I Cannot Get You Close Enough (28 page)

Mike and Helen stayed three days. On Saturday we went into Rockland and poked around in antique stores. We found a small bookstore near the quay and bought books. Mike found a book by the poet Seamus Heaney and read a poem out loud.

On the day he was to take the poison

Socrates told his friends he had been writing:

putting Aesop's fables into verse.

And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom

and advocated the examined life.

The reason was that he had had a dream.

Caesar, now, or Herod or Constantine

or any number of Shakespearean kings

bursting at the end like dams

where original panoramas lie submerged

which have to rise again before the death scenes —

you can believe in their believing dreams.

But hardly Socrates. Until, that is,

he tells his friends the dream had kept recurring

all his life, repeating one instruction:

Practise the art,
which art until that moment

he always took to mean philosophy.

Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift

for practising the right one from the start —

poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;

whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass

like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.

When he finished the poem he was looking at me. I forgot about the junky troubled life we were living in Noel's house in the name of being on a vacation. I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint as long and hard as my eyes and hands would allow it. No matter how hard I run from it or how much I bitch when it's going badly, my work is my life. I take the world and create art from it. Ideas born of sadness or jealousy or rage, who knows what. A rage to order. Noel sitting in her bed among her toys. Crystal Anne asleep. Traceleen dreaming by a window. Crystal looking down at a book of sonnets. Sooner or later I would paint all these things because I had lived through and survived this summer. But I did not know that now. All I knew was that I was standing in a dusty book shop on a quay in Rockland, Maine, being read to by a poet. He looked at me when he finished and it was okay that Helen got to fuck him. I got to understand what he had read. I was pretty sure no one else really had. King was embarrassed. Andria was charmed, but wary. Helen was gaga. Crystal was sad. Anna, who should have been there, was dead, and the bookstore owner probably thought we all were crazy.

“Do you want to buy it?” Helen asked. “I think we ought to buy that book.”

The next morning I drove Helen and Mike to the airport. “You must come and visit us sometime,” Mike said. “Since you hate to travel, you should come down to Boston while you're in the area.”

“I might,” I answered, knowing I never would. Helen Abadie would have had a fit if I had shown up in Boston to pay a visit to her love nest. Are you going to marry her? I wanted to ask. Will he marry you, Helen? What will you do if he doesn't? But I didn't ask it. I kept my mouth shut, tried to be polite.

“You keep this,” Mike said, and pressed the book of poems into my hand. We were at the airport. The desk clerk had taken their bags. “You might want to read the rest of this man's poetry. He's the best there is right now.”

“Except for you,” Helen put in. She took his arm. “He's the best, Lydia. Everyone knows that.”

“Well, I think I'll go on. You'll be off in a few minutes. He said the plane was on the ground.”

“Don't forget to talk to Noel. We need those letters. Tell her how important it is to our work.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for the book. Come back up. Come back when Daniel comes.”

“We might,” Helen said. “Be sure and talk to Noel, won't you?”

5

TRACELEEN At last Mr. Daniel Hand of Charlotte, North Carolina, was due to arrive with his daughters. King was in such a state of excitement. I don't think he had slept for three days. He would sit on the porch or in the yard swing, his big legs stretched out in front of him, and smoke cigarettes and pretend to read, or pace all over the house. No one could calm him down, not even Andria or Crystal Anne. Crystal Anne adores her big brother. When she was little, about three or four, we would dress her up and let him take her for walks. He took her with him once to deliver the Christmas wreaths he was selling for Trinity School. She was so happy he was letting her tag along. As they were starting out the door, he took her hand to lead her along and she put her little precious face down and began to lick his hand. I'll never forget that moment. Miss Crystal and I were standing in the oval doors to the dining room and Crystal Anne and King and his buddy, Matthew Levine, were in the hall and she put her little precious face down on his hand and licked it. He didn't know what to do. He was so embarrassed. “Don't lick him,” Matthew said. “Give him a kick if you want him to go faster.”

Andria and Crystal Anne stayed with King while he waited for the Hands to arrive, following him around. Not lecturing him about smoking. We had all made a vow not to say a word about his smoking. “In the fall,” Crystal said. “We'll get him to a smoking clinic. One thing at a time. Conquering drugs and alcohol is enough for one year.”

“If it was my lungs I would not wait another day,” I said. I am adamant about smoking. I have seen one of my friends die of lung cancer already and another one on her way. I haven't got a good thing to say about cigarettes.

“He is madly in love with this girl,” Andria told me. “He says he will die for her, but there might be a problem.”

“She doesn't return his love?”

“No. She loves him too. But her father doesn't like him. He told him he had to show some ambition before he would trust him with his daughter.”

“Then why is he bringing her up here?”

“Mr. Hand is in love with Crystal and will do anything for her.”

“Oh, no, the last thing Miss Crystal needs is someone else in love with her. Mr. Manny is coming, I hope. Crystal Anne's been writing to him, begging him to come and visit. We have not given up on keeping this marriage alive.”

“Auntee Traceleen.”

“Yes.”

“Stop calling Crystal Miss Crystal. It's nineteen eighty-eight. It's time for all that to stop. Call her Crystal. Or Mrs. Weiss. It embarrasses her. She told me so.”

“Andria, please go on with your story of Mr. Hand and King.”

“Well, that's all I know. If King does well at Tulane and gets a degree in engineering, then Mr. Hand will let him think about marrying his daughter. Until then, he's on his honor not to touch her.”

“Who told you that?”

“King did. They can come up here and visit but King can't make out with her. He had to promise Mr. Hand on his honor.”

“I don't believe King told you all of that. That isn't like him to tell his personal secrets that way.”

“There aren't any secrets anymore, Auntee Traceleen. Everyone tells everything to their friends.”

“So he is telling you all these things and, when Jessie Hand gets here, if that doesn't work out, with him having to love her from a distance, then you will be there waiting to mend his broken heart? Is that what's happening now?”

“I'm not talking to you anymore about it.” We were cleaning out the cabinets in the old-fashioned kitchen. Trying to make some sense of all the plates and cups and spoons. Miss Noel had collected enough things for three kitchens and stuffed them into one, and we were putting some things in boxes to store in the attic until we left, so we'd have room to operate. Andria went over to the other side of the kitchen and started wrapping up extra glasses as fast as she could.

“There are plenty of good black men in the world,” I said, “without you wanting to complicate your life by a mixed marriage.”

“I can't even talk to you,” she answered. “You are living in a world that is gone and dead. That's the main thing wrong with you, Aunt Traceleen. You don't believe in the future.” She finished off a box and hoisted it on her shoulder and carried it to the bottom of the kitchen stairs. Then she pulled another box off the back porch and began to fill that one up. She is the fastest worker I have ever seen. Every move she makes is just right. She can do anything she wants to do in the world. She could be a politician or a teacher or fulfill her largest ambition and work for
Time
magazine or CNN as an overseas correspondent. It will break my heart if she decides instead to be in love with a white man and fight that battle all her life. What am I supposed to do? All I can do is say what I think and keep on loving everyone I love. I can't control the world. Enough about that. It is time to tell you something about King.

You could blame it on the divorce of his parents, if you were looking for things to blame other things on. I don't think things always have to be blamed on someone. I think it all just turns out as it does and there's a plan we can't see. Miss Crystal thinks it is his genes. She says all the men in his father's family are the way he is and all the men in her family are the same. He is just so big and strong and has all this nervous energy. He's got this sandy red hair like his father. His father was a football player and has never gotten over the fact that King quit the team and became a dope addict instead. Even now that he has straightened out and begun to make something of himself, his father is very cool to him. That's part of our problem. If Mr. Hand comes up from North Carolina and is cool to him also, it will not help our situation. We will have this big grown boy on our hands with no man to counsel with him. He has alienated Mr. Manny, his stepfather, and you have seen how he treated Mr. Alan, so that leaves him with only women to talk to. I had hopes for Miss Lydia being good for him but she got sidetracked with Alan. It was looking pretty hopeless. Tincture of time, that was my main hope. If only he would settle down.

“We must begin to cook better meals,” I told Miss Crystal. “I want you to go with me to the store this afternoon. I would like to make macaroni and cheese for supper and a meat loaf. We'll make all his favorite dishes. We'll feed him up.”

“Oh, Traceleen, you precious angel,” she said. “You think of everything.”

“We could get him some chewing gum while we're there. He could chew gum when he wants to smoke.”

Then Miss Crystal and I took the station wagon and went into town to buy more groceries. One thing about going grocery shopping. If you have money to pay for the food, it is a satisfying thing to do. You make a list, you drive to the store, you get the things you need, you bring them home, you put them away, you cook them.

Miss Crystal and I drove along this asphalt road that goes between these gigantic pine trees. We had the windows down and it smelled so good. I hadn't had a chance to talk to her alone in days. I was quiet for a while, enjoying the breeze and the smell of the pines and the deserted country road. I watched her every now and then, her blond hair was tied back with a pretty little brown-and-white scarf and she had on white slacks and a rumpled linen blouse. She is starting to look older the last few years. Just as pretty as she always was, but more thoughtful. Not sad, and not that the wrinkles made a dent in the loveliness of her face, but she is getting tired of having problems. I guess we all get tired finally, much as I hate to admit it. It looks like we could get smarter instead.

“If we feed him more he won't smoke so much,” I said. I couldn't stay away from the topic.

“Don't say anything about it to him, Traceleen. The doctors told me not to harp on that.”

“I wasn't harping on it. I just said I knew a person who died of lung cancer and I told him how they looked at the end when they couldn't get their breath.”

“We can't do anything about it this summer. We have enough to do. I'll be glad when Daniel gets here with his girls. That will liven things up.”

“Every time he lights up I see my friend JoAnne, lying there in Touro Infirmary breathing on that green machine and gasping to talk.”

“Well, we can't do anything about it now. What do you want to cook, Traceleen? Get a notebook out of the glove compartment and let's make a list.”

“I didn't mean to add to your worries.” I reached in the glove compartment and pulled out all the cups and plastic spoons and straws we had collected from places we stopped on the trip. I put them in a sack that was on the floor. Then I found a pad and pencil and began to make a list. “Butter, flour, macaroni, cheddar cheese, asparagus if they have any, rump roast, ground-up pork and lamb and beef, tomato paste, onions.”

“I am so tired of worrying about him,” she said. “I thought when we got him home from the hospital things would be all right. Since he met Jessie he's been better. I don't know, Traceleen. I don't know what to do with him. I don't know when to help and when to leave him alone. Everyone says I baby him too much. Do you think so?”

“I guess you do a little bit,” I said. “Well, we will cook for him instead of worrying about him. We will set an example of being busy and happy and make our meals pleasant and hope for the best. He's in Tulane University for the fall. It's working out, Crystal. You wait and see.”

“You called me Crystal.”

“Yes. I did. That doesn't mean I'm going to keep it up. It's too much trouble to break all my habits at my age.” We had come to the turn-off to the main highway into town, which saved us an embarrassing moment.

I took my half of the grocery list and went off to collect the things. I don't know how Miss Crystal can let herself suffer so much over a grown boy. I don't know how he got so mixed up to begin with. But I know the order of events, because I have been there for all of them.

First it was the bicycle-stealing ring. That happened because he didn't get into this club he wanted in. Valencia, it's called. It is this club for teenagers in New Orleans that all the children in the private schools think they have to get into or die. Miss Crystal had just married Mr. Manny and moved to New Orleans and she didn't even know they had it. Also, Mr. Manny is Jewish and that might have made a difference. This club is mostly for people that are not Jewish. What happened was Miss Crystal didn't know the club was there so she didn't have her society cousins put him in an application. Then, one day that first fall he lived in New Orleans, he came home from school and said there was this club he hadn't gotten in. Miss Crystal went crazy calling around and making sure he had passes to visit but it soured him on New Orleans. He hadn't wanted to move there to begin with. He wanted to stay in Mississippi and be on his own football team and go to the white supremacist school Miss Crystal's father had him going to.