I Loved You More (54 page)

“The next day when I get home from work, she and Boomer are gone,” Hank says. “No note, nothing. That was just two days after they'd found the tumor behind my eye. Fucking things never looked so bad.”

Hank snuffs up, wipes his good eye. In a moment, he pulls the hood of his sweatshirt up to his new eye, holds the fabric there. Soft, the way you'd touch something brand new, or a baby. The trembling in Hank's big hand.

“By Christmas, though, she was back on the phone. Crying. Telling me how much she and Boomer missed me, begging me to take them back. I was just starting radiation.”

Hank pulls the hoodie away from his eye. That's when Hank stops. Everything. As if before my eyes he's turning to stone. I wonder if he's breathing. I wonder if this is how he does it. Pulls his cards close into his vest. Shuts it all down.

The coffee in him keeps going, though. Jet propulsion. I pull my chair across the ugly yellow linoleum with purple triangles, around the table next to him, sit down close enough that our shoulders touch. Hank's chest is up, his shoulders down. He doesn't move, just stays wound up like that. His shoulder and his arm muscle, man, as if I were touching stone.

“That's when I did it,” Hank says. “I moved to a studio apartment closer to the university, changed my phone number, and made it unlisted.”

My tuna salad sandwich is a bunch of crumbs on my big white plate. The big white plates I bought so Hank and I could have something to eat off of. On Hank's big white plate, his tuna sandwich looks like a hurricane had hit.

Hank's bottom teeth come out, bite his upper lip. Chest so full, he's going to burst. That's when Hank turns his head, locks his eyes into mine. One eye looking at my soul, the other eye staring into nothing.

“The crazier his mother got, Gruney,” Hank says, “the more that boy needed me.”

I put my arm up around Hank's granite shoulder, lay my open palm against the back of his neck.

“I fucking left him, Gruney,” Hank says. “Boomer.”

“I left my son when he needed me the most.”

“And that's why I came here,” Hank says. “To you. I knew
you'd know what to say. I've been so fucked up. Gruney? Do you think I did the right thing?”

SO MANY THINGS
happen in that moment. Portland, Oregon, Southeast Morrison, in my yellow house, in my kitchen, sitting in one of my wooden kitchen chairs. Christmas Day. All that goes away. There is only one place where I exist. Inside Hank's eyes, the place in there he's made for me. The eye he can see through and the eye that he can't.

A gaze that fucks me up because it's looking for an answer.

And Little Ben is an oracle without a clue.

Big Ben is going wild on advice: sometimes when you lose things you can find them again. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes when you find them you can fix them. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes things are just gone and there's no coming back no matter what you do.

But the longer I sit in Hank's gaze, I figure Hank didn't fly three thousand miles for advice.

Guys, real guys, don't want advice. Hank came to me because he had a story he had to tell. A story he'd never told before, even to himself. A story so heavy it was getting him down. And there was no one else to tell it to.

The place where you scribble down your prayer to God, lay it in a chink of stone, bury it in the sand, whisper it into a crook of broken tree limb, then cover it with mud. The altar where you lay your burden down.

That's when I really finally get it. Hank wants to know if I've got his back. That's the only thing Hank wants to hear.

From a guy who's never understood guy things, right then I think hard about what to say and how to say it. With authority, but not like I'm trying to have authority. And then when I say it, how I should touch him. There's got to be a touch, but it's definitely got to be a guy touch.

And this time I think I get it right. I make my hand into a fist, not hard, just close my fingers in, pull my thumb around. I
take my not-hard clenched fist and pop Hank one, a blow of love, right in the middle of his chest. When I speak, my voice ain't Catholic-boy high. It's my voice, deep and clear and smooth.

“With you and Boomer,” I say, “how solid was it? The web between your hearts?”

The scar under Hank's eye that makes the yellow and blue dent there. Inside Hank's gaze, in his good eye, right then something changes. Light from down deep, and out of the black there's color. His breath comes back. Mine too. I'm back in the chair at my kitchen table. My arm around Hank, my open palm against the back of his neck. On the table, the big white plates. On my plate, tuna crumbs. On Hank's plate, a tornado tuna salad sandwich. Across the room, outside the kitchen window, it starts to snow.

Never ceased to startle me, the way Hank and I could look at each other. So many times Hank Christian has turned his black eyes on me. But none of those times were this look. Never seen him so fragile, so close to busting open the seams. Vulnerability like that, only being close to death can make you feel. In your bones the way you fret. Hank's good eye is looking at my question. Looking at the spiderweb that connects his heart to his son's heart.

Like a tree falling in the forest, there's no sound, there's a crash, fuck, I don't remember. All's I know is Hank and I are on the kitchen floor, lying on the ugly linoleum, his head in my lap, and he's curled himself up into a ball.

      
20.

Stink eye

RUTH HAS FINISHED THE EDITS ON THE LAST CHAPTER
of my novel, so that next morning Hank and I drive to Ruth's house.

That's what I told myself for a long time. That the reason I introduced Hank to Ruth was because he just happened to be there the day I picked up the final edits.

FINAL EDITS. I
know you've got it by now the relationship between Ruth and me was complicated. She saved my life and she was a pain in my ass and every fucking possible nuanced psychological aspect in between.

There's one specific part of our relationship, though, that I haven't really stepped up to talk about.

As a writer, your editor is the only person in the world you allow in. Where what is invisible through your breath becomes structured. Where you exist the best and are the most vulnerable. The only place that is holy. Where you tell your truth from. How the words rise up out of you, in there in between your soul and its utterance. Your ecstasy.

Your editor. Your fucking editor, man.

Ruth Dearden is your editor.

THAT AFTERNOON, HANK
puts his sunglasses on before we go out. The glass is so dark it's black.

“Never leave the house without them in the daylight,” Hank says.

It's two in the afternoon and it's already getting dark.

“You call this daylight?”

“Ultraviolet,” Hank says, “is my enemy.”

In my driveway, my green Volkswagen was covered with a canvas and at least two years of leaves. I hadn't driven that car in months. No idea if it would start. In fact, it didn't. Had to push it out from the driveway and get it pointed down the hill. Hank and I pushed, then I jumped in and popped the clutch. Never fails on a Volkswagen. Unless the generator's bad. Hank didn't ask me no questions about my expired driver's license. He just got in the car, slammed the door. Drizzling rain. Crazy fucking windshield wipers moving like paraplegics. Cigarette butts in the ashtray from years back. No heat. The exhaust backfiring. The driver's door won't stay shut and I have to hold it closed with my armpit. Hank and me driving up Hawthorne Blvd., Hawthorne to SE 60th, then onto Pine. Thank God they're both left turns or I'd have lost the door completely. Plus I'd forgotten. The horn honks whenever you make a right turn and more times than not, the horn got stuck.

Quite an adventure getting to Ruth's house. To meet our destiny.

Ruth's brick house is on a hill and it's just as I pull up in front and pull the emergency brake that I realize I've never driven myself to Ruth's house before. It's always been in Ruth's Honda Civic, Ruth who drove.

So the only time I drive to Ruth's house is the only time I have Hank with me.

Years later now, of course, I can see what I couldn't see then. I dusted off my old Volkswagen, pushed it down the hill, jumpstarted it, then drove across town illegally, in the rain, the windshield wipers not working, the windshield covered in steam, holding the door closed with my armpit because of some pages Ruth could have sent me in the mail? And this from a guy who was still afraid to leave his house.

The truth is I wanted Hank and Ruth to meet. For a bunch
of reasons I didn't have a clue about. I mean, really, no doubt about it, Ruth and I had gone through the wringer. Over two years of trying to make sense of what was going on between us, we'd fucked each other up pretty good. And by that time we were only speaking when we had to talk about the edits. Still, no matter what I say about her, I have to admit it. Ruth was the one who went through the wars with me. Day by day, man. Nobody else, family or friends, had made that kind of commitment. Yeah, there was Ephraim, but he was seven hundred miles away.

So I guess I wanted Hank to meet the only other person who was still alive I had a strong connection with. Even if that strong connection was full of shit and resentment.

Then, too, I knew how much Ruth wanted to meet Hank. Like with all my students, the way I'd talked up Hank Christian over the years, Hank was a literary John Lennon to her. The truth is, I wanted to be there, in the moment, when I presented my hero, my beloved, to Ruth, in the flesh. It was a way of proving that it wasn't all talk, that I really knew the famous Hank Christian, and here he is and ain't I cool.

And something else that was more difficult to see. Took me years. Ruth's care for me had been a mother's care. Most men with women get past the mother thing and miraculously somehow turn it around and then want to fuck the mother. I'll never understand how they do it, but that's how it goes.

The truth is, deep down, the way Hank was suffering, some part of me wanted to introduce him to a woman he could trust, a woman with the healing powers of a mother, Ruth Dearden, the woman who had saved my life.

And Ruth: the man I couldn't be for her, had just arrived in the flesh.

I didn't even call first to see if Ruth was home. Just all of a sudden knew in my heart it was right and Hank and I were out the door.

RUTH'S FRONT DOOR
was locked but we could hear the music. The soundtrack from
Living Out Loud
. The key was usually under the
bienvenue
mat in the alcove, but when I looked under the mat, the key wasn't there.

Hank and I walk around to the back of the house. Nobody walks along the side much, so it's overgrown with ivy. Tall dead flowers. That's where Hank steps in the dog shit. Only we don't know it. Ruth's back door has a glass window and it's painted white. Something scrapes at the bottom when I open it. I don't for a minute think about that door, what it means that I am opening it.

Inside, I call out to Ruth. The music's way too loud, so Hank and I let ourselves in. We walk through Ruth's white kitchen, Hank's dog shit shoes across Ruth's white tiled floors, into her Craftsman dining room with the wood paneling. Two six-top banquet tables side to side take up almost the whole room. I remember thinking:
this is where Ruth teaches her class
.

On the table, a manila envelope with the last pages of my novel in it. Ruth's black cat, Maupassant, walks right up to me, slides her body against my leg.

“A fucking cat,” Hank says.

But Maupassant doesn't want anything to do with Hank. That cat ain't dumb. Hank's shoe is covered in dog shit.

The music is coming from the back bedroom. Ruth's banging around in there with Queen Latifah. As I knock on the bedroom door, Queen Latifah is in the middle of “Lush Life.”

Ruth opens the door with a paint roller in one hand, cornflower blue dripping off it. The floor of the room is covered with newspaper. She's got a red bandana pulling back her red hair and she's not wearing a blouse. She's just in her bra and Levi's. A pink bra same color as her pink skin.

Those too-blue eyes of Ruth's, her pink lingeried breasts, her thin waist, her full hips, the voluptuosity, her red hair pulled back off her forehead, strands of blonde in the red, luminous her white skin, the thick blue paint dripping down, the smell of
the room, cornflower blue and sweat, Queen Latifah:
and there I'll be while I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are / lonely too
. Hank Christian didn't know what the fuck hit him.

Ruth's startled, suddenly modest, goes to cover up her breasts, then not modest. She pulls her arms back and sucks in her breath. Her breasts get even larger.

“Ben?” she says.

“Ruth,” I say, “this is.”

“Who stepped in dog shit?” Ruth says.

“Hank,” I say.

HANK LEAVES HIS
dark glasses on and his shoes outside. They're those kind of tennis shoes with traction and the dog shit is imbedded. Ruth pulls on a paint-stained large old Columbia T-shirt of mine and, for the longest time, she and Hank do a dance trying to see who can get the dog shit up on the floor first so the other doesn't have to clean it up.