Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 3

A couple of weeks later, Mom and Dad took a little vacation, leav ing the twins in Michele's care-not that they needed that much looking after anymore. But we all felt scrambled, breathless. The girls swung with Michele for a week, and her capacity to radiate suns.h.i.+ne was put to the test.

I expected any number of thunderclaps upon their return, but re entry was uneventful: Dad was smoothly, loudly affectionate, shout ing back at the twins, laughing, sticking out a hey-buddy hand for me to shake-which I took, with real happiness. Mom followed, but not right away. Michele dashed outside to meet her, and they came in together a few minutes later, their arms around one another.

Everyone took a big breath. Everyone relaxed. Except the twins.

part 2 The business has changed. What used to sc.r.a.pe up ten grand in a year now brings ten grand a pop: a split-level Dad raised from eleven ounces of soft- and hardwood sticks, cellophane, plaster, and paint in a week's time is a hot item, and the rich collector is always col lecting. My own work, while in demand, naturally brings less. But now and again I act as consultant with the big makers. In the age of virtual wonders, the old stuff is creaky, quaint, and costly-collect ible to some, art to others-and I am a minor celebrity, salesman, and spokesman for the good old days.

Which ended when the clients quit coming.

"Where the h.e.l.l did everybody go?" Dad asked too often, then not often enough, then not at all. He lived on the phone, shout ing enthusiasm down the wire, pressing old clients for the names of their friends.

The twins slipped out of the workshop, where the thinning for ests were beginning to collect dust, and into life. But Dad wouldn't allow anything to be covered. ("Get those G.o.dd.a.m.ned sheets off of that work.") We finished 1968 eating out of cans. Mom had tak en a job landscaping for a local builder and lived in rubber boots, rubbed lotion onto the backs of her roughening hands, smiled.

Dad stuck it out downstairs until it was over. We squeaked through Christmas.

On New Year's Day, grim-faced, Dad brought up box after box from the cellar, and he and I loaded a few small towns into the back of the station wagon. Two hours later, he announced he was going into business with a man he knew from the trade-a Mr. Golden, who had a hobby shop in town. He'd bought in with miniature real estate.

The Chief had become a partner.

He and Mom talked about putting the house up for sale.

Michele went to college.

But before all that happened-that and more, to our great sor row-I went into the navy, where I found lots of trouble waiting for me. *

I met Darwin Tolstoy in boot camp. He had not, it turned out, been named after the famous Darwin, but after his grandmother Dar winia, who had been named after the famous Darwin. A large, shy Minnesota boy, he struggled to keep a low profile, but his name and size were against it. Crouching, he became more, not less, visible, his sleek head and large ears cutting through the lower alt.i.tudes, bright eyes s.h.i.+ning like anxious headlights. Our company commander, a bitter, middle-aged drunk who hated boots, and especially boots who stood out in any way, called him "Tool Boy," "Toadstool," "Toy town," and "Toasty."

"Toasty" stuck with the men, in part because it sounded friend ly and also because no one knew what to make of Darwin. Was he man or mouse? Brain or r.e.t.a.r.d?

Certainly not the latter: When tapped as company historian, Dar-win wrote up two dozen thin, just-add-water personal histories, embellis.h.i.+ng and improving the life stories of boys who had had too little life, thus far, to contain much history. He took down the facts on me during one of the company's twice-daily fifteen-minute smoke-and-c.o.kes.

The air in the smoke-and-c.o.ke room was pure sepia poison. Boots chain-smoked, guzzled c.o.kes, and shouted. Toasty leaned in to ask a question and after I answered, I asked if I could be his a.s.sistant. He replied that he didn't really need one. I said I'd help, anyway. Looking away, he nodded.

Nights after dinner, we sat in a corner of the barracks and worked on the histories, ignoring the general roar. We worked and talked and wrote our letters until lights out and then we went to our bunks. Days, we double-timed the boot-camp routine: rifle range, naval history, fire control. Things slowed down in the mess hall, where the air was dark with the aroma of burned coffee. Darwin and I sat together-sometimes. A caution I'd never known opened its eyes, found mine, and whispered into my ear.

On Christmas Eve, Darwin and me and about ten others from adjacent barracks were volunteered to set up chairs for the follow-ing day's ec.u.menical service in the drill hall, a building so huge it encompa.s.sed distinct atmospheres. Carols tinkled down from speakers hidden in literally unseen heights, echo upon breathy echo s.h.i.+vering the air with slivers of thinnest gla.s.s. Three thousand fold-ing chairs lay in vast windrows, gleaming in the dim light, along the blocks-long walls. We set about it, resigned to working all night. Darwin and I worked together, gradually moving away from the others, until fields of s.p.a.ce lay between us and them. At midnight we drank coffee, discussed the histories, shared an unregulated cig-arette, smiled. Looked at one another, smiled, embraced, kissed, and made love, our maneuvers clumsy, urgent, and quick-a liquid, earth-shaking full-body handshake, ears p.r.i.c.king for the sound of voices, my hand over my own mouth to stifle the cry at the mo ment of climax.

"Tolstoy," I said, holding his big head and looking into his sleepy, brilliant eyes. "Tolstoy, I love you. What should I call you?" We were reclining lumpily on pea coats in a shadowed alcove between two banks of chairs. From a quarter mile away, men's voices mingled ic ily with the notes of "Silent Night."

Darwin smiled and looked away. "Leo," he said.

Because he was too tall to negotiate safely a s.h.i.+p's pa.s.sageways and hatches, Leo was a.s.signed sh.o.r.e duty at the Naval Air Station on Coronado Island, just over the bridge from where fifty thousand other sailors and myself were kept fresh in the tin cans of San Di ego's Pacific Fleet. Overjoyed at our luck in being stationed so close together, we got an apartment in Old Town, ransacked the Goodwill for kitchen stuff and a bed, and spent our weekends on the beach.

On weekday mornings I took the bus to the base and at the end of the day, caught a bus home-lots of sailors did. Leo rode a Honda over the Bay Bridge twice a day; on laundry day, toll change rained from all his pockets. When one of us had duty, the other bach'ed it. California was hot, cool, foggy, sunny, cheap, glorious. We lay in the dunes piled at the back of Coronado beach with paperbacks and drank Oly and gazed at the far-off loaf of Point Loma baking in the sun.

One morning on the way to the base, a sailor from my s.h.i.+p-a gunner's mate with whom I had a nodding acquaintance-pushed his way to where I was standing in the aisle.

"Hey, lady," he said.

"Beg pardon?"

He grinned-Swenson was the name-and looked around. "He begs my f.u.c.king pardon." He turned back to me. The smile had be come a sneer. "I said, 'Hey, lady.'"

"I don't get you." But I did.

Two other men from our s.h.i.+p were sitting nearby. They watched with interest.

"I said, 'Hey, f.a.ggot.'"

More men became interested. Message delivered, Swenson breathed his dismal breath in my direction and turned away. The bus droned into the base lot, cornering like an old man negotiat-ing ice.

At noon chow I got looks on the mess deck. There was some high schooltype snickering. A boatswain's mate name of Henderson fol-lowed me into the head after lunch and demanded I go down on him and, when I tried to push past him, knocked me to the deck. Mildly concussed, I made my way to the electronics supply room, let myself in, and sat shaking for ten minutes.

That evening, I told Leo what had happened. "Please, don't," I said, but he was up and out of the apartment. I went after him. We walked twelve blocks and ended up at a Denny's. Leo and I sat op-posite each other and I looked at him looking at our coffees. "It'll be okay," I said. "It's nothing. It'll pa.s.s." His face was white, he was that scared.

There was no laughter the following day. I saw some stone faces, I saw others that were too happy to see me and too busy to pause. I cruised through my duties in Radar and, spinning out the time, continued through chow-skipped the meal, cursing myself-and finally exited Radar at the end of the day and stood at the railing. A pelican sailed with amazing slowness down, down, and plooshed! into the bay.

Leo had duty that night. I ate, watched television, and picked up a magazine. At eleven I called him and was put through. What? he said, as if we had a bad connection. What is it? "I wanted to make sure you were all right," I said-and felt foolish. All right? Okay. I was baffled by the distant tone, the bland wall of words. "Can you talk now?" A pause, then: All right, then. And he hung up.

He came in the next morning in a rage. "You can't call me there. Don't ever call me there! Are you crazy? I don't answer the phone there, the duty officer answers the phone!"

"So? I'm glad he's doing his duty." I moved in, trying to make light, but he pushed my arms aside.

"These people know-are you crazy? We can't let these people know what we're doing."

"What are we doing?"

"We are breaking the law." He stood with fists clenched, redden- ing, his Midwestern shabby gentility in tatters.

"I love you." I was spiraling down, every word-even the right ones-wrong.

"You're late," he said. "Go."

After morning muster, I set about replacing a series of relays in a Radar unit. When I returned to the electronics shop, the s.h.i.+p's doc tor, a lieutenant commander, was in occupation. He held his hat in his hand as if he'd come to ask a favor-which, in a sense, he had.

In his stateroom, he pushed a paper across the desk. Would I swear to a preliminary finding, pending an investigation, that I was not a h.o.m.os.e.xual presently cohabiting with another h.o.m.os.e.xual named Darwin Tolstoy? "We know all about it." He looked sad.

I said I wouldn't sign.

"I wish it were otherwise," he said. "We will have to let you go, John. There are . . . better and worse ways to go about this."

I left the s.h.i.+p and walked down the pier, so dizzy with confusion I lurched. At the apartment, I opened a beer and sat at the kitchen window and looked out into the light of the flawless, changeless California day. When the telephone rang, I seized it.

It was Mother, sobbing. "Johnny, you have to come home. You have to come home now, right away, right now." *

Late in the afternoon of the October day that Mother, the Chief, and Michele celebrated the twins' sixteenth year, the girls went off to spend the night with one of their friends. We found out later that they didn't stay with the girl, who was a party to the deception, but instead walked over to Route 63 to hitchhike to New Haven to meet up with a boy Eve had met at the beach the previous summer. They planned to return to the friend's house the following day, and then return home-with no one the wiser.

A battered Lincoln pulled up. The driver said he was a musician heading to New York to play a gig. He had some beer in the car and Eve and Peggy shared one-their first. I've got something better than beer, he said. Would you girls like to get high? I always get high before a gig. Eve said they were all laughing, and then he asked if they'd like to hear a really different kind of song-one of his own-and that she and Peggy said okay. But he didn't sing anything, Eve said. The girls talked to each other for a few minutes, but the silences grew longer, and the car flew along. Then he said, as if talking to himself, We'll have to be careful. He pulled the big car off of 63 and on to the road to Peat Swamp Reservoir and then into a dirt pulloff that dis solved into gra.s.sy scrub. He shut off the car's engine.

The girls hadn't had much to drink, Eve said, just the one beer between them, and in the sudden quiet under the trees, with the light on the water glimmering up through the turning foliage, they were frightened. They told him they really needed to get to New Haven and he replied, Yeah, but we were going to get high. The girls said that maybe they shouldn't. The man was quiet again, Eve said.

He glared at the water as if the view hurt his feelings and said, Did you ever see anything so beautiful? My sister said that they looked at the water but did not find it beautiful. Then he raised his voice.

Well, how about that song, anyway, before we get going? he said, and they were relieved and said they wanted to hear it. My ax is in the trunk, he said, and they all got out and walked around to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and reached inside, and when he straightened up again, Eve said, he was holding a tire iron. And then his arm as if spring-loaded flicked toward her, the impact of the bar crus.h.i.+ng the bones on the left side of her face and the bridge of her nose and driving a splinter of bone into her eye.

When she regained consciousness, she was alone in the dark. She tried to stand up, but the pain kept her down, and she pa.s.sed out again. When she came to, the woods were full of light and the sing ing of birds. She crawled to the road, where she was picked up by a man and a boy who were on their way to fish the reservoir.

Peggy's body was discovered a month later in a ditch in Hart ford. *

The big console stereo in the living room had always belonged, more or less, to Michele and me, but after Peggy was killed, the par ents took it back. They buried our records under a mound of their own-old, heavy 33s that slid out of their sleeves with authority, and even a few 78s, glossy, hazed with age, filled with jumpy music that clawed the air. Dad built manhattans while Mom bent her face to the labels. Swimming in her dress, worn down to the thinness of the handle of a pitchfork plunged into the heart of grief, she looked as though she would will into being the mood she would suffer. Then she and Father drifted together and clung, through long afternoons that floated on smooth music and the swish and rustle of Moth er's dress. The Chief, steeped in bourbon-even his new paleness seemed to mellow to the rusty color of booze-anch.o.r.ed himself swayingly in the middle of the floor and spun his partner through the odd and fancy figures of dances they'd learned back when they first met. They went through the military motions of a tango and tried the rush and whirl of a waltz but settled finally on the rhumba, that simple movable rectangle, spinning their grief in a slowly spi raling pieta in which the living hold and comfort the living. *

I returned to San Diego three weeks later and let myself into the apartment. Leo had kept the place neat, as always, right to the pen ciled note, squared to the edge of the kitchen table. I slipped it from beneath a seash.e.l.l.

I am very sorry but received word this week of immediate transfer and have had to move as quickly as you might imagine. I wish you well, never otherwise. D.

I have noticed lately that all my memories now have equal weight. A sea change of middle age? Some rearrangement of the ballast be-tween my ears? It's a small thing, but to discover that the world of my memory no longer discriminates between the recent past-this morning, or ten minutes ago-and the past of a world so distant it might be hiding on the other side of the stars, while no great shock, is still a sadness. It was not so long ago that I also noticed, climb ing a staircase in strong morning light, that the skin of my arms was covered with dust. But looking more closely, I saw that what I had thought dust was instead a fine, soft skein of wrinkles. So the past, loosened from the net of memory, swims away, while I am held more firmly than ever here, in what appears to be the present. *

I refuse to do billboards, or even to sell them. I ask my customers, Why pollute a world of any size? Yes, they say, lifting one of Mi- chele's creations out of the box, but it's not the real world. No, I say.

It is not. All the more reason to leave it alone.

Fired from the service, I came home to Darien to find the house hold breaking up. Michele had come close to getting her degree, but left school when Peggy was killed, waffled about going back, then didn't, then went to work for a graphic designer. Dad found a buy er for the house. He took the couple through the building, top to bottom, throwing open doors, thumping walls, demonstrating the soundness of every switch, latch, and appliance, right down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the papers lay on the bar, waiting to be signed.

Everyone but Eve was glad to go. Michele took Mrs. Claus and got an apartment in town, above Ackerman's Hardware, and I slid in there with her temporarily, sleeping on the couch, playing with the cat-but gingerly, now. Stroking the whitening throat she turned up to my touch. I hung out in my alien civvies, lonely, bruised inside.

Mother and Dad moved to a condo village-one of the first of these-on the other side of town. "Miller's Creek," both mill and creek having been obliterated in the process of its creation. They settled in just before Thanksgiving, and on the day, Michele and I went over together. "Don't laugh," Dad said when he opened the door. "It was a great deal." Theirs was the model unit.

At dinner-our first Thanksgiving with an empty chair-we couldn't get the rhythm right. The Chief shrugged, talked, kept the conversation going. He was skinnier, but no less quick; sharper, if anything, as if he sensed dullness in the air and would cut it free, but the smudges under his eyes were the size of thumbprints, his skin sallow as a poor man's candle. He lamented the end of the busi-ness, but without fuss. "No one wants small anymore," he said, and pointed at the TV. "Unless it's that."

But occasionally a client appeared. Dad took me into the apart-ment's little den and rattled out a rolled-up drawing. A church. Two hundred years. A Celebration of Our Heritage. Dad grimaced. "Your mother doesn't think much of it. Neither do I, tell the truth. I'll put it this way: It's G.o.dd.a.m.ned dull." But his fingers caressed the pic-ture's solemn lines. He let go of the drawing and it rolled itself up.

"Tell you what, John. I'd like to do it, anyway. Just for fun. Of course, we don't have a shop. What can you do without a shop?"

He glanced around the box-like room. Walls and ceiling smooth as sheets of paper, rectilinear windows, their sills bland as balsa wood, the gla.s.s flawless, spotless. The carpet beneath our feet soft as felt you'd slash with a razor just to see it fall away from the blade.

I smoothed the drawing open, grabbed books, dealt them to the corners to hold the paper flat. Mother came in, Eve at her elbow. They were seldom apart.

"Oh, dear," Mother said. "This thing." But she, too, touched the drawing. We all looked down at the artist's work. Eve's fingers traced the irises sketched beneath the building's bank of windows. "Pretty," she said, and gave her hand to Mother. But the flowers, the tall case-ments designed to drink sunlight, the white exterior-the whiteness of a purity we believe we can turn to-said to us only that Peggy had gone out of the world.

Nevertheless, we looked down at the drawing as if we were see-ing our own home, all together, for the first time. Because just then, Michele came in. Finding ourselves in a circle around the table, we joined hands.

And looking over at Mother's face, I remembered again who she was.

This is what I mean: When Mom and Dad took that little vacation-the only one, I think, that they've ever taken-and returned home, their problems apparently mended, I registered a shock: I didn't know my mother. After Dad came in, in the slow seconds of the screen door's drift-ing back, I had spied Mom sitting in the car-and in the moment before she looked up and pulled her face into a smile for Michele, who'd run out to greet her, I didn't recognize her.

In those seconds, what I saw was just a woman sitting in a car, like any number of women I'd seen in parking lots and in the street and in stores-anonymous, bearing lives I'd never given a moment's thought to except to cla.s.sify and catalog as members of what I called the female race: girls, wives, women, sisters, mothers. Peering into purses and mirrors, scanning shelves, looking for change or cold remedies or reaching for a baby or prodding a sulky toddler. Women of the world-or of no world I knew existed. Their world, it is theirs. The small world that sits within and completes other worlds: the little world of oil and gears and heartbeats and joys and vanis.h.i.+ngs and the silences of the everyday and the every night. The world we keep breaking down and they keep building and giving back and back and back into our hands.

White.

Without thinking, she hit him. And because she had not made a fist-for all that had been said, she had not expected to strike her husband-Sheila's blow was neither slap nor punch, but a flail of nail-tipped fingers that zipped open the skin under his near-side eye. The cigarette he had just put to his lips flicked itself neatly out the driver's-side window as his hands shot up in a reflex of shock, and as she pushed the door open, she thought: He doesn't know what hit him.

They'd just seen a baseball game. Grant had played in high school and college, but out of school for seven years, he liked to watch, now. Televised games, mostly, but sometimes, like today, the Pa-dres, high up beneath the blazing sun.

They drank beer. Excited, Grant scratched his tingling buzz-cut scalp, pointed down through acres of broiling air, detailing the play-ers' mistakes, while Sheila nodded.

Afterward, disoriented in the crowds churning through the ex-its, Sheila lost him. When at last she found the car, she slipped in and buckled up, smoothed black hair down the nape of her neck, didn't look at him. Didn't have to.

"Look," he said, tuning the AC. "I told you I wanted to get out of here fast." Also trying to back the car into a break that closed as suddenly as it had opened. "Now look."

"I was trying to hurry. I couldn't keep up with you. We didn't even see all of the last inning."

"We know how it ends, Sheila. Well, now we're stuck." Grant lay on the horn but no one seemed to notice.

Sheila's voice notched up into the harsh, defeated range. "Well, I can't keep up with you," she said. "I don't like walking alone."

She gazed out at the acres of cars and thought of the television westerns she'd watched growing up back East: plains alive with res tive, murmuring cattle, rain sifting from Technicolor skies. They were sitting not more than ten miles from their neighborhood's strip malls and lock-step streets, rows of pastel-bright houses with low-pitched, pebbled roofs, west-facing bedroom windows sealed from the sun with aluminum foil. With the AC on, the car had rap idly cooled. Everything she had loved about California had already evaporated off her skin. And now this.

"If I wanted to walk alone, I'd go for a walk by myself."

"Well, go ahead, for Christ's sake." The hands that gripped the wheel fell to his sides. "We have plenty of time now."

Sheila stared at him. "Would you like me to?"

His eyes rested on hers for the first time that day. "Whatever.

Whatever you want."

She sprung the catch and the seat belt slithered aside. "Okay," she said. "I'm going." She opened the door.

"Oh, boy-oh yeah" he said, and reached automatically for his cigarettes. "Weird City. Here it comes." He put a cigarette between his lips.

Without thinking, Sheila hit him.

In the grocery store, Sheila would watch as Grant rounded the end of an aisle, disappearing into, say, Dairy. She'd catch up in, say, Wine & Beer. He'd be putting a six-pack into the cart: "What-you want to spend the night here?"

When they attended church, Grant rose with the choir for the closing hymn and bolted, leaving her to stand in the queue to speak to the minister.

They had recently attended the funeral of Sheila's aunt. As Sheila contemplated the finality of a quarter ton of earth heaped next to a hole in the ground, Grant, beside her, said, "Okay?" That night in their hotel, Grant preceded her in sleep. Sheila lay awake, view ing in her mind's eye an image of the distance between Grant and herself until the picture-a kind of weepy seascape-dissolved in a white light that was like sleep, and then was sleep. *