A Theory of Relativity
“We’re sorry,” Lorraine began. There was an awkward pause. “Leland told us. About your marriage troubles. That you’d parted, at least for a little while . . .”
“It’s okay, it’s really okay. It’s been coming for, like, ever. And after . . . Ray died, and Georgia died, I just decided it was time for me to start living my life as if my life wasn’t going to last forever. I’m twenty-one and I’ve only ever done what I was told! It was like I had three lives—one for me, one for Leland’s parents, one for my parents, but every time I cut the pie, my slice got smaller.”
Neither of the McKennas could respond. Keefer, however, said, “Birdie?”
“I have a finch,” Caroline explained, “and it’s her best friend right now. You know, she’s so wonderful. She’s like a cuddly little koala bear. She’s exactly like Ray, those legs! She’s just the image of his baby pictures. And who she really looks like is my dad’s mom. I don’t think Grandma Nye was still alive when Ray and Georgia got married.”
“I don’t think so,” Lorraine said.
“Makes me want my own someday,” Caroline went on easily, as Lorraine without warning found herself sweating in the frigid room. “But not right now! I need a life first. I’ve been married to Lee since I was born, and we are clearly not going to ever have a child.”
“Perhaps it can be worked out,” Lorraine said. “Being newly married is so hard. You’re not quite a dating couple and not quite a family yet.”
“He’s gay, though, that’s the thing of it.”
“Oh,” Lorraine said.
“He’s a great gay husband. I felt like I was being dressed by my own in-house Versace. But he is a gay guy. And his parents would sooner eat glass than admit it and my parents would sooner eat poisoned glass. But Ray knew. Ray told me, get out, girl! And now I don’t have my big brother to stick up for me. Mother and Father are taking it hard, but I just can’t pretend anymore. Anyhow, now they’ve got little peachie here to fuss over and worry about. I’m done being the baby.”
“Have, Caroline, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but have your parents made plans . . . about Keefer?” Mark asked.
“Just totally made that room into F.A.O. Schwarz is all. She’s got a slide into her bed, don’t you, Sugar? A slide into her crib. She can’t climb up it. It’s completely child safe—”
“At their house?”
“Well, Andy and Ali can’t decide. Frankly, I think Ali has her hands full with the monsters—”
“We’ll just get a taxi over to the hotel now,” Lorraine said abruptly.
“Don’t you want something to drink or eat?”
“I just want a hot bath, a cool bath,” Lorraine said, absently gathering up from the floor whatever seemed to belong to Keefer. “You know how it is when you travel? You just feel grimy. Is her dipe bag here anywhere, Caroline?”
“Mother’s been putting her on the potty.”
“She’s fifteen months old!”
“She does a great job!”
Keefer grinned.
“Can we use your phone?”
“Oh, I’ll drive you over. We have family counseling at four. This has been so”—Caroline’s face crumpled—“We just never imagined. Losing Ray. Ray was our hero. And I don’t know if I should say this, but . . . you know, this was their wedding day.”
Lorraine stood up. “I know when my daughter’s wedding day was.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I’m sure you . . . I know. We’re all on edge. So, now, Caroline, the memorial is at noon tomorrow?”
“It is, but Mother expects you for dinner tonight.”
“You know, Caroline, we can’t. I just . . . don’t feel well,” Lorraine said. “And we want to get reacquainted with Keefer. Spend some time with her.”
“Mother and Father really appreciate everything you’ve done. For Keefer. And what Gordie has done,” she looked up, shaking back her blond curls. “Is Gordie single?”
“He’s engaged,” Lorraine said. “Not really. Not formally. But you met Lindsay.” Mark stared at her. “They’ve been sweethearts forever.”
“He’s great,” Caroline said, “hot.”
“He’s hot all right.” Lorraine smiled. “So, okay, we’ll see you tomorrow.” She scooped Keefer up, and pull-up pants and juice bottles tumbled. Mark scrambled to retrieve them. “Just leave them, Mark,” Lorraine whispered, as Caroline went to retrieve her car keys. “Let’s get out of here.”
Mark settled Keefer in her car seat in the back of Caroline’s Mustang. With his knees folded under his chin in the backseat, Mark looked like a marionette. Once at the hotel, Lorraine threw open the passenger door in the crushed-shell circle drive, and hauled Keefer out, seat and all. Keefer looked up plaintively, “Birdie?”
“ ’Bye, ’bye, Kathryn,” Caroline said, brushing the baby’s outstretched hand with her lips. “Keefer Kathryn.”
Mark and Lorraine stood in the blazing sun, Keefer struggling in her seat. Mark took the seat from his wife and they stepped, blinking, into the lobby gloom, where two-story waterfalls made Lorraine feel she had to shout to be heard. “Let’s get in the room,” she called to Mark.
He returned a moment later, looking sheepish. “It’s been paid for,” he said, “for as long as we wish to stay.” They rode up silently, beside a silent bellman, in a glass cage.
Keefer trampolined on the king-sized bed while Lorraine rummaged for a phone book. “I doubt whether we can get a flight out of here tonight. But we can drive to Tampa. We can drive anywhere, really . . .”
Mark put his hand over the phone cradle, depressing the lever. “Wait, Lor, I know what you’re thinking. I’m thinking the same thing. But we have to go to the memorial service.”
“Why? Why? They’ll have us restrained by Republican bodyguards.”
“It’s not a joke, Lor.”
“I’m not joking, Mark.”
“Let’s get a good night’s sleep and decide tomorrow. Let’s call Gordie.”
“I’m not leaving this room.”
“Let’s get some food.”
Mark chewed on lackluster ribs, but Lorraine ignored her shrimp cocktail. Gordon was not at home. They did not leave the room, or set up a crib. Keefer slept between them, savoring her sideways thumb. In the morning, they dressed Keefer in the white dress with the daisies, which looked cleaner than it had when Diane unwrapped it from its tissue paper in Tall Trees. Perhaps it was a duplicate, Lorraine thought. The phone rang, and a car came. Lorraine scrutinized the interior locks. The parking lot at the Nyes’ club, Sandpiper Reserve, was crowded, and knots of identical young men, all blond, all wearing red ties, rocked heel to heel, restlessly, in the sun. Inside, interlocking circles of white roses around a smaller circle of red buds, at least four feet tall, stood at the entrance to the ballroom. “Happy Trails, Raymundo,” the ribbon read, “from your pals at Knockers.”
“I didn’t think . . . it’s so obvious,” Mark said.
“They’re not known for taste, they’re known for . . . fun,” Lorraine answered. She had never openly acknowledged her discomfort with her son-in-law’s tour sponsor, a restaurant chain neither she nor Mark had ever visited, which specialized in the Knockouts, bikinied servers in knee-high black leather skates. But it was a big tour, as big as the Nike tour.
Spotting them from across the huge polished floor, Carl Jurgen came gliding over to welcome them. Diane Nye followed him, subdued in a black skirt and white long-sleeved blouse, her artfully cropped hair flattened and, to Lorraine’s shock, displaying yellowed roots. “I look like hell,” Diane read Lorraine’s mind. “But for us, this is the worst. This is the end. This is when I have to admit he’s never going to walk in the back door and pick me up . . .”
Drowned in pity and regret, Lorraine opened her arms, and Diane let herself be held. “Do you ever think you’re going to lose your mind, Lorraine? I mean, really lose it? Just melt away?”
“Every day.”
“What
do you do?”
I think of Keefer, Lorraine thought, I remember Keefer. I remember Gordon. “I try to think of the future, because I can’t bear to think of the happy past,” she said.
“There’s no God, Lorraine,” Diane said.
“I wonder myself. But I want to think so.”
“Do you take antidepressants?” Diane asked.
“Not yet,” Lorraine murmured, thinking of her stash.
“There’s no God, or God is insane,” Diane went on. “Hi, Mark.” He touched Diane’s arm. “Hi, darlin’ baby girl. God might have needed one of them. But both of them? Raymond was . . . he was a gift to the whole world.”
“He was a decent, good kid,” Lorraine agreed, thinking, Gordon was right. People of goodwill can compromise. She did not envision ever being Diane’s friend precisely, but they could share, bind a warp of sharing around their love for Keefer.
“Can you have dinner with us after this?” Diane asked. “I mean, just the four of us? So that we can really talk?”
“Of course,” Lorraine said. “Of course, we will.”
“Big Ray and I really want to talk to you, grandparent to grandparent. We want to make this work. We want you to be an important part of Baby’s life, always.” Diane looked into Lorraine’s eyes. In the center of Diane’s eye, Lorraine imagined she could see an egg yolk, expanding and contracting. “If only you didn’t live at the damn North Pole! Pardon my French. But we want her to . . . grow up with all . . . well, you understand, Lorraine. You want the best for her, too. I know you do.”
A drizzle of guitar notes urged people to take their seats. Huge and solemn in his gray suit, Big Ray nodded to the McKennas and motioned to Diane. Into Lorraine’s ear, Mark said evenly, “I want you to listen to me. I don’t want you to flip out. I heard what she said. I know what she said. Now, I am going to leave this room quietly, and you take Keefer up there and sit down, and when I come back, I promise you I will have made arrangements for us to go home. I promise, Lorraine.”
Lorraine’s heart tumbled in her chest. She showed her teeth to Mark, to the room. She knelt to pick up the baby. The guitarist was playing something sad and Spanish. Then they all heard the faraway sound of a bagpipe, its burr closer and closer, and a young man in Blackwatch plaid strode slowly into the room. He faced the crowd and played the song Ray and Georgia had chosen for their wedding processional, an old ballad called “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Her eyes streaming, Lorraine went to sit beside Diane, placing Keefer between them.
Carl Jurgen rose to speak. “All of you here today knew Ray Nye as well as he knew himself. You knew him on the playing field, in school, in the house where he grew up and where his parents still live. I had thought to be older when I spoke at the memorial of my best friend. I thought perhaps it would be Ray who spoke of me. But what I will say here will be the truth, and brief. Ray Nye, Junior, was a phenomenon. He could drink every night, of course I’m not saying he did, Ray and Diane, but he could drink every night, and come home and walk through the Scholars house, tutoring Gordie when he hit the wall on differential equations, reminding me how Locke differed from Hume. I never observed Ray study, and yet, he breathed in knowledge and shared it. He would have given you the shirt off his back, which would have been big enough for you to live in, and the answers on his test paper . . . though, of course”—Jurgen smiled whitely—“of course, he never did. Ray believed it all belonged to everyone.
“And because I believe he is looking down on me, I am going to tell one tiny tale out of school. When Ray and I were sophomores, we believed our fathers did not support us in the fashion we wanted to become accustomed to. And so, up we would go, to Pelican Point, and hang around on the green, stubbing putts, for many hours, until along would come some fellows . . . and Ray could spot these fellows, perhaps because he was, in his own way, so trustful of human nature. We are college students, Ray would tell these fellows—men from Plum, Pennsylvania, or Iron River, Michigan—and we play a little. And we would start, stiff-legged in our earnestness. Now anyone who has ever seen Ray Nye play golf knows he did swing slowly. To watch him swing was to think, this is impossible, this ball is going to dribble off the tee like mustard onto an old man’s tie.
“And indeed, that’s what we’d do at first. Diane, close your ears if you can’t bear this . . .” But Diane was smiling, as was Alison, who’d slipped into the seat beside her mother with her two combed and Eton-suited tots, “We would hit the ball out into the road, and take the distance and the penalty stroke. We would tee off into a tree. And it would be we who would at some point suggest six-point Scotch . . .”
How long, Lorraine thought, had Mark been gone? Did anyone notice, in the blazing charm of this boy’s presence?
“I’m not playing well, Ray would admit, and this was not a falsehood. He was not playing well.
“It was on the fifth tee, I would stand back in awe, that Ray would gently, ever so gently, suggest that he and his buddy must catch up, that the fifty cents a point could be a dollar. Was that okay with me? My job was to shake my head, no, ever so emphatically, but by then, Mr. Plum and Mr. Iron River were in the thrall of competition. They didn’t need much pushing. And Ray would stand up then, and take about a ten-minute backswing, and send the ball three hundred yards, no more—Pelican Point was a par four, three hundred and twenty off the tee—and it always seemed that we would play downwind . . . and there he would be, putting for the eagle. And he would say, God bless his heart, I’m feeling looser now, should we double?
“Ray Nye, Junior, never had to hustle golf, just as he never had to study to get a score of ninety-seven while the rest of us sweated our gentlemen’s Cs. He would not have to hustle heaven, because he was heaven’s draft choice.”
The smell caught Lorraine’s nose at the exact moment that Diane, her face upturned in rapture at Carl’s closing words, twitched and turned and grimaced delicately. Keefer’s tiny face was red with concentration, her chubby knees tucked up in her folding chair.
Whispering some foolish words of apology, Lorraine scooped the baby up and carried her, reeking, toward the ballroom door, chanting, thank you, Keefer, thank you. Mark was standing in the arch, just to the left of the giant floral boobs, and they ran. It did not seem to Lorraine that they stopped running for nine hours, until they turned the key in the lock of their house in Tall Trees and saw the message light on their answering machine blinking, blinking red in the dark.
CHAPTER eight
The spot at Spirit Lake was their own. They had claimed it, how long before? Eight years? More? For both of them, that long-ago night had been the first time, and it was over before it started, Lindsay comforting him past her own pain and the blood they’d had to wash off her white sweater, past his hideous embarrassment, it’s okay, Gordie, really, it’s okay, I wanted it, I wanted to. He had never been able to think of that except as “innocent,” as guileless and tender as a childhood Christmas. He had been, well, not even sixteen, she two years older, the one “good girl” who’d stuck with Georgia as she’d begun her cheerful descent into disorderly conduct. Before that, the sum total of his sexual experience had been one quick handful of Annie Toffer’s sweatered boob on the pool table at Tim’s ninth-grade birthday party with Mrs. Upchurch fifty feet away in the kitchen preparing Sloppy Joes. As a junior, Lindsay had been sociologically well beyond his reach. “But she wants you,” his sister had assured him, and Georgia had come along with the two of them, to throw his parents off the scent.
The movie they’d gone to see was some Swedish thing with subtitles, which, Georgia had convinced their mother, Gordon needed to see for his World Geography class. Just before they entered the theater, by a prearrangement that Gordon pretended not to notice, Georgia ditched them to join her fellow nail-heads at the mall. Partly because it was boring, partly because of the hot friction of their entwined hands, Lindsay and Gordon had not stayed for the end.
When Lindsay agreed with Gordon’s suggestion of a walk at Spirit Lake,
he froze, stabbed in the leg by the Empire-State–size erection. The most he’d expected was the excuse to put his arm around her in the blue moonlight. Tim’s entirely theoretical opinion was that the best technique for the kiss was to open with a dry lipper, no tongue, and then, if all went well, settle down and explore.
But their first kiss had gone well indeed, and it had been Lindsay, like every other girl he’d ever loved, who upped the stakes, who nudged his shirt out of his pants, so that his softest skin made contact with her softest skin, and there had been no turning back. There had been no condom, either, which had given Gordon a bad . . . oh, sixty-five seconds or so, since everyone knew it was impossible for a girl to get pregnant the first time. He’d known as much about human biology, at the time, as he’d known about quarterly income taxes.
The giddy grin that split his face didn’t escape Tim’s notice the next day at church youth group. “Don’t tell me, McKenna,” he’d grimaced. “Don’t tell me. I know you did. I can’t believe you did. Christallfuckingmighty, you did, didn’t you?”
Gordon was sure dozens of strolling couples, toddlers with buckets and shovels, old people with binoculars, teens with six-packs and blunts in their pockets tromped all over this tiny and sexually sacred spit of sand that made a pocket harbor. But he and Lindsay had never, not once, encountered another soul on their visits. Lindsay called that magic. Gordon called it luck. As teenagers, they’d done it there as naked as people could get and still have skin, backward and forward, mouth to breast, mouth to thigh. The first time Lindsay had put her lips to him, he’d exploded all over her chest and the layers of their clothing beneath them. (Another sweater. Another furtive purchase of Shout stain remover from the Smart-Mart, more scrubbing.) As they grew older and realized they might actually live long enough for another try, they’d thrown a sleeping bag over themselves, or left their tops on, saving the Cadillac screw for borrowed beds.
Now they had apartments. They were grown people, well into the fifth or sixth resurrection of their whatever-ship, and still, they came to the lake. Today, it was the Fourth of July, so early in the morning that even the birds still sounded confused.