The Myth of You and Me (5 page)

5

O
liver used to
tell people that he had found me wandering in the woods, taken me home, and adopted me, and though this couldn’t have been further from the truth it was certainly how I felt. I didn’t see my parents very often—my mother, remarried, lived in California; my father, retired, lived in Montana and volunteered at Yellowstone. Between dropping out of graduate school and going to work for Oliver, I had a series of unsatisfying jobs—cataloger in a used-book store in Austin, waitress in a vegetarian restaurant in Asheville, copy editor for a university press in Chapel Hill. I had even gone back to Nashville, where Sonia and I went to college, for a summer, and had a brief tenure as a secretary in the Vanderbilt English department. When I left Austin, the man I dated there said that I thought that because my father was military, I was, too. He said I’d treated my life there, and my time with him, like a tour of duty, and that the only reason I was leaving was that my year was up. I said, “You’re probably right,” and then he was quiet. I accepted this view of myself as restless, and thought I would probably move around forever, and most of the time that was fine with me. There were times, though, usually late at night, in a new apartment, when I was lonely, and sorry that I’d never found a place where I wanted to stay.

Oliver’s daughter, Ruth, was the one who hired me. She’d been trying for years to get her father to accept a live-in aide. He was almost ninety and, while mentally acute, he was frail. He had refused her offer to hire help until she began to call this hypothetical employee his “research assistant.” That was me. Ruth heard about me from my undergraduate advisor, who had never given up hope that I would do something with my education, maybe even go back and finish the doctoral program I’d abandoned after less than two years. Every few months, he wrote me an impassioned letter about his latest scholarly interests, meant to convey to me the pleasures of the life of the mind. I appreciated his efforts, but I hadn’t found graduate school to have any pleasure in it at all. Ruth’s husband knew this professor, and through him she tracked me down in Chapel Hill. I’d already begun to have the feeling that signaled an upcoming move—that my life was a piece of paper I wanted to ball up and throw away—so Ruth had no trouble convincing me to relocate to Oxford. She wanted me to encourage Oliver to write his memoirs. He had written many books about other people, and was famous for doing so. In high school I’d read his biography of Faulkner; in college, his history of southern race relations. Among other things, he had once won the Pulitzer Prize.

At first I actually tried to do the job I had been hired for, getting out my little tape recorder and doggedly asking Oliver questions he was usually in no mood to answer. “Tell me about your parents,” I said, and he said, “She was a cold woman. And he was a philanderer. The end.” He tried to turn the conversation to me, wanting to know what I thought of Oxford or what my social life was like. He said that he could tell I was wicked, like his old-maid aunt had been. It was true that when I did go out, which was seldom, I went to the City Grocery and sat at the bar drinking bourbon. And then there was the graduate student I had met there. But I couldn’t tell him about that, and so I beat back his questions with my own. My persistence made him irritable. He began to seem bored and frustrated with me, but I didn’t know how else to interact with him. I was miserable because I lived and worked with him, and I admired him, and so he was like a father and an employer and a respected professor—all of them impossible to please.

After three months of this, he said, “That’s enough.”

“Okay.” I clicked off the tape recorder. “Enough for today.”

“No,” he said, with a sweeping gesture. “Enough for forever. I’ve been humoring Ruth, but I’m not interested in my own life. Please note my all-consuming interest in the lives of others.”

“So I’m fired.” I felt at once ashamed of my failure, and relieved. “At least I can stop trying to figure out what you want.”

He laughed. “Of course you’re not fired.” He leaned forward in his chair. “As for what I want . . .” He directed me to the window of his den, which looked out on the driveway, where a burgundy Crown Vic peeked out from under a blue tarp.

Oliver hadn’t been behind the wheel in almost a year—Ruth had forbidden him to drive after he blew out a tire hopping a curb in a McDonald’s parking lot—but that day, he got the car up to eighty-five on the interstate. He looked happier than I had ever seen him, and so I said nothing, even though I was certain he was going to kill us. When the cop pulled us over I was rather glad, but when I looked at Oliver his face was pale and his hands were trembling on the steering wheel, and I remembered that whatever else he was, he was a frail old man, and under my protection. I leaned over him to roll down the window, and when the officer appeared, I said, “I’m so sorry, officer, Grandpa isn’t supposed to be driving.”

“Why is he, then?”

“I ran over a dog,” I said, and as I said it my eyes filled with tears. “It just ran right out in the road. We stopped, but it was dead. I was shaking so much that I had to let Grandpa drive.” On cue, a tear rolled down my cheek. I’ve always been a good liar because I have the ability to believe that whatever I’m saying is true.

The cop let us go with a warning after I assured him that I would take the wheel. He got in his patrol car and watched us in the rearview mirror as we made the switch. Oliver was delighted with me. “Attagirl,” he said once he had eased into the passenger seat. He banged on the dashboard with the flat of his hand. “Getting Grandpa out of trouble. What a performance. In the old days I would’ve thought of that.”

I wiped my eyes, which continued to tear even after the need had passed. “All this time,” I said, “you just wanted to have a little fun.”

“My dear,” he said. “Of course.”

I busied myself with adjusting the seat, which Oliver had pulled up so close to the wheel that I was bent in half. It was clear he hadn’t thought me much fun before. My entire life I had been accused of being remote and stern, sometimes mysterious. Many times a person had said to me, after a long acquaintance, “At first I was convinced you didn’t like me” or “I thought you were a bitch.” When I was younger I was bewildered by these misconceptions. I thought maybe it was my height, which set me apart, that made other people think I had set myself apart. By this time I had come to accept the version of myself reflected back by others, as you cannot help but accept the image you see when you look in the mirror.

I put on my seat belt and looked up to find Oliver watching me like I was his science experiment.

“Let’s have fun from here on out,” he said. “There’s no reason to be so stern, is there? I already have Ruth for that.”

I pulled out onto the road. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he was a pain in the ass. It was what I would have said to my own father, and he would have laughed and approved. Instead—I don’t know why—I said, “You make me nervous.” Even this small confession made me feel wretched with vulnerability. I felt a flush rise in my cheeks and kept my eyes trained on the road, waiting for him to tease me. I added, “And you’re a pain in the ass.”

He laughed and patted my knee. “Tough hide, soft heart,” he said. “That’s my girl, all right.”

I would have stayed with Oliver, if only he had not died.

In the three days between his death and funeral, I felt a righteous indignation directed at everything around me, especially Ruth. After all our bickering over the question of whether Oliver might need more care than I could provide, I imagined that I detected in her bearing an accusatory smugness, as if Oliver’s death were the final point in her favor. I suspected that she intended to sell the house immediately, that she was just waiting for the dirt to cover Oliver’s grave before she asked me how long until I could be gone. When I’d moved from Chapel Hill to Oxford, I’d shed every possession that would not fit in my car. Everything I owned was in my little room. I could have been packed and gone in a day. Once, I’d been proud of how portable my life had become—far better to accept a transient and unstable life than to pretend permanence when there was no such thing. Now this same idea made me angry. Every day, I looked at the suitcase on the top shelf of my closet and defiantly left it sitting there.

Late to Oliver’s memorial service, I slipped into the last pew in the middle of a testimonial from an old friend, or maybe a cousin—some story about Oliver wading into a stream, trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. “He was so sure he could do it,” the friend/cousin said, shaking his head in sad amusement, as the people in the pews laughed or murmured or dabbed away their tears. Who were these people? I’d seen only a few of them at the house, but it seemed to me that every one of them arose on cue, one after another, and went up to speak. There were dozens. Ruth was the last. In the middle of her speech she tilted her head back abruptly and looked up at the vaulted ceiling, trying not to cry. She waited a long moment, and then lowered her head and went back to talking. Not a tear escaped. I tried not to be hurt by the fact that no one had asked me to speak. At the graveside I stood outside the tent that sheltered Ruth and the other close relatives, who sat in folding chairs. I couldn’t hear anything the minister was saying. I stared at the spot of sun on the grass near my feet and thought that soon it would be summer. I had not yet cried.

Afterward, back at the house, I stood in a corner of the living room with a glass of wine in my hand and watched people eat. Ruth and her husband had added the extra leaves to the dining- room table, which was now covered with food. Three different people had brought deviled eggs, which seemed to me food more suited to a picnic than a death. Ruth’s son manned the bar in another corner of the living room. There was a silver ice bucket like something out of a bantering 1940s comedy. I’d never seen the bucket before, but it was a big house, and Oliver owned a lot of things. All day I’d had the feeling that I was outside whatever room I was in, watching the action on a movie screen.

Ruth stood in the center of the room, surrounded by an endless flow of people kissing her cheek and pressing her hand. Ruth had Oliver’s big, sharp nose, without his plump mouth to offset its haughtiness. Her lips were thin. In old pictures she had a severe, spinsterish look, but age had softened her face. And she wasn’t a spinster—she’d been married for forty-two years to a sweet, quiet man named Bill, who seemed an odd choice for a woman raised by Oliver. Ruth’s mother, Oliver’s wife, had died in her late thirties. She had been pretty, with large eyes and a baby-doll mouth, which Ruth did not inherit.

Ruth had gone to the beauty parlor to have her hair fluffed into a cloud of white curls. Over the other conversations I heard her say, “Daddy would have been so happy you were all here,” and I thought that if she believed that, she didn’t know her father very well. I also thought how strange it was for a sixty-year-old woman to call her father Daddy.

Ruth glanced over at me and then looked away. She hadn’t bothered to introduce me to anyone, and so I’d spoken only to the handful of people I already knew. I’d caught several of the others staring at me with expressions that said, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Now, listening to Ruth use the words
Daddy
and
my father
from her position at the center of the room, it struck me that to the world at large Oliver was not anything to me but my boss. It was unfair. Perhaps he was not my father, but he was my something. I couldn’t find a word that measured both our relationship and my grief.

A large man in a black suit appeared next to me, a plate piled high with food in his hand. He was sweating, and he mopped at his brow with a cocktail napkin. “Hot in here, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was.

“He was a great man,” he said. “I’m a cousin.”

I wondered if he was one of the cousins Oliver had meant for me to marry.

He sighed. “I wish I’d been able to see more of him,” he said. “I’ll miss him.”

At the sorrow in his voice, my own throat tightened. “Me, too,” I managed to say.

The man looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “So what’s your story, anyway?” he asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

After that I finished my glass of wine and drank two more in rapid succession. I had just gone back to my corner with my fourth glass when a woman I knew from Square Books squeezed my arm. I’d seen her just a few days before, when I went to pick up a book Oliver had ordered. “Give him a kiss for me,” she’d said. Now she asked me what I was going to do next. The truth was, I had no idea, and when I thought too hard about it I felt blank, empty, and scared.

“Bartending school,” I said.

She laughed. “Will you finish Oliver’s memoirs?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not? Don’t you have lots of material?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Because most of what he told me wasn’t true.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s see,” I said. “He used to say that he had his first harem at the age of five. Every little girl in town followed him around, and he put them in order—first wife, second wife, and so on. He said his nickname was Beau, and they used to fight over him, screaming, He’s my beau, he’s my beau.”

The woman laughed again. “I love it,” she said. “What else?”

I was drunk. I didn’t want to use Oliver to entertain. “He told me he’d live to be a hundred,” I said. I looked into my empty wineglass until she moved away.