I see you everywhere (40 page)

“Guys! Shoes off !” I shout above their clamorous talk. They become still for a moment when they notice the stranger in their kitchen. “Hey,” says Luke, the older one speaking first. “Hey,” echoes Max. They stand there, two large damp boys with roughed-up hair and clothes. Though they share their mother’s pale, delicate coloring, it’s now obvious that they will both grow into their father’s extreme stature; Campbell is tall and bony in a way that makes him look impressive and graceful half the time—but then, just as often, so precarious that surely he must topple to the ground.

When the boys shake hands with Ralph—firmly, making steady eye contact, as their father has taught them—I see how dirty their hands are, how dirty they are from head to foot. But this kind of disorder pleases me; it’s a healthy antidote to the sterile, sometimes monastic atmosphere in which I do business, where the one constant is a large, pure-white, resolutely spotless room through which various spectacles and spectators come and go, none leaving a permanent mark. In that world, the colors and shapes and attitudes ceaselessly change, but there is very little dirt. There’s not enough patience for dust.

“Are you the bird man?” asks Luke.

“In person,” says Ralph.

“Cool,” says Luke, simply, conclusively. He turns and lifts Henri onto his shoulders. “We’re ’napping you, man.” Henri squeals as he is galloped across the loft and into the boys’ room. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 270 270

Julia Glass

“Nice to meet you,” says Max, and then he shouts out that he gets the bathroom first, and they vanish, all three boys, behind a pair of loudly closed doors. I hear the shower running, I hear muffled synthetic electric guitar; behind me, a soccer ball drops from the hallway bench and rolls past the table to rest at the edge of the carpet that marks the divide between kitchen and living room.

“Boy Heaven,” I say.

“Boy Jungle,” says Ralph, eyeing a clump of grass on the tile floor. We stare at each other, first happily, then tenderly, then sadly. Quietly, Ralph says, “Can we get back to morbid? Because I want to tell you how incredibly sorry I am about your sister.”

“I know, and I appreciate it. A lot of time’s gone by, and I hope you don’t feel—”

“No,” he says forcefully. “What I want to say is that I’m sorry I never wrote or called you when it happened. Because I meant to, and I should have. We were good friends. Even though we hardly ever saw each other. When I got my first big grant, I tried to get her to work for me, but she’d made up her mind to stick with mammals. She liked writing letters, and sometimes she’d call. I was so ashamed—I mean, that I hadn’t taken some things about her seriously, so it . . . so by the time I screwed up any kind of nerve to get in touch with you, I figured it was too late.”

“It’s never too late.”

“Can I tell you, that makes me feel even worse? Because now it’s you who found me. I would never have been in touch. That’s the truth.”

“And I’d never have been the wiser. Or stirred this up again.”

“I’m glad you spotted me. I’m glad to be here.” His right hand rests on my left arm. I cover it with my own right hand. I can see the feet of the blue cormorant below the edge of his T-shirt sleeve. I’ve lost my sister’s laugh, but across twenty-five years I’ve held on to the image of this fairly plain tattoo: on the subway, that’s what I recognized, not Ralph’s face. He was standing across from me, facing away, just your typical stranger on a crowded train, but his right arm was raised to hold the steel bar. The short sleeve had pulled back toward his shoulder, and there it was, upside Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 271
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down but distinct, the blue cormorant flying across his biceps. I still can’t believe I had the courage to tap him on the shoulder. I give him another beer and pour myself a second glass of wine. “I made brownies. Would you like a brownie?”

“Good lord, yes! Who says no to brownies?”

“Leave it,” I say when Ralph begins to clear the table. I hand him a plate with a brownie and lead him back to the living room. I see him eyeing the ceiling, the inverted parachute of feathers. I say,

“It’s called
Host.
I hope it doesn’t seem cruel or thoughtless to you.”

“Let’s stop acting like I’m a saint, okay? I am anything but.”

I sit on the couch and begin to eat my brownie. It’s undercooked in the middle, too dense, but it fills the need for something solid and rich, something to weigh me down. I say, “No matter how many things Clem did to shock me—the guys she shafted, the crude way she talked about people she’d written off—I thought of her that way a lot of the time, as a saint. Because of her work, I guess. How important she thought it was. How other things mattered less. But maybe all the good work . . . maybe it felt . . . I think she worried it was pointless. A kind of hubris. Though she would have made fun of my using such a big word.”

Every so often Ralph’s gaze shifts to the sky outside the window, over my head, but I know he is also intent on our conversation. “All ‘good work,’ ” he says, “feels foolish at times. Naïve and stupid. That’s part of the territory. She knew that.”

And how about work that really
is
foolish? I think. How about parsing and praising the glories of art? Isn’t art, strictly speaking, just another form of human excess, even waste? Shouldn’t it seem pointless once you think your whole world’s been changed by (for example) cancer, then by your only sibling’s death, then by a terrorist act? Is it “good” to go on doing the same old oblivious thing, to still enjoy it no matter what? Does perseverance steady the world?

“I don’t know what she knew, if you want to know the truth,” I say. “I want it not to matter, but it does.”

“Of course it matters.”

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Julia Glass

Max bursts out of the bathroom and makes for the bedroom, wrapped in a towel, trailing water across the floor. He trades off with Luke; both doors close again. I hear Henri exclaim “Dude!” in his high-pitched voice. When he’s around Max and Luke, he seems to drink the very air around them.

Ralph stands up, and I panic at the thought that he will leave. But he says, “I brought you something.” He goes through the kitchen and gets his backpack, from which he pulls a manila envelope. “I found a few of your sister’s letters in my office. The others are probably gone—I’m a nomad—but you can keep these.”

The envelope yields a sheaf of paper, a dozen sheets torn from spiral notebooks, blue lines covered with row after row of my sister’s oddly ingenuous printing: self-consciously neat, each letter distinct, the handiwork of a pupil eager to please. I close my eyes for a moment and hold them in my lap, both hands flat on the surface of the first letter. I look down.
May 15, 1981.

“The year after we met,” says Ralph. “After I met you, too, I guess.”

“Alaska.”

“She wrote me from so many places.”

“Amazing places.” I start reading; I can’t help it. She was twenty-one, a year of college left to go. She’d won a summer internship with a government agency that monitored the whaling in northern Alaska; Clem had explained that the native people of the region were still allowed to make a living this way. I remember when she set out for that adventure, all the gear she had to buy, the winter-worthy hats and boots and underwear, though it was nearly summer. The whales were moving north across the Arctic Circle, through the fracturing pack ice. She’d be part of the team counting the whales, judging their numbers more by the sounds they made underwater than by their appearance on the surface. Clem wrote me, too, from all her amazing places, but when I looked for those letters after her death, I found only recent ones, the ones from Wyoming, the ones where she admitted to feeling isolated in many ways yet never sounded desperate. (Such interesting work, I’d think; how Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 273
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lucky she was.) I could not believe I had thrown away all those earlier letters, and sometimes even now—when I visit my parents in Rhode Island—I go through the same closets, the same boxes in the attic and the hayloft, sure that I will find them yet.

Second day and here I am making tea from a snowbank on Point Barrow. I’m in the sled shed, monitoring array B broadcast from Tovak Perch Lead. My 6 hr. watch ends at 1800 and I’m listening to underwater sounds: bearded seals (oogruks—isn’t that a great word?), ring seals, belugas, bowheads. Screeching, whistling, clicking, warbling—it sounds like the tropics, like birds and monkeys and cats, insects buzzing, vines dripping, rivers flowing. What is so weird is how totally silent it is UP HERE, except the breaking ice now & then, the crunching of your feet in the snow or the loud eerie blow of a whale when it comes up for air. Long flocks of king eiders mutter past in the sky. It’s like all the life’s above or below, while the “earth,” this narrow plane, is just so incredibly still. At the tiny drugstore, this older lady asked me what I was doing here—not hostile, just curious. I felt myself sort of apologizing for the intrusion, how I know we’re from outside this world (like WAY outside!), and she said, “God put you down there with all those trees and oranges and flowers and mountains, and you have a great time. He put us up here and all we have is the animals. That’s what we live on. You can just look at the animals, but we have to eat them. We count on them for that.” She wasn’t complaining, just saying how it is.

I force myself to look up. Ralph is staring out the window. I suppose people who study birds must keep an eye on the sky as often as they can, no matter where they are. I think about the woman in Clem’s letter and then about Ralph, how completely different their lives are, how they were both connected to Clem, connected to each other through the letter itself.

Ralph says, “You need a telescope. There’s probably much more to see out there than you realize.”

“I’m sure. Afternoon liaisons and domestic fights.”

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“Oh, much more than that, I promise you.” He’s reaching into his backpack again. He pulls out a pair of large, serious-looking binoculars. I set aside Clem’s letters. The three boys emerge from their lair. They stand at the edge of the living room, staring at the two grown-ups as if they’ve caught us doing something peculiar. Henri is jumping up and down, leaking absentminded joy. I have a vision of them as two young horses and a monkey, creatures who’ve ventured into this room from another, more natural world.

“Can we have ice cream? We’re like famished,” says Luke.

“There are brownies,” I offer.

“Brownies
with
ice cream?” Max gives me his most flattering smile. I tell them to help themselves, to put the ice cream back in the freezer, and not to eat ice cream over the computer. (Another rule—the no-foodin-bedroom rule—that gets suspended because of Henri.) The eager commotion of hunting and gathering sweets erupts in the kitchen. Ralph is silent, absorbed in scanning the view. “Bingo,” he says at last. He beckons me over. He points out the direction and gives me the binoculars. I am shocked at just how powerful they are. I am looking at the frayed weave of a plastic chaise longue several hundred feet away. Beneath it lie a pair of flip-flops, faded but stylish; on one of them, I can read the name of the designer.

“Higher,” says Ralph. He adjusts the glasses, his hands over mine.

“There. Do you see the nest?”

A parcel of twigs, lodged inside a decorative bit of cornice at the top of an old industrial building. Something moves among the twigs. Finches, Ralph tells me. Or possibly sparrows. After I’ve looked for a short while, he shifts the direction of my vigil to a broken flowerpot shoved against the railing of a little-used deck. “And there you have a pigeon nest.”

“Wow,” I say. “Mystery solved.”

“What mystery?”

“You know: where are all the
baby
pigeons? It’s the burning question on every New Yorker’s mind.”

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“They’re everywhere. You just have to look,” says Ralph, who seems not to have heard the urban myth that pigeons arrive on the earth fully grown and ready to be despised—or that they perform a backward version of human migration: raise babies in the suburbs, then move into town.

The boys stampede past us, bearing large bowls of glistening chocolate. Before I can tell them to slow down, the bedroom door closes behind them.

Ralph is searching the roofscape for other signs of avian life. I stand behind him, letting the silence soothe me.

“Ralph, did you have a clue that she’d kill herself ?”

He turns around to face me. “Louisa, I want to say no.” He sets the binoculars on the coffee table and sits.

“You mean yes?”

“Didn’t she joke with you about death? She did with me. About flaming out young, packing it in, making your exit in a blaze of glory. She called it pulling a Patsy Cline.”

“That was part of her bravado, I thought. Her need to be fearless,” I say. “To impress the guys. Which she did. In spades.”

“But that’s it. She
needed
to be fearless. Do you need that?”

I think about this for a moment. “I couldn’t be fearless if I tried.”

“But you don’t
need
to be. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“That asserting her fearlessness was . . . a sign of fear?” Now I’m the one facing the view, and I’m beginning to notice how many birds cross the sky at any given moment.

Ralph sighs. “I’m just guessing. That’s the best I can do.”

Seven years ago, I joined a support group. The loneliness of my Clemlessness—privately, that’s what I called it—had become so acute that I could feel it pulling me away, like an undertow, from the people I loved who were still alive. (I angered easily. I wanted to yell at them, “You don’t fucking
know
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