MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  “Not that long.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  She sniffed. He’d noticed this was her mannerism before she said something that could be construed as privileged. “Our apartment. We have an apartment there.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  “Well, I still have some packing,” she said. “I’d better keep going. But thank you for coming by!”

  He wanted to ask about Molly’s plans and prospects, but that was a flawed topic for them. Suddenly he didn’t have the least idea what he could talk about. He was aware of the differences between them more acutely than ever, and astonished by how large they loomed; he wondered how he looked to her in the tree, with his plaid shirt and its rumpled, bunched lapels, his jeans with worn knees, his sneakers with the peeling rubber around the sides. Rather than cutting a romantic figure, he was a curiosity, a bit player, a yes-man, nothing more. Before he knew what he was doing, he yanked another pair of old shoes from a branch and he threw it over her head, pelting the wall of the diabolical house.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” she said.

  He grabbed another pair and flipped the shoes one after the other. Each old shoe thudded onto the balcony and bounced off, falling to the ground.

  “Mac, stop!”

  He hurled another, and another, not at her but close enough, as she ran for cover through her French doors and shut them with a bang. And she began to fade, as if she was being siphoned into her next life, the outline of her becoming less clear, until he could no longer see even a glint of her in the room. It left him gasping.

  In a few days, early for an interview at a bank in North Beach, he sat on the broad marble steps out front. A long shot, but he’d seen bank tellers less on the ball than himself. He was good at math, and he’d shaved and even borrowed a sport coat from Tim. The slow shuffle of shoppers and people on errands came and went before him, soothing his melancholy with steady, anonymous motion. Shortly an older man came out of the bank and sat down on the steps beside him. He wore a green leisure suit and a white golfing hat. “Howdy,” he said.

  Mac nodded back. Because he was preoccupied, he tried to look grim and unapproachable, but the man began fidgeting with his newspaper, and momentarily he said, “Boy, oh boy, you’d think for all that money these fellas could get a little more privacy.”

  “What’s that?”

  He showed Mac what he was reading. An article about the wealthiest people in America. He was going to tell Mac his name— it was inevitable. It was Johnny Durkin. “You’re not by any chance related to an ex-nun in Boston named Bridie Durkin?” Mac asked.

  “Ex-nun? I don’t know. Could be. I’m from Buffalo originally,” he said. “Why, you from Boston?”

  “Yep,” Mac said.

  “What do you know. Used to pull into Gloucester once a week. That was my line of work.”

  “Fishing?”

  “No, they fished ‘em and processed ‘em, and I picked ‘em up in my truck, frozen. Took ‘em to Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Youngstown, Ohio. Thirty-two years that was my run. Big Catholic population back there, you know, fish sticks every Friday night. You can see what an important guy I was.”

  He proceeded to tell Mac about how he had just had an appointment at the bank to get a personal loan for his daughter, who had finished college and wanted to go to art school in London. She had been drawing since she was five. They always knew she was talented. “Lately she specializes in paintings of dead animals,” he said. “Which

  I never really cared for, but the art teachers go crazy for them.” He and his wife wanted to help her out, make her year in London comfortable. What a good guy! The direct and practical way he wanted to encourage his daughter seemed to contrast so sharply with any kind of help Carolyn could get, even with all her advantages.

  Mac’s feet were cold. He must have shuddered.

  “I tell you, I know it. My wife keeps telling me we’re in California, I don’t believe it. ‘Course, people here are softies, have you noticed that? Once I had to back two miles into a frozen mountain. At the center of this mountain was a big cold-storage place for the government. I dropped off a load there. You know. Where all the government folks will come and live if there’s a bomb.”

  “Chewing on frozen cod two miles into the earth,” Mac said. “I don’t know. I could skip that.”

  “Well, son, don’t think you’re invited.”

  They laughed. Mac’s heart warmed without restraint to anyone who called him son.

  And then the man’s wife, a pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman, strolled up with a shopping bag on each arm. Would Mac ever have a pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman in his life? It seemed like the greatest goal of all, suddenly.

  “Nice chatting with you,” he said. They shook hands, and Johnny Durkin was yet another board to nail to Mac’s raft. His raft that had floated him over hard times, his raft that he hammered together with his primitive tools, built of all the people he had known and talked with and listened to.

  Against his better impulses, Mac called Carolyn’s cell. He still wasn’t sure what day she was returning, and he wanted to tell her about this man whose daughter painted dead animals. He wanted to tell her anything. He missed her like crazy. He was ready to be patient, to prove himself her friend, to ride a unicycle with no hands.

  He reached her voice mail yet again. In a burst of nervous energy, he blurted: “Carolyn, know what the bottom line is? It’s that I’m in love with you, and so we’ve got to find a way not to freak out but a way to freak in, into this thing we’re making together, and not take anything the wrong way, and then we’ll get to know each other better than we’ve ever gotten to know anyone else before, and by doing that we’ll begin to understand that people can make mistakes and it’s to be expected because no one’s perfect and then we’ll decide we are going to dedicate ourselves to this proposition and swear by it and hold it to be true all our days. Okay?”

  And he hung up and paced in front of the bank for ten minutes, giving himself a lashing. Jesus! What a turnoff. He’d probably never hear from her again.

  The interview was conducted by a robot in a suit. “We-will-be-in-touch,” the robot was programmed to say.

  Fat chance, Mac was programmed to think.

  No word from Carolyn.

  There was the day Mac spent drawing on the covers of magazines, making mustaches and eyebrows on faces, penning teeth black. A hundred years ago, that’s how everyone looked. Ha! But probably not Carolyn. There was the hour he stared at his tongue in the mirror the way he’d never done before. He could do an interesting puckering twist with his tongue, plus, there were thick blue stripes on the underside of it. Plus, if you looked closely, you could see little, tiny taste buds. How fascinating. The afternoon when he walked around his neighborhood kicking twigs and rocks from the sidewalk, the day he drove over to the coast near Santa Cruz and sat in the warm sand, digging his hands into it until they cramped. The road over the mountain seemed cold and lonely. His mind was bloated with memories of false promises and premonitions of a walk down a long lawn toward death.

  It was not a good idea to spend days with such grave thoughts. One day he had to stop the car, hold his head in his hands. He was idling outside a tennis club. Women in short white skirts and clean white shoes were swatting around their clean, little balls. What did they know of the world? How much he pitied and despised them, watching their skinny legs run.

  There was an afternoon in a grocery store, a bit smashed before he went, many minutes spent wandering the aisles, leaning on his cart, finally knocking over a display of spaghetti sauce jars. “Broken glass and red sauce”—had a certain ring, maybe he could write a song. There was the nice bag girl who leaned over and mopped it up, whose blouse he could see down. She kindly told Mac it happened all the time.

  There was the day he began to sing, “She’s not aware, she’s not aware,” to the pounding motif at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth, until it started to sound like
“She’s not aware, she’s not a Ware.” Like some freaky conspiracy theorist, like someone who listened to Beatles records backward, he began to churn over a number of loose ends. If he’d started searching for anagrams, it would’ve been time to turn himself in. But for the time being, mulling it all kept him safe. Kept his brain hovering over the pain like a cloud refusing to break.

  And then things changed. One morning he woke with the usual muffled feeling of failure caused by his recent hangovers, but he had somehow sorted out in his sleep that finding William Galeotto had never stopped being part of his quest, sponsored by Carolyn or not.

  He had already scrolled through the search engines on Fran’s computer, finding thousands of mentions of Galeotto House, analyses of Galeotto’s characterization in Tangier, of Ware’s relationship with him. But no luck finding any reference to the man lately, or his whereabouts.

  Mac called the house phone at the Wares’. No answer. He felt uncomfortable leaving a message for Carolyn’s mother, but so what? He did it. Fran was tapping on his door.

  She said, “Want to come with me and Mom to the Buying Club?”

  “I hate the Buying Club,” Mac said. “I hate it more than you know. I hate it more than flies on babies’ eyes, stepping in dog shit, bad eggs, Wendy Fugelsby’s mother’s armpits—”

  “What was wrong with them?”

  “Ever see them?”

  “You need to get out, Mac. Come on, it’ll be quick—I’ll buy you a hot dog.”

  He decided to go because he liked the hot dogs, smothered in sauerkraut and onions. But to get one he had to pull a squeaking metal wagon around, showcasing Fran and Helen’s purchases. Cases of tomato paste, tuna, and a bale of toilet paper bound for glory. They picked up half a side of beef for the freezer and grabbed giant jars of kosher dills, for what end, he did not know. They ogled books and clothes and socks. Not to mention aisle after aisle of the presumed essentials for housebound life. What else was a store but a place organized to excite you about all the things you didn’t have? Though Fran had a pantry full of pots and pans, she hemmed and hawed and finally decided to splurge on a huge set, which came in a box as large as the cart.

  “Why are you buying this?” Mac demanded.

  She looked hurt, defensive. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “What’s wrong with the pans you already have?”

  “The old ones don’t match, and they’re all black.”

  “Who cares if pans match?”

  “I do!”

  “How is your life going to be better if the pans match?”

  “You’ll understand someday, when you have your own house,” Aunt Helen assured him.

  “I’ll never have matching pans, never!”

  He had already guessed Fran’s master plan: to chase out, piece by piece, all things slightly dog-eared or anomalous from her midst, until there was nothing left that could make her feel substandard. He’d seen the trait in Uncle Dick-Dick.

  Time was lost forever in the Buying Club. Mac had his phone in his pocket, hoping it would ring. Of course, it didn’t. When they got home, he jumped out of the car without carrying anything in and shut himself up in his room and called again. To his surprise, Mrs. Ware answered this time.

  Be cool. “Hello, Mrs. Ware. It’s Mac West, Carolyn’s friend. I’m— I haven’t heard from her since she went to New York. . . . Everything’s all right?”

  Adela said, “Don’t you have her number?”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t seem to get through. When’s she coming back?”

  “Mac, they flew home a few days ago.”

  “Oh, right, well, I just— Okay.” He held on to the back of his door. In order to be brave as a boy he’d think, Ho ho ho!No matter if his mother was in bed all afternoon, no matter if she was kissing some man in the kitchen one minute and hurling plates at him the next, no matter what. Ho ho ho.

  “It was a successful trip—Molly is in. She’ll start school after Labor Day.”

  “Off to school in New York. How great is that.”

  “I’ll miss them, of course.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes, Carolyn has all kinds of plans. And we’ll probably start to spend more time there. Charles has a duplicate library there.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Not really, Mac. Books are his tools.”

  “Ah. Right.” He took a deep breath and looked out his window into Fran and Tim’s side yard, which had a gravel path that magnified the sounds of all footsteps, including those of dogs and cats and raccoons, and contained a clothesline Fran freshened bath mats on. There was one on it now, one he’d stepped on this morning with his big, wet feet, one he’d never once hung up in the sun while living there. He never thought about what it took to keep the place going. At once, seeing a damp bath mat, he hated himself. “Listen, you probably remember, I have this thing, about my mother—”

  “Most men do,” she said.

  “Right. Anyway, do you happen to know where I could find Bill Galeotto these days?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  How he detested having to go through this! “As you may have heard by now, he knew my mother, long time ago.”

  “If she was young and pretty, I’m sure he did.”

  He had nothing to say to that. He closed his eyes.

  “Where’s Carolyn, then, is she home?”

  “You seem like such a nice young man,” Adela said, almost wistfully. “Have you at all been considering the job I offered you?”

  “Job …”

  “I need someone to transcribe my tapes.”

  That’s right. He’d dismissed the idea before, thinking it would annoy and distance Carolyn. “I’m not sure I’m the man,” he grumbled.

  “I’d be extremely grateful. I really can’t proceed until—”

  “Uh-huh.” His voice sounded as if it was coming out of a machine. “Okay, I’ll do it. But about Mr. Galeotto?”

  “The girls are riding,” she said. “Would you like to know where?”

  Of course he would, he wanted Carolyn more than Galeotto— he could meet her away from her maddening house.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “First come get my tapes,” Adela said.

  He kicked a book across his room, as hard as he could. It knocked the plastic cactus off the table.

  “You see, it wasn’t love at first sight with Charles,” she began. “I had a lot to learn. My mother nearly killed herself all those years, rubbing her hands raw, pushing the heavy cart to the different grocery shops so we could look like it all came easy. I had lived with that at school, dressing even better than the well-heeled girls, my mother pushing me into pretending, pretending, pretending! And here I crawled out of Canaryville on pickle money!

  “Well, Charles was very pleased to hear from me when I finally came around. I liked him quite a bit better after my New York follies. Suddenly I saw my life taking shape around him. He wrote the poem ‘Lilacs Deep, Deep Lilacs’ for me. Did you know that? They teach it in schools. Bill Galeotto happened to come through Chicago: we were introduced. Bill turned to Charles and said, ‘Get off my back, Charlie. Marry her.’ Something about that introduction always bothered me. …”

  Mac “prostituted” himself that day, listened to her but, by doing so, ended up not having to stop by. Ended up conning her out of a set of directions. A recipe for a wild-goose chase if he’d ever followed one. Adela wasn’t clear on all of it. But he made sure to pay more attention to her than he ever had before.

  So onward went Mac, shaving and parting his hair. Onward went Mac, digging out his best shirt and pants. Best in that they were clean. On he went, throwing the rolled-up rug, his supreme offering to Carolyn, into his car. Why had he waited so long?

  Hadn’t they been pledging their love all summer? Hadn’t they found in each other the perfect solution to life’s immeasurable grind?

  Hadn’t it seemed absolute, unqualified, whole, the time they’d spent together, the thing
s they had shared?

  And yet, hadn’t he, deep down, imagined Carolyn moving on all along?

  Imagining it could cause it. As if by doing that you created an opening for betrayal. In an insolent, childlike way, he offered himself up to such betrayals. It was something he would likely examine for the rest of his life, the fine line of permission he may have granted his mother to leave him. Like the good old Milgram experiment in depravity: how far would people go if you let them? How far would they really go?

  He remembered kneeling in his room in Tres Osos, praying. Praying was something he had never tried in Boston. In the beginning he prayed for his mother’s return. Then he prayed he could hate her, and once he succeeded at that, he prayed he would soon die gruesomely in many newsworthy pieces. He later prayed that he wouldn’t die but that he would someday distinguish himself in the world, so she would suffer intensely for leaving him. Sometimes he prayed he would be offered the job of the next messiah. If so, there would be reason for all his suffering: his suffering would become legend. If so, it would explain why he had no father. It would explain why his mother couldn’t bear the burden of raising him. It would explain the whole mystery of his existence; for certainly, his existence was otherwise uncalled for.

  Okay, so he probably wasn’t the next messiah. Now what?

  The corridor down 19th Avenue until he could see the elbows and knees of the bridge always impressed him, and thus the traffic along it never bothered him the way jams drove him crazy on the peninsula. He thought of Carolyn, knees up in her bed. His car gunned on. He had a bag of short, oblong carrots he was munching on like a termite. At last, crossing the great bridge, he saw tourists on the walkway, capturing their images; he’d been out there with his camera, too. He liked how humans from all over spread the word that they ought to witness this sight, and usually he felt proud, but not now.

  He was back in his shoes, the night he met Carolyn, kissing her mouth in the weeds. “Didn’t expect this,” he’d said.

  “What’s your name again?” They had laughed!