My Dear Emma,
Wishing you all the best in your life and career this Christmas, and in the new year. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mother when you needed a mother the most. I married a Scorpio. I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t get out. You know him and how he was. Anyway I hope you are well and happy. Have a happy holiday season and please don’t forget me.
Love, your Mother
The week before Christmas, before I left for the island, Emma was rummaging through a storage unit, separating her things from her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s, and she came across several of his journals and made the mistake of reading them. She called me halfway through the third notebook, and I could hear she’d been crying.
She said, Sometimes I feel like I’m doomed.
You’re not doomed, I told her. That’s ridiculous.
I mean yes Matty left me, but it’s not as though I was blameless in all this. Far from it.
Okay, I said.
Because listen we know I didn’t exactly have a great model, growing up, for how to take care of people. And there were plenty of times with him that I was hateful, or indifferent, or plain mean. There were times when he needed me to carry more of the load, and I didn’t manage it.
Alright, I said.
So when I say I feel like I’m doomed, what I mean is I worry that I’m turning into my mother.
I thought about this a minute, and it felt like nothing so much as a warning.
You’re not doomed, I said. Are not. You don’t even live in the same neighborhood as doomed.
Two days before Christmas I drove to Emma through a sudden snowfall. Every ten miles or so I hit a pocket of whiteout, and had to pull into the breakdown lane and wait. The car drifted and shimmied, and I held the steering wheel as though it were a life preserver. Plow trucks bombed past, pelting me with slush and road salt through the driver’s window, which I’d opened to vent cigarette smoke. I’d left early in the morning to beat the worst of the storm, and when I got to her place she was still in bed. The shades were drawn. In the half-light I could see her smiling with her cheek pressed against the mattress, and I said cheerfully, Mind if I join you?, and she said, Of course not, and I stripped down to my drawers and climbed under the covers, happy and stupid. She didn’t slide across the mattress to meet me, and this was the first indication that something was wrong. The next and clearer indication was when I heard her sniffling.
Hey, I said. What’s the matter?
She made an exasperated sound, then was silent for a few moments, then said, Thinking about last Christmas.
When Matty was still here.
Yeah. But it wasn’t a great time. It was a disaster, in fact. He told me he didn’t love me, and hadn’t for quite a while.
That’s some Swiss-type timing, there.
We lay quietly side by side under the covers, careful not to touch.
Then she said, I was glad when I heard you come in. I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to tell you that when you first came upstairs, but I couldn’t get the words to come out of my mouth.
Good, I said. That’s good, that you’re glad I’m here.
Listen, it’s not because I miss him. It’s not that at all. Days when I wake up feeling this way, I just don’t have anything to give. And that’s not fair to you.
I understand, I said. It’s like the Berryman poem: ‘I must start to sit with a blind brow above an empty heart.’
That’s perfect, she said. That’s it exactly.
We had a good day despite her upset. Big greasy brunch, after which she walked with me to the Old Port to assist with some emergency Christmas shopping. With her help I found two gifts for my mother in no time, and I goofed around and made her smile in spite of herself. Then to dinner, and a few drinks, and back home, where I showered while she read in bed. I climbed in next to her and she tried, she plumbed herself to find something to give me, and she climbed on top of me and kissed my face, my eyes, and my lips, but the whole time she kept making these sad little sounds I didn’t understand, and then she said I’m sorry, I just can’t, and I took her under the arms and lifted her off me and set her down on the mattress. It’s okay, I said, and meant it. I stroked her hair for quite a while, until her breathing evened out and grew deep, and no other parts of our bodies touched except for my hand, her head.
But other times her grief would recede, and in those moments we often fell together like the teenagers we’d been. The last Sunday before Christmas I got up early, walked out in the cold with my head bent to the wind, in search of the paper and coffee for her. I was always happy to run morning errands, because I liked the idea of her warm under the covers while I strode around, and also because it gave me a chance to have a cigarette. I returned with the Times and a medium breakfast blend with cream, got undressed again, washed the smoke off my face and hands, crawled back under the covers with her. She opened the front section; I grabbed the Book Review. It wasn’t long, though, before the paper’s component parts fell unfurled to the carpet and we got tangled up in each other. I kissed the length of her left leg, let my tongue loiter in the hollow where thigh met hip, close enough to tease, then up the left side of her torso, lingered again at her breast, then on to her neck, ear, throat, across her jawline, to the other ear, then back down the right side of her. Her skin hot, almost burning, from being so long under the comforter. I tugged her panties down over her knees, and she flicked them off her toes. She was ready to come the moment I touched her, but she fought it for four, maybe five minutes, and when she finally gave in she pulled away from me and clamped down on the meat beneath her thumb to keep from screaming, and she went from flat on her back to sitting up straight against the headboard, bite-marked hand now splayed over her face. Behind that hand she was laughing.
We talked and joked, adrift in warm pheromonal ease, the newspaper scattered about the floor, forgotten, and then I went after her again. When it was over she struggled to catch her breath. In between gasps she said, Jesus I need to get out of this bed, and we both laughed long and loud, peering at each other, eyes squinted and welling, sharing our mirth like a meal.
If this were one of the novels I used to write, I would portray Emma’s mother as a monochromatic villain, because that would be her sole function within the narrative. But this world does not produce monochromes, of course. Hitler loved animals, and passed a law requiring citizens of the Reich to use humane methods when killing lobsters. Pol Pot was, by all accounts, gentle and kind as a boy. Slobodan Milosevic married his high school sweetheart. Even Mike Tyson reserved an alcove, in his otherwise murderous heart, for the gentle care of homing pigeons. By the same token, Emma’s mother is evil and sad and ill, but she is not a monster. She is, at times, possessed of love, both for her daughter and others.
She apparently even has a soft spot for me, which I learned one night before Emma sent me away to the island. We were at my place making chili. I diced the onions at Emma’s request, and she laughed at me as I sniffled and grinned and tears rolled down my face. Somehow we got to talking about how her mother had kept the eight-by-ten of me and Emma at the prom, had left the thing hanging on the wall in her living room for years, which to me seemed hilarious and strange and more than a little improbable.
It’s true, Emma said, laughing. I don’t know why . . . I think she really loved the dress I wore.
It was red, right? I asked, and she nodded.
I remember that dress, I said. I poked her with my index finger, and she leaned away and cast a mock-scolding glance in my direction.
Then she said, But so you know what’s really funny about that. Here’s my mother, of all people, holding onto this ridiculous photo all these years, right?
Not ridiculous, I said. We made a handsome couple.
We did, she said. And we’ve made good-looking couples with other people, too. Because we’r
e good-looking people. Anyway she’s got this picture, and then the night before my wedding, in the slide show at the rehearsal dinner . . .
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, I said.
Swear to god, she said. I’m sitting there watching the slide show that she and Erica put together, both our families there, Matty sitting right next to me, everybody’s smiling and happy, right, and that fucking prom picture comes up on the screen. I nearly choked to death on a canapé.
I slid onions into the pot to sauté and said, Who put it in there?
Had to be my mother.
Jesus. She could have at least cropped me out, for God’s sake.
Oh no, Emma said, still laughing. That wouldn’t do. Not at all.
I thought a minute while I stirred the onions. Should have taken it as a sign, I guess.
Of what?
Maybe your mother knew something we didn’t. Maybe she knew that the goofy guy in the tuxedo next to you would never really be out of your life.
At this Emma rolled her eyes. Whatever, she said.
Listen, again, a reiteration: this is me talking to you. This is me telling you the truth. As evidence of my forthrightness, I offer these embarrassing facts, which I obviously would not reveal if not for my dedication to comprehensive honesty:
One: this morning I masturbated—this is nothing unusual—then realized I was out of cigarettes and so went immediately to the nearest gas station without washing, and as I gave the clerk my debit card I realized my hand would probably light up like a Mannheim Steamroller concert if someone passed a black light over it. I should also mention that I used a visual aid for my masturbation session, and the theme of that visual aid was an older woman, mid-forties maybe, seducing a boy who appeared to be no older than twenty; this is not necessarily a fetish of mine, simply what I found myself in the mood for on waking.
Two: I have, in the last week, shed sincere unashamed tears while listening to ‘Separate Lives’ by Phil Collins, and twice while viewing a television commercial currently in heavy rotation featuring a sick boy whom United Airlines flew gratis to a renowned children’s hospital for treatment. It was impossible not to be aware of the obvious cold corporate intent to paint United as a benevolent and socially engaged entity rather than a monolithic conglomerate whose sole fealty lies with its shareholders, and despite my awareness of this intent I still cried, and felt weird and silly about that, but have since decided that my emotional reaction was, you know, what it was.
Three: since meeting her in my thirteenth year I have been willing, even eager, to turn myself over to Emma, to let her decide what I should think and how I should behave at any moment—i.e., despite the appearance of a strong will and firm boundaries, I’m all too eager to make myself her automaton. I would do it even now, if she’d have me.
So with Emma’s disappearance my frustration spiked there in the heat and the dust on the island, and I saw everything through the lens of this frustration. Bartenders and store clerks seemed unfriendly, even hostile. The few vacationers—giddy with the isolation of the place and the faux adventure it implied, the virgin beaches they had almost to themselves, the guilt-free A.M. cocktails—baffled me with their smiles, with the joyous sounds they made in the street outside my windows.
Nothing was a comfort. I started to feel loose, lethal. In my more rational moments I worried, as the caballeros continued to pick fights, that on the wrong night I might kill someone. And then, right on cue, there occurred a circumstantial confluence that sent the whole thing corkscrewing wildly off into thoughtlessness, and petty revenge, and regret, with barely a moment to look around and make an attempt to understand what was happening.
Life, I have found, is often only too willing to provide that little push. The butterfly flaps its wings, and lo.
In this case the butterfly came disguised as a text message from a friend named Rick, a bar acquaintance back home who, after a long stint in the Marines, after getting divorced from his wife of ten years, had enrolled in college on the GI Bill, and now was on spring break and happened to be traveling around the archipelago Emma had exiled me to.
Rick was interesting to me insofar as he was pure Id, nothing more or less than the sum of his appetites, of which the three strongest were for dope, rugby, and young women. In other words, a good guy to drink with, and little else.
I hadn’t heard from Emma in a week—she’d dematerialized into work, meetings, lunches and dinners, political fund-raisers—and that morning I sat at the beach, scribbling in a notebook and sipping a pint of Palo Viejo, trying to calm myself by watching pelicans as they dive-bombed the surf over and over.
This was the state of things when my phone chimed with Rick’s message. Pissed off. Tipsy at eleven in the morning. Suggestible. It’s no excuse, but still.
The text read, in part, that Rick had ‘some serious specimenz from the opposite sex’ in tow. Presumably, these were coeds of a more traditional age for undergraduate students than Rick himself, and while I wasn’t at all interested in that, I figured what the hell. It wasn’t like I was doing much else of consequence. I was watching pelicans eat, for Christ’s sake.
I picked Rick and his three specimenz up at the ferry dock, and we drove to the malecón and started in with Bloody Marys before the sun reached its apex. By the time the sun had set we were all drunk, and bent sideways on some unidentified pills Rick had distributed. One of the specimenz, a thin, pretty blonde named Charlotte who kept her oversized Jackie O sunglasses on well after dark, attached herself to me.
Charlotte informed me that she was a comparative literature major, and she’d seen me lecture at U Maine twice. She pressed her thigh against mine in the open-air booth. She smelled like booze and aloe, and under that hovered the sharp fecundity of a bottle of multivitamins. She talked about Saul Bellow, and yoga. I listened, mostly, as the second unidentified pill, plucked from Rick’s hand in the bathroom and washed down with tap water from the sink, started to turn on me. I thought I felt Charlotte grip my knee under the table, but I couldn’t be sure.
Though my senses were leaving me I suggested we drive out to Playa Navio for some night swimming. Navio had the roughest surf of all the island’s beaches, and with a southern swell roaring up from Venezuela it would be rougher than normal. I was trying to save myself from Charlotte, but I can’t tell you how I imagined going to the beach would accomplish that. Maybe I planned to just swim until I reached South America.
We piled into the Jeep, a boozy mess. On the center console my phone flashed its LED, a green beacon informing me I had messages. I let it sit untouched.
Stars glittered wildly above the water at Navio. In the moonlight, breakers curled into black barrels and pounded the sand. Two of the specimenz saw this and balked, but Charlotte stripped down to just her bikini bottom and joined me and Rick in the surf.
We fought our way past the break, to where the water was calm enough to swim comfortably. I was counting on Rick’s indiscriminate lechery to save me from Charlotte, and he didn’t disappoint, paddling over to her and speaking in hushed tones as she laughed, his hands presumably on her flesh under the water. Fine enough. I flipped over and floated on the swells with only my nose above the surface. The claustrophobic hush beneath sounded like the womb to me.
The next thing I knew, Rick was pulling me through sea foam up onto the beach while the specimenz fussed and worried above, their three faces framing the moon.
If you asked me now whether I’d simply passed out and gone under, or if I’d intended to drown myself, I wouldn’t be able to answer you with anything resembling certainty. But I do remember thinking, as they all four stood gazing down while I lay on my back in the wet sand, that I wished Rick had been too preoccupied with Charlotte to notice that I’d disappeared under the swells. I do remember that, if I’m being honest.
And apparently my near-dr
owning renewed Charlotte’s interest—or perhaps she’d never lost interest and had only been using Rick to try and stir me from my indifference—because when we left she insisted on driving, and she dropped Rick and the specimenz off at the Crow’s Nest, and then, and only then, drove me back to the pink stucco casita.
The butterfly flapped its wings. Charlotte helped me up the back steps, unlocked the door, and pushed me onto the bed. When she started taking my clothes off I responded with all the vigor of a quadriplegic. She did what she wanted, and while I didn’t exactly participate, I didn’t stop her, either.
And for the first time in nearly twenty years I genuinely, if temporarily, did not care about Emma. I didn’t care about anything, in fact. Charlotte and I could have burst into flames, for all the difference it would have made to me. We could have fallen instantly and irrevocably in love. The Earth’s poles could have reversed. My father could have stumbled in, trailing dirt from the grave.
Of course, none of those things happened. Charlotte made do with my limp indifference, moaning and crying out in ways I remember thinking seemed like a put-on, and the next morning, while she lay sleeping it off in my bed, I smoked on the porch with my head down, and the sun didn’t shine on the island so much as beat on it, it seemed.
There was a moment that next day, somewhere between my sixth and tenth beers, when I realized it was possible, likely even, that the reason I didn’t trust Emma had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me.
Like the song says, it’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else.
Because even before Charlotte happened on the scene, I knew the treacherousness that resided in me, and in a deep place beyond words and reason I believed that this same duplicity existed in everyone—Mother Teresa, Gandhi, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and, yes, even Emma, especially Emma.