MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  “Egregious misunderstanding, Filipo! Egregious!”

  Why did he always hit this red light? Mac hated this intersection. It had left-hand-turn lanes from every direction and took forever. And whenever he was detained there, he had the same thought. It was always his impulse to cut to the right lane, which in fact was an illegitimate lane, and then speed ahead, beating out the other car when the light turned green. And why? Because the illegitimate person always had to make up for something, try a little harder. The one in the regular lane, nothing to prove, took off at an absentminded pace. Just like in life! Because Mac felt marginal and ill at ease, he always had to go at everything with a running start. Try harder. He was probably trying too hard with his new girlfriend.

  “It’s better,” Carolyn was saying. “Really, I would have worried he’d hurt himself.”

  “He didn’t know how to handle me,” said Molly.

  “It wasn’t nice to make fun of his socks,” Mac said. “Anyone can have holes in their socks. Including your father.”

  “He thinks of his toenails as part of him,” said Carolyn, “so he’s afraid to cut them off.”

  “Oh, really? I hear that’s the same reason infants like to roll around in their shit.”

  In the rearview mirror, he could see Molly, staring at him with disgust. Bull’s-eye!

  He drove them back across town, viewing the city with less affection than usual. As soon as they parked in front of the Ware house, the baboon jumped out and ran inside. Once she was out of hearing range, Mac said, “I’m sorry, but that was grotesque.”

  “Why? It was good for her!”

  “She humiliates a nice guy, that’s good?”

  “Don’t take it so seriously. She’s as inexperienced as he is. I thought she was flattering him.”

  “Flattering?”

  “Are you coming in?” she asked. “Mac?”

  “I guess. Your loving father around?”

  “I think he’s at the press.”

  “I don’t know. You might try to flatter me.”

  “I can do that.” She reached for him and kissed him, and though he felt cold toward her in his mind, his body reacted predictably. He had never wanted anyone more in his life than he did this woman.

  He followed her inside, chased her up the stairs, they were kissing on the bed, things were getting a little better, when that winged gnat of a sister came knocking on the door, and he wondered if Carolyn would push him into the closet this time, but she didn’t. She yelled through the wall for Molly to wait, but then the knocking started up again and Carolyn rolled her eyes and growled and he knew that she would go to the surly girl and that there was nothing he could do to stop her. It was in that cloud of dissatisfaction that he goaded himself into taking a peek into the hiding place in the closet, because he had a horrible hunch about something that might be inside it. His dark side was leading the way. So now he was a spy, pushing past the silk garments and the mountains of shoes, lunging for the little door, yanking it open and feeling the warm, musty draft on his face, narrowing his eyes and blinking. In the bare-bulbed light, he reached for the closest pile and placed a hand on what he wanted. The letter he had written to William Galeotto, in its unaddressed envelope, was right on top.

  He shoved it deep in his pocket, withdrew from the closet. By the time she came back, he was examining her drawings on the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Kind of ruins the mood, doesn’t it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Can I make it up to you?”

  Lies peel away like a bad coat of paint. Later, he realized that this was a time when he should have said something, that in a way she needed him to shake her up. But it was hard to interpret her that way when he still imagined she had all the advantages. “You know what, I have some stuff to do at home. I’m gonna head back.” His voice came out thickly

  She tried to kiss him; he gave her a quick peck. Did he really know her at all ? Her smile came apart from her and flew his way. But her smile didn’t have a corresponding crescent in him to nestle into; her smile would not find shelter with him, he would not know how to nourish that smile. He would kill it the way he’d killed the rat in his closet. He would lock it up until it died. And when he opened the closet, he’d find the dead smile, still smiling.

  “Hey, is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No! I’m just … a little cold. The fog’s finally getting to my bones.”

  “It lifts in the fall.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You look a little sick,” she said.

  “Maybe I’m coming down with something,” Mac said, backing off.

  In the night, finding his equilibrium back in Redwood City, savoring the smoothness of the bourbon on his vocal cords in his room, he fell under the influence of lost worlds again. The waylaid envelope was pinned to his wall, awaiting a decision. Was it possible she’d done it for his own good? Maybe Galeotto was a menace and a villain! But how to ask? She’d think he was a real creep for snooping in her closet. That was pretty low.

  If only he could trust someone for once.

  He found himself thinking of his first girlfriend, the one and only Wendy Fugelsby

  Wendy had been a ballerina, next-door neighbor of Uncle Richard’s brother, Alex, in Los Angeles. Ferried to her dance studio three to four times a week by her irritable warthog of a mother, she had twirled in several commercials, and she had very powerful calves. He could see them perfectly in his mind, the way they flared out wider than her knees, as well as the thinness of her hips, and her flat, muscular breasts.

  Whenever the Solders went to visit Alex, Mac and Wendy would spend hours together hiding in her garage, which had been converted, with the help of her royalties, into a dream suburban rumpus room. In it they practiced the art of rumpus: playing eight ball on the pool table, watching horror movies on a big-screen TV, and rolling around together on the red leatherette couch.

  “You’re great,” Mac whispered passionately.

  “I’ll never make it if I’m not,” she replied.

  “I don’t mean your stupid ballet! I mean, you are great. You. You!”

  They never really connected intellectually, but it was the intensity of his feelings for her body and its availability to his lips that he’d never forget. During the year, he heard himself asking Uncle Richard if he missed his brother, Alex, and preached that brothers ought to stick together, and coming from brotherless Mac, they thought this a poignant sentiment. He bought a few trips to Encino that way—that is, until he gave himself away by stealing Dick-Dick’s car.

  The beloved automobile was a Lincoln Town Car, a powerful machine, in body and spirit everything Uncle Richard strived to be. A warm summer night set the scene for Mac’s yearnings—nights were among the few romantic things about Tres Osos. Mac could wander outside in the dark and look up into the blackness of space and see every available star. He taught himself the constellations with a map of the sky and had favorites, but the one he loved most was Polaris. The North Star. It was the one constant of the world— the faithful, like a steady parent—and for all time people had been able to find the lost way home by its light.

  This night they’d been home from the yearly jaunt to Los Angeles almost two weeks, and he was seventeen, and he was pining for Wendy. He’d always told her he loved her, but that summer he’d proposed they elope as soon as he could get a car. And she told Mac she didn’t know what love was. She told him her mother had destroyed her for all relationships. She told him, paraphrasing a favorite song, that she was a rock, an island. She told Mac she was off to college in the fall and between them love was an unreasonable demand.

  Three hours separated them, three hours as ephemeral as moth dust. He packed a few quick things, including some gifts for Wendy. The gifts included a ripe watermelon from the refrigerator, four large crystals from the dining room chandelier, ten bottles of wine from Richard’s collection, and an enormous potted cactus from the garden. Ma
c stole into the Lincoln, rolled down the hill, started it up, and sped away, trembling only at the burden of softening Wendy’s rock heart, of rowing to her lonely island.

  Does it occur to a seventeen-year-old that all his jumping adrenaline can transform itself into a sleeping potion in a matter of moments? He was wide-eyed and alive through Santa Maria, but a few miles later he nodded off and the car plunged off the road and rolled. The roof caved in. Mac didn’t die. All he could remember was a highway patrolman cussing as he wrestled Mac out the window of the wreck, filling his hands with the cactus spines that were poking out of the upholstery everywhere. The crushed bottles of wine were like marinade, and the Lincoln was like a pounded flank steak soaking in it. Helen and Richard and Fran showed up as fast as they could get there.

  “Sorry, Dick-Dick,” Mac said deliriously. “But I’ve got to get to L.A.!”

  “Stop calling me Dick-Dick, you little punk!”

  Since this wasn’t long after his “spell,” the few months during which Mac’s tongue was paralyzed, no more was said about the incident lest it tip him over the edge, and magically, a new Lincoln appeared in the driveway the next week. Richard had a hard time disguising his infantile pleasure in getting his hands on a newer model.

  Mac then wrote single-purposed Wendy twenty or thirty letters over the next couple years before he finally heard from her again. He was in Boston by then, trying to dig up his past. Wendy was in some dance troupe, living in West Hollywood, and wasn’t speaking to her stage mother anymore; her plans were to marry an older man, a studio pianist. Evidently she liked a man who could tickle the ivories. She told Mac that she could never communicate with him again, because Boris was the jealous type and opened her mail and was violent if provoked. She said she was happy. She said she thought of him whenever she heard the term rumpus room. (How often was that? he wondered.) At the end of the letter, she wrote, “Mac, it’s been nice.” He wadded that letter up on the streets of Cambridge and jammed it in the daiquiri blender of the first tavern he came across and whirled it into a million wet bits.

  (Nevertheless, a few weeks later he received an “Edwardian” knee-length coat, with a note: “I know it’s cold out there and I know you don’t have a good coat,” and he held on to it, he held on tight.)

  Should he throw his letter to Galeotto in the blender, too? Forget about it? Fran had at least three blenders to choose from. Liquefy. Whip. Puree.

  “You look like someone I used to know,” Mac said to his plastic cactus. “Don’t I know you? Say, haven’t we met? I’ve seen you before. You look like a friend of mine. You look so much like a friend of mine, it’s— You know what it is? ‘S uncanny.”

  10

  For the first year, tooling around the city, he didn’t recognize Angel Island as an island at all. It rises from the water precipitously but at a glance blends in with the hilly country on the north side of the bay. Later Mac would fixate on the small island right under his nose, beautiful and exploited by various authorities over the years. It was like so many other things in his life right then.

  At noon it ranked as the warmest day that summer in the city. Still no sun. Dry hills north of the bay were burning, and the sky was strewn with smoke and bits of pale ash, fluttering down and irritating the whites of all eyes. In the Marina, ashes fell like snow on a forest of masts. He hadn’t seen Carolyn in several days.

  He found her sitting on the dock next to a whale-size sailboat, in jeans and a large man’s shirt. Long sleeves dangling over her hands. She wore the darkest glasses made.

  “Hey there,” she said. “Wasn’t sure you’d show.”

  “I always show,” Mac said. They’d spoken a few times by phone, but it wasn’t easy to be false with her, and he had cut the conversations short. It was when she lifted her arm to push the hair from her face that he saw her hand was wrapped in an Ace bandage. “What’s that?”

  “A slight injury.”

  “What happened?”

  She said, “Oh, nothing. Socked my dad.”

  He smiled, despite himself. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing unusual.”

  It was hard to conceal his joy.

  Isabel Porter came down the dock then, rolling an ice chest stacked with cushions. She wore a Cal Bears T-shirt and was strong-looking for her age—eighty-two, Carolyn had told him. He met her in time to gallantly lug the chest a few whole feet.

  Carolyn said, “Isabel, do you remember my friend Mac?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Nice to see you again,” he said.

  They all stepped onto the boat, and Isabel invited them to help her take the sails out of their covers, which they commenced to do with the seriousness of purpose that makes activity so stabilizing for the soul. He thought maybe Carolyn and he should go into construction work together. As they leaned and unfastened and unfolded, they grinned at each other. And this time it felt good. Punched her dad! Bravo!

  Isabel said to Carolyn, “Tell me, dear. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard how you met.”

  Carolyn said, “It was an act of God.”

  Mac said, “Actually, it was an act of Molly. Carolyn was folded up—”

  “Molly and her friends—”

  “—in front of her house, sideways, in a bed—”

  “You know that old fold-up bed we had? It was a trap,” Carolyn said. “I was the bait.”

  “I swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker,” Mac said.

  “What luck.” Isabel laughed. “Do you know how many generations of Carolyns family I’ve known? Charles’s mother, Mary, was my dearest friend. I’ve known Charles longer than anybody.”

  “Isabel’s dad’s godmother,” Carolyn said.

  “Charles was a wonderful boy,” she went on. “Do you know, he was very clever with arithmetic and the sciences; I thought he would go into medicine. He had an elaborate chemistry set, and he was always collecting specimens and looking under his microscope, and he had all kinds of white mice he would build mazes for. He was so earnest—I’ve never seen a more earnest boy. He designed and built all the birdhouses in my yard. And he built that beautiful chest I keep all my photography equipment in. Those terrible thick owl glasses Mary picked out for him—how he hated them! Do you know, I saw him smash them once. He picked up a cobblestone from the garden and smashed them to bits. Told Mary an elaborate story about birds dropping rocks from the sky. But could you blame him? The pressure the boy was under. His father had no interest in his temperament, no faith in his writing, and had Charles not found a woman to marry, I think his father would have disowned him.”

  And no sooner had she said the words than the man himself pulled into the Marina parking lot in his little black car.

  “He has arrived,” Mac said. “Where’s Adela?”

  “She doesn’t like water,” said Carolyn.

  Mac saw that another car had pulled in next to Ware, who was now busy helping three older women out of it, like a do-gooding scout.

  “You will meet my three best friends today,” Isabel said. “Sal, Winnie, Bess, and I go back years. Now that they’ve lost their husbands, we depend on each other as much as we did in high school.”

  And finally a car pulled up at the gate to the dock, letting out Molly and another girl.

  Charles and the old-time gals made their way over, Molly and her friend carrying their bags and parcels. Mac was introduced first to the three women, and they all shook hands with stronger arms than he would have given them credit for having. They climbed onto the boat gamely, and Charles Ware greeted him in his usual fashion, but he had a bruise on his face that almost resembled a black eye. “Mr. West! I’m glad you found your way.” The phony bastard! I’d love to throw you overboard when no one’s looking! he was more likely thinking.

  Isabel said, “What happened to your eye, Charles?”

  “I have been sleepwalking lately. My unconscious is restless. I’m making my way east. I made my way last night straight into a bookcase!”
r />   “Mac, this is Saki Harrison,” Carolyn said.

  “Sorry about your horse,” he said.

  “Now he’s in a little box.”

  “She’s getting a new one,” supplied Molly.

  “Nothing like getting something new,” said Mac with some venom.

  Shortly they set sail. Isabel turned on the engine and took the wheel, and they putted out of the Marina past the other shimmering crafts, joining the promenade of rigs and masts and booms on the bay. Mac did not tell Carolyn, but he had never before set foot on a sailboat. Her beauty was incandescent to him that day. The possibilities of how their love might flourish if he could control his demons went through his mind like a time-lapse film of a bean stalk—growing, growing, growing!

  They tacked out toward the Golden Gate, met choppy open sea, turned about, took in that breathtaking view of the city, which he could never get enough of. At one point Molly complained of seasickness, and Carolyn rooted around forever in the hold for a ginger ale to bring her.

  As they hit smoother sailing, Charles Ware moved over beside him. “Now then, boy. I want to ask you something.”

  “Like what?” Carolyn interrupted.

  “We’ve never had a chance to talk. That shouldn’t be! I want to ask him about his music.”

  “My music?” Mac laughed.

  As the bracing sea air met his skin, he marveled at how he had traveled in his life to this strange moment. From his scattered, proud childhood in borderline slums, through his anticlimactic teen years in the veritable outback of California, to his swinging early twenties in Redwood City, he’d had the most wasted, obscure career he knew of. If someone had told him, as he wondered about his future in Tres Osos and smoked skunk weed and scribbled with Cesar, that he would one day be questioned by Charles Ware about his endeavors, he’d have used it for collateral to buy all kinds of dreams. He would have borrowed against it all along.

  Ware said, “I hear from my daughter that your piano lessons paid off.”