Apologize, Apologize! (16 page)

“Nineteen.”

“Is that all? You look like shit. You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over this thing. You’ve got a long road ahead of you. You need to ask yourself these questions for the sake of the rest of your life.”

“And Steven, you need to stop this now,” Kitty said, sounding firm.

“Please . . .” The note of pleading that I heard in my voice surprised me. “Try to understand. It was hopeless. No one stood a chance, and anyway . . . I didn’t think he could drown—”

“Enough small talk. Shall we retire to the dining room?” the Falcon interrupted, smiling coldly, gesturing for the others to precede him. He brushed forcibly against me as he passed by, the corner of his shoulder jabbing me in the chest and briefly knocking me off balance.

“How dare you let that nincompoop speak to you that way, and in my house,” he hissed into my ear.

I was astonished. “I thought you’d get mad at me . . . I didn’t want to make a scene. Anyway, you could have said something. Why didn’t you stick up for me?”

“For the same reason that General Patton never called on his wife to make his case to Eisenhower—stop trying to be all things to all people. I can’t make up my mind whether it’s cowardice or arrogance that makes you behave as you do. Now if you don’t mind, my guests are waiting.”

“I don’t know about this,” I said as the senator’s wife lowered herself under me.

I was retreating to my room, walking backward, trying to make my getaway, when I ran into her on the landing of the back staircase off the kitchen.

“Ma Griff,” I said, inhaling her perfume as if it were chloroform. Ma would have been horrified to know that she and Kitty Paley shared the same taste in fragrances.

“Shut up!” She put her hand across my mouth.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bingo was splitting a gut.

Twenty minutes later, I was alone in my bedroom, throwing up into my pillowcase.

Two weeks after the party, I was sneaking into the unused side entrance of Cassowary, tiptoeing by the Falcon’s bedroom at four in the morning, when Carlos, his parrot, caught sight of me.

“Son of a bitch!” he hollered, peering out into the hallway.

“Shhh . . .” I put my fingers to my lips. Carlos was a mainstay of my childhood; I felt about him the way Candice Bergen must feel about Charlie McCarthy.

“Motherfucker.” He said it as if he meant it, head bobbing, showing off his spectacular four-foot wingspan and cobalt blue feathers. Bingo taught him to swear like a death row inmate, and the Falcon never forgave him for it. Jailbird, Bingo nicknamed him.

I heard my grandfather’s voice preceding him around the corner. “What’s the racket, Carlos. . . . Oh, I see . . . well, if it isn’t the playboy of the Western world.” The Falcon, in slate gray silk dressing gown and pajamas, stood in the doorway.

“Hi, Granddad.”

“Hi, Granddad,” Carlos mimicked as I glared over at him, and he smirked at me in return.

“How kind of you to put in an appearance,” the Falcon said, pretending to examine his fingernails. He looked up. “Where have you been all this time? Entertaining the senator’s wife?”

He recoiled in disgust. “Good God! Look at you. What rock did you crawl out from under before coming home?”

“I shouldn’t have come here. I’ll leave.” My eyes were trained on the floor.

“Where will you go? That’s right. Run for cover. Take flight. There’s an answer,” he said as I began to back away, preparing to descend the stairs, my hand on the balustrade. He reached out to stop me. I glanced down at his fingers pinching my forearm.

“Before you leave, Collie, I’m curious. Where will you go tonight? Back to service the lovely Mrs. Paley? She’s already run through the entire graduating class at Groton and Andover. Rumor has it you’re seeing her daughter, Edie, as well—the possibilities are positively ill making. I’ve had the senator on the phone every night this week, apoplectic with rage and making threats all over the place. Seems it’s a game they play—she taunts him with her young lovers, and he’s willing to pimp out his wife and daughter and keep silent about it in exchange for generous support from me for his campaign.” He tightened his grip.

“It’s not like that. . . .”

“Oh yes, it’s exactly like that. I can smell it on you. Tell me. Are you punishing yourself for what happened or are you trying to make yourself feel better? Or are you just living up to the abysmally low standard of performance you appear to have set for yourself?”

“It’s not true.”

“Well, prove it, then. Pull yourself together. Get over it.” He released my arm and took a couple of steps back, as if he were trying to regain his perspective, looking me over as if he were assessing an unfinished painting.

“I can’t.” I was becoming a sheet of ice that had begun to crack, intricate ventricles spreading soundlessly across a vast and barren frozen lake.

“Don’t tell me that you can’t when you can,” the Falcon said, sounding firm, almost angry. “For goodness’ sake, Bing was a lovable boy, there’s no disputing his appeal, but he was at the peak of his attractiveness, believe me. The rest of his life was going to be conducted on a downhill slide. He was cut from the same cloth as Charlie and Tom—he was destined to become just like them, eccentric, silly . . . a hopeless drunk . . . Collie, this must be said. The very things about Bing that so amused you in your youth would eventually become the same things that made him intolerable to you. I regret his passing. I do.” His voice softened a little as he folded his arms across his chest, hesitating for a moment before continuing. “And it pains me to say it, but men like your brother, Bingo, come a dime a dozen. . . . Well . . . now I see I’ve made you cry. Good Lord.” He threw up his arms in exasperation. “I’m trying to make you feel better.”

Was I crying? I guess I was. I touched my hand to my face. My cheeks were wet.

My grandfather always preferred me, made it plain to everyone. His choosing me left a stain that resisted scrubbing. By picking me, he put me on the wrong side of everything—money, power, privilege, love. The Falcon seemed to have no trouble forgiving me for what happened. To him, Bingo was not worth dying for.

I couldn’t sleep after my encounter with the Falcon. When the sun came up, I wandered down to the rose garden, took off my shoes, and sat beside the fishpond. The koi, orange, blue, red, and gray, some of them twenty, thirty, sixty years old, swam to the water’s surface to greet me, greedy mouths gaping, heads poking out, looking for breakfast. I tossed some pellets into the water—Bingo loved to feed the fish. He gave them crazy names: the Empress of Japan, Tangerine Dreams, Huckleberry Fin. The Falcon’s koi had outlived Bingo and Ma, and I was starting to think they accomplished it by swimming around in circles.

The aging koi at swim, the topiary elephants stopped in midtrot, for a moment I thought I saw him there, hiding in the grass, the breeze picking up. He smiled, wanting me to spot him and calling out for me to come catch him.

“How about having a little fun for a change? The Falcon’s right, you’re getting to be a drag with this grief stuff. Hell, you couldn’t stand me when I was alive, and now that I’m dead all you do is moon over me. You’re turning into a giant, hypocritical pain in the ass.”

“I want you back, all right? You win. You’re right. I can’t think of you without feeling as if someone has punched me in the stomach. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being a prick to you when you were alive. I’m sorry I didn’t go in after you. Just come back. Come back. Give me another chance.”

I looked for him everywhere, but he’d vanished. “Bingo, come out from where you’re hiding. I said I’m sorry. I didn’t want to die. Now I don’t want to live anymore.”

“It’s okay, I forgive you, Collie.”

There he was, standing under the old willow tree on the other side of the pond. I walked toward him. I could feel the tremor of his hands as he spoke. In the light cast from the early morning sun, I saw the events of the past preserved in all their original intensity, and calling out clear as a bird for me to hear was the beating of his open heart.

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want you to forgive me. I can’t stand it.”

For the first time, I felt despair for the future because I knew that for me there was no redemption in forgiveness and so there was no redemption at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
WAS AT A SMALL LATE SUMMER GATHERING IN A BOSTON TOWN
house that was owned by a friend of a friend. I didn’t feel much like another party, but I got talked into it. Everyone agreed it would do me good to get out. Life goes on, Collie, my friend prodded gently. He didn’t need to worry about being so sensitive. After the senator’s wife, I was on a roll that would have made Bingo blush.

I spotted this girl right away. She had one of those stark hairstyles, graphic ear-length black bob with short bangs, red lips, and white complexion. A glossy pelt in a roomful of dull coats, her conspicuous interest in me glowed like a distant light in the mist—a very red light.

The music was loud. She asked me to repeat my name.

“Can’t hear you. . . .” She shook her head and leaned in closer.

“His name’s Collie Flanagan,” someone shouted in her ear before I had a chance to respond. I reached out and put my hand on her upper arm to draw her even closer, but in the crush of people we got pushed apart before she had time to introduce herself.

I saw her again when she decided to escape to the second-floor balcony of the old Victorian-style brick house for a cigarette.

“Hi,” she said, surprised to see me.

“Hi.”

“So your grandfather is Peregrine Lowell . . . wow, you must be rolling in it.”

I was smiling in an agreeable sort of way but not responding. Pop had a horror of people who ask personal questions, which he’s transferred to me. Hell, I don’t even ask myself personal questions.

“What do you do?” she persisted.

“Mind my own business.”

“Fuck you, rich boy.”

I laughed and did up my jacket. It was a cool night.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “I’m not usually so rude.”

“You’re the one whose brother died a couple of months ago. I read all about it. Wasn’t he hit by a go-kart or something? Weren’t you driving?”

I nodded and closed my eyes. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Too bad. How old are you?” she asked between puffs.

“I’m nineteen, well, almost twenty.”

“You seem younger, and you seem somehow older, too,” she said, her voice lowering a few octaves, her descending voice inappropriately intimate. She was sounding like a refugee from an afternoon soap opera, but I wasn’t in the market for someone to help me deconstruct Hegel. I shot her an investigative glance.

“I’m twenty-six,” she said, adding in a flippant aside, “Hey, I could almost be your mother.”

The rain had barely subsided. There was water on the floor of the balcony. The air was thick and moist, wet as a sponge. She’d grown quiet, practically meditative, both of us silently sifting through what was trapped dankly in the vaporous air, trying to determine how much of what was passing between us was the leftover steaminess from the rain, or was it the humid expectation of whatever she detected emanating from me? I was nineteen, so my intentions were about as subtle as a hurricane.

I didn’t even bother to ask her name.

We turned the corner in the dusk of the parking garage of her building, and she grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into a corner, into the tight spot where one wall meets another wall, and she was kissing me, licking my lips. She kissed me behind the ear; she kissed the back of my neck. She was kissing my face. She bit my lower lip. She put her hand on my thigh. I put my hand in her hair. I pulled her into me and lifted up her skirt—was this what it felt like to be Bing?

Someone in the car across from us honked the horn.

“Hey, you two, get a room,” some jerk hollered as his friends hooted. I was vaguely conscious of where this was going, of it being somehow inappropriate, but I couldn’t seem to apply the brakes.

Bingo did pretty much the same thing and made all the papers. I gave him hell for it. Oh, but typical Fantastic Flanagan high jinks, at least he was in a nightclub, bright lights shining, his high spirits spraying the crowd like an uncorked champagne bottle, blurring what little judgment he possessed. 

I might as well have been at the mechanic’s having my carburetor inspected. What with the smell of grease and oil in the surrounding air, my back against concrete, the rough edges digging into my shoulders like fingernails, drawing blood and making shallow canals from my collarbone to my waist.

I didn’t feel a thing.

Whenever I think of that night, I remember it as a trail of footprints on watery glass. The wet soles of her bare feet leaving their damp imprint on the fire escape door of her apartment building, on the tabletop in the kitchen, tattooed on the inside of the shower enclosure.

It was raining. We were in front of a restaurant. I was with someone new, some girl who smelled like lilacs, someone whose name I didn’t know. I called her Lilac. She didn’t care what I called her. We were under the marquee, making out in the rain. I was finally able to free one hand long enough to get the attention of a taxi driver. We climbed into the squalid rear of the car, and in the ten minutes it took to get from the restaurant to her hotel, I shamelessly screwed her in the backseat of the cab. 

I could feel the shredded ends of the torn fabric rubbing against my knees. I smelled the mildewing carpet. I soaked into my bones the dampness of the air. I was conscious of the driver’s wide eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. We left a stain on the upholstery. I paid the cabbie a hundred bucks and told him to keep the change.

The next morning my whole body ached from what I’d done. That night I went out and did it again, only this time it was with a girl I called Lavender. Her real name was Edie Paley.

It was turning into the summer of a thousand fragrances—a perverse kind of aromatherapy. Even now, I can stand, eyes closed, among a throng of women at a summer garden party and pick out individual scents as easily as if I’m reciting the alphabet: L’Air du Temps, Chanel No. 5, Trésor, Youth Dew, Shalimar, Allure, Alliage, Le Dé, Quelques Fleurs.

Rubbing the back of my head, I found a worn spot. It was only mid-August and my skull was dented from too many recent encounters with floorboards. My fingernails were bitten to the quick— my hair was falling out, my inner organs, too, pieces of me were scattered from one end of the hotel room to the other—I couldn’t pick myself up fast enough, and anyway, I couldn’t figure out where anything went anymore.

Bingo, ever merry in his willingness to believe, was enamored of reconstruction, always trying to refurbish old junk he found lying around the property, refusing to throw out anything; everything had a higher purpose as far as he was concerned.

Pop had his own way of adapting and adjusting to life’s little setbacks, insisted there was magic in third-person accounts. He called it
tertium quid
—a third something. He started talking to us about it when we were in our early teens.

“Boys, sometimes this I-slash-me-business just gets you down.” His voice raised an octave as he recited in singsong this confessional litany: “‘I drank the Communion wine. I got drunk. I passed out and missed my own mother’s funeral. I dishonored my dear wife with other women. Woe is me.’ Where does it get you? Try substituting ‘he’ for ‘I’ and it sets a lovely distance in place. Not that you’re trying to avoid responsibility—just you’re aiming for a little breathing room.

“Put it another way: ‘Charlie Flanagan stole the money his brother William had been saving for a year to purchase an old car and used it to buy drinks for everyone at the local bar instead.’ Do you see the merit? You view your deeds in the cold light of day with no great loss of self-esteem. Your good opinion of yourself is very important. Well, in the end, what else have you got? If I say, ‘Charlie Flanagan gave his aunt Colleen a Christmas gift of white bark chocolate, which he then took back and hid in his coat jacket as he was leaving her house—’”

“Did you really, Pop?” Bingo interrupted.

“He did indeed. But maybe he had good reason, which he’s not prepared to go into for the sake of an old lady who’s dead and whose memory, however complicated, deserves to be considered in respectful silence. Do you see the magic of it, boys? As a species, we tend to go easier on the other guy—at least in public. Make yourself the other guy. People will hurt you, boys. The world compels suffering. Satan is a first-person man. Be kind to yourselves, and always remember God is in the third person.”

I reached for Pop’s theory as if it were an analgesic; it was worth a shot if it would ease the ache. In the process I added my personal touch, discovering the merit of metaphor as an effective tool for putting distance between me and my misdeeds. My third-person version of events went something like this:

He lay back in the long grass, waiting, eyes closed, almost sleeping, arms at his side, sun on his face, the summer breeze stirring his hair. At first he thought it was the warm breath of the wind, the caress of the long grass, the burning touch of the sun. By the time he knew otherwise, knew what it was, it had him by the throat, had him, shook him violently, and carried him off. Dragged him through grass and ground, took to the air with him, landed with a thud far away, and dashed him against a flat rock. Shredded his shirt, cracked him open from stem to stern, ripped out his entrails, sucked his marrow, drained his blood, flayed his flesh, and tore strips of stringy tissue from his living body.

He opened his eyes. “What fragrance are you?”

“Shut up.” Oh, that’s right. No fragrance at all—just the ruthless scent of Kitty Paley, or maybe it’s her daughter, Edie, or maybe it’s someone whose name doesn’t matter. He was beginning to suspect he wasn’t built for promiscuity.

“I want to revive the dead,” he thought aloud. “I want my brother back.” He hesitated. “Possibly my mother as well—though that one’s up for a little negotiation.”

“For Christ’s sake,” she said, “would you keep your mind on your work?”

His mouth was full of her. He was drowning in bodily fluids, sinking to dangerous murky depths, his pulse ringing in his ears like a plunging diving bell.

“That’s for what you did to your brother,” she whispered in his ear before leaving.