Boonville (14 page)

“Maybe I exposed you to some things you shouldn't have seen, but at least you saw something,” Mom said. “You didn't turn out so bad. I must have done something right.”

It was an unfair argument. Sarah would have to confess to being a terrible person to win it. Mom was accountable for most
everything that had happened in Sarah's life. Sarah hadn't gone looking for hippies and Future Primitives. It was irresponsible of Mom to subject her to that reality.

“I did the best I could, hon,” Mom told her. “You didn't come with directions. Neither did the divorce. I was trying to have a life, something I never had before. I was improvising. I didn't have any goals of my own; I had your father and you, and when your father left, I only had you. What was I supposed to do? I moved on. I took you here, and now you can take yourself somewhere else if you don't like it. I don't hear you bitching about free room and board, a place to do your projects and grow your dope. You can't lay it all on me. The only person holding you back is yourself.”

“That and twenty-six years of chaos,” Sarah said.

“I can't turn back the clock, babe,” Mom said. “And I wouldn't if I could. I don't know if I could do any better. You think you can, take your shot. But don't be surprised if you make mistakes too, staying in Mendocino, not finishing college, Daryl.”

“I was nineteen, Mom,” Sarah said, referring to her marriage with Daryl.

“I was nineteen when I married your father,” Mom told her. “Twenty when I had you.”

“Old habits die hard,” Sarah admitted. “At least I didn't have any children.”

“Cycles are made to be broken,” Mom reported. “I don't regret having you, you shouldn't regret having me.”

“That's easy for you to say,” Sarah said. “I'm a nicer person.”

“Says who?” Mom wanted to know. “Maybe if you spent more time with your spirituality, like you did as a child, you'd find the way within, the healer inside yourself. You say I don't help? I've got a great book for you to read.”

“I don't need a book, Mom,” Sarah said. “I've read that shit.”

“It's not shit,” Mom declared.

“It's self-help and it's an industry, every month a new angle, a sequel, nobody getting any better,” Sarah said. “You've got a library, look at you. I spent my childhood in fear. What's the book going to say about that?”

“Get over it,” Mom told her.

“Can I quote you?” Sarah asked, looking at her mother ill-advisedly remaining out here in the cold.

What did she expect? Mom wasn't going to change. What did she tell Squirrel Boy, you can't pick your relatives? That was for sure. There came a time when you had to cut your losses. Get over it.

“You're right,” Sarah decided, turning away from her mother to struggle up the incline of the waterfall's gorge, Raven Newchild in her line of vision also climbing, then plummeting.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked, when Sarah was halfway gone.

“I don't know,” Sarah said, not turning to face her. “Away.”

J
ohn could tell this wasn't a good connection, even before Christina answered the telephone, “Michael?” There was static on the line preceding the first ring and he became aware of the space separating them, all the roads, pit stops, blown tires, traffic, wrong turns, mountains, malls, concrete, telephone poles. Forget the straight line, there were still over three thousand miles between them, fiber optics trying to make it seem like distance was an illusion, that someone's physical presence wasn't necessary as long as you could hear their voice in your ear. John leaned into the receiver, trying to force his way to Christina's lips. But telephone calls, at best, were sweet nothings whispered without the heated breath that made them worthwhile. He heard the weak signal, the ring, her voice, the almost imperceptible splash of a pebble dropped from the top of an abyss. He asked himself, “When did things go wrong?”

“Christina,” he finally said. “Who's Michael?”

“John?” Christina said.

John considered hanging up, thinking maybe he shouldn't have paid to connect Grandma's telephone in the first place. He found little solace in experiencing the same sufferings that had plagued his fellow man for centuries: family, addiction, bad teeth. Hadn't getting beaten up solidified his union with humanity for the week? He didn't need to add heartbreak to the list, especially when hair loss was around the corner.

“Yes, this is John,” he said. “The man you shared your bed with? Six feet, 170, brown hair, blue eyes? I think I left my toothbrush on your sink.”

“John? Is that you?” Christina said.

“Yes,” John repeated. “It is I, Ensign Gibson, I just threw your stinking palm tree overboard and what's this crud about no movie?”

“John? I can barely hear you,” Christina said. “You're not making any sense. Where are you?”

“Where am I?” John said, feeling the pull of the current, sucking, sucking, out beyond the reef, floating, floating, soon to be lost at sea. “Where do you think I am? Joe's Stone Crabs? I'm in Boonville.”

“I can't hear you,” Christina told him. “I'm hanging up.”

“You can't hear me?” John said. “Maybe you should tell Michael to take his tongue out of your ear.”

Click.

“Fuck!” he screamed, hitting the receiver against its cradle, catching his finger. His knuckle cracked. He slammed the receiver down again, catching another finger. He held the scepter of communication away from his body until the pain subsided, feeling his insides being pulled taut. Someone had to let go.

“You can't be gone!” he yelled, nobody to hear his cry but Grandma's squirrels.

The receiver bleated in his hand like an electronic sheep: baa-ugh, baa-ugh, baa-ugh. He looked around the room, which suddenly seemed as foreign as a marketplace in Tangiers, dust playing in the window light, table and dresser elongated with trains of shadow, smell of bleached sheets and pickled citrus. The strength of Grandma's presence. Her space and his, colliding. His reality mixed with her dreams.

Get a grip, he demanded of himself, staring past the bedroom door into the living room where Grandma's metaphysics books were shelved alongside her volume of Emily Dickinson's poetry.

“Instability gives birth to art,” Grandma had told him. “It isn't something to be afraid of, it's the human condition. It's something to embrace.”

John agreed, chaos was order. Liquid order. To deny that was to go against the flow of life. You weren't supposed to ask for relief, you were supposed to want more, and more, and so much more that you could explode.

All my friends going to therapy and Al-Anon meetings, John thought, letting go, letting God. Seeking safety in the status quo, straightening up so they can find someone to screw missionary
position every night, watch videos with on the couch, eat ice cream, plan vacations to Jamaica. Buy a cat and call it Mittens. They've all given up.

Heaven may be a place where nothing ever happens, just like the song said, but John saw a flicker reflected in the darkness of their pupils, one eye on the hunt, straitjacketed by fear, begging to bolt to the edge of themselves, to the euphoria of open air. It didn't ever go away, the continuous craving for one more drink, one more kick in the crotch. One more kiss. Everybody wanted to feel exalted and alive, but to pursue that instead of filling your life with excuses was an exercise in faith. It was dangerous to search for something you've never seen, having only caught glimpses of the Grail from films, paintings, French poetry. Baudelaire dreams and Marquis de Sade reality.

“You can't deny who you are, because eventually you will be revealed,” Grandma had also told him. “You can only try to reroute your impulses and spend energy where it will pay off.”

John understood it wasn't healthy to be compulsive, but what else did he know? Parents in separate bedrooms, never kissing except for an inch of air near the cheek on holidays – staying together for the good of the child – resigned to a sufferathon sponsored by the Catholic Church, a mutual agreement to wrap each other in barbed wire. Meanness, mistresses, curses, lies. A life they had chosen, other lives they had failed to choose. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

He couldn't help picturing Christina sitting in what used to be their home, waiting for a man named Michael to call. Was there a skip in her step when she went to meet him? If a street light was changing, did she dash through traffic to be with him that much sooner? Was she imagining him in different clothes, haircuts, underwear? Asking herself what it would be like to take him home to meet her parents? Was she thinking of his kisses now? Does he do it better than I can?

John remembered how in the beginning of their relationship they had poured out their love for each other like it was an exotic liqueur. But somewhere between ruffled sheets, their delicate touches became familiar, exquisiteness turned bland, intoxication became anxiety. They sobered, parched bodies thirsting for another sip. Anything wet. They looked at each other, not knowing whether their glasses were half-empty or half-full. It was this uncertainty
that had separated them. They began confusing love with habit, a label for the irretrievable hours that had to be deemed special or else they were lost.

Baa-ugh, baa-ugh, baa-ugh.

John wanted to throw the telephone through the wall. To punch or kiss her. To see it hurl, line snapping from the outlet. Hssss. Wham! Don't cry, I love you. Right through the wall. Can you feel that? Splintered paneling, square thud. Temporarily out of service. “We're sorry, if you believe this recording to be in error, please check the number and try again.” How could she not recognize my voice? She used to say that since I had been surrounded by retired Jews all my life, I had a distinct inflection, that I was the only raised-Catholic who could recite the Ten Commandments as questions. Now she can't identify it? Now she was expecting calls from someone named Michael?

John tried to imagine Michael's voice. It came across as the speech of a soap opera star, one of those schmoozers named after a disciple of Christ and a northwestern state, Luke Montana, all store-bought biceps and haircut, “I know it's a small ranch and a small mansion, but Miss Christina, we could be happy, especially if Blackie comes out of that coma and the child's really mine.”

Child, sex, somebody else touching Christina. John's head was spinning. He's stealing kisses meant for me. Gasps and swallows. His hands are where mine should be, running fingers through the silkiness of her hair. Tickling the wetness between her legs.

He dialed Christina's number again, trying to convince himself that Michael was nobody, someone from the office, a friend calling for computer advice. He wasn't hearing any sound from the receiver, no dial tone or recording or anything. He jiggled the cord at the connection where the receiver met the phone. He heard the hollow rush of wind, saw telephone lines swaying somewhere in Nebraska, a loose end down in a cornfield. He envisioned himself, alone and bitter in a hotel room with the bathroom down the hall, heating coffee and tomato soup on a hot plate, reading Bukowski and smoking Camel straights. He might even start whittling squirrels from driftwood.

“What am I going to do?” he asked the cabin, hearing no sound in the receiver.

He hated technology, paying fees to depend on something
that was a mystery. What did he know about telecommunications? You dial a number, you get a voice. Was he supposed to grab a screwdriver and shuttle himself into space to work on the satellite or whatever it was they had cluttered the skies with in the name of convenience? He had given them his trust.

“Work, phone, work!” he screamed, fiddling with the connection, removing the plastic clip from the side of the telephone and reinserting it.

Dial tone. He held the receiver away from his ear to see if the noise wasn't coming from somewhere else, the refrigerator or a faulty electrical outlet. But it was the go ahead from AT&T to transmit his disembodied soul. He pressed the numbers that used to mean home, sadly confident that after years of shooting the shit, heart-to-hearts, pillow talk, and orgasmic utterances, this would be the last time he would speak to Christina.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“John?”

“Christina.”

“Did you just call?”

“Yes, I called, and you answered the phone, ‘Michael?'”

“I thought you were somebody else,” Christina told him.

“I gathered that,” John replied. “The question is, who did you think I was?”

“Nobody,” Christina answered, then realizing he wasn't going to believe such a bald-faced lie, “He's the neighbor who moved in before you left.”

John remembered him: barrel chest, Le Coq Sportif tennis shirt, Suntan U. Law School, internship at Merrill Lynch. Four-star consumer. He drove a Mustang and smiled at Christina when he washed it in front of their building. He suggested that they all be friends, invited them to play a round of “goff” at the Doral Country Club, boasting about his handicap, and adding that his grandfather had been an original charter member. John declined for both of them, explaining that his grandparents had been killed by putters.

“Not too far to go for a cup of sugar,” he said, hurt by the mediocrity of his replacement and the thought that Christina might have started with Michael before he had bought his plane ticket.

“In case you didn't notice, you left!” Christina told him.

“Two days ago!” John matched her indignation. “Thanks for your period of grieving, but you should find some way to go on with your life. It isn't right holding this torch. I don't even have an IRA account.”

“Two days is right,” Christina retaliated. “You didn't even bother to call. How do I know what you're doing out there?”

“They didn't turn on my telephone until today,” John said, Sarah entering his mind for the first time since he had been sober. “And I got sick.”

“Too sick to find a pay phone?” Christina demanded. “They don't have pay phones in California, only ashrams?”

“I did call from a pay phone, but the line was busy,” John said. “Then I got sick.”

He didn't add that he had also been hung over, attacked, and Maced. Essentially he had told the truth, the chronology was just wrong.

“Anyway, what difference would it make?” he said. “You would have been talking to Good Neighbor Michael, discussing jurisprudence and tanning lotion. Tell me, when you graduate from law school at U.M., do they give you the police radio with your diploma or do you have to go buy it yourself?”

“If I want to see someone else,” Christina said, “you can be certain I will. You left.”

“You didn't follow,” John said.

“I was supposed to follow?” Christina asked. “Is that your patriarchal take on things? I'm expected to waste away or follow my man because I don't have my own identity?”

“Did I say that?” John replied. “If anyone's called the shots in this relationship, it's been you. And if anyone's been in danger of losing their identity, it's me.”

“When did you join this men's group, John?” Christina said. “Before you left? Or did they recruit you on the plane?”

“I wanted to leave Miami a long time ago,” John said. “I followed you by staying right there. I didn't mind either, until I realized we were both unhappy and standing still. That's when I made this move, for both of us.”

“If I've been so awful,” Christina said, “then you should be happy with your decision. Bon voyage.”

“I didn't leave,” John insisted. “You didn't come!”

“You left!” Christina screamed. “You left! You left! You left!
I'm here in what used to be our apartment, surrounded by everything that used to be ours. Everybody keeps asking, ‘What happened?' My parents, your parents, our friends, the fucking dry cleaner. I tell them John's an asshole, that's what happened!”

John rubbed the back of his neck. He had to admit that it must be awful to be in the apartment alone, looking at extra hangers in the closet, empty drawers in the dresser, doing the dishes without bumping elbows. No sounds coming from any room but the one you were in. As improbable as it may have seemed, it was probably easier to be out here where everything was unfamiliar.

John turned to the picture of Christina resting on the nightstand, glassless now after Blindman's visit. He recalled how they had met, second semester, sophomore year, English 250. Stumbling in late, the professor signed John's transfer, telling him, “Ask a student who arrived
on time
what you've missed.” Filling a desk in the back row, John asked the girl to his left if he had missed anything worth writing down. It was Christina, before hardship or happiness, expectation or fulmination. Completely intact. Before the static electric longing that precedes a couple's first kiss. Her pink tongue had appeared from behind pearl-white teeth to tap seductively a single word, “Lo-lee-ta.” That became their first private joke. Later, as they ate lunch in the cafeteria, John told her, “She was plain Chris in the morning, studious Christine in the afternoon, but in English 250 she became Chris-tee-na.”