The Last Life (35 page)

"That's enough, Sagesse," murmured my mother, who had taken her hand back into her lap. "Don't you think you'd feel better if you went and lay down?"

"All right." I pushed back my chair and lifted my plate to carry it to the kitchen. "I'm going."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart." My father was embarrassed. He did not think of me as bleeding; he thought of me still, as I thought of Etienne, as a child. He hung his head, his supper no longer pleasing to him.

"Never mind. It'll pass." I felt guilty for lying, although my mother had all but asked me to. I felt sorry for my father's tamed attempts at love. But the accusations that I wanted to make, the bile I held back, lay in a bitter coating on my tongue.

Within my skin I suffered, too: that spring of 1990, my back erupted in boils, painful hillocks of pus beneath my shirt, which my mother attributed to adolescence and chocolate, but which I knew were caused by my parents' quivering restraint, the secrecy in the air. As my peers disrobed to skimpy sundresses, I layered myself more fully with cloth, my back sticky with sweat and sore to the touch. I succumbed to panic attacks, a turmoil of pounding blood and breathlessness that washed over me without warning, in shops or on the bus—more than once, I had to get off and walk the remainder of my journey, my hand on my heaving chest, so that I was often late to my destination. I struggled to eat: all food tasted chalky and bland to me. And I could not sleep. I lay awake listening, night after night, hoping to hear my parents arguing, hoping to hear anything, afraid not of the silence but of its interruption, certain that if the worst would come it would at least be better than this, this terrible anticipation.

My birthday, in early June, came and went. I refused all celebration, hid in my room while my mother iced the cake downstairs, and refused to emerge to the pile of presents that seemed like gross hypocrisy, enraging my father—who had cancelled something, ostensibly a business appointment, although his very wrath convinced me otherwise, in order to be at home—so that he stood outside my door, rattling the handle, bellowing, "There will be no locked doors in my house." To which I retorted, through snot and tears, "Except yours, is that it?" and he cried, "What does that mean? What kind of tone is that? Open this door right now and explain yourself!"

I burrowed beneath my bed like a dog and waited until he strode away. My mother left me milk and a sandwich on a tray, the repast of childhood illness or banishment, and I gnawed at the stale bread which was my birthday supper after everyone had gone to sleep, perched on my windowsill, cursing my imprisonment, staring out at the winking lights of town and the black water, certain that I understood Becky at last and whispering to myself, with conscious theatricality, "I have nothing to live for. Nothing to live for. I might as well be dead."

I tried to pray, to rekindle my former confidence in the church, but God failed to provide any sign, and his intermediary, the priest, droned out sermons as hollow to me as my father's excuses. I couldn't listen. Thibaud's letters from Paris, every fortnight or so, were my solace, and in composing my dishonest replies I thought that at least somewhere, to someone, I lived on unbesmirched. Awake, at night, I imagined myself again in Thibaud's embrace, knowing as I did that this was a fruitless yearning. I could find nothing to look forward to; no deus ex machina presented itself even to my imagination; I saw no way to my former life (I could hardly remember what it had been).

I despised my brother as myself, had to force myself to stroke his gentle head, traced maliciously upon occasion the frail line of his breastbone and contemplated crushing it—without him, my mother could leave my father, take me with her to a new life in America, abandoning this one as easily as if it were a car with its tires spinning in a ditch. And yet: his shallow sucking for air, his toothy smiles, his resolute joyfulness were what kept us whole, in our ghastly contradiction. As if aware that he alone was responsible, Etienne spurted in size, stretching his rubbery length a full four inches in as many months, bursting out of all his clothes. His legs hunched in their footrests; all his straps had to be loosened. My mother, shocked by this expansion, asked the new nurse what she had fed him to prompt this Alice-in-Wonderland behavior, while my father seemed not to notice.

Playing doctor as I had in childhood, I palpated my brother's limbs while he lay in bed, to see whether the bones had separated from their joints deep beneath the surface. It was in the course of one such methodical examination—finger bones to wrists, elbows, shoulders, down the spiny torso on which the little nipples lay quiescent and pink—that I encountered my brother's erection, a brave resistance below the sheets; and it dawned on me that in his silent and supposedly safe cocoon, even there, my saintly Etienne had followed me, and fallen into adolescence, this murky pit from which I could plot no extrication. He, too, was human, neither more nor less; and with an emotion akin above all to curiosity, I wrapped my fingers tight around the protrusion, wound in the white cotton—a little Halloween ghost, a tyke in disguise—and rubbed until my brother arched his back, as much as he was able, and the sheet dampened. Only then did I remove my hand, feeling nothing but the faint trill of his relief; and only in my own bed did I wonder if, in this small favor, I had done wrong.

The wrong, as I saw it, was not incestuous in nature—although I knew that the world's morality could not condone such action of a sister upon a brother—but lay in the very awakening of Etienne to possibilities beyond his grasp, in the bitter and futile assertion of his humanness. As a child he was perfection, willing repository of all we could not ourselves accept, but nevertheless untainted, blind to sin; but as a man, he would be consigned to conflict and despair far more profound than any I could know, and alone in a place where no one could hear.

Words, meaningless though they might ring, as wrongly as we may interpret them, are the only missiles with which we are equipped, which we can lob across the uncharted terrain between our souls. Without them, and yet also without knowledge—of the life outside, of the failure of those very words—my brother had known joy. I had seen it, often, on his face. He lived like Friday before Crusoe, alone in his paradise, or in his hell, but not knowing it to be either—and now, with this sigh, with this relief, his body had communicated desire and been heard, and however my brother registered knowledge, he must know that it had, and, most terribly, would know when it remained, henceforth, unattended. Having been, beneath his sheet, unalone for even a moment, he would know forever more what it meant to be alone; which I was only just learning, to be sure, but against which I had at least the bolster of language. The wrong I had done, I realized, was to make my brother aware of his prison as he had never before been; to corrupt his joy. And I recognized both that I would keep my act a secret (more for the sake of the world's morality than out of my own dismay), and that I would never repeat it, which was the worst admission of all.

At the same time I, for this, felt less alone, certain that my brother would now know loss; that in this, as in everything else, he and I were conjoined (although of everything else I could not know what he knew). Years later, I wonder if this distress, alleviated by a strange pleasure, is what my father felt in seducing his women: a fleeting feeling of beginning again, of not being alone, of sharing sin and in so doing, relieving it. My father's awareness of his Eden and its loss, like Etienne's, like anyone's, were almost simultaneous. The moment's bittersweet fruit is nostalgia, the dangerous fruit of my father's sustenance, and, for a long time, of my own.

What would the opposite of nostalgia be? That is the kernel for which I groped, and still grope; that is the answer to the question of whether life is worth living. In committing suicide, my father denied any such answer, or certainly, any such answer that he could accept upon this earth. With such an act, the fabric is rent, the stage behind the drop cloth nakedly revealed: we live "as if," as if we knew why, as if it made sense, as if in living this way we could banish the question and the "as if"ness itself, the way we speak and act as if our words could be comprehended; and such a moment as my father's death exposes again the thinness of that curtain, the unreality—although surely sweat and blood and sex are real, as real as death—of the quotidian. Severed from our surroundings, we have to ask, or else to throw ourselves again into pretending, as though nothing were more real than that.

But my father wasn't dead yet. In my naive way, I imagined death quite often, that spring and early summer: his, or my mother's, or Etienne's, or mine—each as a way of propelling us forward, out of the place in which we were stuck. I willed my father's death, in fact. In the night silences, that's what I listened for: my mother's screaming assault, perhaps with a kitchen knife aloft; my father's grunt of surprise. I pictured it: his eyes popping in their sockets, his body crumpling, deflating like a balloon. There was in my imagining no blood, no moment after. My father would walk again, after a poor night's rest, but be a changed man, his vibrancy turned upon us, instead of away. I didn't know death: most real, it was not yet so to me. I couldn't shake the fear and the desire of it, though: I developed an aversion to knives and scissors, to pills and cars. I couldn't sleep, in part for worry that I would rise, in my slumber, and slaughter this man, this treacherous father, in his bed. And as if to compensate for this desire I became, in the daytime, terrified for my parents' safety, as worried that my father might fall or be flattened by a van or a heart attack as I was that his excuses were lies. The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.

But I could not, at first, see where that change was to come from. Neither of my parents seemed prepared to initiate it. In their own ways, they had bent, stoutly, to a life without my grandfather, and now, again, they were inclined simply to go on, to live as if—as if!—the night of their furious row had never taken place. Heeding her mother-in-law's advice, my mother determined to eradicate the information she hadn't wanted to know; and my father, who had lived for so long as though this were possible, slipping between isolate lives and imagining that he controlled them all, was only too keen to go on. Nobody wanted to talk about it, about any of it; nobody's life was altered, it seemed, but mine, and mine only because I could not twist the stories to make myself an actor in any of them. The disposition of our family upon its stage was not my affair; I was merely disposed, as children always are.

Against this inertia, I realized, the puppeteer would soon resurface to take up the strings again. My grandfather's prison term was drawing to a close. He had immersed himself in Balzac, studied Spanish on tape, reflected upon the future of the European Union and its ramifications for the hotel trade. He was ready, according to my grandmother, to emerge into a healthy retirement. But the LaBasse households quaked and fretted; and I began eagerly to await the day. He was not Lear, he had not willingly renounced his throne; it had been usurped by circumstance and by my father. Surely Jacques would reclaim it, surely—I decided—he would restore order.

The afternoon before my grandfather's release, the horizon was hazy and the air sluggish. My father was flying to Paris for a two-day travel industry convention. This, he smilingly assured my mother, was a crucial gathering, a fair at which his physical presence, suntanned and boisterous, was essential. He was compelled—for the Bellevue's greater glory—to sacrifice his ardent wish to be with the family.

"But your father—"

"Knows and understands and approves. He'd do the same. Look, I saw him three days ago, and I'll see him again in three days. The only difference is, he'll be at home. He's not precious about it, believe me. He'd rather put this whole thing behind him, and I feel as he does."

"But couldn't you have sent, I don't know—"

"If you want a job done right, do it yourself, we always say. It's not a big deal. Relax. I'm not going off to wallow in some hedonists' playpen, I'm headed for a huge hall that smells of socks, to talk shop with a herd of fat, balding travel agents in cheap suits. Unfortunate, but it's worth it."

"Whatever you say."

We drove him to the airport, my mother and I, our faces sagging in the new heat, our skin beading in the first diesel-filled miasma of summer. He leaped to the curb, fresh and full, his blue houndstooth sports jacket a blip of color on the bleached sidewalk. He almost stepped on a small, beribboned terrier that yapped ferociously at his ankles, and had to interrupt his farewells to apologize to the dog's mistress, a tight-cheeked face-lift maven with a cloud of platinum hair and a cocoa expanse of crepy cleavage, firmly corseted in dusky rose and heavily ornamented with gold. The stretch outside the terminal was peopled with such women, some with wizened husbands in tow, clutching leather pouches, others commanding surly porters or paid companions, young ladies with pressed lips and waxed eyebrows whose expressions of permanent disdain and surprise their employers were, it seemed, attempting to recapture from the ravages of time.

"Each one a potential client." My father winked. "Or the friend of a potential client. I'll see if I can chat one up on the plane."

"Why don't you see if you can resist the impulse?" I muttered, but my aside was drowned out by a departing jet.

My mother turned the corners of her mouth in a constrained smile. "Do what's good for the hotel," she said. "And remember what's good for the family."

"You bet." But my father's tone, infected by his wife's annoyance, was no longer blithe. "Raise a glass to Papa. I hope he won't be too tired."

"Tired?" said I. "He's been resting for six months." I spoke out of conscious impertinence, but my parents chose to laugh, easily, almost naturally, as if we were a proper family after all.