by Chris Knopf
“Not when it’s just you and me out here in the parking lot where nobody can hear us talk. Anyway, you guessed it already.”
“What does that tell you?” I asked him.
“Somebody made the mistake of putting a burlap bag over Sullivan’s head.”
“Caught him sleeping in my lawn chair.”
“Yeah. That’s the point. Your chair. They thought he was you. Sullivan must’ve put up a hell of a fight.”
“Probably didn’t even mean to stab him. Or clobber him on the head. The situation just got away from them. When they realized they had the wrong guy, they just left him there. Might’ve thought he was already dead or would be soon enough.”
“Like I said, him I’m not so concerned about.”
As I drove out of the parking lot I looked in my rearview mirror. He was still standing there, as if waiting to be sure I was completely gone. He was watching me steadily as he rummaged around his shirt pocket for cigarettes. Nicotine addict and inscrutable fidget that he was, sent down from the Planet Zircon to serve and protect the safety of all the souls within the confines of the Town of Southampton, Long Island.
TWENTY-THREE
Mom’s dating. Old fart, old money, old brain.
Me hurting. New guy, new money, new life.
Till he dumps me, same old shit. Think I’ll
take up drinking, Daddy-style.
I wrote her back:
Dad’s dating, too. Stick with vodka, less of a hangover.
WITHOUT AMANDA’S HELP it took longer to lay down the rest of the subroof, but she had a different job to do that day, lying on her chaise lounge with only bikini bottoms and a trade paperback as defense against the pounding July sun, providing an incentive for frequent water breaks and a considerable upgrade in the aesthetic character of the neighborhood.
The addition was now a defined building, a plywood box with a roof jutting perpendicular from the ridge line of the original house. I’d waited for this stage to stand back and take it all in, deferring disappointment until it was too late to do anything about it. But it looked okay. I don’t know what my father would have thought. He had no design sense as far as I knew, though I could hear him growling that I’d messed up the look of the place, even though all the angles were his angles, established by feel and eye over fifty years ago.
I wasn’t sure why I’d starting building it in the first place. I’d lived with what I had for almost five years. I didn’t want or need much more than the screened-in front porch with a kitchen stuck to it, and two miniature bedrooms, one that was my parents’ and the other a glorified closet where my sister and I slept on bunk beds, both paneled in Masonite and lit by an assortment of randomly sized windows retrieved from surplus bins, or possibly stolen off job sites up island in the dead of night and hauled out east, old man Semple’s assessment of my father’s honesty notwithstanding. But there it was, a product of physical effort unencumbered by self-reflection or analysis, which I was happy to defer to some indefinite time in the future.
By the time I’d showered and climbed into clean clothes, Amanda had switched over to my Adirondacks, still lined up along the breakwater, box seats for the evening’s performance in the sky. The grandiflora was coming into bloom, the leggy stems curved groundward under the weight of giant balls of tiny white petals, shaded with pink and blue hues cast off by the light show over on the horizon. The Little Peconic was rendered passive by the innervating south-southwesterlies that coasted in over the South Fork from the Atlantic Ocean, the weak trails of the African trade winds that once spent their energy sweeping in rapacious Caucasians and now merely cooled their Niveasoaked skin as they sprawled across the Caribbean and up the East Coast. The only sailboats within view were drifting upright, their sails ballooning and collapsing as the evening zephyrs taunted with the possibility of a freshening evening breeze. Others had wisely given up the quest and were ghosting under power with bare poles to the next anchorage or back to home moorings. A yellow-and-orange cigarette boat shot across the bay, a steady streak over still waters, its rumble of exhaust tones felt as much as heard through the weathered slats of the Adirondacks, leaving behind a slim white wake that looked from a distance like a foamy contrail.
Amanda had brought a little side table with her, on which she’d stocked all the necessary provisions. She wore a white cotton beach shift and her new favorite wraparound sunglasses. Having abandoned the book, she was calmly watching the bay when I approached.
“I could see you finished the roof. I thought that called for a celebration.”
“Just the ply, but who’s counting.”
“When do you think you’ll be all finished?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a full hold on expectations.”
“And that’s news?”
“I liked your tanning outfit, what there was of it.”
“So you still believe repression, avoidance and denial are effective operating strategies? Doesn’t leave much to expect.”
“Unavoidably.”
I thought there must have been a time when all I had were expectations, probably in the form of goals and ambitions. Maybe not fully formed, more like focused impulses that thrust me through successive days and nights of compulsive determination and professional tumult. But all that was getting harder to remember now. Probably because I’d spent the last five years determined to repress, avoid and deny it all ever happened, which had worked to the extent that specific images and streams of anxious recollection had dissipated, now replaced by a vague hollow pain, an awareness that much had passed raucously through my consciousness, leaving only impressions of destruction, free floating and indistinct, the phantoms of experience.
“You’re not asking,” said Amanda, “but I’d like you to know I’ve adopted your strategy, at least for the time being.”
“It’s the air at the tip of Oak Point. Gets to everybody eventually.”
Amanda had been raised by her single mother on a tight budget. Not quite poor, but lean, stuck along the fringes where my own family lived. She’d lived a comfortable life with Roy financially anyway, but now that she’d come into her inheritance she could afford to withhold any expectations she wanted to.
“You haven’t asked me what I’m going to do with Reginas house,” she said.
The muscles along the back of my neck and across my shoulders stiffened in that dreary involuntary way they often did when topics arose that I’d rather avoid.
“Your house, you mean.”
“I’m not going to knock it down, or even alter the exterior dimensions. In fact, for now, I’m keeping it just the way it is. If you ever come inside you’ll see. Her nephew took all her furniture. I brought in just enough. Nothing I care about, strictly utilitarian. So when I leave, if I leave, I don’t have to care about what’s left behind.”
“You’ll need a new furnace. Circulating fan and heat exchanger are on their last legs.”
“My, you are a champion avoider,” she said.
“Just leading by example. More wine?”
I did get to see the inside of her house that night, and she was true to her word. She’d stripped out all the furniture, dug up the rugs and whitewashed the walls. I was glad for it. I didn’t want to be reminded of Regina any more than I had to. The interior spaces felt like they’d doubled in size, and as she said, they were furnished in a spare and simple style that would be easy to forget. Though my mother would have thought it all decadently luxurious. An air of sanctuary mingled with one of impermanence, which likely expressed the climate of Amanda’s mind. Whatever effect that had on my own mind, I couldn’t tell, since my recently discussed life scheme was in full operation. I did like sitting on her own version of the screened-in porch, and wandering along circuitous and mostly meaningless conversational pathways. I liked her loose lavender translucent dress and bare feet, and noticing the beginnings of razor-thin crow’s-feet beside her eyes formed solely by an occasional laugh, or a particular breed of smile I could
generate with a particular style of wisecrack. Eddie, bribed into stupefaction by cheese and duck pâté, slept in a ball on a cushioned wicker chair. Out of deference to me, I’m sure, Oscar Peterson was playing somewhere in the house, and when I took the trouble to search for it I seemed to have misplaced that ugly hollow pain. Or its location inside my chest had been appropriated by something else, though in no way did I want to think about what that could be.
Trouble, I thought, as she took my hand and led me to another part of the house. I knew it the moment I first saw her car in Reginas driveway. More trouble than I’d ever be equipped to endure.
—
Jackie Swaitkowski showed up the next day for a road trip we’d been planning. The Grand Prix was all ready to go, having been thoroughly cleaned and maintained by a team of crack performance artists. Eddie was happy to live outside, using a little covert dog hatch to get in and out of the house, but I felt better having Amanda keep an eye on him, bringing him in her house if it got late. Not a hard sell given the leftover cheese and pâté.
By way of preparation I’d filled a large thermos full of freshly ground Viennese cinnamon from the coffee place on the corner and cleaned up a travel mug for Jackie, which she accepted gracefully. She had her rebellious hair throttled into a ponytail and wore a spiffy light oxford-cloth shirt and khaki shorts outfit that made her look like a recent graduate of an exclusive women’s boarding school. Or a recently expelled undergraduate lobbying for readmission, a far more likely scenario.
She’d done the best she could with her eye patch and contusions. For her, the trip would end with me dropping her off at NYU Medical Center where they were supposed to put her face all the way back to the one she had before joining me for lunch on the Windsong deck. I coaxed her into letting me drive her in by describing some stops we could make along the way, and promising not to give her a pep talk or act in any way that could be construed as sensitive or nurturing.
“Stick to your strengths,” she’d said to me. “Make the coffee, drive your lunatic car, offend people we meet along the way.”
Inspired by her wardrobe, I picked out a pair of khakis and a blue shirt of my own.
“Team uniforms.”
It was early in the morning. The sky was overcast, but bright enough to drench the scrub oak and maple of North Sea in rich shadowless light. We drove south out to Montauk Highway where it turned into Route 27, the four-lane highway that formed a bridge to the west over which City people and tradesmen crossed the pine barrens. But only stayed there long enough to pick up Route 24 north to Riverhead, where I thought I could easily find the Sisters of Mercy home where my mother had lived out the last few years of her life, and where Gabe Szwit and Appolonia had told me Mrs. Eldridge was living out hers.
Jackie and I had debated the wisdom of getting Butch’s or even Gabe’s okay to see her, then decided it would be easier to explain later than get permission. Jackie gamely asserted some legal theory on why we didn’t need to ask, which was good enough for me. I was more preoccupied anyway with the prospect of revisiting a place I thought I’d never have to see again. Voluntarily.
It wasn’t the Sisters’ fault. They ran as good a home as you could. It was the sight and sound of all that human wreckage, sick and exhausted souls waiting it out, or simply bewildered to find themselves wherever they thought they were. My mother never knew, or if she did, she was determined not to share that knowledge with me.
By the time we hit the incongruous four-lane road that passed the crotch of the Great Peconic Bay, the sun had burned off the morning haze and was now busy burning up the grasslands and vineyards of the North Fork. We followed it up to Sound Avenue, then went west until we came to a complex of three-story brick buildings with white trim, and discreet notices of the home’s ecclesiastical affiliations.
I crossed myself and found a place to park.
The reception desk sat in the middle of a small foyer. An overweight white guy in a white shirt and tie with a photo ID badge clipped to his breast pocket was on duty. On the desk were a large sign-in book, a phone, a walkie-talkie and a paper plate littered with the consequences of a partially eaten corn muffin.
Jackie had done most of the prep work, so I let her take the lead.
“Hi. We’re here to see Aunt Lillian,” she told the guard, her face filled with an ingratiating smile. “Lillian Eldridge. I called ahead, they said this was a good time.”
The guard nodded.
“Oh, yeah, they’re all done with the morning routine by now. Folks’re either in their rooms or out on the patio or in the open areas with the TVs. Eldridge, is it?”
“I’m her niece Lillian. They named me after her. This is my husband, Dashiell.”
I smiled, too, and tried to look like the victim of a winter-summer romance. The guard called somebody on his walkie-talkie to check out our story, ignoring the phone on his desk. I would, too, I guess. More fun to say things like, “copy that.”
He signed off and said, “Okay I just need some identification.”
Jackie looked at me.
“You probably left your wallet in the car again, but here’s mine,” she said to the guard, dropping an official-looking photo ID in front of him. He squinted to read the fine print.
“Institute of Blepharoplasty? You got your driver’s license?”
She looked embarrassed.
“Sorry It’s all I brought. Dash likes to do all the driving,” she said, mooning at me and slipping her arm through mine to demonstrate how safe she felt with me behind the wheel.
“I always tell you to bring your purse,” I grumbled. “But what do I know.”
“At this point, not a heck of a lot,” she said, sprightly.
“That’s okay,” said the guard, seeing a way to take the side of a pretty young wife against her grouchy old husband. “This is okay. What’s blepharoplasty?”
“Eyelid surgery,” she said, signing the book. “I’ve been practicing on myself all week.”
The guard gave us each passes to clip to our shirts and a map of the facilities with Lillian’s room x-ed in. We walked the distance without challenge, passing rooms with open doors with white-haired wraiths in and out of the beds, and common rooms, the TVs blasting out advice from talk show hosts, the volume set to the viewers’ average hearing capacity.
“Wasn’t that some kind of felony you just committed back there?” I asked her.
“I don’t think you can be charged with pretending to be a member of a society that doesn’t actually exist. Or giving a false ID to a private security guard. I looked it up last night, sort of.”
“Whatever you say, Lil.”
The guard’s map brought us to a nurses’ station behind a high counter that protruded into the corridor. Two women were sitting in swivel desk chairs and deep in conversation. We waited for an opening.
“We’re here to see Lillian Eldridge,” said Jackie, waving her visitors tag.
“Isn’t that nice,” said the bigger of the two as she stood up. Bigger by a hundred pounds, carried unsteadily on legs shaped like inverted cones. Her face was round as a full moon and slick, with a yellowy, almost jaundiced tint, though warmed considerably by her happy smile. She established her balance with some effort, then offered her hand.
“What a nice surprise,” she said. “She’ll be thrilled.”
“She will?” I asked, surprised myself.
“Well, it’s been like forever. Nobody from the family ever seems to come, I’m sorry. And you’re her niece?” she asked Jackie.
“We’re from California. First chance we’ve had,” said Jackie, looking a little guilty on behalf of her impersonation.
“So you haven’t seen Butch or Jonathan?” I asked.
She thought about it.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t recall the names.”
“So how is she?” asked Jackie.
“Remarkably well, if you ask me,” she said, forthrightly “Very stable. Been that way for quite some tim
e.”
“So how would you describe her mental state,” said Jackie. “I just want to know what to expect.”
The nurse, Maryanne by her name tag, pondered the question.
“Well, she’s not agitated, if that’s what you mean. Might seem to you perfectly normal. Medication is a miracle, especially for people as profoundly dissociative as Lillian,” she said.
“Dissociative? I’m so sorry, I don’t know what that means,” said Jackie.
“Too much time in California,” I said. “Dissociation central.”
“Doesn’t know if she’s here or not,” said Maryanne. “Can’t quite seem to get herself fixed in the world. We all drift off a little. Lillian is never able to get all the way back.”
Jackie and her assumed identity thought about that.
“Will she know who I am?” she asked Maryanne. “It’s been a few years. Will she remember?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. She has a difficult time remembering who she is herself, so it’s doubly hard to remember anyone else.”
Jackie jerked her thumb at me. “By the way, she never met Dash,” she said, and then, as if to celebrate Maryanne’s professional tact, pointed to her face, adding, “It was an accident. I’m here to have some work done at NYU. Thought, while I’m in the neighborhood …”
“You’re a doll,” said Maryanne. “Mrs. Eldridge is lucky to have you.”
“We all are,” I said, giving her waist a husbandly squeeze.
Jackie returned a glowing but not entirely sincere smile. She built on her rapport with Maryanne as we moved down the hall toward the patio where Lillian was reportedly taking in the late morning sun.
“I think they’ve done a wonderful job keeping Lillian stabilized,” I heard Maryanne tell Jackie. “I just wonder,” she added, turning down the volume of her voice so I could barely hear.
“What do you mean?”
She hesitated, maybe for dramatic effect.
“I mean, Mrs. Eldridge is seventy-eight years old. At this point, how can you tell mental pathology from simple aging? I wonder if something different should be done. But it’s not up to me. It’s really the family.”
