Because They Wanted To: Stories (15 page)

“See, you’re doing it again. You’re not respecting my wishes.” But her voice was full of shy delight.

“I’ll sleep on the floor!” he said. “In the living room!”

“That’s ridiculous. It would be much too uncomfortable.” She paused. “You can sleep on the bed, but you have to wear your clothes and stay outside the blankets.” She felt like a little girl with a rhinestone tiara on her head. She waved her plastic scepter. “You have to promise.”

All night, he shivered against her warm, blanketed body. In the light from the window, her sleeping face appeared concentrated and intent. Once she twitched, and the tiny, urgent movement seemed the result of a fierce, private effort she was making deep in her head. He turned away from her so that he could look out the window, his back firmly against hers. His thoughts went forward, then backward, then he fanned them out laterally: a phone call to his mother, a quarrel
with the drummer, a newscast about a raped and murdered teenage baby-sitter, the kitchen of that dump in Seattle where he ate hot french fries out of the fryer basket and listened to the cook talk shit about some girl. He imagined scooping up sleeping Valerie and placing her in the middle of his thoughts. He imagined her waking in the thriving garden of his thoughts, confused and possibly frightened. Then he imagined her realizing what he’d done; she put her hands on her hips, she tapped her foot, she fixed him with a fussing eye.

He was cold to the bone by now, but he didn’t move even to shut the window. He was respecting her.

“Michael?” She turned and gently groped his back. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking so—oh, you’re cold! Come under the blanket!”

“It’s all right. I said I would stay outside the blanket, and I will.”

“Don’t be silly. Come under the covers.” She lifted the blankets, greeting him with her warmth and smell. “Come on. You’ll get sick or something.”

He hesitated, drawing out the moment.

“Don’t you . . .” She faltered. “Don’t you want to?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to.” And he did.

Daniel sat in his San Francisco apartment on a big, mushy pillow, with his black rubber drum pad on his lap. He stretched his legs and pushed the coffee table on which he and Jacquie had just eaten dinner into the middle of the room at a cockeyed angle. Jacquie sat on the bed, coiled in a blanket, holding an Edith Wharton novel in her small, stubby hands. As she read, her gold-brown eyes moved intently back and forth, giving off a spark of private frisson. Half hidden under her lowered lids, the movement of her eyes reminded him of an animal glimpsed as it slips quietly through the underbrush. With loose-wristed strokes, Daniel cheerfully swatted his pad. The phone rang.

“Probably somebody we don’t want to talk to,” said Jacquie.

Daniel rolled his eyes. It was his brother, Albert, calling from Iowa.

“Dan,” said Albert. “Something bad happened.”

“What?”

“Mom had a car crash. She’s alive, but she’s really hurt. She’s broken her neck and smashed her pelvis.” He paused, breathing heavily. “And she also broke some ribs.”

Daniel made an involuntary noise. Jacquie’s quick glance was almost sharp. The drumsticks fell to the floor and rolled.

The evening became a terrible melding of misery and sensual tenderness. Jacquie held his head against her breast and stroked him as pain moved through him in slow, even waves. At moments, the pain seemed to blur with the contours of Jacquie’s body, to align itself with her warmth and care, as if by soothing it, she actually made it greater. He stared at their dirty dinner plates, shocked by their brute ordinariness: tiny bones, hunks of torn-up lemon, mashed fish skin.

Late at night, they lay without sleeping on their narrow bed. Jacquie held him from behind, one strong arm firmly around his chest, her dry feet pressed against his. She spoke against his back, her voice muffled, her breath a warm puff against his skin. “Your family gets in a lot of car crashes, don’t they?”

He opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “So do a lot of people. There’s car crashes all over America all the time.”

“Well, there was the one with the whole family in it when you were a little kid, and then the one when your father drove into the fence, and then the one where your mother got hit in the parking lot, and now this. That seems like a lot for one family.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I just noticed it.”

“My mother’s lying in the hospital with half her bones broken, and you just noticed that.”

Jacquie took her arm from him and turned the other way.

There is something wrong with her, he thought. They had been together for two years; this was not the first time he had had this thought.

He flew to Iowa the following day.

He had not been in his brother’s suburban house before; he found it bland and characterless, and he was glad of that. A more decoratively expressive home might’ve waked his sensibility and made him feel worse.

Albert was a pharmacist. Together, he and his wife, Rose, reminded Daniel of two colored building blocks made to illustrate solidity, squareness, and rectangularity for children, the kind of blocks that, when picked up, turn out to be practically weightless
and not solid at all. Apart from Rose, Albert became heavier, more sullen. His problems expressed themselves in his heavy brows. His hands took on a morose, defensive character. The brothers were eight years apart. They had never been close, and they had become less close in adulthood.

On the night of Daniel’s arrival, they sat at the kitchen table, eating Mexican takeout and trying to comfort each other. Their words were difficult and, on the surface, not especially comforting. Their halting conversation would’ve been small talk but for the emotional current moving under it, sometimes rising to fill whole strings of words with mysterious feeling, then subsiding to a barely felt pulse. Rose sat forward attentively, as though she were silently monitoring the unspoken current. When they got up from the table, Albert hugged Daniel as though part of him wanted the embrace and part of him wanted to get it over with. When his face came away, Daniel saw Albert’s left eye staring over Daniel’s shoulder, wild, bright, and oddly furtive.

All night, he lay awake in his hard little guest bed, thinking about his mother. He remembered her serving dishes of yogurt and cut fruit for dessert. He remembered her sitting with her feet up on the couch, painting her false fingernails pink. She was wearing her night-gown, and he could see that her knees were rough and that veins had flowered on her legs. Her hair was a manic knot of curls. She looked at her watch often. He could see all these images, but he could not feel them. He turned them this way and that, trying to feel his mother. She used to sit across the table from their father, working her jaws stiffly and minutely. “Daniel,” she said. “I want you to ask your father where he was last night.” For five years preceding the divorce, his mother and father had addressed each other primarily through their children, although when things got truly ugly, his mother would drop the act and scream at her husband straight on. Daniel brought his hard guest pillow to his side and hugged it. “Mother,” he said.

The next day they drove to the hospital. Daniel cracked the car window, and the winter air drew his cigarette smoke out like a thin ghost. He saw square porches, bricked-in flower boxes, and shiny
black lampposts standing before each entrance walk; the familiar landscape soothed the itch of memory. He hoped they would pass the church with the stained-glass windows he and his friends had smashed with rocks when they were in the sixth grade. The day after they’d done it, he’d heard his mother on the phone, discussing the incident, which had destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of stained glass. She had speculated, as had the papers, about the rise in juvenile crime and what it meant.

“You must’ve been very angry,” Jacquie had said when he told her about it.

“I was just being a kid,” he’d returned.

“A very angry kid.”

He’d rolled his eyes.

The ugliness of the hospital pleased him; it seemed appropriate. The lounge was furnished with smudged plastic chairs, a vinyl couch with a strip of duct tape on it, and a candy machine. People sat in various attitudes of unhappiness. Daniel looked at them. One man looked back. His hair was standing up, and his hands appeared numb. He looked as though he might say something hostile. Daniel looked away.

A girl with a bitter mouth and blue eye shadow that deepened violently in the crease of her lids handed them purple guest passes. A female voice, enlarged and blurred by a loudspeaker, clouded the hall. The elevator bore them up. They entered a room. Daniel saw a person he didn’t identify as his mother until Albert said, “Mom?”

Tufts of pale, silken hair floated from her partially shaved head. Blue veins lined her scalp. The skin on her face and neck was lax, but it looked stiff as old papier-mâché. A ghostly array of bottles hung from metal poles around the bed. Little rubber tubes were taped against her arms. A thick rubber hose protruded from her distended mouth like a visual bray of anger. She was held erect by a brace at her back. It was a minute before he noticed that holes had been drilled into the frontal bone on either side of her forehead and metal rods had been driven into the holes. Her head was suspended in a metal hoop centered by the rods. Her eyes were closed. Her breath rasped. Daniel thought, Frankenstein. He began to sweat.

“You can talk to her, Dan,” said Rose. “She’s sedated, but she understands.”

Albert sat in a chair beside the bed and touched the papery arm. “We brought Daniel, Mom. He’s here from California.”

Her eyes opened.

Daniel’s ears were suddenly filled with internal noise. A tremulous black fuzz blocked his vision. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He stumbled out, palming the bumpy wall of the hallway. He banged his shins on a bench and sat on it, dropping his head between his knees. The fuzz parted to reveal an expanse of gold-flecked tile.

“Daniel?” Rose’s voice. “Are you all right?”

When they got back from the hospital, their father called. He invited Daniel out to dinner, without Albert and Rose. He preferred taking his sons to dinner one at a time, a preference neither brother questioned.

Before hanging up, his father said he was involved in a new business. His last venture, importing tropical fish, had lasted two months.

“It’s some weird thing to do with informational videos,” said Albert. “Some crap for tourists in hotel rooms.”

“That sounds viable,” said Daniel.

“I doubt it,” said Albert.

The comment annoyed Daniel, and he changed the subject. “Has he seen Mom?”

“Yeah,” said Albert. “He’s been good that way.” He sighed and stiffly stretched in a hard, ungiving little chair. “He was there the first night they brought her in. All Mom’s family were there, and I guess it was a bad scene. It might’ve been better if Rose and I were there, but we didn’t arrive until after.”

With a sort of angry relish, Albert told his second-hand version of the story. When their father arrived in the waiting room, no one in the family could tell him what exactly had happened to their mother, what condition she was in or where she was, apparently because they had been given inadequate information by the hospital staff and were too timid to press for more. Their father roared around the waiting room,
cursing and calling them all sheep. Aunt Pauline wept and Uncle Jimmy called their father a bastard. A nurse came out of her station and told their father what he needed to know, and everybody shut up.

“Once again, Dad does the thing everybody wants done but no one will do,” said Daniel.

“Yep,” said Albert. A smile of unhappy vindication made his dull eyes glint. “Later, after we got there, Grandpa came up to Dad and tried to make up, but Dad told him to fuck off.”

“Oh, man.” But Daniel felt a sneaking little triumph for his father.

Albert half looked away, as if he knew what Daniel felt and didn’t want to think about it. Instead of saying anything, he got up and went to the refrigerator to get a drink from his water jar. He was only thirty-five, and already he walked like an exhausted man in late middle age.

Daniel and his father went to an expensive mall restaurant with a railroad theme. Booths were tricked out to look like the seats in trains, and there were framed pictures of trains on the walls. Wait-people dressed like porters had their names affixed to their jackets on plastic cards. Daniel never went to restaurants like this in San Francisco, but he secretly loved them; they made such an effort.

His father sat away from the table, his long legs crossed, a cigarette lax in his fingers. He was very handsome. He wore an expensive suit. His eyes were harsh and watchful, his thin mouth downwardly taut. Daniel admired him.

As they ate, his father described his new project, producing instructional videos for people who have to stand in line, at the post office or the DMV or anyplace where lines are formed.

“I was thinking maybe you could represent us in San Francisco.” His father’s eyes shifted up. “If you’re interested.”

“I’ve never done that kind of work before.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’d be a natural.” His father speared a slice of lobster meat with a tiny aluminum pick. “The next time you start worrying about your career as a musician, I want you to do this: Just put on your best suit, then go stand in front of a full-length mirror and take a good look at yourself. Just see what a good impression you
make. You’ll always have that. Whatever happens, with your music or anything else, you can always sell.” He drew on his cigarette, his eye wrinkles tensing. “Although you would have to cut your hair.”

No matter how thoroughly his father failed, Daniel saw him as a suave, sneering gambler who might win at any time. The ridiculous tropical fish business, the trips to South America, the drunken squabbles with surly young girlfriends in motel restaurants, the seedy hotel rooms, the dirty socks that surely accumulated under the beds of the wifeless—it all merely added to his allure. Even the vision of his father rising from a badly scrambled bed in a box-shaped motel room and staggering into the bathroom to vomit gave Daniel a pang of admiration and love. When he was a teenager, his father had said to him, “You’re the son I don’t worry about at all. You’re a cat that lands on its feet. You could be stuck in the middle of the desert and you’d find your way.” He loved his father for saying that to him.