Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  Edgar smiled and shook my hand. He said, “When are you going to get a freaking haircut? Is this all the luggage you got?”

  “That’s it, Edgar.”

  As we were driving out of the airport, a minivan in the breakdown lane was engulfed in flames. About twenty yards from the van, a man leaned against the Jersey barrier, staring straight ahead into the passing traffic, pretending, I suppose, that he had nothing to do with the disaster. He was just waiting on a friend. I said, “How does that happen? How does a car just combust like that?”

  “Happens all the time down here,” Edgar said.

  We heard sirens. I remembered how we used to pronounce it when we were young. “Sireens,” I said, and Edgar laughed. Edgar looked spiffy. He wore a starched white shirt, yellow tie, ebony cuff links, gray cotton slacks, and loafers. His hair was short and brown, but his sideburns were white. I’d forgotten his eyes were blue like that, like my mother’s, turquoise almost. There was a baobab tree right by the side of U.S. 1.I recognized its swollen trunk and its delicate limbs from a photo in Peoples and Places, my fourth-grade geography book. I pointed the tree out to Edgar. I told him if he ever needed water, he could just tap into the trunk. I said, “You know that’s an African tree. It doesn’t belong here.”

  “We got lots that don’t belong,” Edgar said. “We got catfish that walk. We got monkeys over here in Dania, living in the mangroves, hanging out in apartment-house parking lots. We got frogs the size of footballs. This is one strange place, bro.”

  Indeed. While I was there in South Florida for what turned out to be ten days, a bank clerk driving a Toyota Celica on 1-95 got so pissed when he was cut off in traffic that he shot and killed a seventy-four-year-old woman who was riding in the bed of the offending pickup truck, being driven by her grandson; a school-bus driver was shot in the back of the head by a fifth-grader; some guy killed his girlfriend’s daughter and they told the cops she’d been kidnapped; a teenage mother tossed her fourday-old baby out a fifth-floor window; a young couple said they were playing with their four-month-old when his neck snapped, when, in fact, they’d been holding him by the feet and battering his head against the fridge. And so on.

  I said, “How’s the family, Edgar?”

  He nodded, smiled, turned left by a car dealership. He took a phone out of his pocket, pushed buttons, and said, “Hi, Mom, we’re on our way.” He handed me the phone. My mother said, “Your father’s locked himself in the bathroom.”

  51.

  Conversation Hearts

  THERE’S A STONE CANNON ON THE ROOF OF THE MARAVISTA MOTEL, ITS BARrel poking through a crenel and aimed at the ocean. The motel is white with gold trim and features a four-story corner tower crowned with a pavilion. The tower, the building, the grounds, are all cluttered with plaster statues—the Virgin, saints, angels, conquistadores, Roman voluptuaries, gnomes, and lions. All this could be mine.

  It turns out that Blaise had forgotten how to undo the lock in the bathroom. We got him out. We ate supper. My father wore a bib now, a white one with a picture of a lobster on it. He closed his eyes when he brought a spoonful of food to his mouth. My mother looked at him, at me, shook her head. She excused herself. We had gingerbread with whipped cream for dessert. Edgar made a phone call from the table. He told whoever it was about a new Mayan restaurant in Pompano, Chicken Eats-Ah! My mother told me that the style these days was for short hair. My father said, Leave the boy alone. Then he coughed.

  After supper, my father put on a black nylon warm-up suit. Nike, the jacket said. The winged goddess of victory. We went walking, the two of us, along the Broadwalk. My father’s suit flapped in the wind. We stopped at a bench advertising L'hôpital du Sud de la Floride pour les Canadiens. We sat. Blaise weighed 116 pounds, he told me, and had shrunk, I’d say, to five feet five inches. He smelled like warm milk. His teeth seemed too large for his mouth now. It looked like he was trying to swallow piano keys. He said, “You just don’t expect this, Laf. Old age. It’s a complete surprise.”

  A file of pelicans coasted along the shore. The sea darkened and the lights of cruise ships came up. Blaise told me he had only peripheral vision left. Can’t see what’s right in front of me. What’s in front of me, of course, is death. Last thing I want to do is die. Joggers and roller skaters passed us, strollers and cyclists. I swear one of the skaters was someone from Worcester, an altar boy with me way back when. Drank wine from a cruet one morning. What was his name? Sister Louise Marie sprinkled him with holy water to drive out the devil. Bruno?

  I said, “How come we never talked?”

  “What are you talking about? We talk. We’re talking now, ain’t we?” He leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, cleared his throat. “You’re right. We never talked. Why?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “‘What’s silent in the father speaks in the son.’ Nietzsche said that.”

  “Why can’t I remember much of my childhood?”

  “You don’t want to. You don’t want to know the truth—that you were happy.”

  “What I do remember isn’t happy.”

  “That proves my point. You need someone to blame for how you are.”

  “What was I like as a boy?”

  “You were pretty regular, sort of. You played with your dick all the time. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to send you to school.” He laughed. “You still do that?”

  Bruno skated by again. Not Bruno. Brazeau. Blaise told me I wasn’t otherwise good with my hands. Didn’t build anything with my Lincoln Logs, Erector set, Legos. All I made were walls. Didn’t like trucks and balls much either.

  “So what did I do?”

  “You liked to talk. Actually, you liked to listen. Tell me this, Dad. Tell me that.’ Talk and dig holes in the yard. You buried things. Marbles, baseball cards, plastic farm animals, money”

  None of this rang a bell.

  “You liked green food, but not vegetables. Lime Jell-O, green M&M’s, like that. You were afraid of pencils.”

  We talked about Edgar. (“He’s foolish enough to be content, smart enough to stay that way.”) About Mom. (“She’s got her shows and her grandkids; she’ll be okay.”) I wanted to find the topic or the question that would bring us together. “Are you happy, Dad?”

  He looked at my shoulder and saw, I suppose, my face. He said, “I’m dying, for Christ sakes. I can remember right now the happiest moments in my life and none of them make up for the pain I’m feeling now.” He took a breath, wiped his eye. “Knowing I’m dying hurts so much.”

  I wanted to touch his shoulder. I wanted to say the right thing, that he was making me happy. Something. I would remember this moment with fondness, I wanted to say. But I thought that might hurt him.

  “You’re happy, and you think why aren’t I always this happy, and you realize why, and then you’re not happy anymore.” He told me the happiest he ever was was waking up in a hospital in Korea and realizing he was alive. He started to cry like crazy, he said. Like a baby

  “So what happens, do you think? When you die.”

  “After you die you’re what you were before you were born. Only then it was going to end.” Blaise reached in his jacket pocket. “Candy?”

  “Sure.”

  He held out a palmful of small parti-colored hearts. Valentine candy I chose an orange one. I read the message. My Pal. I gave it to Blaise. He thanked me. He picked one out for me. OU Kid.

  My turn. A white one. Tell Me.

  Blaise chose Coax Me.

  We ate the entire pocketful.

  The wind swept sand across the Broadwalk. Blaise said his patron, St. Blaise, had his flesh torn with iron combs.

  “You feel like a martyr?”

  “I feel like I’m blowing away.”

  I told him I’d hold him down and put my arm around his shoulder. He leaned into me. I remembered this moment: My father and I standing on an icy lake, fishing, watching our tilts, stomping our feet. I’m so cold I’m crying. I turn to him a
nd bury my face in his chest. He hugs me.

  On our walk back to the Maravista, Blaise said, “Here’s a tune you’ll remember. I used to sing it to you all the time.” He started to sing “It’s Howdy Doody Time,” only he didn’t know the words, so he made new ones, and then I joined in and we walked along the darkened Broadwalk singing:

  It’s Lafayette Proulx time,

  It’s Lafayette Proulx time,

  Can’t even save a dime,

  Can’t even make a rhyme.

  He’s such a silly schnook

  That you could fill a book

  With what he don’t know

  So, kids, let’s go!

  In the morning, Eudine shook my knee until I woke. “Your father’s passed,” she said.

  52.

  Waking the Dead

  MY BEST FRIEND AT ST. STEPHEN’S WAS JIMMY CARRIGAN. WHEN WE WERE NINE, Jimmy’s dad, Rags, died suddenly. Not sick or anything, at least not so you could tell. Jimmy told me about it later, one night when we were twelve and lying on our backs in left field at Lake Park, looking up at the starry sky, hoping we’d see a satellite, or, better, a flying saucer. Jimmy said that one minute Rags is settled into his BarcaLounger, watching a Sox game on the tube, yelling at Yaz to lay off the curveball; the next thing you know, the napkin on his lap is on fire from his cigarette, and his rayon shirt’s like, melting. Jimmy poured his dad’s ale on the flames. He shook his father’s shoulder, then he watched the next inning, spying on his dad out of the corner of his eye. When Rags still hadn’t moved or snored, not even when Jimmy dropped the ale bottle on his slippered foot, Jimmy went to the back porch and called his mother in from hanging out the clothes. I almost didn’t yell to her, he said. The wind was blowing through her hair, flapping her dress. She had a clothespin in her mouth. When she saw me, she smiled and lifted a pillowcase from the laundry basket. In the den, Jimmy and his mom stared at Rags and held each other. Jimmy told me he could smell his dad’s flannel shirts on his mother’s apron. He told his mother, When I die, I’m going to have a lot to tell him, how good I did in school and Scouts, how I took care of you and stuff, and how maybe I became a priest and what that was like. Or a cowboy. And he’ll want to know how the Sox did. We’ll have a lot to talk about. Jimmy told me it was funny, and he couldn’t explain it, but at that moment, standing just inches from his father’s cooling corpse, he felt strangely exhilarated. He understood maybe for the first time that life had meaning beyond all the crap the nuns handed you in religion class. He’d have to pay attention to the world now, knowing he’d be reporting it all to Rags in heaven.

  I lay there looking at the Big Dipper, thinking how my old man was alive and how I had nothing at all to say to him. Jimmy said he’d already forgotten what his father’s voice sounded like. I tried to hear my own father’s and couldn’t. Tone, I got, but not sound. Jimmy and his mother moved away not long after that night. Moved up to Methuen, where her people were from. Methuen might just as well have been Timbuktu. I never saw Jimmy again.

  And here I was some twenty-six years later, kneeling at my own father’s casket in the Burgie Urgel Funeral Home in godforsaken Miramar, Florida, and I was being nettled by morbidly obsessive thoughts. There was Blaise’s head, propped up a bit, turned to the right as if intent on hearing whatever secret I might whisper to him. I wondered who had done his hair like that, parted it on the right side—the wrong side—and slicked it all back. The hair in his ears was gone. Were his eyelids closed with Super Glue, his jaw sutured shut with heavy thread or wire, his throat and butt stuffed with wads of cotton soaked in cavity fluid? The bruise on his forehead had been bleached away. I heard the click of Edgar’s camcorder. I tried to summon grief, but what came to mind were the trocar buttons on Blaise’s chest. Yes, there was one thing. I realized that when your father dies, then you’re next.

  I found myself downstairs, sitting in the smokers’ lounge with Edgar’s wife, Delores. Just the two of us. No smokers. She was tapping her foot a mile a minute. She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and rocked on her chair. I smiled at her. She said the boys were going to miss him. She told me how the family took Blaise out to the Black-eyed Pea for his last birthday. How the wait staff all joined them in singing “Happy Birthday.” Blaise had the catfish dinner. When the meal was over, Blaise decided to soak his dentures in a cup of coffee. The boys thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I said something to Delores about dignity and confusion, and I probably didn’t make much sense. I didn’t even know my father wore false teeth. Delores started in about her and Edgar. Out of the blue.

  She said, “We had our honeymoon at the Mallory House in Key West.” She shook her head, raised her eyebrows, took a deep breath. “On Whitehead Street. It’s not there anymore. Anyway, we’re unpacked and freshened up and in our room. Smelled like patchouli. Your brother’s sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded on his lap. I’m on this wicker ottoman thingy. We just looked at each other for minutes. We didn’t smile or talk or twitch or anything. We looked at each other, and we knew at the very same instant that we were not in love, never had been, never would be, and we should not have married.”

  I said, “Honeymoon jitters,” and smiled.

  Delores ignored me. “I don’t know how we realized it all of a sudden like that or why we hadn’t faced it earlier.” Delores blew her nose. She looked at me, fixed my eyes. “I said it first. I said, ’Edgar, what have we done?’ and I felt great relief.” Delores closed her eyes. “No one can tell you what love is, what it feels like, can they?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t guess they can.” I sure can’t.

  “And so it’s easy to make a mistake like we did.” Delores looked at the ceiling. “But, you know, there we were, the pair of us, up there in our love nest in Key West with our new outfits on, with these gold bands on our fingers. And me with a new name even. And back here in Hollywood in our new two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom dollhouse was a living room full of shiny electrical appliances and dinnerware and linens and culinary gadgets and other wedding gifts. It was too late to do anything about our mistake. We weren’t movie stars. We hugged each other and then went out to eat at this very elegant Cuban place, La Paloma Verde or something.” Delores took another long, slow breath, smoothed out her dress. She looked at me, trying to gauge my response. We heard the creaking of the floor above us, muffled voices from the staircase.

  “We treat each other well. We do. Better than most, I think. From what I gather.” Someone came down the stairs and went into the restroom.

  I said, “Things seem to have turned out well.”

  Delores said, “So now we sort of live in different parts of the house. We’re scared. Scared of being the one who leaves.” Delores waited for whoever left the restroom to make his or her way back up the stairs to the viewing salon. “Is it right to go to your grave without ever even once in your life feeling honest-to-God love and intense passion? Is it?” Delores began to cry. “Even with the kids, I don’t know.”

  I held her, said how we’re all tense and edgy what with Dad’s death and all. While I reassured her, patted her shoulder, she told me how it’s the fear that drove them to their charismatic church. Keep yourself busy and keep yourself in line. That sort of thing. Delores excused herself. Said she needed to wash her face, compose herself.

  I said, “It’s okay to cry. It’s a wake.”

  She said, “I’ll see you back upstairs.”

  If Delores ever left Edgar, would I even remember her? Would I recall her voice? the color of her hair? her tapping foot? I thought, yes, I’d remember this exchange at least. I could say, yes, I remember Edgar’s ex. Delores, right? What’s she doing these days? But who on earth would I say that to?

  I went back upstairs and sat beside my mother. She looked at her watch. Guy Duplessis and a man I did not know whispered together in French. What might be worse than living without love? If you are in love and if that love vanishes—that could be worse. I remembered a c
onversation with Blaise. He was talking about his erratic eyesight. He told me he hoped the next trick his brain pulled would enable him to see into the future. I hoped that didn’t happen.

  53.

  A Many-layered, Infolded Mystery

  LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT IS IRRESISTIBLE AND INEXPLICABLE. I WANT TO SAY IT’S transmundane, but transmundane seems haughty, and love at first sight is not that. It arrives without warning and is earned without effort, leaving us startled and grateful. It is neither reasonable nor calculated. It is like ecstasy, like rapture, like standing outside yourself. It is apprehension not thought, gesture not word. Love at first sight elevates romance above the level of accident—the accident of geography or economics or occupation. It is, we may decide, destiny Love at first sight is sudden, ineffable, profoundly emotional, and absolutely transfiguring. It’s what we live for. It’s the obliterating focus on the beloved and the eloquent shortness of breath. It is a stroke of lightning, as the French say, a blast of passion. And it can only happen to strangers.

  And there I sat on my two-hour layover in that mutopolis of strangers, Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport, thinking about love at first sight and death and time; that and studying the women who passed by Gate A-33. Like this woman—the one walking her brown suitcase like it’s a dog—with her thin, straight blond hair, her ankle-length print dress, her denim jacket, her squash blossom necklace, the needlepoint carpetbag on her shoulder. What’s her story? I wondered. Art school graduate, maybe. Vegetarian. Dreams of living in Santa Fe. Or this woman who looks vaguely, I don’t know, Lithuanian—high cheekbones, prairie wolf’s eyes, coppery hair. She notices me notice her, and so she stares up at the video monitors as she walks. Arrivals. Departures. Or this gap-toothed woman sitting across from me, reading a paperback novel, her black hair swept behind her right ear and falling across her left eye. No makeup, no jewelry, except for a thread of gold around her right ankle. I adjusted my sunglasses, watched her read, imagined what it would be like to wake up in the morning beside her.