All My Relations

by Christopher McIlroy

  If in his home market Dominic tiptoed a financial tightrope, Denver was the equivalent of seven-league boots. Hospitals within spitting distance of each other accepted bids for nearly identical multi-million-dollar imaging systems. Soon, Dominic thought, every school nurse would be demanding her own MRI. Logging four million in sales his first two months, he was flown overseas for seminars and conferences. In climatized capsules he soared from hemisphere to hemisphere, cloud-continents outside his window, the curve of the planet below. Drowsing, he jerked awake with a daydream: his family had separated. Marco would go with Ella; practically, that would be the result, whatever the custody settlement, because of Dominic’s traveling. Harry would stick with those two, moving in as he became infirm. Ella sponge-bathing Harry’s scrawny, sinewy body.

  Dominic would remain plastered to the sky like a cathedral angel.

  Sheetrock was hung, taping began. Frustrating to learn, the technique of “mudding” panel joints with compound, embedding paper tape, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, mudding the finish coat, was phenomenally boring when mastered. At first Ella’s joint knife skidded fitfully, leaving a trail of blobs and gouges. Simply aligning the tape exhausted her patience.

  Under Harry’s tutelage, Ella learned the sensuousness of tools. With the pressure of a finger, the blade yielded to the slopes of a valley joint. The sander floated rather than rubbed, feathering the edges of a seal. Weight alone told her if she’d scooped sufficient mud onto the knife.

  But the repetition, its tyrannical productivity, left her deadened and sour.

  “I don’t know why he bothers coming home at all,” Ella told Harry over a pitcher of draft. “Himself.” She laughed.

  Dominic couldn’t fathom Marco. One moment the boy was shinnying up Dominic’s leg, both arms—at last—hugging tight, a familiar game. The next he was jabbing Dominic’s nose and armpit with a T square while his father hunched over the floor plan. The night before, Marco had said, “Get your smelly feet off my bed” while Dominic tried to read him a story.

  With a linebacker’s build in hand-tailored fabric, and genial professional confidence, Dominic had his admirers on the road. He was accustomed to offers of dinner, and franker invitations. Since he and Ella were making love so rarely, he repressed desire altogether. Instead he gift-shopped. Saleswomen were infatuated with his gelded brilliance. The oak-framed wall mirror—so tasteful, sturdy but graceful, a hint of recklessness in ornament yet without ostentation. No less than style he appreciated comfort in choosing his wife’s shoes—fortunate wife! The electronic baseball game, ideal for father-son weekends.

  The presents irritated Ella. Dominic’s bargain discoveries for the house, such as the antique wagon wheel, went directly into storage. “Honey, you want to stoke me, buy me a drywall crew,” she said.

  Soon, Dominic promised.

  Ella was bored with her self-reliance. Requiring no will to maintain, it lifted her from bed in the morning, performed multiple duties, and retired with her at night. Unnervingly, this competence doled out even spontaneity and love. Her play with Marco was exactly inventive and silly enough, her rejoinders to him the proper balance of tenderness and instruction. When Dominic hired contractors to finish the house and Ella returned to the school, she pleased her students effortlessly. The flagstones she indifferently laid for the patio walk arranged themselves into a harmony that defied improvement.

  As a warehouse assistant loaded bags of ready-mix concrete into her station wagon, Ella became aware of the man’s hands passing inches from the tips of her breasts. The thought of his knuckles gently bending back her nipples occurred to her. Evidently her musings were forceful enough so that he paused, remarking, “This walkway, it would be some job to handle by yourself.”

  “I manage,” Ella said.

  Harry’s voice, when Ella called him for a drink, was a coded mumbling she scarcely could understand. But he met her at the sports bar. Though she’d repeatedly invited him to inspect progress, it was the first she’d seen of him in a month, since the subcontractors took over, and his face was thin and pouchy. Only when Ella relayed compliments from the drywall crew did he perk up, stroking his watered-back hair. Then he subsided again into his beer.

  Though Ella fed him lines about his New Jersey exploits, he didn’t bite, instead complaining that Dominic’s brothers and sister had stopped sending anniversary cards since Bernice’s death. “Of course, from Himself, some gilded tablets from the Hilton gift shop. Moses on the mountain.”

  Ella asked the proper consistency for ready-mix, mortaring the flagstones.

  “Hell, I’ll come do it myself,” Harry said. Though Ella had seen him drink far more, the two pitchers left him blithering, sunk in his chair. He said he was too drunk to drive home. Contemplating the ten-mile round trip to his apartment, Ella agreed that he could stay at the Airstream. Marco was sleeping at a friend’s.

  The night air rushing in the car window invigorated him. “Hey bunnies,” he called, as two jackrabbits strobed across the high beams. “Got yourself a real house in the country now,” he told Ella.

  Stretched full-length, Harry actually made the bed appear large. “Just your boots off is enough,” Ella said, unlacing them. She loosened his belt. Rather than the clingy, semitransparent nightgown, she considered her one set of emergency pajamas, but they would be sweltering.

  When she came out of the bathroom, changed, Harry’s clothes had molted neatly onto the floor, leg openings of his Jockey shorts like two eye holes. Ella could imagine perfectly, between her sheets, the browned leathery body, penis lolling in its nest—was the hair still black?

  “See you bright and early,” she said.

  “I’m not turning you out of your bed,” Harry protested. “Put a two-by-six between us. I’m passing out, that’s it.”

  “Good night.” She touched the top of his head. Seeing in his frank stare that she was fully revealed, Ella could not leave. She must suggest a cold glass of water, useful in preventing hangover. She must lean across the bed, adjusting the curtain.

  Finally she lay down on the kitchen bench. The filmy nylon breathed across her body with the hum of the fan.

  In the morning Harry treated Ella with the shy consideration of a new lover. She was mute with embarrassment, clumsy, upending a wheelbarrow of ready-mix over the flagstones, dropping a trowel on her foot. She couldn’t wait to drive Harry away.

  In the midst of conversation, Dominic would catch Harry shooting glances past him, for Ella. She didn’t respond, Dominic noticed, but why would Harry expect she would? “I know you can’t be having an affair with Harry,” he said. “But why does it seem like you are?”

  “That’s the most revolting thing you could have said to me if you sat around thinking about it for a hundred years,” Ella cried.

  It was a bad day. Dominic had claimed he and Ella could tile the sunken tub over a weekend. But the several hundred thumb-sized cerulean chips, rather than conforming to the tight lattice flaunted by the brochure, undulated across the walls like shoals of fish.

  Ella hadn’t called Harry for two weeks when he happened by. She felt compelled to offer him dinner. They toured the house, treading earth-red tile in the den, pearlescent vinyl in the kitchen. The fixtures gleamed under the skylight.

  “We’ll be able to throw the switch next week. Dom’s taking his vacation,” Ella said. It was November, a year and a half after groundbreaking. “We’ll paint together, trim, at least. Aren’t those cabinets stunning? Dom has good taste.”

  Ella sat on the floor, Harry lounging against the sink. He looked awful, flaccid; he complained of headaches.

  “I can’t get over the feeling,” Ella said, “that the minute we set the last pebble on the driveway, someone’s going to haul the whole thing away, and there will be the vacant lot, and we’ll start all over.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Harry said, pointing. “The ceiling’s bowed out.”

  Ella stared but shook her head.

  Harry tilte
d her chin. The defect was visible as a fine gradation of shadow.

  Ella cursed. “By the time I get the crew out here, Dom will be home.”

  “Screw the crew. I cover my own tracks,” Harry said.

  “No, no, no,” Ella sighed, shoving his arms gently. “You’ve earned your bust over the mantelpiece already.”

  Harry’s face folded up like an old glove. “Dom’s going to know it’s us. We hung this room.”

  “Dom scarcely remembers what state he lives in.”

  “He’ll make it his business to find out,” Harry said shrilly.

  “Dom isn’t that way.”

  “Pardon my French, but he’ll bust my balls ‘til kingdom come.”

  Ella couldn’t explain, though she always remembered, the hardness that set into her then. Harry’s very frailty goaded her. O.K., order the materials, she said; they’d begin the following afternoon.

  When Ella arrived home from school, a T-brace of two-by-fours rose from the kitchen floor to a raw gray panel of new gypsum board. Bent backward across the stepladder, clawed hammer pawing the Sheetrock, Harry seemed to be crawling across the ceiling. Sweat splashed beside Ella.

  “Harry, goddamnit you come down right now.”

  “Sure.” His voice creaked breathlessly. Dismounting, he moved the ladder beneath the other end of the panel, the last of four. He extended the hammer to Ella. “You do the honors. Whew.” He wiped his forehead. “Hate to live anywhere else, some place where it doesn’t even crack 85 degrees in November.” Harry jack-knifed suddenly, crumpling against the wall. As Ella screamed, diving for him, he straightened, tried to push her away. “Hoo, dizzy,” he said.

  He was still protesting, jeering at her, as she drove him to the hospital.

  Based in Phoenix that week, Dominic had made an unscheduled two-day side trip to a remote reservation clinic site. When he returned to the hotel, a sheaf of frantic messages from Ella awaited him at the desk. Harry’s stroke had occurred not the afternoon he was admitted, but the following morning.

  Ella met him at the airport. “Crazy,” Dominic shouted, fast-walking her past the taxis, toward the parking lot. “Hanging drywall by himself?”

  Ella was silent.

  “So much woman you can make him twenty again,” Dominic said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “He used to box, too, you know. Let’s hang a speedbag over the hospital bed. He can work on his jab.”

  “Dominic, let it go.” She was crying.

  Harry looked like a goblin, fleshy nose and ears prominent in his sunken face, his weathered tan paled to a dull orange.

  “Papa,” Dominic said, for the first time in over thirty years.

  Harry’s hand lifted in a wave.

  Dominic adjusted Harry’s pillows and bossed the nurses. Harry stared straight ahead, dozing intermittently. Dominic sat in the undersized chair, crushing his forehead into the mattress, waiting for tears. The inertness of his father’s hand in his made him look up in dread. But the old man was gazing steadily at Ella.

  Physically Harry recovered, but he cringed from Dominic in a defeated way until the February housewarming. Ella had installed the Chinese lion in a niche beside the front door. Harry told a number of the guests he was “waiting to die.” But then he led the house tour, limping slightly, with an anecdote for every room. “Picture Ella squatting up there, just a thin plank holding her, and it’s jumping like crazy as she drives the nails …”

  Guests complimented Dominic effusively. His sunken tub was “a disaster,” Dominic pointed out, the misaligned tiles slewing this way and that as if riven by seismic faults.

  “You must be proud,” a local hospital director insisted.

  “I don’t feel anything for this house,” Dominic said.

  The visitor looked to Ella, who shrugged.

  When Dominic’s company relocated the Terrys permanently to Denver, buying the house at a handsome price, Dominic and Ella were beyond regret, or even relief. Marco had foreseen occupying the house as the resumption of family life. Leaving filled him with shocked apprehensiveness.

  The Terrys rented a spacious three-bedroom in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Harry settling into an apartment three blocks away. He watched TV curled on the couch all day, ignoring Dominic’s efforts to rouse him. Dominic couldn’t see Ella without wanting to knock her down. Once again Marco instinctively protected her, creating diversions. He was suspended for tripping and injuring a classmate. Viral meningitis hospitalized him for three days, while his parents helped him to the bathroom and summoned the nurse for his painkillers. The doctor labeled his illness “opportunistic,” with stress a possible susceptibility factor.

  Dominic could not grasp how their efforts of the past two years could have been reduced to nothing, worse than nothing. It was as if a piece of opaque tape had been stuck over that time. The failure discredited them all, made them somehow unrecognizable.

  He was destroying a nest of red ants in the yard. As the poison took effect, the colony’s purposeful swarming deteriorated. The ants staggered off to convulse slowly in isolation, antennae and limbs twitching. He could not separate the image from what he saw in his family. He thought about the ants while eating and driving to work. It was worse than a tic. In search of relief, vaguely considering hypnosis or some drug, he went to a therapist.

  “The lesson of the house may be that this is no longer the family configuration for you,” the therapist said. “It doesn’t work. Perhaps it did once, but people change, lives change. That’s what we’re not willing to acknowledge.” She was blonde, about Dominic’s age, wearing a severe teal pantsuit and chunky dangling earrings.

  Dominic broke down, hands clenched between his knees. He scarcely heard what she was saying: “It’s as if you lifted the shell off a turtle and found, say, a bluejay. What is this? It doesn’t fit.” The woman paused. Her gray eyes were kind. “It hurts,” she said. “It’s painful, casting off the shell. And freedom? It’s not easy. The bird has to find food. Make a nest. See, I’m warming to my metaphor. There are predators trying to eat you, cats, and eagles. You swallow the wrong kind of berry and you get constipated.” Dominic laughed a little. She smiled. “But at least you’re one with your life again. When you move, your life moves with you.”

  Dominic took her hands, sensing that she was weak and unscrupulous. That suited his bitterness. Two sessions later, she and Dominic went to her townhouse. Stripped to the waist, she kissed him with pained intensity. Her heavy breasts, with their big yearning areolae, sank into his palms.

  When Dominic confessed the affair, Ella was relieved, as if she were dropping to her knees to receive a long-awaited blow. But she kept falling, fast, and there was no bottom.

  Dominic moved in with the therapist. Despite no prior experience, Ella applied for a job as office manager for a construction firm. “I just built a house with my bare hands. You think I can’t shuffle papers?” she snorted. She was hired anyway.

  For the first weeks, Ella was positive Dominic would return. Each of their conversations was incomplete, lacking his plea for reconciliation. As she realized that wouldn’t happen, she cried for hours at a time, shaking, dizzy. Marco’s reaction to what his father had done hurt and bewildered her. Instead of concealing the affair from his friends, he openly boasted of it. Yet he took care of her, drawing landscapes for her office and managing household chores during her depressions, when she’d sleep twelve hours a day. For him their bond was unbreakable, now that their deceitfulness had driven his father away.

  At work Ella smiled at contractors and surveyors, bantered with associates. The competence she once had despised was her salvation. It was the narrow scaffolding plank that carried her safely from one Sheetrock joint to the next, over the plunge to concrete.

  The therapist did impressions, including Nixon’s Checkers speech in Bugs Bunny’s voice. As Dominic laughed helplessly, she spread herself over him. “Republican cloth coat, ya maroon,” she yukked in his ear, before sticking in her tongue.


  Rising from bed in the morning was a daily battle for him. Though discharging his professional duties, he was indifferent to their outcome. He felt defeated by the slightest inconvenience, such as kneeling to retie his shoe.

  “I know exactly what you’re going through,” she said. “My marriage broke up when I went back to school.”

  “I don’t want my marriage to break up,” Dominic said.

  That sank in for a few minutes.

  “You’re ready to go back to your family. It’s time,” she said. Her chest flushed and her chin trembled. “I’m not a very good therapist. All I do is articulate what you already feel.”

  Dominic surprised Ella at the construction office, closing time. They could go out, he said. “I can’t tell you how much I regret what I’ve done.”

  “Convincing,” Ella said. “Did she write the script?”

  “Somebody can make an effort,” Dominic said patiently.

  “Why?” She was still excited. They stood beside her car, close enough to touch. His size blocked the wind.

  “Don’t you want to try to work this out?”

  “You sound completely false,” Ella said despairingly. And the affair, which she had numbly accepted as a judgment on her, struck her for the first time as contemptible. “‘I’m done screwing this woman, so shucks, I dunno, I’ll go home to Ella,’” Ella said. “Is that all the imagination you have?”

  “I wouldn’t say starting a round of finger-pointing is your best move.” Despite the measured words he was suddenly heated, out of control. “This from someone who practically kills my father, slutting around.”

  “Now you’re loud and clear,” Ella shouted. She smacked his face. She was slapping him again and again, with both hands. “Now you’re talking with spirit, Dominic.”

  “If he’d died then, you would have been the one with him, not me.”

  Ella slammed the car door behind her and covered her face with her arms.