The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (17 page)

And so while James brought Jackson food and books and the oatmeal soap he requested, I sat in the apartment my past bequeathed me and slowly began making the phone calls that other people dread answering. I swallowed my pride and a great deal of anti-anxiety medication Paul had brought, like everything else, without my asking.

These are the type of phone calls that everyone receives from time to time but that no one wants to admit making. They are to people one hasn’t spoken to in a significant amount of time, and they involve self-centered apologies, circuitous anecdotes, the repetition of stock phrases “I don’t know,” “It’s just that,” “If only.”

I had let myself forget: that honest-to-goodness, forever families are made of blood. That a history doesn’t guarantee a future. That no matter how many secrets Jackson and I had told each other; no matter how many times we’d returned home to find the other waiting; no matter how many seasonal colds and flus we’d spread back and forth,
taking turns playing nurse; no matter how many, no matter how much, he was not my family. And neither was James, who was happy to be reunited with Jackson and wonder sweetly at the common acids, pigmentations, and chromosomal intersections.

I called friends and feigned interest in catching up, but their good news made me resent them and their bad news paled in comparison to mine. Those who knew me more intimately let me cut to the chase, rehash the last three or five or twenty years of the relationship. And what I wanted was someone to simmer incredulously with me, to deny that all of this would last, but they always offered advice. I should take up jogging or tennis or, one suggested after I rejected everything else, perhaps smoking again, at least temporarily. The majority of conversations ended this way, but still I went on making the phone calls, “reaching out,” using words and terms like
“profoundly sad”
and
“head space”
and
“grief”
and
“I wish he would just call and let me know where he is”
and a great deal of expletives.

“Fuck,” I would say, after I’d exhausted the story for the fifth time that day. “Fuck!”

Besides friends I’d forgotten—who’d essentially forgotten about me—I called my father, who listened but would not commiserate.

“Dear heart,” he said with a sigh, “I want you to hear what I’m about to say and try not to be angry.

“You and Jackson …” he said, and all I heard was the familiarity of our names once again united, “… you and Jackson have had your time. I’m an old man, and I know
what I’m saying when I tell you that just because you love someone, Peaches, just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’re right. For you. At least not forever. And how many times, Ida—how many times have I picked up the phone to you in a state of absolute disrepair because you’ve woken up to him gone? How many times have you worn long sleeves in the summer—I don’t care if it’s not his fault he hurts you, Ida, but the truth is he does. And you hurt each other. You’re my child and Jackson might as well be, and don’t hate me for saying this, honey, but I think he was right to go.”

When I had run out of old friends to call, and even my father said he’d be happy to talk with me about anything but Jackson, I began calling James’s hotel. He was required to pick up and so I was able to get in a few angry words, hammer out a few reluctant answers, but after two weeks he convinced his boss of a frequent prank caller and the need of a little box that he glanced at, then ignored, while the telephone wires ached and the numbers of my location pulsed and pulsed and pulsed.

A
mid all of this, my father and Julia undertook partnership wholeheartedly, almost as if it were their profession. They made an art form of consideration, compassion, frequently stumbling over each other to accommodate. Rolls of Tums showed up with the slightest mention of stomach upset, you-shouldn’t-haves exchanged like currency. Whatever tension there’d been decades ago, as young parents trying to survive in different ways, they relegated this like an old couch for the sake of something more comfortable. She moved from the room where I had slept as a child to his. Though they slept in the same bed, we understood this was not for the sake of lust but nearness; Julia wanted to be there in the middle of the night if my father’s breath grew troubled, and he felt obligated to receive whatever end-of-the-day or postdream thoughts she offered. In a word, Julia navigated all things physical and tangible for the both of them—trips to the post office
and the pharmacy, groceries, whole days mopping and sweeping—and my father held her hand and listened, read her short stories by Latin American authors about little boys sailing and drowning in a sea of light.

T
here are photographs I could display, stories I could tell, that would mitigate harsh images like that of Jackson sitting demonic in the chair at Paul’s gallery, of him looking down at the most recent bruises on my breasts and turning away, not able to manage the information. There were whole days laughably perfect, those we memorize to nourish us later. Of course, I try to reject turning to these for hydration, given the subsequent drought and its crater I sat in speechless, but it would be unfair to him and, mostly, all that time, to say we faltered for the entirety of it.

There is a game we used to play, after sex, in which we’d try to stay connected afterward for as long as possible. As in we’d lie there, adjusting our bodies and breathing patterns to avoid possible displacement, having conversations about the books we were reading, the man at the corner store whom we loved, our parents, the status of the tomato plant we tried raising several times. It’s silly to describe, the next part even more so, but sometimes, on the
heaterless winter mornings in our apartment, we’d try to get up like that, the comforter wrapped around both of us, my legs around his lower back, and he’d sometimes succeed at pouring a bowl of cereal that we’d then share, me still suspended and calves straining to grip, giggling but trying to refrain from doing so, wanting to be a part of the same warmth. We’d put our serious faces on again and he’d oscillate between an exhausted, happy still and an erection, and sometimes we’d enjoy each other again.

Were I testifying for a case of happiness, there’s much else I’d mention. For instance, the fact that we never bought a mop, preferring instead that childish thing where you attach damp cloths to your feet and slide across the floor. A Sunday evening ritual, with beers in hand that sometimes dropped and made the cleaning all the more necessary. There was much of adulthood we had no idea how to navigate, and new challenges arose all the time, but we found ways to live happily within them, and the shrieks as we cantered down the long hardwood hallway were loud.

I might also tell the jury how talented we were at presents. My because-it’s-Tuesday honey sticks countered with his fish of strange colors waiting to be named, my strings of little lamps made of mason jars complementing the cerulean he’d painted the living room as a surprise. I’d mention that he mostly always placed a glass of water and two Advil before me without my requesting it (he just knew), that he had a habit of buying fresh flowers and a knack for arranging them. That also a favorite joke between us was to tape a terrifying photo on the inside of the toilet seat or
the cabinet, ideally at night so the other would find it in the morning: that famous mug shot of Nick Nolte, a particularly disturbing image of Carrot Top post steroids.

Everyone who visited our home found it just that. They clucked their tongues at the history it implied, some awed given their free lifestyles as just one person, some envious, some inquisitive. We hung photographs by wooden clothespins on a string that ran the length of the east wall. My father and Jackson, age nine, on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, Dad holding a fifty-dollar brick that Jackson is fixated on, fascinated by the promise of pyrotechnics. James and Jackson and myself, sitting on the steps of Julia’s porch on what was my first day of high school. James has grown shadowed already, turning his face away from the camera so that his awkward nose seems larger, doing that thing boys of that age do where they hide their hands inside the sleeves of their sweatshirts. Jackson in a worn shirt that details species of birds, his eyes so bright they’re almost garish. Me in a tight-fitting striped linen button-down that I adored and jeans I’d put holes in over the summer. There was evidence of later years also, of course. Jackson and me, home from college for Christmas, smoking cigarettes on someone’s absent parents’ back porch, in on a joke, our blooming intellectual freedoms nearly a third figure in the photograph, one itchy scarf wrapped around both our necks. Jackson pissing off the winding two-lane highway that follows the edge of California and sometimes closes for repairs when chunks fall into the ocean. A picture taken just after, the first morning
of the camping trip we were driving toward, of our faces mashed against each other in the two sleeping bags whose zippers we tricked into meeting. James at sixteen with his guitar on Julia’s porch, singing and his mouth open as if waiting for the unbridled refreshment of a hose, Jackson and me barely visible in the background, smirking at each other; my father’s thumb in the bottom left corner, so intent on capture that he was careless.

When new friends came over and saw all of it, when they asked how long we’d been together, we had several answers.

“Since somewhere between simple addition,” I’d start, “and multiplication tables,” Jackson would finish.

“Since before cursive.”

“Hell, probably since before we knew the alphabet.”

Some of them wanted to know: And do you fight? And we would say: Yes. Of course. Doesn’t every family?

P
aul couldn’t explain how it happened, but given the circumstances, it was the one blunder of the evening I forgave him for. Somewhere between Jackson’s frenetic outburst at Caroline and her subsequent breakdown,
I asked you nicely the first time
went missing. Though we both remembered Jackson leaving the space empty-handed, we both figured he had something to do with it. It was too obvious a symbol. He had asked us nicely the first time, hadn’t he? He had asked me not to provide him with the materials in his sleep. Not to let him take buses and wander into art stores. Not to show anyone, and certainly not to exhibit the pieces. He had asked nicely the first, second, and third times, but I had insisted, as always, on knowing that surely this would do some good and instead unleashed, once again, that which was diseased and clawing.

Three weeks later the piece appeared for sale on the Internet. Ridiculous, many-pronged threads ensued about
how Jackson was a hack or Jackson was the biggest talent to emerge in years or Jackson was rumored to abuse women. A bidding war actualized, and the seller, whoever it was, let it rise. Paul called and asked if I wanted to pursue legal action, to find the thief, but I didn’t respond. Jackson had brought about explosions on several fronts, and it seemed only logical to me that there would be more.

What didn’t seem natural was the money that appeared in Paul’s mailbox with a handwritten note in neat capitals requesting he forward it to the artist. As Paul didn’t have any better idea of where Jackson had gone, I accepted it, but only to spite Jackson, to prove to him that I’d been right: what he did in his sleep, whether or not they were “his,” were gut-wrenching and compelling and other people loved them so fiercely they were willing to pay upward of a thousand dollars. That someone would steal the piece only to return the money would have to mean something to him, I thought.