Strange but True (28 page)

lol…

brb…

what ru in2?

stats?

brwn, brwn, 6', 165, 22

And it is only a few nights later that he works up the courage to invite someone over. As he waits, Philip sits by the window with a cup of coffee in his hands, staring out at the tall brick buildings of the housing development across the street. When he hears an unfamiliar voice call a made-up name from the street, he looks down at the stranger in the shadows and wonders one last time if he should go through with this. Finally, Philip wraps the key in the same towel Donnelly had used. He reaches his hand out the window and lets go. Soon, he hears the clomp-clomp-clomp of shoes on the crooked old stairway.

The closer they get, the faster the beating of Philip's heart.

BECAUSE OF THE DIFFICULTIES HIS CAST AND CRUTCH PRESENT, IT
takes Philip a good five minutes to get into the bathroom, drop his pajama bottoms, and do his business. So when the telephone rings, he is not about to jump up and go running to answer it. As he sits on the toilet in the small bathroom beneath the staircase, Philip listens to the answering machine pick up on the extension in the kitchen. After the mechanical, recorded voice instructs whoever is calling to please leave a message, his mother's voice echoes through the house. “Philip. It's me. Are you there? Pick up.” Filtered through the machine, she sounds softer than usual, stripped of her harshness. He might actually mistake her for a sane, decent person with manners if he didn't know better. Then she says, “Okay, well, I just want you to know that I'm on my way to Melissa's house. I plan to settle this whole thing once and for all. By the way, I got you a book from the library. I think you might like it. Well, okay. Bye now. See you when I get home.”

Philip tilts his head back and looks at the ceiling. Even though he doesn't believe in God, he shouts a frustrated question up to the heavens, “Why can't she just leave the poor girl alone?”

After he flushes and washes his hands, he hobbles to the kitchen with the help of his crutch, picks up the telephone, and punches in *69. “M,” Philip says when the call rings through to voice mail. “It's me. I don't know how you even found out where Melissa lives. But please don't drive over there and rail on her about last night. Call me back when you get this. Or better yet, just come home.”

He hangs up and sits in one of the stiff ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table, exhausted from what little sleep he had the night before and jittery from all the coffee he drank today. Ten cups was a lot, even for him. After his mother woke him this morning then went upstairs to her room following their lovely mother-son talk, Philip tried to focus on reading his book or writing in his journal between watching the occasional scene from whatever old movie happened to be on television. It was then that he began to feel utterly stir-crazy for the first time since he came home. A feeling that returns to him now. Since he didn't exactly make contingency plans for his life beyond that night on the fire escape, the question of what to do next has slowly begun to creep up on him. He can't envision himself staying in Radnor forever, or even a few more weeks for that matter. Likewise, he can't imagine going back to New York—not after the way things ended there.

Five minutes pass.

Five minutes during which Philip sits at the table doing not much of anything except ponder his lack of options. And still, his mother has yet to call back. Finally, he stands and picks up the phone, hits *69 again. Voice mail. He repeats an abbreviated version of the message he left last time, telling her not to bother Melissa, that she should call him or simply come home. After he hangs up, Philip considers putting on another pot of coffee. Then he thinks better of it and goes to the sink to see about cleaning those pots and bowls that have been there for days.

Back in the city, Philip never would have dared to leave out a dirty dish even for a second because of the mice problem. Between those mice and cockroaches, plus that bird and snake, Philip lived a life that was something akin to a zookeeper's. With the exception of those strangers who came clomping up the staircase late at night to ease his loneliness, those rodents and pets—if you could call them that—were his only company.

Four and a half years of living in the city and Philip had spent almost every single day alone. In the mornings, he sometimes went to Aggie's Diner on Houston Street, not far from where he lived, and treated himself to breakfast on his father's credit card. As he sat at the counter, sipping his coffee and picking at his oatmeal with a spoon, Philip often spotted a guy about his age sitting at a booth with a blond woman and her baby. There was something about the three of them that drew Philip in. Throughout the years, he eavesdropped on their conversations so often that he knew the details of their lives. She was a novelist and he was her student. She taught a writing class at NYU and he taught one at a Senior Citizens Center. They had traveled to California and Key West together. Like Philip, they had each lost a sibling. While they talked and laughed and gave each other advice on everything from their writing to where to get the best Tarot card reading, the baby—a beautiful blond boy with bright blue eyes—fussed in his seat. Sooner or later, one of them would sweep him up and lift him over the table until he was laughing and giggling too. Meanwhile, Philip looked on and wished for a friendship like theirs to save him from his loneliness. On so many of those mornings, he envisioned getting up from his stool and introducing himself, but he could never go through with it. If his mother's personality had exploded in the aftermath of Ronnie's death, Philip's had
im
ploded. There in the city, among all those millions of people, any of whom might have become his friend, he grew more isolated than ever.

After he hunts down a stray S.O.S. pad beneath the sink, Philip begins the insufferable task of scrubbing the dried green gunk from all the pots and bowls. The residue from his mother's pea soup concoction is attached so firmly that Philip may as well be scraping barnacles off the hull of a ship. As he scours away, it dawns on him that even if his mother gets his messages (an iffy proposition at best, considering she's not the most technologically savvy person around) there is no way in hell that she is going to listen to what he said. In fact, Philip would be willing to bet money that at this very moment she is defying his every word. He can just see her fat fist knocking on Melissa's door, her big mouth opening as she lays into her the way she did last night.

When will it be enough? Philip wonders as he gives up this business of scrubbing pots already and tosses the S.O.S. pad into the sink. When will she have yelled and screamed herself all out so that there is no anger left?

He turns off the water, dries his hands on his pajama bottoms, then goes to the phone again. This time, he picks it up and calls 4–1–1. When the automated operator comes on the line, he asks for the number of Melissa Moody on Monk's Hill Road. But the only listing for a Moody in Radnor is under the names Joseph and Margaret on Church Street. Her parents, Philip figures, and hangs up. Standing there in the middle of the dirty kitchen, he feels an acute sense of restlessness once more.

His eyes go to the wooden key rack on the kitchen wall.

Dangling from one hook is a slim silver key with a black grip attached to Ronnie's bottle-opener key chain. Philip steps closer to the rack and stares at the tiny Mercedes symbol, a pie split three ways, etched into the silver. Before lifting the key from the hook, he waits a half minute more, willing the phone to ring, willing his mother's Lexus to pull in the driveway. When neither of those things happen, he resigns himself to the obvious fact that she is not going to call back or come home of her own volition. And since God only knows what his mother is capable of, Philip decides to take the Mercedes, whether she likes it or not, and drive over there before she can do any more damage.

He removes the skinny key from the hook and cups it in his palm, then makes his way to the family room where he begins searching for his wallet, which contains his driver's license. Not since his first week in New York has Philip been behind the wheel of a car. He realized pretty quickly that the alternate-side-of-the-street-parking game was nothing but a royal pain in the ass that served to ruin a big chunk of each day. And since he didn't need a car in the city anyway, he decided to get rid of it. Philip dialed up the Olive Garden and did his best to disguise his voice when that imbecile Walter answered. He asked to speak with Gumaro, and when his old pal came on the line, he said,
“Oye, maricón. Es
Philip.
Come estás?”

Gumaro laughed.
“Bien, pendejo. Donde estás
? Miami? Las Vegas?”

“Nueve York.”

“Ah, you are finally living the good life, my friend.”

Philip remembers looking around the studio then at Donnelly Fiume's dusty antique furniture and the mote of glue traps he strategically positioned around the Murphy bed on his second night there. The good life, he thought. If Gumaro only knew … Just then, Walter began grumbling in the background, and since Philip didn't want to get Gumaro in trouble for staying on the phone too long, he came right to the point and asked if he wanted the car.
“Te gustaria tener un auto nuevo? Mi
Subaru?”

“Quante costo?”
Gumaro asked.

“Nada.”

“Nada?”

“Sí
. It's yours for free if you want it.”

“En serio?”

“I'm serious, Gumaro.”

A few days later they met and made the exchange, taking care of the necessary paperwork. And when Gumaro drove off a happy man down St. Mark's Place, Philip felt freed from one more vestige of his life in Pennsylvania.

Now, as he sorts through the mess of his belongings on and around the foldout bed, he wonders if he'll be able to manage maneuvering his brother's car with his leg in a cast. Since there is only one way to find out, Philip keeps searching until he spots his black leather wallet shoved inside one of his black leather shoes on the floor. He plucks out his driver's license then slips off his pajama bottoms and tugs on the clothes he wears once a week for his trips to Dr. Kulvilkin's office—a pair of jeans cut on one side so they fit over his cast and a giant wool sock that slides right over his toes. Then Philip pulls on the turtleneck he wore the night before, finger-combs his hair and heads out of the room. On the way, he glances up at that antique schoolhouse clock on the wall. The hands point to five-thirty, even though it's somewhere around four. For an entire month now, the ceaseless ticking of this defective piece of junk has driven him crazy. Philip finally decides to do something about it. He pulls open the hinged wooden and glass face, reaches inside and grabs hold of the small pendulum, as though choking its neck, until the thing stops moving.

The room is silent behind him when Philip leaves. He considers making one last stop in the bathroom, since all that coffee is going right through him. But he makes up his mind to hold it and keeps walking to the door that leads down to the garage. The biggest problem with wearing the cast is that he cannot bend his leg. For that reason, descending a simple set of stairs becomes an Olympic sport for Philip—never mind driving. He persists nonetheless, taking step after awkward step until he has lowered himself into the bowels of the house. From here, he moves quickly, limping through the narrow hallway cluttered with Ronnie's and his forgotten ten-speeds, a collection of tennis rackets, a volleyball, an old Weber grill, as well as a long-deflated alligator raft they used to float on in the pool out back when they weren't playing Marco Polo.

When Philip reaches the garage, he runs his hand along the wall until he locates the switch inside. The bulb must be blown because nothing happens when he flicks it on. He tries a few more times before giving up. With only the hall light to see by, Philip steps inside and looks around at the snug canvas cover his mother must have bought to keep over the Mercedes. The other two bays are empty except for the Rorschach-style oil stains on the floor, a few dented paint cans, and a box marked
CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS
.

He peels back the cover on the car and tosses it in the corner. As Philip sticks the key inside the door, he thinks of how ridiculous it is that his mother keeps it locked in the first place, just like Ronnie's room upstairs. Once it is open, he puts his crutch in the back then gets situated in the driver's seat. It takes some effort, but he finds a way to position his legs so that his right is stretched to the passenger side, while his left (the one free of the cast) is poised to man the gas and brake pedals. It is not an ideal setup, not even close, but he tells himself that Monk's Hill Road is only so far away and he'll just have to make do.

Before pressing the button on the garage-door opener that's clipped to the visor, Philip sits a moment longer inside that dark, sealed garage. He is thinking of a section in the biography he's been reading, the part that came last, though he read it first.
At the age of forty-five, after two unsuccessful suicide attempts, Anne Sexton finally succumbed to her demons. After pouring herself a glass of vodka, she went into the garage of her house at 14 Black Oak Road, started her red Cougar, turned up the radio, and listened as the exhaust fumes took her life
. As Philip wonders what kind of courage, foolishness, and instability it must have taken to successfully follow through with an act like that, a few scattered lines from one of Anne's poems drift back to him:

Of course guitars will not play!

The snakes will certainly not notice
.

New York City will not mind
.

Philip is sure that somewhere, some stuffy erudite scholar has a lofty interpretation of those lines, but he takes them to mean that she did not expect there to be a heaven and that the world would go on without her. It is much the same way he feels when he contemplates his own death and his brother's too, though when it comes to an afterlife, Philip wishes he felt otherwise. He used to assume that atheists were comfortable, even smugly defiant, in their disbelief. Now that he is one, he realizes it is quite the contrary. In Philip's case anyway, he wants to believe. He wants desperately to regain the wholehearted, unquestioning faith he had as a child. But after suffering from his own demons all these years as he carried the memory of his mother's words wishing him dead, and after facing so many other cruelties and disappointments of the world, Philip has lost something he cannot get back. That something is his faith.