Above The Thunder (4 page)

“She’ll be back,” Charlie said. “She needs to get some things out of her system. I accept that. Poppy knows I love her. That I’m here for her.”

“He’s right, Anna,” Hugh said. “Her judgment’s off. She’s a bit erratic right now, but she’s a smart woman. She loves Charlie.”

“Hogwash. You’re going to regret this,” she said to Charlie. “Either we act now or you’re going to lose her.”

“Now, Anna, you don’t know that. There’s no need to be alarmist. She might be back home before dark, for all we know,” Hugh said.

“I do know this. I’m certain of it.” She strongly sensed that Hugh would never see his daughter in the flesh again.

“Anna, darling,” Hugh said. “She’ll be back. This is vintage Poppy,” he said with a false laugh, looking from Anna to Charlie. “Even as a young girl, Poppy had her own ideas about things. One time, when she was nine, she decided she wanted to go to Disneyland. Remember that, Anna? Somehow, she managed to get to the bus station on her own. She’ll be back.”

It was a full year before they heard from her. For a while, Charlie still came over almost every night, sat with Hugh and Anna to the end of the evening news. He wanted to be there when or if Poppy called. Anna watched him sink into a depression, then into a kind of helpless fugue state.

Finally a letter arrived from New Mexico. Anna tore it open and photographs spilled into her lap. Poppy and Marvin and an infant. She skimmed the letter. Marvin was some sort artist. They’d gotten married shortly after leaving and now had a baby. “I’ve never been happier,” she wrote. “Marvin is working full-time at his art and I’m doing this and that, going to school part-time and taking care of the baby, whom we adore. Her name is Flynn.”

A year after this letter was another, one every year or year and a half for five years. When Hugh had fallen out of remission for what he and Anna both knew was the last time, Anna spent months tracking Poppy down. By this time she and her family were in Seattle. “It’s just a matter of months or weeks,” Anna said, when she finally got her daughter on the phone. “If you want to see your father alive you better come now.”

“I’ll get a flight next week,” Poppy said.

Except that she didn’t. Didn’t call or send a card or get in touch with her father in any way. Anna made the mistake of telling Hugh that Poppy was on her way. He perked up every time the phone or doorbell rang,
asked for Poppy until he drew his last breath. Anna couldn’t ever forgive her daughter for this.

She rinsed out the tub, hung up the wet towels, then walked back into her bedroom and replayed Poppy’s message. She picked up the phone and started to dial, then put the receiver back. What would she say? Yes, you can come. No, don’t bother, I never want to see you again in my life. Maybe she should just call and find out why Poppy wanted to visit. Anna picked up the phone again, but instead of dialing her daughter’s number, she dialed Greta’s. Her fingers found the numbers as automatically as they found F-sharp on her cello.

Greta picked up on the third ring. “Hi, it’s me. Were you asleep?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Is he home yet?”

“Not yet. What’s going on over there?”

Anna suddenly didn’t want to talk about it. She and Greta never talked about her daughter. In fact, Anna wasn’t sure she ever told Greta about Poppy. Maybe once, when she first moved into the townhouse and gave her new friend a broad autobiographical sweep. An all-inclusive statement about burying her husband, the past, starting anew as nobody’s wife or mother.

“I can’t sleep, either.” She paused. “Anyway, one of the doctors at school today asked me to pick my most compassionate student to lead a support group.”

“Uh-huh,” Greta said, and Anna heard her exhale cigarette smoke.

“Isn’t that a mystery?”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“How would I possibly know if someone’s compassionate?”

“What do you mean? Of course you know. Someone is either open or they’re closed. They can feel another person’s trouble and anguish or they can’t.”

Anna said that made sense, but deep down she suspected that this trait, along with the maternal one, had never been activated in her. She doubted if it was possible to understand someone else’s suffering. Even her beloved husband whose pain had become a private geography on which she couldn’t trespass.

Anna listened to Greta’s lengthy examples of what compassion was.
“Well,” Anna said finally. “I’ll be up for another hour or so grading papers so come over for tea if you want.”

“Okay,” Greta said, and sighed.

“And I might be calling you back to ask your opinion on whether you think forgiveness exists outside of biblical myths.”

Greta laughed. “Oh, do tell.”

“Nothing. It’s all crap,” Anna said, and hung up.

F
rom the window of their Back Bay apartment, Stuart watched Jack down on the street corner talking to the tiny Italian shoemaker, Mr. Fabrizi. He seemed to have taken up residence in the coffee shop next to the Korean grocery where Stuart and Jack shopped. Fabrizi came racing out to say hello every time he spotted Jack. Stuart could usually get by the window with just a friendly wave, but Jack was a verbal hostage to the scenes and tribulations of Mr. Fabrizi’s life. Who knew why.

Mr. Fabrizi was gesturing wildly, the way he did when he talked about shoddy workmanship or how he couldn’t break the habit of shining his wife’s shoes every day even though she’d been dead over a year. Jack was nodding continuously, shifting from one foot to the other.

Stuart went into the kitchen to check the bread. Another ten minutes. He clothed the naked David magnets on the refrigerator with red panties from Venus. Stuart had been cooking most of the day. Their friends Leila and Jane were coming tonight to discuss what Jack called the Tykes for Dykes campaign: the women hadn’t actually declared their desire for a child, only that there was something they wanted to talk about. Jack insisted it had to be about conception.

“Why else does a lesbian couple want to have dinner with a couple of beat-up fags?” Jack had asked earlier.

“Maybe they simply want our company. Friendship, Jack, remember that? People who you don’t necessarily work for, sleep with, or want
something from.”

“Right, sweetheart, what world do you live in and where can I sign on?” He’d grabbed his wallet from the hall table. The Korean grocery was just around the corner. “Saffron, a pinch. Anything else?”

“No. That should do it. If for some reason they don’t have fresh saffron, don’t accept a substitute herb.” The last time Stuart was in there looking for fresh rosemary, he’d somehow been hoodwinked into buying chervil, by the owner, Mrs. Kim. She insisted it would do “miracles” for lamb if he beat it with egg whites and basted every half an hour. The meat had ended up with a texture like milk jugs and a taste like lawn clippings.

“Back in a flash,” Jack said, holding open an imaginary coat.

At the window, Stuart saw Jack was still at the corner, talking now to a young man. Jack held a brown grocery sack on his hip, which meant it was stuffed and heavy. He could never buy small quantities of anything. But if Stuart had sent him for saffron
and
coconut milk—which he could have used—Jack would be holding
two
bags. All of their household items were family size, huge bottles of shampoo that would be replaced with another kind before they’d used even half. When Stuart cleaned the bathroom last Saturday, he’d counted six bottles of shampoo, four conditioners—two deep, one daily, and a leave-in—and seven bars of soap. The cabinets and drawers were crammed with medicines for every possible ailment, foreign and domestic, including, Stuart saw with horror, Vagisil.

“Jack, there’s very little chance either one of us is going to be afflicted with minor feminine itching.”

“What?” Jack had called in from the living room.

“What’s this Vagisil doing in here?” The package, thank God, was unopened.

“I bought it, what do you think?” Jack said.

“Why?”

“It was in the sale bin at Rite-Aid.”

“Oh, Jesus wept.”

“Crocodile tears,” Jack called back. “And it’s not inconceivable that we could have female guests. My sister could come to visit. Don’t throw it away, Stuart.”

“Really, Jack. What are the odds that your sister would visit, first of all, and second, arrive with an itchy booty?”

“Itchy booty.” Jack laughed. “Your talk of itchy booties is lost on me, darling. I can’t tell one Japanese car from another.”

Stuart took the bread out of the oven and set the table with the good china for their guests—he knew Jane would appreciate the Wedgwood plates. Jane was the first to befriend them when they moved from San Francisco a year ago. She was in personnel at the investment firm where Jack worked. Neither Stuart nor Jack had really wanted to leave San Francisco, but the Boston office had offered to double Jack’s salary and it seemed foolish not to take it. Both agreed that if either one of them didn’t acclimate well to New England they would move back. So far, Stuart didn’t like it much here. The general atmosphere of the city struck him as distinctly unfriendly, one of suspicion and distrust. Partly it was that he missed his studies, the routines of academia. He’d been enrolled in the Ph.D. program at San Francisco State, working on an interdisciplinary doctorate in anthropology and art—specifically, the relationship between color and design patterns in Incan pottery and the culture’s rituals and habits. His preliminary thesis linked human sacrifice and geometric landscape patterns on bowls. Stuart’s theory was, the greater the culture’s strife, the more intricate and beautifully bright the pottery. In the Bay Area, there was a private anitiquities collector who trusted Stuart enough to give him a set of keys to his loft. Stuart came and went as he pleased, sat for hours in front of ancient grain bowls and ceremonial chalices.

Stuart hadn’t yet found a doctoral program in Boston that seemed like the perfect match, but B.U. offered enough courses to keep him interested until he figured out where he wanted to study. Things would work out if he was patient. Jack was thriving, and for now, that was enough.

This coming October would be their ten-year anniversary. They’d met in a twenty-four-hour Walgreens in San Francisco. Stuart had run in for nighttime cold medicine. In aisle one, an obese woman flanked by two policemen was praying to Saint Cecilia and opening packages of curlers. “You know you have to
buy
those curlers,” the policemen kept saying, but the woman went on rolling up her hair and shooing them away. In the pharmacy, the pharmacist was banging on the bulletproof Plexiglas and shouting at three boys who were stuffing their pockets with vitamins. By the time he’d come around and unlocked the door the boys had run out of the store, right past the cops guarding Saint Cecelia’s acolyte. Stuart hung
around the medicine aisle pretending to study labels so he could see how the commotion would turn out. A man dressed in a pink bathrobe and scuffy pink slippers, hair slicked back under a scarf and a fully made-up face, wheeled his cart past Stuart. He shook his head. “This place is getting so crazy,” he said, nodding at the woman with the curlers. His cart had nothing in it but cosmetics. Stuart chose a bottle of NyQuil then stood in line while the pharmacist gave a description of the boys to the cops, who had the curler thief in handcuffs. Pink Scuffy wheeled up behind him, humming, and opening his package of press-on nails. The man in front of Stuart turned around to see who was behind him, then smiled at Stuart.

They exchanged small talk. He said his name was Jack. He was the handsomest man Stuart had ever seen in his life. By the time they left the store, Jack had mentioned a relay-for-life walkathon the following Saturday, a benefit for the Bay Area AIDS association. Maybe Jack would see him there. At this point in his life, Stuart had considered himself bisexual. For the past three years, he’d been living with a Japanese woman he thought he would marry. He loved Roberta, loved their camaraderie and ordered life, but it wasn’t until he met Jack that he realized how being in love truly felt. Before now, he’d scoffed at claims of passion, thought anyone who blamed desperate or extreme acts on being in love was mentally ill at worst, too dependent on Hollywood depictions at best. Certainly, he felt pangs of tenderness when he was away from Roberta. But seeing Jack again had engendered a whole new feeling, as though his skin was electrified and stretching away from his muscles and bones, his body instinctively making a space for what he didn’t know, until now, was love.

The day of the relay Stuart spent most of the afternoon threading his way through the crowds looking for Jack. He finally spotted him when the group ended up in Golden Gate Park for a picnic. Stuart watched Jack from a distance, felt something like sickness rise up in him: a man like Jack would never, he thought, be interested in the likes of him—soft, doughy, the scent of a woman and a woman’s ways clinging to him. Looking at Jack—God, with his shirt off now—Stuart realized how much he’d let himself go. He’d always preferred libraries to gyms, theater to sports, but his body had never felt this lumpish and thick before. He looked around at the men at the picnic, admired some of them, was indifferent to others, but no one had the magnetic power Jack had. Stuart felt an ache when he
looked at Jack, deep in his gut, like the emptiness of hunger. Stuart circled closer to him, stood in the group next to Jack—the men were three deep around him. Jack didn’t once look his way.

Later, the crowd thinned to just a dozen men, Jack included, all of whom seemed to know each other. One of them suggested tequila shots at a bar around the corner and Stuart, though he promised Roberta he’d be home early, went along.

At the bar—a working-class, blue-collar place where all the men looked like pipefitters or union electricians—Stuart sat between Jack and another man from the relay, a blond in his early thirties with pockmarked skin and a ’70s layered haircut, who gave Stuart dirty looks for getting the seat next to Jack.

This close to Jack, Stuart felt light-headed. He was gorgeous, by anybody’s standards, his eyes not quite brown, not precisely green. When Stuart was a boy, he spent hours lying on his back under the birch tree in his backyard. The late autumn light on the underside of its leaves was what Jack’s eyes reminded him of.