Read All My Relations Online

Authors: Christopher McIlroy

Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Short Stories

All My Relations (7 page)

BOOK: All My Relations
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At the punch line—“Well, nobody's perfect”—Julia awoke laughing.

Through the church grapevine Julia learned that foot surgery had confined Philip to his apartment, his wheelchair unable to navigate the stairs. She assembled a CARE package of deli items, fresh fruit, and a bottle of Dry Sack, along with mundane necessities.

Grinning, Philip held out his arms. Even seated he was huge.

“I've missed you so much,” Julia said.

“Moscarpone! Smoked oysters!” He twisted the sherry cork and poured two glasses.

Lit only by a gap in the Venetian blinds, the disheveled room showed no sign of outside intervention—a wife's, for instance.

Philip's bandages were cloddy white blocks. “The idea of someone cutting,” he said. The wince bared his teeth. “I keep imagining them stepping into an egg slicer.” For another two months he mustn't walk.

Julia did some picking up. “Today's man on wheels needs room to roll,” she said, shoving books against the walls.

Philip beamed, sipping. “You are dear,” he said. “Now we have a dance floor.” He put on Vivaldi. Grasping Julia's hands, he lilted her to and fro. From behind, she lumbered him through figure eights. A hub caught books, loosing an avalanche. Deliberately Philip rammed another tower, toppling books and a broom, spilling the wastebasket. Flouncing her onto his lap with a thick arm, he said, “Have you ever made boom-boom with a mechanical centaur?”

“Philip,” she said, “I love you, but that aspect of our relationship is past.”

“My regret.” Stretching for their glasses, he clinked. “And deepest apology.”

Leaving, Julia demanded a key, and they argued. “What if you called for help and couldn't get to the door?” she said.

“All right.” He slapped the key on the counter. “Not because I need it, but because you deserve it.”

“Thank you thank you.” Julia curtseyed. “I shall wear it like a diadem on my forehead.”

“I'm an ass,” Philip said. “Please take the key.”

The morning of Christmas Eve, a dressed goose under her arm, Julia unlocked Philip's apartment and stepped into a glow like played-out neon, candles in red glass chimneys. “Boo,” said the black hulk in the corner. “Happy Halloween.”

Julia set the bird in the refrigerator and poured herself wine. “I apologize,” Philip said. “I'm undergoing a seizure of reminiscence.”

“You can talk about Vera,” Julia said.

As if continuing an interrupted monologue, Philip said, “We were trekking in Nepal, our honeymoon. The sun fell toward the peaks”—his head dropped to one side and his voice thinned—“which went molten orange, as if just pulled from the fire by the glazier's tongs. Then we were rising, forced apart, until we found ourselves on separate peaks. The burnished ice fell away in all directions. We regarded each other across great distance, yet in perfect awareness and sympathy.”

Philip's hands pressed together. “I steered our lives by that vision for years. So what if we were miserably incompatible. I willed us a couple, and now she can't live without me.”

“I married my husband for his sadness,” Julia said. “A mistake I undid. You're not bound to this lunatic!” she exclaimed.

“I become loquacious,” Philip said, toneless. “I'm imposing on you.”

“No, Philip. Wrong. This is what people do. They talk to each other.” Her arm wrapped around his head, fingers in his beard.

Philip jerked back. “Ah, yes, the orgy of ‘sharing':

‘I have cancer of the bowels, and your breath stinks.'
‘Thank you for sharing that with me.'”

“Call me when you are yourself,” Julia said and ran out the door.

From a pay phone she retracted “lunatic.” Until ambulatory, Philip said, he was unfit for company. They should limit contact to the telephone.

Obsessively Julia pictured Vera, red hair billowing, filmy dress clinging to her white limbs, bouncing on the pavement. Appalled at herself, she researched outings for Vera—chamber music, gallery openings, the botanical gardens, a bird sanctuary an hour's drive away. Reporting these to Philip, she added recommendations for therapeutic books and magazine articles.

“How is Vera today?” she asked him.

“Buzzing off the wall.”

In this proxy existence, through Vera, Julia felt disconnected, as if there were no footing beneath her.

“Julia,” Philip said, “our material is stale. My topics are few.” He would be responsible for calls, which stabilized at two a week. Tacitly the phone arrangement remained in force even after his first gingerly steps, on crutches.

Linda commiserated over the passing of Julia's sex life.

“It's not even the sex,” Julia said. “When he calls, I feel the same as when we used to make love. When he doesn't, it's just as maddening. Suffocating.” In fact, she was resorting to a Bronch-Aid inhaler frequently for shortness of breath. Coughing fits had ended the swims. Mornings, swinging her legs out of bed, she'd fall back, dizzy. Her limbs always were cold, her legs felt leaden, two minutes' walk tired them.

The inability to smoke enraged Julia. To outwit her lungs she puffed while limp in a hot bath, or nearly asleep, over bourbon or steaming tea. Her lungs convulsed.

“I'm glad to see you and Linda working out,” Julia said.

“I'm in a holding pattern,” Tim said. “Eventually we'll break up.”

“You were a sweet boy, Tim. There, I'm Generic Mom. But it's true. I have every card you hand-made for me, birthday, Mother's Day, Christmas, Easter, Valentine's, for twelve years. Our first visit to the Grand Canyon,” she said, “we stepped to the edge, and the ground was broken in pieces as far as we
could see. We grabbed hands, clasping so tight I think we both believed we could have floated down together. “And you know what? That boy still exists, as much as you do.”

“You mean in your head. These guys are thirty-one.” Tim wiggled his fingers.

She'd depended on him for a sense of future, Julia thought, not happy, simply tangible. But he defeated her like a TV after sign-off, a gray static buzz.

Philip sent a letter. “Our phone calls have outlived their usefulness. Increasingly they are an obligation.”

Julia laughed out loud at herself, pacing the floor until she gained the equanimity to sit and type:

You will be happy to read that this letter relieves you of your duties. Please don't call. Don't write. The books I've lent you, you may keep. Their meaning to me henceforth would be deformed.

You probably consider withholding yourself as manly, a guarding of old virtues. It is not. It is monstrous selfishness. Caring people share themselves. I feel sorry for you. The loss is to us both.

For the record, those burdensome phone calls, as our entire association, were delightfully stimulating to me.

Philip wore a loose gray shirt outside his pants, loafers sans socks. “Come in.” He beckoned like a hotelier. The room was unchanged, though brighter, blinds open.

Julia handed him the envelope, which he laid on the counter.

“Don't put it aside. Read it.”

“Not under this scrutiny.”

Julia slit the envelope with her fingernail and read the letter aloud.

Philip rubbed his face. “Quite fair,” he said. “Points well taken.” Off to the house, he said, for a packet of old manuscripts.
Come with? He hadn't invited Julia to his home before.

“Will she be there?”

“No. At the shrink.”

Driving, Philip was expansive, head dipping toward her, hand flashing. In fantasy Julia had made this journey repeatedly—rescuing Vera from another suicide attempt, supporting Philip across the threshold after her death, tipsily dousing him with champagne after Vera's divorce. That she was actually rounding Philip's corner she attributed to two factors. One, without a more satisfying resolution, which she would not get, she could not give up this final moment. Two, in Philip's view she no longer existed.

Tidiness shielded the interior of the solid brick house. Amazed at her detached curiosity, Julia searched for clues, nothing so obvious as a photo presenting itself. A pleasant scent, spicy, lingered. Philip rummaged in another room, drawers slamming. By the open French doors a curtain stirred.

Julia stepped into a profusion of snapdragons, tiger lilies, gladiolus, trillium, red poppies, crocus, plants she hadn't seen growing in the Southwest. Rustling trees filtered the sunlight. Cool, broad leaves slapped her thighs as each tread crunched, releasing a musky vegetable smell.

“I haven't trimmed the fruit trees. They're looking shaggy,” Philip said. “I've wanted to introduce dogwood—those starburst blossoms are a vivid growing-up memory—but I suspect the climate would be too much of a shock.” He lowered himself, knees swaying, to pull a weed. “Planting the rose bushes was hell on my hands. My gloves weren't thick enough. Beyond punctures. Lacerations.”

He looked up at Julia. “I retreated here from our love affair. This suits me. Vera and I scarcely meet. She's content to know I'm puttering nearby.”

Julia saw the scene as a paperweight, an exquisitely-wrought foliation of colors, encased in glass. In the midst stood Philip,
feet transfixed by long pins topped with red hair. Placidly he stooped with the watering can. It was set in Julia's mind, the vision of what he'd chosen over her.

Although lying still in bed, curled on one side, Julia felt as if she were bounding. Flinging out her limbs brought no relief. She wrenched from side to side.

She dreamed she was floating on a sea of burning oil, the ship's prow silhouetted, sinking. Fire crawled over her skin. Thirst cracked her mouth. Flaming vapor wriggled skyward, sucking oxygen, as the hot air collapsed, closed like a fist. Inhaling, her lungs seared. Gasping, the sheets drenched, she yanked the chain to the bedside lamp. The room's white and greens harmonized tranquilly to the point of eeriness; the scene looked stilted. Julia read.

A canopy of flame crinkled overhead, following her. Julia would sit, hand to her chest, laboring for air. After a few yards' walk her knees buckled.

Without loving Philip, Julia thought, she had sickened. Loving him, she had sickened worse, more quickly. How could it have become so simple?

Rising from the typewriter, the newsletter complete, she lost her balance. She could not control her legs, which skidded from under her. The second fall she waited until sensation returned, rubbing her calves. Crawling, she backed downstairs to the phone.

Within minutes Tim was carrying her to the car. “Oh, no,” he said, shutting the door, but the sound, broken as the latch clicked, had no origin. It could have been spoken by the dashboard.

Tim whizzed through red lights, emergency flashers blinking, horn beeping. His face was serene with purpose. Traffic in the left-turn lane slowed them. Alongside, in the center median, a
cloud of butterflies bobbed across shrubs, an entity not quite whole, not quite dispersed. They reminded Julia of a meadow she'd once hiked years before, as a teenager. Breaking from the woods, she'd happened on a field strewn with deliriously yellow flowers. The air was so clear she'd felt no barrier between herself and the sky, earth, the fluttering petals. Running, with cleansing, full-chested pants, she leaped into their midst.

H
UALAPAI
D
READ
I

The Hualapai village of Alav lies at my back. The rocky path is steep. As I mount the ridge crest, a bicyclist is laboring toward me, up the other side. Though exertion makes holes of her eyes and mouth, she's beautiful, black hair tossing, skin buttery with sweat. Her bare midriff is taut over skimpy purple shorts. In the town of Hualapais, not exactly fat but rounded, dressed in modest anonymity up to the neck, she's a cover girl, a star. Her tires hiss. Pebbles crunch. She passes, and I look over my shoulder at her thinclad rear squunching on the bicycle seat.

Grasses are flared white in the sunset. Beyond the cliff shearing off the ground to my right, a line of hills runs toward the Grand Canyon, a gash on the horizon, veiled in orange light. I'm walking to acclimate, get the lay of the land. As new district manager for Associated Investment Services, out of Flagstaff, I've inherited one client in Alav, my last stop on a swing through rural Arizona. Damaged in last year's stock market crash, the goods—IRA's, cash management funds, limited partnerships, flexible annuities—aren't moving well.

Earlier today, when I first arrived in Alav, two horsemen rode straight down the middle of the street, broad copper faces unreadable, hooves scooping explosions of dust. To these people I
must seem the human incarnation of a cash management fund, animated like a zombie: moussed forelock, suavely creased gray suit, red tie emblazoned on my chest. The thought brings up a capering chuckle in my throat, startling me. I would rather not have laughed that way.

By the time I rejoin Alav's main road, twilight has knitted the overhanging cottonwoods together and pulled them low. The cyclist is poised beside my car, one leg braced against the ground, the other foot on the pedal.

“Dooley,” she introduces herself, and tells me she's a metallurgy student at the University of Arizona, on leave because her mother is ill. Meanwhile she's fighting fires, working construction—laid block on the new kindergarten wing.

“I don't know how I'm talking to you,” Dooley says. “I look so atrocious. At the university I maintain myself, but here I don't even bother with makeup. At least I've had the morale to keep biking, so I don't swell up like a pig.” Unconsciously—I think—she skims her belly. “I've done two hundred miles in a day.”

“You must get hungry,” I say. We settle on Chinese food in Worthington (home of six AIS clients), forty-five miles away. I feel dwarfed by my good luck. This admirable person.

In Dooley's triplex I wait and wait while the shower gushes, followed by an even longer silence. Mottled zigzags break up the TV screen. Dooley's mother is blind. A calico dress envelopes not only her shrunken body but the chair, stretching over its frame. The old woman seems to be resting in the embrace of a larger skeleton. She mutters to herself, not English. I can enjoy situations like this, if I have to.

BOOK: All My Relations
2.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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