Among the Ten Thousand Things (18 page)

“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. God our Father, thank you for your love and favor. Thank you for bringing a member of our family to share with us today.”

In the restaurant, Jack was peeking. Or, no, Jack was plainly watching, his chin not even lowered, his hands folded on the table but not in prayer, not pressed at the palms like his mother’s or Charles’s. Here is the church; here is the steeple. Charles said the words, and they both were holding their eyes closed, not that Jack believed it. Who closes their eyes, really, in the middle of a restaurant—praying, as with kissing, who keeps their eyes really closed? Jack smiled, watching. Go ahead, call me out. Both of you, either of you, pretending not to see.

“Bless our loved ones who are near us and keep safe those that are far away. May we always be mindful of the needs of others, for Jesus’s sake, amen.”

Open the doors, and here are the people. Phyllis and Charles returned to the room, to the middle of the mostly empty Shining Star Tavern where his mother’s chief worldly concern had been getting a table.

The restaurant was Charles’s idea, to save Phyllis from having to unwrap or defrost an extra meal. They took the Lincoln there, his stepfather driving, his mother on her special ass pillow, Jack in back like a little boy.

“This is our son,” Phyllis said on the way in, addressing herself to the hostess, the waitress, the busboy, to everyone but the signed photographs on the walls, George Foreman and Walter Cronkite. The best use of family was having it in front of other people. Jack won them fewer points than a grandchild, and Wade, the seventeen-year-old kid who poured their water, didn’t bear much witness, but it was something.

“They’ve redone the menu,” Phyllis told him when they were seated, flapping her heavy napkin out of its fleur-de-lis fold.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Redone the prices too.”

His mother got her tonic with a garden salad, lots of pepper and dressing on the side. “And one of your chops,” she said, patting Charles on the hand. “I never eat enough to make it worth ordering my own. Just one of his chops, that’ll do me.”

Jack got the ahi tuna, which came with wasabi molded into the shape of a leaf, outer Houston’s soft stab at the urbane. Charles’s chops turned out to be lamb, with sprigs of rosemary and a porcelain vat of electric-green jelly center plate. Phyllis made a show of choosing the smallest and most well-done piece of meat.

“Falls off the bone. He likes ’em bloody. Don’t you, Charles?”

“Still saying baa.”

“Jackie, I don’t know how you eat that. I just cannot stand the smell of fish.”

“It’s very good, Mother. Good for you too. You should try it.”

“Jack, how’s work?”

“Now, is that going to smell up everything?” his mother asked. “Because we don’t eat fish.”

“You eat shrimp.”

“I do not.”

“Charles’s jambalaya.”

“Tell us about the art world, Jack.”

“That isn’t—that’s not fish. Is it, Charles? Shrimp’s not fish.”

Jack wished he could order a drink, just a beer. Phyllis went through three sodas because what’s that they say, about old habits. She guzzled tonic like it was wine, and wasn’t she fooling herself with everything, not just the drink but the man, with Charles? Who the hell is this guy? Jack wanted to say. Who invited
him
. Simon’s first Christmas in Houston, the boy not yet two, Phyllis’s special friend had been an extra place setting at the table. The first time they said grace before dinner, the first time the holiday had seemed to have anything to do with Jesus.

“Shrimp’s a crustacean,” Charles said now and nodded.

“That’s right. It’s a prawn.” Phyllis tapped her glass with a long, ovaled nail.

The drink is no drink and Charles is no John—Jack’s father, John. John Shanley wouldn’t know her now, the woman he’d married, she who’d bronzed poolside for hours, who’d held her liquor and herself in mink stoles. She who’d said
shit
under her breath and
goddamn
and who’d believed in, what? Not God. You traded in your silver Cadillac for a maroon town car and you let your anger atrophy, but it is not gone.

“Jack, I believe you were about to tell us how work is going,” Charles said.

“It’s all right. Don’t know how much you’ve followed.”

“You tell us about it.” Charles dabbed a chop in mint jelly. “Any new developments?”

“Here and there.” His mother’s husband didn’t read the
Times.
His mother’s husband read the
Chronicle.
Still, there were always old friends someplace clipping newsprint with scissors from the junk drawer, dating the back and sending it, paper clipped and envelope tucked, out into the world.
In case you missed it! Hope you and yours are well.
Hope you and yours are still kicking. “Can’t please everyone, but, you try to please a few people.”

Phyllis was scraping her plate with a butter knife.

“Now how about those Yankees?” Charles said. “How are your Yankees doing?”

“I don’t know. I guess they’re doing well.”

Charles smiled. “Not what I’ve heard.”

The ride back existed in only two moments, the first as they came slow around a long bend, Charles up front saying, “We get some deer crossing, this area.” Jack knew that they did. Even in the dark this road was familiar to him. Then, the sudden light bouncing off the garage door, the blank page that had snuck up on him.

Inside, Charles got down on the living-room floor in front of the hearth.

“I don’t see why you need to bother with that thing, honey.” Phyllis sat on the sofa, stockinged feet slipped out of her soft brown loafers. “In high summer.”

“I’ve put on the AC, you won’t cook.” Charles clicked on the gas fire. “Jack should see how this works. Heck of a lot better than the logs you all used to use.”

“Much better,” Jack said. His mother and Charles had redone the whole fireplace and flue the first fall after they married. This was back eight or nine years ago—no, Jesus, eleven years: Kay had just been born. A chimney sweep had come and taken a steel brush to the insides, scrubbing off years of soot from the kindling they’d burned when Jack’s father was alive. Now they got the chimney sweep in annually. There was some reason for it, a fire that caught once when Charles was younger—Jack didn’t know the details—something like that had made him careful. One of those perfect-fit stories that make you say people aren’t all that hard to figure out. Maybe it’s true.

Phyllis went up to bed after the fire show, citing and reciting instructions for the clock in Jack’s bedroom, how it ran a little slow and how the alarm got set, and Jack went with his stepfather to the dim and woodsy study, Charles’s brown-Bible world, a cave apart from the fringed rugs and white wire baskets. When Jack lived there, it had been a sewing room and always empty. Now a gold-plated cross hung nailed to the wall, mixed with Charles’s diplomas, degrees in business. A years-old cactus sat inert on the windowsill.

From his shirt pocket Charles produced the key to a cabinet behind his desk, and from there he pulled a half-emptied bottle of port. The only fermented thing let into the house, residents aside. “So, take a seat.” The cork came out with a hollow pop, like an echo of the real sound. “It’s a wonderful thing, you know, having children.”

Jack stayed staring at the shelves, the embossed spines, discards from the local library. “How’s this?” he asked, holding up a Reagan biography, its edges woolly with dust.

“You may borrow it. I want to tell you, it is a very powerful thing for Phyllis, seeing you grown. A man, with a family of his own. Please.”

Jack took the glass, the measly pour of port, and sat.

“I know how proud she is of you. You should see the way she talks—about her son out in New York, how you’ve got yourself all this acclaim, about how there’s the prestige—”

“It isn’t—”

“Well all right, all right but that’s what she likes to say to people. She likes to tell them all that, and about the kids and how you’re married and how it’s two kids, a boy grandson and a girl grandchild, and she says if she died now, she’d be complete. That she has everything. Now, I know a lot of that has to do with how proud she is of you, this life she sees you leading.” Charles paused for a sip of garnet wine, but he must also have considered this a good breaking point, thought that even if the whole mountain of his argument was not yet visible, at least the mist had begun to clear.

For Jack, fog. “Thank you. That’s always, it’s nice to hear those things.”

“Here’s where we have our problem. Here’s where I’m a little worried. You say things are all right at home.”

“I do.”

“And work, your career.”

“Still do.” Jack followed Charles’s gaze to where it dropped on the desk between them, to the sand timer with the heavy marble bottom and brass casing. Phyllis used to keep it in the sun-room with what curios she deemed nautical. Called an hourglass, though it measured only thirty minutes. The upper half was empty now and for a bad moment Charles looked about to flip it over.

“Where I’m worried is where a grown man comes, flies, by himself—a married father—to stay with his mother on no notice—”

“I would have called—”

“—and behaves as though he were asked to come. And I don’t just mean that he’d been invited. I mean unhappy to be here. As though it were not a matter of his own free, human volition.”

“I thought we had a nice time tonight.” Of course it hadn’t been a nice time, but it was unlike Charles to say so, or to notice. Dinner had been grim because their lives were like that, grim. Jack had been, he thought, only a fly on the wall. “The restaurant was a good idea. Thank you for choosing that.”

“All right.” Charles took another sip of port, set the glass down and turned it. It was a nervous thing to do, again not what Jack would have expected of him. He was working toward something, the old man. “Jack, now, I’m not your father. Never was one. God didn’t bless my first wife and myself with children. Instead he saw fit to take her away, I’ll never know why. But he blessed you, and Deborah, and I don’t suppose it isn’t trying. In ways I can’t imagine.”

“Okeydokey, Charles.”

“I can’t tell you how to be a parent, except to tell you words from one wiser than I. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’ ”

Jack stood and turned back toward the bookcase. Books on theology, golf, the theology of golf. “That’s a lovely sentiment.” Rubbing his neck, he realized it hurt.

“You should be with your family.”

Jack spun around. “Why is it so hard to conceive that maybe I wanted to check up on her, see how she was doing? My own mother.”

“We seem to be missing each other.”

“It’s not like she hasn’t had her problems. It’s not like there couldn’t be any cause for concern.”

Charles pressed his fingertips together and touched them to his mouth. When he moved them away again, he said, “The thing I’m asking, Jack, is what do you need from her? What do you need that she can give you. Money?”

Jack was furious all of sudden. He’d been mad and now he was furious. “Does she even eat? Does she even eat food? Who’s to make sure she does that, Charlie, you?” He came right up against the desk, standing over his stepfather, towering. “No. You probably have her going into raptures.
Seeing God.
”

“Don’t turn this onto God. We’ve been down that path already. Don’t make about God what is about me.”

No, this is about something older even than you, Charles. Jack saw his problem in Charles’s question: What do you need that she can give you. To which the answer was: Nothing? There is nothing I need that she can give me. Which is not the same as, There is nothing I need.

The problem was older than Charles, but Jack was too old for the problem. Such things expire. Your mother never would take the full weight of you, even when you were small and tried to be easy. Now you are heavy and her bones are weak; now is not the time to try.

“I know what you think.” Charles leaned back against his chair, belly buoyed up as though separate, a large egg nesting under his checkered shirt. “I know what you think of me, my life. And I sure know how you feel about God. What I don’t know is what you feel about your mother, but I am going to hope and pray and give you
benefit of the doubt
that you wish her only well. As I said, I’m not your father. But so long as we’ll be under this one roof, I suggest, and suggest strongly, that we all put on a nice face until you get on that plane.”

Jack spent the next day up in his room or out by the pool when he remembered it. In the bathroom he’d had a small proud moment finding his old purple trunks still fit, though in profile under the good lighting he had to admit that they hung not quite like before. His legs were thinner—that was what caused the nylon to gape out around his thighs. Also his ass had bloomed full. Maybe it was no real achievement, for thirty-year-old trunks still to fit. Was anything outgrowable that had a drawstring. Surely it had not always been this hard to see his feet.

“Why didn’t you just take the key?” his mother said when he told her where he’d been. This was in the dining room, where sunlight still papered the walls but where, at six-thirty, it was dinnertime. Phyllis said
the key
because technically it was a shared pool, though because only the houses around their cul-de-sac were granted access, there was no lifeguard, and, while the women were supposed to wear swim caps, no one ever did.

“Don’t need a key.” Jack unsheathed his paper napkin from its porcelain holder. He didn’t need a key because the fence around the pool was low and, like most every partition in the neighborhood, trespassable. When he went for a swim he still tucked his wallet in his shoe, but right at the heel, not even fingering it up into the toes.

“People will think—well, they won’t know who you are,” his mother said, passing around a limp salad. Dinner at the house was Phyllis slicing a beefsteak tomato on Bibb lettuce and delivering to her son and husband a half can of tuna each.

“I’ll tell them then,” he said, reaching for the bread basket. A grid of rolls, nicely thawed and reheated, that was dinner too, and a saucer of mayo with a miniature spoon, recurrently seesawing onto the table. Jack, since that morning’s grapefruit, had already felt himself going hungry. He tried surrendering to it, embracing it as an ascetic would. Little food, plus the sun and swim. Not that the pool was much exercise—he mostly floated—but for the elixir chlorine. After a dip he liked to air-dry on his stomach, mouth resting on his bleached-smelling arms, and breathe deep, sucking up the arm hairs, which danced with the nose hairs and tickled his nostril walls.

“From their
houses
you’ll tell them?” His mother’s eyes ticktocked an appeal to Charles, who sat sorting the church mail, slitting envelopes open with a butter knife. She’d made her voice loud so as to reach, not just Charles, people in other rooms.

“No, guess not. Guess I’ll just wave.”

Other things chlorine did: It cleared his back of teenagery blemishes, drying them into pickable white nothings. It sluiced orange fudge from his ears, exhumed the crunchies deep inside his belly-button pit. Pool water purged him by the swallow or noseful, doses that made sterile his lungs and empty stomach. He basked monastic on his holey towel.

Later, upstairs on his invertebrate bed, Jack sat and he sank. Suddenly very close to his knees. The lamp went on with a tick. In the middle drawer of the nightstand, an old spoon, forsaken. He used to smuggle up ice cream, cups of yogurt, in zippered jackets. Phyllis had complained to the maid about missing silver.

His mother, this house, Charles, always they had this effect, of reminding him why he’d built what life he had, away. No reason it should be any different this time, only a hopeless hope for something else. For the feeling of home, which he was nearly sure he used to feel, somewhere here.

He bent between his knees and drew up the quilt. He saw the curve of his own weight dipped low between the bed frames. Also, the thing he was looking for, the orange rotary phone he’d had since high school, wound in all its cords. He dropped onto his knees and crawled with it to the jack by the window, where he used to lie on the floor and look out at the sky and talk to girls, or friends from his terrible band.

The phone worked—a surprise, hearing that digital ohm. His finger was slow to find the numbers, pulling each one through and waiting for the dial to whir back around so that it felt like he was calling from another time, when he was another person. The rotary made him young and tender toward himself. The rotary and Deb, the careful way she answered, not recognizing the number, and him saying, “Hi, it’s me.”

“God,” she said somewhere in Rhode Island. “I saw the area code and thought your mother—what’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, no. I’m just, losing my mind.” He walked his elbows out behind him, easing himself down until he was lying back that same way he used to. “Probably I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying.”

“You’re right.” He fingered the spiral cord, uncoiling it and wrapping it around his finger the opposite way. “Probably I’m not dying.”

She asked if he’d been drinking.

“I’ve been with my mother.”

“Why on earth would you go there? I’m sorry.
I’m
a little drunk.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing, talking to Gary. It got late.”

“Well, so.” He let go the cord and watched the bendy orange twist stubbornly back to form. “How is Gary? The worm.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Okay, fine, I’m not. He’s a worm, but I’m not saying so. Ignore me.”

Like Ruth, Deb laughed when nothing was funny. Her laugh now meant: Right, ignore you. You make it so easy for anyone to ignore you.

“Would you put the kids on please?”

“You could try in the morning. You could call around ten.”

“I think,” pressing his fingers to his lids, “I’ll be at church then,” and that she really did find funny.

“So,” Deb said. “How’s the Arizona project?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay. Anything from Stanley?”

“How can I care about all that while this is going on?”

“You mean multitask? I don’t know, Jack. You always seemed to before.”

“I know I’ve been…not all the way here. Or there, I guess. You know, for years—ever since that September stuff—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t
use
that.”

“Well, but it’s true. I’m not using it, but it scared me.”

“Of course you’d say it’s work. Of course you say that.”

“Let me finish, please. Before you say. You know how I get, these things, they carry me. What next. It’s all I was thinking about: What next. Every day, what next. And nothing was good enough, and everyone had their eyes on me.”

“With bated breath.”

“Don’t—You were there. You know what I mean.”

“I
was
there.”

“But what you don’t know—or what
I
didn’t—and I am trying to tell you something here, all right? I really, really am.”

“What?”

“Is that, sleeping with someone…”

“Sleeping with someone
what,
Jack?”

“Yes, okay? Yes, she flattered me. She admired me. Like it was important, what I was doing. I think I thought if I could just hang on to that feeling—”

“Vampires do that. Parasites. You can’t fuck somebody and have that not hurt us.”

“Why?”

“Because those are the
rules
.”

“This was never supposed to touch us.”

“This
is
us. Every time you chose to be with her, you chose not to be with us.”

“People don’t have a limited amount of—affection, of interest.”

“People have a limited amount of
time
.”

“But, Debby, we fuck up. You of all people should know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing. You know what it means.”

“Don’t you use that either.”

“But why? It’s how we happened. I,
we
fucked up.”

“Please do
not
go there with me now.”

“I’m sorry. I was making a point. You there?”

“It was a shitty, bullshit point.”

“I know.

“It’s your birthday tomorrow. Deb? You didn’t think I’d forget?”

“Wish I could.”

“Happy almost birthday.”

“You stopped talking to me about your work.”

“I didn’t know that bothered you.”

“I was so, I don’t know, honored, or flattered, when you wanted my opinion. That you thought I could help you. I didn’t know a thing about art.”

“You knew more than you thought you did. Instinct.”

“But I was so young, you know, and a
dancer.
God. I’m not a lot of things I used to be.”

“You are more than you used to be.”

“You talked to her about your work.”

“It’s how we met.”

“You stopped wanting that in me.”

“I want that in you now.”

“Oh. Fuck off.”

“So what
did
you think of the show?”

“Fuck off.”

“Come on, tell me. What does it matter now?”

“Well. I thought you made a mistake.”

“Obviously.”

“No, stupid. I mean the Tigger.”

“The whatter?”

“The stuffed animal, the Tigger.”

“The tiger?”

“He’s from Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“They sell those all over the world, though, right?”

“In Ramallah?”

“I didn’t say in Ramallah.”

“It’s just funny to me, since you bought it for him.”

“I bought it. For Simon.”

“Yes, of course for Simon.”

“Will you let me come see you?”

“Don’t, not—no.”

“What you were saying about time, how when I was away from you I was with her, how we only have so much time?”

“I remember.”

“You assume that when I was away from you, I was closer to her, but I was far from her too. I was running from her the minute it started, my own mistake I was running from, and where I ran was into my work. You see? It’s why people have these messes. We make our lives impossible places to be, and that’s when we do our work.”

“Not everyone is like you.”

“Well, that’s what this was for me, more than anything. This was about work. Deb?”

“You want to know if I believe you, or if I believe you believe it?”

“Both. I do believe it.”

“Both is I don’t care.”

“Okay.”

“Both, I don’t think it matters. Not one shitty bit.”

“I understand. I get it. You know, I went to her apartment. She wasn’t home, but I wanted to tell her what—”

“You saw her?”

“She was gone, I said.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, after she sent the package.”

“So the very next day you’re there.”

“To tell her off. I wanted her to know what she did.”

“I don’t get why that mattered, to tell her that.”

“Because she should know what her actions—”

“Who cares what she knows? You do, obviously. You saw her?”

“No, are you not listening? I didn’t see her.”

“Too bad, maybe next time.”

“Listen to me.”

“
No.
I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you I don’t trust you I don’t trust you. Say what you want; I won’t believe you. It’s too much. Definitely,
definitely
do not come here. You will not be welcome here.”

She’d been down in the kitchen when they started talking, though she was vaguely aware, in the interim, of being other places too. Vaguely up the stairs, vaguely down the hall. Touching her face, absently, in the bathroom, in the angled mirrors where Rockettes of her receded endlessly. Staring into the empty hall closet, not seeing. She was at some point sitting at the top of the stairs and at some point sitting at the bottom. The phone warmed and sweated her hand.

There, on the last step, she became aware of her breathing.

“Deb, don’t—don’t do that,” the voice in her ear was saying. “You can’t say that. Please, Debby, don’t do that to me. Don’t tell me you would have let me come if I hadn’t told you that.”

She did not think she could tell the voice anything. Her throat had cracked open, and in place of lungs she had two produce bags. They seized, fuller and emptier than her actual lungs had been ever.

“What’s—Deb?”

These bags! They took so much air and couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. She thought: I am a bicycle pump. I am some kind of wind-powered machine. Her breath was something being done to her, violent and involuntary, like sneezing.

“Breathe. Debby? Baby, breathe. What’s wrong?”

Wrong was that they’d talked themselves to where it felt natural, and it was good to hear Jack’s cello voice, the one every other man’s was higher or lower than. But talking wasn’t natural, the words weren’t right, and she’d let him too far in. That was what all the moving around had been about, as though new rooms could keep the minutes from collecting and catching up with her. Of course, everywhere she went, there he was.

She let the phone down but could still hear the hum of him against the step. She stayed that way for she didn’t know how long. “I’m okay.” Seeing if it felt true. She picked up the phone and said it again. And yes, she’d thought of telling him, yes, that if he hadn’t confessed to her that last part, about going to see the girl, she would have let him come. It would be easy to say, but cruel, and untrue. “I wouldn’t have let you come anyway.”

“How can you make up your mind without seeing me?”

How was the phone this hot. She switched hands and wiped her palm on the step. “Because you’ll come and you’ll be sweet, and it won’t be real, is the point.”

“You’re afraid it will be good.”

“Obviously. Obviously I am.”

“Fear is never a good reason.”

“We’re afraid of the things that hurt us. That, repeatedly, hurt us.”

There was a quiet, and when he spoke again she almost didn’t believe it, that this was the same—well. “You can’t do it, you know. Officially, you can’t make it so I can’t see my kids.”

“What, you mean legally?”

“That’s your word.”

“Wow. That’s impressive, thank you. That’s nice.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I’m just hanging up.”