Clearly Now, the Rain (14 page)

Eighteen

I made my drive across the top of America toward the East Coast and Serala in mid-August, Kaya panting in the shotgun seat. I had technically “broken up” with Mona but knew she was going to hang on in anyway she could. Devoid of the energy required to cauterize our split, I just went. In the trashy motels where I stopped, the story on the news was the blackout on the East Coast.

By the time I reach Serala, it's all over, electricity surging through wires as well as the bruised and stormy skies. Her hair is long and we both have new tattoos: hers are moons and stars, on her feet and covering scars. Mine is for my father, a sacred heart wrought with other tangled symbolism. We stand in her kitchen a bit awkwardly, just trying to figure out if we'll undress or not, drinking the end of a bottle of whisky. It's too hot to stay idle—I'm dripping even at nine o'clock—and we decide to start driving to visit Samar in Massachusetts.

It's far too late to bother Samar's family. Though it has been years since I was “with” her, her caustic mother and stepfather can still drive the fear in me. So we go walking through the serpentine streets of her wealthy town, heading for the beach, past places where she and I used to park her car and make it rock with passion under five fingered lightning and the crash of summer thunder.

After days in the truck, Kaya is tugging me left and right, desperate to be free of her leash. I'm catching Samar up on my mother's current conundrum: she has taken custody of twins we've known for years, one of them severely disabled, because their own mother is locked up and strung out.

I mean, she loves her kids,
I say, referring to the jailed mom,
but she's a fucking junkie
.

The cicadas sing a few bars.

Sometimes you can be a real asshole,
Serala announces, and crosses her arms and takes a couple of strides ahead of us. Samar decides it would be a good moment to lag behind. I can't find the words to apologize that night, probably because I didn't understand on an intellectual level what I'd done—only on an intuitive one. But I don't have to because Serala lets it go—with a kiss, or a laugh, or an arm looped through mine, we are soon reconciled.

We sit on a beach where Samar and I, as infantile leftists, once turned an American flag upside down early in the a.m. on the Fourth of July. Now the three of us drink twelve beers and watch Kaya and Knox crash back and forth, chasing nothing in the brackish surf, until day pushes the sky up with a rosy palm.

The next night we witness Samar perform in a cozy dive bar. The place is packed with regular boozers and we have to move along a wall to get close to the stage. In front of me, taking her pose beneath peach stage lights, Samar closes her eyes and begins. Behind me, Serala is managing to look tough enough that all of the boozehounds can only softball their hungry glances at her. I stay close, virtually at Samar's feet, and clap and whistle to compensate for the inattention she mostly receives. But I keep looking back at Serala and there the music glistens and widens her eyes, even makes her forget her cigarette growing ash in her hand.

She cops to the power Samar has after we hug Samar goodbye outside the lounge in the absolute black of a tenement shadow at midnight. As we hit the freeway, Serala says,
I feel like I want to hear Samar sing every song that I love
and we promise to make a mix tape in that spirit. We drive back to Brooklyn a little bit heavier, a little bit closer, too. For the first time in over a year, we make slippery love in one hundred percent humidity and then, in the morning, I drive back to Carolina.

After my first graduate year exiled with Mona in a subdivision, I was finally moving into Wilmington proper: The ancient house on the edge of the vast ghetto loomed up, crooked with history. I was downtown—or right on the edge of the Historic District, depending on how you looked at it. The landlady called it a “transitional neighborhood,” a real estate euphemism for black. The park across the street was carpeted with shattered bottles, drug baggies, and litter. Groups of idle men milled on the corners all day. It wasn't too wise to walk alone at night, but in the light of day it was a community, full of good and kind people who knew one another well.

Wilmington was full of ghosts, a fact fairly well accepted by the locals. I told Serala all this while she rocked in a chair on the porch on her first visit south, her cigarette dribbling blue. It had been a hundred and four years since the upstanding white citizens massacred the professional-class blacks in the only coup d'etat in U.S. history. Libraries and parks in other parts of town bore the names of the killers, but from my porch, behind the screen of Spanish moss, bougainvillea, and electrical wires, you could see the intersections and plots of land where the killing took place. Daily, I'm sure I waved to people who lost grandparents in that bloody string of days in 1898.

Roaches skittered over your toes on the sidewalks at night and the shadows were deep and rich. A freight train's blue horn rose from the north and the Cape Fear River carried in gusts from the sea. Wilmington was terribly, wonderfully haunted, and I think Serala loved that, I think that's part of why she came to visit twice in my first months of that year.

At first she wrote that she felt safe there. She said,
Nothing for me is real or true till I say it to you.
She said it was enough: me, and bottles of wine, and sad music in that old Dixie city. But by her third letter, two-thirds through September and approaching the darkest part of the year, she was despairing again.
I'm really trying so hard this time, Eli. I know where this road goes,
she said,
I pray for a detour
. A presage of another winter, and her pain stole even more sleep. The moments she did manage to go under were again spoiled by nightmares she recounted in halting whispers on the phone while I tried to edit student essays and listen at the same time: people pulling out her perfect teeth, one by one, and she swallowed shards of enamel and mouthfuls of blood like almost drowning.

For me, however, there were suddenly nights of music, soft light, and debauchery at the riverside. There was a tiny bar, which used to be a holding cellar for recently arrived slaves, where I drank in the horrid history and gin with manic poets. There was an antithetical sofa lounge on a second story where velvet chairs and couches held me as I slipped deeper into tipsy literary debate. I ran hard miles with Kaya through the Historic District and our adjoining ghetto almost every morning, wearing a groove into the town that made it feel known, something like home, even.

Meanwhile, I suddenly found myself as an adjunct professor—though they called us “TAs”—in charge of a section of Freshman Comp and Creative Nonfiction. I felt very little of the authority that I was entrusted with, and the nearly panicked fight to craft lesson plans and critique student papers exhausted but also thrilled me.

But messages Serala sent told me that as I eased closer to belonging, to faith in my own path, she was close as she'd ever been to the edge.

Despite the tone, I was eager to convince myself that she was okay—a bit worse than normal, but okay—as if that were possible. Her letters stopped and her emails got short and her phone calls ended except for a few of that broken whisper.

Finally it was time to drive up and leave Kaya with her so I could fly home to a blue Christmas in my father's home.

The one night I spend with Serala that December, we take the dogs on a stroll to the little park near her Brooklyn apartment. The park is divided by some hedges and a cocky statue of Columbus placed there by “the Italian-American community with pride.” It is snowing and the ground is already blanketed; our breath blurs the world. We're letting the dogs goof on the ice, holding onto one another for warmth. We begin to hear a man's shouts, punishing his dog viciously. The first couple eruptions elicit chuckles from us—who could get so worked up over a dog's mischief? When it continues unabated, though, our amusement dies. The tone of the man is sharpening with the dropping temperature. Finally we leash Knox and Kaya and walk around the hedges.

The man is framed against a chain-link fence; his dog cowers in front of him. He's showing it a tennis ball, then ramming the ball into the animal's snout and screaming,
You think this is a goddamn game? You stupid fucking animal, this is no goddamn game!
Then he chops the dog hard across the spine with the heel of his hand and that little snap in my gut that I've only felt a few other moments in my life happens. I'm walking toward him—and he's not a small guy. Serala backs me up, though, and as he sees us coming he hooks a rope on his dog, jerks it viciously, and begins walking toward the exit. He huffs past me, just hauling the dog, which Kaya snuffles at sympathetically. But Serala puts herself between him and the street, squares her shoulders, and shouts at him

You ought not have a dog if you don't like dogs, you fuck.

He pauses and I move closer to her. But after dueling her eyes for a moment, he puts his head down and gives her a wide berth as he leaves. He vanishes into the New York cold, pulling on that poor pooch's neck and cursing like muffled gunshots.

Still reckless and fearless and righteous, still living fully and standing up, even with a death wish swelling again in her breast.

In those past few months, without Serala in my life, I would have either blown my stack and done something wildly self-destructive or I would have done what many people watch themselves do when grief slaps them silly from out of nowhere: swallow it, move on, simply turn down the wick at one's center because life shouldn't be so well-illuminated anymore. But with her at my father's memorial, her prepping me with ferocious love before I faced Wilmington and all those people who would see me as
that haunted guy
, her with her way of teaching me that pain should lift your chin, brighten your eyes, make you say
fuck it
, that pain makes you wiser and stronger and you should embrace that—because of her I was not just tentatively able to return to the path that had been broken by the bubble racing to dad's lung, but I was able to return to it with determination, force, and pride. And so I looked up to her way of being and felt more bonded to her than ever.

So that night in Massachusetts when I spit the word “junkie” thoughtlessly, I wanted to tell Serala that I didn't think of her as a junkie, that she was so beautiful, and strong, and good that I couldn't. But I failed to see that she wore that badge not with shame—and not with pride—but with resignation. She felt solidarity with this faceless, nameless mother I was maligning. I'd negated the mother's love for her kids by that thoughtless sentence. And I suspect I said “junkie” with the same vitriol one might say “nigger” or “raghead.” My blindness reflected my elitism, and Serala, as a rule, rejected both.

Back in Carolina, I was becoming real to myself at last. The experiences that I was engaging were transforming the way I understood my theretofore youth. The delinquent hijinks and arrests, the drugs and betrayals, my father's life and death, the arduous journeys through other countries, all of the privilege I'd enjoyed—it was suddenly being translated into tangibility for the amorphous “reader.” But also for myself. I felt wiser and stronger than I ever had, though also weary and still very deeply grieving my father, something I didn't share much except with her. I felt that because of the way Serala had helped me to weather death and see it through, the experience had improved me instead of ruined me; it had opened me instead of closed me, which is really the key, I still believe, to growth. What I failed to see then is that this was the very place where Serala and I split: as I rose with a new faith in myself fixed in place, ready to be weary forever, a little sad forever, but also strong forever, she came out the other side of loss just a little more tired each time. She'd long ago learned she could survive; it's just that she didn't want to.

Nineteen

My eyes were on the calendar the rest of that semester. The moment I tied up the last loose end, I put Kaya in the shotgun seat, plugged in a Lucinda Williams tape, and drove off into the tranquil May sun of a war-frenzied America. I spent a northwest summer deep in a cocoon of marijuana, manual labor in the mountains, and the Novocaine nights of movies with Mona, praying for August. Serala wrote infrequently but intensely to me, relaying things that were as cyclical for her as the Mona roller coaster and aimless summer months were for me.

Over the last months I'd heard infrequent mention of this “boy,” Jon, she was now kicking out of her life expressly because he had become more to her than a fling. There were dogs and music and curative laughter involved and she felt good with him. But in the heat of the summer he turned foolish and claimed he was in love. And so she stiff-armed him away.

The way that I found out was through one of her vague, sideways comments at the bottom of an email in the long summer of 2003:

He had called her and finally told her the truth about his anemia, the bored sockets of his eyes, the wincing pains, when the doctor told him the sarcoma would let him live just forty-eight more hours. He had called to say goodbye.

I know what she would say about the hurt. I can hear her saying it now:
It's mine, it's just for me
. Hoarding sorrow like a child hoards something sweet. But it wasn't sweet and the fallout demonstrated just how bitter, though the fallout surely had as much to do with not sleeping and slamming herself full of temporary numb as it did Jon's death.

Before leaving Seattle for the long drive east, I tested Serala's waters, wanting to know what I was driving into—wanting to know, maybe, if I should skip New York this time around.

Let's go to the Jersey Shore,
I said.
Let's rent a shitty room and write the shitty volume of poems like we always said we would. I'll bring the whisky and two pens.
The static on the line and the music behind her was all I heard at first. I anticipated the response.

I'm not going to have time for that,
she said and I heard the thirsty drag off the cigarette.
Work is too much right now.

Kaya bellied up to me, as if she understood the suggestion and would love to go to the shore. I rubbed her ears and waited to see if Serala would say more.

I better save all the patience I can for the next weeks, actually,
she said, a theatrical weariness—versus the real weariness that I could recognize—under her words.

After an ambiguous summer that left things even more muddled between us, I said goodbye to Mona in the forest fire-choked canyon of Missoula. She had landed a teaching fellowship in a women's studies program and so she had taken a deep breath and dove. She kissed me quick and hard, bit her lip and stepped to the curb. I watched her contrast there against the backdrop of a hunters' dive bar, dark skinned and so sad in that lily-white, sports-crazed town.

But she was on her road, and I was back to mine. We were technically still involved, but as far as I was concerned it was a technicality for the most part, part of a molasses-slow process of separation. I coughed through the hazy west, helicopters dangling totes of water the size of small cars into the crackling forests. The interstates were heavy with heat, Kaya panting more and more as we crossed into the damp east.

When I whip around a bustling Brooklyn corner and find Serala waiting for me at the entrance to her new apartment building, I can see the twenty-five-year-old business ace, forged. Not even a shred remained of the punk-rock artist aesthetic that had been her cocoon when I met her seven years earlier. Stilettos and leather briefcase, many ounces of silver jewelry sliding on wrists and chest as she paces—struts, really—with oblivion to everything around her. She waves to greet me—and to postpone our greeting, because she is yelling into her phone. I clamber out with odds and ends under my arms, a very emotional Kaya leashed to my wrist. I can hear Serala over the grinding of traffic and beats of calypso music floating by and the discussions fired in Puerto Rican Spanish.

No—no! Goddamn it, Donald, now you're just wasting my time. I asked you for all of those files on Friday—this is
Tuesday
, Donald. Do you think I have time for this shit?
She pauses for a drag of her smoke and lets Donald squirm on the other end of the line while she pulls off her shades and rolls her eyes
. I hope you can handle it. I hope you handle it
now.

She flips her phone closed and, with her perfect smile, endures Kaya's gregarious hello.

My version of New York had changed: Luke had arrived in the city to finally finish his college career at NYU and Serala had moved into a luxury apartment, high on a Brooklyn hill. At first I couldn't comprehend the square footage, the balcony right out at the feet of the city, helicopters buzzing around it in the humid shimmer, like yellow jackets on a flower. I chose to see it as a sign that she was doing better.

The doorman nods at me as Serala and I struggle through the door with bags and the hyper dog.

Must be your brother that's already up there,
he says and grins.

I can't say exactly when Luke and Serala started to become close. But by this time they are—hanging out far more than I am with either one of them. While some of it is small-hour cocaine mania, they also idle Sunday afternoons, chatting and watching films. He's had her presence at his back as he's thrashed through the grief for our father and then the disorienting move to New York. Not to mention that Luke has contended almost exclusively with immature females in his short life. Serala is a grand departure and just maybe the older sister he didn't get.

The door to her apartment is cracked; laughter and smoke somersault into the hallway. I unleash Kaya, who leaps with her whimpering cries of joy into the space. I hear Luke exclaim her name and I step in to see him pinned on the sofa beneath Kaya's hefty paws, half-heartedly dodging licks, holding his spliff high, smiling and laughing, Knox nosing in jealously.

How's the Rotten Apple, kids?
I ask and Luke and his girlfriend Adaline go on about school, about the apartment they've found on the edge of Spanish Harlem. When I've done the requisite petting of Knox, Serala comes to me with a glass of wine and a kiss. The city's silhouette blazes through the window.

Let's paint the town, fuckers,
she says at the end of a Pixies disc.

In pairs we negotiate the throngs, close together, walking fast on New York streets. We settle into a booth at a place called Silver's. It's full of tattoos, Elvis Costello glasses, wide-gauge piercings, absurdly loud indie rock, and screamed conversations. We all lean in—away from the hipsters, Luke and I on one side of the table, Serala and Adaline pressed close on a bench seat across—yelling at each other over beer and whisky. Luke gets up for a piss and I watch Serala speaking in Adaline's ear. Adaline's slender arm cocks her cigarette away as she brushes her auburn hair back and leans in close. Her green eyes spin, processing whatever my best friend is sharing with her—it looks important from here. As another tune breaks and whines out of the jukebox and the room swims through banks of clove smoke, Serala laughs with her, lights her Camel, puts a hand on her shoulder, and that is it. Adaline's in with me.

I don't recall much of those few days, actually, between the heat and the napping and the booze, but I know that Serala and I slept together tenderly then, arms twined or my head pressed to her breast, in the middle of that stifling month. She kept the window open and long, white drapes billowed over us.

An email that chased me back down the coast was sweet and buoying with the promise of a better year.

Back down in Wilmington I faced a heavier teaching load and the daunting task of assembling a book-length thesis by April. But I found myself pleased to be back in the city. There was a nook of a room hung on the backside of our ancient house. I moved my desk out of my bedroom and against a peeling wall, beneath abundant light, amid husks of roaches and yellow jackets. Through the dirty panes I could see the center of our block's backyards, Carolina's nature rioting with ivy, Spanish moss, bougainvillea, feral cats and families of squirrels. Kaya could spend hours on the back porch, watching the creatures dart with a Zen intensity. My writing came easier with the change of venue and the nascent manuscript thickened. My roommate, Smith, brewed cherry and muscadine wine and we grew close over long idle nights, rocking on the front porch and sensing the lightless ghetto below, sharing our favorite albums.

But by the time that October ended, Serala was nasty, sometimes mean. It was that time of year again: wet and dark but also the beginning of a lineup of hard anniversaries, beginning with her birthday, which she could scarcely tolerate. She fought with me tooth and nail over stupid things late nights on the phone.

I'm standing in the kitchen, spinning a glass of muscadine on our sticky counter, looking out at the big oaks, alive with busy families of feral cats. Kaya's got her paws on the sill, interested but thwarted by the barrier of glass. The cordless phone against my head is getting uncomfortable, just as the conversation has.

So . . . the rejection letters keep rolling in, but I keep sending essays out. Got a professor who says to keep them all and wallpaper your bathroom someday—God knows I'll have enough.

Serala makes a sound of disgust, blows a drag of smoke out hurriedly.

God, that's fucking asinine. Throw them away, Eli. Why would you hold onto rejection?

Her tone is out of all proportion to the topic. I try not to match it. I swallow some wine, turn away from the window.

Well, I mean I guess his point is that one day they will be laughable. Or maybe he thinks it's valuable to remember how hard you've had to try.

Yeah, well, he's an idiot. Who needs a reminder of how hard they have to try? Who isn't aware of it every fucking day?

I say I suppose that's true, kill the muscadine, beg off the phone—till the next round.

But I knew that she had to tighten up her shell, wax her shield, draw down her masks; I knew the process. In other conversations when she began to break and weep, her turmoil was clearer. But all this fury, I knew, was better—if things became truly as bad as they could be, I wouldn't hear a whisper.

The first rumors of Jack may have come in an email I've lost, or it may be that Serala found the voice to tell me in person. I know that by the time she sailed down the coast in December for a visit, she was well down the road with Jack. She'd known him since she was a teenager but until then nothing had ever blossomed between them besides drug-addled hijinks and platonic affection. I remember it as funny—chuckling at her as she tried to explain it.

I don't know. I've known him for so long and I don't think there was ever anything there
. She sits in a rocker on my porch, smoking.
I guess just because he was far away, because he had that brat, I never looked at it as possible.
Across the street in the park, the blanket of shattered bottles divvies up the moonlight, and she fixes it with a stare and I know not to chuckle more. This is serious—a real conundrum.

And I knew she was serious when she stopped calling his son
brat
. She never stopped referring to children in general that way, but Raymond became his
kid,
or his
son,
or
Raymond
.

That December weekend we hauled Knox and Kaya down to the empty, gusty beaches where Knox sprinted for miles after birds. She ran until she was as small as the gulls in our sight, then ripped all the way back like someone had just then plugged her into her racing dog genes. Kaya tried to keep up but she was oafish and lumbering in comparison, and so she took to trying to chase her down, nip her heels, make Knox stop outshining her.