A Theory of Relativity (10 page)

Helplessly, he thought of Georgia and how she’d been unable to keep her hands out of the back of Ray’s tuxedo pants even during the reception, of Ray shaking him awake the morning after his and Georgia’s second date, “You and me got to have a word, Bo. Did she call you?”

“Ray, it’s nine a.m.”

“But did she call you yet? About me?”

“Didn’t you just come from there?” And then the realization. Sleep parting for amusement. “Did you spend the night there?” Ray shaking his head, shaking Gordon’s shoulder, shaking off his prying, a blush spreading up from his jaw, possessing his whole face.

“We sat up all night. On the beach. I never felt like this before.

This is the real one, Bo,” he said. “I want you to sit up here and tell me everything about her. All the TV shows she used to like. What she’s scared of, like bugs or snakes. Like, what’s her favorite color and was there, you know, was there a guy before me that she really, you know . . .” At their wedding, leaning over to whisper to him, as they waited for the opening notes, “I love her more than my own life, Bo.” At the end of the reception, Georgia running back in blue jeans to kiss him good-bye, him standing there rumpled, resentful, drunk and blinking under the sudden lights that signaled the party was over, her cheerful
kiss me so you don’t miss me
. .
.

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Just before Gordon took his month’s family leave from school, he’d awakened one night at his parents’ house. It had been a cold spring weekend when Ray was home, but scheduled to take off early the following morning for Atlanta, so Gordon had slept over in anticipation of watching the baby while his mother took Georgia to the doctor. In the middle of the night, alarmed by noises from the hall, Gordon stumbled out to find Ray, carrying a blanket-bundled Georgia in his arms, his foot wedging the front door open.

Gordon blurted, “Is she sick? Are you taking her to the hospital?”

“No, no,” Ray smiled, genial and calm. “We’re just taking a drive.”

“A drive?”

“She can’t sleep. And it’s the anniversary of when we got engaged, Bo. Two years since the night she said yes. We’re going to drive out to Hat Lake and look at the stars . . . maybe fool around. We’re still newly-weds, after all . . .” Gordon took in Georgia’s thin arm, bruised from her endless blood draws, dangling from a fold of the blanket, her dozy smile, and was struck speechless. There was so much he could respect, but not understand.

His last long conversation with Georgia had been a fight. It had been . . . Thursday. No, the previous weekend. Certainly since the little stroke that had put her in the hospital for a week, an ominous marker that the end was closing in. She’d been cranky, short tempered, who wouldn’t have been? Coughing and puffing—it was in her lungs, now, the doctor said, in her bones, and Gordon had thought, only Georgia would consider telling him off as being a good use of her last breaths.

She’d started in, did he realize what other people would give to be like him? She had said he was like a people savant, memorizing the human phone book at first glance. He got dates out of wrong numbers, from picking up packages people dropped in parking lots. A girl had written him thanking him for taking her virginity. People stuck to him the way Sargasso stuck to turtle grass at the beach.
Man, woman, and dog,
they fall in love with you
, she’d said,
and you take them for granted. You
don’t work for it. What you’re good at is being loved
. .
.

“You have a thousand friends, Georgia,” he’d said.

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“But I had to work for them. I figure forty beers per one friend.

Twenty pounds per dozen.”

“I work at it too. I’m nice to people.”

“You let people be nice to you. You work out, so people will have something nice to look at. You have experiences, so you can tell people about them. That’s your big gift to the world, Gordie. You are your gift . . .” She’d paused, breathing so deeply and slowly Gordon thought she’d fallen asleep. “You have to make Keefer be just like you.” He’d thought, I didn’t hear that. He and Georgia were dog and cat—he, active, agile, more competitive at everything than skilled at anything, she the laziest nonmale he’d ever known, who had never walked anywhere she could drive, who called him Pectoralisaurus.

Georgia hated pain so much she wouldn’t even get a back rub. For the past two hundred days and loose change, the grit she had summoned in her suffering had amazed him.

“You hope Keefer is like me?”

“I hope she’s like you. It’s all easy for you.”

“This isn’t easy for me.”

“Easier for you than me,” she’d said.

“No, not really.”

She’d turned her wasted face against the pillow and smiled at him.

“I didn’t mean that. I know it isn’t.”

“I think she’ll be like Ray,” Gordon had said.

“Well, she won’t,” his sister replied. “That’s not my wish.” Georgia let her eyes drift to one of the prints Lorraine had framed for her in childhood, an early O’Keeffe, a pansy so luxuriant it seemed the very paper would be velvety to the touch. “I don’t want her to be the kind of person who cares so much about love that she can’t let go. It was her

. . .” Georgia sighed. Talking was a breathtaking task for her.

“Her?”

“Her, Georgia O’Keeffe her. She said, um, don’t be the kind of person who loves, because it will . . . chew you up and swallow you whole.

I wish for her to be good at being loved. Can you do that one thing?

Can you make her like that?”

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What had she meant?

Was there something wrong with him? Was he too into himself? He was a teacher, for Pete’s sake. Teachers were altruistic. He contributed to every environmental cause on the globe. He was not selfish. Or was he? Why did he prefer to let all his interactions skim instead of sink in?

That wasn’t true. He and Tim had been friends for fifteen years. He and Lindsay . . . well. Would he want to infect Keefer with a vaccine against caring too much? But otherwise, he’d have been engaged ten times already.

Okay . . . some of it was bullshit. He’d cultivated a shy, wistful demeanor for the purpose of breaking up with girls. Tim called it the Velvet Cad. He’d make dreamy open-ended remarks about his basic immaturity, about the real possibility of his moving to Australia. He’d mastered a shrug . . . slow, expressive, as if redolent of regret over his own inability to commit. He left a door slightly open. He might become more seasoned with time. . . . It worked like hypnosis. Women who should have wanted to burn him in effigy were magically content to remain his friends. That was a great relief. Why shouldn’t it be? He valued those women, even more so after they’d let him go, when his memories of them were rinsed of the jittery tedium of long dinners, TV

shows endured entwined on a series of couches, hair spray against his cheek. What he loved to remember were their bodies all so different, soft or taut, mounded or convex, rolling and bobbing, rising and falling, nipples spreading like the secret stained hearts of flowers, so many varieties of poppies and lilies. He loved them all, still, in retrospect. How could he fail to be genuinely happy when he saw them again? Why would they ever think that his smile, his welcome, even his physical affection, in the moment, meant he wanted them to share, again, more than memories? But they always thought that. And he always had to be a thug again, a person who carefully returned only the third phone call, and then breezily.

He wasn’t a thug.

He was a thug.

For Christ’s sake, he was young!

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here? EnviroTreks had been like a floating Shangri-la of nonchalant sex, easy fitness, learning, and teaching . . . why had he come home? His mother had written him about the job opening at the high school.

Why? He had wanted to come home for the baby’s birth; why hadn’t he just sent a fruit basket?

There was nothing wrong with him. He had his friends, his beautiful old 1972 Fender that he was finally learning to play, his students, the occasional bright bulb among the mumbling throng of turnips. He was not lonely.

That was what was wrong with him.

He would be lonely . . . now.

Eager to close up this place, to run, Gordon riffled through her desk, her bookshelf, and her jewelry armoire, finding another copy of her will stuck in a folder of scrawled notes, notes that, so far as he could tell, dealt with Georgia’s suspicion that Keefer had allergies. A pamphlet from an agency in Boston called Families United. He had never heard of it. He snatched these up. This place. You couldn’t breathe.

The air was greenhouse quality.

Why did he care so much, in point of fact, what he said at the funeral? Who’d be taking notes? The only things he was now able to think of were so poignant he would not be able to make his mouth say them without crying. (“She said yes, Bo! Can you believe that? You got to be my best man. I’m so happy I could shit.”) They would be vulgar or meaningless. Except to the two people who would never hear Gordon say them.

Damn Georgia.

She and Ray had an entire life that had nothing to do with him, but she had also not wanted to surrender her eminence in her brother’s landscape. She had been as selfish as he.

She had been.

She’d wanted the gratitude. Honor thy sister, who rescues you on a regular basis from the otherwise swift and direct results of your own slack-witted tendencies. Remember the First Date Recipe, for angel hair and broccoli, she’d be saying.

She hadn’t done it all for gratitude.

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She had loved him and tried to color in his blank spots, out of love.

He was thankful she’d come home. He was thankful he’d come home. What if she’d died in Florida? She’d grown to hate the South as much as Ray loved it. (“Sex on the Beach,” she wrote to her brother once, referring to a cocktail popular at the time in local bars, “is a real oxymoron. When I watch
Here to Eternity,
all I can think about is the sand in her crotch.”) Even Ray could not have convinced Georgia to raise her baby there. Gordon imagined how it would be now, if all of them had had to troop down there to bring Keefer and all of her para-phernalia home.

He locked the door behind him and drove the few blocks to his own apartment. His lair. His slum. Opening the door, throwing himself down on his couch, he imagined Georgia saying,
remember the time you
wanted to impress somebody but you couldn’t get home and I cleaned the
whole place and even put my CDs in the player, even though I was eight
months pregnant?

That was one thing he could say. Marriage had remade her. Domesticated the girl who often purchased her outfit on the way to a party and dressed in the car. She became this sweetheart who not only cooked, but baked sourdough from a Nye family starter, who not only cleaned, but hand-covered a whole wall with quilted textile. She’d taken an interest in remodeling, her brother as well as her condo. Gordon, who’d never in his life owned more than two pairs of shoes, and one of those for running, who bought and wore out the identical four pairs of Lands’ End corduroys each year, was taken shopping for real slacks, Italian loafers, and a pillow-top mattress that sat on an actual frame, instead of on the floor. She’d made him feel like a hobo, a parody bachelor with his single set of silverware, his guitar, his bike propped against his scuba tank in his living room, and his unframed blowups of his underwater photos of Cod Hole at the Great Barrier Reef thumbtacked to the wall.

He had never really thanked her. In fact, he’d pretended he was the one doing her a favor, letting her work out her hormonal excesses, in Ray’s absences, on her poor single-guy brother.

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moved back to Tall Trees, before Keefer was born and new life collided with new peril, that had been the time when they had finally come par-allel, after a lifetime in which one had pulled ahead and glanced back, and then the other overtook and surged ahead. They had been eye to eye, and so close.

It had almost made him forgive her growing up, so all at once, so without him.

And now she had gone on ahead, without him, again.

His phone rang. Gordon realized he had nearly fallen asleep.

He let it ring through to the machine. There were twenty-three unplayed messages on the tape, a few that he’d heard come in. Women.

His cousin Dan. A couple from students, which touched him deeply, and three from Tim, who seemed to think he should come over or Gordon would kill himself. “Hey,” said his own slow voice, picking up, his before voice, ready for anything. “Depending on who you are, leave a message for either Gordon or Mr. McKenna, and don’t make it your life story.” Lindsay’s voice filled the room with its urgency.

“Gordon? Gordo? It’s me. I guess you’re not there, but if you need me . . .”

Lindsay could help me write this, he thought. Lindsay and Georgia had been friends since they were children. He picked up the phone, and said nothing. “Gordo? Is that you?”

There was no one who could help him. He put the receiver back in its cradle and let himself drift again.

His father had slept twelve hours straight after identifying Ray and Georgia.

Gordon had offered to do it in his stead, but after an hour of thinking it over, Mark had gone alone to the morgue.

All he had seen, he told Gordon, and told him reluctantly, was a close-up color photo of Georgia’s left hand, with its green diamond engagement ring, pale and unmarked except by the big sickle-shaped scar she’d gotten when they were little, fighting over a croquet mallet, breaking it in half. Then, softly lit behind a plateglass window, they’d shown him the side of Ray’s face that was most intact. The rest of Ray’s head and body had been layered in clean sheets. “But you could see Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 64