Return Trips (9 page)

I have just been visiting my own mother in Austin, Texas; this side trip to see Jeffrey before going home to Petaluma is an indulgence, but not much of one: juggling new airfares, going home an odd route through Denver, it only cost twenty dollars more than not stopping at all would have. Anyway, my mother has become an alcoholic, and a recluse, almost. She sits there all day, sipping sherry and smoking and watching soaps on TV, like someone a great deal older than she actually is. And she looks much older, too; she is both puffy and withered, at barely sixty. I don’t know what to do about her.

Another problem on my mind is Rick. He is a building contractor; that seemed an eminently sensible move, from skilled carpenter to contractor, ten years ago, in the financially optimistic early seventies. But now he is out of work, and he is enraged—at everything in the world, me included. I have a teaching job, fourth grade, and so we are not as badly off as many people, but Rick keeps saying that I could be laid off too, which is true, of course, but I think in a way he hates it that I am the one still working, and it makes him hate me, a lot of the time.

And, more worries: Barbara, our daughter, who is only fifteen, wants to marry her boyfriend, Brad, who is all of eighteen (it is very possible that she either is or thinks she is pregnant).

And (this is sad): our old cat, Puss, who is almost fifteen, a sort of wedding present, has almost stopped eating.

For some reason Puss is the one I think about the most. I don’t know why. It is true that I love her very much; she is
such an outrageous calico, with a bright orange patch on one eye, and a yellow stomach. We have been through a lot together, as it were. But I love those people too, my mother and Rick and Barbara, all of them, very much. Maybe in a way it is easier to think about Puss? And of course she is the only one who does not talk back; when, in my mind, I tell my mother to drink less, and tell Barbara not to get married and Rick not to be so angry, they all have a lot to say to me, in return (and this goes on all day, like a radio that I can’t turn off).

I suddenly remember that Jeffrey has always had cats, and so I ask him, “Do you have a cat now, down here?”

He smiles, one faithful cat lover to another, and he says, “Of course. Actually we have three, a mother and two sons. The kittens were so cute we couldn’t give them up. You know how that goes.”

The “we” must mean David, whom of course I should ask about, but I am not quite ready for that. Easier to go on about cats. I tell him that I am a little worried about Puss, her not eating.

And Jeffrey remembers Puss—how endearing of him! “A really great cat,” he proclaims, as I beam. And he goes on, “Who could forget an orange eye patch like that?” He tells me not to worry too much about her non-eating. Sometimes an older cat will just be off her feed for a while, he says, the way people sometimes are. He also says that he has a friend here in town with a beautiful calico cat who is
twenty-one years old
.

This is the best news I’ve heard in months, a cat that old. It is so good it makes me laugh. “Wow, twenty-one. I’ll tell Puss she has to make it that far.”

Jeffrey laughs too. “Well, sure she will.”

However, my plane to Denver is not until ten tonight, and
we can’t talk about cats all that time, although in a way I would like to.

And so, in a plunging-in way I ask him, “Well, how’s David?”

Deliberately Jeffrey takes a drink of his wine, before he says, “Well, actually not too good. He had an operation, one of those real uglies. You know, they say they got everything? But you’re so damaged. David is so damaged, I mean. That’s what this trip to see his mother is all about. We don’t know what to expect, really. Or when.”

“Oh, Jeffrey.” I reach across the table and take his hands, remembering as I do so, as I touch them, what beautiful long hands Jeffrey has. Holding hands for a moment we just look at each other—nothing else to do. I say, “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, you’re nice, but don’t be sorry. We’ll manage. And right now he’s really okay. We’re just sort of playing it by ear, day to day.” As we both retrieve our hands, he adds, “He’ll be sorry he didn’t see you, of course. He sends love.”

“Oh! Please give him my love.”

We sit there quietly for several minutes, then, adjusting to the presence of this awful news of David, lying there between us like a stone.

Often, lately, as I castigate myself for such self-absorption in my own forms of trouble, I have thought about people in refugee camps, in the Middle East, or starving people anywhere, the hopeless, the genuinely anguished population of the world. But here is Jeffrey, directly in front of me, and while his troubles are nowhere near the horrible pains of those people, still his are considerably worse than mine, I think: a possibly (probably) dying loved person.

Like many shy people, Jeffrey tends to come out of silences into small speeches that have the sound of paragraphs. He always has (fifteen years is always); he does so now. “One
thing I’ve meant to say to you,” he says, into our silence, in the sun-moted room, “is that, uh, splitting with Susan had nothing to do with David. Although it could have looked like that. But she took off with a guy from art school. I felt pretty bad, and David said why not come down here. He was living with somebody at the time, and so the three of us shared a house for a while, which I have to say was not all that great.” He gives me a twisting smile.

“I’II bet not,” I tell him, trying to imagine how that would be: me and Rick and—and who?

“Anyway, then the other guy left, and there we were again, roommates. And then David got sick.”

“
God
, Jeffrey.”

“Yeah.”

At that moment everything in our minds—in mine, for sure, and surely in Jeff’s too—is so awful that as we look at each other across the table we begin to laugh, like nuts, or drunks (the bartender must think we’ve been drinking all day). We laugh and laugh, and when one of us stops the other starts off again. We exhaust ourselves.

“Oh God,” he says, finally, wiping at his eyes with a big clean handkerchief. “Oh God, I’m so glad you came here to see me.”

“Wait until I tell you all about my life,” I say to him. “That’ll really cheer you up.” Which sets us off again, into minor hysterics.

Finally we sober up, so that I can tell him in an abbreviated way about my people, my concerns over them. He has never met my mother, and he only knew Barbara as a small child, and so it is Rick that I mostly talk about. “Basically he’s just very depressed,” I say. “And instead of cheering him up I get depressed too and that makes him feel worse. It’s just so difficult, people living together, isn’t it.”

Jeffrey speaks slowly, and very thoughtfully. “Sometimes it does help, though,” he says, “if you just accept the fact that you can’t do a lot for anyone else. Then you stop trying so hard, and worrying over what feels like failure.”

I consider this; it seems sensible, and even helpful. It is true that I can’t do a lot for Rick, beyond being there, which sometimes he doesn’t want. (Will he be more glad to see me after this trip? I have wondered.)

Jeffrey looks at his watch, just then, and I do too. It is much later than either of us imagined. We have talked for a long time. “I thought we’d have dinner here in town,” Jeff says, “but now I wonder: maybe you’d rather come out to the house, and I’ll rustle up a snack?”

“Oh, I’d really like that.”

“I’d like you to see it.” He smiles, adding, “And the cats.” More soberly, a little anxiously, he further adds, “I really mean snack, though. With David gone I haven’t been eating a lot. Like your Puss, I’m off my feed.” Another smile.

“Well, I’d love to see your house. And the cats. And a snack would be great.”

Once we have made this plan it seems so obviously what we should do that I wonder why Jeffrey didn’t suggest it before; of course I would want to see his house and cats. And a tiny question flashes into my mind: could Jeffrey possibly have had some worry or shyness at the idea of our being alone, in an empty house, with David away at his mother’s and Rick up in Petaluma? Just possibly he had, although there had never been a suggestion of that sort of feeling between us. Gayness aside, we are not each other’s sexual types. Both being dark (we look just slightly alike, come to think of it: tall dark shy people who smile a lot), we both seem drawn to blond people. Rick is the blondest of all, big white-blond Swedish Rick, and David is blond, and so was—is
Susan. But you can’t tell; sometimes men just think they are supposed to come on to you, at the oddest times. The oddest men.

We get out of the bar and we trod across the Plaza, past all the blindingly bright brass, and the Indians, to Jeffrey’s car. His house is out on something called Bishop’s Lodge Road, he tells me, maybe fifteen minutes out of town.

And, generous Jeff, he seems to have been thinking about my problems. (He has always been like that, I remember. Maybe that is a reason I carne to see him?) Specifically, he has thought about my mother. “If she really doesn’t care about her life, or looking good,” he says, “if she just wants to anesthetize herself, I think you have to let her. What else can you do? Maybe this is the happiest she could be. I think you worry too much.”

I can see that he is right, probably, and I am grateful—but at the moment it is hard for me to focus on my mother, in Austin; I am so overwhelmed by everything I see, the sand and rocks and sagebrush, the sheer stretch of space. Every shape, each color seems entirely new to me, and it is all so much larger and grander than anything, anywhere that I ever saw before.

Jeffrey’s house is small, a white adobe shack, on a dirt road up off the highway—on a hill, with astounding views of further rocky, sandy hills, strange gray-green desert vegetation. We park and go into the house, and at first I think there is only one room, with a kitchen and long trestle table at one end. Some low couches, pillows, Indian rugs. But then I make out a sleeping loft. Still, hardly room for three people, David and his former lover, and Jeff—poor Jeff.

“Well, another glass of wine? We might as well?” Jeffrey begins to rummage about in the kitchen, and I see that I was right; having me here is making him nervous.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful here,” I tell him. “I really wish Rick could see it. And Barbara, actually, the dumb kid.”

Happily, he seizes on this. “Well, why not?” in an eager way he asks me. “You could all come down? Even when David’s back, we’d make do. You know, pretend it’s fifteen years ago, and we’re all sleeping around in bags.”

We both laugh, and somehow the very idea of those absent people, my people, and his, has made Jeffrey easy with me again, and that silly bad moment is over.

The cats are something of a disappointment, though; scrawny and shy, they lack style, or maybe I’ve been spoiled by glamorous Puss. But I pat them and scratch their ears, and I tell Jeffrey that they are nice. What is actually nice is touching a cat at all. My mother is allergic to them, and so I had not had my hands on a cat for a week; it was like getting a fix.

All around us, on the walls, are big canvasses, filled with huge dim gray-green shapes, like mirrors of the desert. No way to tell whether the paintings are Jeffrey’s or David’s, and it doesn’t seem right to ask. In any case, they are so much a part of the room, as well as of the landscape, that it feels unnecessary to remark on them at all.

For supper Jeffrey makes us omelets with sour cream and some greenish Mexican glop that I don’t much like, but I appreciate his effort, of course. Most of all I appreciate the fact that my spirits have lightened, quite a lot; I really feel okay.

He makes very good coffee. It has the faintest taste of chocolate, and we talk some more, drinking coffee.

I’m worried over Rick, and my mother, and Barbara. And Puss. That is what, in effect, I say.

And Jeffrey says that he is worried and sad about David.

And we say to each other that we must not worry.

We are like people holding hands through a disaster, I think.

Later still, Jeffrey drives me down across the now-darkened desert to Albuquerque, to my plane, and on the way he tells me that he was serious about our visiting, all of us. “Or any one or two of you,” he says, with a little laugh.

I tell him that it is a nice idea, nice of him, but in a practical way it seems very unlikely indeed, and I urge him to come up to see us, in Northern California.

However, as I settle into my seat on the plane, and buckle in, headed for Denver (which is certainly a long way to go, to get to Petaluma, California), then, along with a return of worry about what I am headed for, my same old problems, and my flying fears, I also experience a shot of warmth, of true comfort: there is Jeffrey, more or less permanently, in a place that I now have seen, and can visualize. Where I would always be welcome.

I smile to myself, in the dark, as I loftily imagine that I am speeding through fields of stars. I feel suddenly rich.

Reaching, pulling, gliding through the warm blue chlorinated water, I am strong and lithe: I am not oversized, not six feet tall, weighing one eighty-five. I am not myself, not Maxine.

I am fleet, possessed of powerful, deep energy. I could swim all day, swim anywhere. Sometimes I even wonder if I should try the San Francisco Bay, that treacherous cold tide-wracked water. People do swim there, they call themselves Polar Bears. Maybe I should, although by now I like it here in the Rossi Pool, swimming back and forth, doing laps in the Fast Lane, stretching and pulling my forceful, invisible body.

Actually the lane where I swim is not really Fast. I swim during Recreational Swimming, and during Rec. hours what was Fast during Laps is roped off for anyone to use who does laps—Slow, Medium, or genuinely Fast, which I am not.

Last summer I started off in Slow, and then I could not do many lengths at a time, 16 or 18 at most, and only sidestroke. But I liked it, the swimming and the calm, rested way it seemed to make me feel. And I thought that maybe, eventually
I might get thinner, swimming. Also, it takes up a certain amount of time, which for an out-of-work living-at-home person is a great advantage. I have been laid off twice in the past five years, both times by companies going out of business; I have a real knack, my mother says. And how many hours a day can a young woman read? That is a question my mother often asks. She is a downtown saleslady, old but blonde, and very thin.