Mendocino and Other Stories (20 page)

I watched him walk and suddenly I was twenty yards back, watching me watch him: me, standing by a snowy cornfield in Nebraska, dressed in borrowed long underwear, watching a man in a silly hat—a man who'd just killed a bird—walk away from me. I
started to laugh. Tillman turned around quickly—to see if I was crying, he said later—and I laughed harder. He stood there watching me and I tried to stop, but I couldn't: what a pair, I thought giddily, what an impossible pair. I heard myself snorting with laughter and I tried to think of something sad—Tillman's father, summoning death. But when I imagined him alone in that white house, sitting in the red velvet recliner in his bathrobe, eating string beans straight from the can, he seemed like nothing so much as a grumpy father in a sitcom on TV. The laughter contorted my mouth and I tried instead to conjure my own father, sitting at his desk with a betrayed look on his face, entirely unable to imagine why his daughter chose to participate in something he abhorred. But I didn't even have the knowledge of my parents' disapproval to sober me: I'd told them nothing about the true purpose of our trip. I put my fist to my mouth and gnawed at my knuckles.

“What's so funny?” Tillman said. He put his hands on his hips and began to smile. “Hey—what's so funny?”

Years later, we'd recall these younger selves with wistful fondness, like parents thinking back to when the babies were babies: Imagine thinking we could leave our pasts behind! Imagine thinking we couldn't! How smug we've become—totting up the early mistakes and self-deceptions, marveling at the sheer unlikely luck that brought us together and keeps us that way: as certain that a particular grace illuminates our lives as all the other happily married people in the world.

“You,” I said to Tillman on that day in Nebraska. “Me.”

SHORTLY BEFORE MY
mother's death I said an unforgivable thing to her. I did not at the time know she was dying, although if I'd known better how to look at her perhaps I'd have seen that something was wrong. By how to look at her I mean, of course, into her: past the brilliant costume to the very blue flame of her heart.

It was Christmastime, and I was visiting her at her little house in Palo Alto—her bungalow, she liked to call it. Between us there were years of difficult phone calls and excessive gift-giving, but also some good hours together, some lovely, lovely hours. I was in her small guest room, still dressed but stretched out on the bedspread, when she knocked on my door and came in to say good night: a tall woman of sixty-four, handsomely dressed in a kind of red and gold hostess gown, her face recently tightened.

She sat on the edge of the bed. “Buddy,” she said, “Christmas
Eve. We should have driven to see the lights or made mulled wine or strung cranberries or something.”

“We could each eat a candy cane before bed.”

“I love it!” She clasped her hands together and laughed, a little too hard. “You definitely have a touch.”

“Or maybe I'm a little touched,” I said, tapping my head.

“I'm touched,” she said. “I'm touched that you're here, Buddy, I am.” She fiddled with her bracelet, twisted it around her wrist a few times. “There aren't many men who'd fly three thousand miles to see good old Mom for Christmas.”

“Not so old,” I said.

“No, but really, you probably had loads of parties and so on you could have gone to.” She looked at me questioningly, and I shrugged. “Or you might've wanted to visit your father.…”

They had been divorced twenty-two years earlier, at the end of my freshman year of college. For years he had been like a ghost in our house, but that last Christmas I'd gone home and found him living in the guest room, unable even to join us for meals. My younger sister, Ingrid, and I prevailed upon him to have Christmas dinner with us, and when my mother brought him the turkey to carve, he sawed off one leg and then carefully set the knife and fork on the platter, suggested that it was time I learned, and left the table. By the end of my sophomore year he had resigned from the university, had moved away from California altogether to chair the English department at a small college in central Illinois. I talked to him three or four times a year, saw him occasionally when business took him to New York. He never mentioned my mother to me. Seeing him was like seeing a distant uncle who I knew would always wish me well. “Grand to see you,” he'd say.

“You know I'm happy to come here,” I said to my mother.

She patted my knee. “I know.”

I swung my legs around and sat upright. “If we wanted to do
something Christmasy tonight we could call Ingrid,” I said. “Say ‘Have a merry’ to her and Bruce.”

My mother frowned; for years she and Ingrid had been on poor terms. (“Have you gotten through to Ingrid?” I'd asked her on the morning after the big earthquake out there; it had taken her hours to reach me. “Once,” she said. “She was about six at the time.”)

“I'm sure she'd like to hear from you,” I said, although I wasn't.

My mother sighed. “It's just so tiring talking to her, don't you find? She's so literal-minded, she hasn't changed a bit.”

“She has,” I said. She's happy, I wanted to say, but didn't. “Maybe I'll call her myself.”

“Oh, Buddy.” My mother moved closer to me, and I smelled her perfume, the familiar spiciness of it. “I want us to be friends.”

I smiled at her. “I'm friends. Aren't you?”

“Then why won't you
tell
me about yourself?” she cried. “Is there a special man in your life? Are you in love? Do you know, I could die happy if I knew you were in love.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, what about your friends?” She looked up at me. “At least tell me about your friends.”

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. “My friends are dead or dying.” When I looked at her again her eyes had widened, and for a moment I anticipated understanding, maybe even wanted comfort.

“Oh, poor Buddy,” she said. “I know how you feel. Mine are, too. Why, talking to Ruth and Mary Ann these days I have to invent illnesses to get any attention.”

Should I, at that point, have told my mother what I'd seen at the bedsides of men I'd loved? Would it have been better that way for her? For me? For us?

Instead I said, “If your friends were as sick as mine you'd drop them in seconds.” And whether or not this was true—and I'm
inclined, with all the aching generosity of hindsight, to think that it was not—my mother rose without speaking and left the room.

MY FRIENDS WERE
dead or dying, although I still had Kevin. Have. Have.

“Why couldn't I have said I was in love?” I asked him after she'd died.

“Because you weren't?” he said. “I guess you could have made someone up. You could have told her about what's-his-name.”

“Dean?” I groaned. “I figured out what it was about him—he said ‘dint.’ Instead of didn't.”

Kevin laughed.

“Plus those cowboy boots.”

“You've never been a big fan of tooled leather,” Kevin said.

When my mother was alive Kevin had a name for me: Robert the Jumper. As in jumping through hoops. He said if my mother called and told me she was thirsty I'd get on the red-eye with a bottle of Evian. I told him if
his
mother called and said
she
was thirsty he'd Federal Express her a bottle of Evian with rat poison in it. He laughed and said, “So why are we both gay if you love your mother and I hate mine?” He was in therapy, so he thought about things a lot. I told him it was all much more complicated than that. Or much simpler.

After my mother died Kevin teased me less, asked me how I was doing, let me tell him stories about her.

A story: When I was five or six my mother took it into her head that I was Ready for Culture. That, in fact, time was wasting. Saturday after Saturday she persuaded my father to stay behind with Ingrid, for whom culture could apparently wait, while she took me to San Francisco to see ballets, concerts, operas. We had lunch beforehand, in dark velvet restaurants where the waiters
brought me glasses of ginger ale and saucers full of maraschino cherries while she drank her vodka martinis. People stared at us, and I was embarrassed because I understood that my mother had invented for us a glamorous hint of tragedy only barely survived: at her cue we spoke in hushed tones, and because she only poked at her food I didn't eat much of mine. We'd get to the opera house just before curtain time and quickly look over the program together, my mother saying something like, “We'll see how they do with the Schubert, Buddy—I have my doubts.” I loved that “we'll”—being included in the practice of judgment—but I knew that this, too, was meant for whatever audience we had. By the end of the performance I invariably had a stomachache from the candy I'd eaten at intermission—entire boxes of Junior Mints or nonpareils; we'd blink as the bright house lights came up, and my mother would rest her hand on the top of my head, or touch my shoulder. Then we went home, to my father at his desk in the study, to Ingrid quietly schooling her stuffed animals.

“You wanted your mother all to yourself,” Kevin said. “Herself would say you hated sharing her, with your father or with Ingrid.”

Herself was Dr. Gold, Kevin's shrink. I loved her only a little less than he did; she was reported to have beautiful rugs. “Duh,” I said.

Kevin laughed.

“Anyway, what about how she embarrassed me? I was mortified. Mortified at six, you never really get over that.”

Kevin said he didn't know. He said he'd ask Dr. Gold for me.

IN THE LONG
fall to where we ended up—my mother alone in her little house in Palo Alto; my father alone in Illinois, in a house I knew only as a street address; me alone, mostly alone, in my apartment in New York; among us only Ingrid attached to someone,
happily and privately in Medford, Oregon—in that long turning away from each other there were swift lifetimes when I imagined us somehow reunited in a determination to be easy and sweet together. Like TV, but without the washed-out saccharine mother. I wanted
my
mother,
my
father, Ingrid, me—but matched. Perhaps because I couldn't imagine how this could come about, I leapt into the future and saw us all equally blue-haired—aged as unconvincingly as Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in
Giant
—and surrounded by nameless children: certainly not mine, probably not Ingrid's, but children who would save us.

There were also times—single days—when we fell long distances, turned so resolutely there could be no turning back.

STANFORD
, 1960. This is before the hippies, before the peace signs painted on the asphalt of White Plaza, before the torchlight sit-ins, the broken windows—years before my best friend's younger brother, sixteen and a track star, is shot in the leg at an antiwar demonstration in front of the football stadium. He is seven now and a pest; when, on weekend mornings, his brother and Ingrid and I ride over to the campus, we pedal as fast as we can so he will be left behind. He always finds us, though: the university is the farthest we're allowed to venture from home, and our favorite, inevitable destination there is a small courtyard in the center of which is an octagonal pool with a classically inspired fountain. We like the size, the scale, the modesty of this courtyard; we spend hours here, playing Statues: swinging each other around and freezing in positions we think are sculptural. Like our parents—two professors and their wives—we respect tradition when it comes to art. At the entrance to the courtyard a pair of empty niches face each other across an arcade, and we think it's a
shame there aren't statues in them. Nothing modern—our tastes run to small cherubs, or replicas of Pan, flute in hand.

A hot Sunday afternoon in early September. Tonight is the annual beginning-of-the-year English Department party, a chance for the faculty to get together and welcome whoever is new. My father dislikes large parties in general and these in particular because, unanchored by the hospitality and comfort of real hosts and real houses, they are usually even stiffer than other gatherings of too many people. This year, though, is different: he is Acting Head and as such has adopted the party with a kind of zeal we don't usually see in him. He has commandeered the common room of one of the older, nicer dorms—the parties are usually held in a shabby meeting room on the second floor of the depart-ment—and devised a system whereby everyone will be sure to mix: a parlor game called “Who Am I.” On arrival, each guest will be given the name of a famous person, and a card with that per-son's initials to pin to his clothes, and everyone will go around asking questions like “Are you Cordelia's father?” to determine each other's identity. It'll be a kind of walking Botticelli, the trick being that all the famous people will be figures from literature. My mother thinks it's the stupidest thing she's ever heard of, and she is still telling my father so as they are getting ready to leave for the party.

“At least let me be who I want,” she calls to him; she's in the bathroom with the door ajar.

My father shakes his head sadly, as if to lament to Ingrid and me our mother's unwillingness to play fair. “Can't do that,” he calls back. “Anyway, I don't have the cards—I couldn't do it even if I wanted to.” He looks at his watch and frowns: he has been ready for fifteen minutes.

Ingrid and I lie on our parents' bed, arguing, idly, over whether
or not to go with them: I want to stay home and read, but Ingrid not only wants to go but insists on my going too—she says she'll have a terrible time if she's the only kid. Our going at all was a last-minute, subversive suggestion of my mother's.

“Who do you want to be?” I call to her.

“Lady Macbeth,” my father says, loudly enough for her to hear.

She pokes her head out the door. She's holding a lipstick, has already painted her lower lip a deep red. “Ha ha,” she says. “So who
has
the cards?”

“We should be there,” my father says. “Dick Traeger.”

My mother smiles. “Buddy,” she says to me, “run outside and see if the Traegers' car is still there.”

“I don't feel like it.” A year ago I would have gone.

“Ingrid?”

Ingrid shakes her head.

“Oh, for God's sake, Ingrid!” My mother slams the bathroom door.

“Go see,” I say, poking Ingrid. “I'll go to the party if you'll go see.”

Ingrid makes a face and rolls off the bed—literally rolls until she's lying on the rug. My father looks at her lying there: his solemn, brown-haired daughter dressed today, as nearly every day this summer, in the navy blue shorts and white shirt that were her day-camp outfit the first two weeks in July. He looks at his watch again.

“Better hurry,” I say, and Ingrid gets up and trudges out; a moment later I hear the front door close.

“Hi, Robert,” my father says.

“Hi, Dad,” I say.

Lately I've been having trouble putting my feelings about my family into some kind of order. I've always wanted, more than anything, for Ingrid to try harder to please our mother; so why do I
now feel guilty for making her check on the Traegers' car? Perhaps because I know our mother won't really be pleased. Ingrid is nine, two years younger than I; she was born in 1951 and as an act of solidarity my mother named her for Ingrid Bergman, whose recent scandalous behavior she applauded, her theory being that if you didn't live by your heart there was no point in living at all. It is a continuing disappointment to my mother—an affront, really—that our Ingrid has no taste for theatrics of any kind. I have heard my mother use the word “stolid” about our Ingrid, use it with a kind of pleasure.