Funny Once (34 page)

“What’s the bad dream?” Nigel asked.

“They tied me up, so I couldn’t save him,” said his grandfather. “I could see him but I couldn’t save him.” He’d stopped struggling against the very real belts that had been secured across his chest and legs and arms. Nigel was holding the old man’s hand.

“Tell him about the prize,” Holly coached her son.

“What prize?” Hannah demanded. “Chess again?”

“Something something humanitarian,” Holly said. “It had to do with fundraising, I think? He wrote an essay? I didn’t even know about it until the newspaper called. His picture’ll be in there tomorrow.” She shook her head in astonishment; this kid of hers was always surprising her. And not because she received phone calls from the police.

Effortlessly, he went around doing good deeds, like some kind of fucking saint.

“Maybe we could turn off some of these lights?” Hugh said. “No wonder he’s having nightmares.”

“He’s talking about Hamish,” Holly said.

“Hamish,” agreed their father.

“Hamish,” echoed Nigel. “I like to say it.”

From the moment he’d moved into the new home, he’d refused sustenance. A kind of vigil was established, a member of the family or a hospice volunteer always present. But Hannah was alone with their father when he died. She thought it was a gift, that the person best prepared to accommodate a death was the one who did, in fact, show up to take on the task. Oldest sister, bossy little stand-in mother all her life. Only Hamish had been able to challenge her, only Hamish, long dead brother. Who would she have become had he remained where he should have, above and beyond her, that boy who skipped ahead mere inches outside her reach, taunting her authority, brazenly disobedient, naughty fox to her clucking hennishness?

When they’d removed Sam Panik from his home, he’d declared that Hamish would have prevented it. Maybe. He lay now deprived of fundamentals, by his own design. He’d stopped eating a week earlier, spitting the water and food from his mouth, unresponsive to any words or actions. Holding his hand, she had a strange wish: that her nephew Nigel was with her, the image of his spatulate fingers in her father’s gnarled grip a lasting one. It appeared to her in a kind of vision, that the boy was the only other human available who would have appreciated the moment, the instant, of passing from among the living to the not. Nigel. That strange boy who shared in Hannah’s bloodstream. Who gave her long penetrating looks from which she, by dint of pride, did not avert her gaze, although she wanted to. He was daunting. He was like her dead brother, she realized. “Who have you assigned him to, in the instance of your death?” she’d asked Holly. Who’d, predictably, burst into tears. “Make plans,” Hannah had ordered, hoping that those plans would include her, yet assuming that it would be Hugh, bachelor alcoholic hopeless Hugh, given the gift of wise Nigel, reincarnated version of their beloved brother.

“Papa,” she said softly. She had watched a litter of kittens die once, born too early; their mother had not been interested in them, dropped them from her body like excrement, then abandoned them to their fate, knowing they wouldn’t survive, were not worth nursing. And they went like this, one at a time, tiny wet black chests heaving up and down, and then not at all, Hannah helpless witness. Her father’s breathing had lengthened. It was something to focus upon, the long pauses in between, in and out. Not believing in anything beyond the here and now, it might be peaceful to enter death’s chamber. The end of labor. The last difficult willed or unwilled drift into sleep, his daughter still helpless, yet there, here, to see him out.

10.
Hello, Ivan

One day Nigel’s father, Ivan, showed up on Holly’s doorstep. It was the beginning of January; snow was falling; spring was ages away; Holly was an official orphan. “I saw the picture!” he shouted when she opened the door; she’d forgotten that about him, his overloud voice. “But you aren’t in the phone book.”

“Unlisted,” Holly said; her number had been too close to a doctor’s, and she’d grown tired of fielding messages. She smiled at Ivan. He was a nice man, and he looked exactly the same as he had ten years ago. He was far too nice to be her boyfriend; that had been the problem. Too nice, too serious, too reverent in his affection toward her, which was the kiss of death, finding her worthy. Too innocent and too worldly, at the same time. He liked to talk about politics and history; Holly had always felt like a spoiled idiot next to him. And also a cynic. Also? Bored. And then ashamed of her boredness. Making love with him, she’d been able to imagine their future arguments, which would end with him being profoundly disappointed in her, and her being ashamed, American ashamed, fat ignorant privileged shame.

“I could not remember the street, so I drove around and around knocking on doors, your neighbors might find me tiresome. I am sorry, the houses are so similar. But finally here you are!” He’d seen Nigel’s photograph in the newspaper, had read about the award the boy had won for his Christmas essay, which had been used to raise money for hurricane victims. He’d first recognized himself in the image; next he had recognized Holly’s name. He had done the math. At any rate, he wanted to meet the boy, whom he did not call “my son,” which Holly appreciated. Men: they could have children they did not know about. How preposterous! An American man, Holly thought, would have sent a lawyer, or done nothing, hidden in fear of Holly’s sending a lawyer, her brother-in-law, in fact, was a lawyer, to collect support. But Ivan merely wanted to meet the boy. He was not going to make any claims. His new girlfriend, he said, had children of her own, and he had, a few years earlier, gotten a vasectomy, frightened of what his homeland experience would wreak upon a next generation. And so his offspring, this accidental, incidental, unknown-till-now child, was a complete gift, in his mind, a miracle, amazing! Exclamation mark! He had landed on Holly’s doorstep with gratitude, solicitude, an homage rather than a court summons. He greeted her by holding her close, murmuring his thankfulness into her ear. He said, “He is exactly like my brother, exactly like Roman, who is gone. I couldn’t believe it, when I saw it, I just looked and looked at my face, at Roman’s face looking at me from the newspaper!” And Holly remembered how Ivan had always smelled faintly of raw onions. And had gray teeth. And hadn’t known how to properly kiss her.

“He’s exactly like my brother, too,” she said when released from his embrace. “He’s also gone. Hamish.” Together they considered their dead brothers over a cigarette on the front stoop in the falling snow. Having a dead brother meant there would always be a sad space in need of filling. A specific space, one that her family had not particularly mentioned but that existed unstated among them just the same. Her father’s death, in a strange way, had made Hamish’s death less painful to Holly. The victims of their shared tragedy were disappearing, one by one, and that made the sadness recede ever so slightly, the inevitable fading of an important bad dream; Holly could feel it. And then, there was Ben the cabdriver, dropping off Nigel. The taxi parked at the curb, the man turned around in his seat to finish some animated point he was making, Nigel nodding thoughtfully in the back, chess technique, no doubt. Then he climbed out and beheld his father. At whom he smiled hugely, fully, her tall skinny beautiful boy. Holly had never seen him do anything like it before.

“Hello, Nigel!” said Ivan loudly. “I am Ivan. I hope you never smoke cigarettes, it is a terrible habit!” They shook hands. And then went inside to have a snack together, bananas, white crackers, milk.

11.
Easy Rider

The man came to Hugh’s door without a weapon, yet Hugh wouldn’t answer, hoping against hope that he’d locked the thing last night, sometimes he did, sometimes not. This would be the husband; he recognized the expression on his face as it came toward him across the street and lawn, hostile red like a meteor speeding toward him, angry beyond reason, an utterly entitled, earned, undeniable anger, and if that weren’t enough, the landed meteoric pounding. It shook the porch, the door frame, the cuckoo clock above the television. Never mind the doorbell, a doorbell was for a mere finger, not a fist, a doorbell could not convey the fury, a fury that could certainly bring down the door, locked or not, could knock down the clock upon the TV. And that would be fitting, a cuckoo for a cuckold. Hugh hid in the kitchen, having scrambled there as soon as he’d seen the man’s approaching furious face; the slammed car door, the resonant bang of that, and then the ensuing bang on this second door, the violence done upon doors, now the booted foot.

The hippies would prevent his breaking it down, Hugh figured, flinching with every strike. He’d never been more grateful for his neighbors’ benign witnessing presence, their choir of stoned opinion. Their gentle indignant voices now calling across the drive.
Hey, man, chillax, whoa, dude . . .
Hugh crawled to his father’s bedroom window to peek out. The hammering at his door abruptly ceased, and then there was Stacy’s husband, roaring toward Waffle and Bob, who had the good sense to scramble up the burnt-orange couch, raise their hands against assault, fall behind the sofa, and use it as a makeshift shield, from which protection they then began screaming at their nearly feral dog, who’d come blazing out from his lair under Mr. Roosevelt’s porch in his own un-reined wild fury, to meet the man in his.

Hugh stood on the other side of the glass, shaking and murmuring, “No, no, no, no,” fumbling the receiver from its cradle, impatient for the first time in his life with the over-long revolution of the rotary dial; 9, it slowly rolled along, then staccato 1-1.

They met at the zoo. The university semester was long over, Ms. Fox had failed them both, her husband was at work, her two older children busy at school, her husband would never suspect she’d meet her boyfriend with the toddler along. While the child stared transfixed at the penguins and flamingos and spiders and cockroaches, in a winding trek from one fictional natural habitat to another, Stacy and Hugh had what was designed to be their final conversation. “Why are you crying?” the three-year-old, Mavis, took a moment to inquire of her mother. The child was bundled in a snowsuit from within which only her chubby red face emerged, a face very like her father’s, small-eyed and skeptical.

“I’m sad for the zebra,” Stacy said. “See? No friends.”

“The giraffe is his friend,” said Mavis. “They both have funny skin. Don’t be sad, Mama!” The child thumped Stacy’s thigh with her mittened hand to emphasize her point.

“Don’t be sad,” Hugh repeated.

Mavis whirled, peeved. “Stop copying me!”

“Sorry. She’s a pistol,” Hugh said, glad to have his mother’s word so readily on his tongue.

“I’ll get a bruise there,” Stacy said, of her thigh. “I bruise so easily it’s ridiculous. I could have a case for spouse abuse, if I wanted to, nobody would doubt it if I said he was knocking me around, he looks like a brute what with that thick neck. But he isn’t.”

Hugh recalled the man’s raging face, coming for him. He could never do a thing about that, not one thing; he’d done what came naturally, which was to cower. He was lacking an essential ingredient that would make him fight for her. It wasn’t in him, whatever it was.

And she knew it.
Pussy
, said his dead brother Hamish, not unkindly, just factually, still age nineteen, sexy as the cover of
Sticky Fingers
, his favorite album. “I think I wanted you to come zooming up on a motorcycle or something,” Stacy had told him on the phone. “Just like some crazy hellion from a movie, carry me away, maybe even hold a gun to my head, frigging kidnap me or something.”

“I hate guns,” Hugh had said. Because he did. He was fearful, and probably lazy, or maybe worse than lazy: insufficient to the labor of love. “I’m just not going to do that,” he’d told her. “I don’t even know how to work a motorcycle.” He’d grown up terrified of them. Hamish had been that kind of boy, would have been that kind of man, daredevil, confident with girls, with women, brave to the point of destruction, fluent in the use of those loud flammable masculine tools . . .

“I know,” she’d sniveled. “I wish you would, but I know you won’t. Maybe that’s why I chose you to begin with. I knew nothing would really happen, in the end?”

This was what his sister Hannah would have predicted: nothing. Holly, too, for that matter. She’d said as much, back when he was acquiring his cell phone. He wasn’t the kind of man women left their husbands for. “You don’t have a sister, do you?” he asked Stacy now, to make her smile. “An unmarried sister? Somebody just like you?”

“My sister is nothing like me,” Stacy said. “She’s real organized and skinny. And also a Republican, I don’t think you’d like her at all.” Then she laughed and laid her head on Hugh’s shoulder. Mavis was busy stumping up and down the stairs at the otters’ habitat, following the figure eights of the creatures’ swimming pattern, from the glass tank downstairs to the exposed islands on top. “I’m lying like a rug,” she said. “My sister’s beautiful and single, but I’m not gonna tell you her name. I want you for myself. Even if I can’t have you.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, Hugh, I truly don’t.” Her husband had flung the coyote-like dog off his arm as if it were a creature half its size; his anger outranked the animal’s, and his threats to the hippies shut them up. He’d pulled a phone from a holster, was punching in numbers himself. He had the law on his side; it was irrefutable. Cuckold: he wasn’t suffering it in shame, that much was clear. His last words, aimed at Hugh’s house, at Hugh, who was stationed back at his father’s bedroom window: “Leave her the fuck alone. I know where you live.”