Dear Mr. You (15 page)

You must, because we are all a family now

I hit a new threshold of speechlessness when you gave me the most tremendous gift I’ve ever received and then thanked me. What can you say to that, there is no saying, “Oh no, thank
you
.” There’s nothing but commonality. Just humility and being keenly aware that I will never live up to that gift, but will wake up every morning and try ferociously to meet it and marvel at it.

The day you married my friend, I pulled up to the hotel and found you outside in the driveway giving directions to someone looking for the check-in.

I waved, rolling down my window, and you loped over with a huge grin on your face. You folded your six-foot-four frame through the car window to kiss me hello and I said, how is she, where is she, and your face lit up as you put one hand in the air and one on your heart, and you said, “Oh, you can’t believe, she’s in there weeping. All day, like this,” you said, drawing a stream of tears down your face with one long finger and making a mime’s expression of anguish, “she’s just been crying.”

I put a hand on my heart, too, as you reenacted her anguish. You were beaming at the thought of your lovely bride, tears overflowing on the morning of her wedding.

I asked could I go and find her and you said, “Are you kidding? She’s dying to see you. She will probably see you and pass
out from crying again. It’s epic, I mean, pure Chekhov. She’s amazing.”

I rolled up my window and you did a little soft-shoe move and waved me off with genuine exhilaration in your eyes. I thought, gee, that’s something I haven’t seen before, a man who could find beauty in a woman’s unruly display of emotion. There was no making her tears about you; just tap-dancing in the driveway and accepting that you were about to marry someone who was spilling over with feeling and too honest to conceal it.

The wedding was lovely and simple, except for one moment. Your bride reached the aisle, which was just around fifteen feet of grass leading to you. Still on the verge of weeping, she stopped. We all turned to face her, expecting her to sweep by, but she was planted, staring back at everyone. It’s the moment where everyone is rooting for a woman’s beauty, projecting loveliness onto her even if she’s low on it, but my friend wasn’t doing that production. She crept up those first few rows until she’d taken a soul count of every person bearing witness to what you were about to swear to each other. Her brow was set and her eyes fervently searched the crowd, her face aching with sincerity. If any part of me was somewhere else I was snapped to the present; she wanted to fully inhabit the moment most people say they barely remember.

•  •  •

I called you one night, nine years after that wedding. I don’t know if I needed someone to hear me or talk to me. I’d stood outside many cold nights in a row that month after my kids were asleep. Sometimes I’d dial a friend only to hang up before they answered. I didn’t feel like anyone wanted to hear me complain and I had nothing terrific to report.

I stood on the tiny balcony of the absurdly overpriced sublet that was draining me of enormous amounts of money. I looked at the lights in Battery Park. I could see inside people’s apartments across the street, families decorating Christmas trees or sitting on their couches, watching television together. I thought about all the places I’d lived, which were too many to count and how at one point in my life this apartment would have felt like a palace. I moved the phone to my other hand so I could warm that one in my pocket for a second. I found myself dialing you. My nose was so cold that I had to keep rubbing it to revive feeling in the tip. You answered.

I said I just wanted to talk. You said great. I’m listening.

I said my kids are asleep and tonight I just waited for them to go to sleep so that I could have a drink.

You said okay.

You said what else.

I said well, I was never a big drinker before, isn’t that enough, and you said, I don’t know is it?

I said it’s too dark here, where I’m sitting. I really hate my life and there are reasons why. Some of the reasons I can’t bring myself to say, but here are some and I started listing. Their combined weight made me nauseous while I listened to myself. I felt charged, opening up, but it wasn’t all that pleasant. I hadn’t talked to a grown-up about anything real for days, and worried I might be rambling.

I said I have to get it together, I’m a mother, this isn’t good enough, and you said, okay, good enough for what? I said my kids. You said you’re an amazing mother. I said I wasn’t this morning, and you said

you make a very good case against yourself, it’s incredibly convincing

I said what do you mean and you said, what I just heard is you putting yourself on trial and assuring me that you’re guilty of an awful lot. It’s like you’re talking from a script you’ve written, do you know what I mean, and I said yeah but I have no new material.

How do I fix myself, I asked. We talked a long time, with Lady Liberty shining over there to remind me why my sublet was priced so high.

It’s risky when you call someone in that state. When I left my daughter’s village in Ethiopia I needed to talk to someone. The experience was so unhinging that I felt drugged, my head was bobbing around as I replayed it all, and I rested the side of my face against the car window and asked if we could stop to buy a phone card so I could call the States. When my father answered I just started talking. I only have eleven minutes on this phone, I said, and he called to my mother to pick up the other line. They listened so beautifully. My mother with her gentle amazement and my father who was so present, I wish there was a word for impossibly present; there was no small talk from him, no perfunctory exclamations. In every silence I knew he understood. I knew the expression on his face after we hung up. He would lie in bed that night and think of nothing else. It sounds like a small thing but it was fathomless, how connected I felt to him during that call. I knew I’d never be the same again after what I’d seen that day and I needed a particular pitch of listening and he hit it. He met me there fresh and followed, voice full of emotion. There was none of me alone while I stood on that dirt road in Africa, the Bale monkeys jumping through the trees above my head.

I remember your voice that night. You were so sane and male, and I needed a man’s voice. You said two things, you said “you need to lay off yourself, just for a day, can you do that?” I said maybe, I’ll try and you said, yes try. Then you said to do you a favor and write down some things that are good and send them to you. You said you did that every morning before you got out of bed, you’d lie there, “clearing the cobwebs out” and ridding yourself of grudges. Ending wars you were ready to fight, mostly against yourself. I said how come some people do this to themselves and you said hey, I get halfway through every day and I want to blow my fucking brains out. I want to drive off a bridge. I can taste the bitterness when it seeps across my tongue, making me feel dry and unlucky. I’m telling you, you said, I just want to break something, but then I ask myself

What can I do? How can I be of service to someone or to this moment, what can I do to help

You said, what the hell, who doesn’t understand self-loathing? You have to get it out, even as a joke. Stuffing it all the time makes you explode later, and who doesn’t understand feeling really hopeless? Seriously fuck anyone who doesn’t understand, you said, everyone gets to feel bad.

I get that you don’t fully know how great a man you are. I know enough of what you do in the course of a day to be massively impressed. You are a good husband and father and you don’t put yourself first, which makes you fairly rare. Despite your never advertising it I’ve discovered how honorable you are. You started fighting self-destruction around the age when most guys are
hitting impressive levels of indulging it. It sounds like you went through the kind of stuff when you were a kid that a lot of people use as an excuse their entire lives. They whip it out like a get out of jail card, the fact that they had to endure this or didn’t get enough of that. From you, though, I keep noticing a lack of blame.

I said okay, now that I’ve laid out the ugliness in me you’ll never have an impure thought about me again, and you said fuck no, I’m having one right now. I asked you about my friend I said how is she I wish I could visit her; I miss her. You said you know what? That woman? She’d go into battle for you. She loves you so much and so do I, so you have that going for you.

I said thank you. I will try not to, I said, but if I need to, can I—

You didn’t make me say the word you said, yes call, please, that actually helps me. It’s good for me. Call. I said okay. I hate it when I have nothing positive to say and you said, “Fuck, I hope that doesn’t hold for me because if I call you and just leave a message saying, hey it’s me, I hate myself so much right now, are you gonna, what? Hang up on me and say that guy’s weak?” I said please, and you said I didn’t think so, go write that list. I said thanks, really, I’ll talk to you later and you said sleep tight, I’ll leave my phone on.

“What I do is, I take the thing.”

“The honeycomb?”

“Sure, the honeycomb.”

“How big?” I ask you.

“I don’t know, like,” you hold your rough laborer’s hands about six inches apart from each other to show me, “about like this, and I dip it in the jar of honey. I hold the comb in the air so they find me.”

“Wow. Okay. And then you . . . what?”

We are sitting on my screened-in porch. You are looking past that tree, to where the quarry is.

“I go where the worker goes, and sometimes I might start a little fire.”

“With what? How big?”

“Matches, it don’t matter, just . . . small, you know. The bee flies away from the smoke toward the hive.” You shrug. “Sometimes I throw a little flour on them so they are easy to spot?”

“Okay. Then you, what, catch it?”

“The worker? No, hold on.” You hold up one finger. “I follow the smoke, because the bee makes a line, a straight one, and I follow it.”

I slap the pillows on the daybed where I am sitting. “Shut up. You follow it? Where?” I am laughing because I can’t believe you actually do this and that you know how. You are laughing, too. You are leaning forward, hitting your knee with your fist and you laugh so hard that you take off your hat. You put your hand on your stomach and take a breath.

“Aw, jeez, well, the worker.” I am still giggling a little. “Stop,” you say, “you’re going to start me going again. Anyway, the bee gorges itself on honey and I follow it awhile until I lose it. I mark the spot and come back and repeat the whole thing all over. Can you believe it? I must seem real simple to you.”

“Not simple,” I say, shaking my head in true amazement. “You are like a freaking Grizzly Adams. So when does it end?”

“Well, that depends, see it’s just—” You stop, giving me a look like you are sorry I have to listen. “Do you really want to hear this?”

“Are you out of your mind,” I say. “Look at me, this is better than
Gone with the Wind
, I am riveted.”

You take off your hat and rub your eyes. You have been up since four this morning and fed all the animals. Already been to town to check on one of your job sites.

“Aw, I can’t be that interesting, you’re just being nice,” you say.

I stick out my tongue and say come on, finish, what happens to the beeeeeeeee.

“Okay, well, I have to tell you, last week,” your voice drops
to a whisper, “I ended up in an abandoned house because the hive was in the wall!” You end with a shout, like the wall was the punch line, and I am laughing too, but not completely sure why.

I make you tell me the whole thing; how you found the house and what the owners said when you told them you wanted to buy not the house, but that one wall. Tearing it down yourself, you raked in about thirty pounds of wild honey. Real wild honey, not what you buy at the store that says “wild honey,” but isn’t wild at all.

“I gave them a tub of it too, them owners, and they were so stinkin’ happy.” You take a sip of coffee.

“You did not!” I say. “That’s . . . wow. You are off the charts.” You shrug. “Can I heat that up?” I point to his coffee.

“No, I’m good, I’ll take another one of these, though, if you got any?” You hold up the last corner of a muffin, a little sheepishly, and I hop up, giving you the stop sign so you’ll pause the story until I come back. I take three steps and come back for your coffee anyway. “I’ll get you a new one,” I say, taking the cup. “You want jam?”

“Heck no, your muffins don’t need no jam, girl.” You touch the top of the large iron crucifix on the bench next to you. “That’s real pretty,” you say, more to the cross than to me.

I go in the kitchen and start the steamer for the milk. Out the enormous back window in my kitchen there are trees painted on the sky in more shades of green than I realized existed four years ago. You taught us the names of those trees and paid my kids a dollar when you tested them and they were correct about which was which. That’s just one chapter of country life you opened up to us. The pages of our index before you were mostly empty.

“Oh, thank you,” you say, as I hand you the muffin, which is steaming from my warming it. “Will you look at that. You spoil me. I don’t deserve this.”

“I put in molasses and almond meal,” I say, wishing we could spoil you as much as you do us. We try to refrain from calling you, but the fireplace, the carpenter ants, someone got a suspicious bite; so many things seem to occur outside my wheelhouse and you are fluent in the languages of trees and bugs. Wood. You never let me feel like we’re a bother, and partly that’s because of your wife, who greets us with hugs in our communal garden or a wave from her front door. She steps out mid-conversation, with her thick red hair shining and her constant coffee mug: “They said you had a thing going on with your sink?” Or “Did you get the garlic we left in the barn?” She knows country life has endless moving parts to keep in order. She tells me about books she’s reading, and I give her an apple pie when she brings us the poppy seed bread her daughter just made. “Still hot!” She says, “You can’t believe how good, taste it, you’ll want to shoot me for bringing it.”