Carry the One (8 page)

Gabe would probably be fine with the rearrangement. Paula had been part of his life for half its length, and if his father moved in with her, it might not be all that disruptive. His people would still be in place for him. In reality, Carmen was the only one being left.

She was beginning to see the depth and breadth of her misunderstanding. She thought, in spite of their differences, that their partnership was complicated and interesting. Marriage and parenthood seemed so fascinating to her right from the start. Matt had come into the picture already assembled, a full complement of personality aspects with which she had to acquaint herself. Gabe was a total surprise. Until his arrival she had only considered him hypothetically, as someone small who would need to be fed and changed and kept from harm and illness. One or another of the generic babies on the covers of the books she read in preparation. From the moment of his birth, though, he had been such a specific person. So particularly kind, and reflective. As soon as he discovered that meat came from animals, he would no longer eat it. So she and Matt became vegetarians by default and sympathy. Once everyone wore out on grilled cheese sandwiches
and scrambled eggs, Carmen tapped into cookbooks from nostalgic non-places like Greenwood Hollow, or volumes like
The Bountiful Bean
that came at the challenge from a particular angle. All of this minutiae was so interesting, life spilling into the blanks without her having much to do with it. And she thought that this was what family comprised, the creation of little dilemmas and challenges, which then had to be figured out, or met, and that both she and Matt were equally engaged in this enterprise. She let herself be lulled by a companionship that seemed to blossom and prosper, a day-to-day built on small conversations, endless amazement at their child, hilariously awful camping trips, messages left on a kitchen marker board for ingredients that needed to be picked up for dinner. The only problem with this calm assessment was that she was, as it turned out, completely wrong.

When Matt took Carmen to dinner one night last week at her favorite restaurant, the Paradise Café (while Paula stayed home with Gabe; that was the truly noxious part), to talk about “something important,” she thought he was going to say he’d found a way they could move into a bigger house. Their current one was too far west, and too small. They were on Ravenswood, facing the tracks. The urgent rush of the commuter trains heading north to the suburbs and south to the Loop was a large component of their immediate surroundings. They would have both preferred a less locomotive setting.

So she thought the “something important” was “new house.” All of Matt’s surprises up to that point had been pleasant ones. But this time the surprise was Paula. Now Carmen could see, with heated humiliation, that the peaceful atmosphere in the room of their marriage was, for Matt, only a muted backdrop to a large, loudly ticking clock. While she had been going on, pretending their union was a rough but working organism, he had been quietly waiting for something to get him out of a marriage he had always seen as tainted. Carmen saw the stain, too. She could still, anytime, look back and see herself standing there in her ironic red wedding dress, just wanting her guests to leave, sleepily watching the splayed fins of Olivia’s old Dodge sashay with
her good wishes down the dirt road, off the farm, navigating by its fog lamps, on its short, murderous course. At first they talked a lot about their culpability. They even went a few times to a couples’ counselor. After that, Carmen didn’t think the problem had gone away, or would ever go away, but that it was something they shared, as opposed to something that divided them. But now she could see the whole of the marriage played out under a long stretch of shadow it couldn’t outrun.

Carmen and Gabe dressed up a little for Horace’s party. For Gabe this meant fresh pants, shined shoes, and a dress shirt. An outfit to which he added a cheesy red satin magician’s cape.

“Peeeuuw!” He climbed into their car, following Walter, who liked to come along, anywhere. He didn’t mind the sour mildew aroma at all, and settled with a wheeze into the pile of old clothes in the back.

“Just hold your nose,” Carmen told Gabe. “We don’t have very far to go.” Yesterday she spent the afternoon combing the racks at AMVETS and Salvation Army for large-size dresses and pants suits for women at Hearth/Home, the shelter where she worked—women who were going on job interviews, or back to school. Except for the really old women, who could be small and gnarly, clients at the shelter tended to be large gals. They lived on McDonald’s and sweet wine. Plus, they hadn’t been putting in much of an effort to keep themselves up.

Coming up the stairs to her parents’ apartment, Carmen could hear the overlapping ebb and spike of party conviviality. Walter had rushed ahead and was already standing with his nose touching the apartment door.

“Pay attention to your grandfather,” Carmen told Gabe, her hand on the doorknob. “It’s his birthday.”

“Okay. But inside me, I don’t like him. He’s too loud, and he’s always mad at everybody.”

The apartment, which occupied the floor above her father’s studio, was pure sixties bohemian, beatnik through and through. Danish modern furniture, blond and webbed; sagging brick-and-board bookcases; a set of bongos gathering dust in the corner, primitive African art on the walls along, of course, with Horace’s paintings. The apartments of all her parents’ Old Town crowd bore a similar stamp. These were the lairs of old artists and their younger trophy muses, women who were themselves now creeping through late middle age, variously thinning down or plumping up dramatically. These apartments were historic sites of landmark parties filled with artistic proclamations, the ignition of feuds, the birth of signature cocktails. Also of false teeth lost in toilets, tatami mats puked on, friendships bitterly ended, chops busted, cross-pollination among couples transacted in bathrooms and broom closets, and usually someone naked found passed out between the layers of coats on the bed.

This apartment had also—between the parties—been Alice and Carmen and Nick’s home. There was little of the empty nest to it now, though. The girls’ room had been refurbished into Loretta’s office when she got her realtor’s license. Nick’s was now home to a giant ornate wood console television Alice called the Credenza Cordoba, and a low-slung, U-shaped sofa. Loretta referred to the room as the “entertainment center.” Everything else was much the same as it had always been. The whole apartment had its own distinct, static smell.

Gabe zipped through the crowd in the living room and headed for Nick’s old reflector telescope, which had, over time, washed up against the far wall of windows. Carmen set her cake at the end of the buffet and told Walter, “Nothing on this table is for dogs.” At the center of the buffet was Loretta’s infamous Texas jailhouse chili. Carmen got a cautionary aura of heartburn as she stared it down.

She checked out the crowd, mostly old friends of her parents, the people who represented adulthood to her when she was a child. Paco and Cindy Beecham. Larry and Giselle Zorn. Phaedra Carlson, who was now widowed and on her own.

She found her brother sitting by himself against the wall beyond the buffet table, a little too upright on a frayed sofa, holding a can of ginger ale as though it were a grenade on which he had just pulled the pin.

“Hey,” he said, and shifted over a little to make room for her.

She was by now used to the thinner, more aquiline nose that emerged from the reconstruction after it had been broken by Casey Redman’s father. It made him look maybe British, like someone who collected butterflies and had read all of Trollope. She also noticed that his hair was meticulously cut, the tips blonder than the rest.

“Has Olivia been doing something bleachy here?” She pulled at a piece for inspection.

“Ouch. Come on, you think that doesn’t hurt? What can I say? When you live with a hairdresser, shit happens.” His breath, as usual, was deeply wintergreen. It was like talking to someone in a Norwegian forest. He used tiny squeeze bottles of concentrated freshener he picked up at truck stops. He had used this stuff since the days when he needed to show up for work, but was dead drunk.

“Where is she anyway?”

“She’s supposed to be parking, but my guess is she’s just sitting in the car, building enough critical mass to come in here.”

Carmen was grateful—everyone was—for Olivia’s presence in Nick’s life, for the constraining effect she had on him. She was the one thing he seemed to value more than getting high. Carmen no longer thought of Olivia as a murderer. By now she was stern and focused, a new person who seemed to have been designed in opposition to the stoner who casually got behind the wheel and killed a girl. Plus she had paid, paid a little for each of them. They were all aware of this.

“Well, sure. I can see that.” And she could. She could picture Olivia in sharp detail, sitting in her car down the block, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “So what’s up? How is it being back at school?”

“It’s weird. You drop out for even just a couple of years and you come back and you’re already the old guy.”

“But you’re finishing the thesis,” Carmen prompted.

“Sort of. The thing is, I have way too much stuff. I’ve got to start pruning. Tons of new information is rolling in. By the time you find something and pin it down, something more has been discovered. Not just theoretical stuff, but stuff we can actually see. We have better scopes, and more ways of looking. Radio scopes, of course. Also X-ray scopes. They’re getting ready to send a big reflector scope into space, to get clear views from outside our atmosphere. The bang put a lot into motion and now we have more ways to watch the action.”

“I love the big bang,” Carmen said.

“Yeah.” He exhaled wearily. “Everyone loves it. It’s very lovable.”

From Nick, she knew that the bigness started very, very, very small. But extremely compressed. In the moments before the bang happened, the whole universe was the size of a dime. And Nick didn’t really let you say “happened”; there wasn’t any space or time for it to happen in. Back then—although he didn’t let you say “then” either—space-time and matter and energy were all just rolled into something incredibly dense and hot.

Carmen had to flex her mind to accommodate stuff like this. Astronomy was not her strong suit. It took Nick three demonstrations with a tilted apple Earth circling a peach Sun to get her to understand the seasons.

“Probably lots happening on the alien front.” Space aliens and astrology were his least favorite subjects. Really, he didn’t even consider them subjects.

So he didn’t say anything.

So she didn’t say anything either.

Finally he said, “If they come for a visit, it probably won’t be with friendly intentions. And they won’t be little green men. The distances are too great for any sort of humanoid creatures to make it all the way here. Even traveling at the speed of light—and you know what’s faster than the speed of light?”

“Something,” she guessed.

“Nothing. To get here they will have to be more advanced than us. Which probably means they’ll have evolved into artificial intelligence.” He stopped and looked at Carmen with well-founded suspicion.

“But I just read somewhere another farm wife said she was taken onboard a saucer by very smooth creatures with short horns. And, of course, she was measured and anally probed.”

“It would take so long for images of Earth to reach those green guys that they’d be watching dinosaurs. Based on their information, when they came for a visit, they’d bring very large anal probes. Which would be useless on us.”

“You’re so much fun,” Carmen said.

He pulled her toward him to kiss her hair at the temple. Aside from his irresponsibility, he was a very sweet person. You just couldn’t count on him for anything. Anything. Nor could you believe anything he said about himself or his life. Ultimately, this made him a tiresome person to talk with. Carmen had scaled back her expectations. She was just thankful that he was sitting next to her on this sofa, to all appearances sober. Before Olivia came out of prison and he straightened up to get her back, there was a scary stretch. Detox, then rehab, then retox, then back through the cycle again. Two days after they put him on a plane to a boot camp rehab in Minnesota, the baggage claim in Minneapolis called to say he had never picked up his suitcase. He hadn’t been able to make it past a bar in the Twin Cities airport. Then a month later, on his way out, back at the airport, he got snagged by the same bar.

“Airports are hard for him” was Alice’s analysis.

“Right,” Carmen said, “Airports are the problem.”

Olivia came through the door in a pea coat and a Mongolian hat with earflaps. She looked great in a flinty, soviet way. Whatever blandness there was to her before, prison had cut away. Horace seemed to be giving her a big welcome, putting an arm around her shoulder. Out of her presence and Nick’s, he referred to her as Butch. As she disappeared
into the back of the apartment to get rid of her jacket, Horace glanced in Nick and Carmen’s direction. He bowed like a butler, then lumbered across the room toward them. Nick started humming the theme from
Jaws
. Horace still projected a hearty image, although some of his former, evenly distributed bulk had slipped off his shoulders to form a gut that hung over his belt. His craggy features had lumped up a little. Carmen hadn’t figured on this, that age would make him more sympathetic. As he approached them, he opened his arms in a giant air hug.

“Glad you could make it,” he said, then to Nick, “I just ran into your lovely bride at the door.” There was something off about the way he said this, but nothing to respond to directly. Something about Olivia, maybe her indifference to his charms, bugged Horace.

“You know, I think I might go look for her,” Nick said. “She doesn’t know many people here.” Nick pinched Carmen’s arm to signal that he was leaving Horace all to her, then got up and slipped off sideways through the crowd.

“I hate this party,” Horace said. “Every year I hate it. I just go along with it to please your mother.” He was lying. He loved this party. He adored it. So Carmen called his bluff.