A Theory of Relativity (9 page)

“And what if someone sees them, Lorraine. There have been enough car wrecks this week, Lorraine. And both of them are probably . . . their blood pressure is soaring. Ray looks like he’s on the verge of a stroke half the time anyhow. The man must be sixty pounds overweight.”

“Well then,” said Lorraine, “run out and stop them, then.” Mark rubbed his chin. Though he would later not recall having said the precise words, he told Lorraine and Nora, “Nothing would stop her.”

And it would be at that moment that something in Lorraine, some interior body that had lain supine, put its hands firmly on the arms of the chair and stood up.

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He felt like a thief entering the condominium.

He felt like a thief stealing into a tomb.

Hesitantly, Gordon made his way down the hall, keeping close to the walls, unwilling to leave marks in the thick carpeting. The place was stifling, hot air motionless and thick with smell. Gordon sniffed—lactobacil-lus. One of Keefer’s bottles, probably, moldering under the couch. Ray had not slept here for weeks. It would not have occurred to him, passing through, to crack the windows or to keep the air conditioner turned on low.

What had made Ray an athlete was his absolute inability to think of more than one thing at one time. Their friend Carl Jurgen used to say of Ray that all guys who play golf keep looking for the zone, the place where concentration is so utter that their swing wouldn’t falter if they stepped on a rake.

“But Ray’s there all the time, not just when he plays golf,” Jurgen complained.

Gordon was looking for clues, something to add to the words he had already written, which were clumsy and expected: “Today, we come here to say good-bye to Georgia O’Keeffe McKenna Nye, a long and remarkable name for a remarkable person who did not live long enough to grow into it. And to her husband, my brother-in-law, Raymond Nye, Junior, not such an unusual name, but simply a wonderful person (crossed out), he was simply one of the world’s great guys. We come to say that these two great (crossed out) wonderful (crossed out) . . . good and gentle people, who were blessings in our lives and in their own lives . . .” 51

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Gordon wasn’t a graceful writer at the best of times. How could he provide eloquence on demand now?

Georgia had bailed out his butt on every term paper he’d written in high school, and most of college. He’d done everything but dress in drag to take her finals in Chemistry for Poets. Georgia would not have stood for this hokey, half-hearted stumbling around. She would have demanded
drama
! Lights, casket, organ music, poetry! That she was not here, helping him out right now, was to Gordon proof that there was no afterlife.

The hall closet door stood half opened. Keefer’s tiny yellow rubber ducky boots tucked into Georgia’s red clogs, the huge old cardigan Aunt Nora had knitted, a horror of psychedelic pastels, which his sister loyally continued to wear, calling it “my matching sweater,” Ray’s wall of caps, each with the band expanded to the last possible notch. His brother-in-law’s head was so huge Jurgen once said that his golf cap looked like a thumbtack on a pumpkin. All ordinary objects were transformed into relics. One of Keefer’s politically correct wooden toys held down a stack of printouts about the Thisacillin or Thatamyicin doctors were eager to put into Georgia’s veins. Next to the toy was his sister’s tinkly ankle bracelet with bells, the one she used to wear with her swimsuit. Gordon remembered her asking, in a voice slurred with morphine syrups, for Ray to bring it to her parents’ house, because the sound would comfort the baby.

A cup that had contained coffee and . . . here it was, the milk that had gone bad . . . stood beside Ray’s datebook. The open entry, June 3, was for Georgia’s chemo. Slightly queasy, Gordon flipped ahead a few days. Block-printed across the spaces for a whole week later in the month were the words “Call lawyer.” That, and a note for September reminding Ray to schedule Keefer’s eighteen-month checkup, were the only entries. A litter of indistinct faxes from the Knockouts Tour were folded and stuck in a back pocket, along with a fast-food game card scribbled with what looked to be a shopping list: Garlic capsules, juice, molasses . . . Ray’s mom was the South’s lay minister of health food. Unopened bottles of herbal drops still lined the win-dowsill in Georgia’s old bedroom at his parents’ house, names more Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 53

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appropriate to a picnic than a war on cancer: dandelion, thistle, wild clover.

Gordon tried not to look at the hall gallery. He’d only a few hours left before the whole engine of mourning was set in motion. Once he saw the inside of Chaptmans Funeral Home, Gordon knew that any remnant of ability to concentrate would be torn away. He didn’t need distractions now.

There was Georgia in her gown with the twenty-two-foot train. Tim Upchurch had called it the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Maria. It was not one of the formal wedding portraits, but a candid, and Georgia loved it more than any of the others. In the photo, also, was Ray’s cousin Delia, who lived in Madison; she’d grown up with Ray nearly as a sibling and had made Ray’s move to the North bearable, and she had also been Georgia’s matron of honor and was Keefer’s godmother. She was quite the Bible-thumping pill, if Gordon recalled correctly—everything that could go wrong with a woman who was resolutely blond, resolutely Christian, and from Tampa. He could recall only one thing Georgia had ever said about Delia, “I like her. She really believes what she says.” In the photo, Delia was reverently holding up the end of the languid net of lace, holy beatitude in her face, but her teenage kid from her previous marriage—what was the kid’s name, Alyssa? Alexandra?—

was peeking through the huge fountain of bronze leaves and stands of creamy Japanese lilacs and bearded irises like some kind of wacky altar ornament, her plush red hair wild and her face a map of pure hellion glee.

Gordon thought idly, nastily, all that holiness did not evidently pre-clude divorce . . . but that was lousy. He barely knew Delia. Maybe she was a widow.

One space over, a photo of Ray and Georgia in the pool at their first apartment, that place in Titusville. (“Titsville,” Georgia had written, just after learning she was expecting a baby. “I’m the only woman in this whole complex under five feet ten and over a hundred and thirty pounds. You have to be an aerobics instructor or they won’t let you sign a lease.”) And the next shot, Ray holding newborn Keefer triumphantly overhead in one of his massive hands, as if she were the Stanley Cup.

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Then, Georgia’s framed collage: “Why You Are Keefer” (picture of the baby, in a felt bonnet sewn to look like a sunflower, with an arrow from that to a toddler picture of Gordon, grinning toothlessly, Georgia with one fat arm around him in a headlock. “Once There Was a Little Boy Who Could Not Say His Sister’s First Name.” How, Gordon now tried to remember, had he ever ended up calling Georgia “Keefie,” and not just when he was a tot, but until . . . what, sixth grade or so, when she threatened to belt him if he didn’t stop it? He still sometimes slipped up, especially after the baby was born, calling both of them

“Keefie.” Gordon put one of his hands over his eyes and jammed Ray’s day calendar into his back pocket.

This place. You couldn’t breathe. The air was greenhouse quality.

That morning, awakening fully dressed on top of his comforter, Gordon had written in his spiral notebook, “Party girl, rowdy girl, dutiful daughter, rebellious daughter, perfect sister, sister tormentor, best friend, generous, and idealistic,” and “Georgia took no prisoners. It took the magic of Raymond Nye, Junior, to accomplish the transforma-tion. But if Ray was here, and I wish he were here, he’d tell you that he knew just who was boss.” It sounded like some awful roast at the Elks Club.

He should be making Georgia sound like Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa, but how could he pretend his sister had meant very much to the world in general? She hadn’t. She’d had no time to redeem her life. All she’d done was love Ray and reproduce and help her brother out and make their folks happy . . . the only loss Gordon could truly feel was his own.

They would never again stand behind Dad’s back and mimic the way he stuck his knees up like a heron when he walked. Georgia would never again send Gordon his Christmas present two weeks early, because she just couldn’t wait, and then call him and make him open it while she was still on the phone. They would never again get stoned and have to wait so long for a table at Fast Eddie’s that they’d start eating from the bus trays. Georgia would never again hear her baby say

“Keefer.”

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sad. This whole ceremonial attempt was a physical effort, like hauling up a lobster pot, hand over hand, and just as deceptive. Water was so much heavier than anything you could swallow and see through had a right to be. Carl Jurgen used to complain about it, the summer that he and Ray and Gordon spent living alone in the Evans Scholars house, running the pots for the tiny old man who owned Leo’s Sea Subs.

The thought that came to him, as he stood poised between staying longer and getting the hell out of there, would have sounded overblown if not suspicious to anyone else, but Georgia would have understood it.

And maybe Ray would have, too. Georgia had probably been the real reason that his bond with his two dozen dearly and temporarily beloved girlfriends had never deepened beyond the well-rehearsed routine of date at the symphony, Italian dinner, first sex, regular sex, camping trip, denouement. Georgia had taken up more room in his life than a sister should have taken. Even good old loyal Lindsay Snow had rounded on him once and said, angrily, “You dote on every word she says!”

He hadn’t doted on every word Georgia had said. But her phone number in Florida was the only number besides his parents’ he’d ever committed to memory. He and Georgia had, of course, gone through that teenage stage when the esteem of peers had been paramount; but she, and a few others, were most of what Gordon required in the way of intimacies. Tim Upchurch and Pat Chaptman were as close to him as cousins, closer than his own cousins were. Then there was Jurgen, and of course, Ray. But there had never seemed to be any good reason to try to explain himself to a woman, or to discuss intellectual puzzles with anyone but his father, or emotional puzzles with anyone but Georgia.

There had never been a need to discuss anything with his mother.

She read his mind.

All his time had been consumed by taking care of Georgia or Keefer.

Those nights he stole for Lindsay, he’d had to all but literally bite his tongue to keep from asking whether they could skip the preliminaries and go to bed. It was true that Gordon had begun investigating a tempting offer from Tortoise Tours, a new outfit that took families on tours to places like the Galapagos. He’d joined a ski and climbing club Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 56

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in Wausau and endured the chatter because the women were succulent to look at if not to listen to. And he’d been out, with Lindsay or Tim or one of the girls Tim called his aqua-bunnies, on most weekend nights.

But stupid as it was, he always felt safer when he came home to a blinking answering machine light. He always called back. Georgia always talked to him, even if he woke her up. Half the time, he’d just drive over there. Sometimes, the birds were talking by the time they fell asleep.

Gordon had rationalized, when Georgia got really ill, that the time he spent sponging her and helping her make her tapes and reading
Wuthering Heights
to her would compensate for the scattered days they would have shared over the course of forty more years—a sprinkling of holidays, a family trip or two. Why had he not taken better care to think of what he’d say when this time came. Why had he not asked Georgia for help? Would she have delighted in the sly mischief of writing her own memorial? Part of him thought so. Would the effort, with its bald admission of defeat, have been so unbearably poignant the two of them could never have borne it?

And yet, Gordon’s memories of his sister were all her version. Georgia was custodian of boxes of blackmail-quality photographs from childhood. Gordon had a single eighteen-by-twenty frame of family snaps, chosen (by Georgia) to represent their lives together, and a shoebox full of semiseductive photos taken of or by girlfriends. It also contained a college graduation card that read, “Way to Go!! Who Says Hard Work Doesn’t Pay Off?” with a laminated fourth-grade science test, grade D-plus. Any stories he couldn’t tell to his mother, he’d taken to Georgia. About the ER intern in Colorado who treated his broken tail-bone and ended up taking him home with her for a week, about the girl he taught who thought animals with split hooves had roots.

Gordon ventured into their bedroom. Georgia’s wedding dress, in its heavy-duty plastic bag, took up the space of three men’s parkas. On a shelf, under a couple of half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, Gordon uncovered an oversized, full-color book of photos, “Compromise and Positions: A Hot Guide for Cool Couples.” Absently, he opened and closed drawers. Georgia’s nursing bras. The big old Knock-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 57

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outs promotional T-shirts she slept in. Ray’s boxer shorts, the size of small backpacker tents . . . Christ, he’d been a big guy. For a crystalline instant, he could see Ray on the fourth tee at Pelican Point, waiting for him and Jurgen, hacky-sacking the ball with his driver, bouncing it around, never letting it drop, Ray’s excruciatingly slow, metronomically precise swing—Tempo Ramundo, they called him, recalling Ray Floyd—the shot cleaving the exact middle of the sky. “That’s no balota,” Jurgen would say, clasping his hands as if in prayer, “thass a bullet.” The horrible pity of trespass swamped him—the dead had no privacy. When he was old, he would burn his every intimate scrap and document. Which would probably amount to that same shoebox full of photos. He pictured himself, a bent, silver-haired man in cargo shorts, poking a tiny bonfire.