Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  Just last week, after Marvin had stumbled in at 1:00A.M. for the second night in a row, Anna said, “We need to talk.”

  He sighed. “Let me guess. We need to talk about Christine.”

  She shook her head. “That’s your business, Marvin. I certainly don’t hold it against you that you’re dating.”

  “You don’t?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Of course not. What’s happening between you and Poppy is your business. In fact, if I had to side with someone, it would be you.”

  “You would?”

  “Flynn, however, is my concern. That night just after you got here, when you and I had dinner at Davidé’s and you asked me about taking Flynn. Poppy’s idea of me having custody of her. Or guardianship. At the time it seemed ludicrous. Now it doesn’t. I want something official.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I didn’t see it then, but I see it now. I can give her more than you can. She’ll have the best of everything. The best education, the best schools. But it’s more than that. I can give her stability. You were right. That night we talked about it, you were right.”

  “You want me to give you my daughter?”

  “Wasn’t that why you came all this way? Isn’t that what you were really asking me to do?”

  He looked straight ahead, rubbed his fingertips together lightly. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Let’s discuss it. But I’m not ready to decide anything, and I’m not ready to make anything official.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “And it’s fine for Flynn to live here with me. You’re also welcome in my home, but I think we should decide on some basic ground rules. I won’t have my house turned into Peyton Place. I won’t ask where you’ve been, or whom you’ve been with, but I won’t tolerate sleepovers. Keep it out of my house. And, at the risk of sounding like I’m giving you a curfew, I’d really like it if you could be home to put Flynn to bed. She gets anxious when you’re not here when she goes to bed.”

  “I feel like I’m seventeen again.”

  “Marvin, you need to think of your daughter. She’s had a hard time. Her mother left her, and you’re in and out at all hours, it’s not easy for her. It’s not good for her. Especially for someone like her.”

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. You have a bead on Flynnie.”

  “On the other hand, you have your life to live. You’re young. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t try to find someone to share it with.”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak. She saw the indecision in his face, saw his thoughts surface and rearrange his expression, the contradictory impulses of freedom from all responsibility and the string that tied his heart to Flynn’s. “We’ll talk about it. I need to think. I’m probably in denial about my marriage. I need to give Poppy what she wants.”

  “Which is?”

  “A divorce.”

  Over the course of a few days, they came to a kind of agreement. For now, things would remain as they had been, with definitive plans in place by the New Year. It was too risky, was what she was seeing. Marvin could just disappear, take her granddaughter the way he took her daughter all those years ago. To lose Flynn like that, to spend her remaining years worried and wondering and waiting for the phone to ring, was something Anna would never get past. In just this short time she was already hopelessly in love with the girl, though that wasn’t totally unexpected. What she hadn’t anticipated was how essential Flynn would become to her. Elemental, maybe. The dark heart of the nucleus in the cell of Anna’s life.

  After putting the turkey in the oven, Anna sat quietly by the window with her coffee. She planned on a late afternoon dinner. Greta and Mike and their new adopted daughter, Lily, were coming, as were Jack and Stuart. Jack was not an insignificant presence in Anna’s thoughts, despite the brevity of their meeting.

  On Monday, she’d dialed Jack’s number on a whim, not sure he would even remember her. But when Jack answered with, “Anna!” it was as if he’d been waiting by the phone for her call. He and Stuart would, he said, love to come to Thanksgiving dinner.

  This might be the last gathering she had here. Shortly after the night she discovered Flynn’s backyard project she began toying with the idea of selling the townhouse, and moving permanently to the house in Maine. Anna suspected Flynn might do better in a small town, in the slow-paced northern community not unlike what she was used to in Alaska. The house was over five thousand square feet, which would mean privacy for all concerned. Assuming he would want to move in, Marvin could use the attic as a studio. It was probably overkill, Anna knew, but last week she had her attorney probate the papers for legal guardianship, effective as soon as Marvin signed, or at any point where parental care was compromised. Anna was making her peace with Marvin, and his presence in her home was comfortable, even, at times, enjoyably companionable. But he did have a Houdini history, and she needed to be careful. Anna wanted loose legal terms, a little wiggle room in how to define compromised care; a good attorney (hers) could have a field day if Marvin got a notion to run off with some woman, Flynn in tow. One could argue, for instance, that a father whose schedule was erratic enough that his daughter didn’t have regular mealtimes, or exposed his daughter to the horrific sculptures he left around the house, was providing inferior parental care.

  She began chopping the celery for the dressing, turned on the radio under the counter to drown out the sounds of the lovers down the hall. It had been going on for over an hour, for God’s sake. What if Flynn awoke and heard them? The child was already insecure enough, her fragile world held together by paper clips and prayers, not to mention the fact that Marvin promised he wouldn’t bring women into the house.

  Anna opened the pantry door. She dropped the mixing bowl she’d been holding. There, where last night nestled innocent cans of cranberries, were Marvin’s sculptures, all of them busts depicting the face of Ronald Reagan and various serial killers. She went out into the hallway and yelled to her son-in-law.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, coming into the kitchen a minute later.

  “What’s wrong? You’ve turned my pantry into Heart of Darkness, is what’s wrong, mister. Where are my damn cranberries?”

  Marvin, clothed ridiculously in a silk kimono robe that barely grazed the tops of his thighs, opened the cabinet above the sink. “Cranberries are here. I moved them.”

  Anna looked at him. He stepped over the shards of glass on the floor, peered into the depths of the closet. “This pantry has the lowest humidity levels in the house. Eight per cent. I just put them in here to dry overnight.”

  “Out. I want these gruesome things out of my house right now.”

  “What would you have me do with them? The college is closed for the holiday. The buildings are locked.”

  “Out,” she said again. “And I don’t mean hidden or put away, I mean out.”

  “Do you have any idea how much work went into this?”

  She turned to look at him, but couldn’t hold his gaze. “Do you have any idea that this is my house?”

  He did a curious thing then, one that Anna would puzzle over for months. He stepped behind her as she stood in front of the cutting board, leaned in close, and put his hands over her wrists. He stood there like that for what seemed like minutes. “I know you, Anna. I know what you’re about, don’t think I don’t.” She wheeled around, but he had already moved on, was already carefully lifting the busts off the shelf to carry them out. She knew she was right, any rational person would say as much. There was absolutely no good reason for those things to be in the house; Marvin had studio space at the community college where he was teaching. Even given his middle of the night “art attacks,” as he called them, it was only a ten-minute drive to the college. There was no justification for her house being turned into the Little Shop of Horrors.

  Though for now Jack was still beside him, Stuart was already sick with Jack’s upcoming departure next week. It
was at his insistence that Jack was moving out, to the tiny efficiency in Jamaica Plain that Stuart helped him find. His health had stabilized, though both his viral load and white count were extremely high, putting him at increased risk of opportunistic infection. Daily, Stuart had to force himself to stick to his decision and insist that Jack leave. They’d had an agreement and Jack broke part of it—the most important part—by seeing other men. Well, at least one man.

  Stuart hadn’t wanted to know, of course, not really. It was David, the director of the library where Stuart now worked part-time, who pushed Stuart toward the truth. “It sounds to me like the man hasn’t changed an iota. He’s living La Vida Loca again, if you ask me, which you haven’t.” Stuart had done a little detective work, which was a mistake. Hector was the most beautiful man Stuart had ever seen, more beautiful than what even Hollywood offered.

  The day Stuart came home early from work and found Jack gone, he knew. At six o’clock, a half hour before Stuart typically came home, Jack walked in, disheveled and untucked and with another man’s scent clearly on him. “Don’t try to lie to me,” Stuart said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s Hector again.”

  Jack sat, ran his fingers through his tussled hair. “It’s Hector still.”

  Because he didn’t try to rationalize or promise it wouldn’t happen again, didn’t beg for forgiveness or declare his commitment to change, it took Stuart two days to ask him to leave instead of the five minutes it should have.

  This Thanksgiving at Anna’s would be their last holiday together, the closure they needed before they went their separate ways. Stuart thought it strange that Anna had invited them, and even stranger that Jack’s enthusiastic acceptance seemed so genuine. It might be a blessing though, spending the holiday with a virtual stranger instead of their friends; the idea of going to Jane and Leila’s or to the feast at Curtis’s was unbearable.

  Stuart reached over to touch Jack’s shoulder to wake him, but Jack was already awake. Jack took Stuart’s hand and pulled him close. They watched the snow come down through the parted red drapes.

  “What time do we have to be at Anna’s?” Jack said.

  “Four, isn’t it? You talked to her.”

  Jack murmured, took Stuart’s hand and held it tighter. If this weren’t the last major thing they were doing together, he would most certainly cancel and stay in bed all day. The cruelest aspect of this disease so far was the fatigue. He could battle infections, put up with fevers and aches, but being so tired that the thought of getting showered, dressed, and doing nothing more strenuous than sitting in front of the television or in the coffee shop half a block away made him want to weep from exhaustion. Nothing would ever be the same again. Monday was his moving day, to the horrible apartment in Jamaica Plain with its mildewy carpet and embedded smell of cooking grease. He and Stuart had cleaned for six hours, then hired Merry Maids to do it all over again, but the bad odors remained. It was choice rather than financial exigency that made him lease the apartment. As he knew it would, the Kobayashi account pulled the plug, then Hank Sherman pulled him. Sherman, Beck and Associates had been more than generous with their severance package, and Jack certainly could have afforded a decent apartment, but he found the idea of decency was more depressing than living in a shithole. There was luxury and fine things, and there was poverty and ugliness. He was never very good at middle distance, moderation.

  Most of the time, Jack was relieved to no longer be working at the investment firm. Losing the Kobayashi account started the ball rolling downhill. The heart went out of him after the Japanese corporation left the firm. Nothing seemed high stakes enough; nothing held his attention in the way he needed to be challenged. Besides, his focus was so fuzzy that he couldn’t concentrate for more than forty minutes at a stretch, often much less than that. He started to make glaring errors that led to expensive mistakes. Hank—who knew but never spoke of Jack’s illness—let him work part-time from home, but even this seemed too much.

  Stuart had tried to show him how to make the severance money last, detailed a careful budget for him, but then just rolled his eyes. “Who am I kidding? You’ve juggled millions but you’ve never even balanced your checkbook.” He didn’t have a plan if his money ran out, which, given the state of the stock market, it might. He hoped he wouldn’t be alive when or if that day came, peeing in his diapers and drooling puréed apricots down his chin in some substandard nursing home. When he left Monday it would be with two small suitcases. He had given away or sold or bequeathed to Stuart everything else, including his collection of African war masks.

  “Do you want breakfast?” Stuart said softly.

  “No. Everything I want right now is right here with me.”

  Stuart squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “If only you could believe that.”

  Later, on their way to Anna’s, Jack said, “Maybe we should stop and get a bottle of wine.” He pointed to the liquor store across the street from Mrs. Kim’s. Hector, he already saw, wasn’t near the Korean grocery—she was of course closed for the holiday, and Hector was undoubtedly with his little wife having dinner with the extended family.

  Stuart pulled over. Jack cruised through the small store and quickly paid for a bottle of expensive white wine.

  Next to the liquor store was a working-class bar where Hector often hung out. He had to check, just had to see. He caught Stuart’s eye, held up a finger and pointed to the bar next door. Inside, he dug in his pockets for change at the cigarette machine while looking around the dimly lit interior. Hector wasn’t here, either. He pushed one of the buttons on the cigarette machine—some extra long menthol girly smokes, he saw now, and went back out to Stuart.

  “Just in the mood,” Jack said, and unwrapped the cellophane on the Virginia Slims.

  Stuart glanced over. “Your boy must be having a private celebration somewhere.”

  Jack lit the cigarette. “Yes,” he said, angry that Stuart knew what he was up to, and angrier still that it was so clear that Hector wasn’t available. “He must be.”

  Stuart snorted. “You amaze me.”

  Jack exhaled, waved the girly smoke around with a Marlene Dietrich flourish. “I amaze myself.”

  Close to noon, Anna went in to check on Flynn, who was still in bed, the cat curled on the pillow beside her. She called Flynn’s name softly, but Flynn didn’t stir.

  Everything was ready, the house clean except for the vacuuming, which Anna didn’t want to start until Flynn was up. Marvin and Christine were loading the clay heads into the VW van. Anna watched from the kitchen window as Marvin—wearing just a jacket over his light kimono—placed the gruesome busts in a semicircle in the back. “In the back of the moving love shack,” he said to Christine, as she struggled under the weight of Ronald Reagan and Ed Gein, the cannibal killer. Anna watched the snow swirl around them. Marvin’s legs were bare, just the hem of his flowered shorty robe visible from beneath his bomber jacket. She felt a wave of nostalgia, an unidentifiable pang—of missing her daughter, her husband, the youth she once had that would have made her stand half-naked in the snow, numbed by the bliss of new love. She opened the window wider; the kitchen was heating up fast. Christine giggled as Marvin pulled something from his pocket. Anna squinted. A pipe. He handed it to Christine. Anna thought she heard him say, “Put a bit in a bowl and hit it, then wait for the bell to ring,” he said.

  Anna sent a few saucepan lids clattering to the floor. Marvin looked up, just as Anna wanted him to.

  “Anna?” he said, coming into the kitchhen a minute later, breathless.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “I think it’s pot. Am I wrong?”

  “No. Are you mad?” he asked.

  “No. I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t smoke in front of Flynn. I might be a little concerned if she saw you smoking, or you were under the influence when she’s in your care.”

  He waved this away. “Certainly not.” />
  Anna began peeling potatoes. “Then I don’t have a problem with it. Will Christine be joining us for dinner?”

  “No,” he said. “She has other plans.”

  Anna opened the oven and basted the turkey, rearranged the dressing around the bird. When she turned, Marvin was still standing there. “Yes?” she said.

  He ran his hands through his hair. “You might be a little mad at me when I tell you this, but I swear to God I honestly forgot until this morning, until, uh, ten minutes ago when I realized Flynn was still in bed.”

  “What?” Anna said, alarmed.

  “Today’s Thanksgiving, which is when we have always celebrated Flynnie’s birthday.”

  “I thought her birthday was the second week in December?”

  “It was. Is. But we changed it. Too close to Christmas. Anyway, Flynn’s always depressed on her birthday, and this year, uh, without Poppy it’s probably going to be worse.”

  “I wish you would have told me. I have nothing for her. I don’t know what she wants.”

  “Well, I do. And it can be from both of us. And I actually, uh, Christine that is, has it at her house. I need to run over and pick it up.”

  “What is it?”

  “A dog. A puppy. Flynn’s been asking for a dog since she could talk. The cat was just a compromise. What do you think?”

  Anna sighed, poured a cup of coffee and sat. She looked over at him. As a matter of fact, she had dreamed of a dog last night or the night before. A dog running around the house in Maine. They had acreage there, plenty of room for a dog. Why not? If it would make her granddaughter happy and give her yet another reason to move out of Boston, why not? She looked over at Marvin. She wished he would put some clothes on. “What kind of dog is it?”