True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  The plane flew into a patch of turbulence and then got caught in an updraft that lifted it to a higher altitude. Two men in T-shirts and shorts who’d looked drunk as they’d stumbled into their seats, whooped with delight as if they were on one more ride at an amusement park. Jane had fallen asleep, and as they bumped higher into the sky, her head rolled gently from side to side, barely making a dent in her new curls.

  2.

  As recently as three years ago, the last time Desmond had visited Anderton’s daughter, Lorna, and her collection of memorabilia, this stretch of the Florida panhandle had been a piney wonderland of shabby motels and tourist cottages scattered along the beaches and roadsides as if they’d been dumped there from a fast-moving truck. There were dark bars and unwholesome, oddball restaurants with gaudy signs. “Home of the Topless Oyster,” “All You Can Eat Shrimp,” “Ho-Made Po-Boys.” He’d been fascinated with the run-down glamour of the place, imagining that if he were a completely different person—a married truck driver from southern Georgia, let’s say—he’d come here to spend vacations with the family. Now even that shaky fantasy couldn’t support its own unlikely weight. The area around the airport was being brutally developed with big concrete hotels thrown up by multinational chains and strip malls with the usual cast of retail characters and restaurants. It was as if some fungus had arrived in the hold of a plane, transforming the landscape close to the airport first, and starting to spread.

  Jane was comatose in the passenger seat of the van, and Chloe and Tim were in back, playing an electronic game that made strange bleeps and elicited groans.

  He supposed people found the growing uniformity of the world comforting. You didn’t have to react to this landscape or these shops or restaurants because they were all identical to ones you’d seen thousands of times before in hundreds of other places. The food you bought at the big chain restaurants was so familiar, you didn’t have to worry yourself with actually tasting it. The world was bursting at the seams with information and “content,” information’s brand-new sibling, and in order to assimilate all of that, you had to neutralize as much sensory input as you could.

  Fortunately, as they got closer to Gulf City, the development thinned, leaving more of the seedy disrepair he remembered fondly from his last visit—roadside bars and motels, a few weed-choked vacant lots. A naval base that had been in Gulf City for decades had closed at the end of the 1980s, and the town was still reeling from the abandonment, refusing to pick up the pieces and start anew, like a bitter husband who couldn’t accept that his wife had left him. Russell had accompanied him on that other visit and had declared Gulf City, “a real place, even if it is a really awful one.” And yet all of it, the drinking dives and dying malls, the hotsheets motels and the little restaurants named after the owner, were circumscribed by the incongruous beauty of the wide, green expanse of the Gulf waters and the white sand that seemed to stretch for miles.

  Chloe had booked them into the Gulf City Hotel, which turned out to be a flat-roofed two-story motel painted in uneven shades of brown that reminded Desmond of pecan shells. The V-shaped building was broken into two long wings that angled out from either side of a glassed-in coffee shop and office, and it seemed to be embracing the parking lot, and, by inference, your most sacred possession: your car. Except today, there were only three cars in the lot; not much to protect.

  As soon as she spotted the place, Chloe put down the electronic game and started making bleeps of her own. “This isn’t a hotel,” she cried. “It’s barely a motel. Talk about false advertising!”

  “If you ran a place that looked like this,” Desmond said, “would you advertise honestly?”

  “I guess I should have known something was up when they told me the price.”

  “It’s fine,” Jane said, although, as far as Desmond could tell, she’d barely opened her eyes. “We’re only here for a few nights. As your executive producer, I approve.”

  Chloe stepped out to the pavement of the parking lot and waved her clipboard in front of her face, indicating either the intensity of the heat or a bad odor. She was wearing black Capri pants and a skimpy white T-shirt and a pair of thick-soled, open-toed sandals that made her look especially tall and narrow. Her face was flushed a dark, pretty shade of copper, and her hair hung halfway down her back in long tendrils. In Boston, she’d stand out for being exceptionally attractive and perhaps only slightly underdressed, but walking across the parking lot of this unpromising motel in a remote finger of Florida that had been dubbed the “redneck Riviera,” she looked almost cartoonishly young and thin. And her confident stride in those thick sandals made her look more vulnerable than poised. She pulled open the glass door of the office and the white sunlight flashed in Desmond’s eyes. If he was seeing through Chloe’s well-made defenses to the weaknesses underneath, they were all in trouble. He looked up to the white sky and had a strong premonition that things were not going to go well here.

  3.

  The air-conditioning unit was clattering like an antique fan, and his room was so cold you could store meat in it. The walls were paneled with dark wood. In the dim light cast by an eggplant-shaped lamp on the bureau, the walls looked slick, as if they were coated with many years’ worth of nicotine or were dripping with humidity. The place smelled of mildew and cigarettes. So much for the charm of undercapitalized businesses. Where was the Holiday Inn with its sanitized toilets and its spotless mediocrity when you needed it? Desmond sat on one of the double beds and started to take off his shoes, but looking at the shaggy orange carpeting, he thought better of it. Three nights. For three nights he could put up with anything. He pulled open the orange drapes, and the room was flooded with a burst of sunlight so bright it seemed to gobble up the room’s flaws. There was ocean, the soft, shifting green of the Gulf, rippling in the wind like a field of grass. When you had this outside your door, how could it matter what color the carpet was or how dirty the walls? The white sand, fine quartz blown down from the Appalachians, started at the foamy edge of the water and sprawled—through spiky grass and scrub pines—right up to the back wall of the motel. He pulled the drapes shut. The funny thing about dazzling sun and pretty views was that they made you want to share them with someone else. Better by far to have a dank room that made you want to run away.

  He turned the TV on and off, checked out the bathroom, unpacked a suitcase, and made a call to Lorna, confirming their meeting with her tomorrow morning. He pulled down the orange bedspread and jammed four thin pillows under his head and, for the next hour, read through Jane’s lists. The business of biography had taught him that people were always the best sources of information about their own lives, providing you didn’t believe much of what they said about themselves. You had to look for the longing between the lines, look for the person they were trying hard to be, learn how to read the essential lies they told to themselves. If you took Jane’s lists at face value, you’d have to conclude that she was the hardest working wife and mother on the planet. But if you really wanted to know what occupied her mind, you’d have to decode the little check marks that showed up in the corner of certain pages of the appointment book. Poor Thomas, he thought, leafing through the numerous mentions of him scattered across the pages; he was the man Jane so eagerly wanted to love, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing as being the man she did love.

  He took a short nap, and when he woke up, decided to try the beach. On the same shopping spree that had produced the gray Armani shirt, he’d bought a $58 bathing suit, a satiny, bile-colored thing chosen solely for the technologically advanced way it emphasized his crotch. He pulled it on, looked at himself in the tarnished mirror over the hotel bureau, and fell back onto the bed laughing. It was about as appropriate for this beach and his body as a pair of space boots. It made him look like a skinny, jaundiced middle-aged man with a saggy pouch in the crotch that was as erotic as a knobby knee. Age is a sneak, hiding little clues to its presence all over your body, wrinkles and bags and dark circles an
d creaky joints you’re unaware of until you trip over them just as you’re trying to make a good impression.

  It was between seasons, too late for the summer crowds that drifted down from Georgia for the Gulf breezes and the fishing, too early for the German tourists who flocked here in the winter. The beach stretched for miles in either direction, empty except for a few children running along the edge of the green water, screeching and splashing. The water was cooler than he expected and he dove in quickly and swam straight out from shore until he was warm and panting. When he stopped and looked back, the shore seemed impossibly far away. Hotels were lined up along the beach like barricades protecting the rest of the town from the waves. He rolled over onto his back, letting the salty broth of the Gulf buoy him up, and gazed at the blank sky arching over him. Love was a little like swimming, he thought. You float along in effortless comfort, not really taking into consideration that at any moment you could be dragged down under the surface and drown.

  Tomorrow when they went to visit Lorna, Jane and Chloe and Tim could photograph the house, take shots of the collected career clutter. He had his questions for Pauline Anderton’s daughter written down in a carefully composed list that narrowed in on those final years after her father had died and Pauline had gone into retreat. Why had she given it all up when she needed the money, finally had freedom, had club owners (albeit owners of minor clubs) hounding her to perform, and one legitimate record company ready to welcome her into their studio? Look how well he’d done, he thought as he paddled back to shore, in the privacy of his hollow room. If his relationship with Russell was the price he ended up having to pay for finishing this project, it just might be worth it after all.

  As he was walking up the beach wrapped in a towel, he saw Jane sitting on the cramped cinder block patio behind the motel. She had on a blue, beachy bathrobe with big yellow flowers splashed on it, and her face was partly hidden by her sunglasses. She was holding a book in her hands, although she didn’t seem to be reading it. As he got closer, he saw that it was the copy of Playing with Childhood, Gloria’s harsh critique of parenting that he’d given her weeks earlier. He pulled a chair beside her and she peered at him over the top of her sunglasses. “Do you like my outfit?” she asked.

  “Better than I like mine.”

  “Opposite ends of the same impulse—trying to hide your flaws by showing them off or covering them up. Thomas gave me this,” she said, and fingered the lapels of the robe. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Low self-esteem.” He tapped the cover of Gloria’s book. “What do you make of this?”

  “It says everything I’ve ever thought about children and childhood.” She slid her sunglasses back up to her face and scratched at the back of her neck. It was late afternoon, and she couldn’t have been out here for more than twenty minutes, but already her skin, newly exposed by the hairdo, looked scorched. “But reading it in someone else’s words made it sound heartless. Poor Russell. If this book is any indication, he must have been raised in a laboratory.”

  “Gloria likes to get on her soapbox and be outrageous enough to make people listen. I think Russell probably had a fairly normal upbringing.”

  The corners of Jane’s mouth turned down, and for a moment, Desmond had a horrible feeling she might get weepy. Having met Gerald, he should have known better than to fling around the word “normal” so casually. Trying to recoup, he said, “What matters is that, eccentric or not, Gloria was a loving, devoted mother.”

  “I’m sure she was. I’m not so sure I have been.”

  “According to your lists,” he said, “you spend half your day doting on Gerald, driving him from one appointment to the next, taking him to museums, classes, lessons.”

  She waved off the significance of this with both hands. “A hired hand could do that. I’m talking about inside. I never felt that hunger to be a mother, that gnawing hunger so many women talk about. I always assumed I’d have a child at some point, but it wasn’t with any urgency. If anything, it was with resignation, the way you assume you’ll probably have your wisdom teeth extracted at some point.” She looked off toward the water where two little girls were digging in the sand at the edge of the waves. The sun was beginning to set and the sky along the horizon had started to turn pale green and pink, like an unripe tomato with a faint blush of color. The wind had picked up some since he’d come out of the water, and Desmond could feel the fine white sand blowing against his ankles. He didn’t know how to respond to any of this; talk about parenthood had a vague, intangible quality to him, like listening to people talk about their vacations in places he had no particular interest in visiting.

  “It’s not something you can talk about with anyone,” she went on. “I suspect Rosemary feels the same way about children, but I’d never talk about it with her. Nothing’s considered more hateful in a woman han not wanting to bear children. Even women who abandon or abuse their kids are regarded with less suspicion, since they at least had them in the first place and there’s always the chance they can be reformed.”

  “You had Gerald,” he reminded her.

  She shook her head slowly, back and forth, her tight new curls unmoving. “Almost from the day he was born, he was a completely independent person. I’d look down at him in his crib and he’d be staring at me with this indignant look in his eyes, as if he was saying: ‘What do you want?’ It must have been a response to something I was doing without even knowing it.”

  “Everyone probably feels that way at some point.”

  “They dont, that’s the odd part. I used to meet with a group of new mothers to talk about feeding and sleeping and trying to fit motherhood into our lives. After a month, I had to drop out. I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying, and it made me feel as if I wasn’t a real mother. Worst of all, that I wasn’t a real woman.” She paused. “I’m sure none of this makes sense to you.”

  He had his own problems with feeling like an impostor. There were moments when he was dining or drinking or having a conversation with a heterosexual friend or colleague, even an abundantly tolerant person, and saw a look of benevolent curiosity cross his or her face, and felt, suddenly, as if he’d been cast off to some vast plain of ambiguity and otherness, where his features were shifting and his gender was indistinct. Then he’d be overcome by his own curiosity—perhaps a bit less benevolent—about himself and where he belonged among women and men in the big picture of life. More than once, he’d felt that way with Jane herself. But never, he realized as he gazed down the beach, never with Russell. He’d always felt solidly in place with Russell, unambiguously male, even when engaged in the least manly of activities.

  “But when you’re with your husband,” he said. “Then you know who you are—a real mother, a real woman. No?”

  “Oh, well,” she said, and set Gloria’s book down on the white plastic table beside her. “Dale could make anyone feel like a real woman.”

  He was silent for a moment, hoping that the Gulf breeze would blow this little slip out to sea, but it must have blown it right back into her ears, for she turned her head away and took off her glasses. “Shit,” she said and reached into the pocket of her bathrobe for a pack of cigarettes.

  The colors of the sky had darkened and spread along the horizon like a stain. A gust of warm wind blew and an empty soda can rattled across the edge of the patio. One of the little girls on the beach screamed and ran up to the road where her mother was sitting on a low seawall.

  “That appointment book I gave you,” Jane said. “I’d love you to do me a favor and throw it out. I can’t decipher the code anymore and even if I could, half of it is lies, stuff I made up to impress someone else or kid myself.”

  He reached out and took her hand. “Jane,” he said. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  The wind shifted and the soda can rattled back across the patio. “I honestly don’t know,” she said.

  Twenty-one

  Pancake Breakfast

  Jane woke up
hungry. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten yesterday. Very possibly nothing. Desmond had asked her to have dinner with him last night, but she was too exhausted—from the flight, the pills, the drive, the exertion of all the confessing she’d done on the beach. She wasn’t sure what had brought that on, but lying in bed in the dank motel room with a frame of morning sunlight around the curtained window, she didn’t regret it. She felt lighter than she’d felt in a long time, possibly the result of letting go of so many pent-up worries. Although it could be that she was coming down with a head cold from sleeping in this refrigerated cell.

  She wanted to stand and look at herself in the mirror across from the bed, but it was midwinter in here. As for walking across the cracked tile floor of the bathroom, that was out of the question. Something was wrong with the air-conditioning system. Maybe even these artificial climates were going wacky. She grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the shelf attached to the wall beside the bed. The cigarette thing had gotten out of hand. At the airport on the way home, she’d toss out however many she had left and that would be that. Berman would probably tell her that taking up smoking in practically the same breath as her initial full-frontal fumbling with Dale was a sign of self-hatred. She was ready to buy the argument—after all, it was her argument, not Berman’s—but that didn’t explain why canceling the Dale situation had upped her cigarette intake. She clicked the remote control and a pinpoint of light flared in the middle of the ancient TV screen. Last night, the local public television station rebroadcast a Keith Sommerstone documentary on the Korean War, and she’d watched an hour of it, mesmerized by the footage he’d gathered, his seamless editing, his ability to humanize even the most complicated political information, and the sheer scope of his project. He had vision. He was a genius. If she was going to have to go through life not being a genius—and at forty, the dream of being a prodigy had pretty much dried up—then she could at least appreciate someone else’s brilliance.