Clearly Now, the Rain (15 page)

We walked miles in the woods, the tropical forest finally giving up the green ghost in the face of winter. We ate venison tenderloin that Smith himself had shot some days before. It was wrapped in bacon, and we drank his muscadine like beer. I thought his and Serala's mutual passion for rare meat and hard wine might just carry them off to elope right then—me, Jack, and the rest of the world be damned. We went and saw the dumb Will Ferrell film
Elf
, and she laughed and laughed, and put her arm in mine afterwards in the glow of the marquee. And we stayed in bed (innocently) a lot, just slugging wine and talking away. She tossed it off, but I know it was true: she was a little happy. She had told me less than a year ago that being in love was probably all done for her.

They referred to Jack's father as “The Doctor” because he had survived a full career as a junkie; he got two of his three sons high for the first time, too. After I met the man, I had a face to go with the image of a father's hand smacking forearm flesh on his young son, raising a vein to bring him the greatest pleasure imaginable. The Doctor was a pale shell by the time I encountered him, dying fast of cancer, but unflappable as far as I could tell with his medical marijuana and stashes of pills. I wanted to know the nature of this thing Serala was in, the family she was necessarily imbibing to love Jack. After her initial guarded enthusiasm came a chapter when she stepped back and wanted to pretend like it was just drugs.

We just fucking get high together; it's just safer that way, it doesn't mean anything.

But he started to move his things down to Brooklyn from Boston where he'd been a carpenter for years. Ostensibly it was to be with his father but he began spending most nights with Serala. She rode the swells of junkiedom with him and that should perhaps have made me hate him. Sure, they enabled one another, but I know that at least sometimes they kept each other strong, that the sex and the tenderness and the booze were enough. But from where I was standing it didn't much matter; she'd never stayed clean for too long and I was a hell of a lot less worried about her scoring smack with a big, strapping cat like Jack than her slinking down to the ghettos in her fancy car alone. Or, worse, going to see someone she used to know.

I started to hear different things—going up to Boston just for fun, camping plans, even in the winter, learning to fish—and a different tone. A silent reversal started to take place in me then: I allowed optimism to slide back into my heart.
Just maybe,
I thought,
just maybe this will fucking do it.

The thing that struck me the first time I saw him—on a weekend jaunt north—was that he looked, to me, very much like Hugh. He was big, and tough, and restive in the shotgun seat next to me. We were feeling each other out. We ate sunflower seeds and said manly things about fishing and trucks—two subjects I know very little about. But by the time we were ensconced in soft light and hard drink, I felt easy. I decided to be happy for Serala.

We're in her spare bedroom and the hour is small; she's yanked the sheets away from me, scoffing at my sloppy, male approach to the project. She's tucking in a corner when he wanders in and sits down on the floor next to me.

You know, you could change the sheets on your bed, too,
he says, looking up at her. I don't remember what she says exactly, but it is something along the lines of why don't you go do it your fucking self.
Well, it's just that this is your home and I'm a guest here. The way I look at things it's a matter of hospitality—we're not in my home.

It might have been a tense and nasty moment if I hadn't watched his eyes dancing and her faux-fist attack, which he rendered futile with a big laugh, tying her skinny arms in knots.

And:

We're at his family's narrow, manufactured home, Serala paying her respects to his father, me just trying to stay out of the way. There is a big-screen TV and a length of very soft couch; his father is counting out pills on the coffee table with skeletal fingers. The cop show on the screen is turned up a bit loud for conversation. Jack is fidgety in his seat and I don't know if he's feeling pressure to facilitate conversation, is worried over his dad's present state, or just needs some kind of fix. Serala slips out for a cigarette, leaving me in the lap of a sad and edgy scene.

Pop, hey, you want to trade some of that oxycodone for some high-grade pot? I've got about an eighth of it.

Jack is hunched over his knees, rocking his bulky frame and twisting hands, muscles shaping in his forearms, looking eagerly toward his father now. A grin is parked, out of kilter, on his face, awaiting an answer—but really awaiting a slice of attention, approval. I can hear it all so clearly somehow, everything I feel I could learn about the situation: a hard-living, but good-hearted man, appealing to his father for approval, for engagement, for something resembling validation. Appealing to the person whose expression of love has been exactly this: the sharing of drugs. All the reciprocal love is in the timbre of Jack's voice, in the anticipatory way his green eyes are trained on his father's sallow, expressionless profile. Serala slips back in as quietly as she slipped out. The open door shoves a brief wedge of brightness across the room and Jack's father squints and blocks his eyes. Then, as shadow re-consumes us, he grunts and shrugs his agreement to Jack, who lights up momentarily, and I realize that he never had any more of a chance than his father now does. And I realize that my father
did
have a chance—and he took it. The chord of that vibrates enough bittersweet light through me to get out of that trailer dry-eyed and whole.

And:

We're sitting at brunch at the Montrose Café: Serala, me, Luke, and Jack. It's a fancy affair, the brunch menu: eggs Benedict, Florentine, Belgian waffles and croissant French toast, mimosas. Serala is staring down her bloody Mary, stirring; Luke is preparing his Irish coffee; I'm being good and drinking iced tea. Jack is wearing a button-down shirt and has shaved. He's ordered a single whisky for the morning, but when they bring it in a shot glass he says:

Bring me a tumbler, will ya?

Not rude, but enough edge in the tone to say that they should have known.

It's just that I wanted a neat drink is all, Jack says
, sounding kind of bored,
I mean, it's just the beginning of the day.

He takes two Valium from his breast pocket and throws them back with his ice water. It strikes me then that this is serious business for him—he even looks the part of the casual businessman: getting fucked up.
This is how you start. This is what you do on Sunday while your father lies dying.

One Tuesday in mid-May, university duties at last complete, I am sitting in my dusty nook, dueling my completed thesis manuscript that nevertheless still needs major surgery before it goes out into the hands of the agents and editors of the world. Kaya is stalking a nattering squirrel at the bottom of the stairs. Carolina blue skies and the explosion of spring. Mona calls. I groan inwardly, expecting another exhortation to get my ass on the road to her bungalow in Montana, though my rent is paid through May and Wilmington has turned sweet enough for me to want to stay a while.

Hey, baby,
I say.

Hey,
Mona says, and I can hear her smoking, which means she has something to say. Outside, Kaya commits to action and hurtles down the stairs with a series of thumps; the squirrel skedaddles, and she yips once in frustration.

So, I met this boy today.

It's funny how fast and distinctive jealousy is—a plunge of ice water through my veins. I gather myself and play it as cool as I can. This is a great deal more effortful than I'd thought it would be—I'd been telling myself for months, if not years, that I wished Mona would meet someone else.

Okay. Well, what does that mean exactly?

I don't know
. A maddeningly long silence while she smokes.
I guess maybe I want to go out with him.

Okay . . .

What was there to say to that? She exhaled brashly and then sighed.

I don't know, Eli. I just feel like I've not really established my own life here—I've been hiding out all the time. And now everything is blooming, and people are coming out of their houses, and I have some real friends . . .

It's cool, Mona,
I say through gritted teeth
, you can have whatever you need. Do your thing. I'd like to stay here a while anyway.

I was pissed, and I was hurt, and I decided I couldn't sit in Wilmington any longer mourning the end of my days there. So I left Kaya with Smith, drove to Raleigh, and got a plane to go to Serala quick, to my consolation. Her, as a place—the only one I could go to with my quiet hurt.

I don't know where Jack is. It's just Serala and me that night. I've gotten in late, even by her standards. I deliver the news of Mona over our second bottle of wine. She just shakes her head.

Mona's a fucking moron,
she says, and there is more bite behind her words than mere ego mending.
I know you love her, Eli, and I know you've thrown a lot of years into this. But neither one of those are good enough reasons to keep this shit up.

Soon my head swims, partly from the wine, partly because my mind does not want to consider the level of cowardice I possess with respect to Mona. So we crawl into bed, beneath that flapping white curtain, in that sweet bed that has held me so many years with its heavy blankets. When I put my hand under her neck and pull her beneath me I do not feel any hesitation and we tangle up like always in the candle's dance. But very soon she goes still. She puts her hand on my chest.

I can't do this,
she says.
No, I can't.

She is apologetic, and mixed up, and almost changes her mind, but I am far away by that point. I feel like the most lecherous fuck on the planet, to say nothing of a bad friend—to both her and Jack. Any doubts about this thing between them are smoke.

But I sleep like a tired dog with my head on her breast and the springtime breathing through the room.

In the morning I am closed into her room and in the living room I hear a strand of angry words. Jack is back and I get very worried. Not so much that Jack is going to hand me my ass, but more that I will be the thing that fucks this up for Serala.

She and Jack continue the fight outside on the sidewalk. It is a strangely cool and bleary May day, but both of them have their opaque shades on, their tense gestures bouncing off each other, like street theater. I drag Knox and Kaya toward a scrap of grass, and the way Jack is tongue-lashing Serala, and the way she is listening to him, I think the worst. So when she tells me it was all over something else, something obscure, something that
doesn't fucking matter anyway
, the cool hand of relief runs down my spine.

We drop Jack off at the tiny house he shares with his struggling family. He and I hug each other goodbye; one of us makes a suggestion about him coming out to Seattle with her in August, maybe bringing Raymond, too, to see the Northwest. I climb in Serala's blue car for one last ride to North Carolina and watch Jack fade away in the rearview, pale against the pale house.

When Serala ditched palliative possibilities I always got anxious. That's why I tried to get her into a bungalow on the Jersey Shore, force her to punch out the poetry that it seemed to me had kept her alive like breath back in college, but she wanted me to believe she was done with art. Moreover, she wanted to believe it herself. The hazards of being open enough for poetry were too great—that was the point of her climb into the corporate saddle: to close certain doors inside. Serala was such a searingly honest person that I didn't understand she sometimes had to deceive herself. I'd read her emails and letters and lament the loss of her voice from the world of poetry. I was slow on the uptake, as fooled by her as she was by herself.

Last night i sat out on the balcony in the rain and watched a storm rage and the river thrash in solidarity. There was no distinction that i could make between the lightning and city lights. It was not a storm raging over the city; the city was the storm. And in that sliver of an hour, early in the a.m., i watched time turn over on itself, i sat there soaked and waiting for the pale blue light to come. Shivering, i wished for you. 

Her art was alive and well; creation was bearable in disguise.

Likewise, anything resembling traditional love was off-limits, or so she'd have both of us believe. And I did until Jack materialized. It was appropriate that he was an old figure, a time-faded if handsome kid that I remembered from photos before my time in her life. The impression that Monty had left on me was that he was her last attempt to fit into any traditional container of relationship and that when that failed (and it failed early on), she just dialed her love for him into a different frequency and simultaneously allowed me closer, compensating for the lack of a life partner with the presence of a highly unorthodox best friend.