The State We're In: Maine Stories (16 page)

Zelda-land. That had been her proposed name for our old people’s apartment building. Zelda-land.

The next day I called and told her no. I apologized for being so uptight. I invoked my inherited collection of Steuben glass birds and mentioned the many expensive art books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. I exaggerated the problem with our toilets barely flushing. I said I had to entertain my great-aunt, and I wasn’t sure when she and her companion would be visiting (true). As she listened silently, I added a few more qualms, then invited them to dinner. She said, “I am so surprised and disappointed, I cannot think what to say.”

They did come to dinner, but it was awkward. She didn’t call again all summer, though somehow her husband sent a signal, and he and Jamie had a couple of games of golf. Then came the end of July. The situation had ruined my summer. We didn’t know when the party was given, and we certainly weren’t invited. We found out about it from the FedEx man, who’d been hired to play music with his band. I will always feel as guilty as I imagine an older, wiser boy would feel for having lawn-mowered a turtle in his youth.

The weather that day was everyone’s worst scenario. It was overcast, then fiercely sunny, then gray clouds accumulated and raced forward like cars escaping rush-hour gridlock. Then began a pounding rain. They’d found a tent company earlier in the week that had come from Boston—cocky guys who said that barring a tsunami, their tent would hold. It didn’t, and the groom was leaning against a pole when the entire thing lifted up like an enormous parachute that carried him out over the beach, where rain pounded down like arrows in the
Iliad
. He went up, up, then down. His hands must have lost their grip on the cloth. While the few drunks who didn’t know what was happening partied on, he was launched like a sailor wrapped in a broken topsail, then fell from a great height onto the rocky beach, where he lay unconscious with a broken pelvis, broken arm, and three snapped ribs.

When I heard this, it made me remember a guide my husband and I had once hired, who’d told us, at the Cliffs of Moher, that the updraft was so fierce that if you threw someone over the edge, they might blow right up again—except in this case the groom didn’t reappear. By the time we found out, the FedEx guy had written a song about it, but as he said to me, “It’s no ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.’ ”

It will be on my conscience forever, of course: the revenge of the universe for the groom’s mercilessness toward a fellow creature. But in what way does the dainty little doll-bride deserve such a thing, to have the dripping fist of fate grab her tiny companion and hurl him to earth in splinters? In the great flip-book of heaven, where our movement is created and the story reveals itself, what’s to be made of some tragedy in miniature: not two people embracing to waltz with perfect steps and swirling tux tails and a voluminous skirt; not an agile fox chasing a rabbit that outwits him at the last second by burrowing into the hole of a tree . . . instead, one tiny figure approaching another, clasping that person’s hand, both turning to face the viewer and to take a modest bow, then suddenly we see only the legs of one figure who levitates, the toes of tiny shoes dangling atop the page. Then nothing. Only the bride. White space.

Our flipping thumb runs out of space and time. We can only raise our first finger in the universal sign: a lesson must be learned.

Having learned it, I pass it on.

THE STROKE

“W
e don’t like the children.”

“We do love them, though.”

“Doesn’t matter. We want them to go away.”

“I don’t want Amity to go. She came all the way from Santa Cruz. And I’m sure she didn’t really want to come.”

“She criticized your new glass frames. Then she bragged about her vacation. We don’t like to hear about other people’s vacations.”

“The worst thing is that she’s still with that Andrew. How can she stand that braying voice? At least we didn’t have to hear about Turks and Caicos from him, talking through that big nose like it’s a megaphone.”

“Remember when the hurricane was coming and the police cars came around with recordings blasting, telling us to leave the island?”

“We were dancing inside Harry Burns’s new house. We just kept dancing. He had those expensive shutters that rolled down and locked, so we were inside with the lights on until they all went out.”

“Key West was such a disaster. It would have gotten more attention if New Orleans hadn’t been destroyed.”

“And our little Kenneth, living in the Garden District. He thinks we care that he’s gay, and we don’t care. We’ve run out of different ways to insist that we’re happy if he’s happy. He glowered even as a little child. Maybe his bad eyes are hereditary.”

“You should talk. Wouldn’t you know that your pigeon-toed walk would be exactly the way poor Amity perambulates. None of the other goslings ever walked that way. She imitated everything you did. She still holds her hand out like it’s got a cigarette in it, and you gave up smoking thirty years ago.”

“Don’t you like the way they all chipped in for presents? For, excuse me, modern things? You can bet Kenneth bullied them all into that.”

“I don’t want any of those things. I like to make tea with loose tea in a tea ball. I hate tea bags, and I certainly don’t need a machine to make tea.”

“It’s modern.”

“That did make him sound so gay, didn’t it? ‘You need some new things, some modern things.’ Jesus.”

“Do you think they’re trying to hear us? I always thought they were listening like little foxes when we were fucking. Now I guess they know we’re not doing that.”

“We could listen intently and see if any of them are masturbating.”

“No one does that in their parents’ house. They forget they have genitals.”

“And didn’t you think Henry went on a little too long about the failure of the human pyramid? No one wants people to fall at a circus, but that’s old news. I think he just didn’t know what to talk about.”

“He never got over not being accepted at your alma mater.”

“Most people would think Stanford was every bit as impressive as Yale.”

“Well, but he’s not as rich as his classmates. He’s still brooding about not making it off the wait list at Yale.”

“He and Kenneth don’t seem very buddy-buddy, the way they did when they were younger. Into their twenties, I mean. After that it seems Kenneth only wanted to talk about how the gay world operates, which I notice he’s finally shut up about.”

“They all get along. I was happy to hear that Amity thought she and Jason might visit Kenneth in Brooklyn.”

“He’s got a place big enough to hold the next circus.”

“I know. I still don’t understand how he could afford it, even with those two Russian girls living in the basement.”

“Garden apartment.”

“I don’t like euphemisms.”

“You have divinely dimpled thighs.”

“I have a major cellulite problem.”

“Let’s make noise so they think we’re fucking.”

“They wouldn’t think that. They’d think you were trying to strangle me, or something.”

“Speaking of which, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that you’ve got a scarf coiled around your throat even when you’re in your nightgown. As if I care about the tightness of the skin on your neck.”

“You wear lifts in your shoes.”

“I don’t. They’re orthotic inserts.”

“We love to bitch at each other, don’t we. Remember when we had real arguments? I hated your secretary. I still resent how bossy she was. Or I resent how cowardly you were in her presence. It bothered you so much that she was overqualified for the job. Why didn’t you hire someone unqualified?”

“Say that again. I like to see your expression when you say ‘unqualified.’ Also, may I ask why you’re suddenly sitting on the bed staring at me and acting like I’m obliged to be the evening’s entertainment?”

“Well, you’re a helluva lot better than having to sit out there with them watching
Breaking Bad
shows they missed. Though Amity isn’t. She’s knitting and trying to be sociable. I taught her some things too well.”

“I taught Kenneth to fish and he lost the fishing pole. And Amity crashed the car in driver’s ed. Remember that?”

“Don’t bring it up to her anymore, even if you do find it so funny. I’m serious about that.”

“Can’t you say ‘unqualified’ again?”

“Why don’t you have your pajamas on?”

“Because I’ve suddenly become very old and terribly tired. If I didn’t have a machine to brew my tea, I might never have the mental energy to make tea again. Let alone climb onto a riding mower. I’m senile, and I’m afraid of that big new shiny machine. It’d be like jumping onto the back of a bull.”

“Put your pajamas on.”

“I don’t think I’ll wear them anymore. I think I’ll skinny dip into bed.”

“I don’t care what you do, but I’m about to turn off the light.”

“We haven’t had our ritual!”

“That’s out. We’ve got to live in the modern world. We have to change our old habits. I see that now. I don’t care if you skip it tonight, but please do something other than mock the children’s good intentions.”

“You like the tea machine?”

“I do not. But I’m not fixated on it.”

“It will have to be visible when they Skype us!”

“They know perfectly well we’re never going to do that.”

“But Kenneth can be quite a nag, can’t he?”

“And you can be quite the chatterbox. Good night.”

“Oh, I’m just kidding. Let me take off all my clothes and throw them on the floor like the vile man I am, taking extra care to put my smelly socks on top of the pile . . . there . . . and hand me that hairbrush, if you’ll be so kind.”

She handed it to him. It was silver. Part of a vanity set that had belonged to her mother. No hair ever touched the bristles, which seemed misnamed, because they were as soft as down. He ran his fingers over them. It was a little gesture of warm-up, like a pianist stretching his fingers above a keyboard.

He held her foot in one hand, though she certainly had the strength to keep her foot in the air, but that was an old debate, and actually she was reassured by her total reliance on him. He placed the brush against the undersides of her toes and brushed down, slowly, only the first split second ever so slightly tickling; thereafter, she felt no such sensation. He brushed a hundred times, always stroking in the same direction, as if brushing hair. She trusted that he brushed her foot one hundred times because she’d long ago stopped counting. The stroking took away the ache in her elbow and the pain in her shoulder, and it dulled the pain behind her head, where the stitches had been taken against her will, after she tripped and fell. “Six stitches! They’re nothing! Only the tiniest bit of hair had to be shaved, and the other hair lies on top of it.” He’d held out the mirror, the silver mirror, which she’d taken in her hand but not been willing to look into, after turning her back to the mirror on the bureau. Now, as he stroked, she had a vision of the children when they were children: blurry and romanticized, not the crying, biting, pushy, and often wild-eyed creatures they’d been. They’d been one big snaggle, and in her worst moments she’d thought about how lovely it would be to just grab the clump of them and cut them out, no different than you’d cut out the unbrushable part of a dog’s matted ruff, worth doing sometimes even with a hopelessly knotted little clump of your own hair. Though she hadn’t. Only monstrous parents did that—or nowadays mothers put them in the car and drove into the water, eager to perish with them.

“Two hundred and six, two hundred and seven, two hundred and eight,” he murmured. It was a lie. One hundred strokes was all he’d do, that was it, but if his joke contained a little protest, she imagined he must be nearing the end.

MISSED CALLS

Dear Mr. Cavassa: I received both your letters, the first belatedly because it was sent to my Virginia address and only forwarded today. So my reluctance to talk about Truman Capote isn’t as great as you suspect in letter #2—just a problem of getting the mail at the right address. In #2 you say that you are working with a former student of mine who is digitalizing your archives. I remember Billie fondly and hope she is still writing those wonderful, subversive little vignettes. Your quote from Diane Arbus was wonderful (to the effect that we can’t despair, since we’re all we’ve got). I met her once, btw (as I now know to say), when I went to a surprise party for Dick Avedon. Blowing up balloons with her seemed easier than gushing admiration. Now, I wish we’d talked—though that sort of imbalance rarely results in anything long-lasting, in my experience. I was dating a friend of Avedon’s who took me to the party as a last-minute substitute when his mother developed a toothache. All more than you want to know. Capote I hardly knew at all, so I doubt that a trip to Maine would benefit you—though it’s not at all a question of my “finding time.” When would you like to meet? With best wishes, Clair Levinson-Jones.

Dear Clair (if I may), Thank you for the quick reply. I’ll be attending my goddaughter’s graduation from Bowdoin in early June, and if you could see me on either side of that—the 5th or 7th would be ideal—I would be grateful for a little of your time. If you’re so inclined, and there’s somewhere you like to have lunch, it would be my pleasure to have a meal together. I do understand how busy you must be, however—so even a glass of water and a few moments of conversation will be fine! Thank you again for getting back to me so quickly. All best, Terry.

Terry—the 7th is good, though there may be some banging because of a new sink being installed in the upstairs bathroom. Tell me approximately what time to expect you, so I will not be running an errand. Again, I hope that my very few recollections about Capote are not a disappointment, but you’ve been warned! With best wishes, Clair.

Noon, Clair, so I might take you to lunch? Anticipating meeting with great pleasure. Best, T.

Terry—I will look for you about noon. Dockside is a restaurant near the water that I sometimes go to, though lunch tends to be a meal I forget. And breakfast consists mostly of vitamins. Though perhaps it would be good to have a bit of midday fuel. It is slightly tricky to find, so come to the house and we’ll go together. Do you need any driving instructions? Best wishes, Clair.