Erasure (28 page)

“William tried to see his children the other day, but it became a big scene. His ex is seeing some homophobic highway trooper or something and they nearly came to blows. The kids aren’t taking the truth very well, I’m afraid. I believe he told me that he’s picked up a few new patients. That’s a good thing.” Then Bill came home. “It’s your brother,” Adam said away from the receiver.

“What have you been telling him?” Bill’s voice was stern.

“We were just chatting.”

Bill took the phone. “Monk?”

“Hi, Bill.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. What about with you?”

“Things could be better,” he said. He sounded near crying.

“Bill, I’m calling because I’m planning to take Mother out to the beach tomorrow. We’re going to stay there for a few weeks. I was wondering if you could make a trip out. I’ll pick you up at BWI.”

There was a long silence.

“Bill?”

“I’d really like to, but things are pretty hectic around here these days. I’m having to go to court about visitation and all that stuff.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, I just thought I’d ask. Hey, what if you brought Adam with you?” Before he could respond, I said, “I’ll buy your tickets. Mother’s not doing well, Bill.”

“Okay, Monk. I’ll talk to Adam. Are you going to turn the phone on down there?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, well, I’ll call in the next couple of days.”

“Okay.”

I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take. For the first time I sat back and watched the destruction of my family, not a weird or unnatural thing, indeed it was more natural than most things, but it was a large portion to swallow. My father was dead for several years. My sister was recently murdered. My mother was slipping away on her kite of senility. And my brother was finally finding himself, I suppose, but seemingly losing everything else in the process. I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.

“Would you rather lose your sight or your hearing?” Lisa asked one evening while we all sat at the picnic table behind the house. The mosquitoes were just starting to come out and the crabs were almost gone.

“Hearing,” Bill answered quickly. “There’s too much in this world to see. Paintings, landscapes, faces. You can get around if you don’t hear and you can learn to read lips.”

“What about you, Monksie?” Mother asked. She saw these sorts of things as good conversation and good for us.

“I don’t know. I’d miss hearing music and crickets. I’d miss seeing things like paintings like Bill said. I guess it would be hearing. I’d rather lose my hearing.”

“Me, too,” Mother said.

“What about you, Father?” Bill asked.

Father had been chewing and listening to us in that absent way of his. He looked at Lisa, then me, studying us, it seemed. He looked down the table to Mother, nodding his head. Then he looked longest at Bill. He then took us in as a group, and said, “Sight” with a smile that was not quite a smile, but enough for us to laugh as if we had been teased rather than insulted.

In my head, as I drove along Route 50, Mother by my side, disapproving Lorraine directly behind me, I considered everything that was not good about the novel I was about to publish, that I submitted for the very reason it was not good, but now that fact was killing me. It was a parody, certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that. The work bored and had as its only virtue brevity. There was no playing with compositional or even paginal space. In fact, the work inhabited no space artistically that I could find intelligible. For all the surface concern with the spatial and otherwise dislocation of Van Go, there was nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at me. Then I caught the way I was thinking and realized the saddest thing of all, that I was thinking myself into a funk about idiotic and pretentious bullshit to avoid the real accusation staring me in the face. I was a sell-out.

Mother touched my arm as if she recognized my torture. “Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

“Fine, Mother.” I looked into the rearview mirror. “Okay back there, Lorraine?”

“Yes.” Lorraine had not really wanted to come, but I needed her help in taking care of Mother and, frankly, I couldn’t see leaving her alone. “I could use a ladies’ room.”

We had been on the road for thirty minutes and had perhaps another twenty to go to Annapolis. “Do you think you can wait until we get to Annapolis?” I asked.

“I suppose if I have to.”

“Lorraine needs to stop,” Mother said.

I nodded and pulled off at the next exit which turned out not to be conveniently located for anything people in cars might want. I drove along the two lane highway until thirty minutes later we’d come to a gas station. I parked in front of the restroom doors and killed the engine. “Okay, Lorraine.” I got out and opened her door for her. A greasy-looking, lanky white teenager watched us through the window.

Lorraine went to the door, opened it, then came back, got into the car. “I can wait,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t go in there,” she said.

“There’s no place else.”

“Lorraine said she can’t use that one, Monksie,” Mother said.

“I’ll just wait until we get there,” Lorraine said.

An hour later we were in Annapolis and Lorraine was asleep in the back. Mother was asleep beside me. I drove through town to the beach. The guard at the gate actually recognized me. He was as old as my mother, but I couldn’t recall him. “Monk Ellison,” he said. “My, my. You don’t even remember me, do you? Maynard Boatwright.”

I did recall the name, but I remembered a big, heavily muscled exmarine with an iron jaw, instead of the sweet old man saying
my my
in front of me.

“I remember you,” I said. “How’s life treating you?”

“Finer than frog’s hair.” He looked over at my mother, then at Lorraine. I remembered that Lisa suspected he had a thing for Lorraine. “Is that?”

“Lorraine,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be.”

I turned to wake Lorraine, but Maynard stopped me.

“You must be a good driver,” Maynard said. “For everybody to fall asleep like that.”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I’ll see you later.” Then he waved to the sleeping Lorraine.

The naps must have had a restorative effect on the old ladies. Once at the house and awake, they set to the task of getting the place in order with single-mindedness. I was only a little tired from the short drive, but they wouldn’t let me close enough to help with the cleaning. I went out to the side of the house, turned on the water and threw the main breaker. I poked my head back in to reaffirm my uselessness and stepped out the back to the little dock on the tidal pond. I looked east out to the bay. The old aluminum canoe was still upturned on blocks and covered with a tarp the way it always was. Later, I would take it out and just float on the water with a cigar. The rim of the pond was crowded with houses, nothing like it had been when I was a kid. I could hear the noises of families, music, dogs, a distant car alarm. I walked between our house and the neighboring one and to the road, where I walked toward the bay beach.

I wondered how far I should take my Stagg Leigh performance. I might in fact become a Rhinehart, walking down the street and finding myself in store windows. I yam what I yam. I could throw on a fake beard and a wig and do the talk shows, play the game, walk the walk, shoot the jive. No, I couldn’t.

I would let Mr. Leigh continue his reclusive, just-out-of-the-big-house ways. He would talk to the editor a few more times, then disappear, like down a hole.

I walked along the beach, then turned to look back at the Douglass house. It had been owned first by the grandson of Frederick Douglass and had fallen into several hands since. When I was a child it was unoccupied and we would walk into it, climb the stairs and stare at the water from its tower. My father told me that James Weldon Johnson had written in that lookout. The thought of it scared me a little, but also made my mind race, searching for lines of poems of my own that would never come. Now the house was fresh looking and somewhat unfamiliar. The tower top was no longer screened in, but surrounded by glass. The house looked tight and air-conditioned. There was a Mercedes Benz station wagon parked by the front walk.

I walked back up the street. I stopped to look at the old Tilman house. A woman whom I had not seen was sitting on the porch and she asked if she could help me, in that way which really asked what the hell I was looking at.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just remembering a former owner.”

“Oh, really?” Meaning of course, yeah,
right.

“No, really. His name was Professor Tilman. I never knew his first name. Maybe it was Professor.”