The Other Side of the World (11 page)

“Can we drink to that—and to Max?” Trish asked.

“A splendid idea,” Seana said, and then: “Okay by you, Charlie?”

“Yes,” I said, and would have said more, but was afraid that if I did, I would break down completely.

Trish poured three glasses of Jamison's for us, and, silently, we raised our glasses, clinked them, drank.

Seana spoke, with a brogue: “‘For what could be worse than drink?' the young Irishman asked, and his father answered, ‘Thirst.'”

“So after Nick left us,” Trish said, “I made Lorenzo and Eugenia legal guardians for Gabe, and later on I added that they be guardians for Anna too, because at least if something happened to me, Lorenzo and Eugenia would have the wherewithal to raise them, or to see that they were taken care of, which I knew I couldn't count on Nick for. But now that Nick's gone, I've changed my mind, and I've decided to call my lawyer and ask him to draw up new papers making you two the guardians.”

“But you haven't asked us if we agree to
be
guardians,” Seana said.

“
Do
you?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Seana said. “But a question first: Your departure from this world isn't in the works, is it?”

“No.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then, as judges are wont to say, we'll take it under advisement, okay?” Seana said.

“And you, Charlie?” Trish asked.

“I agree with Seana,” I said. “I'm flattered, Trish—honored, really—but I think we should give it some time. I know what you're like when you get high, and I'm not sure, with the news about my dad, that
I'm
capable of thinking clearly right now, even if I seem to be rational…”

“And you've been off your meds,” Seana said.

“Okay, okay,” Trish said. “Sure. And thank you both very much. Thank you. I feel better now—a
lot
better. I mean, not better that your father's gone, Charlie, but…”

“It's okay,” I said.

“…but even when I go back on my meds—lower dose, right?—and you're gone and I try to get back to what passes for normal life, I know I'm going to stay firm about my decision. I just know it because it feels so
right
—it just does,” she said, and then to me: “Do you still want to have your own kids some day?”

“Yes,” I said.

“If you didn't have any, would that be a loss—something that would diminish your life?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I remember how enthusiastic you were when we talked about maybe having kids together, you and me—but you were calm too—like it was something you'd always known about yourself. It made me care for you a lot.”

“When you and Nick had Gabe,” I said, “I was happy for you and sad for me—that I wasn't the father.”

Trish put her hand on mine. “You weren't, Charlie. I know you worried about that, but you can trust me on this. You're not Gabe's father, okay?”

“Max was just like a mother to me,” Seana said.

“
What?
” Trish said.

“Max was just like a mother to me,” Seana said again.

“Oh,” Trish said, and nodded several times. “Sure. I think I understand.”

“Do you
really
?” Seana said.

“As I was saying,” I said, “my father and Freeman were on their way to a convention somewhere—Baltimore, I think—yes, it was definitely Baltimore because when Max came home he promised to take me to the aquarium there—and Freeman was ragging on one of the guys who check in your stuff curbside at the airport. I don't know if the man was white or black—I don't think my father would have made such a distinction…”

“But if he memorialized the event in prose, he would have,” Seana said. “He would have been specific, so that you would have
seen
the man. You would have believed you
knew
him.”

“I've always pictured the man as being black and toothless—the men who did that work at Bradley were mostly old and black—” I said “—and after Freeman checked his bags and left, my father apologized for the way Freeman had treated him—rude, and no tip to boot—and the baggage guy gave my dad a big grin, and said, ‘Oh that's all right, sir—I've sent his bags on to Los Angeles.'”

“Your father would have done the same had he been in that position,” Seana said. “Max had great empathy—a large capacity for negative capability.”

“I don't see what's negative about what he did,” Trish said.

Seana kissed Trish, and said she'd explain what she meant later. Then, so I wouldn't feel left out, she kissed me too.

“Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fare,” Seana said. “Said the pieman to Simple Simon, let me taste your wares.”

“So?” I said.

“So I met your father and moved in with him on a day in which he'd set out his wares. Nor was he wary. Nor was I. Though he
can at times be wearing. Are you aware of that, Charlie, you only begotten son? Max the pieman, not Simple Simon…?”

“Did you taste them—his wares, I mean?” Trish asked.

Seana started laughing at Trish's question, but, as if seizing her laugh in an invisible fist, stopped abruptly and, slowly and in a low voice, began reciting Max's name, “
Morris Herman Eisner
…
Morris Herman Eisner
…
Morris Herman Eisner
…” and then started punching me, first with one fist and then with the other—left, right, left, right—while continuing to repeat his name: “
Morris Herman Eisner
…
Morris Herman Eisner
…
Morris Herman Eisner
.…”

I didn't try to block her blows, and when she saw I was just going to sit there and take it, she hit me a serious one-two combination, chest and shoulder, after which she got in my face and asked me if I was a wimp or what, and when was I going to hit back.

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Is that a threat or a promise?” she asked and, stepping away, tried to repeat her question—to show she was making a joke—but she couldn't get the words out, and she collapsed on me. “Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, Charlie—what will we do without him? Tell me, please.
Tell
me…”

“What I can do is to write the story you believe he wanted me to write,” I said.

Seana sucked in an enormous batch of air then, and gradually got herself under control. She didn't say anything, but she put an arm around me, which I took as her way of showing approval for my decision. The floor had been descending slowly and steadily, like the near half of a drawbridge falling back to where it was supposed to be, and now that Seana had stopped crying, I figured it was okay for me to let go, and so with her to one side of me, Trish to the other, and Anna holding tight to my
right ankle with two hands, I let myself heave in and out for a while and, my throat good and raw even before I began, I roared out all the curses I knew, and then made up a few new ones.

I
n order to understand Singapore, the most important thing to know, Nick had told me at our UMass reunion, was that you weren't allowed to chew gum there. For natives, chewing gum—or even possession of gum—was a crime punishable by heavy fines, and for foreigners like me and Nick—or for tourists, or for anyone doing business there—cause for immediate deportation. The same went for using a toilet and not flushing when you were done.

There was more: You could be fined for spitting, jaywalking, littering, chewing tobacco, or for owning obscene material, play money, or toy guns. For more serious crimes, there was prison and caning—they were big on caning—and for trafficking in drugs (500 grams of marijuana would do the job), the death penalty. Per capita, Singapore had the highest number of death penalties in the world.

It also had the densest population of any country in the world except for Monaco, and the highest standard of living, along with the most desirable quality of life, especially for business and professional people, of any city or nation in Asia. An island of less than two hundred fifty square miles (not counting about twenty square miles of small islands that were largely uninhabited), it had all been rainforest once upon a time, the way some of Borneo still was.

From a miserably poor third world country (its population was about the same as that of countries like Norway and Denmark—just over five million), it had, in less than half a century, transformed itself into the most efficient place in the world to do business—a completely air-conditioned, high-tech preserve that offered exceptional levels of service, comfort, and safety.

Its harbor was the most gorgeous in the world, Nick claimed, more beautiful even than Hong Kong's. Unusually wide and deep, it could accommodate more than seven hundred vessels at a time, large or small (Singapore became a major east-west port after the opening of the Suez Canal in the late nineteenth century, when it was part of the British empire), and at night, lights sparkling on the water as if they were stars in the darkest of skies, it was especially beautiful. But what, in addition to its physical beauty and technological efficiencies, made Singapore more deliciously inviting than Hong Kong, according to Nick, was that, whereas Hong Kong was vibrant and exciting—Shanghai, Rome, and New York City wrapped up in an exquisite Asian paradise—Singapore was blissfully bland.

To live in Singapore, Nick explained—despite its ethnic mix (Chinese, Maylay, Indian), and despite the food, customs, and traditions that came with these cultures, along with the cultural residue from the British, and from the World War Two Japanese occupation—was to live nowhere. And given what the world was like, Nick had concluded, living nowhere was the place to be.

His theories about living nowhere were hardly new—he'd been pushing the same line at UMass (and not long after he'd quit the football team, early in his junior year—he'd been All Conference at halfback the previous season, with pro scouts showing interest), when he'd carry on about the homogenization and Americanization of the world: how instead of living somewhere, people were now living anywhere.

If you were transported blindfolded to a shopping mall in Houston or Seattle, Atlanta or New Orleans or Boston, he'd point out, and you took off your blindfold, how would you know where you were? All across America, small towns were dying, and the people who lived in them were praying for Wal-Marts and contracts for new prison construction to save them. Large cities, ravaged by crime and drugs, were rotting away, and if and when they renewed themselves, they did so in ways that made them look like every other city trying to renew itself. Whereas until recently most people had grown up
somewhere
—in towns, cities, and neighborhoods whose identities were marked by particular cultures, ethnicities, and traditions—most of us now lived
anywhere
. So that the secret, Nick said, was not to want to drown in yearnings for what things used to be like, or might be like again, but to see that living anywhere was merely a way-station on the road to something infinitely better: to be living nowhere, and that, he said, was what would set you free.

The thing to do, therefore, he argued, was not to get trapped by the past or the future, but—how Zen could you get? he'd laugh—to accept the world and yourself for what they were, to live in the moment, and—not quite as Zen—to rejoice in earthly pleasures. And there was no better place in the world to do this than in Singapore.

After my father had met Nick a few times, he talked about him—this when I'd come home mid-week (I lived on campus at UMass, about a dozen miles away in Amherst) in order to pick up hiking gear for a trip Nick, Trish, and I were planning to Mount Washington—in a way he rarely talked about any of my friends, telling me he found him remarkably intelligent, but cautioning me to be wary of him.

My father was married to his fourth wife at the time, Geraldine Strober, a professor of chemistry at Hampshire College. About seven months later, Geraldine, thirty-six at the time (two decades younger than Max), would die of ovarian cancer, and
my father, honoring her wish not to die in a hospice or hospital, would care for her at home through her final months. On this night, however, she was as delightful and warm—as seemingly healthy—as she'd ever been, telling stories about growing up as an army brat at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, where her father had served, and where her grandfather, a major with the Sixth Infantry, had become friends with Major Tadeo Terriagaki, an officer of the Imperial Japanese Army who spent six months attached to the Sixth Infantry, and who, a few years after his stay at Jefferson Barracks, would figure prominently in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A year or so earlier, my father had heard Geraldine give a lecture on Primo Levi's career as a chemist, and his ingenuity in solving problems relating to paints and solvents. Enchanted, he discovered that she required all her students, whether in basic chemistry courses or graduate seminars, to read Primo Levi, especially
The Periodic Table
and
Survival in Auschwitz
. In assigned papers and end-term exams, she proposed problems of a kind Levi might have faced in his laboratories in Turin or Auschwitz, and would ask students to explain how they would go about solving them, and, for extra credit, to speculate on the relation of Levi's scientific vocation to his literary sensibility.

Max composed an answer to the extra credit question and, under a pseudonym, left it in her Hampshire College mailbox. When she responded with a note saying his was the most brilliant essay she'd received on the subject that semester, but that she didn't recognize the name—Morris Herman—as belonging to one of her students, he revealed his true identity. They were married six weeks later.