Perfect Reader (16 page)

The old bricks of the rounded ceiling of the chapel had begun letting go and one had nearly brained the chaplain, so a gauzy netting had been hung overhead to catch them. It looked insubstantial, like mosquito netting. Why not instead restore the bricks and shore them up? It seemed demoralizingly like Darwin to give in to entropy like that, to let them fall. As the tuxedoed a cappella group Flora had worshiped in the early days took their positions, sounded their pitch pipe, and broke into the old Irish song her father had so loved, “Will you go, lassie, go? And we’ll all go together,” Flora imagined the bricks releasing themselves in a single God-like gesture, plummeting through the nets, pummeling one and all, death begetting still more death, and when she let out a sob, she surprised herself, and Cynthia reached right up and put her arm around, pulling Flora toward her, cradling her in the crook of her narrow arm and rocking her gently in the surging harmonies.

Then it was over and there were endless arms and hands, holding her, touching her, squeezing and patting, offering what they hoped to be comfort but which made Flora feel soiled and bruised. A blur of weepy faces—why were they all crying? It was her father, for God’s sake. Sudden death was not a learning experience; it had not made Flora larger-souled, or kinder. It had made her jumpier, like a feral cat, ears twitching at fresh movements and unseen noises. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming,” she told the hands and arms, the salty cheeks. “You spoke so wonderfully,” they told her; “he would have loved it.” What was there to say to that? She’d invited it, invoked it, she supposed. “Thank you,” she said, “thank you for being here.” She’d never been so thankful in all her life. Thank God there was no reception.

Madeleine and Ray presented their unified front, clasping not her but each other.

“You’re a hell of a girl, Flora Dempsey,” Madeleine said.

What did that mean?

“Not girl, young woman,” Ray corrected.

And Flora’s eyes spilled over again and her nose would never stop running and she felt small and childlike, crying so freely among the adults, and Madeleine gave her a pack of tissues from her purse and they left.

“I wasn’t expecting to see them here,” her mother said, appearing behind her. “They’ve finally forgiven you, after all these years?” Then she added, “How are you holding up? You okay?”

Flora wanted to be alone, alone with her father. She wanted to talk to his coffin, confide in his grave—there were good reasons for these things she lacked. She hadn’t yet decided what do with his ashes. She didn’t like the idea of spreading them, of scattering him. Who wanted to be scattered or spread thin? She would bury them, one day, if ever the ground thawed, alone, like Antigone burying her brother—another reference she’d learned from him.

“Why didn’t you tell me there was a woman in your father’s life?” her mother asked, angling her head toward Cynthia. “C’mon Flo, you know how they say the wife always knows? Well, it’s true of the ex-wife, too. Even the ex-wife always knows. I could spot your father’s type anywhere. Wolfish. I know his type better than I know my own.”

Flora was distracted by a batch of students.

“How’s Larks?” one asked. Her father, who’d taken the dog to class with him, liked to say, “He’s very big on Hardy. Weak on Rossetti, but big on the Hardiness.”

“Your father was such a great mentor to me,” another claimed.

A third, who insisted they’d met, insinuated himself: “If you need help with anything, anything at all.”

“Thanks,” she said. Why not just be frank and say “Fuck off”? If ever there was a moment to get away with it.

Her city friends told her she was beautiful, and
so strong
. “I don’t think I could have handled that if I were you,” one said.

“Call us,” said another. “We miss you.”

Her mother moved in the direction of Ira and Cynthia. She and Rubie had liked each other a great deal, but her father had gotten him in the divorce. Could he now be her mother’s friend, her father gone? They greeted each other with a hesitant kiss on the cheek and fond faces. Ira started to introduce her to Cynthia, and the dean of admissions stepped in and blocked Flora’s view.

Change came fast once it came. Boxes packed, the rental house found, movers scheduled in days. Flora and her mother were moving five blocks away. Five blocks—an inconsequential, horrifying distance. Their last move, from the city, had happened gradually, every household object contemplated before it was lovingly swaddled in bubble wrap, the choice of what to keep and what to give away deliberated, piles made and analyzed. This move was hurried and careless; things were broken in the process. As her final stand, Flora’s mother burned the white bedspread she’d bought on the day of their arrival in the fireplace in the living room, though the June air was sickly sweet and hot. Flora watched the molten strips of cotton drifting toward the chimney as though possessed, and thought, She’s going to burn the house down. Don’t let her burn it down. Please, let her.

But divorce was not discrete. Divorce kept happening. Her parents didn’t love each other. When her mother got mad, Flora would ask, “Do you still love me?” and her mother would say, “I still love you. But I don’t like you much at the moment.” Flora only returned to the President’s House on Tuesdays. Tuesdays were the only day of the week that hadn’t changed—Flora and her father back at Ponzu, sometimes with Georgia, her mother in the city being analyzed. All other nights it was her and her mother alone together in the normal-size house, which would have seemed huge a year ago but now seemed small, the two stories furnished sparsely with tables and chairs from the third floor of the big house, a reenactment of their old apartment in the city, which was somehow the place where they’d all lived just a year before. Sometimes Flora imagined that her father had died. That was why she saw so little of him.

If she had to choose between her two parents, whom would she want to die? And between her parents and Georgia? She could not imagine life without her mother. “You don’t get to choose—you’re not in charge,” her mother would tell her if Flora voiced these deliberations, which she tried not to do. “Take it from someone who has spent a lifetime wishing people dead. There’s no harm in it, but there’s not much of a future, either. You’re not that powerful.” But Flora feared she was that powerful—more powerful than her mother. If she had not moved to Darwin, what would the world look like? Would her parents still love each other? Would no one ever run away from school? Would the Flora in the city be generally more sophisticated, taller?

That summer, there was terror in unexpected places. In school she’d been going through a literature of atrocities phase. All the girls in her class had gone through it, swapping and devouring the school’s little library of Holocaust books. They traded books about young girls paralyzed by drunk drivers, abandoned by parents, abused by older brothers. The terror in these books was their allure. But in the new house, the books turned sinister. Flora read
I Am the Cheese
and then made her mother read it and swear to her there was no way, under any circumstances, their family would end up in the witness protection program. She saw the movie
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
—a comedy?—and worried that her mother was growing incrementally and imperceptibly smaller, that one day she would fit inside a cage, like one of the gerbils or mice in Georgia’s room. How could Flora know which terrors existed within the realm of possibility and which without? Previously unimaginable things had happened in brisk succession. The plausible had ceased to be—if it had ever even been—knowable.

The thing was that life had been hard before. There’d been weeping; there’d been fury. People said, “That’s life,” when something unfair or unfortunate happened. Did that mean life was bad even when it was good? “Who said life was fair?” her mother had said before when Flora complained about the smallnesses of badness—an early bedtime, a denied play date. Now she also said, “God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike,” not because she believed in God, but because she believed in heartbreak.

12

Institutional Life

C
HRISTMAS MORNING BEGAN WITH SEX.
Better, longer the second time around, though less stunning. Flora liked having sex with Paul, but she would have preferred to do it in the afternoon or evening, or at least after she’d had her coffee. She felt incompatible with most men she’d been with for this reason—morning sex. She caught herself missing the sex of her girlhood, which had occurred later in the day. There was something about high school sex. Not skill, of course. And really, she was romanticizing it. She was always doing that, getting the past wrong. But as sex became more competent, more expected, even more pleasurable, it seemed a little less exciting, less dangerous. Gone was the sense of being bad. Where the titillating fear of getting caught? No wonder academics loved adultery (along with the rest of the planet). It saved them from the suffocating appropriateness of the rest of their lives. Growing up, it became harder and harder to feel illicit. So what, you fucked. Big deal, you smoked. Okay, you went on the occasional bender. You were an adult. You knew what you were doing. You used condoms. You understood the risks. You repented with brain-pummeling hangovers.

Flora had decided not to celebrate Christmas. Her mother, who’d grown up just Jewish enough to be deprived of the holiday, had never been very good at it, and didn’t seem to mind when Flora announced after the memorial that she would not be observing it this year. The Christmases they shared in the little house had been the most desultory occasions, deliberately gloomy—such gloom could not be arrived at by accident. Two sad presents under the tree, and later, no tree at all. So much trouble. All those dried pine needles. “I’m better at daily life,” her mother had offered as an explanation. But her father had excelled at Christmas. He’d loved it with an unabashed glee found more often in people under the age of ten. He used pillowcases for stockings, stuffing them with thoughtful curiosities—a clear plastic stapler where you could watch the interstices at work, a pocket-size kaleidoscope, a hand-carved wooden spoon with a coiled serpent tail for a handle. His cards were watercolors he’d made, with captions running across the top: “Flora-Girl at Work,” “Where Is My Flora-Girl?” The first of a small Flora behind a giant desk, the second showing a sad mouse on the phone, looking patiently out a kitchen window. He’d drawn himself as an importuning mouse, rendering her and, before her, her mother as cats. Flora still had a yellowing card he’d made her mother when she was newly pregnant. It showed a round-bellied Rapunzel-like cat, her tail trailing out a window, the humble mouse on the ground, hat in hand. The caption read “From the Mouse Who Loved the Puce So Much He Gave Her Exactly What She Wanted.”

Flora had spent Christmas Eve at Paul’s apartment so she would not wake on the morning itself in her father’s bed. She had called him at his office that night, having no one else to call, and he had sounded as lonely as she was, and when he arrived at her father’s house to pick her up, standing there in the kitchen she had felt that if they weren’t naked in minutes, she would die. She led him upstairs, though not to her father’s bed, but up the back stairs to her old bed, the twin canopy, where she had lost her virginity at fifteen, her father away at a conference and her mother thinking she was staying with him—how much easier parents who did not speak had made a life of deception—and she pulled off his clothes and helped him with hers and they had fucked and she had come in moments. Afterward she was embarrassed and Paul was stunned, and it seemed better not to think too much about it. But the good thing about it was that while lying on his back he noticed she had done nothing to fix the leak, nothing, that is, but duct-tape a garbage bag over the offending area of ceiling, and he had reached for his pants and found his cell phone and called the contractor he knew and soon, right after the holidays, it would be fixed, or at least patched. No longer oozing, or molding. But a new roof would have to wait. Threads and patches would do for now.

Despite the threadbare roof, the niceness of her father’s house was awkward. There Flora was, not working, never expected to show up anywhere at any given moment, and living alone in a house big enough for an upper-middle-class family of five, while Paul worked late nights to pay back his student loans and make rent on his one-bedroom in town. And there was the further awkwardness of his knowing the intimacies of her finances—knowing them perhaps better than she herself knew them. While lying post-coitally stunned and staring at the garbage bag where the ceiling should have been, he had asked her if she’d thought of selling the house. The mortgage was paid off; the local market had appreciated in recent years. “You’d make enough to buy something in the city,” he said. “More than enough.”

But mixing financial and sexual services seemed inadvisable.

“Let’s leave, I think,” she said.

And they fled with Larks to Paul’s apartment, which smelled faintly but persistently of kitchen grease from the Burmese restaurant below. They ordered pizza from a new place and brought it back, and the eating was almost as brief as the fucking, as Paul was determined to get to midnight Mass.

He invited her to join him, and she laughed. When she saw that he wasn’t joking, she asked, “Are you religious or something?”

“Or something?” he said.

Who was this Paul? He flinched when she described what they had just done as “fucking.” Curse words, he called them, not swears.

“You like cursing, don’t you?” he asked her. And maybe he was right—such words curses, sending ill will out into the cosmos like a vulgarized call to prayer.

Flora was a mutt, with generations of intermarrying Catholics and Protestants on her father’s side, Catholics and Jews on her mother’s. No one really knew what she was, and so she was really nothing. Being nothing, she tended to forget religion was a category for other people; that in other families the Bible was the book, that the Word meant the word of God. When she was little, she had visceral reactions to churches and synagogues, struck suddenly feverish in the midst of a family wedding or bar mitzvah. “Mom,” she’d plead, “seriously, I’ve got to get out of here.” Her mother would hand over her purse, as if boredom were the problem, and not God. Now, during pious ceremonies, Flora suffered Tourette’s-like fantasies of hurling obscenities at the silent devotees—
fuck
, or even a word she hated, like
cunt
. What would they do if she did? Sometimes she imagined it so vigorously, she worried she had done it.

“I think I’ll pass,” she told Paul—one service in a chapel already that month more than enough for her—and she climbed into his bed and fell asleep and only woke at his return to ask, “Did you all get Jesus born?”

Either he did not reply or she was asleep again before he could.

In the morning, he made her coffee—after the sex—and brought it to her in bed. This alone seemed a solid foundation on which to build a future, though, she reminded herself, her father had brought tea and an English muffin to her mother’s bedside each morning and it had proved not to be enough. Paul was driving to his father’s for Christmas dinner, and this time he did not invite her to go with him. He left her a key so she could lock the door behind her, and a note alongside it that read “MERRY CHRISTMAS?” She crossed out the “MERRY,” and amended it to read “WEARY CHRISTMAS! AND A HARPY NEW YEAR!”

Alone and conscious in Paul’s apartment for the first time, Flora felt urgeless—no yen to prowl through drawers or otherwise invade his privacy. A bad sign, probably. Though there were things she could see without effort. The place was orderly and ugly, conceived without thought, like his office. Had the man no taste, or simply no money, or both? For midnight Mass, he had doffed his hiking boots for black dress shoes, which now sat stiffly by the closet door, his gray slacks hovering above from a metal hanger on the doorknob.

“You look nice all dressed up,” she’d told him, because he did, though it was risky to compliment anomalous behavior, implying as it did a criticism of the norm.

Being in the apartment with Paul, she’d not noticed the bareness of the place. It was willfully unfinished. Nothing on the walls-no family photographs even, or museum prints. No lamps, only the harsh glowering of overhead fixtures. What furniture he had could be taken apart into a hundred pieces, like a puzzle. What he did have were books. A tall, precarious wood-laminate shelving unit cluttered with paperbacks was the apartment’s central feature. Which was the novel where the low-class man is killed by toppling books? In the bedroom, next to a stack of solved crossword puzzles (there was no bedside table), a threatening heap of periodicals—
The New Yorker, The New York Review, The New Republic
, and fat glossy journals from every conceivable southern state. Being an educated person took a lot of time, left little space for other activity. No wonder her father had resisted the Internet. He’d had no room in his life for more print, digital and ephemeral though it was. Did one read so religiously for enjoyment, or to be able to respond with a firm and knowing
yes
when asked if one had seen so-and-so’s latest piece in such and such? The world small and insular, a self-perpetuating colony, with the same names springing up on tables of contents and mastheads, the cast of characters interchangeable. Of course she was an outsider, excluded from, though related to, the anointed. She often felt with the Darwinians and other, less provincial intellectuals that she was being tested, that they were poking her brain for gaps in learning, seeing if she knew what they had deemed important for her to know. She was jealous, defensive, insecure—she was Holden Caulfield railing against “phonies.” Or maybe the whole literary intellectual scene really was a colossal snooze. Maybe her father had nominated her to it as an improving punishment, like doses of prune juice or Bikram yoga:
Finally, in death, I’ll make my daughter smart
. Or, by choosing her over someone more qualified—someone like Paul—was he, too, testing her, assuming she’d be unable to meet the rigors of the responsibility with her lazy, flaccid brain?

She grabbed her long black coat, which had absorbed the unappetizing smell of the apartment, threw it on over her shirt and the old pair of plaid flannel pajamas she’d borrowed from Paul, put Larks’s leash on, and left. The town was sealed for the holiday, windows along the common dark. On the common, the plastic, lightbulbed menorah stood beside the brown-hued manger in politically correct vulgarity. Where were the Jews? The nonbelievers? In the city, they’d be well on their way to matinees and Chinese food. She could go back to her father’s house and order delivery, watch television. How cheery. Or she could drop Larks off and go to a movie—she liked seeing movies by herself. But she found she was walking in the direction of the President’s House. It would be decorated like a frenzied Yuletide catalog at this time of year, wreaths and ribbons, poinsettia and holly, and a strapping, showy tree. At the annual Darwin Christmas party, Betsy, who still worked at the house, served suckling pigs that looked like pigs but had apples in their mouths and grapes for eyes, which Flora as a girl found disgusting and wonderful. Her father’s half-teasing mantra to Betsy for the endless stream of college events was “Ship ’em in, ship ’em out,” but Flora had loved the parties that first year, till the end, and especially the Christmas party—the crowds, the muddle of adult talk, the attention she got from being her father’s daughter. One of Darwin’s physicists was a near concert pianist, and at the Christmas party he played all the carols and the faculty and families gathered around to sing together. The party was a few days before Christmas, so there would still be plenty of leftovers. A funny thing about institutional living, how protected it was from change, the rules of the calendar guaranteeing a sameness from president to president. The wife (if she could be bothered) might have chosen new colors for the walls, traded out a painting here and there for others from the college museum collection, but no doubt the house looked now much as it had twenty years ago.

Flora walked up the steps through the old rhododendron bushes, Larks pulling, wanting to investigate within, as she had as a child.

“Okay, wild Larks,” she whispered, and freed him from the leash. He disappeared into the branches.

Venues of childhood often appear smaller later in life, but the big house was not one of them. It had been a long time, but the house was every bit as big as she remembered. There was a car in the driveway, lights on in the kitchen, but she couldn’t see anyone. She walked to the front door but stopped herself from knocking. No one used the front door. They used the side door, which led into the sunporch and the kitchen. The front door was for parties, or strangers. For guests. From where she stood, her hands cupped around her eyes, her face pressed against the window, Flora could see the Christmas tree sparkling with light, just where she remembered it standing, beside the fireplace in the west living room, the refuse of unwrapping scattered across the rug. The wife
had
repainted—the walls looked a pale blue or gray, the room brighter than it had been in her day. Maybe the family had gone out for a walk.