Vintage Ford (3 page)

“Raise up your own arms, 'Leeny,” Glen said. “I can't see any angel's wings, can you, Les?” He looked at me, but I looked away.

“Then you go on and get it, Les,” my mother said. “You weren't raised by crazy people.” I started to go, but Glen Baxter suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder and pulled me back hard, so hard his fingers made bruises in my skin that I saw later.

“Nobody's going,” he said. “This is over with now.”

And my mother gave Glen a cold look then. “You don't have a heart, Glen,” she said. “There's nothing to love in you. You're just a son of a bitch, that's all.”

And Glen Baxter nodded at my mother, then, as if he understood something he had not understood before, but something that he was willing to know. “Fine,” he said, “that's fine.” And he took his big pistol out from against his belly, the big blue revolver I had only seen part of before and that he said protected him, and he pointed it out at the goose on the water, his arm straight away from him, and shot and missed. And then he shot and missed again. The goose made its noise once. And then he hit it dead, because there was no splash. And then he shot it three times more until the gun was empty and the goose's head was down and it was floating toward the middle of the lake where it was empty and dark blue. “Now who has a heart?” Glen said. But my mother was not there when he turned around. She had already started back to the car and was almost lost from sight in the darkness. And Glen smiled at me then and his face had a wild look on it. “Okay, Les?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“There're limits to everything, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Your mother's a beautiful woman, but she's not the only beautiful woman in Montana.” And I did not say anything. And Glen Baxter suddenly said, “Here,” and he held the pistol out at me. “Don't you want this? Don't you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they'll die. But I'm ready for it right now.” And I did not know what to do then. Though it is true that what I wanted to do was to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop. Only at that moment he looked scared to me, and I had never seen a grown man scared before—though I have seen one since— and I felt sorry for him, as though he was already a dead man. And I did not end up hitting him at all.

A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he'd never seen before—something soft in himself—his life going a way he didn't like. A woman with a son. Who could blame him there? I don't know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone's life to be the expert.

My mother had tried to see the good side of things, tried to be hopeful in the situation she was handed, tried to look out for us both, and it hadn't worked. It was a strange time in her life then and after that, a time when she had to adjust to being an adult just when she was on the thin edge of things. Too much awareness too early in life was her problem, I think.

And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn't lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don't know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.

Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.

And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn't see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It's still half wild out here.”

And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.

“When I first married your father, you know, we lived on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don't mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.

“No,” I said.

“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don't feel part of things tonight, I guess.”

“It's all right,” I said.

“Do you know where I'd like to go?”

“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with life, but did not want to show me that.

“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn't that be something? Would you like that?”

“I'd like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.

“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”

“I didn't like him too much,” I said. “I didn't really care.”

“He'll fall on his face. I'm sure of that,” she said. And I didn't say anything because I didn't care about Glen Baxter anymore, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“Do you think I'm still very feminine? I'm thirty-two years old now. You don't know what that means. But do you think I am?”

And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

REUNION

When I saw Mack Bolger he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travelers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.

I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices on Forty-first Street. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy's. It was four o'clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting good-byes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn't come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long, well-fitted gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill—an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss; his trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat, he seemed even taller than what he was—perhaps six-three. His hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin slightly elevated the way a middle-aged man would, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw was not Mack Bolger but a good-looking effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.

For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger's wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough—only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers—our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red-brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middlewest, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I've always found it interesting that it was both the boyhood home of T. S. Eliot, and only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It's a place, I suppose, the world can't get away from fast enough.

What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery—spirited, thrilling and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack Bolger's unlikeable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at some point he was forced to confront me (and Beth as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis—a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair—with the result that I got banged around in a minor way and sent off into the empty downtown streets on a warm, humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the St. Louis airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she'd ever seen and perfect for a man just commencing life as a book editor. I'm glad she didn't have to know about my losing it, and how it happened.

I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theater district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street, feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see
The Iceman Cometh
, which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.

But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the crowded, festive holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden and strange impulse—which was to walk straight across through the eddying sea of travelers and speak to him, just as one might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly yet not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but simply to create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other respect. Life has few enough of these moments—the rest of it being so consumed by the predictable and the obligated.

I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we'd last confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our—Beth's and my—love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack's marriage. This I'd always understood. There were two children, and Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for their sakes and futures; Beth was a portrait photographer who worked at home, but craved engagement with the wide world outside of University City—craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unsatisfied with everything in her life. After my sudden departure, she moved out of their house, rented an apartment near the Gateway Arch and, for a time, took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agri-biz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana, briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisive from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was said, expressed and threatened, after which a standstill was achieved whereby they both stayed in their suburban house, kept separate schedules, saw new and different friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth's case, certainly) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink and the O'Neill play. I'd assumed at that time that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.

“It's really odd, isn't it?” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits. “We were so close for a little while.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled almost girlishly. “You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I'm telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”

Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash-blond woman who smokes cigarettes and whose hair often hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl. This can be attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations.

“Well,” I said, “it's all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round black-topped café table. It
was
all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we'd done, none of it except for what we'd done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been worth it. But I couldn't undo it. I don't believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded. “Sometimes, friendship's all we're after in these sorts of things,” I said. Though this, I admit, I did not really believe.

“Mack's like a dog, you know,” Beth said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him, and he tries to bring me things. It's pathetic. He's very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”

“I really don't like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”

“You're just afraid I'll say the same thing about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.

“Afraid,” I said. “Afraid's really not the word, is it?”

“Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth looked quickly away and motioned the waiter for the check. She didn't know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.

But that was all. I've already said our meeting wasn't a satisfying one.

Mack Bolger's pale gray eyes caught me coming toward him well before I expected them to. We had seen each other only twice. Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I'd come to St. Louis to wrest a book away from. It was the time I'd met his wife. And once more, in the Mayfair Hotel, when I'd taken an inept swing at him and he'd slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don't forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, myself, find it hard to recognize people when they're not where they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. Of course, he was an exception.

Mack's gaze fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached. His large tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he'd known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists onto you unwilling; resigned to himself. Resignation was actually what we had in common, even if neither of us had a language which could express that. So as I came into his presence, what I felt for him, unexpectedly, was sympathy—for having to see me now. And if I could've, I would have turned and walked straight away and left him alone. But I didn't.

“I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, ten feet before I ever expected to speak. My voice isn't loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing the arrival from Poughkeepsie on track 34 seemed to have blotted it out.

“Did you have something special in mind to tell me?” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occured to me at that instant—and shockingly— that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment's time I would be standing here facing her and Mack together, almost as we had in St. Louis. My heart struck two abrupt beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a second to stop altogether. “How's your face?” Mack said with no emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn't hurt you too bad, did I?”

“No,” I said.

“You've grown a moustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.

“Yes,” I said, though I'd completely forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if it made me look ridiculous.

“Well,” Mack Bolger said. “Good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you'd never see again. Though there was also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call
juiciness
in his speech, some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s's and f's. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I hadn't noticed it before in the few overheated moments we'd had to exchange words.

Mack looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy, dark, bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height, but he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me—something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.

“I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark almost feminine eyelashes, and small, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display. He might've been forty—younger than I am—and looked more than anything like an army officer. A major. I thought of a letter Beth had shown me, written by Mack to her, containing the phrase, “I want to kiss you all over. Yes I do. Love, Macklin.” Beth had rolled her eyes when she showed it to me. At another time she had talked to Mack on the telephone while we were in bed together naked. On that occasion, too, she'd
kept
rolling her eyes at whatever he was saying—something, I gathered, about difficulties he was having at work. Once we even engaged in a sexual act while she talked to him. I could hear his tiny, buzzing, fretful-sounding voice inside the receiver. But that was now gone. Everything Beth and I had done was gone. All that remained was this—a series of moments in the great train terminal, moments which, in spite of all, seemed correct, sturdy, almost classical in character, as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.

“Did you buy a place?” I said, and all at once felt a widely spreading vacancy open all around inside me. It was such a preposterous thing to say.

Mack's eyes moved gradually to me, and his impassive expression, which had seemed to signify one thing—resignation—began to signify something different. I knew this because a small cleft appeared in his chin.

“Yes,” he said and let his eyes stay on me.

People were shouldering past us. I could smell some woman's heavy, warm-feeling perfume around my face. Music commenced in the rotunda, making the moment feel suffocating, clamorous: “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar . . .”

“Yes,” Mack Bolger said again, emphatically, spitting the word from between his large straight, white, nearly flawless teeth. He had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, gone to a small college in Minnesota on a football scholarship, then taken an MBA at Wharton, had done well. All that life, all that experience was now being brought into play as self-control, dignity. It was strange that anyone would call him a dog when he wasn't that at all. He was extremely admirable. “I bought an apartment on the Upper East Side,” he said, and he blinked his eyelashes very rapidly. “I moved out in September. I have a new job. I'm living alone. Beth's not here. She's in Paris where she's miserable—or rather I hope she is. We're getting divorced. I'm waiting for my daughter to come down from boarding school. Is that all right? Does that seem all right to you? Does it satisfy your curiosity?”