Inexcusable

T
he way it looks is not the way it is.

Gigi Boudakian is screaming at me so fearsomely, I think I could just about cry. I almost don't even care what the subject is because right now I am sick and I am confused and I am laid so low by the very idea that Gigi Boudakian is screaming at me that the what-for hardly seems even to matter. I love Gigi Boudakian. I hate it when people I love scream at me.

And I don't feel guilty. That is, I don't feel like I
am
guilty. But I sure as hell feel sorry.

I am sorry.

I am one sorry sorry bastard. And I feel very sick.

I am so sorry.

“What are you sorry for, Keir?” Gigi screams again, grabbing me by where my lapels would be if I had a jacket
on, or a shirt, or anything. She can't get a purchase because I have no clothes, and very little fat, because I have been good about my health lately. She grabs, can't grab, scratches instead at my chest, then slaps me hard across the face, first right side then left, smack, smack.

“Say what you did, Keir.”

“Why is Carl coming? Why do you have to call Carl, Gigi?”

“Say what you did, Keir. Admit what you did to me.”

“I didn't do anything, Gigi.”

“Yes you did! I said
no!”

I say this very quietly, but firmly. “You did not.”

“I said
no
,” she growls. “Say it.”

“I don't see why you need Carl. You can beat me up just fine on your own. Listen, Gigi, it was nobody's fault.”

“Yes it was! It was
your
fault. This should not have happened.”

“Fine, then it didn't.”

“It did, it did, it did, bastard! For me it did, and it's making me sick.”

“Don't. Don't be sick. I don't want you to be sick or anything. I just want everything to be all right. Everything is all right, Gigi. Please, can everything be all right?”

“It is not all right! It is not all right, and you are not all right, Keir Sarafian. Nothing is all right. Nothing will ever again ever be all right.”

She is wrong. Gigi is wrong about everything, but
especially about me. You could ask pretty much anybody and they will tell you.
Rock solid, Keir. Kind of guy you want behind you. Keir Sarafian, straight shooter. Loyal, polite. Funny. Good manners. He was brought up right, that boy was
, is what you would hear. All the things you would want to hear said about you are the things I have always heard said about me. I am a good guy.

Good guys don't do bad things. Good guys understand that no means no, and so I could not have done this because I understand, and I love Gigi Boudakian.

“I love you, Gigi.”

As I say this, Gigi Boudakian lets out the most horrific scream I have ever heard, and I am terrified by it and reach out, lunge toward her and try and cover her mouth with my hands and I fall over her and she screams louder and bites at my hands and I keep flailing, trying to stop that sound coming out of her and getting out into the world.

I am only trying to stop the sound. It looks terrible what I am doing, as I watch my hands doing it, as I watch hysterical Gigi Boudakian reacting to me, and it looks really, really terrible but I am only trying to stop the awful sound and the way it looks is not the way it is.

The way it looks is
not
the way it is.

T
here are verifiable reasons for the wrongness of this situation. I have character witnesses. Because I have character. I have two brainy, insightful older sisters, Mary and Fran, who brook no nonsense off anybody, and Mary and Fran love me to pieces and respect me, and they would not do that if I were capable of being monstrous. People like that don't support monsters. But they support me, Mary and Fran do. Meeting Mary and Fran would convince you I am what I say I am.

And here's another reason. If I'm going to tell you the truth, and that is exactly what I am going to do, then I would have to tell you this about me: Most of the time, I would rather go to my room and whack myself silly to a good song than to have a whole team of actual lap dancers all to myself in person. Really, truly, I would
rather. Does that sound like a menace to society to you?

Really, I'm the kind of guy who would rather stay at home on a Saturday night to play a board game with his dad than go to a party. I have done that, a lot of times. Truly. Does that sound like a monster to you?

*  *  *

Ray never screamed at me, which was one of the many things that made him a great father, a great man. I hate it when people I love scream at me. There is no more piercing sound, there is nothing that runs you right all the way through, like having somebody you love scream at you.

What he did do was play Risk with me. My dad and I had a game of Risk going forever. It started on the Sunday night when we got back from trucking the girls off all the way to college, three hours and one state line one way and three more and one more back this way, and we came back wrecked and empty to a house without the girls in it and even though that should have come as no surprise, inside, it was a big surprise. I thought I knew, but I didn't really know, what a house without girls was going to feel like.

We stood in the doorway, looking around in the darkness, looking around as if we saw a strange car in the driveway or heard a burglar alarm wheening, and we were standing and staring and listening for what was there that shouldn't have been.

He was as tired as I was, I knew it. It was time for bed for both of us.

“I don't want to go to bed yet,” he said, flipping on a light but still looking all over like everything was spooky strangeness.

“Na, I'm not ready yet either,” I said.

And so the war began. It started with my Venezuela kicking squat out of his Peru, continued through my fierce razing of the rest of South America, two frozen pizzas, one tub of microwave popcorn, and half a white chocolate cheesecake.

Before we finally went to bed, I had been driven all the way back up into Canada, and pretty deep into the second half of the cheesecake.

We left the board right there, on our square maple- top dining room table that had no leaves for extensions but was always the right size for the four of us, me and Dad and Mary and Fran, for all those years, and for me and Dad and Fran since the year before when Mary left for school, and would surely be enough for just the two of us now, but not with the whole of the Risk map spread out across it. We said we'd finish up the next day, and clear the table again and eat dinner there like always, once the game was finished, and we went up to bed.

*  *  *

“I'm looking forward to it,” he said, near the end of our bachelor year. When it was just the two of us in the house. “I can't wait for you to be gone.”

Right.

“Right. Why is that, Ray?”

“Because I'm going to need all this space. Going to need all the rooms, to start my new family. To start my new, beautiful family to replace the one that left me. My brand-new, loyal family that won't leave me.”

“Guilty family, you mean.”

“Loyal.”

“It's the same thing, probably.”

He didn't mean it. Some of it, he did. He missed the girls terribly. And it was going to be worse next year when I went to school.

But I kind of doubted he was going to replace us.

“I'm going to join one of those dating services. Meet the right woman. Start making babies left and right.”

“Dad, jeez,” I said.

“See, you're jealous. My new family is going to be better.”

Mercifully, the phone rang. Fran. She called me every day from school. Good ol' Fran. Thank god, some days, for good ol' Fran on the phone.

“So who wants to hear about his fantasy family?” she said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That's what I told him. Here, let me put him on—”

“Don't you
dare,”
she said.

“He'll listen to you, Fran.”

“Like hell he will. He'll just get worse.”

She was probably right. Nobody could really do much with Ray once he got going, once he got to having a good time. If he thought he was getting a rise out of you, he'd just keep upping the ante.

“Mary,” we both said into the phone at the same time.

We said this because he'd listen to Mary. Everyone listened to Mary. There would have to be something seriously wrong with a person not to listen to Mary.

Mary was my older twin sister. Right, no. Not my twin. Well, not Fran's twin, either. They are Irish twins, y'know, born ten months apart, with Fran coming just a year ahead of me. Ray said that was just a helluva time, baby-machining, him and my mom, getting started on a complete zoo of a house full of us that they weren't ever going to stop making until somebody passed a law or something.

Or something. Or something like my mom dying, which is what she did to us.

Three years married, three kids, and bang, gone, so long, Mom.

We have a piano in this house that exists solely for the purpose of supporting her photograph.

He marches us to her spot in the cemetery about six times a year.

I didn't even know her. I wouldn't even ever have known her. Wouldn't have missed her, I don't think. If it weren't for him.

Ray loves her like she was standing right in front of him.

“You telling people about my new better family?” he said as he passed by the phone.

“Don't tell him it's me,” Fran said.

“Want to talk to Fran, Dad?” I said.

“Jerk,” she said.

“Franny, my Franny,” Ray said, pawing at the phone like a bear at a honey pot.

Anyway, they are not twins exactly, but they look enough like twins, and they act enough like twins—in that under-each-other's-skin kind of way—that they are mostly considered to be twins.

“When are you coming home?” Ray said, sounding all wounded and needy as if he had been abandoned by the world. “And where's Mary? I want to talk to Mary.”

He had no business acting abandoned. He had not been abandoned, yet.

Mary was a sophomore at the university. Fran was a freshman.

Me, I was a senior in high school, for a couple more weeks. Then in the fall I'd join the girls, if all went according to plan.

“But you'll be here for the graduation, right? You wouldn't dare miss—”

He was cut short and started nodding as I watched him there, squeezed into the too-small telephone table/chair setup. We could assume Mary had come on the phone.

He nodded more emphatically.

“She can't hear that, Dad,” I said.

He waved me away, but resumed oral communication.

“Of course. Of course. Sure I know that. Sure I do.”

I watched him. He was one outstanding old geezer. A geezer and a half.

He was a full-time, long-time, professional widower. There's a word for you. Widower. With that
er
at the end, making it sound like an action verb. He widowed pretty well.

And he was a pretty fine roommate, a great player of games, a sport, and a loyal best, best friend.

You had to be a good guy if you were Ray Sarafian's kid. You couldn't possibly be anything less.

I
can show you how things can go wrong, how they did go wrong one other time. I can show you by showing you another thing I didn't do. Anyway, a thing I didn't do in the way some people tried to picture that I did it.