Elegies for the Brokenhearted (9 page)

How it would happen that my mother and this stranger would come together I didn't know. The odds were against it. This man was much older than my mother, and serious, not at all the type she usually went for. On top of which he was black, which seemed to complicate things, at least for my mother. Once, when I was young and we were driving into a black neighborhood for takeout, I had asked my mother why black people all lived together in one part of town, and whites in another, and she had tried to explain the difficulty between the races. According to my mother it wasn't that she, and the rest of our family and friends, had a problem with “the blacks,” as she called them, it was just that we didn't know them, we had no experience with them. Part of the problem, she said, was that they had their own way of talking, and dressing, and they watched different shows on television and listened to different music and danced and even walked differently. And so sometimes it was hard. For example, one of the recurring conundrums of her existence was that she happened to love the fried chicken at this particular walk-up takeout window more than any other food in the world. It killed her sometimes how much she loved it. They must have done something magical to that chicken, it was spicy and crispy and the meat fell right off the bone and the bones themselves, you could suck them. She wanted to eat this chicken every day, she said, but there was always a crowd of blacks standing around in front—Nothing against them! she said—it was just that when she walked up to order she had to stand around waiting and it was hard sometimes, to talk with black people, partly because she didn't understand what they were saying and partly because when she did understand them, she didn't know what they were talking about. Bid whist, for instance, she had no idea what bid whist was. One of the men in particular who was always there had a slow smile that made you feel like you were being made fun of but didn't realize it, like a joke had been made against you which you failed to comprehend. “And it's not just me!” she said. “A lot of my girlfriends say the same thing. So you see,” she said, “it can be hard.”

Yes, it was hard to imagine. I particularly couldn't imagine how this serious man would tolerate such a frivolous woman as my mother, except to say that underneath his fine clothes and good manners must beat the heart of a fool. My mother kept leaning forward into the front seat and asking inane questions—what year the car was made, who was singing on the radio, what the boy liked to study at his college, whether or not the Red Sox were going to do it this year, finally—and the more she talked the less likely it seemed she and this quiet, polite man would ever take an interest in one another. Nevertheless I had seen it, it was there. I knew it would happen.

At first I blamed you, Elwood Fucking LePoer, for leaving us there on the side of the road and delivering my mother straight into her fourth marriage before she had even finished her third. But in the following weeks and months—after we got our things and moved yet again, as my mother and Walter Adams began at first a friendship and soon enough a romance—I came to value Walter's presence: reasonable, sobering, like that of a police car parked on the side of a road on which people tended to drive too fast. To make his living he worked as a mechanic, but in his spare time he read and listened to music, played chess, whittled sparrows out of fallen branches, wrote letters to friends in Germany, where he'd been stationed during his ten years in the army. Often he gave me books to read (
The Plague
,
The Idiot
,
The Trial
) and then, after I'd read them, asked me about the characters over a game of chess. I never knew what to say—the world of those novels was so distant and intricate, so thoughtful, so far from anything I knew—but in the process of that slow, quiet game, he'd manage to draw out of me the thoughts he suspected were buried in my mind. Overall I was a poor chess player—I never thought of advancing against my opponent—but I had a talent for evasion which Walter said would take me far. We became a club, of sorts, two people who went out to the front porch when my mother's moods were intolerable.

I suppose it must be confessed here that for a number of months prior to Walter's arrival I had stopped speaking to anyone but Malinda and the occasional complete stranger. It had started as a game, something to drive my mother crazy. But the longer I played it the harder it was to stop, until eventually the part of me that spoke to other people was gone, and I was knocked out cold, a chloroformed cotton ball dropped into the jar in which I lived. Once I'd been forced to meet with my high school's counselor, who informed me that if I didn't snap out of it I'd end up working in one of the city's factories, folding shirts or assembling boxes alongside the dregs of society, murderers and mental defectives, ex-priests, and I had more or less resigned myself to this. Many a life had passed this way and I didn't see what difference it would make if I did the same. But with Walter around I started to imagine a different kind of life for myself, a possible future, away from that place and those people, maybe even college. With Walter I found that I had things to say. Whenever I stopped to think about how chance our meeting was, how I would have turned out if I'd never met Walter, I thought of you, Elwood LePoer, I saw your battered red Camaro speeding off, and I felt for you a begrudging fondness.

 

I
t happened that in the months before you died I saw quite a lot of you. I had graduated high school and taken a summer job checking groceries at the Super G, where you worked part-time in the meat department as an assistant butcher, arranging cuts of meat on cotton pads, in Styrofoam trays, then running them through a machine that sealed them in cellophane. After my shift ended at the grocery store, but before I had to show up for my second job, I often sat in the grocery store's break room drinking coffee from its vending machine, which was awful but which I couldn't stop drinking, something about the Styrofoam cup dropping down and the two streams of liquid—one oily and black, the other steaming hot water—striking me as clever. This was the time of day when I sat thinking over the question of what I would do with my life. My mother had already left Walter Adams and moved in with someone else, her life fully absurd now, her last chance blown. She was irredeemable. I was saving money and trying to decide whether to use it for college or to go off in search of Malinda, who had left home the day after she graduated high school and hadn't called or written in a year—we had no idea where she was. Most of the time I told myself it didn't matter. Malinda had turned wholly cruel by then. If she spoke to me it was only to tell me to fuck off. She had barely graduated high school. In the months before she left she had been going around with an older guy who took her to bars every night, and her movements and speech had taken on a languid, melting quality. She had stopped eating, stopped showering. One day she woke up with a tattooed snake wrapped around the entire length of her left arm and told me she had no recollection of getting it. By then she didn't care about anything, anything, anything at all, and to find someone like that—to defer one's own life, to uproot oneself and go off in search of a person like that—wasn't something lightly undertaken.

Sometimes you came into the break room for a soda, and a few words would pass between us. Rumor had it that, even though a war was brewing, you had gone and signed up for the military, that you were just wasting time until you left for basic training. All that year the army had been running advertisements—“Be All You Can Be”—and I imagined they must have appealed to you in the same way that other commercial slogans had. People talked about your enlistment behind your back, but I never heard anyone ask you about it personally. “Jesus,” people said whenever you left the room, “that dumb bastard.”

The last time I saw you you were especially animated. You had a secret, something you couldn't wait to tell someone, and you burst through the door of the break room hoping for an audience. When you saw only me sitting there you looked disappointed, but you went ahead and took what you could get.

You wanna see something gross?
you said. And I said, Okay. You waved me toward you—
It's back here
—and you walked out of the break room and through frozen foods, behind the meat case and through the swinging doors into the cold of the meat room, which smelled of flesh and fat, the bitter stench of old blood. It was a wide-open room with white walls and a concrete floor, a steel table at its center, a hulking steel machine off to the side, the grinder, I guessed, and a wide steel sink at the back, at which stood a skinny man in a white coat and a white hat in the shape of an ocean liner. He was cleaning off a stack of metal trays.
That's José,
you said. And José, rat-faced, looked up and nodded. The radio was going, the ecstatic wailing of Robert Plant. You walked past José and disappeared through a doorway covered with vertical plastic slats and when I followed you through them it was into a dark freezer, biting cold, with three sides of beef hanging from the ceiling, red muscle wrapped in yellowish fat, still alive somehow, it seemed, something glowing about them, and I thought about a book I had read as a child in which the world was controlled by three amorphous beings who sat alone in a dark room, receiving and enduring millions upon millions of tiny communiqués, measuring them, keeping track by the second of the amount of life and death in the world, its beauty weighed against its suffering. In the world of that book the fate of the universe depended upon good outweighing evil—the world would end, it was said, the very instant that evil tipped the scales—and it was a vicious battle, the world being saved sometimes by a single act of kindness, a smile bestowed upon a stranger.

You walked through the room and out its back door, which opened in a burst of light onto a concrete platform, up to which a truck had been pulled, a small ladder running up its back side.
Delivery,
you said, and jerked your thumb at the truck.
Go ahead and take a look.
I climbed the steps and looked over the top of the truck, which was open, and down to its insides, in which lay a skinned horse, its muscles painfully red, intricately woven, its eye still intact, lidless, staring. “Jesus,” I said, and climbed down, my face screwed up in disgust.

Hamburger,
you said.
Cheap meat.

“No way.”

Way
. You fished a cigarette from the pack in your coat pocket, lit it, dragged with the scowling intensity of all smokers.

I said, “I heard you joined the army.”

Yeah,
you said.
I leave in a couple weeks.

“Oh,” I said. As usual I wanted to talk, to say something expansive, but couldn't find the words. What I said was, “Have fun.”

Where you living now?
you asked, a discreet way of acknowledging that we had moved yet again, the fifth time since I met you. My mother had moved in with a golf pro ten years her junior, and we were all living in a carriage house at the back corner of the grounds of a country club.

I said, “I don't know. Somewhere around.” Because the truth was I sometimes forgot where I was going and started walking toward Walter Adams's house, sometimes I still went there to sit on the porch with him and play chess, his chess set so oversized—the kings and queens standing six inches high—that my mistakes could be seen from a block away.

What's up this weekend?
you said.

“Working. Here and Friendly's.”

Yeah,
you said.
I seen you there.

I had seen you, too. On weekends you and Bill and Bill's new girlfriend—a squat, short-haired girl named Jeanine—came in for burgers and ice cream. The sight of the three of you together had struck me as wrong somehow, and clearly it struck you the same way. As Bill and Jeanine sat with their arms around one another, feeding each other spoonfuls of ice cream, you sat looking away, a pained expression on your face. In fact your expression was so wounded it had caused me to wonder if you'd joined the military out of spite, like a rejected lover.

You blew smoke out your nose, as if some sign of disapproval.
I gotta fix Bill's car tomorrow,
you said.
Then me and him are going up the beach.

“Oh,” I said, the memory of what we had done to you, and you had done to us, flashing through me. “I heard there's a party up there somewhere.” The kind of lie I was prone to telling in those days, anything to keep up a conversation.

Yeah,
you said.
Well, see ya.
You took a last drag of your cigarette, tossed it down into the parking lot. Then you belched long and loud, and without another word walked back inside, through the freezer and cutting room, out the swinging doors with their circular plastic windows, whistling all the while a tune that was familiar but hard to place, the notes sent off slow and halfhearted, just shivering in the air, and it took me a moment to recall the lyrics—
I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, that is what I'd really like to be
—this song trailing you all the way out of the store, Jesus, Elwood, what a farewell, what an exit. It was the last time I ever saw you. Because the next morning, when you went to fix Bill's gas tank, which had a leak and which was, he assured you, bone dry (“Bone fucking dry,” he kept saying afterward, crying at the funeral, in bars and stores and the bank and post office and wherever else he ran into people, “I swear to God it was bone fucking dry”), when you got on your back and squirmed underneath the car and touched your soldering iron to the tank it exploded, it killed you.

“Jesus,” people said when they heard the news, “that dumb bastard.”

At the wake, on a table draped in white cloth, stood a gold-framed picture of you, from your last year of school. In the picture you were staring off, openmouthed, your dark eyebrows pushed together in an expression of strained effort, as if you were trying to recall someone's name, or multiply in your head. Those pictures had, I remembered, been taken in the gymnasium, and we had stood in long lines waiting for our turns in front of the camera. When we finally got to the front of the line, and were seated on a wooden stool in front of a marbled blue backdrop, our friends had stood next to us saying things to make us laugh, and I imagine as your picture was taken someone had told a joke you didn't get, and the photographer, hating his job, having grown weary of waiting, had snapped the photo in the second before the joke's intentions announced themselves to you, the second before you smiled.