Carry the One (21 page)

“They’re already having wine when I get there—drinking it out of glasses; mercifully, Horace didn’t bring that goatskin thing with him. Anyway Mom says he’s been offered a show at the Walker in Minneapolis. And I say something like ‘Hey, that’s great!’ I mean it’s years since he’s been taken seriously. And then she says it’s a very special show and I start smelling a rat. A big rat.”

“I’m smelling it a little, too,” Carmen said.

“I could see Loretta was the designated hitter. She told me they want it to be a father-daughter extravaganza. ‘Kenney: Two Generations.’ Horace told me that was a title they’re bouncing around. I, of course, haven’t been included in the bouncing.”

“They didn’t approach Dad at all, did they?” Carmen said.

“Of course not. It might have been his gallery that called them, but it was probably just Horace on his own hook driving up there one day. He’s still totally capable of that sort of ballsy behavior.”

“What’d you say to Mom?”

“Well, what could I say without looking like Camus’s stranger? I told her it sounded great. Gabriella is going to be totally pissed off. They’re so serious over there. The Walker might be sentimental, but my gallery won’t be.”

Carmen noticed the pillows on the sofa were pretty bedraggled. “Let me put fresh cases on these,” she said. When she came back, Alice was making a wimpy attempt to straighten up her sick bay.

“I’m reading all these cheesy dyke novels from the forties and fifties.” She gestured to small, soft, teetering piles around the couch. Carmen bent to scoop up a handful. The covers had a sinister tone, usually represented by a woman in a black or red slip. “They’re all great,” she told Carmen. “They’re like Greek tragedies. Everyone gets horribly punished in the end. Or they hang themselves with a belt over the steam pipe.”

“But weren’t these somebody’s real, tortured life once?” Carmen said.

“Well, sure, but now they’re more like folktales. Hardships of our ancestors. Like Lincoln walking ten miles to school every day through the snow. That sort of thing, only in bars.”

“So sad for them,” Carmen said.

“Yes, of course,” Alice said. “But don’t you think the sex was probably great?”

“Just lie down now and rest,” she ordered Alice, gave her a little push for good measure. “Do you have any of that soup left?”

“In the fridge.”

“I’ll heat it up.” Carmen got this stuff for Alice from a Tibetan place on Sheridan. It was a remedy soup, hard to tell what was in it. It was
extremely herbal and aromatic, the flavor was something like mush-room/VapoRub. But it really seemed to help with the sore throat.

When she came back with a bowl, she sat on the floor in front of the couch while Alice ate.

“What do you think?” Gabe came out of the studio holding up his painting, bracing the sides of the canvas with the palms of his hands. His method was using the smallest brushes he could find, starting in one corner, without gridding the rest, and just painting his way out of the corner by assembling a huge number of tiny details. He now had his staircase completely done. He had put in the first cobwebs.

“Cool,” Alice said, leaning forward over her soup to see the painting’s detail. “Very cool. You sure you want to be painting in that shirt, though?” It was a lurid Hawaiian shirt, luscious with flowers. “Where’d you get that anyway?”

“It’s a surfer shirt. Maude brought it for me from California. Last week at Grandma’s birthday party.”

The conversation clenched. This would be Gabe’s other grandma, Matt’s mother, Marie. Maude was crazy about Gabe and took the opportunity to spoil him a little whenever she was in town. Carmen didn’t mention these visits to Alice as they invariably induced the same look she was getting now. Grim, crazed bravery. The French Lieutenant’s Woman on hearing that the lieutenant had just been seen riding through the village. Carmen hated this look, hated that Maude was still able to elicit this much pain from Alice just by her existence somewhere in the world, out of Alice’s reach.

Part of Carmen’s opinion of Maude came from her being Matt’s sister, guilt by association. But really, she was annoying enough all on her own. She came back once, after her divorce, for about ten minutes, the length of time she could apparently bear to be queer. Then she rushed back to being a straight person, or to some more complex idea of who she was that wasn’t defined by Alice. Somewhere during these ten minutes, Alice, after putting up a pathetic impersonation of
indifference, let her defenses completely crumple and threw herself at Maude. She sold the farm. Carmen told her not to sell the farm, but Alice sold it—a quick and complete liquidation of agricultural assets. Followed by Maude leaving yet again.

It was usually not, Carmen had told Alice, a good situation when the same person provided both the pain and the analgesic. Also, Carmen didn’t understand Alice’s ability to maintain such a renewable present. For Carmen, the present had become so heavy with past. She could be going up a flight of stairs in an old apartment building and suddenly she was moving through something invisible but dense, something a decade thick. Some particular combination of landings littered with sneakers and earth shoes and moon boots and bicycles. Groaning floorboards and worn carpet and varnish and incense and cat litter and curry would drag her back through compressed time like an undertow, up a hundred staircases—to birthday parties, babysitters, the sofa of her Jungian analyst, the tables of massage therapists, the hearty dinners of chicken baked with rice and mushroom soup, rent and fire parties thrown for friends in crises, political strategy meetings. By now the present had become a very crowded place for her. If only she could impress this idea—factoring the past into the present—on Alice. But she didn’t have the heart to hammer on her now, sick as she was. And in any event, Alice had moved from disturbance and sorrow to having fallen asleep.

“No offense intended,” she said, waking a little, groggy, and reached down to touch Carmen’s mangled ear. “It’s the mono.”

“None taken,” Carmen said, then just sat on the floor, her back against the sofa, her head by Alice’s, Alice’s breath passing over the hair at her temple. She pitied everyone who didn’t have a sister.

pad sieu

If Nick weren’t Alice’s brother, if he were just a friend, she supposed they would have drifted apart long ago. But they were not friends. They were here to keep each other from spinning off alone into the dark matter of the universe. They never said this aloud. Instead they held small rituals, concocted ordinary traditions; they tried to seem like everyone else, like two people in a snapshot. For instance, the two of them had November birthdays a week and three years apart; every year they found a midpoint and treated each other to dinner. This year Alice was turning thirty-five, Nick thirty-two. She suggested they meet at a Thai restaurant up on Broadway; they’d been there before.

When Alice arrived, Nick was sitting alone by the door on one of two chairs provided for take-out customers. Although the windows were steamed over and it was about ninety degrees in the restaurant, he seemed quite comfortable in a heavy flannel shirt with a red quilted vest over it. Both looked as if they were from L. L. Bean. He enjoyed ordering from catalogs. He looked like he had just arrived from a logging camp.

At the moment, he was fascinated by a little electric fountain near the entrance that ladled water out of, then back into, a synthetically
steaming, miniature wishing well. This piece of Asian bric-a-brac had been ladling and steaming through the two or three previous dinners they’d had here. So it fell into the category of peculiar, but no longer remarkable. Alice took Nick’s fascination as a bad sign.

He was holding a thick, plastic-sleeved menu—the cover a collage of lurid color photos, which at first glance appeared to be underwater shots of amorphous sea creatures, but when you looked closer were snapshots of various curries and noodle dishes.

“These pictures are just so fucking colorful. I’d really like to Xerox this for this woman who just moved into my building. She’s a photographer. Tina. No. Nina.”

From this neighborly impulse, Alice understood that Nina was a woman with large breasts. Nick went on.

“Do you think they have a copier in the back there?”

“Sure. Probably a color copier,” Alice said. “And a postal substation. Like most storefront restaurants.”

He twisted in his seat to peer back toward the kitchen. “Do you think it would be okay to ask them to make a copy?”

Alice said, “I think we ought to just get a table and use the menu to order the meal we’re going to eat here. You know—now.”

More bad signs cropped up when they were seated across from each other at a glass-topped table giving off a blue astringent smell. Alice noticed that Nick’s eyes, usually a clear green, were currently crusty pinholes. His face had too much definition, the skin was stretched a little too tight over the bone and muscle beneath. She was reminded of faces in Lucian Freud’s paintings.

He seemed to be in a hurry, although when she asked if he had to be anywhere, he said no. As soon as they ordered, he popped off to the bathroom.

Alice looked around. The restaurant appeared to be an extension of the life of the family that owned it. An old woman in a back booth
worked on an adding machine amid piles of paperwork and long loops of register tape. Two small kids sat doing homework at a bamboo bar against the far wall. Above the bar, a Thai video ran on a TV hanging from the ceiling. In the movie, two Asian women—one in a sarong, the other in a jogging suit—were having a heart-to-heart. Then one of them turned to hide her tears and the music swelled and the scene changed to a jail cell.

Nick came back. He wrestled himself out of the vest and the flannel shirt until he was down to his T-shirt. His left forearm was mostly taken up with an aging tattooed portrait of Olivia. He didn’t talk about Olivia. She was a non-subject. A couple of years ago, she found a pill in the cuff of his khakis. That was all. One Vicodin. She left on the spot—left their apartment, her job at MarcAntony, apparently left Chicago—and he hadn’t heard from her since. He didn’t say a thing about her, ever.

He picked up his menu and scrutinized it for a long time. Whatever he’d loaded up on in the john was kicking in; he had pumped up from cold to hot, dropped from agitated to dreamy. He sat awhile without speaking. When he finally said something, what he said was “coconut.” Like this counted as conversation, or he had just taken conversation to some higher plane where everything was encrypted and compressed. While Alice was still working the old-fashioned way, with sentences.

When the food arrived, he did not remember having ordered it, and seemed to not be particularly hungry. He only poked at the curry and
pad sieu
with his chopsticks, which he was holding by the thin—wrong—ends. After taking a sip of the iced coffee, he tried to set the glass back down on the table. They both sat silent for the maybe minute-long stretch during which he brought the glass in for a difficult landing. Something heavy and slippery fell inside Alice watching this.

He said, “I’m okay. Talk to me.” He pulled a pill bottle out of a pocket in his vest. “Actually, why not join me?” He put a long white tablet on the table.

“Thanks anyway,” Alice said. “I might find out I like it. That would be a bad piece of information. But listen, before you fade out, can you talk to me? It’s about the girl.”

“About the paintings?”

“Sort of. They keep coming to me. It’s like I’m her portraitist, and she won’t fire me. And the paintings she has me make are always better than any I make on my own. Whoever is painting her is a better painter than I am. It creeps me out.”

“Plus it’s depressing.”

“Thanks for mentioning that,” Alice said. “So much time has gone by. I feel like everyone else has put the whole thing behind them, except me.”

“I haven’t put the whole thing behind me. I still drive down to Missouri to see Shanna.”

“The mother? I thought you only did that once.”

“No. I try to get down there every year around the time—you know. I don’t know about Tom Ferris. I guess his way of keeping her alive was making a bunch of money off a song about her. He’s just a jerk, but I don’t think anybody else has put this behind them. It’s like—” He drifted out for a moment. Then back in. “I think we altered what was supposed to happen. And we can’t go back and make it happen right. So we’re stuck in some kind of endless loop, trying to improve the past. Which, as you might notice, is resistant to revision.” He furrowed his brow and nodded, as though giving consideration to what he’d just said. But then he kept nodding, like a bobblehead doll in a rear car window.

“Come on. Please,” Alice said. “Don’t fucking go away.”

“This is the best I can do right now. I do my best for you.” For several minutes they were silent. Alice ate a little, Nick kept a close watch on his plate. “I do appreciate that you’re not trying to save me. Like Carmen. I feel like she’s wearing vestments when she approaches. Like she’s just putting up her hand to bless me. Like she’s riding by in the Popemobile. Fuck that.”

“That’s just her. She’s trying to save all of us. I’d miss it if she weren’t trying to save me. You would, too. What’s this?”

She tapped her finger on a manila envelope, the interoffice kind with a grid of senders and recipients listed and crossed out.

“Oh yeah,” he said, then with some difficulty, unfastened the string clasp, and pulled out a photo. “I brought this for you. A really excellent nebula.”

Orange sparks and a kind of roiling aqua steam burst off a deep, inky background. Like a storm made of vapor.

It was amazing to Alice that Nick still occupied a place in the world of astronomy. He had become a weirdo hotshot. His expertise got him off a lot of the usual hooks. He didn’t have to show up for classes or department meetings. He took on individual advisees and made and broke a lot of appointments with them. The students were apparently willing to put up with this for the opportunity of studying with him. He wasn’t pressured for regular performance of any kind. What got him all this latitude was a talent for ferreting out black holes. Envelopes arrived by overnight mail, as though understanding celestial activity that was thousands, millions, sometimes billions of years old was suddenly urgent. He also got flown to various radio scopes—Kitt Peak in Arizona, the Parkes in Australia—to observe and interpret what he saw. Incidents had occurred. He still had his little trouble with flying and airports, their temptations. But these missteps had, so far, been swept under various carpets. He had made a small success of himself in spite of his limitations. Everyone was surprised, Horace not so pleasantly. He’d been counting on Nick continuing to fail. He was totally unprepared for Nick succeeding. Now all he could do was feign overwhelming happiness for his son, so overwhelming that everyone would understand the sentiments were a parody.