“I’m sorry?”
“In a cube. Your little cubicle. I’m just happy that you’re here.”
He was having trouble following her.
“Did you take the subway?” she said.
“There’s no subway in Birmingham.”
She focused on his words, readjusted, as if tuning in to his frequency. She knew she had said something that wasn’t quite right.
“Metaphorically, I mean.”
“Then yes,” he said. “I guess I did.”
* * *
They were done with dinner in record time and retired to the living room. She sat in her overstuffed wingback chair with the uplifting floral pattern—yellows and blues and oranges against red—and he sat in the corner of the couch closest to the door. The scotch smelled like a cleaning agent, but she threw it back as if it were mountain water. He did not partake. She opened her socks and tugged them on.
“Toasty,” she said. “Inside and out.”
“You need to press the button on the side to turn them on.”
She did so. “Even better,” she said.
She sipped and sniffed at her whiskey, and an expression of such contentment enveloped her that Bronfman thought she might melt.
She smacked her satisfied lips. “So what’s the big news?”
“What do you mean?” With the introduction of Barney’s skull, her downhill momentum, and a feeling that he was at sea—metaphorically—he had briefly forgotten the game-changing telephone call.
“I can always tell when you have big news,” she said. “When you made straight B’s that time, I knew before you told me. When you passed your driver’s test. It’s a fifth sense.”
“Sixth.”
“I lost my sense of smell, I think, so I’m letting this one take its place.”
It was warmish for mid-April, but the gas fire was turned on anyway, along with the AC. The logs were made of stained concrete and carved to look like wood. They had fooled more than one person. The fire itself flickered identically to the fire of thirty years ago, through the same prefabricated knotholes, as if there were some realities that could be repeated over and over without modification forever. In some ways, Bronfman had modeled his life on this fire.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. But it’s still—I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“Hardly worth mentioning.”
“You’re killing me, Edsel.”
He took a deep, sustaining breath. “I won something,” he said. “A free weekend at the beach, in Destin. At a brand-new condominium unit that sounds, well, very nice. I’m looking forward to it.”
“And?”
“And what?”
She closed her eyes and smiled, then shook her head like an old nightclub jazz singer under the spell of a tune. “There is no such thing as a free lunch!” she proclaimed, as if to a large crowd. “There is always an and, an if, or a but. Which is it?”
All three, he thought, strictly speaking. “Nothing really. I just need to bring someone with me. A companion—you know, a girlfriend, something like that. A date, or a wife! Ha-ha! Because—well, I’m not sure why. It’s just the rules.”
“And do you have someone?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Not now. Not yet. But I have a couple of months before the offer expires. I think that if I really put my mind to it I might be able to find someone by then. Don’t you?”
His mother, Muriel Bronfman, regarded him. Estimated him. Took his measure, and then took a small sip from her tumbler and swished it around a little. Grimaced. “No,” she said. “Honestly? I don’t. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.” Then, apparently dismayed by his own apparent dismay, she said, “Don’t you doubt it as well?”
“Well, I think … I think it won’t be easy. But—”
She snorted a laugh. “You should run for president.”
“Why?”
“The way you talk. In flip-floppy same-isms.”
Gibberish. It felt like this with her sometimes lately, that she was in another time-space dimension and they were having two different conversations at the same time, and then, somewhere down the line, they would come together again. Silence settled in for a second, two. Then she aimed her gaze at him.
“So you’re not seeing anybody, Edsel?”
“Not presently,” he said. “But … so? Not everybody in the world is seeing somebody else right now. But maybe—”
“Maybe nothing. You’re starting way at the back of the pack. I mean seriously, Edsel. Seriously. Did you ever even date? In high school—if memory serves, and God knows it doesn’t anymore, not really—I don’t remember you dating. I don’t remember you dating anyone. You’ve never brought a single girl/woman/anything into this house to meet me, or gone out to see one, as far as I know. Not one. In all. Of. Your. Life. Do you realize that?”
“Do I realize that? Of course I do. And that’s sort of true. But you don’t know everything. I have been on dates. A few.”
She shook her head. “A few dates … good God. A few dates. That’s very odd, Edsel. You’re thirty-four years old.”
Night was falling. Bronfman couldn’t look at her. Instead, he looked over her shoulder at a vase full of flowers and weird plants: a big yellow gladiola, a carnation, a pussy willow. None of them, he realized then, were real. The carnation was made of fabric, the pussy willow of what looked like Styrofoam painted brown. This was the home Bronfman had grown up in, where he had lived all his life until he went off to college, and these flowers had been there for as long as he could remember, yet he had never noticed that they weren’t real.
“You know I couldn’t give a flying fuck, Edsel, but if you’re gay you could tell me. No need to be ashamed.”
“Mom.” He wasn’t gay, had nothing against people who were, but the fact that she thought he could be hurt his feelings, as if his failure with women could mean only one thing. Also, “flying fuck”? What was that?
She nodded, lips pursed, as though the fact that he wasn’t gay was bad news. She regarded him as a carnivore does her prey in the moment before she eats him. “Edsel,” she said, very slowly, very carefully, her eyes narrowed. “Have you ever even—”
He knew where she was going with this and headed her off at the pass. “Really? Mom. Really? Please, you have to stop.”
She was not going to ask him this. She was not.
She was.
“—been with a woman? Had actual sex? Done the deed? Have you … Jesus … are you … are you???… have you never—”
“Yes!” he bellowed, trumpeted, and maybe lied. “Good Lord. Of course I have!”
She held up both of her tiny shaky hands, as if they might protect her from his oncoming indignation. But his indignation did not have the horsepower to reach her and stalled halfway across the living-room floor.
Because, of course, there was no of course about it.
Bronfman had been in the intimate vicinity of a woman only once in his life, and that was when he was fifteen years old—nineteen years ago. A girl, really, she had been the only one, and that had been it, the only time, the lone instance he had been with a female in that circumstance, both of them mostly naked, sitting on ready. What actually happened that day was debatable, however, and he had debated it with himself for all these years. Something had happened, but because whatever happened hadn’t happened since, and he had no basis for comparison, he wasn’t sure. In short, it was possible that Bronfman, in fact, had technically never had sex with a woman—that he, at thirty-four, was still a virgin.
His mother sighed, and smiled, and shrugged her puny shoulders.
“Methinks thou protesteth too much,” she said softly, pleased with herself, nodding, pursing her lips in a pleasant affirmation, throwing back a swallow. “I’m going to use that word more often. Methinks. Methinks. Methinks I like it.” She lifted her legs and wiggled her toes and smiled to herself, almost seeming happy, but then her old bloodshot eyes filled up wi
th water. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said. “I coddled you. I should have pushed you out of the nest with more vigor. But I was afraid you couldn’t fly.”
She shook her head and wiped her cheek, and her eyes looked far away, as if she were watching a montage from the past.
“Not everyone needs to fly,” he said.
* * *
It wasn’t over. Her attention drifted to other things—the persistence of dust, to books she’d never read but wished she had, to the checkout girl at the Piggly Wiggly—until, after her third scotch, she began to sniffle, then cry. Just a few tears, but enough for her cheeks to reflect the light from the lamp beside her. And yet something about them seemed forced, unreal, as if her eyes were merely leaking.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Your father’s dead,” she said. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “He died. I’m so sorry to break it to you like this. But I couldn’t hold back a minute more.”
“My father? What father? How do you—? I thought … you always told me—”
“I spent less time with him than I have with the cashier at the Piggly Wiggly. Wouldn’t recognize him now if he bit me. That’s true, to some degree. But he came to see me, Edsel.”
“He came to see you? Where? Here? Did he die here?” Bronfman had a flair for imagining death scenes.
“No, of course not. It was after. It was his spirit, or whatever it’s called. His essence. Everything that’s left after everything else is gone. I don’t know. But he was here, right where you’re sitting now.”
Bronfman suddenly felt uneasy in the chair, as if he might be sitting in an ectoplasmic residue.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Why would he come to see me?” That was not what he was thinking. “But it’s clear as day to me. These people, when they come back? They come back for a reason. With a message. When you die that’s what happens, I think. You’re in with the in-crowd. You are in the know.”
“Probably true,” he said.
“Probably? I’m certain. That’s where the truth is now, Edsel, up there. All we can see down here is a bad mimeograph of it. But dead, dead you know everything.” She leaned her head back against the chair’s cushion and her watery eyes gleamed. “He was a sight. Nice as could be, too. First time in thirty-five years.”
“So now I am wondering,” he said. “Why you?” He was appealing to whatever residual rationality she possessed; maybe she’d realize nothing had really happened if he presented things to her logically. And it wasn’t logical that this man’s ghost would visit her. He probably had a lot of other, more important stops, since out of all the hours in his life he had been with Muriel for only two of them. “You barely knew him. You were in a room with the lights off for most of your relationship. Surely he has better things to do than come see you.”
“Not me,” she said. “He didn’t come to see me. It was for you! He had a message for you.”
Bronfman settled deeper in his chair (where the ghost of his father had recently been) and took an inventory of the evening: the grave digging, the chicken-leg dinner, the scotch, the smoking, the invasive questions. Now this. What had happened to his mother? Her brain was like a trapped squirrel, frantically trying to find some way out of her head. She would say anything! Until now, his father had never even been spoken of in human terms; he might as well have been an errant sperm flying wildly through the air in a windstorm. And now he had made a special trip to see his accidental son with a message from the beyond.
“But you said you never told him about me.”
“I didn’t, Edsel,” she said. She was losing her patience with him. “But, as I said and will say again, he’s dead. He knows about you now.”
“Okay, sorry.”
She held out her glass for a little more scotch. He poured some, and when she didn’t drink it or move her hand he poured her some more. Then she drank. She took a second to reflect, or to invent, what happened next.
“He regretted dying before getting a chance to know you. He was glum about it.”
“Glum. A glum ghost. They are the worst.”
“Now you’re having fun with me,” she said.
“No, Mom, I’m not,” he said. “It’s just that if he came back—”
“If?”
“What?”
“You said ‘if.’”
“Yes. If he came back.”
“But he did come back. I just told you he did. There is no damn if about it.”
She waited for him to endorse her. And waited. She was almost crying again.
“Okay. Okay. But if he wanted to tell me something why didn’t he just come to me? Tell me himself?”
Her eyes flicked on, shimmered, flashed. “He knew I wouldn’t mind seeing him again, I guess. It was a nice gesture.”
“Okay,” Bronfman said. “I’ll bite. What did he say?”
“He said … be yourself.”
“Be myself?” His disappointment was palpable. “That’s the worst advice I’ve gotten in my life.”
“Not that self, Edsel. Listen, Roy had the world wrapped around his little finger. That’s your father in a nutshell. The most charming man I ever met, bar none. Sold his soul to the Devil for that smile! And quite the lover. Don’t look at me like that. More information than you need, perhaps, but that’s the stuff you came from, and you should know it. You need to know it. I was a fool for his bedroom hocus-pocus, mesmerized when he gnawed at my neck. Thrummed when the palms of his hands rubbed my arms, shoulders, hips, thighs. He lived, Edsel—that’s the thing. That’s all I want you to know and all he wants you to know. He lived life the way it should be lived, to its fullest. Savoring every moment and collecting those moments like rain in a cup. His cup runneth over.”
“Mother,” he said.
“Bottom line is he wants you to take a page from his book.”
“That’s what my father came back to say? To be more like him?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Pretty much.”
Bronfman didn’t believe her, of course. There was nothing about the story that could even remotely be true outside of the brain of a woman who was losing her mind, or a woman who was making this all up to try and make him feel better. That being said, he was open to believing in the message, the context, the vote in his favor—to having a father cheering in the stands for his son to make the big touchdown. He had never thought that he wanted a father, or to make a touchdown, but now he found himself wanting both, in the same way you swear off dessert until the waiter brings you the menu and you see how good everything looks.
“So he thinks I can do it?” Bronfman asked her. “Get a companion in seventy-eight days?”
She shrugged. “Absolutely,” she said. “If you give it all you’ve got.”
“But you don’t think I can.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, actually, you did say that. That’s exactly what you said.”
She drew back and peered at him. Her chin appeared to disappear into her neck. “Edsel, dear. I’m your mother. I know you better than anyone ever will. It’s not a thrilling prospect, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s true. You’ve always been exactly who you are. Hesitant. A second-guesser of second guesses. I was in labor with you for two and a half days because you wouldn’t come out. You just wouldn’t. You were such a careful child. Quiet, and so easy you were almost intolerable. You cleaned up around your own high chair when you were two years old. You started making the bed when you were five. If there was rain in the forecast, you insisted on taking two umbrellas to school, just in case you lost one of them. Sweetie, I love you. I wouldn’t trade you for anything. But you were never … in the world. Not like I was. Not like Roy.”
“Oh, really. And what was that like?”
She turned her good ear toward him. “Come again?”
“What was it like to be ‘in the world,’ as you put it? Because all I could see, from the safe and quiet spot I
watched from, was a woman who was alone for about half of the time, and for half of the other half was introducing me to some new ‘uncle,’ who was on occasion an ex-con, which was fine, of course, no judgment implied, and the rest of the time realizing what a huge mistake she’d made with this last one and went off in search of another. And Roy—my father—I’ve learned more about him today than I have in thirty-four years. But that’s not surprising, because there’s really not much you can tell me, is there? After all, you didn’t know him a lot longer than I did. So if I’m a careful person, as you put it, or hesitant, or just plain dull, which I really think is what you’re getting at, maybe it’s because I’ve seen the alternative.”
He stopped. Realizing it had been some time since he last took a breath, he breathed. His mother was deathly still, but she wasn’t dead (was she?). No, she was alive. She was more of a wax sculpture of herself than herself. What had he said? Even now, just seconds after he’d finished, he couldn’t exactly remember. He had been hurtful, though. He was sure of that. He could tell by the taste the words left in his mouth: bitter, metallic, covered in rust from years of being unused. And he could tell by his mother, who looked as though she were lifting herself up from the mat just a count or two before the end of the fight.
Her cheeks had reddened; her breath was shallow. Three little veins beneath her eyes—lost tributaries—glowed purple. She leaned back in her chair hard, as if pushed there by an emotional g-force. She closed her eyes, self-composing, and came back a few seconds later all better. Grinning, in fact. Her eyes glistening with what was, unmistakably, love.
“That,” she said, “was impressive. There may be hope for you yet.”
The air-conditioning hummed on then, and the window curtains billowed, as if a ghost, satisfied with how things had turned out, was making his final departure.
* * *
Bronfman decided to stay the night. He could wear to work tomorrow the clothes he wore today. He walked his mother to the door of her bedroom. Before she closed it, he said, “I understand why you’d think I can’t do this—find someone at the drop of a hat. But I do have a plan. I’m going to put myself out there. I’m going to make friends, because I think having friends will make me feel like a part of the world. I’m even going to exercise more. Possibly. My overall goal is to face my fears. If I do that, something positive might occur. This is my plan, anyway.”