And West Is West (12 page)

CHAPTER 20

Florida

Dear Jessica,

Though your last letter is five months old and contained but a newspaper clipping and no return address I am still trying. Once a month I send a letter general delivery to the San Bernardino post office that postmarked your envelope. I would not be having to tell you this if every one of those letters did not come back to me stamped RETURN TO SENDER.

Why do I not stop writing? My faith in you tells me we will somehow connect again. When that happens I will offer these returned letters as proof that I am no longer the unreliable father who was not there to see you grow or be your mothers support. By the way you should not blame her for running off. She learned that trick from me. When I heard she had left I almost went to get you. But staying with an aunt and cousins was better for a twelve-year-old than being raised by the lost person I was then. I never visited you fearing I would spirit you away if I did. I HAD to let you go.

And now even though you are not receiving my letters I CANT let you go.

The selfish reason for this is that I have nothing better to do than scribble words on paper.
The better reason is that I want to be your example of what not to be. My hope is to keep you from giving up on yourself the way I did when my life started going south. A cell I can pace with five steps is where that attitude brought me.

But enough of the pity party. You still have a life and so do I. And things are not so bad in here. My cellmate Ector Ramirez has begun to teach me some Spanish guitar. Have you ever heard Malagueña (thank Ector the professor for the spelling)? I was never a real smooth picker but when I was young I could jangle a tune. This song though is a complicated animal. And as we only have one instrument and because of regulations only one hour a day to strum I practice on a neck made out of a paint stirrer. After lights out I take up my practice board until the sound of tapping makes the professor shush me.

One more piece of news that is neither good or bad. My Hail Mary appeal is dust. This is no tragedy because it was an unlikely hope that my public defender would admit to screwing up at my trial. Maybe though I was denied not for lack of evidence but because the warden thinks I am a loon for writing to myself. Time and again I mail off these letters to you only to get them back a few weeks later. But maybe this is not crazy. Even if you have not read them my minders have. I can tell from the taped envelope flaps. So I aint just talking to myself here. Be sure to keep this in mind if my letter gets through and you choose to write. I would sooner smash my fingers with a brick than do anything else to hurt you.

Your loving father,

Don

CHAPTER 21

California

“The house is a wreck and it's in a neighborhood from hell, but it's yours,” Miss Shelly says, getting close to a topic Jessica refuses to discuss. “I spoke with Newt's brother and he don't want it. Says he has enough stuff to work on.”

Jessica looks away from her friend.

“Honey,” Shelly says, “There's a notary here and it would be better if we take care of the paperwork before I'm too weak.”

Out under the jacaranda at the hospice, Jessica picks at blades of grass while a breeze waves the branches overhead. She had known that Shelly was not well on the day they had met. But she didn't know then that Newt's bad back was metastasizing cancer. He is gone. Soon Shelly will be. It's her choice.

“Come on, Jessie. I'd like to do this for you. I know Newt would have wanted to, too. Why you stayed with us through all this is a mystery. But I'm grateful. I've got to do something for you.”

Looking up at Shelly, withered and yellow, her oxygen breather shut off and dangling from her neck while she sips from a shrinking, pencil-thin joint, Jessica wants to tell her there is no mystery. She has stayed because too many of the people in her life were not there when she needed them.

“What do you say?” Miss Shelly asks.

Jessica's only line of defense is reproach. “Why don't you go back on dialysis? Why don't you get in line for a kidney?”

“I'm not a good prospect, not with stage four hep C. My liver's tanking, too.”

They had never talked about Shelly's decision to die. Shelly hadn't even told Jessica that she was going off dialysis. Jessica's cheeks are damp now and she wipes one with the side of a fist. She takes the joint from Shelly's lips, sucks at it, and coughs.

“You should give up those damn Marlboros,” Miss Shelly says.

Jessica extinguishes the remainder of the joint, a roach now, by licking it. Then she swallows the roach, like Newt taught her. Also thanks to Newt she doesn't have to worry about getting weed. Shelly and she could never burn through all the cannabis hanging in the shed.

The two women get down to business. Shelly fills out checks for the bills Jessica has brought—bills for the house's electricity, water, telephone; bills for the private hospice charges. Even at this point Miss Shelly is meticulous with her figures, like the CPA she was studying to be. When she's done with her bookkeeping she gives Jessica a serious look.

“Jessie, you are the most goddamn responsible person I know. I want you to start taking care of all this stuff for me.” She offers Jessica her checkbook. “There's not a lot a bread in the account but I signed a bunch of blanks. Guess I'd better kick soon or they'll be moving me to a public bed.”

BACK AT THE
house Jessica collects the day's mail and drops it on the dining room table. It's mostly bills, including past due notices from several of Newt's doctors. While Jessica contemplates the figures, his ghost watches her from his old chair. Then Skittles sits up and her golden eyes pose a question.

“What do you want, girl?” Jessica asks her.

Skittles makes a hum in the back of her throat.

“You don't really think I should write checks for these?” Jessica says. “If I do and Miss Shelly is still alive in three months, there won't be enough for her hospice. She'll be sent to a hospital that won't be half as nice as where she is. Is that what you want?” Lately Jessica has begun to have many one-sided conversations with Skittles.

Across the table, Newt's ghost smiles.

“What do I do?” she asks of the burly shadow. “You know I don't want anyone to find me yet. You know I don't care about the money. I'd tap my old bank account in a second to pay this pile of bills. But that would put me on the map, send me out of this safe place you made for me.”

Newt's gentle eyes remind Jessica of what he had whispered in her ear toward the end—that with her around it was easier for him to let go, since he knew that Shelly would not be alone. He reminds her that she is responsible for Shelly.

“Okay,” Jessica says, her relief palpable. “You're right. You're absolutely right, Newt.”

At the sound of his name, Skittles lifts her head, confused at the attention Jessica is giving to an empty chair. But Jessica knows that Newt is there and what he wishes her to do.

THE NEXT MORNING
Jessica drives to the Bank of America monolith in downtown San Bernardino. She gives up her name, account PIN, her social security number, her former address on a Nevada Air Force base, a current address that she lies about, and she is finally allowed access to her military savings. From a nervous teller she requests money orders for the doctor's bills she's brought along. Exiting, Jessica cuts between a pair of surprised businesswomen, who step back and gawk at her, she imagines, as they would at Bonnie Parker making a gunpoint withdrawal. Or do they just see some kind of street trash?

That's how Jessica lately has begun to feel under the gaze of middle-class eyes, dressing as she does in jeans and a tank top. She hasn't taken scissors to her hair since her Air Force discharge and it has grown wild down to her shoulders, almost Rastafarian. And, after Newt's death, she had let Miss Shelly ink her arms with a wild cosmology—the right with jungle flora, the left with Maori spirals. But does her appearance deserve those glances? Are they even real? Or is this silent tsking that follows her of her own doing—the result of her disciplined military side, the old Jessica, emerging.

Loudly, publicly, she introduces her two halves, “Jessie, this is Jessica. Jessica, Jessie,” and makes a formal bow.

At the post office, a clerk sells her postage and points her toward a table with forms. Miss Shelly is having her mail in Newt's final taxes, and per her instructions, she is sending them certified.

She puts stamps on the doctor's bills and returns her certified slips to the mail clerk. He looks at the envelopes that she has addressed to the IRS and Sacramento.

“You know it's the sixteenth. You're a day late with taxes,” he says, reviewing what she's given him.

“Not if you're dead.”

“Just trying to help,” he apologizes. And then his face brightens. “Your name is
Jessica Aldridge
?” he asks. “From
Florida
, maybe?”

The hairs on Jessica's arms bristle—ten minutes after putting her name back into the system at BoA and they have found her. And by
they
, she does not know who she means. But there
are
wanted posters on the nearby walls.

“Hey. Slow down,” the clerk says as Jessica backs away. “It's an innocent question. For the past six months we've been getting general delivery letters here addressed to a Jessica Aldridge. She never picks them up and we keep returning them to the sender. We just got another. They're as regular as clockwork.”

Jessica manages to halt her retreat—partly because she has not yet paid for the tax mailing. “There must be a lot of Jessica Aldridges.”

“No doubt,” the clerk says.

“So why would I be
that
Jessica Aldridge?”

The clerk, a middle-aged man with brown eyes and short curly brown hair, looks askance. “I'm just asking, ma'am. It's my job.” Now his pupils dart across Jessica's tatted arms.

“That letter from a penitentiary?” she asks.

“Yes,” the clerk answers. “So then,
you
are . . .”

“Yeah. Well, I guess I do look like a person a prisoner would write to.”

“Nah,” the clerk lies and goes back to business. He rings up the certified receipts. “Thirteen dollars and sixty-six cents,” he tells Jessica. “Thirteen sixty-six. That's a good lottery pick. Now let me go find that letter of yours.”

SKITTLES DANCES IN
the yard while the concrete stoop pinches the skin under Jessica's rear. Over the past weeks she has lost even more padding on her butt. She doesn't care. Miss Shelly is not getting any weaker; maybe Jessica's fasting, like the cosmic balancing she would like to believe in, has something to do with it? Not likely.

At Jessica's feet Skittles drops a toy, a stuffed ape made limbless. Again Jessica tosses the rag into the yard, weedy and barren from drought. Skittles, instead of chasing, nuzzles Jessica's hand and Jessica wonders if she can scent Don on the letter.

Pieces of her memory quilt together a past she has tried, for ten years, not to acknowledge. Her aunt telling her about Don's conviction. Her pretense that he, having disappeared from her life, was meaningless to her. Her ache for her absentee mother. Her denial that she wanted a father. Her fury that he should be a drug dealer and had killed a man.

“Go away,” she tells Skittles and pushes the dog's snout from her face. She studies Don's envelope. Its sealed flap is singed where she has tortured it with a cigarette, hoping to see it ignite. But it didn't. Now she puts a pinky into the burn hole and tears.

Skimming the letter, Don's words feel like the touch of a soft hand.

CHAPTER 22

Washington, DC; New York City

The summer has been hot, but Zoe is shivering. She is seated in the audience of a Broadway musical playing at the Kennedy Center and is chilled by more than air-conditioning. Beside her, Porter is rocking his rather large head to the left and right. She becomes aware that this might be disruptive to the people seated behind them. She becomes aware of how unaware Porter seems to be of anything but the singer on stage and her syrupy lyrics. And she begins to shift her attention from what is on the stage. She notices the ornate fixtures high above in the opera house, the elderly woman in the fox stole in front of her who is sitting next to an empty seat, the family beside her dressed in flip-flops and shorts. Seconds pass as slowly as minutes. And locked in her cold islet Zoe is mostly noticing that her hand is covered by Porter's—whose fingers twine through hers and pinch the skin around the diamond solitaire.

Its stone intermittently glints as Porter rocks her hand to the tempo of the song, something schmaltzy about lost love. The stone is neither too large nor too small. It is not schmaltzy. It is a stone as flawless as the pitch of the petite blonde on stage.

Because Porter is her boss, she has so far been able to avoid the spectacle of wearing this perfect ring to the office. In fact she has not worn it at all unless prompted by Porter. He may attribute this to discretion, to her concern for their careers. In truth, she has not yet gathered the will to give back the ring. This is unsurprising since she couldn't find the will to not accept it when—while they were preparing a lazy dinner of bruschetta and Chianti last Saturday—Porter got down on one knee.

“Shall I knight you or call your osteopath,” she had joked as his knee cartilage popped on the terrazzo. Her comment dimmed the spark in his eyes. With Porter you cannot take certain things lightly—not sexism, not domestic violence, and as she was to learn, not the ritual of a marriage proposal. Is this generational? Porter's serious expression had left her seriously at a loss, until he'd unclasped his hands to show her a small velvet ring box. Upon his opening it, she could only respond, “
Excuse
me,” as if someone on the Metro had indifferently stepped on her foot.

She let Porter slip the ring onto her finger. For him this proposal must have been the foregone conclusion to their cohabitation. For her it only made imminent the inevitability of her leaving him. Immediately she should have said, “
No
, Porter. I'm sorry. I can't.” But a torpor sank her into a chair. And after this she'd overindulged in the Chianti, with Porter assuming that they were celebrating.

Zoe's funk has continued through the five days since, aided by Porter's wine closet and Xanax. So far he's made no comment about the empty bottles of grappa in the recycle bin or the pills disappearing from the bottle she found in his desk. He hasn't mentioned her beached dolphin passivity during sex or even her inability to complete the sub-Saharan donation report he'd asked her to turn in by Tuesday. Porter had been as clueless to these signs of her discouragement as he is to the sighs of the person sitting behind him at the Kennedy Center—a stranger who, just as Zoe does, finds Porter's oversized bobblehead annoying.

After centuries pass, and like a wildfire on a windy day, applause crackles up around her and blows toward the stage. Porter's sweaty hand releases Zoe's and he rises. He slaps his palms so furiously that Zoe fears they'll rupture and spatter her with blood. After he stops clapping, they slow-step with the crowd into intermission.

The August night is humid as they exit onto a terrace as vast and characterless as a parking lot. Porter goes to a parapet and stares at the lights across the Potomac. In the middle distance a dinner cruise putt-putting toward Georgetown transmits the clinks of glassware. How many more calm and tepid nights like this might there be if Porter and she marry? Zoe considers whether such a life might not be so bad after all.

Porter has charm. He is handsome and fit for his age. He is capable and loyal. He is able to laugh at himself and generous about the faults of others. He is intuitive in his decision making but analytic about the merit of his ideas. In other words, he is an easy person with whom to work. And this might not be a bad attribute in a husband.

“Porter,” she says before her speechlessness returns.

“It's all right, Zoe,” he says. “I understand.”

But Zoe does not. How can he know what she needs to say? And if he does know, does such perceptiveness and sensitivity make him an even better prospect for a life partner?

“I guess I was kidding myself,” he adds.

The whine of a jet descending toward Reagan allows her a moment for composition. “It's not about our ages,” she says. “It's about . . . It's that . . .
You
are a fully formed person.”

After many seconds he smiles. “So you think I've stopped growing?”

Porter is on the wrong track. Zoe tries to clarify aloud to him and to herself what she means. “
No
. It's that . . . you would always be taking the lead for us.” In her stumbling she feels much less mature than he, like a student speaking to her professor, which confirms her argument against their marrying. And she realizes something curious then: she cannot recall their ever fighting. Their relationship has progressed so smoothly that it is as though she is being funneled into a cage. Still, she trusts Porter and she knows he is not toying with her. It is
her
feelings that are the trap. Her months with him have passed without incident, except for a growing affection and solidarity. Marriage does seem the logical conclusion.
This
is the trap.

“If you need time,” he says.

“Perhaps a decade might help . . .”

“Put us on the same plane?”

Confusing the metaphor, she tracks another descending jet.

“A decade is a long time,” Porter says. Then he sings a short bar. “ ‘Will you still need me . . . when I'm sixty-four?' ”

She doesn't answer the question.

“Ouch,” Porter says lightly. “You're right. We shouldn't get married.”

Apparently Porter has different rules for making a proposal than for rescinding it. In the latter case humor is a permissible Band-Aid. But now she's the serious one.

“I care for you,” she says. “I'll always appreciate what you gave me. The time and space to grow up enough to be on my own.” This may not be true. But they're words to toss into the vacuum she's creating.

Porter looks toward the black water and for an instant the night encloses them. The Kennedy Center's foyer lights have flashed, signaling the end of intermission.

“But didn't you live alone when you first moved to DC?” Porter asks, weakly contradictive.

“I was with you every day in the office, even before we were together.”

Porter's leaning forearms pull back from the parapet rail. His lanky frame pivots toward the bright glass walls. He takes a step and nearly sinks. When he is upright he rests against a planter, then against Zoe. “Stunned there for a second,” he says.

Somehow this cheers her—not that she is causing him pain but that she has made him alive again. This will be their first and last disagreement, she decides. But if they'd had more disharmony, if they'd been more immature, maybe then she would have accepted him. Arm in arm they enter the foyer as the more focused concertgoers shuffle up carpeted steps toward the auditorium.

“You finish the show,” Zoe tells him. She hurries away before she can't. She doesn't glance back to see if he is following.

“COFFEE?” MARIATU ASKS
as Zoe props her bag by her door. Though it is late Mariatu is curious. Or perhaps she is primarily offering a sympathetic ear—after all it is past midnight and tomorrow is a workday, though not for Zoe. In the goodbye note she'd left for Porter, she'd scribbled how it was best if she resigned. She'd weighted the note with his engagement ring.

“Coffee,” Zoe confirms.

While Mariatu fills the brewer Zoe tells her about her night. Like a psychiatrist Mariatu asks no questions, merely
hmms
sympathetically at intervals to let Zoe know she is listening. She fills two mismatched mugs—swag, Zoe sees, from various work-related conferences. Is it cynical of Porter to assign Mariatu consistently to event duty? Her plaited hair and distinctive face make her a representative not easily forgotten.

“So you will not even return to the office?”

“I need to leave right away,” Zoe explains.

She senses herself judged, as much by Mariatu as by the ritual masks on the wall, which with their high foreheads and small features represent a tribal Sierra Leone vision of female dignity and calm—traits the opposite of Zoe's for many weeks.

“But,” Mariatu pleads, “won't you
miss
your work?”

My work
, Zoe thinks. What has become of it anyway? Since April, when WIDO's accountant finally nosed out the bribe she had sent to Jean-Pierre in Burundi last December, Zoe has only been tasked with proofreading donor reports. So far the scandal has not leaked to the outside world, or even to the other staff, but she fears that Porter might be preparing to fall on his sword. Her leaving is the best, or at least the easiest, solution for everyone.

“I'll miss the people,” Zoe says.

Mariatu strokes Zoe's cheek and she is overcome by the loss of what she is giving up—which is not simply Porter or her job or even her friendship with Mariatu. She is losing her future. She has failed, here in DC, to invent herself. The next morning, ignoring Porter's texts, deciding to get a new number, Zoe is on the train back to New York.

“I'VE ALWAYS DEPENDED
on the kindness of strangers,” Zoe tells Marla, her freshman-year NYU roommate.

“Me, too. Thanks for the house-sit.” Marla has been waiting on the stoop of her Henry Street building. Zigzagged with fire escapes it might have been teleported from a 1950s Hollywood movie. And Marla, smoking and leaning back on her elbows, looks like she belongs in one—except with the sexes reversed. Her most famous role to date was as Stanley in a cross-gender production of
Streetcar
last year, and even now she is wearing a wife-beater.

“Man, it's hot. You up for some brewskis, Blanche?” Talking through her cigarette, Marla scratches her chin like a longshoreman.

Zoe feels lighter. “God, it's good to see you.”

Marla flicks away her cigarette and gets up so she can squash Zoe into her with her man-arms.

“REMEMBER THAT GUY?”
Marla asks. They are seated in Marla's favorite dive, the old Skinny on Orchard. “Ben what's-his-name? You know, from our modern poetry course. The lit major you thought was hot.”

“I thought
you
thought he was hot.”

“Come on.
You
stalked him to that gay cowboy disco in Hell's Kitchen. That's how much you liked him.”

So far Zoe and Marla have consumed two plastic pitchers of ale.

“
That
was a rumor,” Zoe says. “And, hey, it's not like I outed him or anything. He wasn't even gay.”

“I know, I know,” Marla says. “He went there to score some ecstasy.”

“I heard it was Ritalin and that he needed it to cram for midterms.”

“Maybe. But he got kicked out for selling Ambien to that divinity student.”

“The Nigerian who woke up sleepwalking naked in Washington Square.”

“So, I have a confession,” Marla says. “I hooked up with him once.”

“With the Nigerian?”

“No. With Ben. I was experimenting. Are you angry?”

Zoe is laughing, perhaps too hard. “He was a good-looking boy, but I never stalked him to Hell's Kitchen. “But . . . but”—and here, laughing, emphasizing, she jabs an index finger at the air—“I did run into him one night up in Times Square.”

“What the hell were you doing up there?”

“My parents came into town to see
Phantom
.” And as if she's run into a wall, Zoe's laughter stops. “I mean . . . my grandparents.”

“Get the alibi straight, girl. Was it your parents
or
your grandparents? . . .
Zoe?
. . . What's wrong?”

Zoe's eyes are welling.

THE TAVERN'S TOILET
has a door with a broken latch that only gives Zoe a moment's privacy to stare into her bloodshot eyes. She doesn't want Marla worrying that she has invited a train wreck to crash in her apartment. It's burden enough for her to have come to Marla because of a breakup. She can't also dump onto her friend the horror of her grandparents' passing, the issue of her revised parentage.

Some people like to live as if there is no tomorrow; Zoe is trying to pretend there is no yesterday. But, now and again, the things she has buried rise like vampires to bite. Zoe rinses her face in the tavern bathroom's filthy sink, then heads out to the bar.

“HARRY, THIS IS
Zoe. Zoe, Harry,” Marla says the next morning. She's leaning over a terrarium on the kitchen counter. “Harry's total contraband. Something about salmonella poisoning and kids kissing their shells. So no kissing.”

“Sorry, Harry,” Zoe cheeps, hung over, as she looks through the side of the turtle's glass lagoon.

“I owe everything to Harry. Harry's the guy who got me off off-off- Broadway and on off-Broadway. He never gets tired of hearing me run lines. Do you, handsome?”

Marla, in a swirl from packing, informs Zoe that Harry is a connoisseur of raspberries, the riper the better. “Thanks for watching the place. See you in September,” she says, hugging Zoe.

“Break a leg,” Zoe says with forced joy and snares Marla's cheek with a kiss.

After the door closes behind Marla, Zoe dissolves back into the futon. She feels like a salted slug.