“Who, the author’s?”
“Her name’s Carolyn. We pretty much hit it off profoundly.”
“You mean, romantically?”
“Um, kind of.”
“Oh, that’s great! That’s wonderful! I never thought it possible!”
“Chill, Fran. We’ll see.”
“What does she do? What’s she look like?”
“I can’t sum her up tidily.”
“I want to meet her!”
“We’ll see. I want to play it cool.”
“Why don’t you bring her here for a barbecue?”
“That’s not playing it cool.”
“Or maybe we could all meet in the city.”
“Yeah, I have to get to know her better,” he said, wishing Fran’s husband, Tim, was in a full body cast so as to be unavailable into the foreseeable future. “I don’t want to rush anything. What’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, Tim bought a juicer.”
“You’re holding it like a baby.” The impulse to pick on her was like the need to pick a scab.
“We made some really good juice with carrots and apples, and now I’m cleaning it. Is that against the law?”
“Giving it a bath. Getting it ready for bed. About to tuck it in.”
“Some people were over; there’s some roasted chicken if you’re hungry,” she said.
“I’m starving. Who came?”
“Tim’s manager and his wife,” Fran said.
“I thought Tim was the manager.”
She said, “Tim’s the Bay Area manager, but Boutrous is the manager of the Western Division. He’s very easy to talk to and normal.”
“I didn’t really think otherwise,” Mac said, hunkering down with the leftovers. “Oh, Brussels sprouts, too. I love ‘em.”
At that moment he cast a glance into the “family room.” There, Tim, the huge, baby-shaped man with beet red elbows because he always slumped at tables holding his head, was now perched on a chair, about to crown one of his totem poles of merchandise boxes with the box from the new juicer. Six to ten high, the packagings from a popcorn popper, an electric wok, a fancy kettle, an air purifier, an ice cream maker, a humidifier, a halogen lamp, an oscillating fan, a food processor, and a special dust-mite-capturing vacuum, among others, were stacked against the wall.
“I know you think this is a stupid thing to do,” Tim said.
“Hey, it’s your house,” Mac conceded. At least Tim wasn’t indulging in his other hobby, staring into space and fondling his rump.
“Giants won tonight,” Tim said, but Mac was already retreating with his bowl down the hall.
“He met someone! Hope you don’t mind, I changed your sheets today,” Fran called after him.
“That’s kind of personal.”
“I couldn’t help it. I don’t think you’ve changed them in about six months.”
“That room smells like gangrene,” he heard Tim say.
He locked his door. God! It was so strange what happened to people once they married. Marriage seemed romantic in theory and damning in practice. Two creatures neutered by their union. And yet it was his own mess that struck him tonight as even worse. Books, in sloppy stacks up the walls, contributed to the must. Bottles of wine and bourbon on the table, next to a couple of resinous shot glasses, lent a biting smell. A large plastic cactus, once his only possession, sat in a phony terra-cotta pot, spines trapezed by cobwebs and dust. On one wall hung a few of the grisly sketches and prints wrought by good old Mom. (These likely had no odor.) They were of prison inmates and the wards of asylums, and the largest and most grabbing was of a disemboweled torso—in the mode of eighteenth-century anatomy texts. Yet his favorite poster was the one Cesar and he had created together, in violent streaks of black paint. It hung directly over his bed:
The Stench of my Soul
Wafts to my brain
My brain, my brain!
Yes! The rancorous, fetid bulb!
Chaotic promoter of the turmoil within!
They intended this masterpiece to rip out of Central California as the first verse of their postsurrealist gospel. They both grew cacti in order to say the cacti were mirrors of their souls. They were proud to think their souls were so prickly and stenchful.
And whenever Fran saw the poster, she looked as if she’d been poisoned, which was most of the fun of keeping it there.
He uncorked a half bottle of rancid red wine and took a long swig. Coughed. Placed his new book by his bed, ready for when he turned in. Held up a few rumpled shirts and pants that had been flattened on the floor like rugs and shook them out, as if it might soon matter what he wore. He snorted his upper lip to his nose, and it smelled like a Bacon Thin he’d eaten in third grade. Then he looked at his teeth in the mirror and rubbed them. He chewed up a candy bar, hiccuped in a spasm, started to leaf through Ware’s book, then sank to the floor. There was a tap on his door.
“What?”
Fran tapped again.
“Come in!”
She peered in through a crack. “Interrupting anything?”
“Like?”
“Okay, from now on I’ll just burst in no matter what you’re doing.” She threw herself down on the end of the bed. “Tim and I just had a fight. He is such a pack rat.”
“How about making him rent a storage space?”
“When we first met, I thought it was strange that he’d order two dinners for himself in a restaurant. He wouldn’t eat it all, but it made him feel secure.”
It was true, Tim did seem especially stubborn about his habits. “What’s his trip?”
“You’ve met his parents. They’re in a death lock of misery. So I think, deep down, he’s afraid it’s not going to work out between us, and he holds on to stuff for protection. And I wish you’d be nicer,” she added.
“I’m nice.”
“Not that nice.”
“I don’t know how to be nicer.”
“Remember that time Dad brought a turkey home a few months before Thanksgiving, and all the chickens in his chicken house were pecking it?” she said.
Mac did remember. The chickens had seemed bent on bringing down the larger bird and were pulling its feathers out in turns, and its poor, bare turkey butt was soon a raw field of stubble and blood. “We could even see the peck marks after we roasted it.”
Fran said, “Remember how we couldn’t figure out why?”
“I think they were scared of that red thing on its nose.”
“Well, maybe, but what I’m trying to say is that you’re like those chickens, and whenever any male figure comes into your yard, you peck at him. You did it with Dad and now you’re doing it with Tim.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Well, maybe because you didn’t have a father, so they seem like intruders to you.”
Mac said, “Maybe it’s because they seem like turkeys.”
Fran stared at him as if she wanted to attack. They used to have huge face-offs as kids, rolling and snarling and kicking until someone screamed “Spitfire!” which meant “Enough.”
“By the way, I’m still not pregnant,” she said, rising from his bed with an expansive yawn.
“Oh.” He felt guilty for how little he ever thought about her concerns. “I’ll try a fertility dance.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“You’re young, what’s the hurry?”
“Mom was twenty-two when she had me. I always felt proud of how young she was.”
Mac had once felt proud of his mother’s youth, liked to shock people with it back in Boston, loved to grab her thick braid in the morning and hold it like a rope, but her youth and immaturity had backfired on him. “Why do you want to have a kid with Tim when you’re not even getting along?”
“I love him. We’re married. What do you mean?”
“I don’t get it, and probably never will.”
“I’m excited about your girlfriend. Give me your dish.”
He handed it up to he
r; a rejected, wormy Brussels sprout rolled out and bounced on the carpet.
“ ‘Night, Ho-ho.” She leaned over and kissed him on the top of the head. Long-standing habit. Made him feel docile, like a pet.
After she’d left the room, he picked up his old coat and slipped it around the shoulders of a hanger, placed it on the vacant rod in the closet. It swung freely a moment, with nothing in its way. A single swinging coat in a closet made him want to cry. So he fell into the book, which, by contrast, smelled fresh and full of promise. What did Carolyn see in him? How long did they have, before she vanished in the night?
4
“If I told you the only happy family I’d ever seen—”
(said Mac’s mother, one gorgeous May morning in his youth, as they moved along the duck-waddled bank of the Charles River in Boston where it begins to widen to merge with the Atlantic, and only a month before he was sent away to California) “—was a trio of snowy owls, what would you think?” She had heard them as a teenager one Christmas Eve, communicating: about sightings of fresh mice under the stars. Next morning, her father was not in the house. The note on the table said MERRY
CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT.
—Told you he wasn’t happy around here, said Cecille with her usual know-it-all savoir faire.
—What do you know about it! cried her mother. I am his wife!
They sat and opened their presents darkly by the tree, and then Cecille, restless in the gloom, talked her twin into a romp in the snow. Maybe they could find the owls.
Helen was disheartened about the paterfamilias, wanting to improve the day with cooking and games.
—It’s too cold, sniffled she.
—Come on, Hel! cajoled Cecille. We need some air. Let’s take our skates down to the pond.
—What about Mama?
—I’ll have a good cry while you girls are outside, the poor woman replied.
The air was stinging as the twins crunched through the shimmering fields. The inside of Cecille’s nose was dry and prickly, the outside of her scarf soon white with crust. As they went tractoring through the bristly face of the cornfield, something caught her eye.
The Connecticut River adjoined the property. A naked willow guarded the white bank like a witch over a ghostly bed. And that’s where she spotted them, the huddled lumps high in a tangle of twitching boughs. The skates went down in the snow.
—Helen, look!
Cecille tossed up a snowball to make them fly. Nothing so beautiful ought to live here. And they swooped from the tree, wings wide, the young one wobbling behind.
But Helen was whimpering and shivering. —It’s too cold. I’m going in!
Cecille snapped off a willow switch and whipped it at her sister. She loved the sound it made, slicing invisible curtains of air.
—Move a muscle or two and you’ll warm up, she said.
—My side hurts, said Helen, on account of the broken rib that had not quite healed.
—You still mad at me? said Cecille.
Helen shrugged. —Maybe a little.
—You should be!
Cecille chased her twin around the trunk but tripped, fell on her knees. And there she noticed the curved leather tips of her father’s boots sticking up through the snow.
—Oh no. She dug through the powder with her mittens.
—Daddy? Helen cried.
Cecille had not called him Daddy for years. She preferred a cool, crisp John. At once the volatile face that had loomed through their days bore out their deepest fears. For never before had the sisters seen human eyes frozen flat like skating ponds. Pupils fixed on the sky. Red ice ran like ribbons through the ringlets of his hair, and a big, livery thing had formed outside his ear.
Cecille wrestled the cold pistol from his tight hand. They were both familiar with the weapon, for he’d waved it around before, threatening to do himself in.
—He’s crazy, Cecille cried, understand? Nobody’s fault but that!
—Don’t say that! cried Helen. Don’t say that ever again!
“Mac,”his mother said to him that memorable day, on which he heard the story for the first time, “you’re made of something bigger and more wonderful than two people linked by empty vows; you’re like lightning that only strikes once. Fathers are overrated. You’ll be safe out there, and you’ll wonder why I couldn’t live that way. But don’t, all right? Tell them we did some great things. Mac, will you tell them?”
“But how long?” he asked, already sobbing.
“Mothers are overrated, too,” she said. He’d never told anyone she’d said that.
“You’re not overrated, Mom. You’re my favorite person in the world!”
“Stop crying! You’re going to go to California and grow up!”
Grow up? He was only nine. He looked bleakly at the purposeful scullers, all elbows down the Charles, and began to gather all the golden, glimmering things about his youth and his mother he would say, in time. was a sunburned afternoon in Redwood City, the kind of day the world turns on, the day to slip on your favorite new shirt; the first day of summer, and Fran and Tim were employing all their latest purchases and throwing their annual barbecue. New gas grill, tumblers, trays, and tongs—from a catalog, they’d ordered the works. Mac’s cousin scurried around inside, her hair wrapped in pink worms. She always became agitated before guests came over. Tim was out cleaning off the lawn furniture while Mac chopped vegetables in the kitchen to keep her from blowing her top.
Then Mac pulled out the bags of meat for the grill. Twenty-five pounds of chicken backs.
“Fran? This is all you got?”
“Chicken, yes.”
“Chicken backs!” he screamed.
“No wonder they were so cheap,” she called. “Well, that’s too bad. Could you chop off those things?”
“What things?”
“Those diamond-shaped nubs, the pope’s nose. Hurry! People are coming, and there’s someone I want you to meet.”
Mac pried a frozen chicken back from the clump in the bag. Fine, he’d cut off the nubs and fry them in chili powder and serve them as delicacies, hope someone would ask for the recipe. Just then a woman wearing a gauzy white dress drifted past the stove.
“I’m Danielle,” she said. “I’m sorry, I was looking for the bathroom, and I stumbled into a room which Fran said is yours.”
“Yeah, temporarily. Probably not for long.”
“I hate doing laundry, too,” she said, sipping from her glass. “If you’re not out rolling in the mud, you can get a lot of wear out of things. If I get a spot on a blouse and the rest of it’s clean, I can dab it off. You shouldn’t overwash most fabrics anyway.”
“My philosophy,” Mac said.
“I always get this way at parties. I drink too much too fast. Then I blurt out mundane things about myself. Naturally, working at the library, I read a lot. Guess what I’m reading right now.”
“What?”
“Anaïs Nin’s diaries. Don’t get the wrong idea—it’s not like I’m poring over erotic literature in a pile of dirty clothes. God, I didn’t make myself sound very appealing.” She turned her head to the side and gestured with one of her hands as though talking to somebody else. “Remember that thing mothers used to do—they’d grab your hand and say, ‘Stop hitting yourself!’ and force you to hit yourself? I believe that’s a German tradition. But you’d laugh, because it was attention. I do nice things for myself, too. I make a bubble bath every night after work. I burn candles and space out. How do you relax?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Anxiety is the key to success.”
Her expression changed. “Are you . . . mocking me?”
“No, not at all.”
“I thought we were communicating. I really can’t take any form of rejection right now,” she said.
“No, I didn’t mean—” Mac said, but she had fled.
Whoops. He must have been glaring at her without realizing it. He flexed his smile muscles a few times. H
e remembered with a jolt how in the old days he always liked meeting new people, how friendly he used to be as a boy, how good a host he was, helping his mother entertain the endless parade of strangers who came through their apartments, and how, like his mother, he prided himself on being able to talk up a storm with anyone.
Once, in the subway under Arlington Street in Boston, an old man from Jamaica Plain revealed to him the secret of his success with people. They had been talking, leaning against the tile wall, for almost an hour. The man’s pockets were jammed with the miniature bottles of liquor they give people to placate them on airplanes. He handed Mac a vodka, told him how good a woman his wife was to him and what a terrible bear he was to her. That was why he was drunk in the subway: he couldn’t face her anymore. She’d packed him a meat loaf sandwich for lunch every day for thirty years. And he’d never bought her a present, no anniversary pins, no pretty dress for church, nothing. All he ever brought her was “a handful of dandy-lions,” he said. “In spring I bring her hard yellow suns, in summer it’s soft white moons.” Finally he turned to Mac and said, “You know why I tell you all this, boy? You got a nice face. You got a nice face that don’t say, ‘I is better than you.’ You listen to an old man feel sorry for hisself, and you don’t say, ‘Go away, old bum.’ You not a big judge like all the rest.”
So that was how he did it, how he elicited these spontaneous confessions. As the old man said these things, Mac nodded earnestly and listened, and inside he was judging whether or not the man was making it up about having such a nice wife, and worried that he might be, seeing as how he’d noticed the guy slumped in the subway for weeks. What nice wife would let him do that? He liked the old guy anyway. He invited him home.
“You want an old bum follow you home?”
“Sure,” said Mac.
“Well, I be damned. If old Ralph stands, old Ralph comes along glad, boy.”
Mac tried to help him up, but the man wasn’t able to get to his feet. He remembered how later he’d begged his mother to make some meat loaf sandwiches he could deliver in the subway.
“Ready?” Fran came in and asked.
Sure enough, he’d completed his chore. His hands were frozen and covered with chicken fat. “I predict these will go like hotcakes.”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 6
