A Theory of Relativity (48 page)

Its smell was not of his mother. It smelled like the Sharpie she’d used to draw.

The grave had been decorated with an abundance of late-summer flowers, mums and stargazers and tiger lilies—Nora was relentless; he was surprised she hadn’t managed a UAW sticker for Labor Day. It was apparent, however, that no one had been around for days. The mums had been plucked featherless by the wind, and the lilies were parched in their empty Mason jar. Behind the stone, the scraggly small pine that had been wound with a sprinkling of white lights on a battery box had succumbed, the few remaining needles a toasty brown blanket on the ground. Georgia O’Keeffe McKenna. Raymond Jasper Nye.

Beloved Wife and Mother. Beloved Husband and Father.

Gordon easily uprooted the tiny, dead tree. It snapped in his hand.

Under the needle drift there had been a litter of bulbs from the twinkle lights. He’d crushed them. They lay sparkling in the late-day rays alongside tatters of ribbons: yellow, violet, silver, which seemed bent on working their way into the earth, graftings for a bush that would bloom with memorial wreaths. All around the grave was festive, forgone litter.

It looked like a fairground after the carnival had closed.

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Tim called it the Hotel California because you could check out anytime you liked, but you could never leave. The first time they tried to open the doors from the inside, they discovered the old wood had swollen so tightly it took two of them to budge them.

For all that, Gordon’s domain was not so bad. The appliances, set off in one corner behind a ridiculous red velvet drape, were startlingly out of keeping—a big, handsome fridge and a newer gas stove alongside a steel sink that roared like some subterranean beast whenever Gordon turned the faucet on. The kitchen and the shower wedged in under an unused attic staircase were surprisingly serviceable. All the appliances belonged to the damned hippie squatters, his father’s friend had informed Gordon, and he would be switched if he let them take a damned thing out of the house before he got a goddamned rent check.

Gordon was welcome to use them so long as he paid the utility.

The view from the front porch made up for the hot and cold running ants. It was staggering, a hemisphere of sky and tree that stretched to the shadowy gray scalloped rim of the Blue Mounds more than ten miles distant. Bats
krred
and swallows crisscrossed in the twilight, while he and Tim sat nursing bottles of ale and sore shoulders, tipped back on a folding chair and a single orphaned recliner. They’d spent two hours in pitched battle with the doors.

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Patting the arm of the pink velvet recliner the squatters had left behind, Tim said, “This chair belongs here, Gordo. It really sets the tone, porch-furniture wise. A real piece of resistance. Confirms you as trailer trash.”

Gordon agreed, “Right you are, my man. People will take me for an Upchurch.”

“Where do you think people actually go to deliberately
buy
things like this?”

“Tall Trees,” Gordon said.

Gordon’s mother blew her top when she later saw it. Overstuffed furniture on the outside porch? She insisted he let them buy him a simple wooden Adirondack chair, at least. “This is like . . . a redneck,” she told him.

“I like it, though. Probably the legacy of my blood relatives,” Gordon told her affably. Lorraine grimaced. Had she been twenty years younger, she’d have given him the finger.

He had let them buy him a set of plastic plates with sections. As a child, he had liked keeping his peas separate from his chicken, and he thought Keefer might like that, too.

As the weeks passed, he came to rely on two polestars, Keefer nights and the view.

He and Keefer liked to sit outside watching the hills disappear, singing the batty-bat song from
Sesame Street
. That peace alone, on a fall night, was worth the rent, which was the steady ache in Gordon’s back and arms from days—after he’d gotten work subbing—nights of scraping and sanding and painting walls thick with generations of gunk. It was archaeological, the layers of flocked fleur-de-lis, natty navy blue stripes, pink paint and white paint and paint the color of ripe pumpkins he unearthed as he tried to strike plaster without destroying it. Something had instructed his predecessors at the house in the doc-trine of redecoration without regret. Even the exterior of the house had been sided insanely, blue aluminum right over the remnants of beige aluminum. When he thought about what might be under the beige, and suspected it might be asbestos, Gordon quaked. But asbestos was no danger to anyone unless it was disturbed. By the time anyone dis-Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:12 PM Page 325

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turbed these walls, Gordon would be living in a sane, cheaply built apartment in some modern anonymous complex, where he would listen to the bathroom intimacies of people on the other side of his eighth-inch drywall, and they would listen to him having sex, if he ever did that. He did not expect it would be soon. He’d told Tim, only last week, he was sure that if he ever had sex again, he’d cry out his own name.

Four weeks melted. The walls were painted a serene, washable white Keefer could scribble on with her wax crayon sticks, something he allowed her to do without reproving her, fuck Delia’s wallpaper. The hardwood plank floor that had underlain the piss-perfumed shag could have been refinished, and he longed to see how it might have looked oiled and shining; but this was not his house. He settled for sweeping.

His mattress on the floor faced the largest of the windows, and he’d calculated that the sun hit his face full, waking him, a few minutes past six. He could work every day he wanted to work, and the pay, though not a king’s ransom, would stand him well into a few months’ rent, if he put away something. By the time that ran out, his student loan checks would have begun to arrive. He’d been accepted into the three-year program that would lead directly from his bachelor’s to a capital
P
and a small
h
and a capital
D
behind his name. He had no idea whatsoever what he planned to do with his advanced degree once he had it. He trusted time to reveal. Substitute teaching had introduced him to morsels of everything, from leading self-conscious, complaining junior girls on a mile-long jog to grinning like a chimp at kids from Poland and Laos through four days of English as a second language.

What he missed was having students of his own, and he knew that he would have ample opportunity to teach, teach regularly, during grad school. He dreamed of resuming life as a student as well. He would welcome the routine of chapters and projects, labs and deadlines. It would make his days finite, predictable. From that imposed security, he planned to flex the muscles of his autonomy, to see how far they stretched before they caught.

Twice, and with utmost care, Gordon had written to Lindsay, breezy informational letters about his painting travails, about the entomologi-Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:12 PM Page 326

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cal fauna that greeted him each night when he tried to sleep. When he came to the closing, he dithered. Love? Your friend? He’d finally settled on, “I’m thinking about you . . .” She had not written back, which sad-dened him. He checked his mail twice daily, hoping for a letter from her. Four times, he had lifted the telephone to call her, then replaced it after dialing the numbers. On nights when he woke chilled from a sudden turn in the weather, he ached for her clean, freckled, gently curving spine. Once, with a few beers in him, he had called Michelle Yu. But their first rush of greetings had subsided to empty air within a few minutes. He’d closed with a promise to look her up at Christmas, a promise that sounded halfhearted even as he spoke it.

He’d let Keefer color or build with blocks on the porch until darkness and the bugs drove them inside. He had no television, nor did he think one would work if he had one, and his library amounted to Georgia’s old copy of
Wuthering Heights, Goodnight Moon,
and
Pat the Bunny
, which Gordon tried to edit every time they began it, deleting the references that bruised him, to Daddy’s beard and Mummy’s wedding band, though Keefer invariably led him back, insistently pointing to the pages he skipped until he read them. They counted cars, his niece gravely holding up one finger, then two. It took forever to get to ten, the volume of traffic, even at five in the afternoon, on his quiet country road outside Oregon, Wisconsin, as bustling as a Sunday midnight in Tall Trees.

“That’s a Dodge, Keefe,” he would tell her. “That’s an Audi.” Using her left hand, she would laboriously uncurl her stubborn ring finger to make three, then gleefully pop up her pinkie to make four, the goofy O

of her generous mouth so like the signal face Georgia would make to mock an adult behind that adult’s back that Gordon nearly cried. It had given him hope, the easy relief he felt the first time he picked Keefer up at Craig and Delia’s. She had galloped out the front door, easily negotiating the steps with legs that seemed to have grown six inches since he last saw her, and leaped into his arms. She’d been out of sorts, lonely, Craig said, or so he supposed, with Delia in the hospital and Alex, who was now a sophomore, consumed with the rapture of her first real boyfriend and the chance to get away with almost anything she wanted to now that Craig had far more than Alex’s curfew on his mind.

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Gently, that first time, so as not to alarm Craig, Gordon had suggested that Keefer spend more time with him. His place was no palace, but he would gladly refuse the occasional job to have her more often.

Warming up to it, he’d told Craig about the barn kittens that wandered over from the working farm next door. Keefer would love chasing them. Something in Craig’s face warned him he’d gone too far. Craig’s mother had gone back home, but she was planning on coming for a long stay soon. And Diane was usually free, between driving Big Ray back and forth to his cardiac rehab appointments. They were all fine, Craig assured Gordon. The baby, a boy, was due in two weeks. They were monitoring Delia closely, as her blood pressure was way up and the threat to the baby real. They could take the baby anytime, Craig said. He told Gordon that Keefer got a kick out of watching the heart-beat blips on Mommy’s monitor. Gordon had been able to suppress his wince and wait until they were back out at his house before pulling the Jesus Saves T-shirt off over Keefer’s head. The little shirts and pajamas he’d brought with him in Georgia’s old doll trunk were tight and short on Keefer. But his mother had made a power sweep at Target when she’d arrived, buying Keefer a season’s worth of clothing in forty minutes. They chose brightly colored waffle fabric mix-up-anyway tops and bottoms, like baby long johns, the kind Gordon favored, his laundry capacity now limited by his willingness to drive to the E-Wash coffee store, computer lair, and laundromat ten miles away on East Washing-ton Avenue in Madison.

Over scallops, Diane Nye assured Lorraine and Mark were the good kind, flown in from her very own seafood merchant in Jupiter, Ray had made a stalwart apology for the pain his kin had caused Lorraine and Mark, and especially Gordie. Big Ray had aged ten years, the weight he’d piled on since the accident having deserted him since his heart troubles, leaving him looking more than ever like a sad hound whose jowls shuddered when he spoke, according to Lorraine’s report. Neither of them had known what to say about Delia’s dangerous condition, about the process of adoption Craig had suspended. They’d eaten hurriedly, nodded politely at the Nyes’ bizarre offer to give Gordie any kind of help he needed in Madison, murmured agreement with Ray’s vow to Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:12 PM Page 328

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behave as grandparents should, stay out of the young folks’ way, thanked Diane for the copies she’d had made of Keefer’s recent baptism as a child of the Congregational Church. They had then joined hands and quickstepped for the door, rushing into the squalor of Gordon’s dilapidated farmhouse, staying late, even though they had available their own perfectly comfortable and air-conditioned hotel room. Mark had expressed some concern about Gordon’s locks, but was reassured when he realized that no one could get in or out except by main force.

Lorraine had promised to mail Gordon a fire extinguisher. He had told his mother that such things were, indeed, available in Madison, too.

Gordon had no life.

The gym teacher at the school he subbed at most often, Madison Middle, was a hearty, deceptively delicate-looking blonde in her forties and had invited him to join her softball league, strictly pickup, though with some mighty moves out there. He’d gone once, his body delight-ing in the release of competition and exercise, his heart protesting at the absence of Sweeney and Church and the Wild Rose Chuggers. He paid for a two-week trial membership at a gym and watched herds of fetchingly flushed women in sports halters eye him from the margins of the track. After two visits, he had no spirit to return. He began taking long walks at night, observing that the darker the field, the fewer the bugs, rambling along the lanes between the contained bustle of subdivisions and the lonelier lights of scattered farmhouses.

The tiny dairy outfits just east of him and across the road were owned by twin brothers, big, rangy men who had to be eighty years old, so similar in every feature that Gordon had believed they were one person until he saw them together, one morning at sunrise, strolling past his mailbox.

One twin was called Ferris. His brother was Larry. One stifling Sunday, Ferris had shown up and announced himself with a smart knock and spent the day helping Gordon paint. “Just don’t call me Ferry, is all I ask,” he said, becoming quietly grieved when Gordon offered to pay him something. The house Gordon lived in had once belonged to Ferris’s much older brother, Stuart. “He passed a few years ago,” the old man told Gordon, and added, as if by way of explanation, “He wasn’t a twin.” Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:12 PM Page 329