Martin and John (9 page)

WE NURSED MY mother through a month of withdrawal, and soon drew our strength from her own adamant refusal to drink again, though sometimes her body called for it in shudders so loud the bed shook with her moans of pain. My mother, I remembered, and told Martin to add truth to the memory, had not really drunk until my father became sick. As he worsened, so had she. Her goal seemed clear: to drink herself into the grave and follow him. But after her sadness had passed there was only the alcohol, which seemed determined to kill her though she no longer wanted to die. She always drank alone in her bedroom, sucking down the dank liquid until she was so intoxicated she
stumbled out of the house and sang sad songs up and down the gravel streets of our trailer park. Going to the bar had clearly, in my mind, been a move to meet someone like Martin, someone to peel the carcass of drink off her, since she was unable to do it alone. It seemed to me, the more I thought of it, the perfect transformation: my father had brought the bottle into her life with his death; therefore, it would take a new life, a new love, to save her from dying. I was young and I had loved my father as much as my mother, and with a respect that came from seeing her bathe his twisted, convulsing, deteriorated body unaided, even as he tried to force his face under the water, I accepted her solution, and loved Martin as my own.

After a month she got out of bed. She arose at her regular time in the morning as if she’d never been unwell, and had breakfast for Martin and me when we emerged from our sleep. We ate like prisoners enjoying their first free meal after a long confinement. During breakfast she got up suddenly and went to the cabinet where she kept the liquor. There was half a bottle of rum there that we’d stupidly forgotten to throw out. She grabbed the bottle, but went with it to the sink, not the table, and poured it down the drain. Then, overruling our protests, she went to work that same day, saying she’d been gone a month and they wouldn’t hold her job much longer, and besides, it was Friday and she’d have the weekend to recuperate if she needed it. I, she said, could take the day off.

MARTIN AND I did the dishes together. We were both very happy, I’m sure, but disoriented, and Martin murmured bemusedly, in a voice with a sound like the flipping pages of a book, something about “only when you’re dead.” I didn’t understand him until years later, after I’d finally made love to a man again without seeing Martin’s face at the door and hearing him say, “Keep this a secret.” We wandered about the house and idly cleaned, vacuuming, dusting, doing the breakfast dishes. At some point Martin asked me, “Where do you keep the tools?” I led him to the closet and showed him the metal tool box that had belonged to my father. Martin lifted it; I knew from experience that it was too heavy for me, and watched in admiration as the muscles of his arm bulged when he picked the metal bin off the floor. I followed him to the front door and then realized what was up. The lock had broken on the door around the time of my father’s death, and it had never seemed necessary to repair it. Now we went at it, but halfheartedly, as though we were tired, and it took us a couple of hours to complete the job. When at last we finished, Martin closed the door, and locked it.

We ate lunch, left the dishes in the sink. The day dragged by. Sometime in the afternoon I slumped on the couch. The energy and tension flowed out of my body like a current, replaced by relief. I suppose I was at last realizing that my mother wasn’t going to die like my father, and that Martin wouldn’t vanish now that his task was done. But then I only felt joy, an overpowering coolness like an ice-laden cloth on my forehead. I started to cry. Martin came up to me then. He
sat down on the couch and folded his hands in his lap like a nervous woman. He didn’t say anything to me, didn’t ask me why I was crying or why I sprawled on the cushions like a rag doll. Instead, he started crying too. Again, I was amazed by this man who could, unlike all the other men I’d ever known, even my father, cry. I said, I don’t know why, “You must love her a lot already.” Looking out the window, he said, “I do.” Turning to me, he said, “And you too.” He paused for a moment as if awaiting a response, and then he said, “It’s been hard for both of you.” While the sun shone outside, and the wind blew, and cars chewed up the gravel in the parking lot, and a radio that Martin must have turned on without my knowledge played somewhere in the house, we cried, a few feet apart on the couch, not looking at each other. Then my tears stopped on my cheeks, and I sniffled with uneven breaths. Martin’s tears ceased as suddenly as they had come, and for just a second I doubted the emotion that lay behind them. But then he reached out and rubbed my hair. His hand rested on my head for a second and I sat like a statue. Then his hand drifted down my face and wiped at a tear. He said, softly, “Come on. Let’s stop this.” I felt the rough, knuckly hand of a plumber, a hand like my father’s. I held it there, and then used his fingers to scratch a soft itch inside the skin of my cheek. And then, slowly, expecting at any moment for him to pull his hand from mine, I put it in my mouth. His fingers tasted like mayonnaise.

A final tear rolled down his cheek. He pulled free from my
mouth and took my face in both his hands, one dry, the other wet, and kissed me on the lips. As I closed my eyes I was left with the image of his face being washed by the tear into happiness. There was nothing more then from either of us as we walked to the bedroom: no tears, no touches, no words, significant looks, or communication: no symbols. I wished for a second that he would carry me. Not like a bride, but like a baby, because that is the only way I could imagine myself in my mother’s bed. We had sex with enforced quietness. Several times I caught him, and also myself, looking at the bedroom door, listening through the windows, as if expecting some third party to come along and complete our triangle, or dismember it completely. When we finished, I lay in bed for a few minutes after he left. Still looking at the ceiling, I suddenly felt the weight of my father’s eyes on me. Then I heard the latch pop open as Martin unlocked the newly fixed door.

THAT EVENING, MY mother’s roast beef gleamed like a small mountain rising from a valley of potatoes, carrots, and onions swimming in a lake of brown juices. Steam bathing her face, my mother said carefully, each word its own proud sentence, “Dinner. Is. Served.” “It smells wonderful,” Martin said, inhaling audibly. “I know it’s a bit much, especially with the weather and all, but it’s been so long since I’ve felt like cooking anything worth eating, that, well, you know.” I couldn’t see if my mother was blushing or merely flushed as
she placed the roast on the table. She sat down between Martin and me. “I think I understand,” Martin said, reaching for the loaf of homemade bread and cutting three thick slices. “This meal belongs in a palace,” he said, and distributed the bread. The steam out of her face, my mother’s skin remained pink. “Oh, you’re just saying that.” She took his plate and put several pieces of meat on it, then ladled out vegetables and the drippings. She put it back in front of him, then took her plate and did the same. Then she served me. She talked throughout the meal about her first day back at work, about how good it felt to walk home and pass by the bar without feeling the need to go inside, about having someone at home to greet her when she came in. I sat in my corner and watched her and Martin, picking slowly at my food, and every once in a while I said something to pretend I was part of the conversation. But her eyes were fastened on Martin, and his on her, and if she barely touched her plate, it was because she was too busy talking to eat. Martin, though, ate steadily throughout dinner, and the only time he spoke, other than to say I know or I understand, was to compliment her on the food. The meal seemed to be over when Martin pushed away his plate with its half-eaten third piece of apple pie and proclaimed, “I’m stuffed.” I got up then to do the dishes, and after a minute Martin started to help me. My mother sat in her chair behind us. She said, “It makes me happy to see you two getting along so well.” My hands submerged in a sink of soapy water, my back to her, I didn’t say anything. Martin dropped a hand on my shoulder, then ran it
through my hair. “You’ve got a good one here,” he said. My mother said she was going to watch some television, then turn in early. “When you’re finished,” she said, “come stay with me.” “Sure,” I said, without turning around. “Not you, silly, Martin.” “Sure, Bea,” Martin said. “I’ll be there in about half an hour.” “I’ll be waiting,” my mother said. “Good night, dear.” I washed the dishes without looking, to see if they came clean and handed them to Martin silently. I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder. Her voice came in my ear. “I said, Good night, dear.” I jumped at her touch. “Oh,” I said. “Good night.” “See you in the morning,” she said, and pecked me on the cheek. She’d never done that before, and it seemed hollow to me, like half a kiss. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes,” she said. At the same time, Martin and I both said, “See you.”

LATER, MONTHS LATER, he and my mother were married, and she had me put away my father’s condoling picture forever. Martin and I never had sex again; and once, after tousling my hair, he sat up quickly and said he couldn’t do that any longer either, and he left my bedroom. Still wanting him, I would look at him for long periods at a time, staring at him through his newspaper until he would drop it tensely and look back at me, softly, sharply, fearfully, always with love and sadness, and once or twice with lust also, but each time he only shrugged it, all of it, away.

The marriage didn’t last because my mother only loved him for helping her to overcome drinking and my father’s specter. I never saw her fight with him; she only drifted further and further away, and grew more silent until one day all she could say was “I’m sorry—” and he moved out without protest. Later I learned that they’d said things when I wasn’t there, had fought and made up often, fucked, talked about me, done the dishes and things like that, lived a separate life while I was out; but then I only hated my mother for sending Martin away even though I loved him more than she. I yelled at her that I would never forgive her if she didn’t bring him back, nor would I accept anyone else, because that’s what I believed she’d do: go find someone else. With the cruelty of adolescence I screamed, “You’re just a slut!” For a moment I stared at the air, as if I could see the word I’d just hurled at my mother. Then she slapped me hard, twice, and said, “Only when I’m dead and gone can you say things like that about me. But while I’m alive you make damn good and sure you mind your place!” On her final words, her voice rose to a scream. I jumped up and down, my arms flying out and hitting the walls so hard that a picture frame filled with family shots fell to the floor—my father, my mother, me; and, still tucked in the frame in front of the glass, new configurations featuring Martin and the two of us. “I loved him!” I yelled, pointing at the broken glass and scattered pictures. “I loved him! And he loved me!” “Shut up!” my mother shrieked. She grabbed me by the hair and threw me down. I lay there and
looked up at her. Her face was twisted with rage and disgust. “Don’t you ever say that again.” I stared at her, my mouth open, tasting blood though I wasn’t bleeding. “Get away from me, you foul boy,” she said, and turned away. If sleeping with Martin had taught me anything, it had taught me about desire, and I yelled at her retreating form, “You’re just pissed because he got what you wanted.” She turned, and I saw the shocked expression on her face, and then, before she could hit me again, I ran away.

I was too angry to admit my grief or guilt, and choked on the apology I knew she deserved. Weeks went by and we didn’t speak, and I heard through a friend that Martin had moved from town. Only when my mother dragged out my father’s picture did I realize how deeply I’d cut. But the alcohol was gone and the only addiction was to a dead man’s memory, and I no more had the cure to that than she could stifle my own sobs for Martin, so I used my pillow to do it to save her any more pain; she clinging to her picture, I to my pillow, we both searched for the essences of men long gone.

I RECEIVED A letter from him today, you see, that’s why I’m remembering all this. It’s months old, and has followed me through four different addresses, as if the message it contains is vital. And perhaps it is, though the phrases he used have a curious discordance about them, and the message, if any, has to be picked out carefully: there is a desperate finality
in this letter, yet at the same time it is mired in ambiguity. “Dear John,” he wrote. “Do you remember our time together?” Sometimes I don’t know what I remember, what’s real and what’s been transformed with time. “I’ve never forgotten you or your mother, but I had to leave for my sake, and yours and your mother’s.” All he ever wanted was both of us, and of course he could have neither in the end. That’s like Martin, like his tears, his touches, his other empty words. You can have your dreams, he’d said in the kitchen, of how life should be and what your ideal lover should look like and how your first time should go, but he knew—and I do too, now—that you’ll never get it, or never be able to hold on to it if you do. Not in this life, he’d told me: only when you’re dead.