Love in the Present Tense (4 page)

“Pearl?” I said.

“Maybe Leonard could stay here today. I'm still thinking.”

She walked past me and looked the place up and down.

Both Hannah and Cahill fell out of their seats and fell into line, like some kind of military inspection. Pearl inspired that. I introduced them both, but Pearl didn't offer her hand to shake or anything. Just looked up at them like she was taking mental notes. Pearl was very small.

Meanwhile Cahill was giving me this look and I knew he was filing this as further evidence against me.

I introduced Leonard to the Avian Americans, as Cahill liked to call them. I had these two big cockatoos. A rosy Moluccan and a pure white. Pebbles and Zonker. I explained to Leonard with great care that Zonker was very nice and friendly but Pebbles had to be avoided at all costs. And I color-coded them for him. White good. Pink bad.

“Why is she bad?” he wanted to know.

“She bites,” I said.

“Hard?”

“Very hard. She has a beak that can crack walnuts.” He didn't seem impressed. “Know what a walnut is?”

“Like a peanut?”

“No, much harder. She could break one of your little fingers.”

“Ouch,” he said.

I took Zonk down off the cage and he hopped rather eagerly onto Leonard's head and preened at little bits of his spiky weed-hair, causing the kid to positively shriek with laughter and delight.

“Okay,” Pearl said. “He can stay here. I've decided it's okay.”

She moved toward the door. Cahill gave me this snooty look, this kind of sarcastic thank-God-we-passed-muster thing. She was rude, there was no arguing that. No defending her.

“Leonard,” she said. “Got your inhaler?”

“Check,” he said, patting his shirt pocket. His shoulders popped up around his ears, like that would somehow make his head, with its big overwhelming bird ornament, disappear.

I took Zonker onto my fingers, put him back up on the cage.

Pearl stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder at me. Such a tiny, fragile beauty. “Mr. Doc,” she said. “Thank you. This is very nice.”

And she left before she could see how stunned I was to hear it.

Not ten minutes later Leonard stuck his hand out to the wrong bird and got it bitten. I was in the kitchen area starting a third pot of coffee. The shriek brought everybody running. Even Graff, who had managed to get his sorry ass into work by then.

Leonard held his little damaged finger up for me to see. It wasn't broken. Actually it hadn't even broken the skin. But there was a definite red mark.

“Go get him some ice,” I told Hannah. I was feeling a little better about Pebbles, because I knew that had not been her best shot. She had cut the poor kid a moment's slack.

“Remember what I told you about Pebbles?” I said, wiping off his tears with the paper towel Hannah brought us and applying the ice, which made him wince.

“Yuh. You said she'd crack me like a nut.”

“Right. She's the rosy one.”

“What's rosy?”

“Pink.”

“Yuh,” he said. “I know.”

He was just a kid. Five years old. He swore he understood the difference between the two birds but I was sure he had simply transposed the names, descriptions, and reputations.

It never occurred to me at the time that even with those big thick glasses he couldn't see well enough to tell the two apart.

LEONARD,
age
17:
photo, last name, father

I have no photos of Pearl. Not one. At least, none that survived her leaving.

I have a strong memory of her, a mental picture of her face, looking down on me with love. From the minute I was born, I think. She believed in looking down on her baby, me, with a face full of joy. Welcoming, she said. She said we should all be welcomed into the world with joy. I remember her telling this at length to Rosalita, who I used to think was my grandmother, when we went to visit her. Turns out she wasn't, though. So, grandparents. Another thing I don't have. I should add that to the list.

Thing is, because I have no photo, I can no longer picture her face. I still see and feel her looking down on me with love, but I can't re-create that Pearl face, that sweet child. So now all I see is the love. Which, actually, is not such a bad deal. You could do a lot worse.

Every young man thinks his mother is an angel. The Madonna, beyond reproach. And I guess I'm no exception.

But there are two things I wanted from her and never got. Two things I begged her to tell me but she never did. I wanted to know who my father was. And I wanted to know my last name.

Better not to know, she said. Trust me on this, she said.

I wanted to trust her. I meant to. But then instead I memorized the name she gave when she took me to the clinic. I couldn't help it. Said it over and over so I wouldn't forget. But I didn't know how to spell it. I could only sound it out in my head. It was like, Dim…eat…tree.

I learned it just in time for her to tell me: Forget it. It isn't ours anyway.

She was scared of something. I wonder sometimes if what she was scared of is what got her in the end. It doesn't always work that way, you know. Sometimes we think we know what to fear. We never turn our back on it. Then something else we never thought of comes along. I wonder if what finally caught her in the end was something she feared all that time, or something she never would have thought of.

I'm thinking all this as I work on the hang glider in the half-dark. I'm working by candlelight. Because what I'm doing, it's this taping thing. I went out and bought ten rolls of duct tape. Sounds crazier than it is. The duct tape doesn't have to hold it all together. The fabric is also sewn. The tape just seals flat all the fabric edges so the wind can't get underneath.

I was told you can also use wax, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I kept thinking about Icarus, flying too close to the sun. I don't know how close I might get. I don't want to commit.

While I'm feeling the tape under my fingers, smoothing it down, feeling each edge adhere to the fabric, taut and perfect, I'm thinking about the last time I saw Pearl. The way she grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me down the street toward Mitch's house. Very sudden. I knew she had seen something, but I didn't look around. I was only five. I never got to see what she saw. I think about that a lot now. I had a chance to see the devil, the bogeyman, but I didn't look over my shoulder. I was just thinking about getting to Mitch's house. Wondering if he got that new computer game he promised me. I didn't know it was an important moment. I guess you never do.

Now Jake comes in and sits in the garage with me. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say back.

“You're crazy,” he says.

“We been through this before.”

“No, I mean, turn on the light.”

“Don't need the light. This is something I'm better to do by feel.”

It's like blindness, a subject I feel qualified to speak about. It turns up my sense of touch. I am feeling tautness, smoothness. I am better off, just in this moment, without my eyes.

The candlelight throws a great huge shadow of the bird craft onto the rafters of the garage. It's breathtaking, really. The aluminum frame is covered with fabric now, but the candlelight bleeds through it like an X-ray, stripping it bare and showing its bones. It's almost a religious thing. To look at, I mean. I think even Jake is filled with a certain reverence.

Now I'm thinking about Pearl coming into the hospital to hold me when I was all tiny and premature. I don't know how prematurely I was born but I get a sense from her stories that it was a big deal. I'm thinking about how she fought the nurses for the right to look down at me with that welcoming love. There were visiting hours, but she more or less told them to kiss her ass. Not that I remember this exactly but I remember being told. And I believe I have some trace memory of that beam of welcoming love.

Jake says, “Talk to me, Leonard. You never talk to us.”

I say, “Jake. You know I love you and all. But you're disturbing my thought pattern.”

“That's just it,” he says. “We never know what you're thinking. It's like you never let us in.”

The soft rip of a piece of tape, then more blind smoothing under my fingers. I'm looking up, at the shadow.

“I'll make a deal with you. If you'll sit here with me quietly, and not mess up my thoughts, I'll think them out loud for you.”

“Seriously?” he says.

“Hush,” I say. “Here's what I'm thinking.

“I'm thinking that if a boy drops into the world without a father, and without a name, it's almost like he didn't get here the same way everyone else did. Like the immaculate conception or something. Not to have a swelled head. I know Pearl was not a virgin. I don't kid myself. I know. It's just this feeling you get. This really displaced feeling.

“I'm thinking how when I went to kindergarten—oh, Jesus, now there's a whole other subject altogether. Anyway, don't distract me. I'm thinking how Mitch gave me his name. So for those three years I was Leonard Devereaux. But I knew I really wasn't. He wanted me to be but I wasn't.

“I'm wondering, what does that mean, to really wear somebody's name? If Mitch's name could be mine for real, if he had impregnated Pearl, would that change me? How would that change me? Would we be something different to each other?

“We would have lived together all this time. That's the part I can see. Not that you and Mona haven't been great.”

Another soft rip of tape. I'm holding this long strip, feeling the stickiness under my fingers. I want to go on, but now I realize that it's not the same out loud with Jake here. It's not the same with somebody listening. Nobody ever listens to my thoughts, and now I realize I don't really want anyone to.

Besides, I want to think about things I can't tell him. Because he's part of my family, my adoptive people, and it's somehow important to them that I wear their name, like a new coat someone gives you because the old one was getting threadbare.

I was thinking about how sometimes I want to go back to using the name Devereaux, but I can't say that out loud. I know it would hurt Jake's feelings.

Also how sometimes I understand these kids who go off looking for their birth parents, because they don't really know who they are. And how other times I think that feeling, that disconnectedness of not knowing who I am, is on my side. It keeps me from getting too earthbound. From thinking this is some kind of final resting place, like home. But I can't feel all that in front of Jake.

“Tomorrow we'll take it out and inspect it in the light,” I say. “Mount the harness.”

I can feel him building himself up, to say something big. One of those critical human communications that seem so popular with everybody except maybe me, Leonard Nobody.

“We can't let you do this, Leonard.”

“Okay. Fine. I understand.”

I knew this would happen. I've already made up my mind not to fight it. It never helps to fight. You have to make like a piece of cheesecloth. Let 'em sweep right through you. No damage.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“You're right. I shouldn't do it. I'll call it off.”

I hate like hell to lie to him, but it's kinder. I've already lied through my teeth to Mitch. I hated to do it. It goes against the grain. But it will be important for them in the long run. This way, if something goes wrong, they can say they didn't know.

And, anyway, this is something I need to do alone.

I'd like to think Jake believes me. But I think we both know that was way too easy.

After he leaves, I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one.

Then I said, “I think it's because my mother loves me so much.”

He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know? But he's my friend, anyway. There are just some things he doesn't understand.

MITCH,
age
37:
leonard won't unpack

Monday morning, like clockwork, I arrive at my office and there's Mona, waiting to talk to me.

Here's the thing about Leonard: Leonard being Leonard, never any more or any less, every time I see Mona waiting for me I get this pitch inside my stomach, thinking what I might hear. If I were a parent for real, it would be the cops on my doorstep in the night. But much as I love that boy, much as I feel I have the right to call myself his parent, and much as he may see me as his true parent, Leonard could die and the police would never bother to come knocking. Likely I would hear it from Mona.

We make that initial eye contact, and I can tell it's not quite that bad. Not this time. And I breathe. And then I sigh. I haven't even hit my office door yet and already I've been fatally distracted.

“You gotta talk to him, Mitch,” Mona says. “It's getting worse. It's getting crazier. All the time. I'm so scared I'm going to lose him.”

Me too, actually. But she's clearly come to me for comforting. And that would hardly qualify. “You want me to try to talk him out of the glider.”

“Mostly. Yeah. But there's been some other stuff, too. And I just don't feel like we're getting through to him. Not like
you
always did. You could always get through to him.”

To be polite, we both briefly pretend that wasn't a hard thing for her to admit.

I've noticed, too, lately, that Leonard has been dancing weirdly close to the edge of danger. Real, physical danger. He makes it sound like some kind of spiritual quest. But he is a human being, Leonard. Somewhere deep down he has the same makeup, the same basic urges as all of us. He just has this thing about transcendence. Doesn't want too many earthbound connections.

This makes me edgy because I get the sense that this is just a stopover for him, that he has no real plans for staying. Like if a guest came to my house and refused to unpack his suitcases. I might tease him about it. I might say, hey, loosen up and stay awhile. But the statement of intent would be pretty damn clear. That's Leonard's approach to life itself. He refuses to unpack.

“Is this about Pearl?” I say.

“Everything is about Pearl. You know what he thinks, don't you? I mean, he tells you, right? That he thinks Pearl is still with him?”

“He's learned not to talk about it around me,” I say. “Because he knows he can't make the sale.”

“When Pearl died—”

“
If
Pearl died,” I say, more vehemently than necessary. Noticing how much vehemence I have gathered on this sore subject over the years. “
If
she died. No one knows for sure that she died. No body ever turned up. Leonard just decided she died. If you ask me, Pearl dropped him on my doorstep and took a powder. Can't you understand how important it is to him? Not to believe that?”

Mona decides to sidestep this entirely. She says, “He's getting pretty reckless, Mitch. He's so damn set on proving this theory about Pearl. But you see the danger, right? Because until he's dead, he won't know. I feel almost like he's trying to get closer and closer to that line. Talk to him, Mitch. Would you? He doesn't listen to me.”

He doesn't listen to me, either, but I don't say so. “What do you mean, proving the theory?”

“Well, you know.”

“If I knew I wouldn't ask.”

“It's like he thinks this whole thing about dying…this thing everybody says about going into the light? Well, he thinks it's true enough, only he has this theory that it's…sort of…optional.”

“Optional?” I say. It sounds stupid. I can't stop it from sounding stupid.

“Optional,” she says. She has deep circles under her already dark eyes. “He thinks if you don't want to go, you just don't. You stay.
With
somebody. Like he thinks Pearl did with him.”

I want to ask what she believes, but then I decide it doesn't really matter. “Forever love,” I say. Because that is something Leonard and I do talk about. He's been trying to teach me about forever love since he was five years old. I'm a slow learner, and he's patient.

Her face lights up at having finally found a common ground in this conversation. Something that we both understand that we both understand. My stomach lurches around almost painfully at the idea that Leonard is so hot to try this out.

“Okay,” I say, steeling myself to say things that need saying. “Okay. Let's say, God forbid, the absolute worst happens. Worst-case scenario.” I can't let myself spell it out any clearer than that. “Who is Leonard planning on hanging around to love?”

Mona's eyes go wide. Like she can't believe I wouldn't know. And I guess it embarrasses her to have to be the one to tell me. And also, it hurts her, because she wants it to be her but it's not.

She looks away again. “Well, you. Of course.” Then, while I'm trying to swallow this meteorite of information, to dislodge it from its sticking place in my throat, she says, “Talk to him, Mitch.”

And in a sudden fit of hopeless idiocy I agree that I will.

Leonard lives with his adoptive parents, Jake and Mona, these people he swears can never replace me. They have lots of kids, all adopted. Eleven, at last count. Many have special needs, so Leonard's vision problems, his asthma, just didn't strike them as a deterrent. Not like I was hoping it would. I was hoping nobody would take Leonard, and I'd get to keep him. But this do-gooder family had to crop up. Leonard and I have come to a fairly good understanding with it over the last decade. We pretend he belongs to them, and they let me visit. We know the truth, and where to keep it, and when to let it see the light. We belong to each other. In that instance, at least, Pearl showed a certain wisdom.

Leonard is in the family garage, just where Mona said he'd be. Working on his hang glider. Mona told me all about the glider, and about the tattoo.

He got the plans for the glider off the Internet. Then Jake hooked into some chat rooms, trying to find out what everybody thought of these home-built glider things. According to Jake's research, they're a big mistake. But here's Leonard in the family garage building one out of aluminum tubing, nuts and bolts, nylon mesh straps, and laminated polypropylene fabric.

Jake tried to find someone who had done the same thing successfully but was told they are all dead now. He was also told that if you are going to jump to your death, there's no need to build a hang glider to take along. He hopes these are “in” jokes for chat rooms but suspects that even “in” jokes get their start in the truth.

Leonard's faced away from me, looking so small and slight. Looking so bald, so monklike with his shaved head. I can see part of the tattoo. The top of the vertical beam of the cross. It rises just slightly up out of his collar. It's so detailed, right down to the rough wood grain. I have a lot of ambivalence about the tattoo, but right at the moment I am dying to see it all.

He's wearing his usual uniform: jeans and a plain white T-shirt. It offsets the color of his skin, which is somewhat magical in itself. Leonard is the color of coffee just exactly the way I drink it, with a generous splash of half-and-half. I can see the lump of his inhaler in his back jeans pocket. A beam of light sweeps down through the skylight in the roof and makes him look like the chosen one, which I often suspect he just might be. In that deep place where I believe almost nothing, I am tempted to believe that—a light, irritating tickle of belief. And the same beam of sun illuminates the weird silver skeleton of his craft-in-progress, nearly the length of the garage, and makes it look blessed.

I have to remind myself that I vehemently disapprove. This is the problem every time I see Leonard. I go in as a guidance counselor, come out as his personal cheerleader. Everything he does seems so right in person, and in proximity.

I just want to be left alone a moment to observe, but Moon Pie gives me away. Leonard's strange dog. A big wire-haired monster of a mutt, brown and featureless, slightly reminiscent of an Irish wolfhound but nothing quite so blue-blooded in the end. He thumps his tail, and I am made, busted. Leonard turns around.

“Mitch,” he says. He always says my name like it's exactly the name he has been waiting to say.

“Leonard,” I say and walk across his family's garage like I am walking in a dream. Clap one hand down firmly onto his shoulder.

“Mona sent you,” he says. “Didn't she?”

“She means well.”

“Duh,” Leonard says. “That rather goes without saying.”

Moon Pie's wet nose leaves a cold smear on the back of my hand. “Well, just to take her side for a minute, what the hell are you thinking, Leonard?”

He drops his head back into the light. Closes his eyes. As far as Leonard is concerned, I've asked a serious question. I'm not sure he even understands the concept of the rhetorical. He is working hard on giving me the serious answer my serious question so richly and obviously deserves.

“Well,” he says, eyes still pressed closed in private prayer, “I'm thinking about Pearl. And I was thinking about you, just now. Right before you got here. And my eyes. I was thinking next time I see Mitch, I have to thank him again. For my eyes.”

“You don't have to thank me for that anymore.”

“Why not? I use my eyes every day. What else did Mona tell you?”

“Well, about the tattoo.”

“They're almost never fatal.”

“That's not entirely true. Are you sure this place uses sterile needles?”

“Positive. Want to see?”

And of course the crazy thing is, I do. I've had Mona describe it to me at great length.

One of his many little adoptive sisters runs in. A scrappy, scarred ten-or eleven-year-old who worships Leonard, as they all do. Everybody who needs love runs to Leonard, who seems to shepherd an inexhaustible supply.

“Hi, Leonard,” she says. Eager and pleased. “Hi, Mitch.” More reserved. “Can I help?”

“Nope, sorry. Gotta scram, little twerp. I'm about to show Mitch my tattoo.”

“I wanna see it,” she whines, already aching with the unfairness of being excluded from this exhilarating adult event.

“When you're eighteen,” he says. “Otherwise I'll be corrupting you. You'll go out and get a tattoo and who will everybody blame? Me, that's who.”

“Awww,” she says, milking it a bit more.

Leonard tilts his head down. Gives her a look. “Fifteen minutes, I'll take you down the block for an ice cream. If you scram. And take Moon Pie with you.”

Properly bought off, she runs out, holding the great shaggy beast's collar, slamming the small side garage door behind her.

Leonard pulls off his T-shirt. He has not one hair on his narrow little chest. I have this horror that some of his theatrics might get him thrown in jail. It literally makes me sweat to think how he'd fare in there. Lithe, smooth, hairless. Slight. Innocent inside and out.

He turns his back to me.

The tattoo is bigger than I realized. It starts just above the spot where the collar of his T-shirt lies and continues down the middle of his back. The horizontal beam extends across his shoulder blades and just beyond his shoulder on each side. So he has to stand with his arms out to show it off just right.

The wood-grain detail is so frighteningly realistic.

With him standing faced away like this, it almost reminds me of performance art. Which is something like my opinion of the kid anyway. Performance art.

I have to remind myself that I am somehow supposed to disapprove of this.

I am here not to admire the boy but to convince him, once and for good, that his dead mother is not here on earth with him. That his dead mother is, in fact, probably not even dead. That it's suicide to play these games, teasing at the edges of death as if he needed the practice. That if he loves me, he should love me right here, just like this, alive. And, also, I think I'm supposed to tell him the tattoo is foolish. I just can't remember why or on what grounds.

“Leonard. You don't…like…think you're…Jesus or anything. Do you?”

“You know me better than that,” he says, still holding the pose. “So what do you think?”

“Well, it's beautiful. Really, it is. I'm just thinking…I'm just wondering if you'll still be glad to have it when you're…You know. Thirty.”

He laughs. Turns around and takes the three or four steps across the garage concrete to me. Under the skeleton of his big dinosaur-bird craft. Still laughing. He touches my face as if I were his child, his silly paranoid child in need of comforting.

“Oh, Mitch,” he says. I am so foolish. I can hear it in his voice. “Mitch. I'm not going to live to be thirty.”