Into the Great Wide Open (15 page)

“One minute,” she said, tucking her shirt in. Don’t leave me, Kenny thought, poor Kenny. Come back, I love you. Come back and do what I tell you.

She locked the door when she came back into the room, turned the light out and stood staring at him in the pale delicate gray light, the last of the afternoon. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said; but he saw that she had been as far away as he had, out in the world, wandering alone. Suddenly he
wanted her close to him; wanted peace, protection from the pornographic world. He drew her down to him but she held back. She slipped her jeans off and folded them over the back of the chair, a moment for him to admire the long lines of her legs, the suspicion, glimpse of her dark hair under the tail of her shirt. As she was unbuttoning her shirt she reached into the pocket and took out a thing, he didn’t recognize it at first, a dome of beige rubber that she set on the table and left there: Junie’s diaphragm.

“What’s that doing here?” he asked.

She took her shirt and her brassiere off before she answered, and lay down next to him. “In case she checks,” Junie said. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

Kenny stared at the thing in the half-light, a kind of fascination. He saw the mother creeping into the bathroom, gingerly opening the pink clamshell case; the family detective, the family suspect.
No protection
. What harm was there to protect him from? But Kenny knew. Her clumsy hands fumbled with his belt, the buttons of his jeans. The diaphragm was watching them.

His father’s face, gray on the white pillow. His father’s hands gripped a rosary, as best they could. His fingers didn’t work correctly. He seemed to fit here, in the pajamas Kenny brought from home, off-white with pale blue stripes and designs; flowerpots? Like everything else here, his pajamas were clean but looked like they would be dirty to the touch; like the hallways, the nurses’ station, the tables in the waiting room, the magazines.

“It’s hard for you to see him like this, I know,” the doctor told him, outside in the hallway. “It’s important for him. He needs to see familiar faces. Don’t be frightened if he tries to talk.”

“I’m fine,” Kenny said. In fact he had seen his father like this constantly, drunk. How much damage had drinking done to him? And how much to me, he thought, me me me. Pulling the chenille
bedspread slowly over his body, and over his head … He had seen his father like this all the time: the five-thousand-yard stare, the mouth working clumsily around some words that only Kenny understood. Here it was a Hail Mary, an easy guess. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Fruit of the Womb, Kenny thought. My father is dead.

Dead: he turned the word over in the stillness of the room. The man in the next bed was dying, clearly. Mr. Lawson was grunting and crying yesterday with all the pain, but now he was just lying quietly behind the drawn curtain. Kenny’s father had the window side, the best bed as always. Kenny could hear the footsteps shuffling in and out of Mr. Lawson’s tent, the door opening and closing, that afternoon the monitor that was counting the heartbeats left to Mr. Lawson, one by one. November in the trees outside.

Here it was gray, quiet. The progress of the year had been suspended: Mr. Lawson wouldn’t see spring; Kenny’s father might not know it when he did. A sudden loud sound from Mr. Lawson’s tent, a sound of surf, or a motor, a motorized pump—and then Kenny realized that he was listening to the amplified sound of Mr. Lawson’s heart. It filled both sides of the room, quickening and slowing, until Kenny felt his own heart moving to the same rhythm.
Shit
, Kenny thought. Something was happening. Just yesterday Mr. Lawson had been sitting up in bed as Kenny came in, had even managed a curt nod of welcome, though he was preoccupied with pain. He looked like a retired supermarket manager, or a GS-15, one of the government’s gray worker bees. Still he was determined to die courageously. Kenny could tell; in the curt military nod he gave when Kenny passed through his room; in the way he stifled his own throat when the pain overcame him. Go ahead and scream, Kenny thought, let some of it out. You won’t bother anyone here. In some ways the grunting was worse.

That was yesterday, though. Today Kenny hadn’t seen anything of Mr. Lawson, except as he was reflected in the faces of the nurses
and technicians as they came and went. A knot of relatives, sheepish, embarrassed, in the way. Kenny saw everything in glimpses, on his way to the bathroom, to the waiting area for a smoke. When he came back, the relatives were gone, and the sound of the heart had quickened. Did you get used to it? Kenny wondered, feeling his own heart accelerate, the autonomic, sympathetic … The technicians learned not to hear it, not to respond, they had to. Kenny felt the sweat start in his scalp, felt his hands go damp and clammy. He stared at his father, who didn’t hear, or didn’t seem to. His fingers clicked from one bead of the rosary to the next, skipping two or three, or staying on the same one. His lips were muttering, a prayer, an incantation, Kenny couldn’t tell. Maybe it was nothing.

He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. The heart beat faster and faster and then, all at once, seemed to stop. It reasserted itself slowly, unsteadily; a swirling, liquid sound instead of the piston beat of before. Kenny heard footsteps, voices through the curtain. Mr. Lawson was going. Kenny kept his eyes closed and heard the sound of the ocean surf in the heartbeat: the crash, the flood, the outflow, the water gathering itself for another movement, poised … Thought of Junie on the beach, the salt taste of her cunt, a complicated elsewhere. Kenny wasn’t only here. Another life was waiting for him, outside. Life and death, drink and drama. Maybe this was the last of it. Maybe he was done with his father.
My future
, Kenny thought; he saw nothing clearly, except that she would be in it; then remembered the teenaged drama of her cut wrists, and then all the rest of it seemed like tinsel, too, the walk on the beach and the unprotected fuck.

The heart beat slowly, oceanically. Kenny wanted to believe but she kept shrinking on him; another dramatist, like the gray face on the pillow. Kenny didn’t have enough sense to keep himself out of trouble.

Except Kenny wasn’t done with her, he knew it. The comfort of thinking about her. She brought him solace. In that moment, he
wanted to see her. It was simple, like hunger, thirst. He wanted to see her. He closed his eyes, and in the darkness he imagined her face.

“Shit,” somebody said next door. The heartbeat stumbled, galloped. A stream of orders, footsteps rushing, the door was opened and stayed open. Kenny unclosed his eyes but there was nothing to see—just the heartbeat filling the room, the drunken stumbling of its pace. Faster, slower, inconclusive; it seemed like it had lost its way.

“Come on,” said the same voice, and another echoed it, “Come on!”

The heartbeat stumbled again, and then stopped. Started again strongly, a brave sound, beat for a minute or more and then it stopped and it didn’t start again. There must have been ten or twelve people on the other side of the curtain. Kenny could hear them all not saying anything.

His father opened his mouth and tried to speak.

“What?” Kenny asked.

“Thanga,” his father said.

“What?”

“Thangga,” his father said. “Thank God,” Kenny said.

His father blinked his eyes, yes. “Fuggin noise,” he said.

And Kenny saw that his father was coming back after all.

They sat through the first half of the concert tentatively, restlessly, like children at a recital. Kenny folded his hands in his lap. Junie twisted her program into origami knots, into constituent fibers. Kenny started to itch and sweat in his good wool sweater, the one he got from his mother for Christmas two years before. The secret language of clothes: this present was sane, it didn’t require explanation, she had shopped for it herself and mailed it herself and it arrived from Baltimore with two days to spare. It was the last time he had let himself hope for her. This feeling of good-bye was at odds with the
music—a string quartet—at least at first. It seemed determined to be spry, to make the music leap and shimmer. An Appalachian brook in spring sunshine, clattering over boulders. Outside was four inches of snow on the ground, more predicted on the way that night.

They were in the east court of the museum, a colonnaded square that rose forty or fifty feet to a glass dome. Rubber trees and elephant-ears surrounded a fountain in the center of the court, usually playful, shut off for the concert. They sat on industrial metal folding chairs in concentric semicircles, no more than thirty in the audience. The threat of snow must have kept them home; there were twice as many empty chairs as people.

The tickets were a gift from Junie’s father, of course. He subscribed to everything and never went. A man of unpredictable generosity. He gave Kenny a bottle of wine once, for helping to rake the leaves in the yard, that turned out—after he and Junie had drank it—to be worth forty or fifty dollars. It was good wine, Kenny thought, maybe not great, a little too much like iodine. Further proof that he didn’t know anything.

Something offhand, indifferent about the feeling in the courtyard; like the quartet was playing to the empty chairs, and not to the few bodies scattered between them. Fuck Vivaldi, Kenny thought. He thought of a record that Wentworth had called
Sounds of the Dragstrip
, about forty-five minutes of burnouts, blowups, and wrecks. And what was Junie thinking? Maybe she
liked
Vivaldi, maybe this frantic paper-shredding was just her way of listening. (Later, looking back, he keeps trying to talk to himself, like he could break through the glass of ten years between them and shout to his younger self
be kind, be kind
…) And then they started the last piece before the intermission, something by Bach, and Junie sat still and paid attention. This told Kenny to listen, and he did, and this matched the feeling of the place exactly: the island of warmth and intelligence and all the coldblack night pressing down against the dome. Human intelligence, he thought, concentrated … There
was no sense of making pictures, of Moorish castles. Kenny liked the mathematics of it; the music chimed with his own sadness. The empty seats confirmed the feeling: intelligence, beauty laid out for anyone who chose to come and listen. And almost nobody came.

Then the quartet was finished, and there was a break. The audience was free to roam the galleries until the music started again, in twenty minutes or so. They left their coats draped over the chairs. Kenny wanted to take his sweater off, it was too thick, a ski sweater, and the air inside the courtyard was thick, fertile, fecund; life and leaf rot mixed, and damp earth, and heat. Trails of sweat went dripping down his back, like raindrops, but the shirt he had on underneath his sweater was old and frayed. He didn’t think it was actually torn but he remembered clearly that the collar was frayed so you could see the white lining under the plaid fabric. And Kenny already didn’t belong. Junie, all in black, looked wrong for the museum, too; but she was
trying
to be wrong, succeeding, while Kenny was born wrong. Poor-boy blues; except he wasn’t exactly poor. He left his sweater on anyway, and followed her down the darkened hall.

“Aren’t you hot?” she asked.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Cold-blooded.”

“Me, too, but I’m still hot in here. What do you want to see?”

“You,” he said, “without any clothes on.”

“Gee, I mean, that’s just
so
immature,” she said; a complex game of mockery, hard to say who was the object. A roomful of Picassos, they passed without comment. The other concertgoers were gathered around the Impressionists, talking and laughing in muted voices, church voices. Water lilies! Cathedrals! Art! They made him lonely; the disappointment of the painting itself, after seeing the images on raincoats, calendars, posters. Even the first time through these galleries, he’d had the feeling that these paintings were worn-out. Kenny thought sometimes that the world was shrinking on him. This made him lonely, without knowing exactly why. He took Junie’s hand and she let him.

They wandered away from the others, they fled. The galleries were lit as usual but the corridors between seemed much darker than usual; or maybe Kenny had only been in here in the daytime. Whatever. The gloom, the dusty potted plants and the Roman statuary that emerged from the shadows—again, it was hard to hold in mind that they were real, and not rigged up from fiberglass—reminded Kenny of a funeral home in California, the one his grandmother was buried from. He pictured the letters above the door in Roman capitals:
FUNERAL HOME OF WORLD ART
. A bronze Rodin lurked in the gloom, a man in a strange hat. He glowered at the two of them. They passed a gallery of Matisse, brilliant colors in the light, like displays of fresh fruit.

He followed her downstairs into the saints-and-angels section. St. Sebastian was the one with the arrows; after that he forgot. The sacred bleeding heart of Jesus. He let his eyes blur: the dominant colors were brown, red, and gold, an occasional washed-out sky blue. He could see these paintings better if they hung them upside down. As it was, they took him to church and left him there.

“Are we supposed to be down here?” he asked Junie. His voice whispered after him on the marble floor, the hard walls, sibilant
s
’s and
t
’s; church, again.
Et cum spiritu tuo …

“I didn’t see a sign,” she said. “I mean, I don’t see why not.”

Trespassing, Kenny thought. You had to be born rich, white, confidant. Kenny thought they might go to jail but it never occurred to her. He asked her, “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“I can never find it,” she said. “I have to get lost first and then I always end up in front of it, but I can never just come in and find it.”

“What?” he asked; but she was gone again, and he was following. They hadn’t seen anyone, guard nor guest, since they left the Impressionists. The paintings sat on the wall, official, self-satisfied, like a lecture on citizenship, a short course in history. Common sense. Empty words in a loud voice: A stitch in time saves nine. A penny saved is a penny earned.