You Can Say You Knew Me When (12 page)

I didn’t know of any woman who’d been with my father except my mother and a lady he dated after she died, who, like my mother, was named Shirley. She’d been at that barbecue, too. This second Shirley had broken things off after a few months. (Later, Deirdre read in the paper that she’d been killed in a car accident—
so surreal,
Dee said. She took Dad to the funeral, but he, already slipping, was mostly just confused by it.) That’s all I knew about my father’s romantic life. Ray Gladwell might be the last person alive who’d had sex with my father, who’d held his body next to hers, who’d felt him inside of her. The possessor of secret knowledge—if she even remembered that far back.

I knew I had to talk to her. But when I called the gallery and left a voice mail message saying that I needed to get in touch with one of their painters “for an interview,” my words emerged in stammers. Cold calls are my downfall; I find it difficult to be precise. One on one, in person, I’m fine. I interview people for a living. I can gauge the temperature of a conversation by facial expressions and body language. But on the phone I’m fumbling in the dark. And here again, I found myself unsure of why I was calling. Was this business or personal?

I was at my computer, transcribing the shampoo-conditioner testimony and, fortuitously, not stoned, when she called back. As soon as I heard the words coming from my mouth—“I’m the son of someone you once knew, Teddy Garner”—I had no doubt that this was personal.

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, I remember Teddy Garner! My God!” She was so enthusiastic, I could hear the exclamation points.

“I didn’t know if you would. It’s been forty years.”

“Forty years! Oh, jeez, I’m a
fossil
.” Her laugh was gleeful, but tinged with nervous energy. “How is he? Where is he?”

So then I had to break the news, and that seemed to upset her, and it left me feeling cruel. Here I’d just brought back a youthful memory, and then smack, down came the guillotine. I apologized, and told her a little bit about the circumstances: the “Alzheimer’s,” my grandmother taking care of him, his death in early January. I heard shame undulate beneath my words, and I wondered if Ray Gladwell could figure out from my description that I’d stayed away during his illness.

“So you found me through the gallery,” she said.

“I had your name.”

“Oh, you are sweet. He mentioned me?”

I made a sound of agreement. She asked me where he’d lived, what had happened to my mother, were there other children? She asked me if I was married, and I answered, “Well, I’m gay, but I’m seriously involved,” and she actually said, “Oh, wonderful!” which just about melted my heart.

“So you’re on the Peninsula?” I asked.

“Yes, in Mountain View.” Just like in the letter. Was she still married to the same man, all these years later?

“That’s a lovely place,” I said, not having any idea if it was. “Aren’t some of the older buildings rather charming?”

“The town center is quite nice. They’re fixing it up. But you still can’t find parking!” She had returned to finishing off her sentences with that lively burst of laughter.

“You know, I’m heading down there this week,” I said, the lie forming easily. “For work. Maybe I could visit you.”

“Well, sure! Great!”

I said I’d be taking the train, she offered to pick me up, and easy as that, we had a date. Her voice hung around long after the conversation, attaching itself to the newspaper photo of her, coalescing into a presence, a hologram. I felt elated, impatient to meet this artistic old lady with the checkered history who laughed so easily and thought my gay relationship was
wonderful.
I sent an e-mail to Woody that said, “I think she’s going to turn out to be my fairy godmother.”

“Jamie? It’s Deirdre.”

“Oh, hi. What’s going on?” My voice casual, as if we’d been in regular contact lately, though this was the first attempt either of us had made since I got back. I’d thought about calling her many times. The idea would strike, and I’d immediately determine why the timing was bad: I’m too tired, I’m too frazzled, I’m too stoned, she’s probably not home, she’s probably making dinner, I’m sure she’s already in bed, I’m just not in the mood, I just can’t deal with her this very second.

“I need to talk to you about some stuff—” Behind her I heard AJ whining for her attention. “Okay, honey just a minute,” she said to him.

“I’ve been meaning to call you, too,” I said.

“Okay, AJ, that’s it! This is a time-out. Mommy’s having a grown-up call.” She must have cupped the phone because the sounds grew muted. Then she was back, or rather AJ was back, saying hello and asking when I was coming for a visit and did I know his half-birthday was coming up, which meant he was six months from being six years old? I heard myself telling him maybe I’d come to his sixth-birthday party, and he asked me if I’d bring him a special present from California.

“Now you’ve got his hopes up,” Deirdre said, then took a deep breath. “Nana fell. She was cleaning out Dad’s closet and slipped off the chair. She has a fractured ankle. Practically a break.”

“Oh, no. Is she in the hospital?”

“She’s here, at my place, on the couch.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hush. “We told her about the senior housing, and she got really pissed off at us.”

“Meaning what?” I thought about Nana’s brand of
pissed off,
the frosty silence, the locked posture, the averted eyes.

“She keeps saying she wants to go back to Ireland.”

“Where families take care of each other.”

“Plus, the home we wanted to put her in won’t take her because she’s not perambulatory.”

“That’s no way to talk about your grandmother.”

I regretted the lame joke as soon as she spoke again. Her voice, so tense throughout the conversation, seemed to crack open, raw and throaty. “I swear, Jamie, it’s like Dad all over again. Having this older person dependent on me. I need a break.”

I’d never heard her complain like this, and it threw me into silence. She told me how the past ten days had been all struggle. Carly Fazio’s company had offered her a job right before Nana’s accident; now Dee was worried that they wouldn’t hold it for her. AJ had been getting picked on by some older kids in school and was
acting out
at home. On top of that there had been some legal trouble brewing with one of Dad’s neighbors. A year before, a tree from Dad’s property, that old oak I’d noticed missing, had fallen into the street. This woman swerved to miss it and wrecked her car. Andy had written her a check to cover the repair bill, but now she’d brought a lawsuit for further medical expenses plus emotional damages.

“Who is this woman? Do I know her?”

“No, someone new. Andy calls her the Angry White Lady.”

We chuckled together about that (who knew Average Andy had a sense of humor?), and before the conversation ended she apologized for
dumping on me
. I told her I didn’t mind. I had considered bringing up the money I was owed, but at the moment, it seemed crass to do anything besides listen. She’d given me the benefit of her confidence, which was rare enough not to risk spoiling.

The afternoon mail delivery brought a Visa statement: an eight-hundred-dollar plane ticket, a seventy-dollar car-service to Newark, a two-hundred-fifty-dollar cash advance (pot, groceries, knives), plus a thirty-nine-dollar
overlimit fee
. My noble silence on the phone suddenly seemed foolish.

T
he day I went to visit Ray was drenched in rain—fat, wet drops smacking my skin like pellets. I rode along a new streetcar line to the train station. The last time I was in this part of the city, this was a warehouse district; I would ride my bike to the No Nothing Cinema, a little collective on Berry Street where you could eat grilled sausages for free in the concrete yard and watch strange short films with people who’d been living this scene for thirty years. Now a gargantuan baseball stadium, ringed by sleek streetlights, had replaced the demolished warehouses. Between the rail tracks and a new six-lane boulevard, Berry Street had been obliterated. I felt like I was visiting another city.

The train station was mostly empty. Everyone who didn’t look homeless seemed to be a tourist, a student, or a retiree—the rare folks without jobs in boomtime San Francisco. With my dry-cleaned overcoat, wool trousers ironed just for the occasion and a to-go cup of coffee clutched in my fist, I might have been heading for a job interview. In my shoulder bag I’d stowed my tape recorder, something I hadn’t prepared Ray for.

I read the
New York Times
on the train—ten years away from the East Coast and I still relied on it for news—distracting myself with the day’s headlines: the latest polls predicting the outcome of the Super Tuesday primaries; the escalating body count from ethnic warfare raging through a half-dozen central African nations; the stock prices that kept rising, rising, rising. My eyes looked up to catch images blurring grayly out the window: ashy men with their hoods up and heads down, lumbering along the sidewalk. Cargo trucks disrupting the traffic flow with wide left turns. Parking lots and squat houses bordering the tracks. I tried to imagine all of it gone or, rather, not yet here. Instead of endless sprawl south to San Jose, the view filled up with green orchards, two-lane state roads, intermittent small-town junctions. Ray Gladwell must have traveled this route, her foot on the gas, racing from her husband to the world of parties and multiple lovers she’d found in San Francisco.

I picked her out of the crowd on the platform. Her face brightened when I waved—open smile, plump cheekbones, laugh lines around her eyes. A young old face. She wore a black jacket with bright scarlet piping, a vaguely Chinese design; chunky jewelry hung from her neck as in the news photo. She extended a rough-textured hand toward me, a painter’s hand. She was laughing and talking at once as she led me to an SUV where a man her age sat waiting behind the wheel. She introduced him as David Stroh, “like the beer,” he said.

“Stroh’s beer. Been a long time since I thought about that.” I spoke heartily, man-to-man. “My dad used to drink it.”

“No relation,” he said. “I mean to the beer, not your dad.” All three of us laughed a bit too hard. He was about her age. He might have been her husband, or lover, or maybe just a friend with wheels. Was mentioning my father a faux pas? This man might be uncomfortable meeting with the son of one of Ray’s old beaus. He started the engine and off we went through the streets, small-talking about the rain and the traffic. I thanked Ray for agreeing to meet me, at which point she sputtered, “How could I refuse? I mean, gee, Teddy Garner’s son.”

She turned and stared, her eyes just inches from mine. I held still, letting her search my face for traces of him, an offering I felt I owed her. When at last she turned away—I was blushing self-consciously—her gaze drifted out through the rain-slaked windshield, as if she was waiting for the past to come into view amidst the wet, silvery air. I half expected us to blur out of focus and reemerge in this same landscape forty years earlier—a corny movie transition, after which actors playing the young Ray and the young Teddy would materialize in our places.

David drove carefully through the slick streets, guiding us from the downtown shops and restaurants into rolling foothills. The rooftops of two-story houses poked out from thick, heavy greenery. After fifteen minutes of chitchat, Ray pointed out the window, newly animated. “Oh, there—that place!” A small cottage, set back from the street by a radiant, well-tended lawn, caught my eye, then slid quickly from view. “They were the only other folks here in the fifties. It was them and us. The daughter still lives there. Her mother was Diana—she used to watch the kids for me. Oh, man, it was the boonies then!”

David let us out at the end of a cul-de-sac, announcing, “Your castle, my lady.” Ray and I dashed through the steady downpour toward a high wooden fence with a simple latch on the gate. The front yard was dense with vegetation: tall bushes, blossoming trees, flower beds quivering under the rainfall. I counted three buildings—a house, a garage and a side cottage that would turn out to be Ray’s studio. Having lived in apartment buildings for so many years, I quickly felt the difference of entering an enclosed yard, the place where privacy began and the nosy world was held at bay.

Ray directed me toward the studio, a newish, thirty-foot-square building with a high ceiling and a skylight. I stood on a pale linoleum floor and peeled off my damp coat, taking in the artwork resting everywhere. To the left, small paintings were stored sideways, like garments on a rack. To the right, large canvases, some taller than me, leaned at angles, as if buttressing the wall. Throughout the room, easels displayed either abstract landscapes—pleasing swirls of color coalescing into sky, water, land—or moody portraits of women.

One large canvas dominated. On it, a woman with short, graying hair like Ray’s, but eyes much more frightened, stared out from behind a cup of coffee. Her blouse hung open, revealing drooping breasts. The effect was unsettling, the kind of sight you’re trained to look away from. I had a quick memory of my mother in her hospital bed the afternoon when I slid my arms under her back, turning her onto her side, and her gown fell open, revealing her flesh to me. The side of a breast, a plane of ass, a swatch of pubic hair—parts of her I’d gazed upon only at the beginning of my life and at the end of hers. I looked away from the painting, half expecting to see my mother herself approaching. But no, just Ray, crossing the room after turning up the thermostat, and I saw that she looked nothing like my mother. Her face was round where Mom’s had been angular; fleshy rather than sharp-boned.

“My entire apartment could fit in here,” I said. “I’m jealous.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” she said. “Don’t be. You don’t know the sheer hell I went through to get it.” She might have been hinting at real misfortune, but her sentence still ended with a disarmingly light chuckle.

A very wet David emerged through a back door carrying a teapot and three mugs on a tray. I prepared a cup for myself and was taking a seat when Ray turned around and flapped her hand at him. “Okay, shoo. This isn’t for you.”

He had paused midway between standing and sitting, and was now looking at me earnestly. “I was around back then. I could tell you stories.”

“No, no, David. You didn’t know Teddy,” Ray insisted, her expression resolute, and David quickly left as he’d entered. I averted my eyes from his glumly retreating figure.

Ray was all brightness. “Look at you! I see him in you. It’s not quite exact, but it’s there. The lightness of your eyes. Something in your jaw.”

“I’m not so Irish as he is—was,” I said. “I mean, I have a lot of my mother. She was German.”

“I’m German, too. German-Jewish. My parents got out before the Nazis.”

“Is Ray your given name?”

“Rachel. But for a woman painting in the sixties, you needed a man’s name. One time I won an award and they were all set to present it to Mr. Ray Gladwell. When I walked up there, oh, boy. Surprise!”

“And Gladwell?”

“That was my first husband. The monster.” Her smile left for a moment; as she paused tentatively above the brim of her mug, I watched something grave pass over her. “I had a brief second marriage, too. David and I aren’t. We’re common-law, I suppose. Is thirteen years enough for common-law?”

“It’s longer than most marriages these days.”

“After two husbands I said, why bother? Just live together, don’t worry about the legal bs. Marriage isn’t for women anyway. It’s a man’s institution.”

“Too bad we aren’t better at it,” I said, punctuating with a nervous titter of my own. The fast familiarity between us was unsettling. I felt a touch of altitude sickness at how quickly I’d been lifted into the flow of her biography. “Ray, I’m not sure if it’s okay, but I brought a tape recorder. I work in radio, so I tend to tape everything. You never know when something might—” I didn’t finish the sentence because a look of surprise, even consternation, had settled upon her face.

“I just hate the sound of my voice. It’s like a little girl’s. They did some videotaping at a museum once, and oh, I can’t watch it at all.”

“This would mostly be for me. You know, family history.”

She gave me a go-ahead wave. I fished the machine out of my bag and fussed with loading the tape. I double-checked the batteries; they sprung out of their narrow chamber and tumbled onto the table. When I looked up at Ray, I saw a blind-date smile, the kind you adopt when you realize your suave suitor is counting his cash, ready to announce he can’t cover the bill.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating. When I listened to the tape later, she didn’t sound dubious at all. She didn’t sound like a little girl, either, for all her worries. I liked her voice; it had an unguarded quality; the romance of youth was still able to work its magic on her.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Do you remember when you met my father? Can you start there?”

“Well, let me think. Sure I remember. Not exactly everything. It was a long time ago. But I remember seeing him across the room at a party—”

She led me to the wall and pointed to a couple of framed, black- and-white photographs. The first was a posed portrait, taken outdoors. A very young Ray in a cinch-waist dress and pumps. Sculpted waves of hair bubbled softly around her face—the kind of frozen, bounce-free ’do only achieved under a hot-air dryer at a beauty parlor. She explained that it was taken in New York, where she and
the SOB
met and were married. I guess she couldn’t have been more than twenty, but as I often find when looking at old photographs, in which the formal styles of the times seem to age their subjects, I felt like I was looking at someone older than me. The second photo, which she dated from the mid-sixties, was more casual. She stood indoors against a bare wall wearing hip-hugging pants and a poncho. Her hair had grown to below her shoulders, frizzy. The light-hearted look in her eyes indicated a younger spirit.