Aloft (44 page)

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being that not too far down the road Jack will take over the house permanently and still have room for their kids and Pop and Paul and Barthes, and that I, with whatever luck is left to me, will find my closing digs elsewhere, such as Rita might desire.

Slim chances there again, champ.

At least this is what Pop tells me after lights out. With the kids in the third bedroom, we're bunking together, the space between our twin beds just wide enough that we can't simply reach over and nudge/hit each other. This is a good thing, I suppose.

The other night he was snoring again with such a tortured, bes-tial rage, as though his body were trying to force his tonsils out through his nose, the wracked growls alternating with nearly minute-long cessations of breathing (Rita says it's sleep apnea), that I had to toss a slipper at his hulking mass, and wake him.

"Do you know what time it is?" he said, like I was the one who'd been sawing away.

"It's late."

"What do you want, Jerome?"

"You think I should put up another headstone out there?"

"What?"

"You know, out there."

"There
are
stones out at the cemetery."

"I mean one for Daisy."

"Oh," he said, scratching at himself down low. "I was wondering why there was that space in between your mother and Theresa."

"I think it all looks pretty good. But Daisy's spot just seemed kind of lonely."

"Maybe to you."

"Still. I should put another one up."

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Pop rolled back away from me, onto his side. "Well, I thought that from the day she died. So did your mother."

"Really? Why didn't you say something?"

"She was your wife."

"But you both loved her. You had a say."

"You think you would have listened to us?"

"Yeah," I said. "I probably would have."

"Well, maybe that's why we didn't say anything. Now let's get some shut-eye."

I thought about that for a while, as Pop almost immediately started rattling the windowpanes with his two-stroke, how in fact after what happened Pop didn't seem to bother much with me as he'd always bothered before, instruct me to do exactly this or that with the customers or the business or the kids. He just kind of re-ceded in an un-Pop-like way, which I attributed to my mother telling him to back off for a while and just lend me whatever hand I might need. Which they both did, my mother especially helpful around the house and Pop, too, at the garage, where he came by a couple of times a week to keep the mechanics in line by replenishing their dented metal cooler with cold beer and sandwiches.

It never occurred to me back then as a presumably long-minted adult that he might have finally decided it was time to let me stew in a holding tank of my own, be it eye-high with shit or honey, and not, as was his wont (born out of ego-fied generosity and expedience), to keep giving me things anymore, foremost opinions and advice. I suppose this would normally be my moment to be expressing gratitude to him, for the usual. (if tardy, extra-subtle) parental relinquishment, but I still wish he'd naturally intruded and called me a cowardly coldhearted fool and went ahead and ordered up a customary funeral and headstone for Daisy, as I 318

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wouldn't now be staring at an oddly unbalanced plot of sod whenever I visit the cemetery with Paul, following a day at St. Jude's.

At the gathering at our house after Theresa's funeral, in fact, among the countless other miserable happenings of that day, Sal Mondello (who is officially retired now, after the bankruptcy filing) came up to me afterward and extended his condolences and then added, "It's a shame her mother can't be with her." If the randy old geezer hadn't actually looked so brittle about the chops I'd have busted him one solid and wrung his neck with his own Major Johnson. But I didn't, and just nodded and accepted his old-country gesture of an envelope, then received the scores of her friends and relatives and other sundry people who came out, some of whom I didn't even recognize. But of course her high school friends, Alice Woo and ladle Srinivasan, were there, in black-on-black dresses and hose, clinging to each other like there was a fierce ill wind blowing, crying their eyes out from the pew to the grave, and then those who obviously came out for us be-reaved, like Richie and his associates, and Kelly Stearns and Miles Quintana, who despite showing no such indication were clearly there
together
(the Movietone story of how this happened I later learned from Miles, and it involved a final Parade parking lot altercation with Jimbo and the subsequent mutual realization by a maturing white Southern woman and her young brown urban knight that they had more in common than simply a love of enabling their respective constituencies to temporarily exit the dreariness of life through mid-budget holidays). The supporting presence of these friends and associates didn't comfort so much as reveal for me a surprisingly pernicious secondary gloom over the already near-suffocating pall of woe, the knowledge of collective mourning initially soothing but soon enough all the more depressing, such is the idea that no one completely escapes.

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Paul, to his credit, didn't try to keep it together for anybody's sake. He lost it at the house that morning, and on the car ride to the church, and literally a few words into his remarks at the pulpit he simply stopped and stepped down and sat down next to us and bawled as loudly as he could. I was proud of him. At the lowering of the casket Jack had to hold him up, lest he stumble and fall into the hole, and back at the house afterward he had an attack of sharp pains in his belly and chest, which Rita and one of our doctor friends attended to, successfully treating with a dose of Pop's antigas tablets. That night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, while sharing the last $150 bottle of a boutique cabernet that Jack had brought over and opened unbidden and somewhat oddly insisted the two of us drink, Paul thanked me for getting up and finishing his eulogy.

I said it was no problem, an honor and a privilege. So we drank to those, and to a few other puffed up et ceteras, even chuckling a bit, and soon thereafter we polished off the plump, inky wine.

Because he naturally couldn't handle it and was completely grief-exhausted besides, I had to walk him to his bed, where I'm sure for the first time in days—certainly then and perhaps since—he slept an intractable, unfettered sleep.

I didn't, quite, and lay in bed for a long while staring up at the ceiling, tracing paths along the mottles and cracks, of course only inviting a dreadful circularity. I began to feel as if I were lying in a box and naturally didn't want to continue on that line and so I stepped outside onto the patio in the cooling night air and sat slumped in a deck chair beneath the moonlit sky, the distant, big-hearted-river sound of the Expressway filtering through the dry leaves of the trees. The sky, despite the half-moon, was still brilliant with celestial lights, and when I looked back over the roof I thought I saw a glinting streak fall 36.0 C H . A L N G - R A E

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to the horizon. There was another, and another, though appearing lower in the sky each time, and to see the next ones better I went around to the side yard, where I kept the gutter-cleaning ladder, and quietly leaned it against the gutter. Then I climbed up onto the roof, walked atop the house back over the kitchen, and sat down and waited.

There was nothing then. And I was trying my best not to remember the day but kept thinking anyway how I had finished up reading Paul's speech, which came right after Pop's, and then Jack's. It was beautifully somber, serious, elegantly lyrical stuff, and not just heady with its quotations from Heine and the Bible and the I Ching and Blake but also marked by earthy and detailed remembrances of her and their life, and even though they knew it had been written by Paul a number of people complimented
me
on the moving, heartrending words.

Though I'd told him he could take a pass, Pop insisted he was fine, and was clearly bent on saying a few words; but he only spoke off the cuff for a minute or two at most, coughing between words to suppress any burgeoning gasping or tears, and talked respectfully of her tough spirit and independent views, though he ended somewhat gruffly and inappropriately, mumbling that he hadn't seen her much of late at "the home." Jack, on the other hand, left little unmentioned in his sheaf of prepared remarks, moving quite slowly and for some reason nonchronologically through this or that scene from their childhood and teen years, noting in most every instance how his brawn had been neatly trumped by her brains. At one point he had to pause for an awkwardly long time because he was physically shuddering at what seemed surely the end of his talk, but then held it together and continued some more and didn't quite arrive to any concerted finish but instead mostly just stopped.

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I was supposed to speak next, Paul slated to go last, all this outlined in the printed program. But after Pop and Jack went, Paul turned and nodded to me and then just popped up from the front. And while it wouldn't be right or fair to say that Pop's and Jack's speeches were failures exactly, because nothing expressed (or not) in such a circumstance can be anything but painfully singularly real and thus in its own profound way absolutely truthful and worthy, there hung in the silence of the church after Jack said his piece a distinctly off-kilter note that seemed desperately in need of some harmonizing response, which automatically summoned the poet in Paul to rise from the bench.

When Paul then took his turn and thereby preempted me I wasn't in the least offended or upset. I was feeling lucky, even glad. Even though I surely had in mind a thousand modest, au-thentic things I could have said, among them how I'd always liked the loose windblown way she wore her all-black clothes, or didn't dig how she'd often hug the yellow line when she drove, or could mention, too, if it were the least okay to do so, that while she never did regain consciousness in the ambulance after her placenta detached and bled out in a manner that, I swear, I swear, I would not describe if even my life depended on it, I was almost certain that her hand's grasp on mine kept tightening with purposeful assurance and not that she was dying or already dead. No, no, I didn't have any words, lofty or not, to offer the broken-faced throng.

No, none.

And why not? I don't know. Maybe it was old-time unrecon-structed denial, or that oft-documented lazy-heartedness of mine, or else what might simply be a pathological fear of sadness. None of these of course is any good excuse, which I can mostly handle, except what does disturb is the thought that
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somewhere up there (I hope and pray,
up there)
Theresa Battle has had to pause in free mid-soar and grant pardon to an utter terrestrial like me.

That night I sat for some time on top of the house, and then, seeing nothing else falling in the sky, stood up to go back down.

But when I checked my footing on the shingles I noticed it, the faint shade of the wide X I had inlaid, which strangely glimmered now more vividly in the moonlight than it ever had in the day. And after I locked the sliding door inside and checked on Paul and Jack's kids and climbed back into my empty bed, I thought no matter how much I wished to disappear sometimes, to fly far off and away, I really couldn't, and maybe never did. Or will.

Rita says, "The sandwiches are almost ready, Jerry. You better call everybody."

"Maybe I won't just yet," I say, my fingers tapping on her hip the first few bars of a majestic unknown song of love. "Maybe I'd just like to stay here with you."

She leans back into me. "It's a lot of sandwiches."

"We can manage it."

She kisses me, but quick and light. "Just go."

In the den I inform the kids that lunch is ready. They hardly nod at me as they momentarily stop sucking with fury on their thumbs, their action cartoon at full-bore climax, worlds explod-ing in a cataclysm of galaxial smoke and fire. They wait in silent, fearful awe until the hunky robot hero reappears and then cackle like the damned. I tell them again, and with their free hands they wave me on to the adjoining laundry room, where Eunice is plucking clothes from the dryer.

"Thank god for Rita!" she says when I mention lunch, handing me a stack of folded dish towels. "Take these back to the kitchen, will you? And please put them
away,
okay?"

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After I comply I head outside and see Pop coming from around the side of the house, where the bedroom addition is going up. He's wearing a ratty sweatshirt and jeans, a leather tool belt loosely wound around his ample waist. He's been eating well since leaving Ivy Acres, and he's been pretty energetic besides, walking daily around the neighborhood and even helping Jack with the construction, only superlight-duty stuff of course, like measuring and cutting pieces of cedar siding.

"How's it going today?"

"Like always," he says, patting his tape measure. "Guns blazing."

"Is Jack back there?"

"Tell me it's chow time."

"A-huh."

"Good, I'm starving. Where are you going?"

"To get Jack."

"He's not over there."

I stop. "So where is he?"

Pop says, "Look in the hole."

What Pop is calling the hole, of course, is not quite that. It's a 20-by-40-foot pool trench, dug by Jack himself a couple of days last week with a backhoe from one of our former competi-tors, who was more than happy to rent him the machine at half the regular rate as a going-out-of-business present (Pop later told me, as it was being loaded on the truck for return, that he'd taken a nice long whiz in the gas tank). Jack figured that with all they'd given up, the kids could at least have a pool, and I wasn't one to argue. He's done a pretty nice job, given that he probably only had fifteen or twenty hours on such equipment before this, and the only associated mishaps were a couple crushed terra-cotta planters and a deep gash in the corner of
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