Carry the One (25 page)

“Okay,” Carmen said, then bossed Alice toward the door. “Let’s go outside now. The shrimp will have to wait. We need to make a toast to Nick. Before he flees.”

As Rob pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator, he said, “And remember: E equals something squared.”

After initially recoiling from Rob—early on he came to a show of hers, pointed his forefinger like a gun at this, then that painting, saying “Like it”—Alice had come around to being crazy about him. Whenever Carmen complained about his passivity, or his cultural ignorance, Alice said “yeah yeah, shut up. You got yourself a good one.” Alice liked how he treated Carmen, put her on a float in the parade.

Carmen was happy to throw this little party—happy that Nick, out of the blue and against all odds—had given them all an occasion for celebration. And the weather had gone along with the social plan, so perfect outside, so overwhelmingly June, everything bleeding out color—lawn, trees, the embankment of the railroad tracks scattered with wildflowers from a spring community project. Her yard, with the years and perennials and Rob helping, was now a respectable garden. Rob stood in the middle of it and popped the cork, massaging it out of the bottle, into a bunched-up bar towel that muffled the carbonated thwap to a sputter. It wasn’t real champagne, only sparkling apple juice. Everyone got rid of any alcohol—threw it out or locked it up—whenever Nick was around. A lesson they’d all learned one or another hard way with overlooked aftershave, vanilla extract, and, one time, canned heat for a chafing dish.

“To a maverick explorer, a Shackleton of space!” was what Carmen came up with when everyone’s glass was filled. She was quoting the introduction given Nick as he stepped onstage earlier this afternoon to accept a small, bronze trophy artistically shaped like a melted radio
telescope, which was to say shaped like a hand-thrown cereal bowl. She was astounded that this turned out to be a major prize. There must have been 300 people in the auditorium down at school. Even with his personal valleys having become so deep, Nick clearly still had the ability to scale peaks in astronomy. Which made Carmen wonder what he might have accomplished if he hadn’t had to drop out so often, drop out then recover, using up so much of his allotment of self on falling and righting.

He still held on to his trophy; he was clearly nervous. He had sweated through, in dark quarter moons, the underarms of his sport jacket. His T-shirt was white, his jeans black. His skin had a freshly scrubbed look, his teeth gleamed. He had dealt with his receding hairline by shaving his head. Carmen knew through Alice that he had been on an improvement program. Micro-dermabrasion. Teeth whitening. Whatever—he embodied the notion of springing back.

She feared this tiny scaffold of glory would have a trap door, but what the hell, today she figured she might as well just be happy for him.

Nick watched Rob work the cork free of the bottle. Even though he knew it was only fizzy juice, he still got a little rush—desire spun with urgency. A frothy little mix in his head. The smallest events—

a billboard featuring black people involved in situations of sex and cognac

a bottle of pills in a friend’s medicine cabinet (he couldn’t ever not check)

a pair of women getting physical with each other, even just hugging hello in a shampoo commercial

—any of these would trigger a glimmery surge inside him.

“Hey,” he said in response to the toast, but from there couldn’t find any more words. The others waited patiently until they understood he
wouldn’t be coming up with a speech, and then they just began to sip their fizzy juice and talk among themselves. That was okay. No speech was really required; he had already amazed them.

“Are those orthopedic?” Loretta gestured toward Alice’s sport sandals. She was here by herself. Horace was not welcome at social gatherings, but for new reasons. Instead of insulting everyone, he now forgot who they were, and how they connected to him. His bewilderment was too tragic to make him and everyone else go through an afternoon of it.

Alice didn’t bother answering; she understood her mother wasn’t asking a real question. Loretta, even though she had retired into a life without any situations for which she needed to look businesslike, wore red pumps with three-inch heels. She subscribed to the belief that heels make a woman’s calves look more shapely. Carmen says if Loretta had lived in China, she’d have had bound feet. At the moment she had a glow to her. Alice liked her mother least when she glowed like this. It wasn’t a glow of true happiness, more a phony patina of nervous excitement, as though she were back in real estate, showing a dazzling house she knew held ferocious mold in the basement.

Loretta had already moved past her little swipe at Alice, and was glowing now, toward Nick. “I’m just so proud of you, honey.” She reached up, maybe to scruff some hair he once had, as if he were still a boy with a crewcut, then, seeing that her hand was currently headed for an expanse of sweaty shaved scalp, she pulled back awkwardly, then bent her gesture into a little hand flourish, like a circus performer beckoning applause for her trained poodles. “Proud of all my children!” she finished.

Alice looked over at Carmen, who crossed her eyes. The two of them disagreed on the subject of their mother. Alice thought she was just a little mean-spirited, a little hunched from a lifetime under their father’s oppression. Carmen thought that, had Horace requested it, Loretta would have locked her kids in a bamboo cage half underwater, like in
The Deer Hunter,
and conscripted them as players in games
of Russian roulette. When they saw that movie together, Carmen thought it was the perfect metaphor for their childhood.

Nick noticed his mother go into the kitchen. He followed and, seeing they were alone, waited until she finished getting herself some ice and water from the refrigerator door.

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you could help me out a little.” For once he wasn’t hitting her up for drug money. Cleaning up his act, along with his apartment, his wardrobe, and getting the dents in his car bumped out, had put him a little behind the eight ball.

Loretta pursed her lips in a schoolmarmish way, a little kiss of disapproval before she pulled an embossed leather checkbook out of her purse. She still wrote checks for everything. She would be the last person in human history holding up a grocery-store line to write a check for two Lean Cuisines. Nick loved the checkbook, also his check, the amount written against a background of pastel cats playing with soft balls of yarn.

Heather came into the yard and got tripped up by Tater—Rob and Carmen’s new dog. (
Not
a replacement for Walter. No dog could ever take his place, Carmen would say, but it did seem she was taking to this little guy.) An inglorious entrance. Carmen went over.

“It’s great you could make it.” Heather was in town just for the weekend. Her mother’s birthday was yesterday. Heather visited her at an ashram in northern Indiana, where she had lived for several years now, practicing a life of keeping still.

“Crispy shrimp?” Alice passed by, holding a trayful in her good hand. She loved playing waitress at parties.

Heather had mellowed. After the business with her and Gabe—which left him hurt but determined not to show it—she began college then started dropping weight again. For a while she was mostly in and out of clinics, scaring the hell out of them. And then, suddenly, she just got normal. She turned nineteen and took about a pound of metal
jewelry out of her ears and nose and privates, let Rob cut her hair. She still had the buzzing bee by her eye, but that was no longer a deterrent to progress in the straight world. She never went back to school. She currently lived in Manhattan and worked for a high-end realtor. The service Heather performed was staging—buffing up apartments for sale to show them to their best advantage. She ordered sets of pale, high-thread-count bed linens, filled large ceramic vases with sprays of exotic flowers, put Pillsbury rolls into the oven set to warm, lined the rim of the bathtub with white votive candles. She brought with her an array of fragrance sprays (summer cotton, sea breeze), and a batch of mood-setting CDs. Heather also replaced the worst of what the client had hung on the walls with what she called “neutral art.” She took flak from both Alice and Gabe about even the concept of art that was neutral. Give me a break, she would say.

For these services, Heather made a percentage of the agent’s percentage. With Manhattan real estate prices, this added up to quite a bit of money, which she socked away in mutual funds. Her troubles, which seemed to run so deep, turned out to be fleeting, adherent to adolescence, a kind of emotional asthma. And Carmen knew she should be happy that Heather started eating like a regular human and dropped the black eyeliner and got a job. And she was, happy. But she also feared for someone—so very like herself at that age—who had all her ducks in order. As if there was any reliable way of ordering ducks.

A chainsaw rip and a rubber whine preceded a motorcycle coming up the driveway out of a turn made so sharply the rider’s shoulder nearly grazed the ground. Gabe had arrived.

Alice turned to watch him dismount in a choreographed sequence of movements. He was extremely aware of how he presented himself to the world. All through high school he had run, worked out with weights, kept an eye on his body mass index. He got this from his father; he and Matt worked out together at one of those new gyms that had a prison flavor. The desk up in his bedroom was piled with giant
plastic containers of supplements he bought there. Protein powder, something called Steel. Whey in a plastic jug big as a tuffet.

He was about to graduate and head off to art school. He had a terrible girlfriend. Donna. They all hated her in a lazy way, the assumption being that she was temporary. For the summer, he was working part time for a sign-painting company, making art in his off-hours. He had pretty much abandoned his own painting, and now performed spontaneous pieces in public areas. Alice assured Carmen he would get past this, that he was not going to be forty and still eating tapioca in a clear plastic box on Michigan Avenue in his underpants. But neither was he the person Alice so hoped he’d become. She’d been expecting someone sweetly shy, but instead he’d turned out to be a little brash. He still wore glasses, but now with frames that called attention to themselves. He had a little of his father’s puffy self-importance. Also a little of Carmen’s challenging manner, and it was usually Carmen he was challenging. Striking distance was about as close as he got to his mother these days. Carmen, so tough in every other way, dissolved beneath his acidic gaze. Today, though, he came out of his helmet grinning at his mother, even gave Heather a quick, cautious hug, then headed straight toward the guest of honor.

“You the man.” Gabe high-fived his uncle, who responded off the beat and they wound up whacking into each other’s forearms. A white-guy high five.

“Cool bowl,” he said, nodding, clueless, toward Nick’s trophy.

He had brought Nick a present, which he pulled out of his messenger bag. A small, sentimental landscape, a meadow backgrounded by an unlikely volcano. He had painted Nick into the meadow, peering through binoculars at a part of the sky Gabe had painted black then salted with stars. This was pretty much the only sort of artistic painting Gabe did these days, the ironic insertion of friends into cheesy paintings he found in junk shops.

“This is so excellent,” Nick said.

Gabe idolized his uncle. He saw Nick’s addictions enhanced by rock star lighting. Nick was his private Kurt Cobain.

A few stragglers trickled in. Nick’s mentor, Bernie Cato, proud as a parent. Jean brought a guitar and sang “Fly Me to the Moon,” to Nick, who seemed not at all embarrassed. She also brought Vincent, a wiry guy wearing a T-shirt that said
COLLEGE
. Carmen knew nothing about this person. Jean had not mentioned him, but from the way he sat next to her and watched in a focused way as she played and sang, Carmen assumed he was a boyfriend. A boyfriend who was not Tom Ferris. A fairly stunning development.

They had chicken kabobs, grilled tofu for the vegetarians, and Greek salad. Someone hauled out the croquet set and there was a while of wooden balls thudding off the ankles of people in lawn chairs. A little after five, a consensus gathered up about leaving. Carmen looked around and thought, with Horace absent and Alice not manifestly lovesick and Nick sober and Loretta subdued and Gabe not witheringly dismissive, these people could actually add up to a happy family.

“Hey,” Alice said to Jean when she found her alone getting a couple of Cokes out of the cooler. “I think I saw Tom driving by the house just now. I was getting something out of my car. He went past twice.”

Jean didn’t seem surprised. “He’s being stupidly tragic. He has no right to tragedy. His marriage broke up. His son turned out to be queer. That bothers him. Really. His cholesterol is too high. Who cares? Do you care?”

“Sean? He’s queer?”

“Tom heard him talking with a bunch of his friends at a party. He was saying ‘Whatever happened to the
fourth
Pointer Sister?’ And Tom couldn’t come up with an example of any straight guy saying that.” Jean popped open one of the Cokes, took a drink, then said, “So let him drive his go-cart round and round the track.”

“This thing is new then?” Alice tilted her head in Vincent’s direction, pushing in a thin end of the wedge to open the conversation.

“Kind of new. Kind of nice. We go places together. He’s not married. He can stay over as many nights as I want. Imagine that.”

Nick needed a lift home. His car was in the body shop. Alice’s burnt fingertips still hurt; she had to hold the wheel gingerly.

“Mmmm.” Nick ran his hands along the center armrest. “Fine Corinthian leather,” he said in a Ricardo Montalban accent. He never missed a chance these days to jerk her chain about having bought a Mercedes, and not a reverse-chic beater like her old one. This one was brand new.

“Looks to me like your butt is enjoying that leather quite a bit. Your butt isn’t embarrassed. Your butt isn’t longing for a hard plastic bus seat. But I’ll keep the critique in mind. Next time, I’ll get something with vinyl upholstery. A Yugo. A used Yugo.”