Like Son (15 page)

The book. I still stood on the book. Strand protocol allowed that I should have ignored it or maybe paused momentarily to push it under a bookshelf with my foot. But the concentrated dense pressure of the small rectangular book under my left foot was the closest I would get to receiving a comforting hug that night. So I stayed standing on it. I shifted my weight back and forth. And switched feet. The binding wiggled and cracked under my weight.

After a few moments of this pathetic solo dance, I picked up the book and opened it at random. I read:

The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon … supports himself on the very lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror …

Italo Calvino. “Lightness.”
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
. I hadn’t located a book of Edward Weston’s photographs. I hadn’t found his portrait of Nahui. But with Calvino’s misplaced book in hand, I couldn’t help but think Nahui had found
me
, that she’d managed to send me a gift. To keep me company. To help explain, maybe.

Nathalie was lucky. She had the gift of flight. And, vain girl that she was, never without a mirror, maybe she was in her own indirect way facing demons. Maybe she’d explain when she called …

Oh shit. She’d said in the note that she’d call soon. What if she’d already tried to reach me? She would have expected I’d be home. My Perseus flown away, all I could do was run.

I sprinted up the stairwell, scurried into the apartment, and ran to the answering machine. The light wasn’t blinking. Damnit, maybe Nathalie had called but hadn’t left a message? Okay, breathe, breathe, she’ll call back soon.

Unable to sit still, I paced the apartment as I waited for the phone to ring. My aimless pacing quickly turned into a detective’s hunt. If Nathalie had packed anything, it hadn’t been much. The apartment seemed pragmatically unchanged. I studied the closet. I knew Nathalie had a red dress, but there was no red dress in the closet. She must have packed it. Or maybe I was remembering wrong and the dress I was thinking of was actually the pink one still hanging next to the gray evening gown? And didn’t we have two umbrellas? There was only one in the closet. Wait, had we lost one of them? I remembered walking home from a movie with Nathalie the last time it had rained—I’d shared my umbrella with her, but it was totally possible we’d had two umbrellas that night and that she’d simply tucked hers in her purse. Was she going somewhere it rained? Fuck. It was useless. I was no good for this sort of work.

Sentimental fool, I continued searching in all the places she might remain. The girly fragrant lotions she’d left at the bathroom sink failed to conjure her. Her fennel toothpaste was only pungent chalkiness, not her full lower lip and teasing bites. The fancy slab of honey and oatmeal soap she’d bought at a SoHo boutique sat in a slight milk puddle of its own dilution and probably offered her DNA to be retrieved by those with the proper tools, but not by me. If only I’d held onto the recreational junior scientist kit I’d owned as a geeky kid: thin-walled glass vials and semi-combustible powders in flip-lid squat containers, a miniature Bunsen burner, flimsy tin clamp-teethed prongs, and a length of frayed wick. I’d never known what to make of the wick. A wick? To craft explosions? To create a candle? For what? Really, why was there a wick in a junior scientist kit? I remember one day a friend came over after school to play mad scientist. She saw the wick and seemed as confounded as I was. And then, pretty much out of the blue, she told me that she lit candles to Saint Jude.

“Why?”

“For faith,” she’d said.

As I stood in the bathroom, sniffing Nathalie’s fancy lavender soap like some hunting dog desperate to pick up a scent, resisting the urge to bite into the soap, it occurred to me that I had no guarantee that Nathalie would find her way home, or that she really wanted to, for that matter. I needed to do something about that. And so I went to the kitchen and filled a mason jar with water. I took the bouquet of marigolds I’d left on our Day of the Dead altar, transferred them to the jar, and put them back on the altar next to the framed retablo of Nahui. Then I lit all the votives. Whining pleas to Saint Jude, I begged for Nathalie to call, for her to love me still, for her to come home.

Hours later, I forced myself to try to get some sleep. A glass of water from the kitchen and two pink pills swallowed, I got in bed. It was the first night since I’d met Nathalie that I was in bed without her at my side. And it fucking sucked. I tried to close my eyes, but they just wouldn’t cooperate. As I lay on my side of the bed, exhausted but sleepless, I stared at the altar. Candlelight bounced off the glass of the framed retablo, and Nahui’s silver eyes seemed to glimmer as she stared in my direction. Maybe I just needed glasses; I know I needed sleep, but I swear it looked like Nahui was weeping. Shimmering sepia tears trickled down her face. She felt my pain. She took my pain. Soothed, I watched the candles die down and extinguish themselves. And as I fell asleep, I promised myself that first thing in the morning I’d collect the burned-out wicks and keep them in my pocket for good measure.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

8 November 2002.

T
he phone rattled on the kitchen table. Telephone wires outside the window unfurled from their post and wrapped themselves thorny binding around my chest. Another ring. I wanted to pretend I didn’t know who it was. I wanted to screen the call and not answer. But even though it’d taken Nathalie nearly a week of being gone to finally fucking call, and even though I was beyond pissed, I still wanted to talk to her. I missed her. Horribly. And so, on the fourth ring, the machine about to pick up, I pushed myself out of bed, turned off the stupid afternoon talk show I’d been sort of watching on television, and made quick of the ten steps it took to cross the apartment to the phone.

“Hello?”

There was a pause. And then:

“Hey,” Nathalie said all monosyllabic monotone.

That was all she could say—“hey”? It was so obvious she hadn’t expected me to be home. She’d probably figured I’d be at work and she could just leave a message. Nice, Nat.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Sweetheart, where the fuck are you?”

“This horrid town called Shamrock,” she said. “The McDonald’s here has a bathroom sink the shape of Texas.”

She said it so matter-of-fact, just like that, like a trip to Shamrock, Texas was one she’d been planning forever, and that I’d known she was going on. What I wanted to know was if Shamrock was so goddamned awful, why was she there? And McDonald’s? What was she trying to prove? She didn’t even eat fast food. Hello, and why the fuck had she gone off in the first place? Was she going to apologize? Explain? I wanted to demand answers. But more than that, I wanted Nat to come home. And so I tried to be patient. My ear burned from how long I’d tightly held the phone to it, listening to total silence.

“Nat, are you coming back?”

“Of course. And I’ll explain when I get home, okay?”

I didn’t respond.

“Frank?”

“Fine,” I said.

I hated myself the moment that answer left my mouth because it wasn’t fine, nothing about the situation was fine. In fact, everything I’d thought I’d known had been royally screwed. I had absolutely no clue how to deal with the intense misery her departure made me feel. Gun to foot, ready to shoot—and why not, my heart was already ripped apart—I started in on surface bullshit.

“I saw Johnny yesterday.”

“Oh, that’s nice. How is he?” I could tell Nathalie was grateful for the deflection of drama.

“He’s fine, I guess,” I answered.

Fine. Yup, I’m fine. And he’s fine. We’re all just fucking fine.

Really, on the matter of how Johnny was doing, I wasn’t trying to be flip or obtuse. I just didn’t know. In fact, I could count on less than two hands how much I knew about Johnny:

1.   Johnny lived in our building.

2.   He was an ancient WWII vet.

3.   He rented the apartment directly downstairs.

4.   He had inhabited that apartment for centuries probably.

5.   He watched TV loud enough to hear the commercials through our shared ceiling/floor.

6.   Each night he went to the corner bar for as many beers as the money in his wallet could buy.

7.   More often than not, a lit Camel hung from his craggily thin-lipped mouth.

8.   I liked Johnny.

9.   And Johnny liked me.

With his irony-free meticulous flattop, flannel shirts, and pressed jeans, at first I’d dismissed Johnny as some sort of redneck throwback who’d love to beat the crap out of me if he still had the wherewithal. But then one night I held the vestibule door open for him, more automatic gesture than intended courtesy, and he responded with a wink and a heavily laced, “Thank you,
young man
.”

The wink. The knowing smile. His tone of voice, like we were in on some shared secret. Were we? Just how much had I misperceived the dude? Was he one of the neighborhood’s leftist rebels of yesteryear? Could it be that his lumberjack style was more Village People than Midwest hick? It would have been insane to presume anything, but
exactly
how much did we have in common? That smile. The look in his eyes. We never spoke about any of this directly, but over time he took to chummy hellos with me and exaggerated flirty winks with Nathalie when we’d see him around the neighborhood. I don’t know, the whole thing was sweet somehow. And strangely comforting. Only a few feet of concrete and drywall between us as we slept and shit and ate, we were nearly complete strangers, but I liked that there was a shared membrane of building and routine connecting us.

I’d seen him the day before when I was getting the mail. Johnny had made his way down the stairwell, his walking stick one step ahead of his house-slipper feet, his drooping face looking particularly tired, his gray flattop not as military precise as usual. I watched to make sure his pajama pants hem didn’t catch on his feet as he took the final steps to the mailboxes. I hadn’t seen him dressed in his dark jeans and red plaid shirt in weeks. He seemed utterly drained.

“Where’s that firecracker of yours been?” he asked.

“She’ll be back soon,” I said. And tried to convince myself it was necessarily true.

“Lucky dog,” he said, and laid an unsteady slap on my back.

I told Nathalie: “He said to tell the
firecracker
hello.”

“Tell him I send hugs … So, what else is up?”

The woman I thought would be with me always is gone, that’s what else is fucking up.

“Nothing major,” I said.

“You been working hard?”

What the fuck?! Could we please have a real conversation already?

And, as for me working hard, until Nathalie gave a little on her end of the line, there was no way in hell I was going to confess that I’d been calling in sick to the temp office each day since she’d left. I’d spent all week just like I was spending that particular day—in bed, wearing pajama pants and a hoody, hood up, slumped down in blankets, and staring at the television I’d dragged over and put on the nightstand. I was living a parallel life to Johnny’s, slightly cooler dressed and without the evening forays to the corner bar, but still.

In all my moping about, I hadn’t even taken down the Day of the Dead altar. Well, I had managed to deal with some of its edible parts. The fruit was first to go, then I made my way through the final meal I’d left for my father. Box of Wheaties: eaten dry, box to hand to mouth. Can of chili beans: opened, scraped from the can with a fork, and washed down with alternate swigs of cranberry and grape juice. The three scoops of rocky road ice cream had melted into a thick sludge moldy mess I wouldn’t eat no matter how hungry I was, and the wilted stalks of green onion had turned dark slime and stuck to the lace tablecloth. The unopened pints of coffee yogurt bulged with gassy rot.

The apartment smelled sour and totally stale, and I didn’t fucking care. All in all, I was useless. Other than my one night at the Strand and a few quick trips downstairs to get the mail, I’d pretty much lain in bed for a week straight.

Was I working hard? Well …

“Frank?”

“Nat, are you really coming back?”

“Of course, love.”

“
When
?”

“Soon. I promise.”

There was something in her voice that told me not to push for more answers. I could tell she meant it, she’d be back. So that was that. She said she loved me. I said the same in return. And it was true. I did love her. More than I’d ever loved anyone. But I also sort of hated her. That night, I hated her for not immediately running back home and throwing herself at my feet and groveling by way of apology for leaving me.

After we hung up, I felt like I’d go crazy if I stayed alone a second longer. At the same time, I didn’t want to be around anyone. Unless Nathalie walked in the door, that is. But, although she’d said she’d be back home soon, I knew not to expect her to walk in the door that night. So, naïvely hoping to cure my anxious loneliness, I went to the closet, reached to the top shelf, moved a stack of extra blankets and towels, and retrieved my father’s briefcase. My fingerprints marked the dusty black leather. Briefcase balanced on my knee, I used my sleeve to give the CIA-man case a quick shine. Clicking open the gold clasps was such a satisfying feeling—the metal spring lock giving way, pushing up into the pad of my thumb. Pathetic, Frank. Totally pathetic. I needed Nat back. Tough beans, kid, she won’t be home tonight. Deal. I sat on the bed to give the briefcase a thorough look-see.