Jernigan (29 page)

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, “too much to drink. Something. I just want to get home if you don’t mind.”

Back came Tim with a Mason jar. One more affectation. But forgivable. He set it down in front of me and said, “Go for it.”

“Listen, Tim?” I said. “I don’t think Martha’s feeling terrifically well all of a sudden, and I think maybe I’d better get her home. I
mean, I feel like a real shit, you made dinner and everything, but.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Martha, her voice small. “I’m ruining everybody’s good time.”

“Listen, don’t worry about
that,”
he said. “What’s the trouble?”

“Just sort of sick,” she said. “Might’ve drunk too much. I was just getting over something.”

“You want to go in lie down?” he said.

“I think I probably better just go,” she said. “I’m really really sorry. Honey, would you be a doll and collect the kids?” She
never
called me honey. I mean, thank God.

I knocked on the bedroom door, called “Hey Danny” to give fair warning, and counted five before opening it. They were propped side by side on a platform bed covered with what looked to be quite a good quilt. Baskets I think that design was supposed to be, though you had to know quilts to know they were baskets. Judith could’ve told you. They were watching what must have been one of the
Star Trek
movies, because the costumes were weird and everybody was old. They weren’t even touching, the two of them. I mean touching each other.

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “I’m afraid we gotta roll. Martha’s not feeling too well.”

“What happened?” said Danny, sitting up. “She okay?”

Clarissa looked at me as if I were something mildly interesting on tv.

“Probably just a stomach thing,” I said. “I don’t think it’s any big deal, but I think we ought to get her home to bed, okay?”

Danny zapped the picture with the remote control and got to his feet. “Can I do anything?” he said.

Clarissa sat there. “Is my mother all right?” she said, talking slow.

“It’s not anything to worry about,” I said. “We’ll just get her home.”

“Daniel?” she said. “Don’t forget to rewind it like he said.”

“I’ve got it under
control
, Clarissa,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me fifty times.”

When we got outside, snow was coming down. “Hey, a white Christmas,” I said. I’d like to say I was being ironic; in fact, with all that moonshine in me, I could have been honestly trying to get some valedictory heartiness going. At any rate, nobody said anything back.

The ground wasn’t absolutely white yet, but white enough that our passing left dark footprints.

We bundled into the car like a family. Kids in back, parents up front, Dad driving. Family friend waving from an open door.

4

Out on the main drag, tires had made black ribbons on the white pavement and snowflakes boiled in the headlight beams. When we’d left to come over here, I’d given Martha an argument about taking her Reliant: a vote of no confidence, I thought, in my ability to drive home, whereas in fact I was a
better
driver when drunk, my concentration more nearly absolute. But now I was glad she’d insisted; her tires were a little less bald.

“How are you doing?” I said.

“Let’s just get home,” she said.

“I’m still not clear,” I said. “Is it stomach or what?”

“I just want to get
home,”
she said. “Is that a big crime?”

I checked the rearview mirror. Danny was whispering to Clarissa, who was staring at her fingernails.

“Maybe somebody,” I said, lowering my voice, “will kindly tell me what the hell is going on. Stud there announces he’s got a girlfriend, and you suddenly have to go home. Maybe you’d like to tell me what it is, exactly, with the two of you?”

“Not what I’m sure you think.”

“How
do you
know what I think?” I said. Shifting ground on her.

“Oh, don’t worry, Peter,” she said. “I don’t
really
know what you think. You’re still as
inscrutable
as you want to be. You’re not in any danger of anybody getting
close.”

She clearly thought this was a home thrust.

“Hey, can we have the radio on?” said Danny. The other thing about the Reliant was that it had an actual radio.

“Not going to be much on but Christmas music, I don’t think,” I said.

“Right,” he said, “that’s what we want.”

I put the radio on, but it was just an AM one and damned if I could find any Christmas music on the whole thing. News Radio 88, Latin music, a bunch of call-in shows. “Big night for the lonely souls,” I said, and snapped the thing back off.

Martha started weeping.

“Fuck,” I said. At least this shut everybody up the rest of the way. After a few miles Martha’s shoulders even stopped heaving.

I pulled up in front of the house and turned the car off. They all just sat there. Without the engine going, it was as silent as it got in New Jersey. Snow hitting the windshield and melting. Finally Danny said, “We’re going to go in, okay?”

I just gave a good big shrug, meaning What the fuck difference did it make what anybody did. This was called not helping matters any.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Peretsky?” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You guys run ahead in.”

That left the two of us.

Martha said, “He was Rusty’s best friend.”

So apparently we were now going to get the story of Tim.

“Like before high school,” she said. “And they both ended up back here after the army. I mean they weren’t like in Vietnam or anything. Tim actually was in the Air Force, and Rusty was in Morocco most of his time. Anyhow, they were sharing this house, and Rusty and I started going out. I was done college and I had my first real job, you know, that wasn’t like waiting tables, and now I had this cool boyfriend. And so eventually I moved in. I was the only one that had a job or anything. Once in a while Rusty would get like a package from Morocco, or he and Tim would go in on a key together and sell enough lids out of it to get their money back, but that was about as far as it went. The whole rent was like a hundred dollars. So Rusty and Tim would just kind of go around scrounging things, like I remember a lot of the wood we used to burn in the wintertime they got following these guys around from a tree service. I think Tim’s dad got him into raising rabbits. At any rate, that stuff gave him the idea to start the magazine, which Rusty thought was crazy. Like Rusty used to call
him the PM? Because he was going to be the Publishing Mogul. But I used to do typing for him sometimes after I got done work and kind of generally help out. And I used to do like little drawings to go at the bottom of the pages and stuff.”

I suppose that was my cue to say
Oh really, I’d love to see some
. Didn’t know she ever did drawings. At this late date it was kind of a so-what.

Snow was starting to stick to the windshield.

“So then when I got pregnant with Clarissa,” she said, “Rusty and I were going to get married and everything, but we were going to all just keep living in the house like before. And then like a month before she was born Rusty sold some weed to an undercover cop and he got sent away for a year. This was, you know, ’72. So anyhow, Tim just stayed and looked after me and Clarissa for that whole year. ’Cause I’d quit my job and everything. For a while he was even pumping gas at night at this service area on the Garden State so there’d be money coming in. And the whole time nothing ever happened, and you can believe that or not.”

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Rusty sure didn’t. After he got out and everything, the three of us just kept living there, but he wouldn’t talk to Tim very much.
Or
me much, either. It like really changed him. I always wondered if guys maybe did something to him there. Though the really weird stuff didn’t start till we moved here and Tim got his own place.”

“The really weird stuff,” I said.

“Well he sort of hit me and stuff,” she said.

Figured.

“At any rate,” she said. “So after Rusty and I split up I started seeing Tim again. I mean, not
seeing
him seeing him, but we’d get together and talk and stuff, have dinner. So I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly got so weird tonight. I think I’m premenstrual.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down.”

“Is that putting myself down?” she said.

The whole windshield was white by this time. You couldn’t see out.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just talking.” Truest thing I’d said in weeks. “It’s cold,” I said. “You want to go in?”

“It’s cold in there too,” she said.

“Unless the kids started the stove,” I said. “Little joke.”

We sat there with my little joke echoing.

“Well, look,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“Would you do me a big favor?” she said. “Could you just leave me the key and go in and start the stove and let me run the heater until it warms up in there? Just this one time? I really don’t think I can stand it tonight going in there and having it be cold.”

“What do you mean can you have the key?” I said. “It’s your car, right?”

“I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not going to make a habit of this.”

“Hey,” I said, and opened the door. “Christmas comes but once a year.” Mr. Gracious.

Snow was really coming down. The walkway was completely white, and just a few blades of grass were sticking up out of the white lawn. It was a little warmer inside than out, but the stove had cooled enough to put your hand on. You could hear the tv going in the kids’ room.

I got the stove started and sat there in my coat. First the heat hit my shins. Then I felt it on my face. Then I went out to fetch Martha. The car was throbbing away with the windows fogged up, and one of those impossible things crossed my mind: that she’d got a vacuum cleaner hose from somewhere and hooked it to the tailpipe. So did that mean that I wished her dead, or was it just one more thought?

I helped her up the steps so she wouldn’t slip. She went in and sat down on the floor by the stove, hugging her knees like the woman in that Edward Hopper painting. My father used to have a print of it hanging in the living room, back when I was a kid. Woman sitting on her bed, window open, face full of sun. He’d done such a convincing job of painting harlequin sunglasses on her that I’d grown up thinking that was what the thing looked like. I tried to give myself a gratuitous feeling of awe by thinking about the comparative pinprick of fire in the stove versus the unimaginably vast fire of the sun. But of course your mind can’t really leap magnitudes that way.

“So I guess the presents can wait until tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot to take the
presents
. He’s going to think I’m terrible.”

“Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,” I said, “He’ll always say, ‘I forgive.’ You want anything to drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well that makes one of us,” I said, and went into the kitchen. “How about to eat?” I called, pouring out a good big glassful of gin. No answer. I’d finished up that bottle of Absolut—waste not, want not—but it didn’t touch the heart the way the old gin-ereeno did.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She’d worn her denim skirt tonight, probably as a message to Tim that in her heart the 1970s would never be over. She had the buttons undone to mid-thigh. The front of the skirt covered her knees as she hugged them; the back fell away, revealing white thigh down to the underpants. So I had finally gotten there: no desire at all.

She looked up and saw me looking. “You have my permission to get as fucked up as you want,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What, me worry?” I said. I considered following this up with a
hugh-hugh-hugh
goofy moron laugh. But that would have taken things to too crazy a place.

You could hear stuff snapping in the woodstove.

“In case you’re feeling guilty, Peter,” she said, “this actually is not the worst Christmas I ever had. Or in case you’re flattering yourself.” She got to her feet and started for the bedroom.

“I thought you wanted to get warm,” I said.

“I won’t say the obvious,” she said. I got her drift, but how, exactly, would she have phrased it?

I heard the bedroom door close. Just close, not slam. Which made me think about how everything went in circles, just like the Beatles used to say. You started out closing the door, then things got so bad you were slamming the door, and then things got really
really
bad and all you did was just close the fucking door. Why the Beatles, though? Probably thinking of that song. The one that goes
Of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning
.

IX

1

Me waking up, Martha gone, same old beginning again. What was different was, I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to bed. I mean, it was obvious
how
I’d gotten to bed: leaning on Danny’s strong young shoulder, right? (Little joke.) But I couldn’t remember actually stumbling to the bedroom. Yet here I was. The old
res ipsa loquitur
. Odd that
loquor
should be a passive verb. Though in Latin, stuff like active/passive or masculine/feminine didn’t really mean anything. Bully for Latin. Take
agricola
, famous example. According to Danny—who wasn’t one of them—a few kids in his school wanted to take
Latin, probably because they thought it would help them get into better colleges, but there wasn’t anybody left in the school system who could teach it. One more way you could have made yourself useful if back years ago you’d done everything differently. Funny shit to end up thinking about first thing on Christmas morning. If it was in fact morning. Though what the appropriate thoughts might have been I still can’t imagine. What, you’re supposed to lie there wondering why the Word
had
to be made flesh?