Returning to Earth (23 page)

“Your boyfriend?” I asked.

“Of course. I should sell you some clothes.” She laughed when I looked down at my inelegant outfit. She took a hand of mine in hers and looked into my eyes until I turned away. She laughed again. Her hands were cool and dry while mine were sweaty. The cuff of my shirt was frayed.

“How long are you staying?”

I looked off down the alley as if it bore a specific interest and shrugged. “Indefinitely.”

“Cynthia told me about your survival kits. Are you going to give me one?” She laughed again.

“We'll take two on a walk in the mountains tomorrow,” I said, my voice lacking volume. She turned to the ringing phone in her office.

“Take a walk. Take a nap. Go to the museum. I'll see you at eight.”

I followed her back through the office and she gave me a peck on the cheek. Another well-dressed man, in his thirties, was waiting evidently to take her to lunch. Of course it had never occurred to me that there would be other men in her life. As I walked back to the hotel I wondered if I'd developed this simplemindedness as a means of self-protection or it had merely dropped on me from the heavens like rain or birdshit. I apparently didn't have the toehold on life processes owned by men who have wives, children, and regular jobs. I was a drifter who could spend an hour in a thicket
watching a bird called a brown thrasher feed on deerflies. Spending half my life in the woods despite all the books piled around the cabin ill-prepared me for a mating.

I ate two bowls of delicious albóndigas (meatball) soup and drifted sleepily through the museum designed by Edward Durrell Stone drawing minus reassurance from twenty-ton Olmec heads and figurines of women undergoing transfiguration into jaguars. Only I could meditate on the nature of love and sexuality staring at these immense heads of sculpted stone whose meaning was as inscrutable as love. I tried to remember what I had written about Dante and Beatrice in college but the conclusions weren't poignant enough to endure the passage of time.

I caught a taxi back to the hotel, undressed completely, and took a nap after rereading a few pages of Octavio Paz's
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, a long essay of more than biblical authority about Mexico. When I shut my eyes I could see Cynthia and Vera dancing in our living room so long ago with my father watching them like an insane ogre in a Brooks Brothers summer suit. How did I watch Vera for those six weeks? Lust and anguish, and the burgeoning of something more we never quite understand, the smallest but most ungodly powerful niche in the human genome, as meaningful as topsoil and rain.

Vera looked very tired when we had a drink in the hotel lobby but a rum and cola perked her up. She wore a pale blue dress, which made her hair even blacker. When I asked her why she worked so hard she was stumped at first.

“My father was your father's servant only so I could spend his money? I don't know. I look after the whole family like he did but I don't make them into children like he did. He could be quite mean-minded.”

“Never to us,” I offered.

“No, his job was to not be mean-minded about you. He was always worried about you but never had to worry about Cynthia. He was happy when she ran away with Donald. He thought Clarence was the finest man he knew in America. He thought the war had made your father a drunken beast.”

“I don't see why he stayed with him.”

“It was his best opportunity. Both Cynthia and I figured out he stole from your family. I'm sure you know this.”

“I don't care. I never did. Jesse and Clarence were my real fathers.”

“And your father stole from you and Cynthia. Our parents were thieves except your mother.”

We were on our second drink and ate a light meal in the hotel. She began to cry when we talked about Donald and then her “hopeless” son. She was unmercifully beautiful when she cried. I ordered a third drink but decided not to touch it. I walked her to her apartment, which was only three blocks away in a rather elegant small building with a burly guard standing near the door. The guard gave me a hateful look as if I were responsible for Vera's tears but then smiled when she embraced me.

“Why are you here?”

“I was wondering if I still loved you. I wanted to find out.” That was all I could say.

“Maybe it's good that we have no future,” she said and then went in the door.

I followed her car with my own with difficulty rather early in the morning. When she stopped at the hotel she was wearing jeans and a wool sports coat against the slight chill. She was smiling as if our doleful evening hadn't happened.

At the farm I waited for the miserable thing that had happened there ten years before to revisit me. It didn't. I had exhausted it until it couldn't carry its weight. My dead father was so much less than an ordinary dead father whom others had actually loved.

The farm itself was dormant and Vera explained that coffee prices had collapsed seven years before bringing great hardship locally. Now the prices were beginning to recover and she might start again.

“This farm partly belongs to you and Cynthia,” she said when we entered the house. An old woman was cooking in the kitchen and they hugged each other.

“I don't want to own anything except my cabin,” I said lamely.

“Cynthia says you are an odd man. You were an odd boy and now you are an odd man. You loved books and women.” She laughed and showed me to what I thought she said was “our” bedroom but then she lapsed back and forth between Spanish and English. On the way into the bedroom I had glanced at the living room floor where my father had fallen with his severed hands. No stains. Vera showed me a big shelf with dozens of books on clothing that Clare had sent her. Two
more cartons had recently arrived because Clare had “lost interest.”

We took an hour's walk in the hills with Vera carrying a machete in a scabbard attached to her belt. I teased about this but she said a neighbor had been bitten by a stray, mad dog. Toward the back of the modest property there was a whitewashed casita where she said an American ornithologist lived with his Mexican wife. She gave them free rent for keeping an eye on things because the old woman in the kitchen was mostly deaf. She said the ornithologist and his wife left at dawn every single day to look at birds and that they would be having lunch with us. On the walk back we saw a small poisonous snake whose name I didn't catch. She said she didn't kill it because it was “just a baby.” She threw me off balance by saying she had to go to Chicago the following week to a clothes show and perhaps I would go with her? She thought that Cynthia might come down from the north.

Back at the house I sat on the living room sofa drinking cold water with a nearly unbearable tension in my heart as if I were swimming through a questionable dream.

“Why are you out there,” she called from the bedroom.

I walked into the bedroom as if my feet didn't quite know what they were doing. There were tears in my eyes and I couldn't stop them. She was standing there in bra and panties holding up two outfits on hangers.

“What should I wear?” she asked.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I tried to before I should have. Now I'm trying again.”

I was hoping I wouldn't die before I reached her.

I checked into the Drake a few hours after David and Vera were due to arrive. I called their room and left a message, then took a walk up Michigan Avenue deciding I didn't need to look at Lake Michigan just yet having spent so much of my life gazing at Lake Superior. The air was oddly warm and still for November 15 and I was glancing at smartly dressed people rather than in store windows when I saw them coming toward me a half block away. I ducked into a store entryway suddenly wondering if I was ready to see them. This is unlike my usual manner that my kids called
confrontational
, a word rarely encountered when I was growing up.

I stood there in the glass foyer surrounded by expensive men's shoes and was amused to think of what Donald would have said about five hundred bucks for a pair of shoes. Within moments I could see Vera and David approaching
through a double pane of glass, which mildly distorted them. Vera was window-shopping with a critical look and David was staring up and away as if something interesting was going on halfway up the tall buildings. He has always thought that the basic realities were within his mind's contents rather than outside of him. I wasn't quite ready and ducked through the door and let them pass. I waved away a neutrally handsome young salesman, waited a few minutes, then left turning down a side street toward Lake Michigan. When I was nearly to the lake I had a feeling of déjà vu before the polished entrance of a brownstone and realized I had been there with my parents nearly four decades ago, and that these daffy people had owned a huge collection of Lalique glass.

I turned west for a few blocks then walked through a piss-smelling pedestrian underpass, and then farther west along the beach. I sat on a park bench needing to collect my thoughts but was distracted by the story of one of my mother's friends, whose corgi named Ralph had found a shoe on the beach with a foot still in it. Chicago detectives call these
partials
. Finally I was calmed by glistening Lake Michigan, which, though it lacked the clarity of Lake Superior, was overwhelming enough to remove the thought of a severed foot.

Five months after Donald's death I still sense strongly the continuing vacuum that once was his body. Sometimes the vacuum struggles to resume his bodily shape but what is most real is the presence of the voice, and the occasional scent of raw lumber and cement, and occasionally the scent of sun on his skin. Now I can hear him say as he did farther
up the beach on a park bench near Mother's house in Evanston, “I wonder if there are any fish out there in front of us?” And then he turned to the vast skyline of Chicago and said, “There must be a mile of bedrock or they couldn't raise buildings like that. They must have had a bunch of people who knew what they were doing.” On our infrequent trips Donald, Herald, and Clare would eat three or four of those crappy-style Chicago hot dogs teasing me for squeamishness.

Uncle Fred wrote me a fine letter from Hawaii last week. There was a fascinating paragraph on all of the delusions the death of a loved one can bring upon those left behind. He quoted a Japanese philosopher whose name has slipped my mind: “No changing reality to suit the self.” I showed the letter to Clare, who became angry and walked away. She finally admitted to me that she thinks her departed father has become a bear. I view this as insane though I know it exists in Chippewa lore. I think she spent so much time up on the Yellow Dog Plains because she was looking for Donald as a bear. The two of them used to fish the Yellow Dog when we visited Clarence in Marquette. I didn't say so to Clare but I was certainly pleased when the season for bear hibernation had arrived.

Sitting there on the park bench I abruptly thought that “No changing reality to suit the self” is too austere for the actual human condition. My dreams have to be part of reality and they aren't susceptible to rules. I'm a fairly clearheaded human and understand that despite all the diversions our culture offers us there's no escaping the pain of his death. There are no palliatives, or at least none that work for me.
Way back in college I remember an anthropology professor saying, “Primitive people think that when they talk to God He's listening and that some sort of answer can be expected.” As Herald likes to say, “I can't get my head around this.”

By absurd coincidence I can see Vera and David approaching in the distance. Actually it's logical because the hotel is close and he's deeply claustrophobic. When we were in Zihuatanejo we took a little panga south and walked his favorite beach, which is fifty miles long. We saw the coxcomb-shaped dorsal fins of passing schools of fish that he said are called roosterfish. I keep stupidly thinking that he could have done all of his logging and mining research in a couple of years instead of twenty but then his head was full of knots that no human hands would untie. Father had to die first and then the knots apparently began to loosen. You wonder how life can be so errantly determined but it is. For instance, in my earliest teens I had seen Donald around school but only as a leading member of the athletic clique. At the time I was busy behaving poorly and reading English novels, which were able to divert me from my life. And then there was that hot summer morning when Clarence and his son Donald were digging behind the garage to shore up the tilting foundation. Laurie and I made them lemonade. I said to Donald, “Why won't you look at me?” and then he did. I was immediately conscious that he was the man on earth least like my father. They're still a hundred yards away but Vera waves. The idea of them together is so appalling that it's acceptable, somewhat in the way ancient peoples would have accepted Greek or Roman mythology. I laugh at this
idea. Your father Zeus rapes the girl you love but keep yourself from. You wander thirty years but after killing your father you return to her. Something like that. How does this story end? Who knows. I only know how my own story ended. I'm trying to have the heart to begin again.

Vera approaches with David far behind, doubtless thinking about the theory and practice of Lake Michigan.

“I saw you hiding in the shoe store. I didn't tell David. You weren't ready for the carnival?” she laughed.

“Not quite yet.” We embraced and turned to David, who picked up half a dog-chewed Frisbee and put it in a trash can. My thoughts returned to appalling love. “You know that I told him that he should go see you. I didn't think you'd end up in the same bed.”

“Why not? I always thought of him as my first boyfriend. That book you sent me said that it's hard to live with the unlived life.” She was properly grave.

“Yes, our Episcopal priest who was mostly a nitwit used to talk about the sins of omission and the sins of commission as if life were a bundle of meat tied up with a butcher's string.” She took my hand brushing a finger across my wedding ring. I was errantly thinking about Thomas Hardy and wondered if those dozens of English novels I read so early had done my mind harm. I would confuse the fictional vicars with the local Episcopalian priest, whose first priority was dinner. My father would send him prime beef roasts from Pfaelzer's in Chicago. When I took Herald and Clare to England in their teens I was daily amazed at how well the novels had prepared me. Donald wouldn't fly. He'd always say, “I'll hold down the fort and feed the dogs.”