The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (18 page)

When Chris was sixteen, he tried to fix the dryer. He was a handy kid, always dismantling failing machines around the house, putting them back together so they hummed. It had gotten to the point where Dot didn't even bother with electricians. She just called in Chris. He had taken an evening course in appliance maintenance at the town hall, and this, coupled with his knack, gave her the utmost confidence in his ability to figure out why the dryer was howling like a cat in heat every time she turned it on.

Up to that point in his life, Chris had been good only at repairing machinery. Every afternoon after school, he would mope around the neighborhood, on the lookout for broken equipment. At night he drove around the sleeping streets with a group of high school miscreants, committing drive-by mailbox beheadings, or playing basketball in people's driveways until lights were flicked on and the cops were called. One summer evening, he and his crew went to the nearest movie theater, took stock of a local family out for the evening, returned to the family's home, broke in, raided the fridge, and cooked an entire barbecue in their backyard. In school, Chris stared listlessly at the teacher, his thumb worrying the eraser of his pencil, jerking it back and forth until, inevitably, it crumbled off.

On the day his mother asked him to fix the dryer, Chris had pushed the machine a few feet out from the wall and was lying behind it, curled up on his side, one leg bent, when he touched the wrong two wires together, went stiff, and started vibrating, 110 volts of electricity coursing through every cell of his body. Strangely, the boy was not afraid but awed by the power pulsing through him. A panicked Dot disengaged him from the current
using a wooden broom handle. The medics arrived soon after. Chris was unconscious but alive. They had to work on him for five minutes that felt like fifty to Dot, who had her hands clamped to her face, terrified eyes staring out between spread fingers, during the whole proceeding.

When Chris woke up, his nose was filled with the smell of burnt hair and rubber; his mind was filled with God. For the first time in his life, he was on fire with ecstatic certainty: first of all, God was real as flesh. Second, the Son of God was neither meek nor mild. He was terrible as a tidal wave, merciless as a lightning bolt. He was the God of love but not mercy. His love was terrifying; it sounded like a million wings beating; it felt like being swept up by a tornado. And He reserved it for the renegades, the anarchists; those who wanted to bring the whole rotten structure of everyday human greed and insincerity to a trembling halt. Chris felt he had been chosen and warned. He started going to church daily and even brought home a woman and her two children whom he had found begging in the street, having missed the closing time of the local shelter.

Dot, who didn't even like her own family sitting on her best furniture, was horrified to find three shy, dusky strangers in her living room when she walked in, her arms gripping two bulging bags of groceries. But she couldn't exactly throw them out; the children were tiny. So she cooked them dinner in miffed silence, made them up two beds in the rec room, then took three aspirin and went to bed in tears, insisting that Johnny sleep with a revolver under his pillow.

Both Dot and Johnny were automaton Catholics; their practice was reserved for Easter and Christmas. The radical faith Chris displayed had no place in their home. His quiet, constant reading of the Bible worried and alienated them. An attempt at becoming a Jesuit novice – he offered himself to the order as a ‘warrior of Christ' – had his parents mildly alarmed, then humiliated when his application was rejected after a psychiatric evaluation deemed
him ‘fervent to the point of irrationality.' (One lay Ignatian brother remarked, after Chris had left his requisite interview for the Vocations Panel, ‘He would have been perfect for the Crusades.')

Once spurned by the Jesuits, Chris set about giving away as much of his parents' money as possible to the bums in Jersey City, twenties and fives filched from his mother's purse, his father's wallet. He started getting into bar brawls with hypocrites; he even got himself arrested once, for screaming ‘
Please stop lying to each
other!
' up and down their quiet suburban street at two o'clock in the morning. He went straight from jail to a tattoo parlor and had the Lord bored into his skin for good. The boy was driving his mother crazy. His father felt completely impotent in the face of his son's problem. ‘If it was drugs,' Johnny said, ‘at least we could send him to rehab. But this …' He flapped his arms and let them slap his sides uselessly.

Chris left home soon after, in the Thunderbird his father had bought him for his eighteenth birthday in the hope that a vehicle would attract a girl (he sold the car a week later and gave most of the money away). His parents didn't try to find him when he left; they just sadly let him go. In the years that followed, Chris took a variety of jobs, as an electrician, mechanic, car wash attendant, all across the country. When he came to a new town, he would coast through it, searching for the poorest, most broken-down neighborhood he could find. Once there, he would seek out a rental apartment, or a room in someone's house. Occasionally, he lived in the back of his truck. Then he would find a church – be it Catholic, First Christian, Methodist, or Episcopal – pray there, help with whatever outreach programs they had going in the community, and then, after a few months or maybe a year, he would move on. Passing through Utah, he met and married a slight, bright-eyed Catholic girl. They prayed together frequently, made love seldom, barely spoke. Back home, his father, a meticulous dentist, was corroded with disappointment; his only son was an itinerant, a drifter, a religious fanatic. He kept hoping
that one day Chris would come back to Jersey, finish school, find a profession. But no. The electrocution had happened nearly twenty years ago. Chris was a washout.

But Johnny and Dot didn't know the worst of it: over the years, Chris's belief in the Bible had sloughed away from him, like a scab from a healed wound. The God he still sensed with such acute certainty had somehow outgrown that good book; this was a deity too vast to be contained in a single system. There was no humility in thinking you had cracked the code. Chris stopped going to church, but he couldn't bring himself to tell his parents he had failed at being a Christian, on top of everything else. So he ricocheted around the country, his wife a stranger beside him, his faith now nameless, formless, dogging him, filling him with longing to see the Face that was veiled in darkness yet he knew was there. He was an exile, unable to stomach even the most innocuous corruption of everyday human life, to get a regular job, to settle into society, yet no longer enveloped in the golden light of dogma. He felt himself standing just outside a warm, safe, luminous circle – the circle of the Church. If only he could return to it. But it was too late: he didn't belong anywhere anymore.

Pippa listened to Chris's story, rapt. When he was done, he took a bite of toast.

‘What are you thinking?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘Tell me,' he said.

‘I'm just thinking, you seem so bright, and it's a pity … that you never settled on a job you care about. It would make your life so much easier.' Why had she said that? So many thoughts – of worry, recognition, admiration – had darted through her mind as he spoke. But as usual, she said the one thing that made her sound like a materialistic housewife.

Chris sat back and looked at her. Surprise, hurt, and then anger appeared on his face in a sequence Pippa found disquieting. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘Well, thank you.'

‘I didn't mean to offend you.'

‘I suggest you go back to that little life you've puffed up for yourself. I'm sure you're very happy underneath all that misery.'

Pippa gathered her purse to her chest, slid out of the booth, her heart pounding in her ears. He was eating again.

‘You're right, you know,' she said. ‘You are an asshole.'

‘Told you.' He hunkered down over the last of his home fries, waved his fork. ‘See you in a few farts,' he said cheerfully, taking a bite.

She was already behind him and stopped, turning back, her jaw dropping. Then she walked to her car, trembling. But once she got in, she started laughing. She laughed so hard, she had to wipe tears from her eyes.

When she got home, she made spanakopita for Herb, folding neat packets of filo dough around a mixture of feta cheese and spinach. Then she settled into a reclining lawn chair on the patio, sipping a large glass of pomegranate juice. Herb was in his office. It was past one, he should be home soon. Pippa looked across the pond at Dot's house. The yellow truck was there. Then she saw the front door open. Chris walked out and got into his truck. He was the strangest person she had ever met. So unpleasant, yet so touching. The yellow truck pulled away just as Herb laid his hand on her shoulder. She turned, startled. ‘Did you think I was a geriatric marauder?' he asked.

‘I was just thinking,' she said.

‘I'm sorry I was a grouch,' he said.

‘It's okay.'

‘It's so hot,' he said, ‘I'm going to take a quick shower, and then we can have lunch.' She got up and put the spanakopita in the oven, tossed the salad she'd prepared. She served him out on the porch.

‘Aren't you eating?'

‘I had breakfast late,' she said. ‘With … remember Chris, that son of Dot's?'

‘The half-baked one?'

‘Yeah, I saw him outside the convenience store, and he asked me to breakfast.'

‘That's weird,' he said.

‘He told me he was an asshole.'

‘Is he?'

‘I think maybe he's just compulsively honest. Which makes him extremely unpleasant. Herb?'

‘Hm?'

‘I did it again.'

‘What?'

‘Walked in my sleep. I drove.'

‘Oh, Jesus.'

‘I woke up, and I was in the convenience store. Chris works the night shift there, that's how I know him, really.'

‘I've never heard of driving in your sleep. How is that possible?'

‘Maybe I'm an extreme case.'

‘We better have you looked at.'

Dr Schultz saw only old people, it seemed to Pippa as she sat in his waiting room. If they weren't using walkers, they had white slacks on. Elastic waistbands, white tennis shoes, pastel tops. The very word
slacks
made Pippa cringe. Who passed a law that old people had to dress this way? Pippa glowered at them all. She was angry with them for living past their usefulness. For being so fucking slow. Old age repelled her; that was the truth of it. Herb wasn't old-old. Not yet. He was old, but his face was still basically on. He didn't have the gaping mouth, the glassy eyes, the imprecise movements of the truly aged. She was frightened of losing her husband to this joke of time. She knew she would love him and care for him, and gradually, depending on how long he lasted in his decrepitude, she would forget his strength, his invincibility, his irony even. Oh, God, it was awful. Pippa didn't want to live too long. Just long enough, she thought. Just
exactly long enough before she turned the final corner. The nurse called her name.

Dr Schultz was a vigorous man. His bald head was shiny, the whites of his eyes luminous. He looked like an athlete – a rower, perhaps. The muscles in his powerful legs bulged under fitted trousers. His feet were enormous. And he looked cheerful. Pippa wondered how he kept that up, seeing so many revolting old bodies every day. Maybe he was a sort of leech, she thought, sucking his youth out of their age. He was asking her the usual questions. Date of birth. What did your mother die of? Heart stopped because. Because she took too much crank. No, leave that out. Father? Aneurism. Any cancer in the family? Aunt Trish. Poor old Aunt Trish. Pippa tossed her head. She was aware of keeping a thought at bay. It hadn't entered the circle of her consciousness yet, whatever it was, but she could tell it was unpleasant. It cast a jagged shadow on her mind, caused her to fidget and clear her throat, shake her head, anything to stop herself from thinking – what? What was the matter?

‘So. Mrs Lee. What can I do for you?'

Pippa started, realizing that she had drifted away as he watched patiently. ‘Oh,' she said, smiling. ‘I – I have been walking in my sleep.'

Dr Schultz wrote that onto his form, his big hand curled awkwardly around a delicate silver pen. His handwriting looked like crooked teeth, Pippa thought: tiny letters crammed up against one another, slanted to the left. ‘When did this start?'

‘About a month ago.'

‘What medications are you on?'

‘None.'

‘What about sleep aids?'

‘Never. I don't take pills. I even take liquid vitamins.'

He looked up at her, surprised. ‘Do you have a history of sleepwalking?'

‘A couple of times, when I was little. But this – I cook in my
sleep. I smoke, which I don't, I mean I do a little now, but that's – I drove the car! To a convenience store. I was dreaming about being in a mall and there was a lion taking a crap in a flowerpot and I went to pick it up and it turned out to be a potato. At first we thought it was my husband, but then we set up a camera …' Her voice had risen; she was being voluble, humorous, as if telling a funny story at a party. She didn't know why she was acting like this. She felt breathless. ‘… and, surprise, surprise, it was me!'

The doctor looked at her, thinking. ‘I'm not a sleep specialist, but some of my patients have problems with night mobility. Usually it has something to do with medication, or … dementia, which is clearly not the case here. Um … do you mind if I ask you a personal question?'

‘No.'

‘Is something upsetting you, or causing you stress?'

Tears came to her eyes instantly. Irritated, she wiped them away with her pinkie.

‘I don't know.' An image of the beach, the day Gigi died: garnet flecks on her white dress, a flash of sky, then under bottle glass green water, swirling sand. She hadn't wanted to come back up.