I see you everywhere (34 page)

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Julia Glass

I say, “Sure.”

For a minute or two, we’re just sitting in his car, in the dark. It’s awkward. Then he gets out, so quickly that I flinch. He’s just going around to open my door. Of course. He says, “Drink lots of water and take a couple aspirin.”

“Buzz, you’d make a great husband,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says sharply. “Women who don’t want a husband tell me so all the time.”

“Sorry.”

“No big deal. But forget about the aspirin and you will be.”

He waits for me to go inside before he drives away. Typical: I send the gentleman off into the night.

Inside my cold little home, I play back two messages from Louisa, the first one eager, the next one anxious. She’s frantic to know what happened with Danny.
You cannot begin to imagine,
I think as I fall onto my bed, fully clothed, not bothering to turn out the light on the table, not drinking a drop of water or taking an aspirin, but then I remember that this is what Sheldon said to me the first time we discussed Danny.
You
cannot begin to imagine.
I saw his attitude as nothing more than insulting. What a simpleton I was. Am. And—if I face things as they are, not as I wish they were—will always be. Where is My Life, my nomadic twin, when I desperately need to meet up with her again? The sheets are so cold. I should get up and turn on the heat, but I don’t. What was it R.B. said about happiness as a clean plain hotel bed? The opposite of happiness isn’t unhappiness, I think as I sink into sleep. It’s surrender.

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august 1993

When the Tetons appear, I am thinking of Eva Hesse. The plane swoons slowly forward, a bison sinking to its knees, then soars in a fanciful arc. The whine of the engines rises in pitch and the landing gear drops, a sound that always jolts my heart. “Seventy-five degrees, clear and dry as a vodka martini,” the pilot drawls, as if this cocktail of an afternoon were his private concoction. “May I personally, on behalf of myself and your flight crew, wish each and every one of you a beautiful, safe, and happy stay in Jackson. Or if this is home to you—well, lucky you!”

Three months ago, I went to Washington to cover a retrospective of Eva Hesse’s work. My sister was there, too, a coincidence, to give a paper on bear census taking in the Rockies. Just to see me, Clem stayed an extra day. A rare collision, a chance to talk without phone haze or time zones between us, without a family occasion to bring on the hornets. We ate lunch at an Indian restaurant and then, though I was sure she’d turn me down—too much to do, paperwork and politics; “an Everest of guano,”

as she’d once described the worst part of her job—I asked if she’d like to see the show. Unpredictable as ever, she said yes. That was in May; on the way to the Hirshhorn, we walked through the last plumes of falling cherry blossoms. Almost finished with chemo, I was still wearing a wig.

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early, and I am considered, even at thirty-seven, lucky. True, compared with Eva. So far at least.

Crossing the mountains from Denver, I keep my face turned toward the window. I want to avoid idle talk from my neighbors, but the scenery on this flight plan happens to be spectacular. In sunlight, the slopes resemble green velour: in some places rumpled like a cast-off gown, in others sedately corduroyed—wherever the paper companies deploy their platoons of ridgepole saplings, forests resolute with monotony. Clem talked about the paper companies with venom. Their power is supreme, she said. They control everyone in these parts, from journalists to fishing guides—even the clergy. They might as well be God; come to think of it, she said, they are.

At this remove, the terrain takes on a brainlike texture, and maybe that’s what makes me think of Eva. But mostly the connection is Clem; the last time I saw her, we were looking at Eva’s sculpture. Among the other passengers, I make my way down to the tarmac. Descending an open-air stairway to the bright hot roar of an airfield makes me feel significant, like a starlet or queen: even today it feels shamefully wonderful, the fragrant heat after hours of anesthetizing chill. Wonderful, the searching faces behind the windows reflecting the mountains. Wonderful, so much blue sky pressing so close, the sun on my newly unprotected head. I am letting my new hair show, curls where it used to be straight, reddish blond where it used to be the greenish gold of hay. I am glad to be out from under the airless helmets I wore for months. When the wind touches my scalp, the sensation is startling, cool and astringent.

On the ground, I turn full circle and see the mountains from below. They seem to lean in right at the edge of the airstrip, as if a child drew them there, upright and pointed, crowned with snow even in August, extruding from the earth like whales breaching water. Then I look for Buzz.

On the phone, he asked if he should hold up a sign, but then he remembered he’d be in his uniform, coming from work. Here he is, sure Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 231
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enough, polyester pants and short-sleeved shirt the brown of walnuts, a color to flatter no one; on the shoulder patches, a poorly stitched elk. He is younger than I imagined—a boyish twenty-eight at most: just the age to make me feel indignantly old.

I wave.

“Louisa?”

“Buzz.”

He says my name again. He shakes my hand. “Not too bumpy, your landing?”

“Fine. For once I sat on the right side of the plane. For the view.”

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

I nod, and he asks if I checked any bags. When I shake my head, he says, “Wagon’s out front.” I can tell that he considered hugging me but decided against it. “Oh!” He reaches for my bag. “Slow on the manners here.”

Not till we’re in the car (the same brown as his uniform, the Game and Fish seal on both front doors) does he say how sorry he is about my sister’s death, how he never knew her real well as a person but worked with her, of course, and thought she was one of the smartest women—“oh,”

he blushes, “smartest
people
”—he’s ever met, how everyone here is in shock.

When I thank him, I feel strangely clearheaded. So far, the hardest I’ve cried was in Denver, between flights. I couldn’t contain it, and there was no place in that airport, not a restroom, not a news shop, not a single flightless lounge, where I could be alone to cry. I had known for twelve hours. Now I feel a callow relief, as if I’ll never cry again, as if I’ve inhaled a potent wintergreen balm.

“We’ll drive through the park,” says Buzz. “It’s a little longer, but phenomenal this time of year—well, any time of year, as you can guess.”

I thank him again, remembering how the pilot wished me, along with everyone else, a beautiful stay. That much, unavoidably, it will be. Beautiful.

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thank him a third time. “We put you in Dubois. About twenty minutes from where she lived. Clem’s place,” he adds, as if I wouldn’t know who.

“I was there a couple times. She had this great cookout last summer.”

“She liked to party,” I say.

“Play ball, too. She was a great shortstop. She tell you about the team?” He is warming up, getting his bearings on this terrible task he’s been stuck with. I envision Clem’s colleagues—biologists, lab technicians, the bureaucratic charlatans she railed against whenever we spoke—

all of them drawing straws and this poor guy coming up short. Because in the three years she lived here, she worked long hours. Outside the lab she knew hardly a soul; so she said. For a year or more, she’d been having an affair; I knew this only because I’d grilled her. She said it was mildly scandalous and never mentioned his name. Not Buzz, I decide; he’s attractive in a preppie, duckhunterish way, but she’d never have gone for his eagerness to please, his habit of jumpy self-affirmation. Or perhaps that’s just his nervousness at being with me.

Clem was physically reckless, her all-or-nothing soul sealed tight in a cactus veneer. The men she liked—a small battalion, and they always liked her back, fell hard for her hardness—were brawny, outspoken types, or sure of themselves in some other way. Buzz reminds me more of my ex-husband, Hugh: dependable, polite. I’d bet his toenails are clean and close-trimmed, his feet soft and white as shrink-wrapped supermarket mushrooms. Dubois is more than an hour from Jackson, through a slash in the mountains called Twogwotee Pass. Most of the vehicles we pass are trucks: pickups or semis or flatbeds stacked with flayed trees. Most of the pickups carry guns or dogs or both. The main drag of Dubois—its only commercial street—is Wyoming’s retort to Walt Disney. On the right, a motel with a hulking plaster bear out front. On all fours, that bear stands eight feet tall. His mouth is open in a livid roar; his teeth drip with blood the color of Paloma Picasso’s signature lipstick. Across the street, side by side, the animal clinic and car wash. You enter the clinic through a bison Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 233
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skull, tall as a house. Next door, on the roof of the car wash, a bull moose looks imperiously up and away toward a red-rock butte. His plastic hide flashes back sunshine. The store where you’d buy your ammo, your flies and tackle, announces itself with a fishing pole taller than a streetlamp, dangling a speckled trout the size of a marlin.

By the time we get there, Buzz is talking about how the grizzly team works, how other teams that share the lab in the wildlife station study other animals, even plants. He takes for granted the surrounding funhouse menagerie, ducking without comment below the arch of tangled antlers that beckons guests to the hotel he’s chosen for me. Beyond this savage curio, it could be any old charmless pit stop on any old frontier back road.

“Beds are comfortable,” he says, reading my look. He insists on carrying my bag. “I got you rooms across from each other—lucky, this time of year.”

“It’s fine. We’re very grateful.”

My parents will arrive tomorrow. Coming from Rhode Island, they had a harder time booking flights than I did from New York. It took poor Dad a few hours to make sure the boatyards were covered; August is a never-ending rush.

The room is larger than it would be in the same hotel back east, and the view is generous: red butte and a canopy of cobalt blue, a sky to depend on. I have a cement balcony with two lawn chairs and, inside, a small refrigerator, which I hope will be filled with small hits of strong booze. I am beginning to drink again, and loving it. During chemo, when it would have made me puke, the unremitting sobriety seemed like an insult thrown in for sadistic good measure. So when Buzz asks if there is anything he can do, anything at all, I hand him the ice bucket from the bathroom. He looks happy. I have learned, just recently, to give people things to do in a crisis. Accepting favors is an odd form of mercy. After he comes back with my ice, he hovers outside the door. “A couple of us were hoping you’d have dinner with us? Later’s fine if . . . or if you’d rather not, if you’re too tired . . .”

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and that I want to visit my sister’s place—just for a minute, just to see it. I don’t tell him I need to call the police, call Ray, call a doctor to cancel a checkup I’m supposed to be having tomorrow back in New York.

“Yeah. Sure,” says Buzz. “I’ll take you out there after dinner. You’d get lost if you tried it alone.”

“Don’t think I don’t know how strange this must be,” I tell him. “I feel sorry for you—for all of you. It’s not—” I’m going to say it’s not their fault, but he interrupts me.

“Oh no. Yeah—no. Everybody feels just awful. I mean for
you.
”

And for Clem? I wonder. Do they feel awful for her? Did she make any enemies, people who are secretly relieved she’s out of the way? After I close the door, I switch on the bathroom light. I look at myself in the mirror. “You,” I say to my reflection, and I touch it on the nose,

“you are now an only child. That’s right.” Which means, I realize (sick at the glint of relief in my bitter sorrow), that I inherit everything. There will be no showdown over who gets what, the kind of scene that’s played too many times in the theater of my father’s large, acquisitive family. Silver demitasse spoons from all the major national parks. Among other antiques, a highboy just like one at Monticello. The arrowheads our greatgrandfather found while plowing his Minnesota fields (Clem would have wanted those). The Spanish Colonial armor, the trunk of raccoon coats, the tarnished silver cups and faded satin rosettes—dozens—won by cows my mother showed at state fairs during her midwestern youth. Complementing those trophies, dozens of medals won in all the wars fought by my father’s long chain of military ancestors (a chain he broke, with reluctance and then relief, after West Point refused his flat feet). It looks as if I’ll inherit all that, and this too: the privilege of dealing, by myself, with our parents’ eventual senility, terminal illness, or both. Unless they outlive me.

I notice how, in fluorescent light, my scalp gleams unattractively through my new hair. Unless they outlive us both. I start running a bath. Tub, toilet, and sink are all a gleeful Bermudian green. I empty a tiny bottle of bubble bath into the water, a tiny bottle of Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 235
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Smirnoff into a glass packed with ice. The steam rises in a cloud of brittle evergreen; it smells like a cat I loved as a child, a gingham cat stuffed with pine needles. Every time I slept with that cat, a needle would poke through a seam and jab me awake. But I never gave up on its thorny love; I mothered that cat till the strained seams along its ears finally burst, disgorging its dry brown innards. I peel off my clothes and get into the tub when it’s half full. I watch the froth rise, from both sides, to bury my shins, my thighs, my navel, my knees. I slump down till the suds cover the scar on my breast and cling to my neck like an Elizabethan ruff. I lean forward, turn off the taps, lie back. I close my eyes and stay that way, sipping vodka, until the water feels chilly and the bubbles thin to a milky scrim like aimless, inconsequential clouds. As my body comes back into view, I suddenly want to know about hers—what she did to it, where it is right now, what there is left to see. I want to see Clem’s body.