No names, p.33
No Names, page 33
I test the water. He lets me lift his feet, again one at a time, into the tub, even though he could do it—or any of this—himself. He of course understands what scene from the past is playing out here. I lower him into the water. I soap him up and scrub him with an old T-shirt I’ve been using as a washcloth. He lies there, looking content. I drain the tub, stand him up, shower him, wash his hair. The last thing I do is dry him with my one coarse, gray towel. At last, I lead him back to the bed.
“You got a place to stay?” I ask, though I know the answer. It’s a feeble gesture, an attempt at giving back. “You can stay here, if you’d like.” Lying on this dirty mattress with a ratty blanket, no sheets, fully clothed is one thing, but naked is quite another.
Unbelievably, he says he’d like that.
Our bodies here, stripped of mountain, ocean, sky. Our bodies here.
When I wake up, Daniel’s lying on his side, one arm propping his head, smiling at me. He kisses me on the forehead and rolls out of bed. After all the rain, morning comes on brighter than I can recall since being back. I’d forgotten to close the blinds. He heads into the other room and brings the guitar case back over. Something funny about a naked man carrying a guitar case. He sits on the edge of the bed with the case on his lap. “You left something behind,” he says, opening it.
My guitar! His great gift to me now given again. It glows as sweet as ever inside a new case. It was so long ago, my second summer on the Island, when Daniel arrived with it. He said I deserved better than his family’s old parlor guitar. The Martin D-35 Dreadnought is such a beauty, top-of-the-line. That bound solid spruce top, a black-and-white rosette, rosewood back and sides, ebony fretboard. I’m floored. I give him a big hug and thank him again and again. Some other time I might tell him about the ridiculous circumstance in which the original case was lost.
He smiles. “You’ll need it.” He lifts the instrument from its velvet bed. “We have to rehearse.”
I look at him, confused. He hands it to me like he’s handing me a child.
“The music school at the university here has invited us to play.”
“Us?” This is completely unexpected, not to mention weird.
He nods. “I was listening to the old recording we did with the band. That, and what you’ve been doing the last few years, made me think we should give it a go. Now that we’re away from the Island, may as well. It will be low stakes. The music hall seats an intimate five hundred. I thought it would be a good place. Neutral territory.” He smiles a little brighter.
It doesn’t surprise me that he could have arranged a concert here on such short notice—if Daniel Beck wanted to play Carnegie Hall tomorrow, they’d make it happen—but this is monumentally crazy. How did he even know he’d find me? It’s been way too long since I’ve performed. Besides, I don’t think I even want to perform. How could he assume I’d want to and go ahead with these arrangements? Low stakes? For who? And neutral territory? More like enemy territory. I’ve hardly ever stepped foot on campus and it’s right here in my so-called hometown. I don’t bother explaining. All I say is, “I’m not ready.”
“Don’t worry, it will be great. You’ll be great.” It’s as if he didn’t hear me. He lies back on the mattress, next to me. “Look,” he continues, “music is what you do. You could make a good living performing on your own. I’m sure of that.”
As if I’ve already agreed to this scheme, he explains how it will go. He’ll play with me here and a couple of other places, just to get things rolling, and then he’ll help me arrange more venues and dates to do on my own. He even has the program planned for this first one.
When he’s done explaining, I roll onto my stomach, hiding my face in the musty batten.
“We’ll split the fifteen thousand dollars.”
That number works like an emergency brake on my train of thought. It’s obviously more than I’ve ever seen, though probably a huge pay cut for him. I roll over onto my back again.
“You’ll be great.” He rubs my stomach.
“Okay,” I sigh, though I’m not at all convinced. Maybe I do need this—need him, his motivation. Left to my own devices, nothing would happen. Then again, I’m not sure I want anything to happen. For a few moments, I picture moving to his invisible house up the coast from his Visible City. I know that’s probably what he wants in the long run. Some part of me wants it too. We could spend our days together there, with music, and spend our summers on the Island. Idyllic. But idyllic’s not really me.
Back at the River Club, where it all started. Not sure Isaac knew this when he invited me. He thought I’d like the band, and once I got the past pushed out the door, I’m finding I do, I really do. They’re called Fugazi and they’re kind of amazing. Between sets, I tell Isaac, “They’re a whole lot more sophisticated than the No Names ever were.”
“But not better,” he insists.
“Not so sure about that. Their anger has focus, purpose.”
“So did yours.”
“Besides, they’re cooler.”
“Definitely not.”
I give my usual shrug paired with a fake cough. Classic me. We stay in the back of the room. I’m trying to lie low. As if anyone’s going to recognize me. Most of the people who came to the No Names shows are probably married by now, with kids, holed up in the suburbs. Just as I’m thinking this, up in front I spot what looks to be a version of Jimmy Ryder. He’s seriously at least a hundred pounds heavier, in a wheelchair, on oxygen. You can hear the machine going click-click-click between songs. Definitely don’t want him to see me, don’t want to hear his surprise, let alone any way belated condolences.
Isaac and I have a bunch of beers and are feeling pretty good. The show ends. It was great. Starting to almost feel back in my former world. He asks if I want to get high. I say sure. I don’t add that it’ll my first time since ’78. We leave the club and wander down to the riverbank. Other people have the same idea. Pairs and groups huddle around glowing bowls and joints. Miles above, a jet unzips the bright night. Venus throbs.
Because I’m still not that used to being around people, watching them transfixes me in a way it never did before. It’s as if either I or they are some strange species. Three long-haired women in way high-heeled shoes and way short skirts are smoking from a glass pipe. Isaac tells me it’s likely something called crack. They’re talking loud. The one tells the other about the third, like she’s not even there: “I gave her a diamond ring and everything, and she goes stealing my brand-new color television set!”
The third, sucking her teeth, looks sideways at the one who made the comment. “Shit,” she mutters, “it was just a chip.”
Isaac nudges me to move on down the river.
“Good seeing you, man,” I tell him, and I mean it.
“You too.” He fake punches my shoulder.
Then, behind us, all hell breaks loose. Screaming and shouting—lots of fuck and bitch. We look back around. The three ladies are going at it, rolling on down the bank and into the river, tearing at each other’s clothes and hair. They’re punching and kicking, even as they’re trying to stay afloat. People run down to break it up, cheer them on, or both. The scene seems like all humanity in a nutshell: love and betrayal, connection and disconnection.
“Come on,” Isaac says, pulling me by the arm.
He tamps the weed down in his little brass one-hitter as we carry on downriver. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says Fermat’s Last Theorem on the front. On the back are a bunch of proofs, each one crossed out. One of the things besides music that we bonded over on the Island was math. I feel numbers and am interested in math but was a terrible student. He feels them too but is a whiz. Which is cool. He can explain things.
He sparks up, takes a long toke. On the exhale he says, “I’m spending a lot of time with Mrs. Lac—I mean, my grandmother!—now.” He passes the pipe to me. “Most nights I stay at her place.”
“You’re kidding?” I’m more than a little surprised but guess this is a good development.
He puts his arm around my shoulder in a dad kind of way that’s become part of the jokey rapport developing between us. Making his voice deeper than normal, he says, “I kid you not.” He laughs. “Seriously, it’s better this way. I can’t get over what my mom did. Keeping me in the dark all these years. Keeping me from this awesome grandma.”
“What does your mom think?”
“Not much, I’d guess,” he says with a weird old-man chuckle, “as she doesn’t know. It’s my turn to keep her in the dark.”
I take a hit. The archaic memory of Pete and Lynn Burns in the sumacs resurfaces again. Isaac’s looking at me like he’s expecting I’ll side with him. But I can’t. I turn away. I never knew his mother, or, rather the girl I’m pretty sure became his mother, but still, I can’t dismiss her, can’t condemn how she’s dealt with her kid. It’s her kid, her life. I don’t want to piece back together that night down at the river—this river—half my lifetime ago, but the pieces won’t scatter. The moment I turn back toward Isaac, the scene starts playing inside my head.
I wasn’t looking for Pete, that much I know. I literally stumbled upon him and this girl who now, all these years later, is looming large in my life. I’ve got to turn away again. I take a few steps toward the riverbank and toe a rock into the current. The air’s warm for October but I’m feeling cold, sweaty and cold at the same time.
Isaac wants to know what do I think, what do I think, isn’t she a real bitch?
I don’t know, so I tell him, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
The traffic on the new interstate bridge in the middle distance—or at least new since I left—sings through our silence.
“I was there. I saw them.”
“What?”
I squat at the edge of the water. He doesn’t come down beside me. Laughter in the distance. Real life in the distance. I see us, hear us, from the perspective of those people partying along the bank. Maybe one of them looks over at Isaac and me and in that instant understands our knot of hurt and loss better than we—or at least I—do?
“This is tough,” I say, twisting my neck to look up at him. Now he does come down next to me. He shuffles his feet in the pebbles. Looking nowhere but into the past, I begin. I remind him we were at a kegger, as if that’s part of an explanation or just an excuse. I emphasize that Pete and I were sixteen, his mom fifteen. I tell him how a lot of kids were pairing off, finding someplace to make out. I tell him how embarrassed I was when I came upon them having sex. I don’t tell him that I never saw her clearly there in the shadows, that I couldn’t swear to God it was her. I also don’t tell him that at first it sort of turned me on a little, her lying there under Pete. I remind him that I left after a moment but don’t say how long a moment it was. Lucky for me, I guess, that language is like that, imprecise. I cannot bring myself to confess that my hand touched the breast that nursed him or held his father’s cock when he was about to shoot the load that would create him. Only now does it occur to me I was like the opposite of a midwife—a midhusband?—aiding in conception instead of birth. Unlike a midwife, though, my role was hardly wholesome. I was looking on, I tell him, and leave it at that.
I explain to Isaac how, as far as I know, they never got together again. Then I recall—or at least I think I recall—the same girl was here, right here at the River Club, at our first show ever, and neither Pete or I talked to her or with any of the other rich girls she was there with. It dawns on me only now that by then Isaac was already born. I don’t tell him this. I don’t know why, I just don’t.
I finish by saying, with as much integrity as an unethical jerk like me can call up or fake, “I loved him—I mean, I love him—you know that—but sometimes he didn’t treat girls right, didn’t respect them. Sure, we were young, but still. I’m thinking maybe your mom has never wanted reminders, doesn’t want to acknowledge him in any way. You’ve got to cut her some slack.”
Isaac presses his forehead to his knees. He doesn’t say anything.
OCTOBER 1994, ISAAC
I open the throttle wide. The Kawasaki loves to run. Mike and I spent the whole night down by the river talking, and now it’s finally late enough in the morning that I can go see Vashti and talk with her about everything. I haven’t been to her house very much in the past couple weeks. I mean, I haven’t been home. Sure, I’m stressed about confronting her, but after talking with Obaachan, and now Mike, everything’s clear, or at least clearer than it was. Finally have to admit, they’re right, I can’t not talk to her.
As I pull onto our street, Vashti’s there, out in the driveway with two blue plastic buckets, hose running in one. It’s overflowing, creating a narrow river down the sloped pavement. I pull in. One of those huge aquariums from up in the attic is sitting in the middle of the driveway. How the hell did she get it down from there? And why now, after like fifteen years? She’s working on the crusty insides. I cut the engine. She doesn’t so much as glance up from the job of peeling away layers of khaki-colored film from the glass with a razor blade.
I lift my helmet off and say, “Hey,” but quickly correct myself, “Hi.” She hates hey. Still no response. “What’re you doing?”
Not a word.
I dismount. “Sorry haven’t been around much.” I rub the toe of my Van across the concrete. “Can we talk, Mom?” Took some effort not to call her Vashti.
She sets the razor blade down on a sheet of wet newspaper and peers up. Eventually, she stands. The sun now rising above the garage roof illuminates her face. She looks sad. In that moment I feel for probably the first time ever as if I’m seeing her as a person. The mother-of-pearl snaps on her blouse glow, as if they have pinhead-sized electric lights inside of them or bits of moonlight.
“You just disappear, and I’m not supposed to worry?”
She’s all mom again and I’m all little kid.
I rub my forehead. “Sorry,” I say, me the one who stopped saying sorry when I was like ten.
“Where’ve you been?” Before I can answer, she elaborates, “Where’ve you been sleeping?”
And before I can answer either question, she’s heading into the garage and I’m following. Even yesterday, I wouldn’t have. She goes into the kitchen, and, like a puppy, I’m right behind. On the blue soapstone island sits the other large aquarium from the attic, this one perfectly clean, full of water, and containing an amazingly realistic forest in miniature. A bonsai-size forest. Neon fish dip and dart among the branches and rocky outcroppings. After all these years she’s suddenly into aquaculture again? We circle the island, her picking up as she goes a half-full coffee mug, a plate of toast crumbs, some coupons. I’m searching like crazy for words. I look around at the Brazilian cherry cabinets and German appliances. All of a sudden, the house I grew up in appears unfamiliar, though maybe it never was familiar, not really.
I’m building up the momentum to tell her I’ve been staying at my grandmother’s. That’s the plan. A bit of a jolt maybe, yet a perfectly natural entry point for telling her all that I’ve found out. But there’s not a chance to say anything. As she opens a cupboard to put the coffee grinder away, she says, just as calm as she never is, “It doesn’t really matter. You’re moving out.”
Oblivious to whatever human drama may or may not be taking place, the fish flock calmly, like birds, above the forest.
She turns back to face me. “And because I’m not going to live up to being the bitch you always make me out to be, I’m not throwing you out.”
I look at her, stunned, puzzled.
“You’re nineteen. It’s about time you get a life. And I need mine back. The lease is up on the condo at the end of the month and the renters aren’t renewing, so to get you set up, I’ll let you have it for a year. If you decide to go to college, you can stay past that, and I’ll continue your allowance. Otherwise, at that point, you’ll have to get a job.”
Not sure what to say or do, I run my nails back and forth on the soapstone, making faint scratches on the surface. The fish glide in unison to the surface of the aquarium.
Amid the ordinariness—the ordinary luxury—of this kitchen, I’m trying to find extraordinary words to make everything okay. I fail.
The fish spiral down into the depths of the tank, disappearing behind the base of the mountain.
