Edinburgh (24 page)

Speck's final assistant is a graduate student, a much more professional young man than I was when I worked for him, and he greets me at the funeral home with real pleasure. He's dressed like a true Speck student: gray herringbone tweed coat, with patches on the elbows. A black turtleneck, black jeans, brown oxford shoes. I go in, uncertain of what to expect until I see, at the front, on a pedestal, an urn. I go back out for a moment. Already? I ask.

He left instructions he was to be burned immediately. The student shrugs his tweed shoulders. He abhorred the idea of his body lying around without him in it.

And . . . speakers, I ask.

No, he says. I go back inside.

In the attendees I see that we are all former assistants, most likely. The moderately sized room is full of men and young men of descending orders of age. A familiar reserve, the articulate quiet I learned from Speck, makes the room familiar, and then of course we resemble each other: dark haired, pale, clean-cut but rumpled from reading and bad lighting. Some balding, many with hair that seems to be rising to Speck's example. Bachelors all. Looking at his urn we look at our future. We smile at each other some and trickle out after paying our respects to this last quiet with Speck. No one asks if there are any heirs, as we all know there aren't.

At home, I have a quiet dinner with my mother and father. At the end of it my mother tells me, Freddy's not doing well.

Why not him too, I tell myself.

Do you want to go see him? I'm sure he'd appreciate it. She picks up all our plates and goes to the kitchen. I recognize a pattern for the first time, of how my mother asks me a question and my father waits for the answer.

Yes, I say. My father smiles reassurance. And I call down to tell Bridey and Penny that I'll be a little later than I thought. Tomorrow, I say.

We're using up all the sun, he says. You'd better hurry back.

Penny says something in the background I can't hear and I ask about it. She said, Bridey says, You're never leaving Maine. But she has a plan you'll hear when you get back.

Thick as thieves, I tell myself as I hang up the phone. They're stealing me.

Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it's the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it's what adults have, when they forget what it's like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can't remember what that feels like.

I have to know how Freddy's doing. I could call, but instead I go over to Mrs. Moran's new house. After her husband's death, my mother tells me, she moved. A quick trip through Portland's rain-stained houses, all of them a wrong color for happiness up in this part of town, the part between the stores and the sea. The Eastern Promenade, Munjoy Hill. There's a cemetery here where kids come in and kick the stones down regularly. Because they probably hate the dead for being free from the sights around them.

Her house is near the sea. In a sense all of Portland is near the sea. Red-brick buildings, mostly, in a crest over the land on the rise of hill here, a gentle brick murmur to the slope of the whole town no matter where you are, the slope from where the glacier came through. Don't think this means Portland isn't beautiful; it's why its beautiful. In any case. She stands taking in her mail as I arrive. I barely recognize her. And she doesn't recognize me.

Fee, she says, when I reintroduce myself. Shocking, how you've changed. She takes me inside her dark clean house.

Freddy's my only one, she says, as I sit down. And she flips open a scrapbook. Pictures from the choir, the robes, the rope belts. All that smooth hair gleaming on head after head. Freddy Moran, the book says on the front. And she shows me the clippings of Peter's and Zach's obits.

I'd last seen Freddy in a restaurant in the Old Port. I was home from California, visiting, out to lunch with my mother, who sat, radiantly blond and happy to see her son again, across from me. It was a two-story seafood place, red carpets sanguine in the stained afternoon sunlight that tugged the gauzy sheers in the windows. Captains' mirrors on the walls distorted us all into faraway and tiny shapes. I watched them for a while, thinking, those are the real mirrors.

He moved through my center of vision like a shadow, like a floater bouncing through the fluid of my eye. The room went black like a wick blown by the wind, returning quickly. It was him, I thought. He had turned into an elegantly attractive, clean-cut young man. His gait gave him away, his walk a little faster than the rest of him, as if his legs were always dragging him forward.

To my mother, I said only, as I rose, I have to go say hi to someone. She gave me a crooked smile and consented.

I found him in the downstairs, seated at the bar, a dark, wooden affair. He took me in as I entered, in a way I recognized. He was checking me out. Hi, Freddy, I said, and his eyes opened large, as if they needed more room.

Aphias, he said. Jesus.

As I stood in front of him, I realized I didn't know what it was I would say to him. I was so happy to see him, I had followed the feeling, and not arranged for anything to say. For it remained that we really had nothing to say to each other. Up until that instant, when language there was gathered, like condensation forming on a window, inside us both.

It's been so long, I said. I don't know where to start.

You look great, he said. I heard you were in California.

I'm visiting, I said. It's been great out there. For me.

We were a study in contrasts. I'd adopted a shabby mode of old-man-style clothing in high school and never really gotten far from it. That morning I wore a black T-shirt, a pair of old suit trousers made from charcoal wool, and cordovan leather shoes, on the worn side. I knew I looked sallow from smoking too much. Freddy glowed, rosy-cheeked, smooth-faced, he smelled clean from where I stood, and was dressed in a red polo shirt and khaki pants, brand-new running shoes on his feet. He looked protected, from germs, depressions, extremes of poverty and misfortune. None of this was true, though. Just a marvelous show. Marvelous even as mine was drab.

It was good to see you, he said to me. Uncertain as he said it.

I went back to my table, the world altered. The lunch, flavorless, my mother soundless: I couldn't hear her. I'd look up periodically and see her mouth moving, and I knew she was saying things, but I couldn't hear any of it. All I could think of was what a terrible person I was. How I needed something terrible to happen to me. And years later, looking at the pictures of this in my head, moving in time, resolving one into the next, I can see how it never occurred to me that the reason Big Eric had gone to prison was because he was found, by the law, to be guilty of the crimes. Not me. I was not the one in jail. I wasn't guilty. Was it enough, that the law said it?

Not then.

He'd been wandering the streets in his coats, no pants. In his apartment, his clothes were found, all of them soiled. He was wearing only the coat because it was his only clean thing to wear—he hadn't lost all of his mind. His mother came and burned the clothes, packed up his things and tried to clean the apartment. He'd scraped all the plaster off the walls and painted it blue, she tells me before I leave her house. It looked as though someone had exploded in there. She shuts the book and goes into the other room.

When he gets out of the hospital, she says, returning with a mug of coffee for me, he'll be coming back here.

In his bed at the hospital, he's a tiny map to himself. A reduction. The dementia is now the least of it. I recalled a friend telling me how either his meds or his virus caused his face to hollow as it went for the fat under his skin. Freddy's face has hollowed, and the bed rises a little in a way that is meant to be his body. I stand in the doorway, unsure of how to go into the room. This is the content of our first visit.

5

PENNY PRESENTS HER
idea to me a few days after I return on a warm summer afternoon some ten years after we first met. She's aged well, and here on the patio of the Provincetown seafood restaurant where she's asked me to meet her to talk about this, age seems to have brought to her mostly poise. She'd quit smoking some years ago, reviving what turned out to be a rosy-cheeked complexion, and she'd stopped dying her hair that henna red, finally, and allowed it to be dark brown, a color more like that of a stone than a coin. She plucks at her hair as I approach her through the dozen Perrier umbrellas on the deck and she rises to kiss my cheek, so that I catch the faintest scent of sandalwood. I never think to wear scents, but I like hers and make a note of it. Hello, she says, against my ear.

You look fantastic, I say. Teaching hasn't done a thing to you that's bad.

She's an art teacher now at a private school on the northern coast of Maine. Your fault, she says of it, when she first tells me. You always made it sound so beautiful up there. Where she is now, though, East Knot, is more beautiful than where I grew up. She'd helped me get settled in New York and had then left me there, and I resented it. I tell her so.

It is so beautiful, she says, and her eyes take in the view. I can't imagine being anywhere else. She lifts a glass of iced tea and plucks at it. The men are far away though, she says, and surveys the men around us. Which, this being Provincetown, is mostly what's here. Single men, she adds. Of a particular kind.

She tells me that she's become the swim-team coach. I can't believe it, I tell her. You hate and abhor athletics.

No. I hated and abhorred me, she says. And the tone is so sad, the phrasing so alien, I realize it is both true and something someone else has told her about herself. Like a check mark on a calendar, the ten years since our first meeting is duly noted. Penny, who had red hair and smoked and hated athletes now has brown hair, coaches swimming, smiles, and, she now begins telling me, wants to have a baby. Wants me to be the father.

The lunch arrives: fried fish sandwiches and fries, sparkling water. I am trying to place all of this. You want me to donate the sperm, I say.

Fee. I want to have a child, and when I think about what man I want the child to resemble, considering the amount of time I'll be with him or her, I thought of my oldest friends. I've not known anyone as long as I've known you, besides my family. She smiles and scratches behind her ear. I'll be with the child so long, and it only gets harder as I get older. I don't want to wait to meet some guy I've not yet met. I've got a good job, secure, with housing, at a nontraditional school. I'll be able to have the baby with me. How's a baby at swim practice? Fine. There's every reason to think it's a good time for me. I've been healthy now for years, my gene plasm repaired, I hope, from the hard years.

I'll think about it, I say. The hard years of course means the years when we first knew each other. And in the bright light of the patio, where everything seems to have a sharper harder edge and color, I can see that she will have her way in this, as she had her way in other things, that of what has changed about her, her ability to get me to do what she wants is not included in that.

You'll be my replacement, she says. At the school. I've already told them I think I'm pregnant and that I know of someone.

What? I say. You did what?

It's not like its not going to happen, she says.

And so it is decided, and soon Penny is telling me all the details. Bridey, too. In the attic room of the apartment we have taken for the summer, Bridey tells me he has decided, if I will have him, to accompany me on the move, as I'd asked. I'll be the faculty wife, he says. I've always wanted to grow roses. When I tell him northern Maine isn't much for roses, he tells me he will show me how it can be done. Sure of each other, we go to tell some friends from New York, here for the week, who are frankly confused by my decision, and further by Bridey's.

Well, says one, when we announce the news before getting dressed for a party on the other side of the village, That will mean you guys are off in the middle of nowhere with nothing but each other.

Delightful, Bridey says. Imagine all the lack of interference. The absence of sweet young things looking to poach a husband. This last is a pointed comment to another, silent friend, who walks the house naked until it is time to leave for the beach, where he takes all his clothes off again. Bridey takes my eyefuls in stride, punishing me later by moving all my bookmarks. I'm trying, he says later upstairs, to make sure your attention is properly occupied.

You made me read the same forty pages of
Ulysses
over again, I say, and clap him with it lightly on the head.

You're the one who didn't notice, he says.

I'm practicing, I say, in case I get dumped.

Wedgies tonight, Bridey says.

Bridey. What is he made from? A secret, apparently. He meanders the party that night, looking through everyone there like dresses on a sale rack. I don't know why he comes. I'm the one who likes parties. This one is loud, lots of New Yorkers, the same people we see all year but here they are sunburned, thinner, in bathing suits and T-shirts and Adidas sport mules. Ropey, gleaming bronze flesh alternates with the occasional pale, hairy limb of a newcomer or midweek visitor. I watch Bridey's neck, where his white coral necklace hangs like a wide smile on a string.

I don't remember, Bridey confides, that people used to get this sunburned. Ozone layer really is going. Look at her! She looks like a radiation victim.

When I go to put my arms on his sides he draws them away with his hands. Holds them. Kisses me once on the lips. You really want this shirt, he says. I'll leave it on the bed for you later to look at. While I go buy some more.