The Weight of Gravity (20 page)

             
Max saw them take a booth in the corner. 
What type of man would Mel find attractive, anyway?
 
Is he a regular boyfriend-kind-of-relationship, or just a business partner?
 
And why do you care, Max?

             
“You care because when you stop caring, you die,” Tommy told him.

             
“Sorry, Tommy, didn’t mean to be thinking out loud.”

             
“Is there any other way to think?” Tommy wanted to know.

             
Max stole glances toward the corner.  Mel laughed and reached across the table to touch Shane’s face. 
What was that?
 
She never did that with me.
 
I did get to see her naked, though.  That was something, right?
  She maintained eye contact with the cowboy and it annoyed Max even more.  Shane was a business partner, she’d said, and Max was the wounded animal she was nursing back to health.  Okay, he knew where everyone stood. 
But, they don’t look like they’re talking about concrete over there.

Max decided it was time to leave.  More alcohol wasn’t going to kill any demons running though
his
mind.  He shook hands with Tommy, arranged to buy him another drink, and headed for the door.  He glanced to the corner –
a friendly wave goodbye seems appropriate
– but Mel was so engrossed in conversation, she didn’t look up.  Fine, no problem, Max thought.

He headed for the ranch, but six miles outside Cottonwood, Max pulled into the
Shady Grove
trailer park.  It was smaller than most, only about twenty or so homes. No swimming pool or community room, no sidewalks or paved roads separating the trailer sites. 
Shady Grove
was thirty acres total, occupying the southeast corner of the Gate Access highway interchange with highway fifty-four.  Had he turned left, he’d be a couple miles from the ranch.  Turning right took Max through the middle of the park, toward the trailer where his mother lived ... and died.  It was also the place where he and Erika first made love.  Max stopped the car in front of an empty concrete slab, just shy of the space where his mother’s trailer had been. 

Two weeks prior to the big event with Erika, Max asked Mom if he could use her place to make Erika dinner and watch a movie.  She told him it would delight her “to the far reaches of heaven” – she talked like that a lot -- to have Max entertain his “little angel” in her home.  She then began rushing around the cramped trailer, picking up clothes and coffee cups, as if the date was that evening.  Regardless of his age, Mom always spoke to Max, and treated him, as if he were eight or nine years old. 

On the evening of their special date, Mom made her exit as Max began boiling noodles.

“You kids have fun.  Behave, but have loads of fun.  Barney and I will be out all evening ... all evening,” she repeated.  Barney was Mom’s latest boyfriend, even though it would be another year before she’d divorce Nathan. 

              Max planned the evening carefully.  He’d make a meaty spaghetti sauce from scratch and serve it over angel hair pasta.  Salad, French bread, and delicate pastries served with coffee, would be their dessert.

             
Erika and Max knew going into the evening what was going to happen.  They’d planned it together.  Conversation across the tiny table was forced, innocuous niceties spilling out carelessly through mouths stuffed with pasta.  They were rushing, but the evening was not about getting to delicate pastries served with coffee.  They wanted each other, now, in this moment. 

They decided after dinner that dessert could wait.  Max took her hand, pulling her gently from her seat, and led her down the narrow hallway to the spare room.  He’d stayed here before, on nights spent nursing his mother through her drinking binges, so he thought of the room – and more importantly the bed – as his own.  He turned her around and she pulled herself up onto the spread.  They began gently, exploring familiar territory they’d roamed on previous occasion, but Max soon touched her in ways he’d only dreamed or written about in his journals.  He studied her face, the way she’d bite her lower lip, or how her eyes would suddenly open wide -- slight changes in her expression fueled his passion.  He was fascinated by the way her incredibly curly hair splayed seductively across the pillows.  Max thought at one point that she was going to cry.

“Please,” she whispered.

“Have I hurt you?”

“No.  I want you ... now.”

Max cautiously removed her clothes, unsure as his fingertips worked –
was it a snap or a button, did this garment go down over her hips or up over her shoulders
-- then he stood next to the bed and undressed.  He watched her hands flit across her own body – concealing modestly one moment, but then she’d spread her arms along the sheet and over her head, opening up, as if to say, “this is me ... am I okay ... is my body what you hoped it would be ... is it as beautiful as your body is to me?”  They gasped in unison when he entered her, and both were silent with their disappointment a moment later when Max uncontrollably poured himself out and she felt the heat in her thighs.

They put on bathrobes Max bought at the J.C. Penney store the day before.  He’d fantasized they’d be on their honeymoon at the Plaza
Suites in New York.  He piled paper-thin pillows against the shoddy headboard, rested her back against them, and asked her to wait.  He returned with a plate of pastries and two cups of coffee.  Sitting on the bed, they talked, quickly shedding any embarrassment about the awkwardness of their first venture into total intimacy.  Erika was taking a bite of pastry when Max took it from her and tossed it on the end table.  She smiled when he pulled open her robe and began to nuzzle her breasts.  She helped him with his robe and they began again, but this time they were intent on taking it slower, eager to explore, to pleasure the other and enjoy everything. 

“Shall we try this again,” he whispered, his lips just inches from hers.

“Oh, yes, please,” she said, closing her eyes as he moved down her middle.  “Then can I have my pastry....” she joked, but his movements across her body stole her breath.

The ease and depth of their lovemaking this time would stay with them always and often in the time they were together.

Sitting in his car now, Max could not remember the last time he and Erika made love.  Was it in her room with the pink shades, or at the cabin in Pine Meadow?  For the second time in almost as many days, Max felt incredibly sad.  This dingy trailer park, he now realized, had been a place of so much love and deep sorrow.  It was here, too, where they found his mother, nude and sprawled over a bundle of bed sheets on the couch.  Incessant howling from her two starving collies alerted the neighbors to call police.  They thought at first she was merely in a drunken sleep, but a trickle of blood on her lips said something was terribly wrong.  The autopsy noted bleeding in her stomach and that cirrhosis had ravaged her liver.  She was fifty-five.

Erika reluctantly gave in, but she didn’t see that she had a choice.  He was already suspicious and would have been more so if she’d made excuses and refused.  Mercifully, Garner was quick about it.  It was routine, predictable, crude – the worse kind of sex.  The experience would sicken Erika, but Garner would be satisfied.

When it was done, he fell asleep and Erika found herself digging through a closet in the basement.  The boxes she wanted were there, covered in dust beneath a clutter of holiday wrapping and ribbon. 

Lifting the lid of one particular box Erika dug through stacks of letters bound with green and yellow yarn until her fingers came to the velvet cover of the journal.  Max had dated the first page on the day she left to spend six weeks in music camp at Interlochen, Michigan, the summer before their senior year.  The journal constituted a single love letter that filled every page of the book.  He gave it to her the day she returned in early August.

             
He wrote first about his daily activities –
Sitting in the coffee shop ... thinking of you.  Visited the bookstore and felt you all around me ... held your hand in fiction.
  He wrote of walking in the desert in the moonlight, weaving through mesquite and prickly pear, and whispering her name over and over again.  It had been decades since Erika read Max’s poetry.  It was unsophisticated, but honest.  "Poetry was never your forte, but it worked magic on my youthful heart," she whispered, then began to read.

Take my hand, my love.  Let us walk where all can see

              Let us brave a troubled tempest where few would rush to be

             
Tomorrow holds no promise, no dawning waits for us

             
The time is now, the moment sweet ... your arms, your lips, your touch             

Erika folded herself into an overstuffed chair where the light was better and continued to read, sometimes whispering the words. 

Say, since I love you, please say you love me too

              I find I like myself the best when I find myself with you

This day upon a lonely sea, our hearts conjoined we cast

Say, since you love me, please say our love will last

Come dream with me, come give me life, for without you there is none

              Two souls converge along a path, destined to be one.                           

              Max wrote about his dreams of being a novelist, to travel and to watch her play with the great orchestras of the world.  On the last page he wrote,
Today you return and life begins again,
then ended the journal with a final poem.

Someone was walking in the room above.  Erika slid the journal under the chair far enough beyond the fabric skirt to conceal it, and left the basement.  The first floor was awash in the glow of recessed nightlights along the baseboards.  She heard a popping sound coming from
the kitchen.  Entering the room she saw Jay standing in front of the open refrigerator, holding a can of soda.

“Where have you been, Jay?”

“Hangin’ with friends.”  He closed the refrigerator.  “What’s up, Mother Dearest?” he asked, smiling broadly.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Late?”  He laughed.

“Who were you with?”

“What’s it matter, Mother?  With some friends, that’s all.  We sat around shooting shit, you know?”  Jay sipped his soda.

“It’s two in the morning.”  Jay turned to leave.  “Look at me!”

“Oh, come on, Mom.  I’ve had a great evening ... lots of laughs.  Don’t spoil it with an inquisition, please.  I lost track of time, happens to everyone.  Don’t you want me to have fun with my friends?”

“You could’a called, Jay.”

“I did.  No one answered,” he said with a hint of venom.  “I thought, ‘hell, if they’re out, then I can stretch the time a little.’  Didn’t mean to stay so late, you know?  Just happened.  Sorry, okay?  Stop worrying.”

“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t question your being out at this hour ... with whoever ... doing whatever?”

“You’re a great mother, okay?  Thank you for caring so much.  Means loads to me.” He bounced over and gave her a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug.  “There.  All better.  Now, can I go to bed?”

“Don’t mock me, Jay!”

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?” he screamed, slamming the soda can on the counter so hard it spilled.

Erika took a step back.  She’d seen this sudden change in his mood, this rage, once before, on the darkest days --- eight months ago.  It frightened her then and it was scaring her now.  “I want to know where you’ve been, Jay, who you’ve been with, and what you’ve been doing,” Erika demanded
in a crisp, tight tone of voice. 
Keep the upper hand ... don’t lose control ... you’re the parent, he’s the child.

“Why?”

“Because I’m your mother!”

“We already established that, didn’t we?  That’s not something I can do anything about, now is it?”  Jay started up the back stairs.  “God, give it a rest,
Mother
!  You and Dad haven’t been in touch with my life since I was thirteen.” 

“Jay!”

He turned on the second step.  “What do you want ... to talk?  Why don’t you talk to each other, you and Dad, huh?”

“We’re your parents.”

“When it’s convenient.”  He started up the stairs again.

“What do you mean by that remark?”

He stopped, but didn’t turn to face her.  “Look, I’m tired.  I want to go to bed."

“Give me sixty seconds, Jay.  Why are you so unhappy ... so angry?  Talk to me.  Tell me what you’re feeling, why you feel ... felt the need to ... do that shit,” she said, matching his conciliatory tone.