Dive From Clausen's Pier (29 page)

“It’ll be slow,” Kilroy said, touching my arm. He lifted his hand and ran it down the back of my head. “It’ll take as long as it takes.”

C
HAPTER
22

I knew Kilroy was right, that what I needed was time, but I wanted to be done with it, to be wherever I was going. At the same time, I wanted Mike to be where he was going, too, and to be OK with my not being there with him, which I knew was impossible.

Fall was so cold in Madison, wind blowing off the lakes and penetrating everything. I thought of the long, wide windows of the physical therapy room and what Mike must see through them, trees bare of leaves, skeletal against the gray sky. We’d always made a point of going to Picnic Point in October, taking the long walk out through the turning trees. It was almost November now. I thought of him more and more, until thinking of him became not an act but a presence in me, a dull ache in the center of my chest. Yet I didn’t call again. What more could I say, beyond
I’m sorry?
I couldn’t think of a thing.

It started raining, a thin, cold rain that turned the entire city dreary. Being outside was unpleasant, but so was being inside, trapped, the idea of all the other people in the city feeling pent up, too. I was too restless to read books, so I bought a stack of fashion magazines and read them as carefully as texts I’d been assigned for a class.

One afternoon I sat in my chilly alcove flipping through
Vogue
by the feeble light of my lamp. The sheer spring dresses made me shiver, but I kept paging along. What was it about fashion? Since arriving in New York I’d been nurturing this fascination, this compulsion to look at clothes. It
was less about beauty than about transformation. Who would I be in a turquoise paisley slip dress and beaded sandals?

By five it was completely dark out—the early, weighty dark of a November afternoon, a long night still to come. I heard footsteps, and Lane appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a collapsed umbrella that was still dripping. She did a double-take when she saw me huddled under Simon’s scratchy blanket. “Carrie,” she said, “you look like you’re freezing.”

I shrugged. “Just the hand I’m turning the pages with.”

“Come into my room,” she said. “Seriously. I’ll make us some tea—Miss Wolf had me reading to her all afternoon and my throat could use it.”

Her room was warm, pans of water under the radiators so it wouldn’t feel so dry. She pointed me to the armchair and plugged in an electric kettle, then held out a tin cracker box full of assorted tea bags. I picked orange pekoe and she took lemon mint for herself, then got cups from a shelf and arranged the tea bags in them. When the kettle whistled she unplugged it and poured the steaming water.

“You know, you can hang out in my room when I’m not here,” she said. “It’s way too cold out there.”

“Thanks.”

The tea was fragrant. I sipped mine slowly, then raised the cup to look at the tiny flowers along the edge—little purple blossoms interspersed with dark-green leaves. There was a gold line on the cup’s fragile handle, another ringing the base.

“It was my grandmother’s,” Lane said from her bed, where she sat cross-legged on her puffy duvet. She held up her cup, which matched. “I inherited the set when she died.”

“You did? Not your mother?” My mother had her mother’s china in a cabinet in the dining room. When we used it, for birthdays and holidays, she joked that it was my legacy so we should be careful—wash it by hand, dry it and put it right back again.

“This was my father’s mother,” Lane said. “He died when I was a child, so I was her only descendant.”

I glanced at her bookcase, where the periwinkle blue books were. What was the line from her poem?
The father of memory
.

“I also have her piano,” she said. “And no idea what to do with it.”

“You don’t play?”

“I do a little, but I’m not exactly going to bring it here.”

We exchanged a smile. The ground floor of the brownstone was furnished entirely with castoffs—stained old couches, broken tables, chairs that needed recaning. Anything nice was in the bedrooms, held separate.

“Someday you’ll have a house to put it in.”

“Or an apartment,” she said. “Maura and I might get one together.”

Maura was her girlfriend—a tall red-haired woman who worked on Wall Street. “Where does she live now?”

“In a studio way up in the East Nineties. It’s a pain, but she refused to live here.”

“Why?”

“She likes Simon in smaller doses.” She got up and crossed the room, then took a photograph from a shelf and held it out to show me. An old lady in a flowered dress sat on a wicker chair in front of a big, wood-frame house, a small child on her lap. Nearby, a couple in matching straw hats held hands. “My grandmother, my parents, and me,” she said.

I took the photograph and studied it. The couple were young, thirty or so, the man standing there with his toes pointing slightly to the sides, just as Lane sometimes stood. In the child I could see the Lane I knew: in the pointed chin and the narrow, arched eyebrows. “How old were you when he died?” I asked her.

“Seven.”

I gave her the picture back, nodding.

“What?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your expression. Is your father dead, too?”

I wondered what she’d seen. After a moment I said, “He walked out on us. When I was three.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

She reached for a package and offered it to me, shortbread cookies wedged tightly in plaid cellophane. I wiggled a cookie out, then she took one for herself.

“He just—walked out?” she said, holding her cookie without biting into it.

I took a bite of mine and nodded.

“But you know where he is,” she said. “You see him.”

I shook my head. “He could live in China for all I know. Or New York.”

Twin creases pinched the bridge of her nose, and she went back to her bed and set the cookie next to her tea, then faced me again, a troubled look on her face. “You haven’t seen him since you were three? He’s alive out there and you don’t know where?”

I nodded. “Presumably.”

“What about child support?”

“Ever hear of the expression ‘deadbeat dad’?”

“God,” she said.

“My mother tried to find him for a while, but then it was like, if he didn’t want to be with us …” I let my voice trail off and stared into my lap. It was strange to be talking about it.

She lifted her tea cup and blew, then set it down again without having any. She said, “I guess we have something in common then—growing up without fathers.”

“I guess so.” I set my tea on the floor, then stood up and wandered to the window. My reflection stared back at me from the black glass, my hair hanging to my shoulders, a little frizzy from all the rain.

She said, “Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if your father had stayed around? If you’d even recognize it?”

Without turning I nodded. On and off over the years I’d thought that if my father hadn’t left, everything would have been different—I might never have even gotten involved with Mike. I remembered my phone conversation with my mother back in September—how afterward I’d felt that my father had somehow caused or at least encouraged my disillusionment back home. Now I took it further, saw his desertion as akin to a physical force that had blown me from my mother’s quiet house to the Mayers’ noisy one, and then had blown me on again, having taught that loyalty, responsibility, and love were as nothing, valueless, light as soap bubbles and just as easily dissolved.
Jump on a ferry, Carrie. Just set yourself free
.

“What are you thinking?” Lane said.

I turned around. “Something along the lines of how events are so powerful—how they determine so much.”

“That’s what I always think about people.”

“Like your father?”

She smiled a faraway smile. “He was a strange guy. He’d be full of plans one minute—he was going to take me to the circus, we were going to stage our
own
circus—but then he’d go lie on this old couch in our living room, his bare feet up on the arm, his toenails all horned and yellow, and he’d hardly know I was there. He had a brain tumor, see, but I didn’t know that until later, and I was six, seven, it’s not like the words ‘brain tumor’ would have had more power than he did.” She smiled again. “I think it’s him as much as the fact that he died.”

“What is?”

She shrugged. “Me.”

I considered the man I remembered. The bathrobe man yelling at my
mother, the fence-post man out in the snowy yard. There was a feeling I used to get when I thought about him, a dull, lowered feeling that I’d always assumed came from what he’d done, not who he was. Now I wondered what it was like during those three years when he was around, my mother with a small child in the house, this man with his anger and his misery. How many times did she sit spooning applesauce into my mouth while he ranted or lurked, came in or stormed out? My mother with a baby in her arms, then a toddler on her hip, so that she didn’t even have the full use of herself to contend with him. She was twenty-one when she married him, twenty-three when I was born—the age I was now.

Lane set her tea to the side and swung onto her stomach, planting her elbows on her duvet and propping her chin on her small fists. Her hands were translucent, the veins pale blue and sinuous, like distantly viewed, meandering rivers. “Miss Wolf is always telling me that the family is the enemy of the artist,” she said. “Well, I think the family
is
the artist. Just like the sky is, or all the books you’ve ever read.”

I nodded, but I was thinking all at once of Kilroy’s evasions about his family, his past. What was he doing with all those books he read but filling himself, refilling himself—pushing further and further away what had been there before?

A few days later a small package arrived at the brownstone with the morning mail, a little padded envelope inscribed with my name. The handwriting was faintly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. The postmark was Madison.

Inside, all by itself, with no note of explanation, was an unmarked cassette tape, and all at once I knew it had come from Mike, that my name had been written by his mother, who’d been unable to bring herself to put her own name and address on the upper-left-hand corner.

The brownstone was empty, and though I was sure it would be OK to use any of the stereos in the house, I didn’t feel right not asking first. I took the tape out to my car, which was parked under a bare tree two blocks to the south. The driver’s seat was cold through my jeans. The car started easily, then sputtered and died. It smelled damp from all the rain. The engine caught again, and I gave it some gas, then switched the heater on and slid in the tape.

There was a scratchy sound at first, and then Mrs. Mayer’s voice, whispering, “OK, you’re all set.” Then her footsteps, and I saw her hurrying from Mike’s bed to the door. Then a faint click—the door closing.

The first thing from Mike was a deep sigh, and I bit my lip, wondering how I would be able to stand it.

“Hi, Carrie, it’s October thirtieth. I guess I should say that—if I were writing you a letter I’d write it. I was going to try to write, on the computer in occupational, but I didn’t want it to take five years, so … Hey, thanks for calling the other day. Are you still walking all over the place? Be careful, you know. I’m sure you don’t need me saying be careful, but don’t walk alone at night or anything, OK?” There was a long silence. “God, this is weird. Sorry. You know, when you write a letter you can stop and figure out what to say next, but if I stop you just get blank tape. Or maybe you’ll hear me breathing.

“Hey, what am I thinking, I have some amazing news. Are you ready for this? Rooster’s getting married. To Joan. Can you believe it? No one can, everyone’s been going on and on about how they can’t believe it, which is really pretty much of an insult to Rooster, if you think about it. I guess he popped the question in Oconomowoc, they’d gone over there one Saturday. Guy’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him. And she’s really nice, I don’t know how well you got to know her, but she’s great. It’s going to be in late December, and—well I mean, would you be coming home by Christmas anyway? I know he’ll want you to come, I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him.

“What else. Hey, I have a new roommate, Jeff went home. This guy’s pretty cool. He’s like my dad’s age, but he doesn’t act it. No offense to my dad or anything, but this guy’s not so kind of businessmanny. He’s a fireman, actually. Or he was, I guess he’s a quad now. He was in a car accident and injured his spinal cord—higher up than mine, the poor guy. He can’t hear me right now, in case you’re wondering. His wife brought him a Walkman and he listens to it a lot. Opera. He had her play one of his tapes on my player for me, and it was kind of pretty, really. The music part. The singing’s kind of hard to take.

“Rehab’s going OK. I might be getting the halo off next week—they’ll do X rays, then we’ll see. Stu and Bill came by the other night, I hadn’t seen either of them for a while. And Jamie was in. She—Well, don’t get mad, but I think you should call her. I mean, it’s none of my business, but—Oh, never mind. Scratch that. Too bad I can’t blank out parts of the tape. The stupid buttons on this machine are impossible to press down, I need to get a gimp one. I guess I could ask Mom to edit it for me when I’m done, but I don’t exactly want her listening in—you should’ve heard me trying to explain why I wanted her out of the room while I talked. I guess I have a sort of juvenile mentality, being so secretive. King says I’m worried
about losing my privacy. You know, once I go home and stuff, not that I have any here. So anyway, I’ve been trying to worry about that for him.” Laughter. “That counselor guy, you know, Dave King. I call him King Dave. He’s not so bad. He tells me what I should be worrying about and then I worry about it. It’s pretty weird, really. Counseling. I keep thinking about your mom. You know how she’s kind of quiet and guarded sometimes, how she’ll kind of look at you while you’re talking like she’s really thinking hard about what you’re saying? Well, that always bugged me. I mean, I can tell you this now. It made me not want to talk around her. But I’ve been thinking maybe it’s because of her job, you know? And she can’t help it. I don’t know. Talking to King, I got to thinking about those letters we used to write each other, remember? Kind of goofy things sometimes, and we’d leave ’em in each other’s lockers? Did you save mine? Yours are all in my closet at home, I know exactly where they are, and it really bugs me that if I ever want to read them again I’ll have to have someone get them down for me. You know? I mean for some reason that’s a lot worse than knowing my dad’s going to have to handle my dick for me every day for the rest of my life. Or his, depending who lasts longer.”