like talking about it?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s just—when a door opens suddenly like that, or when I see something muddy, anything with a family—”
“It was your family? Oh my God.”
“It was the whole family,” I said. “I’m sorry—”
“No, no. Don’t apologize. I can imagine how upsetting this can be. Joe, I hope you’ve sought help.”
I smiled thinly. “I’m around the eighth step now.”
She put both hands on my shoulders so the sheet slipped all the way to her waist. Her breasts were sticking out like they were reaching for my shoulders, too. “I’m very proud of you. I mean it. You’re surviving so well. This kind of thing can destroy so many people.”
I saw the wreckage at the lab. “It has.”
“That’s what I mean. I’ve read about this, Joe. When your family abuses you it’s like—I don’t know, but anything can happen, you know? Anything.”
I took a deep breath. “A monster.”
“It is like a monster,” she said, curling beneath the bed again for the vampire book. “Why do you think people write things like this? I bet it’s a what’s-it-called, an allegory. It’s allegorical. I bet you anything she was abused or something and it felt like a monster was after her. So she wrote about it—”
“But I’m the monster,” I said. “I think I am, anyway.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “You’re not the monster. You’ve got the allegorical thing all wrong.”
“It’s hard to tell,” I said.
She hugged me, her breasts like tines against my chest. “I know it is,” she whispered. “That’s why I’m so proud of you. It’s hard to tell, and you told me.” She smiled down at my erection and patted it briefly, like a pet that had fetched the wrong thing. “Now we really have to get back to work, Joe. Listen, I’ll talk to Mike, if that’s O.K. with you. I’m sure you can be my assistant again. Can I tell him—?”
“Yes.”
“And we’re done with”—she ducked beneath the bed again and found my piece of paper. With a start I realized I had been given a gift. Hire Power hadn’t let me down; the boss they found for me had given me the eighth step. I’d been trying to make a list all the time and it turned out it was a handout from the Entertainment Coordinator. Mike had said it: I had wronged all the guests here at The Vast Resort, and here was a list of them, alphabetized and everything like some index of a perfect universe. “We’re done with this, right? You know who everyone is?” I took it from her and gazed at it. The Andersons. Mrs. Bitburg and the Jew daughters. Giltmores. The horny Hackett. Everyone I’d wronged, all down the alphabet from A to—“Oh, wait. I didn’t get to the punch line. Look at the last entry—it’s just like that book. Frank and Mimi Zhivago. And he’s a doctor . Get it? Dr. Zhivago?”
It was true. In the cellophane sunshine there was no way you could miss it, the names in neat black ink at the bottom of the page. Zhivago, Dr. Frank. Zhivago, Mimi. I had the allegorical thing all wrong. Cyn, Stephen, Ben: It wasn’t like they’d been killed by a monster; they had been. I wasn’t the monster, not at all; the monster was. It wasn’t as if Mimi, back in the fourth act, had gotten up out of bed and shaken hands with Zhivago over a scene well played; she had. Then they’d gone to a resort.
“Yes,” I said, back from flashback. “Yes,” I said, holding the eighth step in my hands like a life preserver. “Yes.” I looked out the window and saw him at once, getting out of the pool and walking on the faux marble. He didn’t look like the family doctor, not at all. He was the family doctor, and once you knew that, you could trace his path to the silent sunglassed woman propping her book against her bent knees. Once you knew that, it was as easy as climbing stairs, as easy as getting dressed and walking right up to her yourself. “Yes, I get it.”
Step 9
My twin reflections blinked at me, one head each in Mimi’s sunglasses, drained of color so my faces looked like masks, as I stood over her and waited. Frank Zhivago was over at the half-real palms, getting drinks and chatting with Marco over the roar of the juicer. I just waited for her to feel the chill my shadow was casting over her tan body, and look up.
“Yes?” she said politely, and then looked again. The shades came off; I was unmasked. For a second, Mimi looked startled, but then just disappointed: Oh, it’s you. Her eyes, her face looked the same as I remembered, except tan. I scanned down her body, glistening in the heat like it had been scorched. Everything looked the same, more or less, or not the same but easily fixable, in my mind: slightly larger breasts, hair back, a sharper chin than the face in nightmares. Of course she looked the same. It hadn’t been that long. Yet somehow I was disappointed, too, as if I’d expected something else, which I guess was true. When someone’s dead you expect you’ll never see them again.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said. The juicer stopped. “How are you?”
Years of social systems—the final S in CRISIS—almost made me say “fine.” I swallowed but I couldn’t think of a word. “Um—”
“Would you like to sit down?” Mimi moved her legs and I found myself sinking to the deck chair like we were sharing a bed. I heard a sharp crackle and I thought maybe my bones were breaking, but it was just my fist, clenching around the list, damp with sweat, of people I had wronged. Now I was supposed to make direct amends. “You’re looking good, Joseph,” she said, almost conversationally. “You look, um, good. Healthy.”
“So do you,” I said, automatically, and then found a foothold.
“Considering.”
She blinked and slipped her sunglasses back on. She shifted her legs up towards her, her limbs moving fluid as tide. She extended a curled hand and I thought for a minute she was going to grasp my shoulder, but she was just taking juice. “Thanks,” she said to her husband, who was lowering himself into the neighboring chair and opening a spy novel. “Frank, I’m going to go off for a minute with him. We have to—”
Frank Zhivago looked up in mid-sip, his eyes pausing on me briefly. I looked familiar. Oh yes, I worked here at the Vast. “Work on costumes,” I said to him, holding up the list, and then frowning and uncrumbling it professionally. “Tonight’s the costume party, you know.”
“I know,” Frank said, and started reading.
“Back in a few minutes,” Mimi said. She stood up and wrapped the towel around her shoulders, not because it was cold but, I guess, because it was indecent. I was guessing at everything. We walked through a gap in the trees to a field which later would be “festooned,” as Mike had put it, with Japanese lanterns, the better to make last-minute costumes work. Beyond the field was the beach with sand so white it looked vacuumed. A ways down on the shore was what looked like a tiny tan globe, probably the gut of the fat man, Anderson, while his let’s-hope-daughter waded topless in the foam like a Venus somebody was trying to throw back. It was as good a setting as any.
“It’s so pretty here,” Mimi said. “Everything looks perfect. How long have you been working here?”
“Not long,” I said.
“It’s nice,” she said, looking around. Out past the exquisite ocean was a thin green line of ink, another island maybe, or the tip of continent we were closest to. “Peaceful. I suppose you’re surprised I’m here.”
“I’m—I’m surprised you’re anywhere. You’re dead, Mimi.”
“No,” she said simply.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I know. I see you. But I can’t believe—”
“Your own eyes?”
“—what you put me through,” I insisted. “What—what happened?”
She shrugged, paused, shrugged again. “I don’t have to tell you, Joseph.”
“But I have to know,” I said. “I’ve been up nights—every night—you won’
t believe the things I—you owe me an explanation! You owe me—”
“Nothing,” she said, her face finally clouding over. This at least was something, something else besides descriptions of the scenery. At least she was angry. “I don’t owe you anything, Joseph. Not a thing. After what I’ve been through?”
“After what you’ve—?”
“Not a thing. Why don’t you think about what you owe me?” She kicked at the grass and then looked at me firmly. “Think about somebody else for a change.”
“Just tell me why you left!”
“You know why,” she said. “You don’t have to hear it again.”
“I don’t know! I’ve been—all this time I’ve been trying to figure it out! No one can tell me but you, Mimi, and now, when I’ve found you, you won’t—”
“Because my husband was fucking my daughter, is that what you want to hear?”
“Yes!” I said, instantly. Exultation and shame slapped me at once, like a flipped coin landing right on its ridge. The world seemed greener, all of it: the grass was brighter and the trees looked better, but the sea had become sickly, the sky all jaundiced and the Anderson girl, turning around to face the shore, exposed alien breasts, miscolored and wrong in the light.
“Yes.”
“It’s what you always wanted to hear,” she said. “You wouldn’t leave it alone.”
“I didn’t—I never knew if it was true.”
“True?” she said, sharply. “What did true matter to you? What could it matter? You just wanted us to see it! You just wanted—”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Everything was—”
“You just wanted to wreck everything,” she said quietly. “You think I didn’t know? You think you needed to wake me up, late at night in my own house, to show me things I didn’t know? You think, after a couple of months up in the attic, you had news?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t—”
“Selfish,” she snarled at me. “So selfish. You think you were the only one in this family? I planned for years.” She began to pace the lawn like something, someone caged. “Saving money. Getting everything set. Getting all ready. And you had to—”
“I didn’t know. I thought I was going crazy.”
“You thought you were going crazy? What about—”
“I knew ,” I said, smiling despite everything, “that you were going crazy.”
“I was planning,” she said. “You can’t just disappear from someone like Ben. The way he—the way he works? He’ll find you. I was planning to take everyone with me, my daughter, my son—”
“Let’s talk about your son,” I said. “Your—”
“—and then I couldn’t. You spoiled everything. All that shouting in the hospital, sneaking around at night—”
“Your son you—fucked,” I said. “We can talk about him.”
She looked down. “I know,” she said. “It was working on all of us, don’t you understand? Stephen and I were being torn apart by him. He brought so many terrible things into our house. He was teaching them—Stephen was learning all those terrible things. He started in on Cynthia, too—my daughter , Joseph, my daughter—so, I—I—what could I do?”
“I can think of about a million things,” I said, “that you could have done, besides seducing your son and faking your own—”
“And you,” she said, sneering. “Don’t forget about that. You and I—”
“It’s different!” I said. “It’s—you’re wrong! You—you weren’t my family , for God’s sake.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “We weren’t yours. We aren’t yours. You could have left any time, just walked out—”
“So could you.”
“No,” she said. “No. You don’t know, Joseph. You didn’t know. You walk in for a few weeks and think you can open everyone’s eyes. But you don’t know.”
“There’s nothing,” I said, “nothing you could tell me that would make this all make sense. No matter what I didn’t know. There’s nothing you could tell me—”
“And there’s nothing I will,” she said. “I’m not here to give you answers, Joseph. What could you hear, what could I tell you, that would make sense of this? Of any family? I can’t tell you anything. I’m trying to get on with my life.”
“This is absurd,” I said. “This is unbelievable.”
“It’s all unbelievable,” she said. “You could have walked down Byron Circle, Joseph, to any house, and knocked on the door and found something ugly you could expose if you wanted to. And I wish you had. Any other girl, any other family.”
“And found this?” I cried. “Incest and a secret escape plan and—no. Not like this. Not like—”
“There’s no family,” she said, “like any other one.”
The Anderson girl skipped over to her father and kissed him full on the mouth. His hands went to her green breasts and I hoped that she was his wife after all. “O.K.,” I said. “O.K.”
“You should have let us be. Everything would have been better.”
“It—it bothered me—haunted—”
“You think I wasn’t haunted? You think, every day, wandering around with Frank, trying to relax, trying to recuperate, it doesn’t haunt me still? Did you ever, ever think of us, Joseph? Think about what we wanted, instead of what was bothering you? We’re real people, Joseph. A family even, despite everything. This wasn’t some opera put on for your own fascination, some drama to thrill you. Did that ever occur to you?”
“No,” I said. “It never occured to me. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t owe you an explanation,” she said. And it was true. I looked down at the perfect lawn, my own feet in Vast uniform sandals, the wet and crumbled list on the ground. Attempt to make direct amends to the people you have wronged, the ninth step began. It was too late to leave the house at Byron Circle, but I could leave this lawn.
“I’m sorry.” Mimi didn’t say anything. The Andersons stopped kissing and lay side-by-side, taking in the sun. “I’m sorry .”
“Your apology,” she said finally, “is not accepted.”
“Please.”
“No,” she said. Her voice was firm now, all mom-like and intractable. “There’s no forgiveness here, Joseph, for you or anybody else. I don’t think there can be. I’m trying to lead a better life now than the one I was forced into, but I can’t erase what’s happened. I guess if I can run into you when I’m on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, someday I’ll run into Ben, and Stephen. I’ll run into Cynthia. They’ll all try to apologize, all of them. But it won’t—”
“They won’t apologize,” I said. “They’re dead.”
Mimi closed her eyes for a second, and I could see her face collapse within, even as her tan skin stayed taut. Just for a moment, one relieving moment, I saw her crumble before the mask went back on. “He killed them, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Ben—?”
“That thing you made,” I said.
“What?”
“You know,” I said. “You don’t have to hear it again.”
“I don’t know.”
“The thing in the basement,” I said. “The golem, O.K.? The golem you made, Mimi, to attack—”
“That was for the opera,” she said flatly. I was confusing her. I saw that I had gotten it all wrong again; it was clear as day. The light everywhere was curdling from green to brown, darkening everything. “What are you talking—”
“You didn’t make a golem?” I said slowly.
“What? It was a prop, Joseph. But what—”
“You didn’t—you didn’t try to make one for real?”
“I don’t—I might—I don’t know, Joseph, I was very upset towards the end. I thought maybe religion—I thought that charlatan of a rabbi could help me, heaven knows why I thought that—”
“You never—”
“He was always looking down my blouse, but I was desperate, I thought maybe I could pull myself through
all this with, I don’t know—”
“But you never—”
“I don’t know, Joseph, yes, maybe, maybe I talked to him about making a golem, but I was hysterical. I don’t want to talk about this! I had to work on that thing like everything was normal when I was about to leave, and you, you were—”
“You never—”
“I don’t know! Yes! I think that night in the basement I screamed about the golem rising up and killing everybody who harmed me, doing whatever magic spell the rabbi taught me, but he was nothing! It was nothing! You can’t just wear white and walk around a clay body and have everything turn out O.K.! I said to rise up and get revenge but it didn’t work, nobody was listening!” By now she was crying, her bathing suit heaving like an exercise class. “God wasn’t listening to me, Joseph!”
“Somebody was,” I said. “Somebody carried out your instructions to the letter.”
“I don’t want to talk about this!” she screamed. “I don’t want to—I’m trying to move beyond—I don’t want to—”
“Fine,” I said. I tried to turn away from her but couldn’t move. The light was growing darker, darker, brown everywhere as dark as earth, as clear as mud. “Don’t talk about it—”
“What happened to my children? What happened to my babies?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“What happened? Tell me what happened!” Her hands grabbed my shoulders, both of her hands, both of my shoulders, and I came to life. I felt a cold strength surge inside me and I pushed her to the ground, hard. She uttered a rough sound as she fell, the sheer physical surprise of pain. When she reached the lawn I could scarcely see her, so muddy was my vision, but I saw the places on her body where my hands had pushed, two darkening bruises of handprints like my palms had been smeared with something, or created, years ago, out of clay. But then I stopped. Attempt to make direct amends to the people you have wronged, the ninth step said, except when to do so would injure them or others. I made myself step back from her, my knees stiff, my hands clenched.
Watch Your Mouth Page 19
