High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (20 page)

We flew out to New York and took a cab to Richmond Hill. But I remember so little from the trip, and almost nothing from the experience of returning to the old neighborhood. I usually see and file away all I can, so I must have closed my eyes in the taxi. I do remember this: my father opening the door, and then something I never expected. The door opening wide, slamming open, really, and hitting the wall behind: and there he was, standing like a game-show host, in suit jacket and tie, with his arms out and open, saying loudly, “So, this is my daughter!”

Mom was behind him in a robe and one of her macramé hats, I think her hair was short and wispy, but finally growing some. Her face was pale because she mostly stayed inside. She was holding her robe together like I imagined a geisha girl would. She looked so proud of me, and of Sarah. In a low voice she kept saying, “Come in, come in, come in…”

Come to think of it, the house was already looking a little rough. Not dirty, necessarily, or terribly unkempt. But little things left undone were accumulating. Dust on every surface. A musty odor. Things were not put away. It appeared as if they’d been gone for months and had just returned for our visit, with no time to freshen up. Except for Dad. In his suit.

“You look so fancy,” I said. We were standing now in the kitchen.

“Come on,” he said, now arranging us, Sarah and me, like figurines on a wedding cake. Josie, like so, and Sarah, like so. “Okay, let me get a look at you,” he said.

They stood there, Mom and he, looking at us, almost like they were willing us not to move, Just stay like that, because you look beautiful! I was really taken aback. But why should I be? These were my parents, and I was their son, and now I’d given them a daughter. I’d always figured Mom wanted a daughter; what mother doesn’t want a daughter? She stood there looking almost shyly at Sarah, afraid to approach too close, like Sarah would skitter off into some other room. At the time I couldn’t know or even consider the truth because I was too happy to wonder about its reasons, but now I see she was probably just afraid of what I might have said, of what horrible things I’d told Sarah about them. Not that I ever would, or did, or that Mom would seriously think I would do anything to hurt them, or that there were any horrible things to say to begin with. And yet this is something we do all the time with our boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives, and our parents did it with theirs. We exaggerate and understate the family secrets, even lie, all in order to get more love. But I’d always been up-front and honest with Sarah, mostly.

“Look at you both!” His suit was too big in the shoulders, or he was getting thinner. Then again, he was already getting older, which is actually a silly thing to say because of course it’s always true.

“Can we move now?” I asked, laughing.

Mom answered for all of us and ventured forward, her hands out and aimed for Sarah’s face. “So beautiful,” in her new low voice. “Look at her, with a mess like you,” she said to me.

I laughed.

And she said to Sarah, “My boy knows I’m kidding, right?”

Sarah hadn’t said a word yet, just kept smiling, our bags still hanging from our hands.

Dad said, “How about champagne?” He turned to the fridge, took out a bottle from the freezer, and started wrestling with the cork. “Leave your son alone, Ida. You’re suffocating him.” He wrapped the top of the bottle with a kitchen towel to get a better grip.

Mom pulled away from me, faking she was embarrassed. “I can’t help it,” she said.

Dad was pulling at the top of the bottle.

We set our bags down on the kitchen floor, and I said, “Get over here.” I hugged Mom and watched Sarah walk over to Dad. She took the bottle from him, he let her, and she locked it between her knees, and turned the towel in her grip over the cork like she was unscrewing it. Dad watched, totally fascinated.

I watched, and Mom watched.

“What does she do for a living, again?” Dad was clearly talking to me, but still watching Sarah work the cork, the towel now tossed aside.

I said, “You’re allowed to ask her yourself.”

“Ahh!” Sarah said, aiming the cork away and
pop!
It hit the ceiling, foam easing out of the bottle.

Dad shouted, “I’ll get glasses!”

Sarah offered me the bottle, and I took a swig, I was laughing, and handed it back to Sarah. She took a swig, she was laughing, and then she handed it to Mom, who refused, but Sarah insisted, pushing the bottle—Take it, just take it—while she wiped at her own mouth. Mom took it, and took a big swig. Dad shouted, “Aye! Wait for me!” He handed out glasses, took a swig of his own, and started pouring.

It was almost surreal. The new Laudermilk family.

I can see it now like a photograph, Mom, her head just above water, in a way. We had no idea she’d get so sick again. Dad in his Sunday suit. The two of them pleased in every way, almost overly so, trying so hard to get it right, because their son left once before, and this was the woman who brought him back and made them a family again.

Sarah said, “I’m a translator.”

We all stopped, froze for a second, and then broke into such lovely and comfortable laughter because how strange was it that this was the first thing she’d said, that this was the first time they’d heard Sarah’s voice, that we’d been in their home for five or ten minutes, and that all of the emotion welling up and spilling over was directly because of
her,
because she had softened me toward them and they knew it, and maybe “softened” is the wrong word, she made me better understand them and myself is what I mean to say, and the first thing she says sounds so unlike something one says in a room so emotional. And then said the second thing she’d ever said to them—a loving creative lie, and I loved her for it—she said: “So, Gill, or Dad—do I say Dad?
Dad?
Ah! All Josie talks about is you since I met him. Dad this, and Dad that, do you know?”

My father was always many things, contradictory things, but never a fool.

He took her face in his hands again. He kissed her cheeks, one and two, and he said, almost whispering: “Thank you.” He wiped at his eyes. “Okay, enough of this blubbering. Ida, stop crowding your son.”

“Oh shut up,” Mom said, wiping her eyes, too. “You two take your stuff upstairs, and make yourselves cozy.”

We went out to dinner that night, a local Chinese restaurant, where Dad ordered for everybody, and Mom and I talked all night about the neighborhood and how she was feeling, and I told her how good she looked—“What a stylish hat”—and she laughed. All the while Dad and Sarah talked, relentlessly talked. He wanted to know what it means to read, and reread, and translate scripture, and not believe the words you’re reading to be divinely inspired. How could that be? I heard Sarah tell him that she
did
think it was divinely inspired, but no more so than any other great book. This was like a different language for my father, and I think it was here, ultimately, at this very moment, at Yen Jing’s Chinese restaurant, in Queens, Dad became so taken with Sarah. He was convinced they were reaching for the very same thing, only Sarah hadn’t had the same opportunities, but the sensibility was there, and she would eventually see the truth he was trying to share with her. Sarah’s heart was at ease, however—searching, but also at ease with itself. This was something he couldn’t imagine. They were a pair that night, and it delighted both Mom and me. I can still see Dad, showing off, filling a spoon with hot Chinese mustard and swallowing it whole, his eyes tearing up, all of it a show for his new daughter. She couldn’t stop encouraging him, daring him to do other things, while casting conspiratorial looks at me, and then at him, as she waved off my attempts at conversation: You leave us be.

The phone calls started the week we got back to California.

And yet she never saw them in person again until we saw Mom at the hospital, and then the funeral. I don’t like to think about the funeral, though. But they spoke every week on the phone, sometimes several times. Sarah loved me whether I liked it or not, even when I was depressed; why was I so depressed? All of which of course made her one day stop loving me so much anymore, which makes perfect sense, now, when I think about it.

That’s a cop-out.

I knew exactly why I was depressed. I knew why I was so miserable. And I’m sounding more and more like a hagiographer here. I nominate Sarah for sainthood! Instead of a somewhat sensible ex-husband who, believe it or not, has learned a thing or two about marriage and love, I have learned this: Nobody’s perfect. Not even Sarah. Certainly not me. And more, it’s unfair to paint such an unreal picture. Worse, it’s not right, and plain inhuman to expect sainthood from someone you love.

Dad told her things he’d never told me, not once, for whatever reason—things about his own calling, even about his father. He hardly talked to me about his father, my grandfather. When I was a boy, I asked. It was natural. And he sidestepped every single time. As I got older, I got the feeling Dad felt like a disappointment to
his
dad. I could relate. Sarah said it had to do with what my father called my “calling.” I’d heard the phrase plenty of times, but hearing it spoken from Sarah’s mouth made it feel like a real thing in the world. No longer a family secret. Even though Dad was freely telling Sarah about his own calling, and that my grandfather had one, too, and I had no idea.

All of which eventually led to a much needed talk between Sarah and me.

This was just before 2000, and I wasn’t doing very well. I used to think a small part of me, a very small part, a piece I thought I’d flushed, deep down, thought, Who knows, maybe Josiah was right after all. Who doesn’t like to be right? And yes, there’s the untidy technicality that Armageddon could be bad news for me (which is debatable because if I
had
been right, then technically I would’ve survived), and more, it would be very, very bad for Sarah. For the whole world, really, but at least there would be some order in everything.

The crux really was this: if Apocalypse never did come that day, January 1—and of course I was sure that it wouldn’t—if I was
wrong,
I had proof. I mean, if faith ever leaves you in a flash, then
this
would be that day. This scared me. The day was coming soon. Who would I be? What would I believe? And, most of all, what would this final disappointment do to my father? So we talked, Sarah and I, but I didn’t tell her all of this. Not exactly. Rather I recounted what had happened on that stage. All of it. I told her about the moment, my reaching up for Heaven and receiving revelation from the Lord. I told her about the horse, and I told her none of it was real. Your husband is a failed child prophet, my dear.

She laughed, and said she wasn’t too surprised.

And so I told her more, later on, the beach, which felt right, because so many important things happened to us on that beach. It felt good to be honest (although never entirely…). And she listened. Wives do this! I told her about it over dinner, and walking on the boardwalk. I talked more that week, and the next week, I talked a lot. At brunches, and over breakfasts before I went to work, until I think before long I was becoming unbearable because that year I went from hardly talking about it with her to talking about nothing else at all.

And then came the day, 2000.

Sarah and I stayed up that night, on the beach. A bottle of champagne. Takeout tacos. And we cheered at midnight to the great messianic no-show, and howled while the fireworks broke open like neon flowers over the Pacific. Sarah poured champagne on the sand, and said, “To a shitty year.” We got very drunk that night, and convinced ourselves the new year would be new in every way imaginable.

It must have been the wine because I woke up that next morning, that first morning, and I was the same old me. No new me. I was disappointed.

We went for a walk.

It was a plainly beautiful day, brisk and bracing in that Californian January way.

“Talk,” she said.

We watched a pregnant woman at the end of a nearby cul-de-sac sweep up New Year’s confetti into a dustpan. I asked Sarah: If we had a kid, did she think I would pass on the “calling”? God forbid. I’d been wrong, and never wanted to be right. Even Dad had been wrong once. And I don’t know what year Grandpa Laudermilk put his money on, but apparently he was wrong, too. This depressed me. We went home, and I’ve been told more than once that that day was the beginning for Sarah: from then on, I became increasingly “emotionally unavailable.”

I hated the phrase.

We decided on a brief separation, a brief one, because the fighting became constant, about my moods, yes, but who doesn’t have moods? But mostly about not having kids.

One year later, in September, the planes came.

What I’m about to say is not an easy thing for me to say, and it’s the one and only real secret I’ve kept from Sarah, but when I first saw what was happening on the news, when the Big Shit buckled the fan and down came those poor toppling towers, for one brief dark moment in the basement of my soul I seriously thought the planes were proof. The prophet lives! I was only off by a year. Only one year, not so bad. I actually had this thought. Fleeting, yes, and fast like light, but that doesn’t matter now. Because I didn’t first think of their faces, and how every single one had a name, and I didn’t think of the purple carpet on the Trade Center lobby floor. I didn’t think of rubbing my shoe soles on the carpet when I was a kid, and shocking my dad’s arm in the elevator on the way up.

That afternoon of the eleventh, Sarah came by the house to pick up some of her stuff, and I was drinking. She’d have a drink with me, a quick one, she said. She turned on the television and we watched the news, and then we turned it off. We were both feeling so sad and were dutifully polite to one another. We didn’t really talk about anything. We just kept drinking. And then we fell on each other in the living room. She then hit me squarely in the face, and it hurt. I clearly heard the crack of her hand against my skin, and then the sound of her fingers tugging at the zipper on her jeans, even the
shush
of the silk ribbon line of her underwear just above her belt rubbing against the palm of my hand. I could’ve sworn I heard the blood rush all through my ears and my head, to my cheek where she hit me, thinking I could actually hear the skin going red. She hit me again. I grabbed at her wrists trying to stop her, and then thought better of it. She started hitting me in the chest like she was beating the steering wheel of a car that wouldn’t start. She was crying, too. I wasn’t, not yet, too overwhelmed by it all, by the pure and naked anger and the final remnants of our love and her frustration coming off her like sparks. Then she grabbed my face. I started to talk, and she said, “Shut up.” She undid all of my belt and pants and whatnot, and then she undid hers, pressing herself against me. Then my back was against the cold hard floor, and she beat herself against me, again, and again, and again, with her hands and her haunches, until I pushed her off because I was going to start. So she let that happen. And then she pressed herself against me again, and again, and again. The floor went warm, and she pressed herself against me until it was almost unpleasant, I think, for us both. I was in one particular place in the whole of the world, knowing where I was and when I was, and then she fell back sprawling on my legs.