A Theory of Relativity

  Gordon wasn’t a graceful writer at the best of times. How could he provide eloquence on demand now?

  Georgia had bailed out his butt on every term paper he’d written in high school, and most of college. He’d done everything but dress in drag to take her finals in Chemistry for Poets. Georgia would not have stood for this hokey, half-hearted stumbling around. She would have demanded drama! Lights, casket, organ music, poetry! That she was not here, helping him out right now, was to Gordon proof that there was no afterlife.

  The hall closet door stood half opened. Keefer’s tiny yellow rubber ducky boots tucked into Georgia’s red clogs, the huge old cardigan Aunt Nora had knitted, a horror of psychedelic pastels, which his sister loyally continued to wear, calling it “my matching sweater,” Ray’s wall of caps, each with the band expanded to the last possible notch. His brother-in-law’s head was so huge Jurgen once said that his golf cap looked like a thumbtack on a pumpkin. All ordinary objects were transformed into relics. One of Keefer’s politically correct wooden toys held down a stack of printouts about the Thisacillin or Thatamyicin doctors were eager to put into Georgia’s veins. Next to the toy was his sister’s tinkly ankle bracelet with bells, the one she used to wear with her swimsuit. Gordon remembered her asking, in a voice slurred with morphine syrups, for Ray to bring it to her parents’ house, because the sound would comfort the baby.

  A cup that had contained coffee and . . . here it was, the milk that had gone bad . . . stood beside Ray’s datebook. The open entry, June 3, was for Georgia’s chemo. Slightly queasy, Gordon flipped ahead a few days. Block-printed across the spaces for a whole week later in the month were the words “Call lawyer.” That, and a note for September reminding Ray to schedule Keefer’s eighteen-month checkup, were the only entries. A litter of indistinct faxes from the Knockouts Tour were folded and stuck in a back pocket, along with a fast-food game card scribbled with what looked to be a shopping list: Garlic capsules, juice, molasses . . . Ray’s mom was the South’s lay minister of health food. Unopened bottles of herbal drops still lined the windowsill in Georgia’s old bedroom at his parents’ house, names more appropriate to a picnic than a war on cancer: dandelion, thistle, wild clover.

  Gordon tried not to look at the hall gallery. He’d only a few hours left before the whole engine of mourning was set in motion. Once he saw the inside of Chaptmans Funeral Home, Gordon knew that any remnant of ability to concentrate would be torn away. He didn’t need distractions now.

  There was Georgia in her gown with the twenty-two-foot train. Tim Upchurch had called it the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Maria. It was not one of the formal wedding portraits, but a candid, and Georgia loved it more than any of the others. In the photo, also, was Ray’s cousin Delia, who lived in Madison; she’d grown up with Ray nearly as a sibling and had made Ray’s move to the North bearable, and she had also been Georgia’s matron of honor and was Keefer’s godmother. She was quite the Bible-thumping pill, if Gordon recalled correctly—everything that could go wrong with a woman who was resolutely blond, resolutely Christian, and from Tampa. He could recall only one thing Georgia had ever said about Delia, “I like her. She really believes what she says.” In the photo, Delia was reverently holding up the end of the languid net of lace, holy beatitude in her face, but her teenage kid from her previous marriage—what was the kid’s name, Alyssa? Alexandra?—was peeking through the huge fountain of bronze leaves and stands of creamy Japanese lilacs and bearded irises like some kind of wacky altar ornament, her plush red hair wild and her face a map of pure hellion glee.

  Gordon thought idly, nastily, all that holiness did not evidently preclude divorce . . . but that was lousy. He barely knew Delia. Maybe she was a widow.

  One space over, a photo of Ray and Georgia in the pool at their first apartment, that place in Titusville. (“Titsville,” Georgia had written, just after learning she was expecting a baby. “I’m the only woman in this whole complex under five feet ten and over a hundred and thirty pounds. You have to be an aerobics instructor or they won’t let you sign a lease.”) And the next shot, Ray holding newborn Keefer triumphantly overhead in one of his massive hands, as if she were the Stanley Cup.

  Then, Georgia’s framed collage: “Why You Are Keefer” (picture of the baby, in a felt bonnet sewn to look like a sunflower, with an arrow from that to a toddler picture of Gordon, grinning toothlessly, Georgia with one fat arm around him in a headlock. “Once There Was a Little Boy Who Could Not Say His Sister’s First Name.” How, Gordon now tried to remember, had he ever ended up calling Georgia “Keefie,” and not just when he was a tot, but until . . . what, sixth grade or so, when she threatened to belt him if he didn’t stop it? He still sometimes slipped up, especially after the baby was born, calling both of them “Keefie.” Gordon put one of his hands over his eyes and jammed Ray’s day calendar into his back pocket.

  This place. You couldn’t breathe. The air was greenhouse quality.

  That morning, awakening fully dressed on top of his comforter, Gordon had written in his spiral notebook, “Party girl, rowdy girl, dutiful daughter, rebellious daughter, perfect sister, sister tormentor, best friend, generous, and idealistic,” and “Georgia took no prisoners. It took the magic of Raymond Nye, Junior, to accomplish the transformation. But if Ray was here, and I wish he were here, he’d tell you that he knew just who was boss.” It sounded like some awful roast at the Elks Club.

  He should be making Georgia sound like Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa, but how could he pretend his sister had meant very much to the world in general? She hadn’t. She’d had no time to redeem her life. All she’d done was love Ray and reproduce and help her brother out and make their folks happy . . . the only loss Gordon could truly feel was his own.

  They would never again stand behind Dad’s back and mimic the way he stuck his knees up like a heron when he walked. Georgia would never again send Gordon his Christmas present two weeks early, because she just couldn’t wait, and then call him and make him open it while she was still on the phone. They would never again get stoned and have to wait so long for a table at Fast Eddie’s that they’d start eating from the bus trays. Georgia would never again hear her baby say “Keefer.”

  He could not say these things—people were already impossibly sad. This whole ceremonial attempt was a physical effort, like hauling up a lobster pot, hand over hand, and just as deceptive. Water was so much heavier than anything you could swallow and see through had a right to be. Carl Jurgen used to complain about it, the summer that he and Ray and Gordon spent living alone in the Evans Scholars house, running the pots for the tiny old man who owned Leo’s Sea Subs.

  The thought that came to him, as he stood poised between staying longer and getting the hell out of there, would have sounded overblown if not suspicious to anyone else, but Georgia would have understood it. And maybe Ray would have, too. Georgia had probably been the real reason that his bond with his two dozen dearly and temporarily beloved girlfriends had never deepened beyond the well-rehearsed routine of date at the symphony, Italian dinner, first sex, regular sex, camping trip, denouement. Georgia had taken up more room in his life than a sister should have taken. Even good old loyal Lindsay Snow had rounded on him once and said, angrily, “You dote on every word she says!”

  He hadn’t doted on every word Georgia had said. But her phone number in Florida was the only number besides his parents’ he’d ever committed to memory. He and Georgia had, of course, gone through that teenage stage when the esteem of peers had been paramount; but she, and a few others, were most of what Gordon required in the way of intimacies. Tim Upchurch and Pat Chaptman were as close to him as cousins, closer than his own cousins were. Then there was Jurgen, and of course, Ray. But there had never seemed to be any good reason to try to explain himself to a woman, or to discuss intellectual puzzles with anyone but his father, or emotional puzzles with anyone but Georgia.

  There had never been a need to discuss anything with his mother. She read his mind
.

  All his time had been consumed by taking care of Georgia or Keefer. Those nights he stole for Lindsay, he’d had to all but literally bite his tongue to keep from asking whether they could skip the preliminaries and go to bed. It was true that Gordon had begun investigating a tempting offer from Tortoise Tours, a new outfit that took families on tours to places like the Galapagos. He’d joined a ski and climbing club in Wausau and endured the chatter because the women were succulent to look at if not to listen to. And he’d been out, with Lindsay or Tim or one of the girls Tim called his aqua-bunnies, on most weekend nights. But stupid as it was, he always felt safer when he came home to a blinking answering machine light. He always called back. Georgia always talked to him, even if he woke her up. Half the time, he’d just drive over there. Sometimes, the birds were talking by the time they fell asleep.

  Gordon had rationalized, when Georgia got really ill, that the time he spent sponging her and helping her make her tapes and reading Wuthering Heights to her would compensate for the scattered days they would have shared over the course of forty more years—a sprinkling of holidays, a family trip or two. Why had he not taken better care to think of what he’d say when this time came. Why had he not asked Georgia for help? Would she have delighted in the sly mischief of writing her own memorial? Part of him thought so. Would the effort, with its bald admission of defeat, have been so unbearably poignant the two of them could never have borne it?

  And yet, Gordon’s memories of his sister were all her version. Georgia was custodian of boxes of blackmail-quality photographs from childhood. Gordon had a single eighteen-by-twenty frame of family snaps, chosen (by Georgia) to represent their lives together, and a shoebox full of semiseductive photos taken of or by girlfriends. It also contained a college graduation card that read, “Way to Go!! Who Says Hard Work Doesn’t Pay Off?” with a laminated fourth-grade science test, grade D-plus. Any stories he couldn’t tell to his mother, he’d taken to Georgia. About the ER intern in Colorado who treated his broken tailbone and ended up taking him home with her for a week, about the girl he taught who thought animals with split hooves had roots.

  Gordon ventured into their bedroom. Georgia’s wedding dress, in its heavy-duty plastic bag, took up the space of three men’s parkas. On a shelf, under a couple of half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, Gordon uncovered an oversized, full-color book of photos, “Compromise and Positions: A Hot Guide for Cool Couples.” Absently, he opened and closed drawers. Georgia’s nursing bras. The big old Knockouts promotional T-shirts she slept in. Ray’s boxer shorts, the size of small backpacker tents . . . Christ, he’d been a big guy. For a crystalline instant, he could see Ray on the fourth tee at Pelican Point, waiting for him and Jurgen, hacky-sacking the ball with his driver, bouncing it around, never letting it drop, Ray’s excruciatingly slow, metronomically precise swing—Tempo Ramundo, they called him, recalling Ray Floyd—the shot cleaving the exact middle of the sky. “That’s no balota,” Jurgen would say, clasping his hands as if in prayer, “thass a bullet.”

  The horrible pity of trespass swamped him—the dead had no privacy. When he was old, he would burn his every intimate scrap and document. Which would probably amount to that same shoebox full of photos. He pictured himself, a bent, silver-haired man in cargo shorts, poking a tiny bonfire.

  Helplessly, he thought of Georgia and how she’d been unable to keep her hands out of the back of Ray’s tuxedo pants even during the reception, of Ray shaking him awake the morning after his and Georgia’s second date, “You and me got to have a word, Bo. Did she call you?”

  “Ray, it’s nine a.m.”

  “But did she call you yet? About me?”

  “Didn’t you just come from there?” And then the realization. Sleep parting for amusement. “Did you spend the night there?” Ray shaking his head, shaking Gordon’s shoulder, shaking off his prying, a blush spreading up from his jaw, possessing his whole face.

  “We sat up all night. On the beach. I never felt like this before. This is the real one, Bo,” he said. “I want you to sit up here and tell me everything about her. All the TV shows she used to like. What she’s scared of, like bugs or snakes. Like, what’s her favorite color and was there, you know, was there a guy before me that she really, you know . . .” At their wedding, leaning over to whisper to him, as they waited for the opening notes, “I love her more than my own life, Bo.” At the end of the reception, Georgia running back in blue jeans to kiss him good-bye, him standing there rumpled, resentful, drunk and blinking under the sudden lights that signaled the party was over, her cheerful kiss me so you don’t miss me . . .

  Just before Gordon took his month’s family leave from school, he’d awakened one night at his parents’ house. It had been a cold spring weekend when Ray was home, but scheduled to take off early the following morning for Atlanta, so Gordon had slept over in anticipation of watching the baby while his mother took Georgia to the doctor. In the middle of the night, alarmed by noises from the hall, Gordon stumbled out to find Ray, carrying a blanket-bundled Georgia in his arms, his foot wedging the front door open.

  Gordon blurted, “Is she sick? Are you taking her to the hospital?”

  “No, no,” Ray smiled, genial and calm. “We’re just taking a drive.”

  “A drive?”

  “She can’t sleep. And it’s the anniversary of when we got engaged, Bo. Two years since the night she said yes. We’re going to drive out to Hat Lake and look at the stars . . . maybe fool around. We’re still newlyweds, after all . . .” Gordon took in Georgia’s thin arm, bruised from her endless blood draws, dangling from a fold of the blanket, her dozy smile, and was struck speechless. There was so much he could respect, but not understand.

  His last long conversation with Georgia had been a fight. It had been . . . Thursday. No, the previous weekend. Certainly since the little stroke that had put her in the hospital for a week, an ominous marker that the end was closing in. She’d been cranky, short tempered, who wouldn’t have been? Coughing and puffing—it was in her lungs, now, the doctor said, in her bones, and Gordon had thought, only Georgia would consider telling him off as being a good use of her last breaths. She’d started in, did he realize what other people would give to be like him? She had said he was like a people savant, memorizing the human phone book at first glance. He got dates out of wrong numbers, from picking up packages people dropped in parking lots. A girl had written him thanking him for taking her virginity. People stuck to him the way Sargasso stuck to turtle grass at the beach. Man, woman, and dog, they fall in love with you, she’d said, and you take them for granted. You don’t work for it. What you’re good at is being loved . . .

  “You have a thousand friends, Georgia,” he’d said.

  “But I had to work for them. I figure forty beers per one friend. Twenty pounds per dozen.”

  “I work at it too. I’m nice to people.”

  “You let people be nice to you. You work out, so people will have something nice to look at. You have experiences, so you can tell people about them. That’s your big gift to the world, Gordie. You are your gift . . .” She’d paused, breathing so deeply and slowly Gordon thought she’d fallen asleep. “You have to make Keefer be just like you.”

  He’d thought, I didn’t hear that. He and Georgia were dog and cat—he, active, agile, more competitive at everything than skilled at anything, she the laziest nonmale he’d ever known, who had never walked anywhere she could drive, who called him Pectoralisaurus. Georgia hated pain so much she wouldn’t even get a back rub. For the past two hundred days and loose change, the grit she had summoned in her suffering had amazed him.

  “You hope Keefer is like me?”

  “I hope she’s like you. It’s all easy for you.”

  “This isn’t easy for me.”

  “Easier for you than me,” she’d said.

  “No, not really.”

  She’d turned her wasted face against the pillow and smiled at him. “I didn’t mean that. I kno
w it isn’t.”

  “I think she’ll be like Ray,” Gordon had said.

  “Well, she won’t,” his sister replied. “That’s not my wish.” Georgia let her eyes drift to one of the prints Lorraine had framed for her in childhood, an early O’Keeffe, a pansy so luxuriant it seemed the very paper would be velvety to the touch. “I don’t want her to be the kind of person who cares so much about love that she can’t let go. It was her . . .” Georgia sighed. Talking was a breathtaking task for her.

  “Her?”

  “Her, Georgia O’Keeffe her. She said, um, don’t be the kind of person who loves, because it will . . . chew you up and swallow you whole. I wish for her to be good at being loved. Can you do that one thing? Can you make her like that?”

  What had she meant?

  Was there something wrong with him? Was he too into himself? He was a teacher, for Pete’s sake. Teachers were altruistic. He contributed to every environmental cause on the globe. He was not selfish. Or was he? Why did he prefer to let all his interactions skim instead of sink in? That wasn’t true. He and Tim had been friends for fifteen years. He and Lindsay . . . well. Would he want to infect Keefer with a vaccine against caring too much? But otherwise, he’d have been engaged ten times already.

  Okay . . . some of it was bullshit. He’d cultivated a shy, wistful demeanor for the purpose of breaking up with girls. Tim called it the Velvet Cad. He’d make dreamy open-ended remarks about his basic immaturity, about the real possibility of his moving to Australia. He’d mastered a shrug . . . slow, expressive, as if redolent of regret over his own inability to commit. He left a door slightly open. He might become more seasoned with time. . . . It worked like hypnosis. Women who should have wanted to burn him in effigy were magically content to remain his friends. That was a great relief. Why shouldn’t it be? He valued those women, even more so after they’d let him go, when his memories of them were rinsed of the jittery tedium of long dinners, TV shows endured entwined on a series of couches, hair spray against his cheek. What he loved to remember were their bodies all so different, soft or taut, mounded or convex, rolling and bobbing, rising and falling, nipples spreading like the secret stained hearts of flowers, so many varieties of poppies and lilies. He loved them all, still, in retrospect. How could he fail to be genuinely happy when he saw them again? Why would they ever think that his smile, his welcome, even his physical affection, in the moment, meant he wanted them to share, again, more than memories? But they always thought that. And he always had to be a thug again, a person who carefully returned only the third phone call, and then breezily.