Lawnboy (13 page)

I walked down a street on which most of the houses had been totaled by the hurricane. Roofs pulled from their joists, stucco stripped, fancy furniture still floating in the pools. There was something incongruous about the wreckage, for the worst damage had been centered ten miles south, in Homestead, Naranja. This region had escaped the fiercest sustained winds, but thunderstorms had spawned tornadoes here, imploding the houses as if they were toys, only to leave the next block unscathed.

Up ahead, something called to me. Soon enough, I was walking toward the house of Douglass Freeman. Dickless, who’d moved to California years ago.

No matter how many others had lived here after his departure, it was still his house to me. In some inexplicable way its walls contained his very spirit, his bafflement, despair, and slanted curiosity. I stared upward at the roof beams, sheared from their trusses by the winds. The house was hopeless. The most recent owners, gone for good now, had spray painted the garage door with harsh jagged letters: ANDREW, GO HOME. Then beneath that: ALLSTATE DOESN’T DELIVER and their policy number.

I stepped up the driveway. The street was empty now, a ghost town of ruptured houses. No one was watching. The front door opened as if its former occupants had been expecting me.

It was worse than I’d imagined. Insulation sagged; walls buckled under the displaced roof. Mildewy curtains flapped on a rod above the open back wall. Beyond that, the pool cage. It lay twisted in a particularly crude fashion. I studied the family portrait above the mantel in which a father, a mother, and two little boys—all with bottle-thick glasses—were trying desperately to enjoy themselves, to show the photographer—a dense, falsely enthusiastic teenager, I decided—they were a well-adjusted family. They’d left everything here, throwing up their hands. I rifled through a desk to find something with their names. I found a short stack of wet envelopes—tithing envelopes for St. Michael’s Parish. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Carson.

I sat upon a ruined pit sofa. A dome light lay perilously on its side. For a few seconds I imagined the Carsons in the contented period before the storm, milling about the rooms, carrying presents to each other at Christmas, the particular smell of this family together—fabric softener, reheated turkey, tube socks, carpet freshener—still wafting through the house. But overlaid were my thoughts of Douglass Freeman. I pictured him sitting in one of the chairs in the dining room, his arms folded over his chest, shoulders hunched, trying not to contort his face as he told his parents he wouldn’t ever, ever go back to Gus Grissom.

“We’ll see what we can do,” Mrs. Freeman said, glancing over at her husband. He sat opposite from them, an older version of his son, slouching forward, thinking.

I walked the halls. I chose the back bedroom, a tiny cubicle in which a Spirograph box with faded, soft corners lay on the bureau. There was no question, I felt him here. And soon enough my premonitions were confirmed. I saw his name, and beneath that a date—7/9/73—etched above the light switch in red pencil.

I lay on Douglass’s bed, closing my eyes, drifting. He was out there somewhere, but I was falling asleep, and the world outside was shifting, slipping away, too fast for me to hold onto it.

***

I was down to zero, zilch. No job, no car, not even a credit card for emergency’s sake. I used to think that I was safe from bad fortune, that personal catastrophe was ultimately self-willed, that we all have the power to make our own luck. But that’s bullshit.

I plodded up Dixie Highway beside the buzzing transformers. I might have been Peter years before. Peter, who’d landed the greatest
drop dead
on my parents’ threshold by leaving the house without warning one day. Ever since, he’d been only two things to me: a torn postcard from Beach Haven, New Jersey—
I’m happy, but you’re not
—and a vague standard of disaffection and disillusionment against which I measured myself.

Now he was where I was going.

I’d finally allowed myself to call him. “So, could I stay with you for a while?” I’d said.

My tongue tasted hot, grassy in my mouth. The tip of a palm frond squeaked against the phone booth. I’d just watched an older man—formal, crisply dressed—holding out a cupped, tentative hand to passersby at the Coconut Grove Metrorail. He looked like he’d never fallen this low, all his dignity coming down around him like rags.

“How long?” Peter said after a silence.

My throat went dry. “If it’s a problem, I understand.”

“No, no. I’m just surprised.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about you.”

“You have?”

“A lot, actually.”

A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. Wind rattled the seagrapes, foam cups blowing across the street. “Did Mom put you up to this?” he said warily.

“Are you kidding?”

“Well—”

“Daddy doesn’t even want me at home anymore.”

His voice thawed, relaxed, as if we’d gone crabbing together that morning. I tried to block out my last picture of him: crying, high, after my father had discovered the bag of bright pink pills in his room. The ground might have heaved beneath my feet. His voice went on and on. And all at once I heard him say yes.

“So I’ll pick you up in Fort Myers?” he said. “You’ll take the bus?”

“Right,” I answered. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

I walked up Jane’s sidewalk now, pressing on the bell. The doleful notes of an oboe drifted out over the roofs of the neighborhood. The door opened, and she stood there in lycra shorts and black T-shirt, cradling her instrument in her hands. Her hair was brighter, the color of cranberries.

She troubled her chin with her fingertips. “You look awful.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You were in a fight?”

“No.”

“Why is your hair such a mess?”

“I walked out on William.”

“You
what?
”

I nodded once, twice. “You’d look like this, too, if you’d spent your last two nights outside.”

“You what? Oh God. Come in here. Come in here and sit down.”

We sat upon her parents’ couch beneath the harlequin pictures. I talked for a good half hour. I told her about the breakup of the relationship, filling her in on the grittiest details as she listened attentively with the gravest expression. She fidgeted with her bracelets on her wrists.

“That’s awful,” she said.

“I know.”

“I had a feeling something was up.”

My head hurt. I leaned over, massaging my eyebrows, making circular motions with my thumbs. For some reason, I couldn’t say another word. “And what about you?”

It turned out that she’d started oboe lessons again. She’d found a stern, demanding teacher, a retired player from the St. Louis Symphony, who was pushing her, excited about her potential. Even though she’d put off college for the year, she felt ready now. In only a few short weeks, she was auditioning for Juilliard, Eastman, and New England Conservatory.

Then, to our mutual discomfort, she’d run out of things to say. Inside the kitchen, Mrs. Ettengoff was tossing avocados inside a food processor.

“I just came to say good-bye,” I said after a silence.

“What do you mean?”

“I might not see you for a long time,” I explained.

“Like I’m not going to see you again,” she said with a throaty, abrasive laugh. Had she been smoking again? “Naples is only two hours away, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not kidding, Jane,” I said quietly.

She saw the seriousness on my face. She turned toward the kitchen and left for a moment without excusing herself. The dense smell of yeast hovered about the rooms. Over the whir of the food processor she and her mother carried on a conversation.

“Do you have enough money?” she said upon her return.

“Of course.” I nodded twice, though she knew me well enough. My forehead felt tight, sunburnt. I hadn’t been drinking enough water.

“My mom says you’re welcome for dinner.”

I shook my head from side to side. “I have to go.”

“You’ll call if you’re in trouble?”

“Of course I will.”

“Take care.”

“
You
take care,” I said, laughing now. “And good luck with those auditions.”

We stood, holding onto each other by the front door. Her right hand wandered down my back. I tensed slightly, resisting the warmth of her touch as she slipped something—two fifties and a ten, I found out later—into my pants pocket.

***

Before I left for Peter’s, I needed to do something.

I waited until I knew he was at work. More than anything I didn’t want to see him. I knew he’d be livid; I imagined the thick cords of his fingers tightening around my throat. It was one thing that I’d departed without a note or good-bye when I was still living with my parents. It was quite another that I’d done it after living in his house for months, when I theoretically knew better. Perhaps I was too hard on myself. I didn’t owe him my future if he wasn’t willing to work for it. But I at least owed him an explanation, some acknowledgment of the fact that something important had transpired between us. I wasn’t a kid anymore. My decisions mattered, had consequences, and I carried within me the lulling, intoxicating power to hurt another human being.

But right now I was thinking about my notebook. It was the one physical thing that I needed in the world. It was the repository of so much—addresses, quotes, phone numbers, clippings, lists, equations, names of books, fractured diary entries, even doodlings—things so important to me that I felt unwhole without it. Leaving it behind had been nothing more than an indication of my fissured mental state. Not a page of it was blank, but I still managed to scrawl things inside, as if I inherently believed in its possibility to always yield some space to me. In its details one could piece together the narrative of my life, and I couldn’t leave it with him no matter how many times I’d said:
Just let it go.

His car was gone. I stepped over the driveway’s expansion joints, glancing over the anise hedge to see if Virginia, the neighbor with the beautiful begonias, was watching. She wasn’t. I made it to the mud-room door, fumbling over the door frame for the key, but what was this? No key. The spare, the ever-reliable duplicate, wasn’t here. My eyelids burned. I read it as nothing more than a statement to me:
You’re not welcome here. You’ve disappointed me. Fuck you. Keep out of my house.

I might have broken the windows, each and every one of them. Instead, I sat on the slab and pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes.
Calm, calm,
I said.
Calm yourself down.
After a few minutes I remembered the loose window over the bath-tub, and before long I was crawling inside, headfirst, my ass hanging over the sill for all of Avenida Manati to see.

I walked swiftly through the cool rooms, my bare feet
shushing
the white terrazzo. Absolutely nothing had changed. The rattan lamp, the stacks of newspapers, the framed Toulouse-Lautrecs—every one of them assumed the same coordinates they always had. Even the dogs, Pedro and Mrs. Fox, hadn’t barked upon my intrusion, only glancing at me in utter ennui before retreating to their respective beds as if I were still the resident boy.

Given what he’d put me through, I decided it was my right to enjoy some air-conditioned comfort and a good hot shower before conducting my business. I still had two hours. At that moment he was most likely seated behind the camera, squinting into the lens with his astigmatic eye while the technicians cued up the theme music for the Florida Noon Report with Sally Reedy. First, though, I needed to eat.

I breathed in the chill of the open refrigerator. Sun-dried tomatoes, yogurt, pears, and raspberries—I had it in me to eat them all with my fingers, swallowing without benefit of spoon or fork before opting for the civilized. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. And I hadn’t realized how fortunate I’d been. The life I’d once taken for granted now seemed decadent and lush, a golden treasure inside a chest. But should I have stayed here? I already knew the answer to that.

I sat on the Chesterfield. Without thinking I aimed the remote at the TV, only to discover that the Channel 7 News was already in full swing, seventeen minutes into the broadcast. I couldn’t not watch, if only to satisfy some morbid curiosity.

Sally Reedy blathered on about the development of a tropical storm sixty miles southwest of Great Abaco. Sally’s face betrayed a curious combination of motherly concern, wry sex, and grace. The idea was to convince the viewer that the set was a purely jovial exercise, that the staff was comprised of good pals who met five days a week for the sheer fun of it. Off camera Sally could be distant to the point of downright cold, though rumor had it that she was suffering terribly, that her gynecologist husband was about to be arraigned for the alleged rape of four of his patients, that once this broke on her own broadcast, Sally’s celebrity (and credibility) would forever be dimmed.

It was perplexing to think that such gossip was no longer a part of my life. I prepared myself to switch off the TV when an auxiliary camera panned the behind-the-scenes staffers, and in an utter affectation of highjinks, they mugged in feigned horror at the prospect of the developing tropical system.

William’s face flashed briefly before the screen.

He looked fit, trim, the hair on the sides of his head just a little too long.

He sickened me. It was strange to have spent so much time with somebody, only to find that with each passing week I knew him less and less, instead of what one would have expected. It certainly hadn’t started like this. After I’d first moved in with him, we were still careful to wear our best faces, to grant tolerance and respect for each other’s tics and idiosyncrasies. Occasionally I saw that darker knowledge passing over William’s eyes:
Who are you? What are you doing in my life? I didn’t ask for you. I only want to be myself in the world.
I’d walk into the woods behind the house, picking up stones, bottles, Coke cans, throwing them as high as I could into the dull blue of the sky until my wrist snapped, until my joints ached. How could you have done this? I loved you, you jerk. I’ve given up everything I had—my family, for God’s sake—for you. You owe me much more than this. But I’d walk back to the house, tasting disappointment like weeds in my mouth, knowing I wasn’t the easiest person to live with, that two people could still love each other and not be able to forge a life.