Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (14 page)

L
ater, at the airstrip, I sat with Charlotte while we waited for her plane to arrive.

She wasn't angry at all. I was happy for this, of course. But right before her plane left she did give me a version of a speech that I'd heard probably twenty times before, from twenty different women.

It goes like this: Tell yourself whatever you like, they say. Tell yourself there were a thousand reasons why we could never have worked. But even if you don't realize it now, there will definitely be a time when it dawns on you that we could have worked just fine. That ‘working' is a choice people make every day, and that the use of the present participle of ‘work' is no accident, because that's exactly what it is—work. Not fate, not true love. Just work. You've chosen otherwise. And that's okay. But just remember that it was a choice, after all. That you don't
have
to love that woman. And remember I said all this when the light finally dawns on your thick head. If it ever does.

When she finished with her version of this speech Charlotte thanked me, somewhat inanely I thought, for helping her get sober, and for encouraging her to start reading widely again. She kissed the top of my head and hoisted her bags and walked out through the double doors onto the tarmac. Her plane hadn't touched down yet, and I didn't understand at first why she would choose to wait in the sun. I sat there for a few minutes, staring at her back, and then I understood, and that's when I left, finally.

S
omewhere in there, before Emma's accident, and before Rick showed up with the specimenz but after the caballeros whipped me senseless, I got an email from my editor saying my first novel had been picked up by a large Midwestern university for its incoming freshman reading program, and that this was great news, and they'd need me there in late August to speak to four thousand newly minted undergrads, and congratulations, my editor wrote, and then at the end he added, in a brief casual way meant to seem almost an afterthought, no big deal at all, that he was looking forward to seeing the book I was long overdue with, the book that had burned in the fire, the book he thought I was still working on when in fact I was working on a new book unknown to him, on Emma's book, which I'd become convinced was the literary equivalent of a thalidomide baby.

At the beach that same afternoon I sat in the driver's seat and watched the Caribbean roll in and out, and gave serious thought to driving the Jeep up over the dunes and straight into the warm water, into all that gently rolling green.

W
hen I looked at Emma and my heart leapt into my throat, as it always did, I sometimes realized that if I could figure out a way to see her as other people no doubt must—as human, in other words, pretty, certainly, but flawed, real,
actual
, doomed to expire like the rest of us—then I would be free, finally. But there seemed to be only one way that I could see her.

A
nd certainly that was how I saw her, after not laying eyes on her for months, the afternoon she flew in to the island's small airstrip. This was four days after her mother steered her car into the tree. An angry bruise ran down her left cheek, bleeding into her jaw and throat, but this did nothing to dim her beauty. And that unmistakable gait as she came across the tarmac toward the little terminal, in faded jeans and, I hoped, no underwear . . .

I knew I had an obligation to tell her about Charlotte. But I couldn't do that. Not then. Because I could see, from the moment she stepped through the doors and favored me with a wide smile, that everything had changed.

She had her hands on me before I could get the door to the pink stucco casita unlocked, and by the time I closed the door behind us she had my T-shirt off and was at work on my belt.

Several minutes later she punched me on the temple, a dazzling shot that put me immediately in mind of the whip-wielding caballeros, and then she came, spectacularly by the sound of it, while I watched tiny meteorites blaze around the edges of my vision.

T
hat night we slept tangled up in each other, our bodies exchanging sweat in the heat even with the ceiling fan raising a small tornado, and with the windows open the omnipresent night sound of dogs barking woke me again and again.

The first time I woke, when I saw Emma in the bed next to me instead of Charlotte, I started as though she were a specter.

The third time I woke, Emma lay on her side, gazing at me, the bruise on her cheek darkened to black in the dim glow of the streetlamp outside my window, and when she saw my eyes come open and fix on her she said, without affect: I love you.

The fourth time I woke she was still gazing at me, and I felt her hand on my face and realized that her touch, and not the dogs, had interrupted my sleep. She traced the fading bruises on my cheeks and jaw, the scar in front of my left ear, and the half-healed laceration above my eye where Ajax's knuckle had split the skin.

What's been happening to you down here? she asked.

You sure you didn't do that? I joked.

She cocked her hand back into a fist, a mock threat, then dropped it to the mattress again and said, Seriously, though. Who did this to you?

Doesn't matter, I told her, tracing the bruise on her own face with my fingers. It's all over now.

And we went back to sleep.

The seventh time I woke, it was the dogs again.

I
did sometimes wonder what those dogs imagined they were accomplishing when they barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked and barked while I was trying to write, or sleep.

I mean, at a certain point it had to become clear, even to a dog, that whatever's pissing you off isn't backing down, or going away, or otherwise changing, and so you'd think the dogs would accept that and pack it in, conserve their energy.

But no.

They just keep barking.

W
hen Emma noticed the missing teeth the next morning she again demanded an explanation, but I refused, guilt weighing on me like the gravity on Jupiter, and this was a strange transference of that guilt, as the manner in which I lost my teeth was pretty much the last thing I felt guilty for.

W
e laughed, furtively, about people at the beach encroaching on our space. We laughed when Emma moved toward me in the water, then dog-paddled frantically away when she caught my expression and realized I was pissing. We laughed in the fancy restaurant of the island's one resort when I did three laps around the mammoth dining room, trying and failing to find egress to the toilet, finally coming to a stop and catching her gaze across the room and shrugging my shoulders in utter perplexity. We laughed when, on the beach, I inhaled a swatch of her hair, gagging and flailing my arms in genuine distress. We laughed when I convinced her to try escargots and she remarked, with a grimace, that all she had to say was it seemed clear to her that she'd just eaten something that spent its entire life in dirt. We laughed when, while we beat one another on the bed, John Coltrane's
Ballads
wrapped and, in its wisdom, my iTunes decided to play ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You,' bringing a swift if mirthful end to our odd brand of lovemaking.

F
or a while I was able to carry on without my conscience getting the better of me. My guilt was eclipsed by the pleasure of Emma's presence—and she was truly present now, for the first time, a pure and unprecedented
thereness
that sometimes left me blinking in disbelief.

After she'd been on the island for a week, while we sipped Medallas on the beach at sunset, she took my hand and apologized for her distance, for her many disappearing acts, for offering nothing in return but a smile when I told her I loved her.

We were sitting in beach chairs. Squinting at the setting sun.

I feel a lot, she said, that I'm just really, really bad at expressing. That's no excuse, of course. But I think you know me well enough to understand that for whatever reason the outside doesn't match the inside, sometimes.

Of course I do, I said—the very picture of empathy and acceptance, as if all along I'd abided comfortably with this deep understanding of her, as if I'd never doubted her for a moment, as if I hadn't yielded to petty frustration, like a spoiled child, in yielding to Charlotte.

B
ut other than that brief moment we were simply getting it right, finally, finally, without forethought or effort, and there were times, I won't lie, when I was convinced that the Singularity had happened without my noticing. Which of course was impossible—no one knows what form the Singularity will take, exactly, but one thing that's certain is it will be noticed. Nevertheless, I had a few moments, there on the island with Emma, when it seemed perfection had been achieved.

I
don't know when it happened but all of a sudden the guys wearing
VIETNAM VETERAN
ball caps look just like the paper-skinned old men from my childhood wearing WWII
V
ETERAN
ball caps. All those who remembered Guadalcanal and the French hedgerows died quietly and out of sight, and the men of my father's generation slipped into their spots on the age continuum when I wasn't paying attention. They use canes now, and oxygen tanks. Their bottom eyelids droop, revealing wet red interiors. They rely on machines even more than the rest of us: supermarket scooters, electric wheelchairs, stair lifts, therapeutic vibrating shoes, hearing aids the size of pinkie nails.

None of it makes sense to my eye. There's an incongruity I can't reconcile when I see a man in a black
POW/MIA
shirt who needs help getting out of his Oldsmobile. To me those men are frozen in time, somewhere around my eleventh year, the mid-1980s, which would place most of them forever in early middle age, a good season in the life of a man, when his callowness has melted away but he remains vigorous and sharp-minded and can still reasonably expect his life to go on forever.

My father always looked like a Vietnam veteran is, in my mind, supposed to. His hair never turned white, and his skin never wore thin and ashy. His arms and shoulders were tanned and thick with muscle, what's usually called work strong. He was that way until almost the end, when seemingly overnight he traded Tonkin and Tet for Normandy and El-Alamein, and then he died.

W
hen my father was alive and still healthy you couldn't take his photograph with a flash camera. Or rather, you could, but it was ill-advised. Everyone in our family knew better and never used flashes at Christmas or birthday parties, so I only saw it happen twice before he got sick. The first time was at my oldest sister's high school graduation, when her friend wanted a shot of my father and my mother flanking her. They stood arm in arm in the gymnasium post-commencement, with graduates and their families milling around, and when the flash went off my father hit the deck, belly-down on the polished wood of the basketball court. Everyone stared while he gazed about wild-eyed. Finally my mother crouched and whispered until, gradually, she convinced him to stand up and walk out of the gym. The rest of us stood there, silent, our hands in our pockets, left with the strange sense of having witnessed something that would have been funny if it hadn't so obviously come from a place of great and, to us, unfathomable horror.

The second time was at a Brownwater Navy reunion in Chicago, where my father posed for pictures with a dozen guys he'd patrolled Mekong tributaries with four decades earlier. I'd gone on the invite of my father's friend Chappy. It's telling that the invitation came from him, and not my father. But I thought it might be fun, not to mention enlightening—thought I might even write something about it, though I never did—and so I found myself in the Marriott ballroom, marveling while my father stood with his buddies and hardly blinked as flashes popped over and over again. I asked my mother about it later, and she told me this was the only time she'd ever seen him sit still for a flash photograph. Somehow he was healed, among those men, however temporarily.

But it was temporary. After he became really sick, when he was too weak to turn over furniture or run away, people seemed to forget that flashes weren't just forbidden, but that they traumatized the guy. And the irony was that now, with him dying, these people wanted to take his picture all the time—by himself, with my mother, with just me, with just my sisters, with the whole family. And it seemed like they always used a flash, and more than once I had my arm around his thin shoulders and felt him wince, over and over, as the flash went off. But he was too wasted to leave the room and, so near to death, too meek to tell them to stop.

D
uring the time we spent together, both in high school and during the more recent stretch, I had to be careful not to raise my hands to Emma's face too quickly. Say I was reaching out to stroke her cheek, or tuck an errant swatch of hair behind her ear—if I moved my hand toward her too fast, she would flinch, and sometimes even turn away. She never hit the deck like my old man—really, she was the greatest paragon of apparent calm I've ever known, even greater than my namesake, who if dispassion were money would have been a wealthy man indeed—but the essence of her reaction was the same as his. Casualties both, stamped by trauma, they ruled like despots over their everyday to make up for the moments when they had no control, when they were most vulnerable, when all they could do was duck and tremble. Or at least that's how I understand them now, at this great remove, with him long-buried, and her gone from me.

O
n the beach one day I found a woman hiding topless behind a lean-to built of driftwood and dried palm fronds. She was in her late forties. I walked by, jumped a bit when she suddenly came into view, then stared at her breasts a moment, on reflex. They hung loose and heavy, looking like they'd never once enjoyed the support of a bra, but the nipples, well, unless there's something seriously amiss I always respond to nipples, and in that moment, for just a moment, I wanted one of hers between my teeth. I stood there. The woman eyed me back, cool appraisal, a smile playing on her lips. The palm fronds chattered in the breeze, sounding like a squadron of prehistoric insects. Then my senses came to me, and I returned the woman's smile, awkwardly, and turned back in the other direction.

Emma sat in the sand a quarter of a mile back, and when I returned and told her about the woman's sagging breasts—leaving out, of course, the part where I'd briefly wanted to gnaw on her nipple—she smiled behind her sunglasses and patted my shoulder and said, That's what they all end up looking like, you know.

Not yours, I said. Those little Hottentots will still be standing up when you're in your eighties.

But what if I have kids? she asked.

And sidestepping her choice of the singular personal pronoun over the plural, I held my hands out, palms up, as if hoisting some invisible weight, and I said, Then they'll just get big. That's a win-win.

And, again, she laughed.