All of Us and Everything (8 page)

“And what did you mean by it?”

“I meant that if someone tells us that something like quitting or, say, running away is bad, we buy into it—personally and collectively as a culture. But that's not true.”

“So, what are you quitting or running away from?” he asked.

“I'm just heading home.” She glanced at him. “Catching up with family.”

“I'm running toward,” he said.

“Toward what?”

And without any sarcasm or hint of insincerity, he said, “I'm going to see Amanda.”

The name charged a distant memory. Amanda. “The girlfriend you broke up with before Liv?”

He nodded. “You cut her from the movie.”

“I thought it was simpler with just one girl.”

“The one who turned me in.”

“Really, I made it about your father because it
was
about your father.”

“More or less. Movies can be redactive.”

“Or expansive.”

“I wrote Liv letters in juvie. She never wrote back.”

“Maybe she did, but she just never sent them. Liv was sent off to boarding school after…”

“Amanda was there before Liv and Amanda was there to get me through the aftermath. She stuck it out with me for a long time.” He took a deep breath and held it. “I'm going to win her back.”

“What?” Ru hadn't heard the term
win back
for nine full months. Of course, he wasn't referencing the name of a Hollywood insiders' screenwriting award that she'd won, but still her previous life flooded back to her—L.A.'s dry air, the interior of her BMW, and Cliff—handsome, with his windswept hair, a little sunburn on his nose, naked in a pool in Beverly Hills at night. She felt stricken with panic. She'd called it off? Jesus. It had made sense while living in a longhouse in Vietnam, but here, now, hurtling through the skies over the United States of America? She swallowed drily. “To win her back? Why does she need winning back?”

“It's a long story.” He shrugged off his passion, but not very convincingly.

“We've got another hour and a half,” Ru said.

“Are you going to rip it off for another book?”

“I'm writing about elephant calls now—guttural breathing, growling deep in the ribs, sharp blasts, circular whirring, deep purring, and this noise like European mopeds.”

“Okay then.”

And so then Teddy Whistler told Ru about Amanda.

They grew up in Ocean City together, same street, and went to each other's birthday parties. “After I got out of juvie and a little time somewhere private, we finally dated through high school, college.” When he was in law school, his uncle died and left him a booming international real estate company, headquartered in Seattle, but with satellite offices all over the world. “It's the kind of thing that you don't say no to,” Teddy said. “I had to give it a shot.” He expected Amanda to follow.

She didn't. They broke up, but only to give each other a little space to grow up, be independent, and then—or so he thought—they'd get back together once he'd built up the business and opened an office wherever she wanted to live.

When he heard she was engaged, he was in Chicago. “I bought a ticket and I'm flying home to Ocean City to tell her I love her, to win her back.”

There were those words again. “Okay,” Ru said, as if he'd asked her a favor.

“Okay…what?”

“I owe you, don't I? And I specialize in win-backs.”

“Win-backs?” he asks.

“Yeah, classic scenes. I've written a bunch of them. It's, you know, a set piece.”

“A set piece? Well, I'm actually talking about my life right now. Not a classic scene. Not a set piece.”

“I pull from the truth to try to reveal a deeper universal truth.” This was something she'd learned to say early on.

He seemed to be considering it and then he smiled a little. “I liked it when my character said, ‘The dog dragged me in.' And when he put his fist through the window. And ‘Even Teddy Wilmer isn't really Teddy Wilmer.' Those were good lines.”

“What about ‘I'm not a hero. I'm just here. I'm the one who stays.' That's the line most people point out.”

He shook his head. “Ah, well, that's where you might have gone wrong. I'm still trying to be a hero.” He fiddled with the latch on the tray table. “But I liked what she said after that.”

“ ‘Then stay, and keep staying,' ” Ru said softly. She hadn't had a conversation about these lines in a long time.

“Yeah,” he said. “That.”

Ru had failed in Vietnam. Though she understood the different calls of elephants and the situations that aroused each of them, she'd made no progress in communicating with them. And she'd long since given up on trying to understand the inner workings and/or implications of a matriarchal culture as well as trying to feel what it might have been like for her father if he had, in fact, served in Vietnam. She'd never even learned how to make sour rice soup or how to dry a gourd to hold the soup. She sucked at weaving cotton. The only thing she'd been good at was swaddling the baby to her chest and taking her for long walks—the fourth generation in the longhouse was, as the matriarch had wished, a girl—and Ru missed the smell of that baby's head.

So, after being of little use in the M'nong village for the last eight months, she suddenly felt like a doctor on a cruise ship volunteering to deliver a baby on the lido deck or, more appropriately, as she put it to Teddy, “It's like you've had a heart attack while trapped on a plane—but it's okay because you're seated next to one of the best heart specialists in the nation.”

“Are you making me an offer?”

“I'm an award-winning win-back writer and you need a win-back.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “But it has to be from me. It has to represent how I really feel.”

“Yep. I can do that.”

He nodded slowly, saying yes while still thinking it through. “Okay, okay. It's like the universe is speaking pretty clearly. Not even a lisp or a stutter. I'm sitting next to an award-winning win-back writer who owes me. Okay.” His head snapped up. “Let's give it a shot.”

For the next half hour, Ru raked him for details, moments. And he ran through everything he could, sometimes closing his eyes tight and leaning his head back against the headrest, trying to remember it all, just right.

At a certain point, Teddy said, “God, I miss the way she looked at me. That look—it just could knock everything down. That look—it could strip everything away. And then it was just me and her. I've been missing that look ever since I left. I can't spend my whole life missing it.”

Ru stopped writing. She looked out the small window again, the clouds sailing past the old lady's elegant profile. Ru felt breathless. She thought of Cliff, somewhere down there. Had he looked at her and felt everything stripped away? Had she felt that way when she looked at him? Had she
ever
felt that way? Maybe it just wasn't part of her genetic makeup.

“Can we put that in?” Teddy asked.

She tapped her eraser on the tray table. “It might be a little too earnest and borderline cloying,” she told him. “But not bad. You could go with that. Or…” She raised her hand and told him. “I've got this.”

And then for another hour or so, she wrote Amanda—this stranger, engaged to someone who was not the love of her life (according to Teddy Whistler)—a love letter.

When she was done, she handed the letter to him.

He read it slowly, sat back in his seat. “You're good at what you do.” He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket.

They settled into quiet for the rest of the flight, but Ru still felt jittery and, well, very, very alive. The most alive she'd felt in a very long time—even more alive than she'd been watching a live birth. She was rocketing back to her childhood home, her family, the past. It was like Teddy knew it and had shown up to confirm that her life wasn't just characters and plots and ideas for books she couldn't write. It was real—undeniably real—and by extension, Ru was real too.

She'd run away and escaped her own life for a while, but Teddy Whistler—of all people!—had made her remember she was supposed to be living her life.

After landing, Teddy said, “Norman Rockwell. He painted sentimentally, right? Whistler was against sentimentality. He loved art for art's sake.”

“Actually Rockwell's first wife wanted an open marriage and divorced him to marry a war hero. She killed herself and his second wife had a lot of mental issues, addictions. They went to the famous therapist Erik Erikson. Stages of psychosocial development? Did you take Intro to Pysch?”

“I did.”

“Well, they didn't have a perfect little picket-fence life. No one does.”

“I guess not.”

Ru unclipped her seat belt.

“Do you want me to let you know how it goes?” Teddy handed her his business card. “You could call me or I could call you.”

She shook her head, refusing to take it.

“You don't want to know? Wouldn't it be nice to hear that it was a success? I could call you only if it's good news, if you want.”

“Success is overrated.”

After Herc Huckley's son asked her about The Amateur Assassins Club, she'd told him that she wanted to know what was in the box. “Is it mine? Are you giving it to me or not?” Her tone had become chilly, a voice usually reserved for moments when she had to stick up for herself around pushy salesclerks or know-it-all hairdressers.

He told her he'd made copies, but these were the originals. “All yours.”

“I'd like to look at them in private. That's fair enough, isn't it?”

“Of course,” Bill said. “No problem. But…” He reached out and touched the box in a way that declared he still had some ownership. “I'd really love to talk to you about it all, after you're done. My mother doesn't know anything about what's in this box. She met my father years later and now my father's gone, in a way,” he said, his voice cracking. He coughed and then went on. “This is all I have left of him.”

She'd told him that maybe the contents of the box would jar loose some memories. He jotted his cell phone number on his business card—his work was related to green technology, whatever the hell that was—and gave it to her. She ushered him to the door. And within moments he was gone. Augusta and Ingmar were alone again in the cool, dark house.

Augusta walked upstairs, leaving Ingmar—who was mistrustful of stairs—behind. He nose-whined his lonesomeness.

Using a small step stool, Augusta shoved the box onto the top shelf of her bedroom closet, behind a stack of quilts. She shut the closet door so tightly she imagined she was sealing up the past. The contents of the box would surely jar loose some memories; the question was, could she bear it?

The Amateur Assassins Club? Yes. Those words meant something to her. They shot through her like fissures across the surface of a frozen lake.

Nick Flemming abandoned her. Herc Huckley and the other members of the Assassins Club were the unwitting witnesses.

And then Flemming came back and her life, for a long while, wasn't hers.

She sat on the edge of her bed then lay down on it with her shoes still on, and she remembered snow swirling on the other side of the window on the fifth floor of the Commerce Building where she'd once worked, the life she'd lived before her daughters existed. The secretaries gathered by the window, pulling their cardigans in close. They didn't like Augusta. Women didn't, in general. Men did. She was odd and yet comfortable with being odd—or, perhaps, unaware—which men sometimes mistook for mysteriousness.

It was the eve of John F. Kennedy's inauguration and someone said, “How are dignitaries going to get to all of their parties?”

“Who cares?” Augusta said. “How are
all of us
going to get home?” She'd left her combative parents in the house on Asbury Avenue as soon as possible—in fact, while still just eighteen and having only completed a short secretarial program. She was living in a small apartment in Arlington that she shared with an older woman who'd never married and who seemed to need no one. Augusta admired her.

The snow had been drifting down since midday, but now it was really starting to accumulate. As it was, she only had a pair of galoshes that fit tightly over her high heels. They would be of little use. The snow was already ankle-deep where it hadn't been shoveled from the sidewalks, and the galoshes were bound to become pockets for snow.

“Do you think they're going to have sense enough to let us go?” Augusta asked, rhetorically. At eighteen, she was already a committed career woman. Her co-workers thought she'd prematurely adopted the jaded tone of some of the older higher-level secretaries, for effect, but Augusta had been a jaded toddler. She found an early Christmas present in her father's closet—a tricycle. She pulled it out, took it to the third floor, and pedaled it around.

When her father found her, he said, “That was supposed to be a gift from Santa.”

“It was in your closet.”

“It's a special Christmas gift. You should wait until Christmas morning for it.”

“Why?” She sat on the red leather seat and stared at him blankly. “That makes no sense.” She meant it seemed arbitrary, but she hadn't yet learned the word.

At quarter to four, Mr. Shapiro walked out of his office, coughed loudly, and then clapped his hands over the clatter of their typewriters. “I have an announcement!” he shouted. “Can I have your attention?” He was exasperated even though they all quieted immediately; he was often preemptively exasperated. “All government employees are getting out an hour early! You can pack up and head home at four
P.M.
”

Augusta finished her final report, tidied her desk, and was leaning over to put on her mother's galoshes when Lloyd Bartel, a young patent attorney, walked up. “You need a ride?” He spread his hands on her desk, leaned in, and smiled.

“I'm okay,” she told him. “I've got a ride.” She didn't have a ride. She was going to take the bus.

“Full tank of gas, working heater. You sure?”

She nodded. “Thanks.” It was just a car ride but, still, she was suspicious of men, in general, and was dating a young dental student named Max Stern in part because it took her off the market. She hadn't yet broken it to him that she didn't believe in marriage. Her parents assumed he was going to propose, and she'd been practicing a speech for that moment. Sometimes the speech was meant to let Max down easy, but often it was a treatise on the pointlessness of marriage:
People who get married seem either encased in blocks of ice, so stiff they can't even blink, or rabid with anger, setting out to kill each other over the course of a lifetime.
Those were her parents' only two modes and what she assumed all couples reverted to in private.

He rapped on the desk with his knuckles. “Keep warm!” he said. “Bundle up!”

She bustled out with the other workers, packed into the elevator amid the cheery nervous chatter—“About time!” “It's a blizzard out there!” “Call in the reindeer!”—and then through the lobby, the wind-gusted revolving doors, and onto the street.

The snow was coming down so quickly that Augusta stopped for a moment and stared up into it, like a child might. She clutched the collar of her mannish camel-hair coat—identical to so many of the women's coats that season—and let the snow light on her face, daintily. She smiled. She couldn't help it. She was out of the stuffy office and in the world. And although she'd been an adultlike child, she could also be a childlike adult. It was as if age didn't apply to her chronologically, but instead it was mood-based, experiential, like matching an age to an experience rather than experiencing things through the lens of age.

The snow felt like a reminder that nature still existed, that the world wasn't simply made of boardrooms and buildings and streets and bridges. It could still be overtaken. The city and all of its important bustle could be blotted out—just like that. All white, covered in a blanket, as if what they did here was unimportant, antlike, as if they'd never existed at all.

She was shoved by the crowd. Some had thought to bring umbrellas; popped open, they surrounded her with their silver spokes. She only had a long thin scarf, which she wound over her head and around her neck. She wedged her way into the herds, slipping now and then. The traffic had already slowed, barely inching along. The city was home to many southerners who had no experience driving in snow. She knew it was bad and only going to get worse.

Her nylons were wet and freezing cold. As she approached the crowd huddled at her bus stop on the corner of Fifteenth and Constitution, she realized that there was no way she'd be able to board the next bus or the next.

A man in a tuxedo and a woman in a fur coat stepped out of a limousine and into a small restaurant. The woman was crying. “What a waste. A horrible waste. Are you listening?”

Augusta turned then and headed east toward Twelfth Street. She'd have to reverse the route to its origins at the depot if she wanted a warm and dry seat for the next few hours. She passed a garbage truck, outfitted with a plow.

At the depot, she found a bus from her line just about to head out. It was idling. She tapped on the door. The driver opened it.

“Can I board here?” she asked.

“You're in for a long night.” He was bundled and flushed, his eyes puffed and bleary, like he'd been making rounds for a long time already.

“I figured that much.” She opened her change purse and paid. All of the seats were empty. She took one in the middle of the bus, slid all the way to the window. She thought of Kennedy. She'd voted for him, proudly, and it seemed that all this snow was nature's confetti. She loved Kennedy in such a deeply personal way that she wasn't sure it was healthy. When she heard his voice, she sometimes welled with such hope that her eyes teared up. She breathed on the glass and then made a print of her hand.

At the next stop, men and women shuffled down the aisle, doubling up. Augusta kept her eyes out the window so that no one would try to catch her attention and ask to sit next to her. She knew she'd have to share eventually; this was a habit more than anything else. An only child, she usually preferred solitude.

As the bus lurched from the curb, she sensed someone's presence on the sidewalk. Maybe it was a flutter of motion that she saw out of her peripheral vision, maybe it was something more inexplicable—sometimes we sense things beyond our senses. She turned and saw a young man running along, his overcoat flapping open. He had dark hair that, if not cut so close, would have been curly, and shining eyes. He raised his hand and called out. He looked at Augusta and opened his arms wide, slowing his pace, as if to say,
I'm at your mercy.

Augusta was about to call to the driver but someone beat her to it. “One more!” a voice shouted.

The driver nosed forward but there was nowhere to go. He opened the bi-fold doors and the young man jumped up the steps. He made a quiet joke that made the driver laugh loudly.

As he headed down the aisle, he looked directly at Augusta. His gaze was so intense that she immediately looked down at her lap, fiddling with the metal snap of her purse. The bus lurched again and she heard the swish of his jacket and then felt his weight as he took the seat beside her. “Hope it's okay,” he said.

She slid toward the window immediately, glanced up, and smiled. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

“My name is Nick,” he said, and he held out his hand. “Nick Flemming.”

“Right,” she said, shaking his hand. She realized now how hard her heart was beating. She tugged at her scarf. “I'm Augusta Rockwell.” She wanted to keep this formal.

“Rockwell?”

“No relation,” she said, “to the artist. Norman, that is.”

“
The Saturday Evening Post,
right? Baseball games and fishing holes and Santa. I don't know if I ever really bought it.”

“Bought the newspaper?” Augusta said, but she knew that wasn't what he meant. He was talking about authenticity.

“The whole ideal. If there's a place in America that's perfect like that, quaint and tidy and all tucked into bed at night, I wouldn't want to live there.”

“Why not?” Her own childhood was a strange lopsided triangle. Her mother and father fought, but all the while her mother took care of her father, who drank too much and took pills for his nerves. With what energy she had in reserve, her mother took care of Augusta. As soon as Augusta was old enough to take on some element of her own rearing, she relieved her mother of the duty. It was as if she fired her mother, task by task, as Augusta grew up, and her mother wanted to be fired.

Nick ran a hand through his hair, wet with snow. He leaned back and smiled—a bright, slightly lopsided smile. “Because it's not the truth, is it? I like the truth even if it's ugly. Don't
you,
Augusta Rockwell?”

She looked out the window, now densely fogged with the heat of the crowded bodies. She felt almost breathless. Yes. She didn't know it until this moment, but yes—she preferred the truth even if it was ugly. Marriage, for example, felt like an enormous lie—joy, happiness, twin souls. She would work this into her treatise against the institution, but she didn't know this stranger well enough to explain what was going through her mind so she said, “What plans are you missing out on because of the snow? You were going somewhere, right?”