Voices from the Moon (3 page)

But he could not. He was the sole owner of two ice cream stores; fifteen years ago he had bought them with a partner, and seven years ago he had bought out the partner, who retired and went to Florida and, according to postcards, did nothing but fish. These stores, one of them in an inland town and open all year, with a soda fountain and sandwiches too, and one at Seabrook Beach in New Hampshire, open from Memorial Day weekend till Labor Day, sold homemade ice cream, or as close to it as people could get without doing the work to make it in their own kitchens. Greg had learned that Russians and Americans ate more ice cream than the people of any other countries in the world, and some nights on the deck he amused himself by thinking about opening a store on the Black Sea, at Odessa or Sevastopol.

But he could not leave for a year, or even half of one, not for the Intracoastal Waterway or for any other place—Kenya, Morocco, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, places where he wanted to walk and look, to eat and drink what the natives did—because as well as owning his stores he ran them too. It was something his partner had not had the heart, the drive, to do; and that was Greg’s reason for borrowing to buy him out, figuring finally that debt and being alone responsible for everything was better than trying week after week to joke with, tease, and implore a man in an effort to get him to work; when all the time, although Greg liked him, and enjoyed drinking and playing poker with him, and going into Boston to watch games with him, he wanted every workday to kick his ass. So he bought him out, freed him to fish in Florida, a life that sounded to Greg right for the lazy old fart who liked money but not the getting of it, while he himself liked getting it but had little to spend it on, and was not free to spend it on what he would like to.

At night on the east deck, when time relinquished its function in his life, and space lost its distances and limits, he completed his travel on the Intracoastal Waterway by sending his boat from Brownsville to the mouth of the Amazon, in the hands of a trustworthy sailor for hire, then flying with Brenda to Rio de Janeiro where they would live the hotel life of sleep and swimming and drinking and eating (and daytime fucking: yes, that) until he was ready for the rigorous part that excluded Richie from the daydream. He would go with Brenda to the mouth of the Amazon, by car or train, however they traveled there. He would rendezvous with his boat and sailor at one of the towns he had looked at as a dot on the globe on his desk. Then he and Brenda would walk west along the river. They would take only canteens, and he would carry a light pack with food for the day. They would wear heavy boots against snakes, and he would wear his .45 at his waist, and carry a machete. They would see anacondas and strange aqua birds and crocodiles. At the day’s end the boat would be waiting, and they would board it, and fish, and sip drinks and cook and eat, then lie together gently rocking in the forward cabin with the double bed. Sometimes he imagined the river’s bank stripped of trees, and an asphalt road alongside it, with rest areas and Howard Johnson’s. But no: it must be jungle, thick living jungle, where each step was a new one, on new earth, so that you could not remember how you felt retracing your steps through the days of your life at home. He went there at night on this deck, and always with the focused excitement, the near-quietude, of love. Only in the mornings with his coffee, or driving from the inland to the beach store, or at other moments during his days, did he ever feel the sadness that he forced to be brief: the knowledge that he would never do it.

If you weren’t there, on the job, they either stole from you, at the least by giving away your ice cream to their friends and taking some home as well, or they screwed up in other ways, and the operation went lax, and you had two stores selling ice cream but something was wrong. So he was at both stores every day, and he sometimes worked the counters there too, and washed dishes, and swept floors, all of this to keep things going, Goddamnit, and because he could not be idle while others worked, and every night he was there to close out the register; he took the money with him for night deposit, the .45 in his belt till he was in the car, then on the seat beside him. He carried the pistol in his hand when, at the bank, he walked from the car to the night depository. He had a permit. When he told the police chief, who approved the permit, how much money he carried to the bank each night, the chief asked if he had ever thought of buying a safe. Greg shrugged. He said he liked doing it this way, but that each store did have a safe he used only on nights when he couldn’t get there, but anybody could get money from a safe if they wanted to so badly that they’d take the whole damn thing. He alternated the stores, taking the money from the inland one on one night, the beach store on the next, so his manager at one store would not always be last to be relieved of the money, and so last to go home. But most nights, when he reached the second store, his people were still cleaning up anyway, and he helped them with that. Some nights he thought he did not use a safe because he hoped some bastard, or bastards, would try to take his money. His pattern was easy enough to learn, if anyone were interested.

Larry was the only man he knew whom he could trust to do everything, and Larry had never wanted to give himself fully to the stores. During college he had needed his days free, and after college he needed his nights for dance or play rehearsals. This was not a disappointment for Greg; when he felt anything at all about Larry’s lack of involvement with the stores, it was relief, for he wanted Larry to be his own man and not spend his life following his father. He believed the business of fatherhood was to love your children, take care of them, let them grow, and hope they did; and to keep your nose out of their lives. He did not know, and could not remember if he had ever known, whether Larry hoped to be a professional actor or dancer, perhaps even an established one with all the money and its concomitant bullshit, or if he was content to work with the amateur theater and dance companies in the Merrimack Valley. As far as he knew, Larry had never said, and he had never asked, and Larry’s face had always been hard for him to read.

But before Brenda, when with no woman or a faceless one for his daydream he rode the Waterway and walked the Amazon on his dark sundeck at night, he had hoped that a time would come when Larry would want or need a break from performing, and would want to work the stores for a few months, and earn much more money, perhaps for an adventure of his own, a shot at New York or Hollywood or wherever else the unlucky bastards born with talent had to go to sell themselves. But not after last night. Probably, after last night, he would not ever show up at the store again, unless it was to collect his final paycheck. As difficult as it was for Greg to believe, as much as his heart and his body refused to accept it, both of them—the heart surrounded by cool fluttering, and the body weary as though it had wrestled through the night while he slept—threatening to quit on him if Larry simply vanished, that was what Larry had said he would do.

Greg had phoned him to come and have a nightcap, at ten at the earliest, saying he had work to do till then. He had no work, unless waiting for Richie to go to bed was work, and finally he supposed it was. Greg had phoned his two managers and told them to put the money in the safes. He did not know what he expected from Larry. An unpredictable conversation or event was so rare in his life that, as well as shyness, guilt, and shame, he felt a thrill that both excited him and deepened his guilt. He brought Larry up to the living room and tried to begin chronologically. He saw his mistake at once, for early in Greg’s account Larry saw what was coming and, leaning forward in his chair, said: “Are you going to tell me you’ve been seeing Brenda?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t
believe
this.”

Greg looked at the floor.

“It’s divorce that did it,” he said.

“Whose?”

“Yours. Mine.” He looked at Larry. “Fucking divorce. You think I chose her?”

“What am I supposed to think?” Larry said, and was out of the chair: he never seemed to stand up from one, there was no visible effort, no pushing against the chair arms, or even a forward thrust of his torso; he rose as a snake uncoils, against no resistance at all, and Greg fixed on that detail, finding in it his son of twenty-five years, holding that vision while the room and Larry and Greg himself faded in a blur of confusion and unpredictability.

“It just happened,” Greg said. “It always just happens.”

“Beautiful. What happened to will?”

Greg stood and stepped toward him.

“Don’t talk to me about will.” And they were lost, both of them, in anger, in pride, facing each other, sometimes even circling like fighters, then one would spin away, stride to a window, and stare out at the dark trees of the back lawn; and it was at one of those times when Larry was at the window, smoking, silent, that Greg watched his back and shoulders for a moment, then took their long-emptied and tepid beer cans down to the kitchen, returned with beer and opened and placed one, over Larry’s shoulder, onto the windowsill, then opened his own and, standing halfway across the room from Larry, spoke softly to the back of his head.

“You have to know how it started, you have to know the accident. The women, you know: when there’s a divorce, they get dropped. You know what I mean. They lose the friends they had through the marriage. The husband’s friends. Goddamn if I know why. Doesn’t matter if the husband was the asshole. Still it happens. And they’re out of his family too. So I’d have her over for dinner. After you guys split up. Her and Richie and me. Shit, I—” Now he did not know, and in a glimpse of his future knew that he never would know, why he had invited her, not even once a week and not only to dinner, but ice-skating and cross-country skiing, always with Richie, and finally canoeing and swimming in lakes, and by June when the ocean was warm enough Richie still went with them, but he and Brenda were lovers. “I just didn’t want her to be alone. To feel like the family blamed her.”

“The family?” Larry said to the window screen. “You and Richie?”

“Well, Carol’s not here. And Mom’s—”

“—Come on, Pop.”

“Will you let me explain?”

“Go on. Explain.” He spoke to the window still, to the dark outside, and Greg was about to tell him to turn around, but did not.

“That’s how it started. Or why it started. I’ll leave all that analyzing to you. All it does is make your tires spin deeper in the hole.”

“That might be good, depending on the hole.”

“Jesus. What happened is, sometime in the spring there, I started loving her.”

“Great.” Now he turned, swallowed from his beer, looked at Greg. “I knew you and Richie were doing things with her. He told me.”

“What did you think about it?”

“I tried not to think anything about it. So I thought it was good for Richie. He likes her a lot. I even thought it was good for her.”

“But not for me.”

“Like I said, I tried not to think anything about it. It looks like one of us should have. Mostly you. What do you mean, you started loving her? Are we talking about fucking?”

“Come on, Larry.”

“Well, are we?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m staying on the surface: my little brother and my father have been taking care of my ex-wife.”

“You want to hear me say it. Is that it?”

“Isn’t that why you called me here?”

Greg pinched his beer can, pressing it together in its middle, and said: “I called you here to say I’m going to marry her.”

Like wings, Larry’s arms went out from his body, his beer in one hand.

“
Mar
ry her?
Mar
ry her?”

“Larry, look; wait, Larry, just stand there. I’ll get us a beer. You want something different? I got everything—”

“—You sure the fuck do.”

“Come on, Larry. Scotch, rum, tequila, vodka, gin, bourbon, brandy, some liqueurs—”

“—I’ll take mescal.”

“You’ll take tequila.”

“And everything else, it seems.”

Greg left him standing with his empty can, and carrying his own bent one descended the short staircase, got the tequila from one cabinet, a plate from another, took a lime from the refrigerator and quartered it on the cutting board, put the lime and salt shaker and shot glass and bottle on the plate, then opened himself a beer. Upstairs he walked past Larry and laid the plate on top of the television set near where Larry stood. Greg sat in an armchair across the room.

“Let me talk to you about love,” he said.

“Paternal?”

“
Love,
Goddamnit. I don’t believe I feel it the way you do.”

“Looks like you do. You even chose the same woman.”

“I didn’t
choose.
Now let me talk. Please. You get to be forty-seven, you love differently. I remember twenty-five. Jesus, you can hardly work, or do anything else; you wake up in the morning and your heart’s already full of it. You want to be with her all the time. She can be a liar, a thief, a slut—you don’t see it. All you see is her, or what you think is her, and you can walk off a roof with a shingle and hammer in your hands, just thinking about her. But at forty-seven, see, it’s different. There’s not all that breathlessness. Maybe by then a man’s got too many holes in him: I don’t know. It’s different, but it’s deeper. Maybe because it’s late, and so much time has been pissed away, and what’s left is—Is precious. And love—Brenda, for me—is like a completion of who you are. It’s got to do with what I’ve never had, and what I’ll never do. Do you understand any of that?”

“All of it,” Larry said, and stepped to the television set, and, with his back to Greg, poured a shot of tequila, sprinkled salt onto his thumb, licked it off, drank with one swallow, then put a wedge of lime in his mouth and turned, chewing, to Greg. “But it sounds like you could have had that with anybody.”

“No. Those feelings came from her. I didn’t feel them before.”

“All right. All right, then. But why
marry,
for Christ’s sake?”

“I need it. She needs it. It’s against the law, in Massachusetts. We’ll have to do it some other place. But I’m going to see Brady. See if he can work on changing the law.”