She called my name again.
“I’m not coming in there. I’m not going to come in there again.”
Pause. “Yes. Yes you are.” And I knew she was right, and I got up in my underwear and went and sat on my mother’s bed again. I had just started wearing boxer shorts.
She was smoking. She had one of those little tartan beanbag ashtrays by her bed, you see them in flea markets now, so every time she stubbed out a cigarette there was a small noise like a child walking on a gravel driveway, and she had a drink, too, but she put the drink down and she looked at me, pulling on her cigarette, her bathrobe off, her summer nightgown thin against her body.
“I’m going to say this once, and I want you to listen carefully. If you’re sleeping with him, if you’re having sex with him, I’ll put you in a mental hospital and I’ll put him in prison.”
“What?”
“I’ve said it. Are you?”
I didn’t say anything.
She screamed at me, “Are you?”
“No! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
But I did, I did know. He had kissed me once on the forehead in the gauze-draped room and I burned with shame and fear. She knew. She knew, the way she always knew when I was going to have a migraine, she knew what was in my mind. She could see us, lying in an embrace on his bed in his candlelit room. She had seen him kiss me on the forehead, bending down and putting his hands on my shoulders and kissing me gently on the forehead. She could see that, if he had wanted to sleep with me, I would have let him. She could see that I was in love.
“Stop it. Just please stop it and let me go to bed. I’m not sleeping with anybody.” And I left and she didn’t call me back anymore.
It was an early September night. I was just eighteen. I wanted to love my parents. I wanted them to be proud of me and I’m told they were, although they never told me. I wanted us not to look at one another like pit vipers through a pane of glass. I wanted to have sex with a blond-haired girl out by the river. I wanted the stinging, burning pain to stop. I wanted what I felt for the boy in the candlelit room to be embraceable, not to be some ephemeral wrong that my mother could see with pinpoint clarity.
I wanted to be someone else. I didn’t want to be me anymore.
I got up and drove with the tow truck to get the car. I never knew what was wrong with it. There was a going-away cocktail party for me that day, and I refused to go.
“Yes, you will,” my mother said, and there was no point. No point at all. My parents had stopped speaking to me, hadn’t spoken to me all day except for that.
At the party, my gentle aunt, my mother’s sister, came up and put her hand on my arm. She was wearing short white cotton gloves with her sleeveless Liberty lawn.
“I know it’s hard,” she said. “I know it’s hard.” I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know what she knew.
The next day my parents drove me silently to Baltimore. They chatted, the way they always did, but it was as if I weren’t there. We got to Baltimore after hours of agonizing silence where we spent the night with some friends of theirs in a great big Stanford White house in Roland Park. My parents never spoke to me, but they were charming and funny and not too drunk with our hosts. They made it appear as though we were talking just normally, and I played along.
I had said good-bye to my friend the night before. I told him nothing except that there was a big insane fight. I had impressed him with my parents’ relentless cruelty. I had told him I loved him, I would always love him, so foolish, I didn’t, but he had held me in his arms and kissed the top of my head and hugged me tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.
Afterward, he and my mother became best friends. They talked for hours. They did little art projects together. He helped her plant a new rock garden. He became one of those young men she took to herself and counseled and charmed with her wit and her grace.
But that was later. That was after. As he held me in his arms, as he kissed me on the top of my head with tears in his eyes, there was no after.
I missed him with every part of my body. It was never the same ever again, not just because of my mother but because it was all as ephemeral as gauze and things change, and eventually we fought and I haven’t spoken to him for years and years and years.
The next morning, my parents kissed our hosts good-bye—they were old, good friends—and drove me to campus. They helped me get my stuff into my dorm. I silently kissed my mother good-bye. I silently shook my father’s hand.
My mother said, “Do brilliantly, darling. Write soon.” And without another word they left me standing there, waiting for the rest of my life to start.
A Persistence of Song
In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are—joy, tenderness, success, beauty—but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don’t love us, can never love us. Sons die, needles in their gangrenous arms, no matter how fathers value them and try to save them from degradation and despair. We lose everything we have worked to acquire, money and houses and dreams and friends. The meat of life goes bad one day and leaves us sickened.
Still, we tend to go on. We tend to want to live, to breathe the air, to stay in hotels in London or Prague and go to the theater to see the bright, the tantalizing new thing and watch baseball on TV and fly to pleasurable places in first class on airplanes and eat dinner in restaurants and pay for everybody with our platinum cards. We generally tend to love, and to be loved. We tend to want.
We want new sports jackets in the fall and linen shirts in the spring. We want to enjoy sexual pleasure. We want flat stomachs and strong arms and whatever kind of hair we don’t have. We want to live while we live, not to be inert and silent as the rocks. We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.
We tend to continue. We tend to continue to gossip, to admire other men and women, to fall sumptuously, even if temporarily, in love, just for the sensation, just for the way we feel in our skin, the exhilaration, the exhaustion, the innate and delectable perfection of the first kiss, the plunge into the sublime abyss.
Even if very bad things happen.
We tend to want to love our families. We tend, in fact, to do so. We are caught in a filigree of relations, of ways of being with our families, and these ways seem both more real and more binding than other ways we are caught in the web of love. We tend to have some place we call home, and that place is defined by the place we grew up, by the way our mothers cooked dinner, by the ways we dressed as children, by the way we grew to maturity as members of a tribe that was completely and wholly unique in all the world.
Even if bad things happen.
Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world.
Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless.
Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen.
We tend to want to hear the water from the creek flowing by as we go to sleep at night. We tend to want to hear rain on a tin roof. We tend to want to watch the sky turn into blue steel on a chilly fall evening. We will want to go on picnics, rent summer houses by the sea, to kiss, to learn French or Chinese cooking, to see the mountains across the broad brown track at Santa Anita.
We will want to be more beautiful than we are, to have better bodies, to be loved in ways the people who love us cannot imagine. In ways they can never get right, no matter how hard they try.
We will not get everything we want, but most of us will
get some of it. And the things we get cannot be taken from us. They are permanent. They are on our permanent record.
I recently saw pictures of my mother as a young woman. She looked happy and beautiful, sitting down by the creek in a black skirt and a white sleeveless blouse and red flat shoes. She looked happy, and the water flowed clear by her red shoes and she had a drink by her feet. In the photograph, it is a billowing summer day. If the picture were to move for a moment, she would laugh.
She looks as though she is leading a charmed life, her hair short and dark and carefully arranged, her posture gamine, her eagerness for the charm of company clear in her face. Not just for the camera, for the world. She used to say, “A collision at sea can wreck your whole day.” “It’s not a tragedy, it’s an irritation.” That’s the kind of thing the woman in the photograph used to say.
In another, she is sitting with a lovely friend, down by the creek on the same day, at peace and wrapped in the embrace of kindness and affection and the pleasure of friendship. Two pretty young women, just beginning the chore of raising children, of smocking dresses, of cooking dinners and changing sheets and of living a life in which things are taken care of, in which more is saved than is lost.
And I saw pictures of myself, holding my baby sister. I look happy. I, too, look eager for life. In the photograph I am six or seven years old. My sister is squirming out of my arms, and I am holding her, presenting her for the camera. I am a handsome child, in a striped T-shirt, my brother standing behind me, blond, buck-toothed, more serious for the camera than I am.
I look happy, even if bad things happened. In the photograph, I will look happy forever. I will never look tortured, or sad, or less than handsome. I will always wear a striped T-shirt. I will always hold my squirming sister. My brother will always have buck teeth, although they were, of course, laboriously straightened in his teens.
My mother had a necklace. It was costume jewelry, rhinestones set with fake rubies, an evening kind of thing. For dressing up. For going out. It was beautiful, in an old-fashioned kind of way, in an artificially glamorous kind of way. Like something the queen might wear, except hers would have real stones. Its intention was more endearing than its execution. It had a secret and permanent value. It was the first present my father ever gave my mother.
I still have it. We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they did not turn out to be who you thought they were. I never saw my mother wear it.
I keep it because it looks like the kind of thing the woman in the photograph would own, the woman who dressed to go out at night, the woman who sewed and kept dresses in rich shades of red and blue, who hated green, who wore dresses to show off her waist. I keep it because it looks like the kind of present a man would give to a woman he loved, a woman for whom he had higher hopes than it turned out he could deliver.
On the night my mother and father met, she walked into a party and my father turned to the man he was standing with and he said, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” He picked her out of a crowd. He knew she was the one. And he did everything he could to win her heart, that’s how sure he was, then.
We tend to start out not wanting to cause damage. To ourselves or to others. We only want to give love, and be given the gift of love in return, bestowed without reason and beyond our deserving. We never know why we are loved. We tend to start out wanting to be, in fact being, happy in our beloveds, happy in ourselves.
My mother showed me great affection, most of the time. She would come in to say my prayers, and she would touch my hair with her hand and I would be completely at peace at those moments.
There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. There is a persistence of song, as one poet said.
It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. It is the loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.
It is in the photographs of our mothers and our fathers. It is in a piece of costume jewelry, left in a drawer, in the sounds of other people making love in the next hotel room, or on the edge of a razor blade in the glowing darkness. Even in the razor in the darkness.
It is in the nostalgia for the moments we are passing through even as we pass through them, the sense of loss as each slice of time leaves us.
My father was not a monster. Even at that he was a failure. He was a man whose desires got short-circuited on a hot late drunken summer night, leaving him with . . . leaving him with I still don’t know what. A sense of violence thwarted. A sense of love unanswered. A sense of shame that liquor couldn’t kill. Something.
And they had born in them that night, both of them, a fear of me, of each other, of the world of illusion they had created and themselves believed in with all their hearts. It was all a terrible secret. It couldn’t be helped.
It was all a cruelty suddenly and unreasonably unmasked in the dark. It was an endless and living and palpable lie, despite the seersucker jacket and the white bucks and the photographs of the happy smiling son and the cocktail parties and the going out, the always going out, to talk about books and ideas and the small-town scandals that existed then.
I believe that he did not mean to do what he did. I believe that he did not mean to whisper in my ear. I believe, because I know, that he did not intend to drink so much. I believe that he did not mean to rob me of my childhood, of the sense of innocence and wonder that is childhood’s proof, what we are left with to remember and cherish when it is gone.
I see it in the faces of young men walking home from work at night, eager for the night and its chicaneries that their bodies enter into without fear or shame. They look as though some part of their innocence, some part of that beauty, had never left them. There is a flush on their cheeks. They look as though there is someone waiting for them. They look as though it excites them, this sense of being whole that carries them through a life in which things tend to get better as they go along, except the inevitable sorrow and frustration of aging, of leaving the beautiful youth behind.
It is what sustains us through the loss and the heartache and the relentless monotony, the getting up in the morning and just getting through the day. It is what keeps hope alive in our hearts.
Losing it was everything; it was the end of something that should have gone on for a long time, and once lost it was gone forever and I was never the same. Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children.
Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father’s waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever.
I do not believe he meant to change the course of that life, my life, so inexorably, to create a distorting lens through which everything that happened subsequently was viewed.
The sorrow was not in all that I became; it was in the becoming. It was not in the razor in the night; it was in the fact that my father’s phantom hand stretched my skin wide while my fingers sliced into the veins. It was not in the whispered kindnesses from dark strangers, or the willingness to suffer fools gladly; it was in the wandering through the night looking for the shadowed faces, for the knife at the throat, for the ultimate assignation that would signal the end, the end of the loneliness, the end of the pretense.
If you don’t receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it, like an amputee who never stops missing his leg, like the ex-smoker who wants a cigarette after lunch fifteen years later. It sounds trite. It’s true.
You will look for it in objects that you buy without want. You will look for it in faces you do not desire. You will look for it in expensive hotel rooms, in the careful a
ttentiveness of the men and women who change the sheets every day, who bring you pots of tea and thinly sliced lemon and treat you with false deference, a false deference in which you desperately want to believe. You will look for it in shopgirls and the kind of sad and splendid men who sell you clothing. You will look for it. And you will never find it. You will not find a trace.
I bought the house in which I grew up. It is very old, and it has a name. There is the creek that still runs by it, the gardens, the lawns and the giant box bushes; there is Roy’s old farmhouse through the trees, although I don’t know who lives there anymore.
I will not go into the bedroom where my mother and father slept. I have taken the old bed and broken it apart nail by nail with my own hands and thrown it away. I wanted to burn it in the yard, but there would have been questions. Too many questions.
I sit and write in the room where my father wrote and paid his bills. I have spent more than half my life trying to restore that house to a splendor it never had, to make it more than it was. People seem to admire it. I think it looks like an over-dressed whore, trying too hard to please. Trying too hard to say everything is fine.
I miss the simplicity of my grandmother’s white linen slip-covers, the summer slipcovers with the red piping, the simple freshness of it, like furniture on a summer porch in a country where it’s always sunny. I miss my grandmother. I miss my mother, dead twenty years. I miss my father, dead fourteen, too lazy to love, too drunk to know the difference, to know what he was doing in the dark.
I have not told this story to the people I know and try to love. I have not told it to my family. I am afraid to tell it now.
You must wonder why I tell it at all. You must wonder at the selfishness, at the hurt inflicted, at the terrible aches revisited for no real reason.
I tell it for this reason. I tell it to you now because I’d like to think that somewhere, sometime, one thirty-five-year-old father will look at his four-year-old son and not touch him and not whisper in his ear and not put his hand down his son’s throat and not invade his son’s body with his own and they will both turn away and sleep in innocence.
The End of the World as We Know It Page 18
