Now You See Him (7 page)

“So hey,” I said impulsively as she pulled the squealing garage door back down.

“What’s that?” She turned to me.

“You wanna come out with me to Padi-Cakes for a snack or a drink or something?”

She laced her arm in mine. “You bet,” she said.

For several years now, Padi-Cakes has been the only place in Monarch where I feel myself somehow lofted out of the town entirely. Rich hippies moving up here from Manhattan a few years ago styled the place on an Indian teahouse, with high arches and lots of fancy colored tile like an explosion in a Chiclets factory, and the visuals, along with the wheedling drone music, tend to carry the mind far away.

“You’ve changed,” she said, as we began the process of loading the stuff into the back compartment of her truck. “You seem, I don’t know…”

“Older?”

I could hear the sound of a smile in her voice as she walked behind me and said, “No, more at peace, I think.”

We finished loading and I offered her a ride to the restaurant in my car. She accepted, and as we drove, I continued to try to banter with her, but she was flowing into a new channel. She stared out the window, saying little, responding with small phrases when necessary. Now that the initial excitement of seeing me had settled a bit, she was slowing, sobering, growing more reflective. When we got to the restaurant, I parked and shut off the engine, but made no move to get out. She for her part simply continued to sit there, saying nothing. After a long moment, she lowered her head. Gently, very consolingly, I placed my hand on her knee.

“Yup,” she said simply.

“I know,” I said.

There was another long silence.

“It’s not,” she said quietly, “that I simply miss him like a kind of sickness, Nick, or that I think about him constantly, or whatever. It’s the
awayness
of it that I’m having trouble with…”

“Of course it is, Belly.”

“It’s like on a basic physical level, I just refuse the whole thing. I mean, the body that was there, vivid, so powerful—it couldn’t just go away, could it? I keep feeling there’s gotta be some way back. I keep feeling it’s like he’s in the next room, and can’t figure out how to turn the door handle and get back in. I can hear that rattling handle in my dreams. I can’t believe he’s never again gonna call me drunk from jail in Laredo, Texas, or all bent out of shape about some new Finnish poet he just read, or harangue
perfect strangers in bars about sustainable planetary resources. I can’t believe we’ll never ever have another chat about”—she pronounced the word with self-conscious pride, smiling a little—“Pantisocracy.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

The smile trembled. “One of those pipe-dream nineteenth-century English utopias he loved so much. The British, he used to say, were into utopias because the Industrial Revolution had driven them fucking crazy, every one of them, and being an island race, the only place they could go was back in time. Nostalgia and bad teeth, he used to say, are the British vices.”

“And drinking.”

“Whatever.”

“You love quoting him.”

“It’s what I’ve got left.” Her face drew down around the mouth as she stared out the window, and then slowly shook her head, mostly to herself, and said in a low voice, “Everybody thinks they have to say something to me. But none of it helps. Nothing does, actually. Not a single thing.” She continued to look out the window, and then slowly turned to me. “And here we are with all our shitty old memories, eh, Nick?”

“He loved you very much,” I said softly.

“Ah, Christ!” She shook her head, and then cried emphatically, “That fucker!” She wiped her eyes roughly with the back of a hand. “That goddamn golden little fucker! We all fell in love with him, didn’t we, Nick?”

“We sure did,” I laughed, “and he made a point of it.”

“You know I once took an abnormal psych course,” she said, “and I learned that there’s this thing, this syndrome,
that happens if you grow up in a home with a handicapped child, in which the afflicted kid becomes the sun of the family galaxy, and everybody else rotates around him about a million miles away in space. Well, it was sort of like that in our family. But there was no handicapped child. Guess what we had instead?”

“Would that be an older brother?”

“A prince of the motherfucking realm. And me and Hiram? We watched. Oh, yeah, we were big watchers. That was the idea, apparently. My mother had him to dote on, and us to be the audience. ‘Here you go, darling,’” she said in a mincing mother’s voice. “‘That’s a good girl, swallow it down to the really bitter part. Now take your sorry, skulking useless ass out to the living room and watch your older brother play the piano. Watch him win the state spelling bee. Watch him be the shortest kid in town history to dunk a basketball!’ God, it was never ending!”

As I watched, she seemed to shake her head as if somehow in censure of her own memories. Then she calmed herself by doing what I took to be a yoga exercise, shutting her eyes, straightening her spine, and breathing deeply, in then out.

“By the way, what did she say to you when you went to see her?” she asked a few moments later, opening her eyes.

“Your mom?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Oh, you know, the usual, about missing Rob, as you’d expect, and the specialness of it all; the love between them and stuff like that. She seemed to take Hi’s agronomy career as a personal betrayal—”

Belinda snorted.

“I know,” I went on, “and of course there was the usual bit about what a tragic mistake it was to move to Monarch in the first place from San Francisco. Oh, and seals.”

“Of course”—she was nodding—“and sea fog. Did she mention sea fog?”

I laughed. “And sea fog as well.”

There was a pause.

“Nicky?”

“Yup.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

I took a long, blind perusal of the view, considering what to say, and then decided to tell her the truth.

“No.”

She nodded. “I can’t say it surprises me.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a sustained silence. And it was then, finally, that Belinda began to cry. There was no intermediate step of gradually gathering congestion. She simply made a sudden plosive sound of release and abruptly, with no warning, started sobbing out loud. On instinct, I put my arms around her and gathered her toward me. “That bitch!” she gasped, and then she buried her face in my neck, and sent fishlike flurries of grief through my clavicle and upper chest. “Why did I know that?” she kept repeating. “Why did I have to be so sure about that? Couldn’t I be surprised for once in my fucking life?”

Petting her hair comfortingly, I held her as best I could and told her that I was there for her, that her mom was an old and unhappy alcoholic, that we would get through the difficulty of Rob together, that I couldn’t believe what a deep and real and righteous feeling it was to see her again,
and then, spontaneously, I told her that I’d missed her. I told her that I’d missed her friendship and our companionship. I don’t know if she even heard me, because she was crying openly now, with breathless cycling little sobs. We stayed that way for a long while, me holding her, she bent forward into the windbreak of my chest, her sobs gradually slowing to sniffles, and then from there slowing further still. I was still talking softly when she turned her face toward mine and I had a chance to glimpse the pretty starbursts her matted eyelashes made around her blue eyes before we began to kiss.

I
T WAS AS IF, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
of my life, the deepest lessons offered me were to squelch my own desires and swallow the taste of my feelings in silence. The point, my parents seemed to imply through their words and actions, was not to offend, or in any way draw attention to one’s self, not out of adherence to some larger code of gentlemanly conduct, but because life itself was a highly breakable object, and as such must be approached sidelong and with the maximum caution.

That being the case, it’s little surprise that my mother and father never seemed particularly to care whether or not I was happy as a child. They did the necessary amount to sustain, clothe and feed me, but I never felt that easy, lifted sense I perceived in the homes of my friends, whose families were organized around them so as to place them on pedestals of loving attention. No such elevation ever took place for me in our home. And yet, from as far back
as I remember, my older brother, Patrick, seemed to dwell within a different world entirely, a world of parental recognitions, ecstatically applied. Their voices were more vibrant around him, the laughter more frequent, deep and sustained. I used to wonder if it wasn’t simply that he, Patrick, had received the family’s feelings firsthand, with the result that by the time they got to me, their freshness had been wilted by sustained handling, like old salad.

Much of this withheld feeling I attach to my father. In memory, it’s as if he passed my entire childhood silently seated at the dinner table with his hands templed together over his nose, his eyes suspended and seeming to float in space while he stared at me in a grave, faintly accusing way. That same pinched face is a constant in an otherwise whirling array of recollection, and I can shuffle these images like a deck of cards. Here he is at the annual Christmas party for his lab, morose among the noisemakers and confetti poppers, with me trailing behind him, grabbing his coattails, attacked by shyness. Here we are all together on vacation, sitting becalmed in a sailboat in the middle of an Adirondack lake, or grimly eating in the campus cafeteria on parents’ day at college, or sitting on a Connecticut beach avoiding looking at one another with the crumbling, hissing folds of waves a distance off. At the center of it is that remarkable document, his face, from which, in memory, a radiant dourness seems to emanate a little like the sunlit rays around the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill.

Why, I often wondered, did he begrudge me the happiness of my boyhood? Why was he so unalterably opposed to my joy? There is a sound recording that exists of me as a
six-year-old child. I listened to it not long ago. On the tape my voice can be heard breaking upward in little interrogative crests. Those crests—I remember them well—were so many entreaties that my father join me in the excitement of childhood; they were my implicit request that he play with me with the ease and amplitude he did with my brother, Patrick, and that we be, if even for a moment, like those other fathers I saw at school, who seemed to exist with their sons in a quiet trance of understanding, letting their arms fall casually across their shoulders, building Pinewood Derby cars with them in long hours of basement collaboration, or camping with them in the nearby sawtooth mountains and thereby opening up vistas of manly expertise. I wanted the dashing fathers of the Italian kids; I wanted the terrible drinking fathers of the Polish kids. I wanted anyone who would hold his son in the safe boxed enclosure of a fatherly embrace. But my own father, though he knew that I’d clumsily fished for his approval for years, and knew as well that I was in love with the vast, cold competence with which he moved through life—my father simply sat before me throughout my childhood, as still as an Indian brave, the disembodied eyes floating in space, refusing to unbend an inch.

And now, here, I’d like to talk of one particular night of our family history. I’d like to dwell on an evening of childhood summer during that time of late August when the earth gives the impression of having slowed to a crawl in its orbit and standing ghosts of heat mist hover beneath the trees. I’d like to concentrate a moment on the three of us, mother, father and myself, in the kitchen waiting for Patrick to return on his bicycle. My mother is
at the stove amid her chiming pots and pans, and seated at the table, I am attempting, as usual, to find such watercourses of enthusiasm as move beneath the dry surface of my father’s disconnect. Should I try magnetism tonight? Or the truth about the curve ball? Will it be Brownian motion, which makes the blue of the sky blue, or
The Chemical History of a Candle,
by Michael Faraday, which I’ve lately read and been stunned by? Intuitively, I’m sure, I’ve opened one of those subjects of science or physics about which my father can grudgingly be convinced to trickle out small explanations. Probably, almost certainly, I am rapt. It is then that we become suddenly aware of a disturbance in one corner of our peripheral vision. Appearing at the screen door, which has been left open because it is the 1970s and nothing bad will ever happen, is a man-size shadow. The shadow, we presently realize, is a familiar form, and it is struggling to say something. It is Marc Castor. I know of my father’s especial scorn for Marc Castor. He refers to him as a “clotheshorse,” and a “goofball.” He looks at him whenever the two men are in the same room, with a parched disdain. I’ve never understood his enmity toward a man who has always taken such pains to make me feel welcome in his presence. Tonight he has done the rare thing of showing up at our front door, which he’s almost never done before. Also it’s as if he’s dancing under the influence of some strange music. He is thrashing his hands and waving his head back and forth. It looks a little like the Twist. Suddenly we understand his words.

“It’s Patrick!” Marc is shouting. “He was hit by a car and the ambulance is coming! Come quick now migod!”
Then he stops, and merely stands there, his hands held up in the air, swaying.

That’s the scene, and it stays that way no matter how many times I replay it in my head: the three of us frozen in our places by news that is already bursting over us like a shell, and yet in memory forever still in the pre-ground of that tragedy, forever still on the near side of all that consequence, and for those slender few instants that remain, still a family comfortably upheld by having dodged so many of the unhappy outcomes of life. I watch our faces fall open in surprise as a pulsing, sirenlike wail starts to pour from my mother’s mouth.

Can anguish change the shape of a life? The car, as it turns out, had crushed Patrick’s skull. It hit him broadside, moving fast, and flung him high through the air and onto a lawn. Marks on his face of a vaguely crosshatched pattern were later revealed to be the impress of the grill on his flesh. He lingered perfectly still in a coma for several days, then opened his eyes, made a small tasting movement of the lips as if in receipt of some new, not especially good information, and died. With his death, time stopped as it does when the projector jams at the theater and the handsome figures on the screen freeze and are cruelly lacerated by giant widening holes. The cleaning lady stopped coming. I no longer went to band practice. Inside the house there was no radio, no television, no sound at all for days save the surprisingly deep, masculine noises of my mother’s grief as they drifted from the bedroom, and those of my father, who sobbed out loud in front of me and didn’t care if I saw. But I did care. And it tore me up, hugely. I sobbed along with him,
but I wasn’t crying only for my brother. I was also crying because I was shocked that the one untouchable thing in my life—my father’s feelings—had been hit that hard, and not for me.

In the days after the funeral, I spent a lot of time visiting compulsively with my brother’s orphaned keepsakes and toys. It wasn’t only that his baseball mitt, his little tin trophies, his white plastic flute, his gem collection, his train set, his plastic soldiers and his three-quarter-size Colt revolver reminded me of him. It was that his sudden death had turned these possessions directional. They continued to move ahead in time as if there was a lag between this world and the next, and the news hadn’t yet reached them of their owner’s death, and in the meantime, stranded between worlds, they must continue to carry on as plucky little bits of metal and plastic and leather waiting for a human touch to set them to life. Maybe that’s why, when no one was watching, I crept into his room and held them individually in my hands for hours at a time, staring at them like you might a bunch of baby rabbits discovered magically unharmed beneath the blades while mowing the lawn, and said strange, impulsive things to them, day after day, which made me feel better.

Two weeks after Patrick’s death, another school year began, with its social gates and enclosures, its rigid stratifications and its shaming categories: geek, dork, pussy, nerd. I was disoriented by all the feeling recently blown through our family, and dreading as well the reckoning that the beginning of a school year seemed to provide. And yet help, as so often in that period of my life, arrived in the providential form of—who else—Rob.

Utterly indifferent to the social price he was paying, he seemed to have grown even more attached to me than before. It was as if my friend were determined to fill the hole left behind by Patrick’s passing and to surround me in a gated enclosure of warmth and attention. “I love you, Nick,” he told me, whenever he had the chance. He said it in complete indifference to the snickering classmates, the occasionally askance look from homeroom teachers and head-shaking janitors. “I love you, guy, and you’re just a champ for how well you’re doing,” he’d say, with that reckless, heart-flooded way of his. As time went on, however, I gradually came to understand that there was more than just simple affection in Rob’s new flare of interest. In the aftermath of my brother’s death, he was convinced I was now the possessor of “special information.”

“You know,” he asked me one day, “that brothers have all sorts of duplicate genetic matter and psychic overlaps, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, so—and forgive me very much for asking—but I guess my first question is, like, at the moment he died, did you feel anything special? Did you like feel a pain in your body where the car had hit him, or get suddenly sad, or when you stood up did you realize you were bleeding from the nose?”

We were sitting that afternoon in our brushy covert sanctuary, as usual. His eyes were hot with excitement, and he was leaning toward me, blinking rapidly in expectation. I wanted above all to make him happy, and so the lie came easily.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“Because I know, don’t worry how.”

“Well, it did. And it was kinda incredible. It was like I was just sitting there reading a book, and suddenly I grew all light, like I was floating. I felt this kind of pointy thing coming off the top of my head, like my brain was trying to get somewhere.” I looked at him seriously, waiting a beat. “At the moment Patrick died, the pointy thing on my head shot through the window and never came back.”

There was a moment of awed silence. “Oh, man,” he said softly, “I mean,” he went on, “
oh, man
. You see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You know stuff. You’ve got, like, access to things that people would kill to have. We should form a death club, you know, and read von Däniken and shit and get a Ouija board and make contact. Everybody’s got some kind of story to tell. After my gran croaked I was certain she was hanging out under the stove for about a week. Listen, have you ever huffed?”

“Huffed?” I asked. “What is huffed?”

“Like, making yourself nearly die and then coming back.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Wanna try it?”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly, not liking the sound of it but wanting to play along.

“Great, stand up.”

I got to my feet.

“Now deep breathe,” he said as I began to take long swimmer’s breaths.

“Faster.”

I quickened the rhythm.

“Now go faster, guy.”

I was panting hard as he shouted, “Okay, stop, and
hold it!” and then came up behind me, snugged me into an embrace, and began, ever so gently, to choke me with a modified headlock. The crook of his elbow was cutting off my windpipe, but he was doing so with a kind of loving roughness that caused a wave of heat to rush upward from the middle of my chest and burst with a giant fissioning bloom of white in my head. For a long moment, I felt grown long and thin, as if streaming free of my body and tethered only by a wispy tendril of nerve. Then my chest swung open and I fell out of myself to my hands and knees, and then continued falling rapidly toward the hot, heavy center of the earth. My flesh buzzed on my bones, and just before I passed out, I had time to note that I felt weirdly naked beneath my clothes, and helpless, and I liked it.

Six months after Patrick’s death his room was repapered and hung with new curtains and carpets. A gigantic television was installed where his bed had been, and my father, mainly, sat staring at it blankly on evenings and weekends. As for me, many years later, having long ago stopped thinking about my brother, I found myself strangely sensitive to the way in which his features would show up in other people. I once felt instantly at home with a gas station attendant because he had my brother’s nose, and for a moment hungrily probed his background in a way I would realize only later was a groping on my part toward an old, flickering pulse of feeling. I was unnaturally warm with an elderly woman who picked at the corner of her mouth with her pinkie like my brother did, or sneezed with his funny little ladylike report, or I would notice how the shape of someone’s head precisely mimicked what I
had always thought of as his, and would sidle up to that person at a party, and speak with inappropriate candor out of the feeling that we were part of some larger conspiracy dedicated to keeping an old memory alive.

My dear, dead, freckled brother!