The Dead Fish Museum (23 page)

“So,” Joe said. “Theater arts?”

“It’s a job for now,” Meagan said.

“You still acting?” Jimmy said, chucking the baby under the chin. He said to Naga, “Meagan’s an actress—or used to be, sounds like.”

“She still is,” I said.

“Those who can’t do, teach,” Jimmy said.

“And those who can’t teach . . . ,” Joe said.

“Teach gym, ha ha,” Meagan said, playing her part in the routine like a seasoned trouper.

“That’s what they say,” Jimmy said.

Meagan smiled, then frowned, then looked at her brother. “If you’d write to me every once in a while you’d know what’s going on.”

“What do you teach them?” Mr. Boyd said.

“I do write,” Jimmy said. “Just I don’t ever have stamps.”

“The college puts on two big productions a year,” I said.

Mr. Boyd pressed his palms together and then touched the tips of his fingers to his lips.

“I’ll send you stamps,” Meagan said. And then, to her father, she said, “Well, come on, what do you think of the house?”

Joe said, “Nice.”

“It’s really old,” Jimmy said. “Makes me want to hear a ghost story. I’m surprised a couple yuppies like you would buy such a beater.”

“We’ll fix it up,” Meagan said.

“It’s like a pioneer house or something.”

“Slowly.”

“Good luck,” Jimmy said. “I can’t imagine Tony using a hammer.”

“How’s the commercial and film market?” Joe asked.

“I haven’t really looked into it,” Meagan said. “I’m sure its the usual small-market stuff.”

“Auto dealers and carpet sales,” Joe said, “and that kind of thing.”

The conversation at dinner had a similar broken flow, full of a casual bickering that, along with the Bordeaux I’d bought for the occasion, gave me a headache. The constant quarreling made every topic seem trivial, and although the Boyd clan, including Meagan, seemed comfortable enough, I found it impossible to orient myself within their universe of disputed claims. By the end of dinner I had no idea what was true or false, important or petty. Fortunately, everyone was tired from their respective trips, and we went to bed early. We got Jimmy and Naga and the baby settled upstairs and then showed Mr. Boyd to our room, which Meagan decided we should relinquish because it had a private bath. Meagan and I slept downstairs.

At some point in the night I became convinced that I’d forgotten to lock the front door and that it had blown open in the wind. I could feel the leak of draft at my ankles like a cold hand. I got up and put on my bathrobe and slippers. The door was open wide. I shut it and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Mr. Boyd standing at the sink. The mop bucket sat on the counter and he had fixed himself a cocktail. I think if Meagan had caught him he might have tried to hide the glass, and if Jimmy had found him he would have challenged his son by taking a drink, but with me, and whatever my reactions were, it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if I made no impression. The tumbler of Scotch remained on the counter.

“Meagan always hides the booze under the sink,” he said. “She must have seen it in a movie.”

“She was only trying to do right by you,” I said.

“It’s Jimmy she’s worried about,” he corrected me. “Apparently I’m a little
harsh
on the boy after I’ve tipped a few.”

He shrugged and took a drink and licked his lips. The rain-beaded window cast shadowy streaks on his sober gray face.

“Join me?” he said.

I questioned whether or not I should be party to this, and then I said yes, not all that sure what string I was yanking, and what would unravel, if I accepted a nightcap. It struck me that it was my house, my kitchen, and I could drink Drano in it if I so chose. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table.

“You like it here,” he said.

“Love it.”

“Driving up from the airport this afternoon, I was surprised how far it is from everything. Meagan led me to believe it was closer to Seattle. You’re pretty isolated.”

Often when I talk to Meagan I have the feeling I’m answering to Mr. Boyd, and then, as I spoke to her father, I felt that I was responding to my wife. This elusive layering made me tongue-tied.

“It’s only two and a half hours to Seattle,” I said.

“And two and a half hours back,” Mr. Boyd said. “So five hours, in good weather, with no traffic. Have you made the trip since you moved here?”

“We’ve been busy.”

“Who goes to the theater around here?” Mr. Boyd said. “Farmers? Lumberjacks?”

“There’s the school.”

“Don’t kid me,” he said. “That school is nothing, and you know it.”

I said, “This is a bit of a compromise, I guess.”

“Ambition that’s compromised,” he said, “isn’t ambition.”

I knew that Joe Boyd had played two seasons of minor league ball, and that on a road trip to Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d met Meagan’s mom, but I suspected that the sense of sacrifice and halfness came later, only after his marriage began to deteriorate. One of the bigger gyps in Joe Boyd’s life was that the lovely farmgirl he’d married turned out to be a manic-depressive.

Mr. Boyd wet the tip of his finger and ran it slowly around the rim of his glass until he coaxed a high, clear note out of it. The sound was like the song of a whale, and with the water washing against the windows it was easy to imagine the beseeching cry of the leviathan, mysteriously astray in the fields.

“We had to get out of New York,” I said. “New York was depressing.”

Toward the end of our time in New York, Meagan would come home from a round of auditions and collapse in a fit of crying. After a while she’d just stop herself. She’d wipe her eyes and say, “Everything’s always going to be like this.” And I’d tell her no, things were going to change, although, honestly, I never understood these attacks of despair—I never really got their profundity—and felt nothing but a rising panic whenever they came up. Myself, I drifted widely and affably from job to job until insurance took me in; it was Meagan who had the passion and depth of a single ambition. My ideal life is a quiet one. I like to read, to sit still in the same chair, with the lampshade at a certain angle, alone, or with Meagan nearby, and now and then, if I’m lucky, I’ll come across a lovely phrase or fine sentiment, look up from my book, and feel the harmony of some notion, the justice of it, and know that everything is there. That’s life to me, those privately discovered moments. I wouldn’t settle for less, yet I don’t expect a whole lot more, either.

But Meagan does, and because of that, those moments of harmony are elusive, if they come at all. She’s always nervous, a little frantic, looking back at what she’s done, wondering what lies ahead, what comes next. That night, after I shared a drink with Mr. Boyd and returned to bed, she said what she had always said when New York was coming to an end for us.

“I love you,” she said. “At least there’s that.”

The floorboards above us sagged as someone—Jimmy or Naga—paced the room, trying to put the baby down. Meagan turned, staring at the ceiling.

“I don’t know how people do it,” she said.

I ran my finger back and forth behind Meagan’s ear. The vein in her neck throbbed.

“You get used to it after a while,” I said. “You don’t hear.”

“Jimmy’s never going to get what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“I guess that’s the problem,” Meagan said. “What does that boy want? He told me he has a new great idea for a business. He says it’s all lined up.” Meagan was quiet, and then she laughed. “Every loser in the world at some point decides the future is in janitorial services. Have you ever noticed that?”

I told her that I hadn’t, but that it made sense to me.

“You know why it makes sense?” Meagan said. “It makes sense because all you need to get started is a sponge. His idea is he’ll keep his job at the convenience store but then clean shitters all the way home. That’ll be his route.” Meagan looked at me. “Dad’s in top form. Why couldn’t he say he liked the house?”

“It was a little awkward,” I said. “It’s been awhile. As soon as he relaxes he’ll feel more at home and everything will be fine.”

“Boy, you’re naive.”

Once I overheard Meagan tell a girlfriend that the reason she loves me is because I’m simple. I think she meant it in a good way—I’m solid and reliable, I can be predicted—but it was wounding nonetheless. I spent several days weighing the comment, and in the end I didn’t say anything to her.

“Dad kept asking if ‘Naga’ was short for ‘Nagasaki.’ ”

“So?”

“Something’s not right with that baby.”

Upstairs I could hear Mr. Boyd coughing, the baby crying. Something about all these people in our house excited me, and I wanted to make love, perhaps to regain possession of my wife, but Meagan said, “Will you pet me?”

I petted her forehead, soothing her toward sleep, while she talked in a dreamy, disjointed way.

“The last time we saw Mom, all of us together, was just before Jimmy went into the Marines. He was seventeen—Dad signed him in, gladly. She was back in the hospital; she couldn’t manage the group home we had her in. We sat in the game room. People were playing Ping-Pong—I remember one guy had a rubber paddle, the other guy had a hard sandpaper paddle. Mom was shaking in her chair, staring away. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, recognize us—I don’t know if she was pretending or what. There was always that blurry line with her. Finally she stood up and said, ‘You’re not mine, and neither is that dirty little boy!’ She blew us kisses as we left, like some movie star.”

I’ve never known what to say to Meagan about her mother. My own father passed away before I was two, and I have no evocative memory of the man, so that my sense of him has always been a little like that of a child who believes that a brightly colored ball, when hidden from sight, never existed. I’ve never longed for him in the abstract or made a crazed, mistaken search after his substitutes. In an old Te-Amo cigar box tucked in the bottom drawer of my dresser I keep some pictures and other mementos—his Phi Beta Kappa key, a pocket watch, a few random mateless cuff links—that aren’t significantly more curious to me than the stuff that haunts the thrift stores in town.

In my business, I deal in collisions, mostly, and people make claims, redressing the world’s suddenly revealed bias—for the scene of an accident is always a cruel, unusual, lonely, but somehow plotted injustice. I suppose that’s what insurance is all about, hedging bets. You expect a normal life, but wager against it. When some guy’s just been T-boned at an intersection, he thinks his whole life’s been one long, inexorable drive toward that terrible moment. But it’s hard for me to find the workings of fate in most auto accidents. They happen, stupidly. Not to be overly philosophical about a job that is, after all, notoriously dull, even to those of us who work in the field every day, but history doesn’t offer the average person the consolation of being interesting.

When I look at the photographs—old black-and-whites, with deckle edges and the date printed along the bottom border—I understand that my father was topping off the tank of his car at a filling station (in Tucson, my mother says) and I see that he was, apparently, quite a handsome man. My mother stands beside him, wearing a neat white scarf and squinting into the same harsh sun, but other than that, the photo yields nothing in the way of memories, nothing I might attach myself to, and my perspective on the scene, those rare, bemused times when I open the box and linger over its contents, is that of the anonymous man who, strolling down a sidewalk sometime in
AUG
1961, was stopped by a young couple, handed a camera, and asked to press the button—a stranger on his way elsewhere.

Jimmy’s car was nearly out of gas, so we took mine to town the next morning. The birthday party wasn’t until later that night. Jimmy figured we had some time to kill, and he wanted to see the sights, so we drove a back route, winding along the levee. There wasn’t much to see, the mountains were gone, the landscape blurred. The rain beat down hard and ragged shreds of mist and fog rose off the dark strips of harrowed earth. A dirt road ran along the top of the levee and here and there as we drove we saw men unloading sandbags off the back of flatbeds.

“I did that before,” Jimmy said. He wiped a clearing in the windshield and leaned forward. “Those bags are nothing but deadweight, nothing but sand. In the Philippines, half of the bags would be rotten from storage. There’d be sand spilling out everywhere when you tried to lift ’em.”

“How long were you overseas?”

“Two tours,” Jimmy said. “A year total.”

When we left the levee, Jimmy turned to watch it vanish. “You want to see some tired-ass people, talk to those guys tonight.”

The talk in town was of the flood, whether it would come or not, and, after that seemed beyond all reasonable doubt, when it would come, and how bad it would be. Comparisons were made to past floods, floods in memory, floods in history. We heard the news like we heard the rain, rumorous talk falling all around us, filling the air. We walked to Melvin’s and I fixed Jimmy up with a decent fly rod and a reel; I bought him a tackle box, too, and loaded that up with everything he’d need to get started—tapered leaders, flotant, flies, knife. Jimmy was like a kid, happy to be indulged. At the register, he picked up a net, and then at the last minute, already headed out the door, he added a duck-cloth cap to the inventory. Jimmy wore the cap, stretching it on as we left. “Gotta have my top,” he said. He hooked a fly in the crown, for the proper look.