None of this Ever Really Happened (6 page)

"We found out that the only thing we really had in common
was drinking."

And so Charlie sought refuge in Cuernavaca, at first on
weekends at Las Mañanitas, and then more permanently at
Villa Katrina. He sat on the porch of his tiny cottage, drank,
and waited for people like us to happen by. He seemed to
know everyone and to see no one.

All that changed in September when Charlie went back
to school. Thereafter we saw little of him. Once he described
his daily routine to me. He was up at 5:00
A.M.
He showered,
shaved, ate, listened to the radio, read, graded papers.
He left for school at 6:30, stopping along the way to pick up
riders: another teacher, two nurses and a young architectural
student. After work he ran errands and shopped in the city,
picked up the same crew for the return trip, and was home by
5:00. Between 5:00 and 7:00 he ate dinner, read, and drank a
fifth of vodka. Then he went to bed.

"I am not an alcoholic," Charlie said. "I am a drunk."

"What's the difference?"

"There
is
a difference. An alcoholic
has
to drink. A drunk
just
wants
to drink. I enjoy drinking. It's my hobby."

One night that fall Stella died. Charlie had never even
mentioned that she was ill. "Oh, yes. Has been for years. Cirrhosis.
She was an alcoholic," he said matter-of-factly.

Another night, Cynthia Kronberg-Mueller rapped on
our door. It seemed that she had sent her chauffeur back to
Mexico City and now, suddenly, unexpectedly, the maid had
gone into labor. "Could you possibly . . . would you mind
terribly . . ."

"No, no, of course not."

All the way down the hill into town, Cynthia crouched
on our tiny backseat, talking. "And to think, this poor girl,
barely more than a child herself . . .
quantos años tiene
?"

"Vientiuno."

"Just twenty-one. Twenty-one years old and a mother for
the . . .
quantos niños tiene
?"
"Cinco."

". . . for the sixth time. Can you imagine? It is so tragic.
And look at her. Fat and worn out. Only a child herself.
Sometimes I weep, Mr. Ferry, sometimes I weep for these
poor, poor people." She stroked Elena's hair. "Poor, poor girl.
Pobrecita.
"

I prayed that Elena understood none of this. She sat beside
me like a smug Buddha, hands clasped atop her latest
blessed event. In truth, I don't think she cared very much for
any of us. Hers was the slow, quiet revenge of the centuries.
She did little work except during the odd weekend when the
Kronberg-Muellers came down and, Charlie claimed, sometimes
entertained her family and friends in the main house.

We moved into Mexico City before Elena and the baby
came home from the clinic. It was there that Lydia had found
a community of artists, studio space, and a gallery that
was interested in showing her work. And while the quiet of
Cuernavaca
suited my needs as a writer, she had grown weary
of its silliness and decadence and found herself longing for
the hustle and hassle of a real city. Still, we came back often
and, both ironically and predictably, it was only as visitors
that we really got to know Cuernavaca and Charlie
Duke as well.

One early Saturday morning we headed over the mountain
and stopped first at Villa Katrina to let Art run free for
half an hour. Charlie got up from his seat on the porch of his
cottage as we walked down the drive. It wasn't noon yet, but
he was stumbling drunk. He was embarrassing and embarrassed,
and we went away quickly.

Later over lunch Lydia said, "You know, we invaded his
privacy. That wasn't fair of us. We have to find a way to make
that right." We decided to come again, this time announced,
to invite Charlie to dinner and, I guess, to give him a chance
to redeem himself. He did so with both the dignity and
aplomb that only he can muster.

It was a cool night in January. We wore heavy sweaters
and ate fresh red snapper in a restaurant garden. Charlie
drank only beer and was full of stories about a new friend
named Father Dick, a Trappist monk from County Kildare in
Ireland who lived in a little monastery outside of town, said
the English-language mass in the cathedral and had bought
a ranch. He was going to make it the center of an agricultural
co-op, and Charlie was going to build a house on it. I
don't think we believed any of this, but we had a wonderful
evening together and after Lydia had gone back to the hotel,
Charlie and I finished up with a schooner or two at the open-air
Café Universal on the plaza. I think that's when I heard
about Charlie's past. And I remember that he asked me then
about the writing I was doing and told me that he wanted to
write, too, that he had a great story to tell about Cuernavaca.

"What is it?" I asked.

"No," he said wagging a finger and smiling. "You might
steal it." I remember that because it was the only time I ever
saw Charlie show any caution or distrust.

On another visit to Cuernavaca I met Father Dick. The
three of us had dinner. Father Dick was a brawny, crew-cut,
very shy man of about fifty. He spoke with a lisp and the
reticence of someone who had spent many years in virtual
silence. That evening ended early, however, because Charlie
got sick. He was not taking his blood-pressure medicine, and
he nearly fainted. I watched Father Dick drive away. Charlie
sat beside him, his head lolling back over the seat.

The next time I saw Charlie, it was to say good-bye. A
year had passed, our money had run out, and we had been
unable to get the working papers that would allow us to stay.
We drove over the mountain one final time, and as we walked
around the grounds of Villa Katrina with Charlie, we were
surprised to find the Kronberg-Muellers on their veranda.
They invited us to lunch. We hadn't seen them since moving
into Mexico City and took some time to get caught up. Then,
after the usual discussion of Bolsheviks and gardeners, I said
to Cynthia, "How's our baby?" I drew a blank stare.

"Elena's baby?"

"Oh yes, indeed," she recovered, "fine, fine, very good.
Yes."

"Healthy and happy, I trust?" I asked.

"Oh quite healthy and happy. Yes, yes," Cynthia said.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" asked Lydia. Neither Katrina nor
her sister Louise feigned knowledge, interest, or embarrassment,
but Cynthia looked at me for a very long moment with
a stupid smile on her face before Elena appeared and rescued
her. "How is the baby?" I asked her. "A boy or a girl?"

"A little girl," she said.

"What do you call her?" Lydia asked.

"Gordita,"
she laughed, "the little fat one."

"May we see her?" I asked.

Elena brought the baby out in a big two-handled basket,
and we played with and held her as she giggled and kicked.
She was nine months old.

During the next few years, Charlie proved to be a faithful
if amusing correspondent. I knew just when he began each
letter (when the bottle was full) and just when he finished
it (when the bottle was empty). Each moved from coherence
and even wit to non sequitur and confusion. There was
the usual quota of people and events we had never heard of,
but there was real information, too. Charlie's house on the
ranch now had four walls and a roof, and he had moved in.
In the meantime, his long-lost children had made contact,
had come to visit and one—his eldest daughter—to live for
a while.

We had news as well. We were back in Chicago with new
careers and a new apartment in Evanston. Lydia was designing
books for a publishing house and I was teaching. A year
later, we flew to Mexico for a two-week winter vacation.
We didn't tell Charlie we were coming because, frankly, we
weren't sure we wanted to see him. After a few days in Mexico,
however, we admitted to each other a bit sheepishly that
we both did. There was something about Charlie Duke that
drew us to him. I hoped without saying it that it was something
more than being smugly amused by him.

Since Charlie had no telephone and only a P.O. box for
an address, we went to his school in Mexico City. We stood
for several minutes outside his classroom door watching as
he worked at his desk with a gaggle of kids. He was a real
teacher. Despite ample evidence, I'm not sure I had ever really
believed this any more than I had believed anything Charlie
told me. It was not that I thought Charlie a liar; it was just
that virtually everything he said had the sound of bad fiction.
He had a way of always choosing the least probable, most
dramatic detail, and then embellishing it. "Father Dick didn't
say a single word for twenty years. When he finally tried to
speak, his voice wouldn't work for two weeks. Isn't that right,
Father Dick?"

"Well, not quite."

Charlie's little house was also real. In fact, it was quite
wonderful. It perched high on the mountain slope facing east
toward rugged rock formations and cliffs, and above them on
clear days the snowy peaks of the volcanoes. It was all of his
own design, including a vaulted roof, great windows across
the front, and a handsome stone veranda that ran the length
of the place. We sat there one evening drinking margaritas
while Father Dick (he had built a house just a stone's throw
down the hillside) described the route of Cortés's army as he
had traced and then walked it himself following Bernal Díaz
del Castillo's explicit directions up this ravine and around behind
that hillock and finally up through that pass there and
then down to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

Charlie insisted that we abandon our hotel and come stay
with him on the ranch. For the next few days, he took us
to corners of the state I had never seen before: hidden forests
and markets and mountain villages. We watched woodcarvers
and stood in cool, ancient churches and shared a
lunch of hot enchiladas and cold beer beneath a bright yellow
awning. We ate big bowls of stew and told stories about
each other late into the night. (I hadn't realized there were so
many to tell.) And we talked with Father Dick who came to
sit on the veranda in the evenings and watch the sun set.

Sunsets in that place are dramatic to the point of being
histrionic. The actual disappearance of the sun is the least
of it. That happens behind you if you are sitting on Charlie's
veranda, and you may turn to glance at it or simply know it's
going on by the absence of the sun's rays on the back of your
neck. The real show is high above you, where for a long time
after the shadows and evening cool have descended on you,
it's still bright daylight on the mountain peaks and gleaming
snowfields, and below you where in the depths of the valley
it is dark night and the village lights have long since twinkled
on. Seeing day and night all at once may tempt you to feel
momentarily immortal, if there is such a thing, and when
taken with a bit of red wine, to wax philosophic. We did some
of that. One evening looking down into the village as if from
on high, Father Dick said that a la Senator Paul Douglas, he
had set out as a young man to save the world, and now he
would be quite content to save this small place or even part
of it.

"I don't suppose you'll ever leave here?" Lydia asked.

"Oh, yes," he said to our surprise, "I'll leave one day.
When my work is done here, I'll go back to my community
in Ireland. The monastery is my home, the community my
family."

"I'll never leave this place," said Charlie.

"What place?" asked Lydia. "This ranch? Cuernavaca?
Mexico?"

"This ranch near Cuernavaca in Mexico." It was just a
clever answer until the next afternoon. Coming back to the
ranch we discovered that a long-awaited calf had arrived.
It was standing in the field on shaky legs beside its groggy
mother. Charlie threw open the car door, got out, and did
something quite unexpected. He started to undress. "Here."
He handed me first his shirt and then his pants. Then, muttering
something about needing to separate the calf from its
mother, he stooped and gathered the little cow still wet with
blood and afterbirth into his long arms. He hurried across the
rocky pasture wearing only underpants and work boots, and
I stumbled after him looking at his broad, strong back and
realizing a rather astonishing thing. This silly man whom I'd
been making fun of all this time was in possession of something
I hadn't even started looking for and hadn't known until
that moment that I wanted or needed. He was a complex,
original, troubled, many-dimensional, self-invented, flawed
and foolish but complete man, and he couldn't care less if I
was laughing at him. He'd probably known all along.

That night we sat on the lawn at Las Mañanitas drinking
cold white wine and eating
camarónes al mojo de ajo,
butter-flied
shrimp sautéed in garlic butter. It was our last night in
Cuernavaca. There was wood smoke, the scent of flowers,
some distant music and one of Charlie's stories in the air, and
as I watched him tell it, I smiled at myself. Charlie was the
guy I'd come to Mexico to find in the first place and I'd never
realized it.

I shook my head. What a boob.

I
WAS NOT SURE
what I was looking for, exactly. It certainly
wasn't Lisa Kim. I knew that she was dead;
that much I knew for sure. But it may have been her
tracks, her trail, evidence of her, clues about the woman who
had written the letter that became for a period of time my
most important possession.

Maybe I was trying to get rid of the letter. I was. I wanted
to give the letter to Peter Carey or Peter Cleary and put an
end to the strange sense of responsibility that had come with
it. Responsibility was a thing I'd spent much of my life avoiding.
It's why I lived in an apartment, drove an old car, and
worked at a job in which my principal responsibility was to
myself and to large children most of whom I could browbeat.
It's why I lived with a woman who didn't want to get
married, and with whom I had no children.

For a long time I thought of responsibility as the other
side of freedom, and it was freedom that I most wanted. Not
the ramblin'-man freedom of a thousand bad folk songs, although
I'd listened to all of these and sung along with a few,
but the freedom to live my life on my own terms. It's another
reason—maybe the primary reason—that I love to travel;
you're never freer than when your only responsibility is for
yourself and a suitcase. My very personal definition of freedom
dated to a time I'd hitchhiked to New Orleans in college.
I was two days out of Chicago and somewhere south of
St. Louis after I'd stayed up late the night before in Macomb,
Illinois, when two soldiers picked me up. I fell asleep in their
backseat in the warmth of the late-afternoon sun. When they
turned off, they woke me and put me out on the highway,
and I realized as I watched them pull away that I didn't even
know what state I was in. I might have been in Missouri, I
might have been in Arkansas, and since there had been some
talk of Memphis, where I was headed that day, it was possible
that we had crossed the river into Tennessee. I didn't know
where I was, and neither did anyone else in the world except
the two soldiers now gone. No one. I was frightened especially
as the dusk came on, but the air was warm, the sky was
clear, and there were fields beside the road in which I could
have slept had I needed to, so almost at once my fear turned
to something else. I knew in an instant that I'd never been so
free, and might never be so free again. I was untethered from
all I'd ever known, and when a car slowed to pick me up,
I was a little disappointed.

Somehow over time I'd forgotten that feeling, but it had
come back to me during the two weeks I'd spent alone in
Thailand over Christmas. Again I'd been frightened at first. I
was tired to begin with and a bit spooked because we'd come
in at night over Vietnam, and the Canadian helicopter pilot
sitting beside me on the plane had pointed out the lights of
Hue and the black winding ribbon of the Mekong River. Then
I'd stepped onto the tarmac at midnight for fourteen days all
by myself on the wrong side of the world with nothing but
a
Lonely Planet
guidebook and the address of a cheap hotel
I'd found in it. What if my appendix burst, I got run over, or
the drunken shrimp fishermen I'd see a few days later in Hua
Hin fighting with knives at dawn turned on me? But that, of
course, is a part of freedom, and within a day or two, I began
to feel comfortable with it and within a day or two more, to
appreciate it.

You don't realize how often you tell lies until you aren't
around the people you know. Not big lies, necessarily or usually.
Little lies, but lots of them. Lies about where you want to
go to dinner, or when you want to go to bed, or if you want
one more glass of wine. How often you say you don't when
you do, you can't when you can, you won't when you will.
After a while, I began to think about big lies, too.

My only companions were E. M. Forster, a Dutch woman
who helped me fix my camera, and an assortment of fellow
travelers I fell in with, sat down beside or picked up at various
stops along the way. I explored much of Bangkok on foot and
much of Thonburi across the Chao Phya River by boat, slept
in a berth on the night train to Chiang Mai, shared a communal
room in a guesthouse there and played Ping-Pong on
the lawn with some Swedish teenagers.

When I got home from Thailand, the apartment seemed
smaller and hotter. I almost immediately started lying again
and resenting the people I lied to. And I lied to myself. For
a month I told myself I was free of Lisa Kim. And then,
suddenly, I was responsible for doing something about this
damned letter, and after all that freedom, there was a small
part of me that liked it, that felt somehow liberated from irresponsibility
and surprisingly relieved to be so. And so there
I was pulled in two very different directions by a feeling so
old I'd nearly forgotten it, and another so new I'd never experienced
it; by a desire for freedom and a need to finally be
responsible for something in my life. And why all of this was
suddenly happening to me I did not know, except that I was
pretty sure it wouldn't be happening if it were not for Lisa
Kim, so I went looking for her.

I could not find Peter Carey or Peter Cleary in the phone
book, nor Peter Kerry, nor Peter Carray. All the Careys,
Clearys, Kerrys, and Carrays I called said "wrong number"
when I asked for Peter. The doctors Kim
were
in the book.
Theirs was a large, comfortable, but not ostentatious white
clapboard house on a leafy, brick side street a few blocks from
Lake Michigan. Its only distinctive feature was a bright yellow
front door that I thought instantly must have been Lisa's
idea. Otherwise it was almost nondescript, and I wondered if
the Kims, like so many Asian Americans I had known, simply
wanted to slip into, fold into society. Down the alley there
was a functional two-car garage and in the backyard, a modest
flower garden that did not draw attention to itself.

New Trier High School looked like a high school does in
the movies. The security guard at the front door sent me to
the security office. There a man at a counter looked at my ID.
"I'm a freelancer writing for the
Tribune.
I'm doing research
for an article on New Trier grads who are doing things in
theater and movies and stuff like that." He issued me a pass,
and I climbed to the third floor, where the library occupies a
large corner of the building.

I asked for the yearbook for Lisa Kim's graduation year,
the one for the previous year, and the one for the next year.
I sat beside four girls who were chatting and doing homework
at the same time. They kept looking at me as if they
recognized me from somewhere. I suppose it was really because
they
didn't
recognize me, because I was an anomalous
adult. I certainly felt out of place. I also felt a mixture of guilt
and resentment. The guilt was because I had begun to conceal
things from Lydia; she did not know that I was here, for
instance, trying to find out something about Lisa Kim. Had
she known, she would have shaken her head and rolled her
eyes; she was treating me like a little boy and acting as if Lisa
Kim were the wounded bird or mangy dog I'd brought home.
That's where the resentment came from. In truth, Lydia was
not the only one. I'd been taking a good bit of shit and getting
a good bit of gratuitous advice about the whole thing.

My gosh, Lisa Kim was a lovely girl.

LISA LOUISA KIM

"To try when there is little hope is to risk failure. Not to
try at all is to guarantee it." Anonymous. The unKorean.
The antiKorean. Fire. Love to Mother Rosalie and the C's.
Thanks to Friedrich Nietzsche. Volleyball 1; SADD 1; Talent
Show 2,3,4;
Bye Bye Birdie 2, Little Shop of Horrors
3;
Hedda Gabler
3;
Oklahoma!
4;
Death of a Salesman
4; Senior
One-Acts 4.

I looked for Peter in all three books. Nothing. I read Lisa's
entry over again. Then I began to slowly read other entries.
I found Annie Pritchard, who was also in
Hedda Gabler,
Oklahoma!,
and the Senior One-Acts. Her entry included the
designation
"Water." Fire; water. It took me a while to find
Wind. She was Hannah "Sammy" Stone. She was not a theater
kid, but she did thank Mama Rosalie and wrote, "Go C's!" I
could not find Earth. I went through each entry twice.

I decided to look for Peter in the other books. No luck,
but in the earlier one I came across Rosalie Belcher, a senior
when Lisa had been a junior who had been in the cast of both
Bye Bye Birdie
and
Little Shop of Horrors.
In addition, she
called herself "C Earth Mother."

I found Annie Pritchard in the Chicago phone book and
called her. She thought I was a salesman. "No, no," I said.
"Listen, don't hang up. It's about Lisa Kim."

"Lisa? What about Lisa?" I told her most of the story. I
told her most of the truth.

"So who are you exactly?" I told her most of that, too.
"I'm sorry, what exactly do you want?"

"There's a guy named Peter Carey or Peter Cleary that
Lisa went with."

"I know Pete Carey. We worked together at John
Barleycorn."

"John Barleycorn?"

"He's a bartender. I'm a waitress slash actor, just like
Lisa."

"Anyway, I have a letter Lisa wrote this guy, and I just
want to get it to him."

There was a long pause. "What kind of letter?"

"A personal one."

"Well," she said, "I guess you could send it to me. I guess
I could get it to Peter."

"You think you could?"

"I think I could. Let me give you my address. I'll get it
to him."

"Okay, yeah," I said, "that would be good. Or you could
tell me where to find him and I could do it."

"I think maybe I should do it. He knows me. He was
pretty broken up." She paused. "Lisa was sort of the love of
his life."

"Okay. Sure."

I never sent it to her. I guess I didn't want her to see what
Lisa had written, to pass it around like a bag of chips. I mean,
I wasn't even sure they were friends at the end. Or maybe it
was because I wanted to see Peter Carey myself.

I talked to a bartender, an assistant manager, and the
manager at John Barleycorn. The manager said, "Sure, I remember
Pete. Fact, someone just called me looking for a reference
for him. Let's see. I think it was Paddy Shea's."

Paddy Shea's even smelled like an Irish pub. They must
have brought the whole thing over. I sat at the end of the
bar nursing a Guinness, reading the
Sun-Times
and watching
Peter Carey move back and forth behind the bar. It was
slow in the midafternoon, and he was washing glasses and
restocking. He did not notice me watching, and I liked that
about him. Still, he was not what I expected. He had an easy
smile, an easy manner, and those sloe eyes romance novelists
say that women like, but he was pigeon-toed, a bit soft
in the middle, and his dark, wavy hair started up high on his
forehead.

When he brought me a second pint, I said, "You're Pete
Carey, aren't you?"

"Right," he said.

"I met you once someplace. I'm a friend of Lisa Kim's."

"No shit. Man, too bad about ol' Lisa." It wasn't the response
I'd expected, but I went on.

"I guess you two were pretty close."

"Not really." He moved down the bar for a while.

When he came back, I said, "Listen, Pete, I have something
that belongs to you."

"Me?"

I explained briefly and put the letter on the bar. He didn't
even pick it up. He was drying a glass on his apron, and
he read it quickly with a raised brow. "That can't be for
me, pal."

"I think it is."

"None of that stuff means anything to me. You know, she
and I . . . we hung out a couple times last summer, but she was
too much work. Sorry if you're a friend or something. That
was it. We didn't have a love affair. We did the old Jimmy Buffett
a time or two; that was all." He moved down the bar again.
I read the letter over, wondering if I could have misunderstood
it. I finished my pint and left. I didn't say good-bye.

For a few weeks I did nothing. As winter softened slightly
and turned grudgingly toward spring, I pretended to have
put the whole thing behind me in the hopes that people
would stop treating me like a dotty aunt. In truth I was waiting
to know what I should do next. In the beginning I'd been
passive; I hadn't done anything except go to the funeral. Everything
else had come to me. Now I was becoming an active
agent, if a cautious one. I folded Lisa's letter and kept
it in my hip pocket with my wallet, but I did not forget it. I
was bothered by the fact that Annie Pritchard had misrepresented
Peter
Carey's feelings for Lisa. Or he had. And I was
bothered that she seemed reluctant to tell me how to find
him. Why was that? And who the hell was the letter intended
for, if not for Peter Carey? While I waited, I went about my
life. I had classes to teach, papers to grade, tests to write. And
then I had a relationship to work on. Lydia and I went out to
dinner on Friday nights, shopped, cleaned and washed on
Saturday, saw friends occasionally, took in a movie, watched
TV, even tried to play Scrabble once or twice, but my heart
wasn't really in any of it. In reality I was becoming the worst
things you can be in a relationship: distracted and indifferent.
Or maybe I'd always been these things and she had, too,
but now she wasn't anymore.

One night I couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed, made myself
a mug of tea, and sat in the shadows of our bedroom
on the easy chair where we threw our clothes and looked at
Lydia sleeping in the moonlight, her slightly Roman nose,
her full lips, her wild tangle of red hair. It was the hair that I'd
first noticed about her. Actually, it had been pointed out to
me across a party. "See that hair," Tom MacMillan had said,
"bet you her thatch is just like that." My, we were young and
foolish, but even then—even at twenty-two—Lydia had had
a bearing, had carried herself just so (it was in the roll of her
hips, the cock of her head, the way she threw her shoulders
back) as if to say, "I don't owe nobody nothing."