I turned and ran back home. When I entered my little cottage and saw the flashing red light on the answering machine, I already knew that the Old Man was dead.
I picked up the receiver and called Paul.
“Time to come home, brother,” he said.
As I drove down US 29 to Spencerville, I rolled down all the windows and left the radio off so that I could be alone with the humid, blustering winds and the rise and fall of the highway over the long stretches of misty green-and-blue hillsides and the lavenders and oranges of the sun setting in the stillness after the rain. At times I could feel thick tears streaking my face in the cool, damp air. But mostly I found myself calm and smiling, thinking about the Old Man the way I wanted to remember him, before Twin Oaks and the Culvers, before Leigh even—back when it was just him and me and my mother, and Paul.
My Old Man has been dead now for almost twenty years. But he’s still with me, every time I look in the mirror, in the lines growing around my eyes in such a way that there is no mistaking from whom they have been inherited. These lines—this resemblance—seems evidence of some small victory: something of his that Paul and I would always share.
I MADE A game run at the life of a working actor. There were touring companies with the big-name musicals, and Shakespeare in the Park, and bit parts on all three versions of Law & Order. A few commercials and small roles in independent films, a lot of bartending, a pilot for a Friends knockoff that might have been “the big break” if the network had picked it up. Along the way, perhaps sensing the need for a fallback plan, I followed the path of my first mentor, Rex LaPage, and earned an MFA at NYU. I fell in and out of love the way young men do until I met a girl I couldn’t live without—a publicist at a literary press with a wild head of Black Irish curls, a wicked sense of humor, and a genuine reverence for the collected works of Neil Young. I had to break the Old Man’s rule: a fifth-generation Mainer, Susan is as true a Yankee as any girl could ever be. Still, she lives every day with both a tireless love for lofty dreams and a sound sense of how hard the world can be to dreamers.
As the years passed, I wearied of closing the bar at 3 a.m. before eight o’clock casting calls that were far more frequently fruitless than not. Susan’s press was bought up by a German conglomerate, causing her office culture to shift from quirky and lively to corporate and paranoid. When we started talking about having children, we began considering the possibility of a different kind of life for ourselves—someplace greener and quieter and gentler. We weren’t ready to admit defeat, I think, so much as wishing to exit gracefully.
Susan and I spent Christmas that year with my mother and my stepfather, Charley Giffen—Old Giff, headmaster emeritus of Macon Prep. A year or two after the Old Man died, a mutual friend invited my mother and Old Giff to a dinner party and made sure they were seated next to each other. The old wounds had scarred over by then, and before long they were laughing about that awkward meeting in Old Giff’s office and agreeing that things had worked out for the best. A year’s courtship followed, and then a wedding in the chapel at Macon, where my mother served a brief term as the school’s First Lady. Now, retired to a quaint little beach house on the South Carolina coast, my mother is as happy as I have ever seen her. She and Giff while away the days antiquing, reading on their screened-in porch, and strolling hand in hand along the shore in front of their waterfront love nest.
I didn’t have the nerve to ask him myself. Instead, Susan approached my mother, who passed the word on to Old Giff, who brought it up with me when we were enjoying a scotch on the porch after Christmas dinner.
“Your mother tells me you’re considering teaching,” Giff said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“There are always openings,” he said. “You would have a number of options.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“There’s one in particular I happen to know about,” Giff said. “I called to confirm that the position is still available this afternoon.”
I didn’t have to ask where.
Now I am a teacher, and a director of school plays, and a costume designer, and a set builder and dresser, and a dorm counselor, and a JV cross-country coach, and all the other things that come along with this life, which is far from perfect but still rich and busy and full. Unbeknownst to my students, I hold the distinction of being the only student ever expelled from Macon Preparatory Academy to return as a faculty member. Susan went to work in the marketing office at Saint Bernard’s, the nursing home where the Old Man spent his final days, and where Leigh Bowman continues reading to the elderly and infirm—with guidance from Susan on appropriate titles. There is much life about us—namely our two girls.
In the classroom and on the stage, I often find myself imitating my dear friend Rex LaPage, stealing his mannerisms and his favorite sayings—“Once is luck; twice is skill,” “Draw on your deepest fear,” and so forth. Occasionally I have to stop myself from referring to one of my young thespians as “honey.” As for Rex LaPage, he managed to survive the dubious judgment of staging a play like Equus with a bunch of sheltered high schoolers in the land of the religious right and has since gone on to become an éminence grise in the world of Virginia high school theater. Susan and I are regular guests at the home of Rex and his partner, who host lavish dinner parties where Rex takes great pleasure in getting his guests soused on champagne and brandy alexanders.
On one of those well-lubricated evenings, I reminded Rex of the time he’d pulled me into his office on the opening night of Equus.
“Do you remember what you told me?” I said. “I’ve never forgotten it. You said, ‘All life is performance, you know. And the performance is life.’ ”
Rex’s lips curled into a wry, purse-lipped smile.
“Did I tell you that, honey?” he said. “Shame on me.”
THE MONTH AFTER Equus, Cinnamon graduated and left for California, to join her sister in the tattoo parlor on Venice Beach. I can’t say it didn’t hurt to see her go, but I think I understood even then how young love is a little like a high school play. A thing that seems insignificant to everyone else takes on the greatest importance. And then, quite suddenly, it’s over. You feel a certain emptiness, but you survive it and go on.
Though we exchanged many letters over the years, I did not see Cinnamon again until after college, on a trip home from the city to visit Paul at his new place out in Holcomb Falls. Her hair was long and black and streaked with red, her arms wrapped in the sleeves of ink she’d designed for herself. She was back for good, to open up her own tattoo and piercing business. For my graduation gift, she said, she wanted to give me something special.
“Anything you want,” she said. “Anywhere you want.”
“All right,” I said. How could I refuse?
No dragons or tribal armbands for me; certainly no dancing bears, dolphins, or mushrooms. Instead, on the inside of my right forearm, a line from our old friend Neil, in delicate cursive:
Only Love Can Break Your Heart.
LEIGH BOWMAN MOVED out of her father’s house to be Miss Anita Holt’s companion and live-in caregiver. Miss Anita actually outlived Prentiss Bowman; without warning, his cold, hard heart gave out on him while he was, of all things, playing tennis. Down four games in the second set of his weekly match, Bowman mishit a serve that went careening off the frame of his racket and over the fence. “God-DAMN IT!” he bellowed. His face red with fury, he marched off the court and disappeared down the hill to collect the errant ball. When after several minutes Bowman had not returned, his partner went after him and found him crumpled on the ground, already dead. Less sympathetic observers pointed out that, fit as he was for his age, Prentiss Bowman might have lived to ninety if he wasn’t such a sore loser.
Leigh made Paul wait for five years before she finally agreed to marry him. “Miss Anita needs me,” she said, but I suspect it took her that long to convince herself that she could endure another wedding, and to fully believe she deserved another chance at he
r own happiness.
In time, over Leigh’s objections, Miss Anita moved into Saint Bernard’s.
“Get on with your life, child!” she said.
Leigh and Paul were wed—again, you might say—at the center of a field in the shadow of Otter Peak. Leigh wore a sleeveless white satin dress and a garland of flowers and ribbons in her hair, which was once again long and lustrous in the afternoon sun.
They settled in Holcomb Falls, where Paul had bought an old farmhouse with a barn in which he’d started his own finish-carpentry business. Just down the road lived Cinnamon Kintz, who, after a long string of bass players and at least one aspiring actor, ended up with one of Paul’s carpenters—an ex-drummer. The shrinks seemed to have worked out Leigh’s brain chemistry by then. Her episodes had fallen off almost completely—unless you counted her visitations in Bible study and prayer group, a gift presumably inherited from Miss Anita, which everyone around her regards now as evidence of a beatific, beatified soul.
THIS SHOULD BE the part of the story where I describe the moment when, at long last, Paul confessed: When he cursed the foolish child he had been, and rued the day he’d left us all, and shed mighty, streaming tears over the sins of his wayward youth. When he opened up and explained what had happened in New Mexico and afterward. What it had felt like to find out what had happened to Leigh when she came home and ended up on that table out at the rehabilitation center. How hard it had been to screw up his courage and return to us, and how he had done it as much for himself as for me or my mother or Leigh or even the Old Man, whom he loved—whom he had always loved, even when Paul’s heart was warped with anger and confusion. But Paul never said any of those things.
The day after we buried the Old Man, I drove out to see Paul. We spent the day alone together in the barn where he built custom cabinets and furniture. Paul taught me how to use a sander and a lathe; how he separated the quality lumber stock from the culls; how he hammered and clamped and bound the raw pieces into something beautiful and, hopefully, permanent. We hardly spoke—just a word or a nod when necessary. The room filled with the sounds of cassettes played on Paul’s portable tape deck, the notes reverberating off the aging boards of the roof and walls.
Even in moments of deep concentration, Paul wore that calm, happy Buddha’s smile beneath the cover of his lengthening beard. I found myself smiling as well, caught up in the pleasure of learning something new: of working, of feeling the ache of labor creep into my shoulders and the palms of my hands, the sweat dampening my shirt, my breath quickening, the sound of my own heartbeat louder in my ears. As we worked together, I came to an understanding about Paul: how he found himself in the moment of formation, how he learned that his truest sense of self came through the abandonment of consciousness in the act of creation and the act of repetition.
As we worked together that day, I knew I had never felt so close to Paul, nor he to me. When people build something together—be it abstract or physical, spiritual or material—the circle closes around them. They find that elusive peace that, as that other Paul once wrote, passes all understanding.
When we were finished, we walked up to the house. Paul took two beers from the refrigerator and led me out to the porch. He lit up a Camel Light with the old Zippo. We sat down on the front stoop together and sipped our beers, watching the sun set over Otter Peak until the air around us turned cool and blue and the crickets sang in the high grass that filled the long green space before us.
JUST THIS SPRING, Paul finally left us, for good. Leigh had managed to wean him off the cigarettes, but three decades of three packs a day had taken their toll. When they found it, the cancer had already spread from his lungs to his liver and pancreas. There was nothing to be done, the doctors told him, but wait and manage his pain. Leigh was already an experienced home nurse, and anyway, she had always wanted to be the one to take care of him.
Paul and I were just settling into the easy, later stage of siblinghood, where we could truly know each other as friends. Funny enough, even then, we only ever seemed to do the same thing we had always done together. Once a week I drove out to Holcomb Falls with a stack of records on the seat behind me—sometimes alone, sometimes with Susan and our girls. Together we would drop a needle on some old Stones or Beatles or Neil Young and sit by the fireplace or, on warm afternoons, out on the porch, laughing and talking, occasionally singing along, sometimes just listening.
For me, a vinyl record will always be a sacred object; the practice of sliding the disc from its musty sleeve and settling it onto the turntable and hearing the warm crack of the needle finding its groove, a sacrament—my Holy Communion.
On the last of our Sunday afternoons together, I sat alone with Paul on the porch at his place. The windows were open. Paul was stretched out on a recliner and covered with blankets, positioned so that he could see my girls in the yard tossing a slobbery tennis ball to his and Leigh’s dogs. Beside them stood Susan and Leigh, laughing and talking. Inside, the stereo was playing Joni Mitchell, which always reminded us both of Leigh when we first fell in love with her. Watching Leigh stoop to help my laughing children pry the ball from the mouths of the prancing dogs made my heart swell.
“I wish I had been able to give her children,” Paul said.
I looked over at Paul. His face was wet with tears.
“She would have been a wonderful mother,” I said.
“I know it,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s my one regret.”
“Your one regret?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Just one?” I said. “My, Paul. I have so many.”
He rubbed his eyes slowly and smiled.
“You shouldn’t, you know,” he said.
Now that Paul is gone, I think I know what he meant. When I look into the eyes of my children, I know that no good can come from regrets. For if even a second of my life before them had been different, my perfect, beautiful girls might not exist—or else they would be some other people. And though I wouldn’t know otherwise, I can’t bear the thought of their being anything other than exactly who they are, no matter what the future holds for them—even if it means that they might face what Leigh has faced, or if, through some unforeseen weakness, I should fail them the way Paul once felt he had been failed. That’s the risk we take when we love. This was my gift from Paul—his legacy, you might say. Only love can break your heart. And who wants to live without love?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all my teachers, especially Patricia Worsham, Jim Ackley, Nick Radel, Lynne Shackelford, Jim Edwards, and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and to my colleagues and students at Montgomery Bell Academy, especially Sean Kinch, Michael Kelly, and Will Norton. Many thanks to Brad Gioia, for continuing support and the opportunity to be part of an extraordinary community. Thanks also to Margaret Renkl and all the good folks at Chapter16.org and Humanities Tennessee. Very special thanks to Haywood Moxley, colleague, mentor, and dear friend, and to Frank Simpson, the finest coach I’ve ever known.
Deepest gratitude to Gail Hochman and Andra Miller, whose gifts to me and to this book are beyond measure, and to Rachel Careau, copy editor nonpareil, and to everyone at Brandt & Hochman and Algonquin.
Thanks to Charlie White, Will and Julia Hoge, Glen Rose, Barbara “Catfish” Petersen, and Robert and Carissa Neff. To all my family, especially Susan (Mom!), Bess, and Eleanor; Tom, Laura, Kate, and Thomas; Tom P.; Brian, Carroll, and Phillip; Lee-Lee, Muchi, and Tico.
To Bob Shacochis, venerable master, in whose debt I will forever remain.
Lastly: thanks (and apologies) to Sir Peter Shaffer, one of the finest playwrights of his age, and to Neil Young, for a borrowed title and the sound track of a life.
GLEN ROSE
Ed Tarkington received a BA from Furman University, an MA from the University of Virginia, and a PhD from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State. A frequent contributor to Chapter16.org, his articles, essays, and stories have appeared in Nashvill
e Scene, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Post Road Magazine, the Pittsburgh Quarterly, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. A native of central Virginia, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
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New York, New York 10014
© 2016 by Ed Tarkington.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN 978-1-61620-541-6
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