I was brought out of my thoughts by Pat unzipping my pants. “And what are you doing?” I asked, smiling.
“Going down on a millionaire,” she said.
“Oh,” was all I could say before I closed my eyes and gave myself to her hands and lips.
It was quite a while later that we left the bathroom, and I was ready to party. No more worries. I’d thought of half a dozen personal experiences that I could write about.
We found Pat’s father next door in the master bedroom of the house with the swimming pool, and he was dancing so down and dirty that I stood in the doorway and gaped.
“You should have seen him and Mom together,” Pat shouted as she slipped under my arm and went to her father. He stopped dancing, exchanged some sentences, ear to mouth, with his daughter, waved at me, then resumed dancing. She returned to me, smiling. “We’re spending the night.”
Since it was already nearly two A.M., that seemed redundant information, but I nodded, then let Pat pull me out of the bedroom and back downstairs to the neighbor’s living room. All the kitchens of the three houses were full of catering people who were filling the dining rooms and backyards with enormous trays full of food. Since neither Pat nor I had eaten much for days, we made up for lost time. I was on my second plate when she told me she was going to say hello to some people. Nodding, I motioned that I was perfectly content to sit quietly in a corner and eat and drink.
The second I saw her skirt disappear around the corner I was up the stairs in a flash. A suitless swimming party! I was pretty sure there was a guest bedroom upstairs where I could look down on the pool. Sure enough, there were about a dozen young adults in the backyard, all beautifully naked, jumping off the diving board and swimming in the clear blue water.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” said a voice behind me. I had my foot propped on a window seat, food in hand, and was looking out a wide window down onto the pool.
It was Pat’s father and he’d shut the bedroom door behind him so we were in relative quiet.
“What’s amazing?” I asked.
“Teenagers today. See the one on the diving board? That’s little Janie Hughes. She’s only fourteen.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Didn’t I see her on a tricycle last week?”
He chuckled. “She makes me understand why old men marry young girls. And the boys of the same age make me understand why the girls are attracted to older men.”
He had a point. Even though several of the girls had removed their clothes, only one of the boys had. For the most part, the boys were skinny, with bad skin, and they looked scared to death of the girls, so they kept their big, baggy swim trunks on. The one boy who was naked had such a beautiful body, I figured he was probably captain of some local high school sports team. He reminded me of one of my cousins who’d been killed in a car wreck the night of the high school prom. Later, I’d thought that it was as though my cousin had known he was going to die early, because by seventeen he’d been a man, not a gangly boy, but a full-grown man.
“He’ll probably die before the year’s out,” I said, nodding toward the nude Adonis standing at the edge of the pool. I looked at my father-in-law. “I thought you were blind, or nearly so.”
He smiled. “I have an excellent memory.”
Since the day I’d cried on his lap, there’d been a closeness between us. I’d never felt close to a man before and what I felt for Pat’s father made me understand “male bonding.”
“I’m leaving Pat the house,” he said.
I put the food down and turned away. Please don’t talk of death today, I thought. Not today. Maybe if I said nothing, he’d stop talking.
But he didn’t stop. “I haven’t said anything to Pat and I don’t want you to, but I know I’m finished here on earth. Did you know that I tried to end my life about a month after she died?”
“No,” I said, my head turned away, my eyes squeezed shut. And in my vanity I’d thought I was the only one who was truly and deeply grieving for Pat’s mother.
“But Martha wouldn’t let me die. I think she knew you were to write your book about her and she wanted that. She wanted it for you, and for Pat, and for herself, too. I think she wanted her life to mean something.”
I wanted to say all the usual things, that her life had meant something, but hadn’t I written a quarter of a million words saying just that? All I could do was nod, still unable to look him in the eyes.
“I know I don’t need to tell you this, but I want you to take care of Pat. She pretends that not being able to have kids isn’t important to her, but it is. When she was eight, after she got out of the hospital, she gave away all her dolls—and she had a roomful of them—and today she won’t so much as touch one.”
A lump formed in my throat, a lump of guilt. I hadn’t noticed that about my wife. The truth was I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the accident that took away Pat’s fertility. Since I had Pat, it never mattered to me whether or not we had kids. And I’d never thought to ask her how she felt about it.
“Let her help you in this writing thing,” he said. “Don’t shut her out. Don’t ever think you’ve become such a big success that you need to get some glitzy agent with a big name. Understand me?”
I still couldn’t look at him. Pat and I had been married for years. Why hadn’t I noticed the doll-thing? Was I that unobservant? Or had she been hiding it from me? Did she have other secrets?
Pat’s father didn’t say any more, just put his hand on my shoulder for a moment, then quietly left the room, closing the door behind him. Minutes later a woman came out of the house downstairs by the pool and I recognized Janie Hughes’s mother. She shouted at her daughter so loudly I could hear her over two live bands and what had to be five hundred people partying.
Dutifully, Janie wrapped a towel around her beautiful young body, but I saw her glance over her shoulder at the naked athlete as he stepped into his swim trunks.
When the excitement was over, I sat down on the window seat. The plate beside me was still full but I couldn’t eat anymore. In essence, a man I loved had just told me he was about to die.
There was a Raggedy Ann doll stuck in the corner of the window seat and I picked it up, looking at the ridiculous face. No matter how much money I made, how much success I had, there were some things—things I really wanted—that I’d never be able to obtain. Never again would I sit at a table with Pat and her parents. Shaking my head, I remembered how I used to think that they were Chosen People who never had bad things happen to them.
When the bedroom door opened, I looked up. “There you are,” Pat said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. This party is for you, you know.”
“Can I have little Janie Hughes for my take-home gift?”
“I’ll tell her mother you said that.”
I put the rag doll in front of my face as though for protection. “No, no, anything but that.”
She walked across the room to me. “Come downstairs. People are asking for your autograph.”
“Yeah?” I said, pleased and astonished at the same time. I started to put the rag doll back where I found it, but on impulse, I put it against Pat’s chest, meaning for her to take it.
Pat jumped back, not touching the doll, and looked as though she might be ill.
Part of me wanted to ask questions, to make her confess. But to confess what? What I already knew? When she walked to the door, she stood there with her back to me, her shoulders heaving as though she’d been running.
I picked the doll up off the floor, put the poor thing back in its corner, walked to my wife, and slid my arm around her shoulders. “What we need is some champagne, and you haven’t told me what you want to buy with all the money we are going to get.” I put a slight emphasis on the “we.”
“A house,” she said without hesitation. “Near the sea. Something high up, with a wall of glass so I can look out and see the waves and watch storms at sea.”
I drew in my breath. Years of marriage and I
’d learned two secrets about my wife in one night.
“Storms at sea, it is,” I said, opening the door, my arm still around her.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Other than Jail Bait Janie, that is.”
“If I went to jail, I might get to see Dad.” I tightened my grip on her shoulders. “I want book number two,” I said honestly.
“Don’t worry, I’ll help you and so will Dad. Now that Mom’s gone, your books will give him something to live for.”
I was glad when a blast of music hit us in the face and prevented my making a reply to that, for I was now feeling like this huge, noisy party was not for me but was, instead, a farewell to my father-in-law.
And I was right, for seven weeks later, Pat’s father died in his sleep. As I stood in the funeral home looking at his slightly smiling corpse, I thought how he’d done just what my melodramatic relatives did and given away his life in grief.
When Pat’s mother died, I was the one who was full of anger, but Pat had held me together. When her father died, she was so full of grief and anger that our doctor wanted her to be hospitalized. There was no room for me to give way, too, so I held us both together. The only time I weakened was when the will was read and I was told that Pat’s father had left me his set of German tools.
Pat sold her parents’ house and all the contents. If it had been my decision, I would have moved in there, as that house had held some of the best times of my life. But Pat kept only the photos—which she put in a safe-deposit box and never looked at—and sold everything else. The only thing we kept was the box of tools.
For the next dozen years, I wrote and Pat wheeled and dealed. As she said, we were a partnership. I wrote and we edited, then she sold. And she was my first reader. She always told me what she thought of the content of my books, at times being almost brutal. It wasn’t easy swallowing my ego, and sometimes we had blazing fights. “Try it my way and see which is better,” she once shouted at me. In anger, to show her she was wrong, I rewrote the end of a book to her specification. And she’d been right. Her way was better. After that, I listened more, trusted more.
We didn’t buy her house by the sea. For one thing Pat couldn’t decide which sea she wanted to live by. And, too, she was fascinated by the idea that as a writer, I could live anywhere in the world, so “we” decided to try out a few places. We ended up moving around a lot.
In all the twelve years, we visited my uncles and where I’d grown up only once. The day before we arrived, I was sick with nerves. Pat tried to laugh me out of it but she couldn’t. I was eaten up with wondering how it would be to see all of them again.
“Afraid you’ll have to stay?” Pat asked me the night before, and all I could do was gasp, “Yes!”
But I needn’t have worried. All my relatives treated me like a celebrity. They showed up with dog-eared copies of my books and asked me for my autograph. And what was really strange was that they collectively seemed to believe that the moment my first book was accepted for publication, a cloud of amnesia had settled on me. Each and every one of them seemed to believe that I didn’t remember anything about my childhood.
Years earlier, I’d visited them. It was after I’d graduated from college, but before I was published, and that time no one had acted as though I remembered nothing. They didn’t introduce me to relatives who I’d lived with as a kid. They didn’t describe places I’d been to a hundred times. And absolutely no one said, “You won’t remember this, but…”
But after I was published, they did. My cousin Noble talked to me as though he’d just met me that morning, and after a couple of hours, I began to wish he’d call me “Buick” as he did when we were kids.
He introduced me to Uncle Clyde as though I’d never met the man. I gave Noble a look he ignored, then made an exaggerated little speech about how I most certainly did remember Uncle Clyde. “Imagine that,” the old man said. “Imagine somebody famous like you rememberin’ me.” I smiled, but I wanted to say, “I have a scar on the back of my calf from where you hit me with your belt buckle so I’m not likely to forget you.” But I didn’t say that.
Noble put his arm around my shoulders and led me away. “You have to forgive Uncle Clyde,” he said quietly. “He lost one of his children a few years back and he ain’t been the same since.”
Again I looked at Noble as if he were crazy. After Cousin Ronny drowned, Noble and I and four other cousins lit a bonfire in celebration. Noble said he’d had black eyes since he was four years old, all given to him by Cousin Ronny. I—the creative one—had made a big turtle out of rocks, mud, and sticks, and we’d all pretended to worship it in thanks for taking Cousin Ronny out of our lives.
So when Noble told me about Uncle Clyde’s great grief as though it were news, I was sure he was joking. “And we’ve got the turtle god to thank for that,” I said under my breath.
Noble looked at me as though he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The turtle god,” I said. “Remember? We gave thanks for that turtle that bit Cousin Ronny and—”
Dropping his arm from around my shoulders, Noble straightened his back. “I don’t know anything about that.”
It was like that all day. By late afternoon, after I’d heard that phrase, “You won’t remember this, but—” for the thousandth time, I was pretty fed up. “Why the hell wouldn’t I remember it?” I snapped at Uncle Reg. “It happened to me. I lived here, remember? I was the Punishment. Me, Ford. Or Chrysler. Or John Deere. Me!”
Pat took my arm and pulled me away from them, and for a while she and I stood under a shade tree so I could calm down. I was grateful that she didn’t try to tell me they were just simple country folk who didn’t understand. Truthfully, I felt it was yet another attempt to exclude me, to make me feel that I didn’t belong. I’d been different when I was a kid and now I was even more of an outsider.
But even more than that I felt they were casting me in a role of their making. “He grew up here but he don’t remember us,” they’d tell people. “He got to be a big star and plumb forgot us.” I wanted people to say, “Even though he made it to the top, he never forgot the little people.” Or something like that. But in spite of the facts, I was being told that now that I was a “celebrity” I’d become a snob.
Pat stood beside me while I tried to get my temper under control, then she said, “Too bad you were such a Goody Two-shoes that you never learned to give any of it back to them.”
“I wasn’t—” I began. “And I didn’t—” It took me a full minute of sputtering to understand what she was really saying. I kissed her forehead and we walked back to where everyone was waiting—and looking concerned about my inexplicable explosion of bad temper. But I guess that’s how celebrities are, their eyes seemed to say.
After my talk with Pat, I was in such a good mood, that I started three fistfights. I knew where the sore spots were in my relatives so I dug at them. I asked Noble whatever happened to that old Pontiac he had and ten minutes later he and another cousin (who’d stolen the car but denied it) were into it.
I asked Uncle Clyde about his beloved son who’d drowned, then I asked him to tell me wonderful stories about the boy, about what good deeds he’d performed, and, by the way, what exactly had Cousin Ronny been doing in the pond that day?
At one point Pat narrowed her eyes at me, telling me I was going too far. But I was enjoying myself too much to stop.
When Pat loudly announced that we had to leave, not one of them suggested that we “come again.” Noble walked me out to the car. “You ain’t changed none, have you?” he said, his eyes angry as he spit a glob that landed a quarter inch to the left of my shoe.
“Neither have you,” I said, smiling broadly. The day before I left for college, Noble and three of his drinking buddies had ridiculed me until I was caught between homicidal rage and tears. I’d stalked off into the woods to escape them. When I went back, just before dark, I found that they’d run the tractor over my suitcase full of clean
, ironed (by me) new (purchased with money I’d earned boxing groceries) clothes.
Uncle Cal had lightly smacked Noble across the back of the head for the “prank,” but he’d made it clear he didn’t think what his son had done was so bad. “Just a little goin’ away present,” he said, smiling. No one had offered to help me rewash and iron my clothes, so I’d had to stay up all night to do it, finishing just in time to catch the bus the next morning—the bus that took me away from the lot of them.
“It was nice seeing all of you again,” I said to Noble, actually meaning it. I’m not sure that getting my first book published had made me feel as good as the second half of that day had. “Listen, Noble,” I said in a friendly way, “if any of the kids want to go to college, let me know and I’ll help with the expenses.”
With that I got into the car and Pat peeled away like she was competing at the local dirt track speedway. When I looked back at Noble, I saw that he was puzzling over my offer. Was I trying to rub it in that he’d told me that only fairy boys went to college? Or was I saying that I was the only one smart enough to get there?
I chuckled on and off for three hours at the consternation on his face. But he must have figured out that I’d been sincere because over the years I sent several of the next generation of my relatives to college. One of them was Noble’s oldest daughter, Vanessa, who ended up teaching at the college level.
“One of your ancestors had a brain,” Pat said. “That’s why intelligence pops out every now and then.”
“Recessive gene.”
“Real recessive,” she said, and we laughed together.
All that ended, all the good times ended, when Pat died. I had grown up without a family, found one, and lost it.
Once again, I was alone in the world.
CHAPTER TWO
Jackie
I think he wanted me because I made him laugh.
No, not wanted me. Not like that. He wanted me to work for him.
Of course I said no. After all, many females in town had tried to work for him, but they’d either been fired or quit in tears. Or in anger.