Calling Home (11 page)

I was queasy, and the tang of cookies in my mouth was sour and almost toxic as I understood how quickly my life had changed from a normal life, filled with simple fears, to a blasted waste. “What?” I croaked.

“I'm getting married.”

17

I stumbled on a train track in the dark, and scratched my hand on a tumbleweed that grew out of the sand like a huge, shaggy head. Sand filled my shoes, so I sat on a short wall and took them off. I took off my socks, too, and carried them in my hand toward the surf.

The spray glowed in the dark as the waves crashed and grumbled at each other, and flattened quietly. I sat in the sand where it was only a little damp from the spray and eased the bottle out of my jacket pocket. It was a full liter, and carrying it down the sidewalks lined with porch lights had been like carrying a small cannon in my clothing, but now I was where no one could see me, sitting, I realized with pleasure, at the very edge of a continent, with nothing between me and, say, Japan. The wind shivered my clothing from time to time, and a whisper of spray would touch my eyes and make them weep. I fit the top of the bottle in the cup of my hand and turned the cap, loving the crisp rip of the tax seal as the cap unscrewed.

I drank hard, until my eyes crossed and my throat wriggled like a hooked fish. The rum smacked of faraway islands, and sun so hot people couldn't stand to walk in it, but had to sit in the shade of trees watching an ocean like this one break and flatten with the kind of regular, gentle crunch that is better than silence. It also had that tough-guy throttle-hold of straight liquor, like it said to your body, “I taste good, but I also taste terrible, too, because that's exactly what life is all about.” Out on the water, across a stretch so dark it was like a canyon of outer space, a light blinked on and off with the movement of the waves. A boat, I reasoned, perhaps a fishing boat, although what did I know about anything like that.

Nothing. I didn't know anything. I drank again, hard, and looked at the bottle when I released it from my lips. It was a line of light, a reflection of the yellow lights of the house behind me across the beach, and the streetlight near the railroad tracks, but aside from that, it was invisible, like a hand gripping a thing that wasn't there, lifting it and drinking from it, liquor out of nothing.

When a wave broke, and the flat shelf of water petered out and withdrew itself, so much feebler than it had arrived, it left little holes, bubble holes, it looked like, that winked and shivered. They grew still within seconds, and then another wave broke, and there they would be again, in different places. I watched the surface of the sand, wondering why there were no shells, and no stones, either, just sand.

After a while, I did not think of Mead, or of my father and his empty, needful life, hungry to have things in it: a son, a wife, maybe new children, and certainly some furniture. He needed a lot of things, my father, but he knew he needed them. I had the feeling that whatever happened, my father would think of me as something he used to accept as a thing to be ignored, but which now had become important through some change not in me, but in him. Maybe, I thought to myself, drinking, my father wanted too much. Maybe a person can't stop his life and reorganize it like someone deciding to remodel a guest house.

A pair of headlights wobbled and jerked over the darkness, making two spears of light across the footprints and bits of charred wood. Imagine, I thought: a car driving along over the sand. I shook my head and sighed. The world was composed of wonders. I managed to get the bottle into my jacket as the headlights stopped beside me and the sound of an engine buried the sound of the surf. The headlights backed away, and a jeep turned sideways so a face could look at me.

“Beach closes at ten,” said a voice.

“What time is it now?” I said, climbing to my feet, ready to correct any misunderstanding that might exist between me and the world, or between me and the clocks anyone might have available.

“Eleven-thirty,” said the voice, and I could think of nothing to say.

I thought, for a moment, of running into the surf, plunging into the face of a breaking wave, and swimming. I would swim hard, toward the place in the water where the light had appeared, but I would not reach it, or, if I did, I would swim on by the fishing boat, with its distant murmur of Spanish and scent of cigarettes, and swim until I could not move my arms, and then I would sink.

“I'm just leaving,” I said, and stepped closer to the jeep. The driver was a young man with white teeth. He wore a T-shirt, and I was surprised for a moment that the police dressed so casually. “I don't live around here,” I said. “I'm visiting my father.”

A radio spat static and numbers from somewhere under the dash, and I understood that conversation was no longer required, or even smart. “So I'll be heading back,” I said.

The jeep's engine spoke and sand arced into the air where the jeep had been one moment before: the jeep fishtailed across the sand and then I could see only the tiny spark of a taillight. “Gone to get help,” I said to myself.

And then I understood that he had not gone to get help. The conversation had ended. The man talked with his jeep. The arc of sand from his rear wheels had said something, something that I did not like.

I drank some more rum, but the fun was gone. I was a rum drinker on the run, now, and I had no sense of belonging where I was. The ground grew hard as I left the hiss of the surf, and I was careful not to stumble on the train tracks.

18

The next afternoon, my father let me pick out a tie. An ugly one with poodles on it draped across my hand. I asked, “How about this one?”

“Oh, Christ. Someone at work gave me that as a joke. Pick out a normal tie. How about this one?”

I took an Ivy League tie, a wool tie of the sort a pipe-smoker might wear if he were an extreme conservative. My father tied it for me, muttering about how difficult it was to knot a tie on someone else. “What difference does it make?” I said. “I won't wear one.”

He snapped the knot tight like he wished I would strangle on it, but as he did so, I studied his face up close, the lines of determination around his eyes, the pores in his nose that seemed put there to show how his skin worked, that he breathed through these little holes the way an orange breathed through its skin.

I had worn a tie only once or twice before in my life, and I craned my neck around trying to be comfortable. “She wants us to live together as a family,” my father was saying, “because she knows how important you are to me. She wants me to be happy.”

“Does she want me to be happy?” I said, sitting on his bed.

“I suppose so,” he said, combing his hair. “She doesn't know you. Except what I've told her.”

“Which means she'll be packing a gun.”

“Let's go.”

“Of course, there's no way it will work. My presence would poison your marriage. You might as well start out a marriage with a kangaroo in the house. A kangaroo would be a much better bet than I would.”

He ignored me. He drove quickly through streets that were bleached, like the sun was too much for them and all the color was long ago blasted away. The houses were all stucco, cheap stucco that had lost its color, too, a jumble of houses, parking meters grimy with salt air, and the long, thin stalks of palm trees. People dressed like poolside winos: bare feet, tight swimsuits, faded sweatshirts. Only their dark glasses looked expensive, and their cars, if I saw a person getting out of one.

My father was driving faster, now, leaning on his horn from time to time, chewing gum, the jaw muscle bunching in rhythm. He swung the car crazily to avoid an old lady in a straw hat that hung shadows of straw fringe over her face so that she looked like an elderly monster. My father drove like we were terribly late, almost so late we might as well not even bother going. The car lurched around a Cadillac convertible making a left turn, and my father floored the accelerator, forcing his car to make a raspy roar as it left behind a restaurant with a painting of a swordfish, and a bay forested with naked masts.

G forces pressed me back into my seat as my father careened up a hill, and I lurched into my seat belt as we whistled to a stop before a green duplex. “Here we are,” my father said.

I stepped out of the car like the survivor of a crash. The front yard was covered with a layer of snow-white gravel, and a spiky cactus grew out of the only exposed patch of dirt. The air, now that we were away from the ocean, had a flat, old-beer smell to it that made me not want to breathe.

My father stepped up to the front door, looking gawky and too old to be anyone's boyfriend. I did not want to be visible; I willed myself into the shape and size of a lizard and crept along the sidewalk to the gutter, where a fingerwide stream of water pulsed. It didn't work. My body remained human. My muscles bunched with tension as my father glanced around to see me standing there, wearing the semblance of his own face. He looked away again. I took my hands out of my pockets and craned my neck, appalled that humanity could have devised an article of clothing as uncomfortable and useless as the necktie.

She looked so much like my father I was disturbed. It was like he had searched the entire world and found someone who looked exactly like he would look if he changed his sex. She did not look like his sister so much as she looked like his twin. And yet she was pretty, in a way, a softer version of his gaunt quickness. She was slower-moving, and had a smile that made me look down at the brown rug. I murmured that I was happy to meet her, too. She said that I should call her Linda.

“Let's have a drink before we go out, shall we?”

“Reservations at seven,” said my father.

“Oh, why then we have a few minutes. What would you like, Peter?”

I wanted a tall bourbon, but modesty stiffened my tongue and made my countenance that of a very badly made wax dummy.

“A Coke?” she suggested.

“That would be fine,” I said.

My father asked for a Bloody Mary, and joined Linda in the kitchen for some sotto voce love chatter, and when they both emerged I understood that she had said that I was so charming, and so handsome. I saw that my father was proud of me, and proud of Linda, and saw his future ahead of him, ahead of all of us, a fertile, happy country.

Although I wanted to tell him about Mead the way a drowning man wants to kick his way out of the trunk at the bottom of a river.

19

My father was witty throughout dinner, sipping a dark pinot noir that I was allowed to taste, too, a wine so smooth and full that it was like sitting in a magnificent church full of plush, wine-colored carpets, with little points of light reflecting the candles. Linda listened to him. I watched her listening, and realized as she sat chewing and smiling at my father's jokes that my mother was a terrible listener. She wouldn't even pretend to listen; as soon as she got even a little bit bored, she would give gigantic stage yawns and begin to give little hints like “For Christ's sake, shut up.”

My father was happy. Linda was happy. “We'd make a nice family, don't you think?” my father said, undoing his tie when we had returned home.

It was a trap, a friendly trap, but I stood away from it. I formulated several stupid replies, but I could not make any of them.

“Of course, you don't have to decide anything now. It's not fair for me to back you against the ropes.” He moved the brush on the dresser. “Did you like her?”

He said it like a man who was sure of himself, knowing perfectly well that anyone would like this woman, and that the question had only one, very obvious answer. But he was vulnerable, too, and wanted to make some sort of point by asking the question. Like maybe to demonstrate to me how deficient my mother was compared with Linda. I did not want to say anything that might be understood to be a criticism of my mother, although why I wanted to protect her I have no idea.

“Of course I like her,” I said, but my answer came so late that bad feeling had slipped into the room. My father unbuttoned his shirt with quick movements. He examined his face in the mirror like it was a recent purchase.

“Anyone would like her,” I added, implying that she was too likeable.

“She's a painter, you know.” My father lifted his jaw at me as he said this, and his eyes were bright. He looked like he wanted me to take a punch at him. I had about as much fight in me as an old potato, one with bone-colored sprouts fanging out of it.

“What does she paint?” I said in a stupid voice.

“Scenes.” He was on his toes, practically dancing like a boxer, and I saw that my father was really in pretty good condition for a bony, wrinkled guy. He didn't look strong, but he looked like he had a lot of stamina, and I wouldn't want to fight my father with fists or with anything else.

“What kind of scenes?” I asked in the same dull voice.

“Trees and meadows. Flowers. And seascapes.”

“Seascapes.”

“That's right,” my father said, stepping forward. “She paints pictures of things that she finds beautiful.” He said the word “beautiful” like it was a word from a foreign language. “Oils, and acrylics, too. She's taken classes.”

I nodded, wanting to agree, but how could I agree? What did I know about anything? I didn't know. My father snapped the shoes off his feet and threw them into the closet where they hit the back wall with a bang. I sensed that he would have loved to throw the shoes at my head. Maybe my father was hoping I would heave a jar of mustard at him so he could go for my throat.

“I can see that she's a quality person.” I didn't like the phrase “quality person”; it reminded me of the “quality meats” signs you see in grocery stores, but I was not very brilliant sitting there on my father's bed. “She's very nice.”

“Look,” my father said, stepping into the closet. “She gave me this painting for my birthday. I got it framed as a surprise.”