Stranger, Father, Beloved (25 page)

When Michael arrived at his mother's house in Greenwich two and a half hours later, it was after midnight. Her night nurse ran into the hall at the sound of the door opening and gave Michael a frightened look. Even after he explained that he had lost his shoes in an emergency, she still looked at him with wariness. This he was used to, as every person he now encountered seemed to be onto him and his secret. He would never be normal. He was insane and was in love with a man, and not for the first time. He had been helplessly in love with Alex, an adoration that would never die, and now he was falling in love with John. John was no Alex, but he had a surprising appeal that couldn't be denied and that was growing stronger the more Michael was around him.

He felt that his insanity had infected his daughter, no doubt, and out of desperation she too had turned perverted and sick. It was probably due to the fact that he had bitten her several months ago while drunk and had transmitted his diseased state into her in what he must have felt was a harmless playful moment of affection. Or perhaps he had passed along a faulty gene? His behavior was something that was utterly incomprehensible to him. When he was drunk, a monster emerged, a monster bent on destroying his life. Michael could not
be trusted, he felt, to be the caretaker of any person, of a wife or of children, and he would remove himself.

In the morning the night nurse was gone, and his mother was slow to wake up. Her health had become worse over the months as her bones became more brittle and her curved spine increasingly pressed into her lungs. She had not made it clear just how bad her health had become when they spoke on the phone, probably not wanting to burden him. As if she could be a burden! But now he saw her rapid decline clearly before him in her crumpled form. She slept longer into the day. When she was awake, she smiled to see him there, sitting in an easy chair with his legs up, sipping a cup of tea, finally peaceful. She gazed into his eyes and seemed to know him, his thoughts, every last bit of who he was, and she loved all of what she saw. Her gaze would continue for long periods of time, understanding and kindness quietly burning behind her tired eyes as they met his. He fed her breakfast, and then they both napped and later watched a golf tournament on TV in the afternoon.

During this time, the room was the stillest it had ever been. This, the dining room of his youth, was now converted into a makeshift bedroom or sickroom. Michael remembered all of the family dinners that had taken place, all so formal; even with casual food like macaroni and cheese, good dishes had been used and candles had been lit. He had always felt such an excitement eating here, knowing that he would soon be able to return to his room, soon be able to be alone in relative silence. The anticipation that that salvation was coming allowed him to eat in peace, listen to the lifeless conversation, a smile
on his face. Michael thought his mother always assumed he was smiling due to the food or the family time, and there was no reason she had to know the truth behind his pleasant expression. It would have only hurt and confused her, but maybe it wouldn't have, as she certainly knew him better than anyone else and accepted his odd ways.

Michael stayed with her every day, and the days began to lose a sense of differentiation from one to the next. He turned off the ringer on his mother's phone and without its insistent sound took comfort in sleeping in the easy chair next to her bed. Several knocks were heard on the front door, but he didn't answer them. It was Marilyn's friends who were coming to see how she was. Finally, he spoke through the closed door to them, claiming it was a bad time for a visit and he would call them when they could again come by.

Marilyn spoke occasionally and slurred her words often. Michael only bathed her twice a week, as the pain it caused her hip showed in her face when he would lower her into the tub. Her fingers would grip his arm and she would look up into his face, caught up in the pain of moving and ashamed of her nakedness. He spoke soothing words to her and tried to bathe her as quickly as he could. When Michael handled her this way, he could feel viscerally the brittleness of her structure, the sense that the bones were collapsing inside, that all was giving way. He could hardly bear those excruciating moments when he had his arms around her and could feel her fragility and sense her desperation, her complete helplessness. Every time after he had bathed her and she had fallen asleep, Michael went upstairs to his room, shut the door, and cried.

After a week of this, Michael washed her only with towels in her bed, as the nurses had shown him before he let them go. She soon started to reject his offerings of soft food, claiming she wasn't hungry. She began to eat only ice chips and slept longer. Michael sat in the room, eating canned soup and drinking his cups of tea, and when he was sure she was dead, when he saw the hardened form up close that appeared so solid, yet so fragile, as if it would shatter upon touch in its brittle, contracted state, the form that only vaguely resembled his mother, and he could tell that he was no longer looking at her, he made himself very comfortable in the chair, took twenty of his sleeping pills, and began to make his way out of his body. The parameters of the room began to blur.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When he woke up, the room was dim. He was lying on his back, looking up at squares on a ceiling. A nurse walked by the room and then back to the entryway when she saw he was awake.

“You're up,” she said matter-of-factly and sat down in a chair next to him. She was uncommonly young looking, with wavy brown hair and a pretty face. It occurred to him that she must have been loved by someone.

“How did I get checked in here?”

“You called us.”

“What do you mean?”

“You called the ambulance to come and save you, so we did.” She was remarkably calm about the whole thing, a half-amused smile on her face, as if it had all been just a silly prank, and for a moment, he felt that it was. He had saved himself amidst the throw-up and the frothy spit that had been on his face and his shirt and in front of him on the carpet.

There was something else he was supposed to remember. He remembered it: mother. He fell silent. She saw his face change. “Yes, the coroner came and took your mother's body away. I am so sorry.”

“Why am I not in a psychiatric ward with restraints on my wrists?”

“We didn't think it was necessary since you called us before you blacked out. What a wonderful thing to do.” She seemed genuinely in awe of him, as if he were heroic, and since one felt compelled to believe anything she said, so confident was she, he felt he had to go along with it.

“You'll stay here with us for a few days until you get back on your feet, and then you'll be released to the world.”

“I don't want you to call my wife. But I would like you to mail a letter to her in the next day or so, once I write it, okay?”

“Whatever you want, Mr. James.” And with that she left.

In the privacy of the small yard behind his mother's house, he lay stretched out on a lawn chair, the late-afternoon sun full upon him. It was quiet back here, the old carriage house fifty yards ahead of him, the compact bushes framing the little squares of grass. The air was still and pregnant, heavy.

He would not be returning home. The thought of returning to his old life was impossible; it was an idea so awful and so heartbreaking as to cause him physical pain at the thought of it. It caused his body to sink even deeper into his chair in a kind of revolt. His body would not let him get up if he did that. It would not drive back. His life with Nancy was over. Though the weight of his failure as her husband was crushing, he knew with the utmost clarity that they would get a divorce. That at some point, months from now, his children would begin to visit him here. He could take them out into the stillness of this brick yard and have dinner with them on the patio overlooking it.

Ryan would understand. She was stronger than he was and so might be able to get what she wanted out of this life. Maybe one day she would once again ask for his advice on books or writing. Perhaps somehow she would want to rejoin herself to him or ask him for advice when she hit a wall in her life. It was up to her. He would be naked here with them, a strange man living alone, and the thought of such a family gathering was horrifying, but it was less horrifying than the idea of ever going back to that house and inserting himself back into that prism of expectations. It was an absolute impossibility.

Would Michael ever have a true lover, one who took his breath away? He didn't know. He knew he had never had one. The malignancy, the unstable mind, all of it, came from this lack and from nowhere else. A life of pretending had spawned an evil twin who would not leave his side. Until now.

Nancy had undoubtedly gotten the note he mailed to her a day before trying to kill himself. He could imagine her walking to the mailbox and opening it, her hands trembling upon seeing his handwriting. It read simply, “
Please marry John
.
You always deserved better than me. I am not sick in a physical way, but I am sick in more ways than you know.
” Would she ever understand? She would undoubtedly blame it all on his mental problems. She would never understand him fully, though she had tried. Even after receiving the letter, she would not believe him, but she would cry and cry, attempting to understand; John would be there for her, and she would fall into his arms while she cried. John would be furious with Michael for lying to him and so would feel okay with taking his wife. Perhaps Nancy would be furious, too, and so she could move on. They could bond in their fury, it could bring them together. Michael might never see John again, and the thought, strangely, brought a tear to his eye. Then the sadness sank in deeply and for that moment dissolved. He had given her John as an offering, an offering he would have loved to receive. The two would grow old together in that house, and when they were buried, their headstones would remain side by side in the graveyard, proof of life, proof of love. So many years later, Michael might not really be remembered at all, for John and Nancy would have so many wonderful family memories between now and their old age. Perhaps Michael himself might have some nice memories, so that the forgery of his life could somehow be undone. The future stretched ahead, unclear.

There were no phones here. He had unplugged them all. He would call Nancy in a few days and have the agonizing conversation of divorce. Until then, he had this: sunshine on his face, his tired surrendered body, solitude, quiet, pouring into his soul like a stream of goodness. He had this at least. He would answer to no one and betray himself no more. If Nancy came to the house, he would let her pound on the door but would not open it. The door had been locked in three different places; she could not get in. She could not access this yard except through the house; it was deliciously private. He felt nothing for her but endless neutrality, with points of deep sympathy for her plight but no bitterness. More than for her, he had sympathy for himself and a desire not to have to think. There was the quiet yard with the busy insects floating over the flowers, there were the still bricks sheltering him in a contained space, there was the solidity of the empty house behind him. There was the dazzling beauty of his mother's young face captured in the photographs in the house, her eyes hopeful for a romantic marriage, for a bright future, for joy. Housed in those eyes, he saw himself reflected a thousand times in unnameable points of light. The poisonous bitterness he had held all his adult life had died when she had died, and now there was just this: endlessness, mercy, stillness, the body free from restlessness. This would be a good place to settle.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the years of support and love I received from my mother, Harriet, and my father, Richard, as well as their belief in my novel. I would like to thank my husband, Dexter, who has been there for me through the highs and lows of life and the writing process and has loved me the whole time.

I would like to thank my brilliant agent, Monika Woods, a diamond in the rough, whose intelligence and abilities as an agent are second to none, as well as the great team at InkWell. Your eagle eye gives me chills, Monika! A huge thank-you to my editor, Karen ­Kosztolnyik, the editor of my dreams, who is warm, generous, sensitive, and is both savvy and intuitive. Karen, thank you for having a genius ability to carefully preserve a writer's voice, while also finding and teasing out the places that are yearning to come out more fully in the story. Any writer is truly lucky to work with you. Thank you, Monika and Karen, for your passion for the book. Go Team Shark! I also want to thank the amazing team at Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster for their tireless hard work and their enthusiastic support: Jen Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Jen Long, Jen Robinson, Meagan Harris, Liz Psaltis, Wendy Sheanin, Lisa Litwack, Anna Dorfman, and Becky Prager. Becky—thank you for answering countless questions and being a great guide along this path. I am truly fortunate to work with this team of dedicated and skillful people who truly nurtured this book. Thank you to Lynn Cullen for your kind presence during the editing phase and for your friendship.

I want to thank my fiction writing teachers. First, my early mentors: Tom Drury, David Plante, and Jaime Manrique, all of whom made a huge impact on my style and made me feel valued as a writer from a young age. David nurtured this book in its infancy and Jaime worked with me on it years later. I would like to thank Mark O'Donnell who spent a whole year working on this novel with me. I owe a lot to the generosity of Tom Perrotta, who years after our workshop at Yale together, always made himself available to me despite being extremely busy. Thank you so much! A big thank-you to my Columbia professors: Jonathan Dee, Nathan Englander, Alan Ziegler, Mark Slouka, and Binnie Kirshenbaum. I would also like to thank Nancy Zafris for sharing her knowledge of craft and for her great workshops at Kenyon.

Garnette Cadogan: you're an absolute angel! Thanks for believing in this book before others did. Also, John Freeman, thank you for your advice and support while I made this dream a reality. Thank you, Diane Zumer, for your powerful belief in my work.

Thank you to Karen Russell, Molly Antopol, and Elyssa East for your kind words and unwavering support. Thanks for always being there, Jamie Pietras, through all the long years. Thank you Eva Wylie for letting me use your image for my website, and to Dr. John Wylie for allowing me to consult with you in your area of expertise, psychiatry. Thank you to Deborah Kelley-Galin for listening to me throughout it all. Thank you, Scooter Jones, for being my writing companion.