How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (26 page)

The Parents Come to Town, but First …

Just leaving the apartment to meet my makers when I hear Philomena's voice on the machine: “Me. You there? Guess not.” Sounding none too eager to find otherwise.

As rapidly as any gunfighter ever unholstered a Colt Peacemaker, I snatch the receiver from its cradle. “Where are you?”

The silence lasts long enough for me to fear I have lost her. “That doesn't really matter.”

“Please come home.”

“I need some time to think.”

“You've already taken the better part of a week. Phil, what are you doing? Where are you?” God, my voice sounds pathetic, tremulous, quavering between tenor and falsetto.

“Things haven't been so great with us lately.”

“I'll be better. I'll be so good you'll think I'm someone else. I'll be so sensitive you'll think I'm a girl. Shit. I mean
woman.”

“Look, I've got to go.”

“Who are you with?” I demand, desperately changing modes.

“I'm not with anybody.” The rhythm and tone of this response are all wrong. I don't need a polygraph to confirm my suspicions.

“Why did you take your diaphragm?” I ask. “Who are you fucking while you're taking all this contemplative Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own
time to think?”

“Good-bye, Collin. I'll call in a few days.”

“My parents are coming to town,” I say lamely. As a logical fallacy this, I believe, is called appeal to false authority.

“Say hi for me.”

And she's gone. It's impossible to present your best self—attractive, assured and desirable—when you are insane.

Deus Ex Machina

Not to be fooled twice, I go to the Spy store on Second Avenue to purchase one of those handy devices that tell you the phone numbers of incoming calls—something I have been meaning to acquire for a long time. Back at the apartment, I plug the little black box into my phone as per instructions and stare at it hopefully but discover that I still have yet to figure out how to will Philomena to call me.

Thanksgiving Cheer

Recently, in the
Times
, Frank Prial wrestled with that perennial question: What wine to match with your Thanksgiving turkey and traditional fixings? Some say Champagne, some chardonnay. Frank leans toward zinfandel, and there's even a case to be made for a young cabernet sauvignon. Be advised that my father recommends Johnnie Walker Black.

We're having Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant at the St. Regis. Traditionalists that we are, Mom and I are working on a bottle of Champagne. My sister's current would-be consort, Doug Hawkin, M.D., is already throwing back the Diet Cokes like there's no tomorrow. He arrived before us, straight from the emergency room at New York Hospital. Mad Dog Doug is a trauma surgeon whose acquaintance Brooke made after she tumbled down a set of stairs at Rockefeller University. Brooke is stoned and sipping mint tea, like the hippie she once was, glaring at her food.

“I find it difficult to give thanks,” she mutters, “when so many people in the world are suffering tonight.”

“Give thanks you're not one of them,” says Dad, tucking into a fresh scotch.

“In Ethiopia a family of four doesn't see this much protein in a month.”

“You must see a great deal of suffering,” Mom says to Doug. I still don't understand why he had to come. Doesn't he have his own fucked-up family to annoy?

Trauma Theory and Practice

“Is there a special season,” Mom continues, “or month or anything when you get more traumas than other times?”

Dad snuffles at this question—the nasal declaration of a man who never ceases to be amazed by the eccentricity of his wife.

“No, actually, that's a good question,” says Doug, answering both Mom and the snort. “The full moon is the worst. Emergency rooms are always extremely frenetic the night of a full moon. I don't know how to explain it scientifically, but the empirical evidence is fairly convincing. What's easier to account for is that sick children, particularly from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, tend to be brought to the emergency room after eleven p.m.”

Mom looks happily perplexed. “And why is that?”

“Because that's when prime-time television ends.”

“The children wait until after prime time to get sick?”

“I believe,” Dad says, “Brooke's, uh, friend means that the
parents
wait until after their favorite shows before bringing the kids in.”

“That's dreadful.” Mom turns to Doug. “Is that true?”

Doug nods sadly.

“The worst are the self-mutilators,” says Brooke, rising out of her marijuana-induced stupor to do a brief promotional spot for her beau. “Can you imagine having a ward full of desperately ill and injured people to tend to, and having to spend two hours on some guy who, tell them about the thing yesterday …”

“Well,” says Doug, “I wish I could say it was a unique case, but in fact we've seen it before. A patient arrived on the ward yesterday under his own power, clutching a towel to his groin. We estimate he lost more than thirty percent of his blood.”

“Don't tell me,” says Dad.

“Fortunately, I guess, he hadn't fully severed his penis. He seems to have lost—”

“Stop!” Dad shouts. “Is this any kind of dinner-table conversation?”

I don't know, I think I agree with my father, although I can't help feeling a twinge of sympathy for Doug, the outsider.

“Doug,” says Mom, “are you sure you wouldn't like a
teeny
bit of Champagne?”

More Beverage Notes

One factor that Frank Prial doesn't take into account about holiday potables is their combustibility. When long-separated members of the same family are soaked in spirits and rubbed together, explosions almost inevitably result. This year it happens after I ask Mom how she met Dad. It's a story I haven't heard in years, certainly never with the kind of vivid dramatic detail she gives it this afternoon.

Boy Meets Girl, Spring 1955

“We used to think Williams boys were so square,” she says, the stem of her Champagne flute pinched lightly between age-spotted pointer and thumb. “And, of course, they were.”

A curmudgeonly harrumph from my father, still dressed in the square-college-boy uniform of his youth—blue blazer, blue oxford button-down shirt and regimental tie, his pink-pickled face unlined by the tussles of commerce or metaphysics.

“We used to think Bennington girls were artsy-fartsy dykes,” counters the former captain of the debating team.

“And the Williams boys were so very tolerant of diversity,” Mom continues, winking at us. “But we had to admit they were very good-looking.” She smiles sweetly at my father. Beneath the sun-and-nicotine-cured skin, she is still girlish, pale blue eyes childishly bright, her hair long, just as she wore it at Bennington, the gold now ghosted with silver. “I drove down with Cassie Reymond and some other girls. Cassie was an actress, and she went to New York, and last I heard she was married to that actor who was in that wonderful play—what was it called—about the, it wasn't with Richard Burton but somebody like that?” She looks hopefully at my father, who coughs impatiently into his hand.

“
Camelot
?” proposes Doug.

Oh, do shut up, Doug.

Beside us, a Japanese family: father, mother, two solemn preteen daughters in severe white blouses and pageboy haircuts.

“Anyway, we got there, and it was awful, all these fierce, shy, hungry boys in their nice J. Press suits and their crewcuts, ready to pounce. We drove down in Cassie's car, thank God, but there was a bus that arrived from Smith or somewhere like that, someplace frilly and proper, maybe Holyoke, I don't know. Anyway, this bus came in just as we pulled up, and the boys were waiting outside it. They'd formed a kind of gauntlet, or gamut. What is it? I can never get those two things straight. Is ‘gauntlet’ the glove you throw down when you challenge somebody to a duel, or is that ‘gamut’? Anyway, this was the other one.”

“‘Gantlet’ is actually the word you're looking for,” says Doug. “I think,” he hedges, for modesty's sake.

Here at the St. Regis they serve the fancy, lumpy kind of cranberry sauce with real berries, but I prefer the cheap, jellied kind. I seem to be the only one paying any attention at all to the food.

“Toward the end of the dance I spotted your father hovering. He was dressed exactly the way he is now. Could that be the same tie?” My father looks down at the neckwear in question, pennon of some lost regiment of the King's Army, and shakes his head. “He was kind of cute square,” Mom continues. “And, oh, I remember—he was wearing white bucks.”

“Not I,” said my father, but I could see he was starting to enjoy this. “Tan bucks, maybe.”

“You were. That was almost the cutest part about you, your nervous white feet. He kept circling us, getting a tiny bit closer each time, all nonchalant and pretending not to notice me. Well, he panicked when they announced the last song—I think it was ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’”

My mother breaks off her narrative to warble a bar: “‘They asked me how I knew my true love was true …’”

“What's the matter with you?” my father demands, noticing my suddenly crumpled demeanor. Philomena and I used to love that song in its Bryan Ferry version.

“And when another boy asked me to dance,” Mom resumes, “his face just collapsed.”

My father snorts in disapproval. “Oh, come on.”

“Well, after it ended, I dragged my feet on the way out. If I'd walked any slower I think I would have taken root in the pavement, and I was just about to give up on him when I felt a hand on my shoulder in the parking lot.”

“What'd he say,” asks Brooke.

“He asked me if I wanted a tour of the campus.”

Brooke hoots with laughter. “At least he didn't ask you to see his etchings.”

The Japanese family aim their solemn dark eyes at the strange, noisy
gaijin
. “I didn't say that,” Dad insists.

“Well, I didn't really need to see the campus, but I told him I'd love to go somewhere where we could talk. So we ended up sitting in his roommate's Buick. And of course the talking led to kissing. I thought he was just a wonderful kisser, and after about ten minutes I realized he was just in agony, so of course I wanted to help him. It seemed like the least I could do.”

“Lillie!”

“And the poor sweet boy was so grateful he proposed to me right there in the back of that Buick.”

“What?” Brooke blurts. “You gave him a blow job?”

“Young lady!”

“Well,” says Mom, “I just, you know, used my hand.”

Dad Demurs

“This is not family conversation!” Dad thumps the table with his fist, making shimmery waves on our beverages.

“You got a proposal out of a hand job?” Brooke is impressed, Doug is nonplussed.

I am thinking back on a time when Philomena and I were still mad for each other and she gave me a hand job in a cab. Why didn't I propose to her then? Why didn't I ever? If only I had, she would be here now, having Thanksgiving dinner, comparing notes on post-ejaculatory proposals with my mom.

Word from Ralston

My phone rings. My caller ID shows an incoming call from Los Angeles. “Hello?”

“Hello, could I please speak to Collin McNab?”

“You can and you are.”

“What?”

“This is Collin McNab.”

“Oh, this is Cherie Smith. Chip Ralston's assistant? Hello? What was that noise?”

“Nothing, really,” I say as I write down the number. “It was probably a gasp of disbelief.”

“Oh. Well, Chip just wanted me to tell you that he's changed his mind about the article. He doesn't want to do it after all.”

“Wait just a New York minute. We had an agreement.”

“I'm sorry. I don't know anything about that. He just told me to tell you, is all.”

“Let me talk to him,” I say. It's not that I'm dying to write a fucking article about Chip fucking Ralston, but I don't have enough money in my checking account to pay my half of the rent next month, let alone Philomena's.

“I'm sorry, but he's very busy right now. I'm sure it's nothing personal. Well, have a really nice day. Bye.”

I'm not going to give up that easily. I wait fifteen minutes, then call the number I'd written down.

“Hello?”

I am stunned silent.

“Hello,” says the familiar voice again. “Who is this?”

“Phil?”

“Collin?”

“What the … what are you doing there?” I demand, but the answer seems obvious enough, if somewhat incredible.

“How did you—”

“Jesus. I can't believe this is happening.”

“I … didn't want to hurt your feelings,” she says.

“You didn't
want
to hurt my feelings. So. That's why you're fucking Chip Ralston? To spare my feelings? What would you do if you actually
wanted
to hurt me and crush my spirit beyond repair?”

“I mean, that's why I didn't want you to know.”

“And that's why he blew me off for the stupid fucking interview?”

“Well, you could hardly write objectively about him under the circumstances.”

“I thought you were in Montana.” I think I'm hoping that if I find a hole in her story, an inconsistency, the whole thing will turn out to be a joke.

“We were.”

“We were.”

“I'm going back up there in a few days.”

“It must be just lovely.”

“I told you I wanted a simpler life.”

“Simpler life? You're moving to Livingston fucking Montana with Chip fucking Ralston. Do you have any idea what a cliché that is? I've got it in my computer. Control MONTANA CLICHÉ. It's not simple. It's just … stupid.”

She is silent on the other end and, as for me, I can hardly speak. Finally I say, “This is a joke, right?”

“Collin, these things happen. You know? It's nobody's fault.”

“Chip Ralston?”

“I can understand your being upset.”

“It's pathetic.”

“Don't make me say things you don't want to hear.”

“That fucking midget,” I say, then slam down the phone and regret it immediately. Scooping up an Imari vase, Philomena's prized possession, I hurl it against the wall, where it shatters gratifyingly. We bought the vase on a trip to Kyoto, and I remember wondering what would happen to it, the first durable object we purchased together. Would we look at it ten, twenty years hence and remember? Afterward, we went back to the
ryokan
in the hills, where a deep cedar tub was steaming in anticipation of our arrival, and blue-and-white striped robes had been laid out on the black-bordered tatami mats. Would I go back to that time, if I could? Would I relive it all to this moment, with foreknowledge? Or would I drown the bitch right there in the tub?