Mislaid (23 page)

Trip was pointing out that abducting Karen had been a crime, the kind where the state presses charges, so it wouldn’t be much help for Lee to lose interest, unless he was planning to bring back Old Testament law.

“Sober up,” Lee said, addressing himself to the judge.
“L’état, c’est nous.”

“Ahem,” the judge said. The jurors hadn’t budged. “That’s it, we’re calling it a day. Case dismissed. Trip, Lee, Byrdie, Miss Fleming, I’ll see you in my chambers. Leave those things you call attorneys here to talk to the press.”

Temple was a lot faster on his feet than Meg. He caught up to her next to the Dumpster behind a drugstore, not far away, counting her money. “Lee Fleming’s not mad,” he insisted. “He was really happy to see Karen, once he got over the shock. Come on back with us! We’ll all go out to dinner!”

“My kids are grown up,” she said, staring at the money in her hand. “I’m free. I can start over. I can get on the next bus to New York.”

It wasn’t even self-pity. It was blank denial via panic. Meg looked back at her own life and thought, Did any of that have anything to do with me? She felt strongly that her life had begun the day she met Luke. Luke didn’t know she had a son. Meg didn’t want to disappoint Luke by opening this particular can of worms. She really was a very romantic person.

“No, you’re not. Come on, this is great! The Thetan hegemon is your son! I knew that guy was all right. My trouble times are done. I’m going to marry the King of Elfland’s daughter!” He
sang several lines of “God Has Smiled on Me” and did a little heel-and-toe dance.

At that, Meg’s heart softened slightly. She asked, laughing, whether Karen was aware of his plans.

“I don’t know, something about that name ‘Fleming’ has a certain ‘ring’ to it. Get it?”

“You’re counting chickens big time,” Meg said. “You know she’s only sixteen. You think I would let her get engaged to a bratty kid who puns?”

“She’s crazy about me.”

“Everybody’s crazy about you. I’m crazy about you! Half the time Karen makes me feel like I’m raising an iguana. She looks at me all walleyed and I have no earthly idea what’s going through her head. None.
You
make me feel like a mom, because you’re transparent and you have
no
common sense. You seriously believe when she figures out she’s rich, her first step is going to be to marry
you
? And what makes you think it’s so smart, marrying a kissing cousin of Harry Byrd? They call it a white machine, but it’s people! Individuals. My family, her family, all the other charming people who if they had their way, you’d be picking cotton. That’s who we are. There are nicer people you could get involved with, trust me!”

“Well, I love Karen very much.”

“I know it. There’s never a reason to take a word you say on faith, because you couldn’t tell a lie to save your life.”

“Also, she loves me,” Temple said.

“Maybe so. I don’t know what goes through her pea brain. Except that right now she’s figuring out I screwed her to the wall, and she’s wanting to trust Lee Fleming. And now you think I should trust him, too! But I’m not going back there. You don’t know him. He’s about five hundred times smarter than you are.
He can dominate people and make them do things they never thought they would do.”

“But he can’t fuck with you now, because Karen would never speak to him again.”

“You wish. My problem is whether anybody will ever speak to
me
again.”

“Are you kidding? You’re Mom. And you should have seen his face when he looked at her. It was love.” Temple lowered his voice like a soul crooner on the word “love.” “Not I-love-you love. This was unconditional love, Christian agape, like his top priority in life is how he can fatten her up. If we don’t hurry up, he’s going to buy her a pony.” Almost whispering, he added in an undertone, “I am rushing so hard on pure euphoria, it makes me frightened.”

He leaned down and Meg stood on tiptoe so they could hug. A deep male voice boomed through the alley. “Get your hands off her, boy!”

Temple raised his arms and stepped away from Meg. It was a uniformed cop, sidling down the alley with his hand on his revolver. “Ma’am, are you all right?” he called out.

“I’m fine,” Meg said, stepping between Temple and the cop. “We’re friends.”

“We had a report you were under pursuit,” the cop explained.

“We were having a footrace,” Meg said. “I won, and now he has to buy me lunch. But thank you for your concern.”

“Why don’t you take two steps toward me and turn out your pockets?” the cop suggested to Temple. He obeyed, starting with his jacket. A battered paperback of
The Confessions of St. Augustine
flopped to the asphalt, and a prerecorded Herbie Hancock cassette landed next to it with a sharp click. “Open it,” the cop said, pushing the cassette case into a puddle with a leather-clad steel toe.

Temple crouched to retrieve the cassette from under the policeman’s boot. “Oh, no! The tape’s all wet!” he said, shaking it. “My sister is going to kill me!”

Out on the sidewalk, a pedestrian paused to watch. Suddenly bored and somehow also disappointed, even disgusted, the cop wished Meg a nice day and returned to the street.

Temple stood poised in front of the Dumpster, mourning the ruined cassette and weighing whether to put the damp, dirty book back in his jacket pocket or in the trash. “I’ve read it an awful lot. I could leave it for someone else,” he concluded, propping it against the wall.

“I’m going to walk you back to the courthouse now,” Meg said.

M
eg and Temple arrived at the judge’s office. Karen was
clinging to Dee, and Byrdie and Lee were gone, to Meg’s profound relief. But they had left a forwarding address. Trip handed Meg a note torn from Lee’s black book—an invitation to dinner at a restaurant. She stared at it in silence.

Karen took the note and folded it and said they would be there.

It was hard work dissuading Temple from coming along uninvited, but Dee finally extricated him and drove him home. She felt Meg and Karen needed time to talk. Which was true, though they spent most of the afternoon playing pool in Karen’s dorm. At suppertime they were late.

The restaurant was hidden down a back alley, up a narrow staircase, with nothing to mark its presence but an old Pepsi sign. Inside, the high-ceilinged loft space was painted white, there were huge crimson roses in white vases, and the prix fixe was a hundred bucks. Lee and Byrdie were waiting in a private back room with oyster shooters and two bottles of champagne on ice. The atmosphere conveyed was that of a 1960s-themed surprise party.

When Meg was led into their presence and made to sit down, everyone could sense the hurt. Lee felt more hurt than he expected—he was used to feeling angry—and Meg felt so guilty she could have gutted herself with a teaspoon. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Byrdie over and over as Lee opened the champagne.

“It’s okay,” Byrdie said. “You did the best you could. I just wish you would have written to me, or called me or something.”

Meg writhed and covered her face.

“Why are you picking on Mom?” Karen finally asked Byrdie. “We should be celebrating! I feel so happy and lucky. I always had the best mom and the best boyfriend in the whole world, and now I have the best brother and the best father, and maybe even the best grandparents!”

“You were a baby the last time we saw you,” Lee said. “Don’t be one now.”

“Whoa,” Karen said.

“When you’re older, you’ll see there’s more to life than the future,” he added. “Byrdie has pent-up negative emotions. If he can’t let them out, they’ll spoil his dinner. Drink up your champagne and let us talk.”

“What about my pent-up joy and happiness?” Karen protested. “I mean it! You could all just be happy for me. If everybody would stop blaming each other and just think about me for a second, we’d all be fine!”

Lee laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re just like a woman. It’s something your mother never mastered.”

“It’s not fair! I’m the one who got the biggest shock today. Everybody here knew what was going on but me.”

“Knowing just made it worse,” Byrdie said. At that Meg exploded in helpless sobbing.

“Stop torturing us!” Karen said. “You think it was any fun? You think she wanted to go on the lam? We didn’t even have
heat or running water! We had possums coming in the house!” She looked at Lee accusingly, and her eyes narrowed to a squint.

“And whose fault was that,” he said. “Possums in the house.”

“Is this what family dinners are like?” Karen wailed to no one in particular.

“You’re asking me?” Byrdie said. “How am I supposed to know?”

“It’s awful! It’s perverted! Mom, help me!” she begged, but Meg was too busy crying. When she touched her mother’s arm, Meg pushed her away, covering her face.

Karen eyed the door, longing to escape. She wanted Temple. But she also wanted the truth, not in manageable portions but now, and not as information but as experience. The situation was unbearably formal and tense and she was alone, but the formality and the tension, and even her being alone: They all might be integral parts of the truth. There was no way to find out but pay attention and wait. She let Lee refill her glass.

He leaned back, folding his arms, and said, “Now listen, Peg, it’s true that most of the time I was ready to shoot you on sight. I wanted Mireille back more than anything in the world. Mickey, darling. I love you. I wanted you back so bad. I paid every spare dime I had to private eyes to look for you. They told me you were
dead
. Because it never crossed anybody’s mind that your mother would be so fucking afraid of me she’d go underground, refuse to cross state lines, live under an assumed name in a shack, never go to college or get a job, and let you turn into this undereducated, underfed—you know what I mean—physical and intellectual pygmy. Like I was the Manson family!”

Karen stared. She had never imagined a father like this. A large, strong creature with an emotional hold over them all and no gears except overdrive. It went way beyond Anne Sexton, deep into Sylvia Plath territory. Yet her mother’s alliance with this animal had been long and voluntary. She looked at Meg.

“You did say you’d have me committed,” Meg said, straightening up in her seat. “And you’re still an asshole.”

“She killed my car,” Lee explained to his children.

“I remember,” Byrdie said. “She drove it right into the lake. And then she stole her own car, and we got to borrow Grandma’s Lincoln.”

“But why on earth are you still in Virginia?” Lee asked. “You could have gone to the Frankfurt School of dramatic arts, like you were always saying.”

“The swamp fox,” Meg sniffled. “There’s no better place to go to ground than in a swamp. It was a foxhunting thing, in your honor.”

“It’s a Revolutionary War thing.”

“In New York I couldn’t have thrown a rock without hitting some friend of yours. You would have found me in three days.” Meg hung her head, thinking it might have been proper to commit her after all. What had been crazier—marrying Lee, or leaving him? “I don’t remember why I did any of it,” she added. “But I must have been very unhappy.”

“Well, you did marry a founding member of NAMBLA,” Byrdie said.

“I beg to differ!” Lee said.

“Who seduces baby dykes for kicks,” Meg added.

Lee’s protests were drowned out by Karen’s sudden squealing. “Get out of here! You’re gay?” She threw herself on her mother and hugged her with vehemence. “Poor Mom! That explains so much! It explains everything!”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.” Meg laughed, sitting up straight and patting Karen’s hair. “It’s not a sickness.”

“Nor does it explain a goddamn thing,” Lee remarked.

Meg glared at him. “So I’ve wasted half my life,” she told her daughter. “So what? I still have you, and my son back. I even have
a way hap girlfriend. Before, I went around feeling angry, like I was the victim. Now I feel ecstatic, but so guilty I could kill myself.” She wiped her eyes and grinned, and Byrdie shook his head.

“Girlfriend? Where’d you meet her?” Karen asked eagerly.

“At the bait shop. I’ll introduce you. She’s spending next semester in Hampton on sabbatical, and then I’ll probably move with her to New York.”

“Dykes, always with the moving van,” Lee remarked.

“Dad, you are such a
fucking
bitch,” Byrdie said.

“Are you really a pederast?” Karen asked.

“I don’t go out loaded for bear. Your mother is a case in point. I’d say there’s a difference between her and pederasty.”

“Well, that’s something,” Karen said.

Meg tried her champagne and said, “Aw, shit. I forgot about this stuff.”

To everyone’s surprise, Karen stood up at her place at the table. “So I’m just wondering,” she said. “Is anybody here truly unhappy?”

“What are you doing?” Lee said.

“I mean, this isn’t easy, but none of us is sad to be here. Right?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but me,” Byrdie said, raising his hand. “I think I have whiplash of the brain. I want to spend the next month in Florida playing golf with Grandpa and pretend I never saw you. But first I want to talk to you and Mom for a week without Dad around.”

“There’s no rush,” Meg said to Lee. “We can hang out with Byrdie first, and then you can get to know Karen.”

Karen said, “See, Mr. Fleming and Mom? Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Why are you trying to be cool with them?” Byrdie asked Karen. “They’re both insane.”

“It’s because I raised my insight to a higher power.”

Lee said to Meg in a low voice, “Where’d she get that? You want to come out as an alcoholic while you’re at it?”

Meg turned to Karen and said, “Higher power does sound awful twelve-step.”

“I mean the Sheltering Sky. It’s something Temple told me about. He’s my boyfriend.”

“It’s a novel by Paul Bowles,” Lee said.

“Really? He told me it’s that when life gets too hard, you can go up to the next level.”

“Like Pac-Man,” Byrdie said.

“No, Pac-Man is the exact opposite. In Pac-Man the higher levels are harder, so it’s like the Peter Principle in college, where if you pass a course they make you take a harder course until you flunk out. In the Sheltering Sky you go up to where things are easier. Temple says”—her voice, now grave but filled with faith and conviction, rang clearly through the room in a way that betrayed her exposure to dissenting rural churches—“that in the ancient world they believed the earth is a turtle resting on an elephant on another elephant, and then it’s elephants all the way down. So if you don’t understand things, it means you didn’t dig deep enough. That’s how science works. But society is a legal system. It goes in the other direction. If you don’t like what you’re getting, you appeal to a higher power. And the higher you go, the better off you are, like Thurgood Marshall. So that’s why I believe in my heart that it’s right that we’re back together, even if on the level of grunginess it’s a tale of sound and fury told by an idiot. When Mom said she was gay, and Dad said he married her because he got her mixed up with boys, and everybody’s white, that was
way
too complex. And there it is! You take it to the next phase.”

There was an awkward silence during which everyone drank, as though Karen had proposed a toast. “Your Temple is clearly an autodidact, but he’s not stupid,” Lee said at last.

“He’s a genius,” Meg said. “Within five minutes of finding out she’s your daughter, he asked me for her hand in marriage.”

At this announcement, Karen turned to Meg, squirming in such an ultra-excited and happy way that even Byrdie began to laugh. “Don’t laugh at me!” she cried.

“I have to admit, you know each other pretty well,” Meg said. “But you’re way too young, Karen. Did you know you’re sixteen? Your birth certificate is a fake.”

“I’m sixteen and I’m at UVA? I am
so cool
!”

“The age of consent is seventeen,” Lee said. “Temple could go to jail.”

“On paper I’m eighteen, and you won’t rat me out.”

“Far be it from me. Pederasts in glass houses. But I will prevent you from marrying Temple until he’s had at least four years of school. That theory of his sounds to me like Kafka in a blender with Hegel and Manichaeism.” A waiter entered the room as Byrdie began to giggle. “Appetizers, thank God.” Lee sighed. “You all are really going to like this quail.”

Later, when Karen went to the bathroom, Byrdie remarked, “You’re scoping out Temple already, you sick fuck.”

Lee replied blandly, “Mireille thinks she’s fated to marry Temple, because otherwise she’s going to have a hard time explaining to herself the advantages of growing up in a housing project.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Meg said to Lee. “Going up a level resolves the cognitive dissonance. But if you say it to her, I literally
will
kill you.”

“And I’ll hold him down while you do it,” Byrdie said. “Temple is the one constant in her life.” His parents gazed at him in surprise as he pressed on. “Letting her think she has no father! Not knowing when she was born, or where she’s from, or even her name, thinking history starts and ends with Temple! Look at how you dress her! What is that thing, a nun’s habit from the dump? She calls herself his shadow!”

“That was something his mother said,” Meg said. “We thought it was funny because he’s, you know, dark.”

“You’re her mom and you make racist jokes about her?”

“I said it was his own mother! She’s black!”

“How does that make it not racist?”

Meg gulped and looked around for help.

Lee came to her aid by saying gallantly, “You just reminded me of a terrific racist joke. So Jean-Paul Sartre decides to tour the back roads of the South, and he runs out of gas at the bottom of a long hill. He takes the gas can out of the trunk and starts walking up the hill. He can see there’s a black guy at the pumps, so he yells, ‘Y’all got any gas?’ and the black guy yells, ‘Yeah!’ So Sartre keeps walking and he gets up to the top and he says, ‘I’ll take three gallons, please.’ And the black guy says, ‘Sorry, man, can’t sell you no gas today.
Huis clos
.’”

Byrdie wailed, “Mom! Why are you laughing?”

“Because I haven’t heard that joke in a long time.”

“You should relax, Bird Dog,” Lee said. “You’re just jealous of Temple because he got to be big brother and you didn’t.”

“That’s it,” Byrdie said. He picked up his napkin off his lap and dropped it on his plate. “I hate the both of you. I’m out of here.”

“Don’t go. Karen will be back in a second,” Meg said.

“Mom, I’m glad you weren’t around when I was growing up. I just wish Dad hadn’t been there either.”

When Karen returned, Meg was dissolved in tears with her head thrown back, and Lee was finishing Byrdie’s entrée.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“I’m a horrible person. I stole you away from a happy life.”

“Am I missing something? I thought Dad threatened to have you committed, so that if you stayed, we would have both grown up without you.”

Meg wiped her nose and sat up. “Good point!” she said.

“Did Byrdie leave? Why is Mr. Fleming eating his food?”

Lee said, “He got upset. He’ll be back. He’s very emotional.”

“I like him a lot,” Karen said.

“So do I,” Lee said. “He’s feeling bad because he chose to grow up with me. He’s thinking what his life could have been like if he’d gone with his mother.”

Lee expected to be called a bitch as usual. But Karen proclaimed resolutely, “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Everything that happens is predetermined. We just don’t know how until afterward.”

“What, you don’t think he had a choice?”