I Thought You Were Dead (6 page)

After the day he'd had, he liked thinking about her. The idea of her gave him peace. In his father's office, he dialed her number from memory.

The message on her answering machine said,
“Hi, this is Tamsen. Please leave a message, and if this is Paul, I went out, but feel free to call and wake me up, or else call me in the morning.”

He hung up, but not before he heard her machine beep, which meant she would know someone had called and hung up and would probably guess it was him, and that was awkward. Now he had to call back and actually say something.

He stopped to parse the meaning of her message. The fact that she'd left a personal message for him was good, because it meant she was thinking of him and wasn't worried about who else (Stephen) might call and hear it. The fact that she said she'd gone out but didn't say where she'd gone probably meant she was with someone (Stephen?) and that was bad. But she'd said “feel free to call and wake me,” and that was good because it meant she wasn't sleeping over at his house, and he wasn't sleeping over at hers. But she'd added “or else call me in the morning,” and that was bad, because it could mean she was at his house, or he was at hers and she was screening her calls, and either way she would not be reachable until the following day. Unless it was good and
meant only that she really wanted him to call and didn't care when.

He had to think. It was true that they'd agreed to be open to each other and that nothing would be off limits, but that said, when they were together, he tried to avoid the subject of Stephen, and she did too. He knew that if he was going to prevail in the rivalry, he had to be the one who was the least jerky — the one she could complain to about the other, and not the one she complained to the other about.

He stared at the phone, the same vintage black Bakelite rotary-dial telephone he'd stared at for a significant portion of his adolescence, under nearly identical circumstances, trying to work up the courage to call a girl, trying to think of what to say. Same room too, his father's office having formerly been the bedroom Paul shared with his brother. It now contained a twin bed instead of a bunk bed, a set of filing cabinets, and the massive rolltop oak desk his father had inherited from Paul's grandfather. The walls were decorated with photographs — one of his father with his college buddies, another of Harrold with his navy buddies (Paul examined the photograph and tried but failed to identify the navy buddy he'd met in the hospital, the barrel-chested guy with the crew cut) — as well as various awards and recognitions of achievement Harrold had garnered over the years, including a Minneapolis School System Teacher of the Year award. Being the son of a teacher had placed Paul in a difficult position in high school, his kinship tantamount to an traitorous alliance with the Enemy. To show his friends that he could be trusted as a “regular guy,” he smoked pot and drank and got in trouble at every opportunity. Harrold Gustavson was considered one of the more acceptable teachers in the school, not popular in the palsy-walsy way some teachers were, but highly respected, even by the juvenile delinquents and the stoners and the jocks, for being fair and honest and for simply being a good teacher,
intense, everyone said — an hour in his class was like a week in anyone else's. Paul had avoided his father's class for the same reason he avoided talking about school at home. It was a question of establishing an identity for himself, apart from his family, which required some sense of autonomy and privacy. Other kids could do stuff at school that their parents never knew about; Paul never had the luxury. From eighth grade on, he left his house to hang out at his friends' houses every chance he got, to get away from what he considered oppressive and ubiquitous parental supervision. Away from prying eyes, he could use swear words in his conversations, smoke cigarettes, drink beer, goof around with chicks, let his hair down and relax — he could be himself. At one time, that meant being whatever was the opposite of who his father was. Now, surrounded by so many representations of his father's accomplishments, with nothing of note to show for his own sorry life, default contrariety didn't seem like such a good idea.

Staring at the telephone was no more productive now than it had been when he was a pimply-faced teenager, and led him to the same conclusion: “Just call — you'll think of something.” He dialed again. Twice, his finger slipped from the hole in the rotary dial and he had to start over.

“Hi, this is Tamsen. Please leave a message, and if this is Paul, I went out, but feel free to call and wake me up, or else call me in the morning. Beeeeep …”

“Hi, it's me,” he said. “I'm home and it's about ten o'clock your time. Just calling to say good night. I was thinking I might ramble on and see if I could fill your entire tape but that would be wrong. We went straight to the hospital from the airport and had dinner there. My mom is actually staying there tonight, so I've got the house to myself. It's a little spooky. I'll tell you all about my dad when I talk to you, but the basic word is, he's stable and resting and not likely to get any worse, so there's no emergency,
exactly, except that they still don't know how bad it is. There's positive indications and negative ones and they're still doing tests. I'll keep you posted. We're all sort of spent. I had a little spat with my brother, which I will also tell you about later.

“Anyway, I really was going to ramble on and on to see if I could make you laugh at how I just kept going on and on and on and on, but actually I won't do that. I wish you were here. I'm in my father's office, which used to be my bedroom, mine and Carl's, and I'm looking at all these awards and honors he won, and it's making me think I really need to get some honors and awards. Maybe when I get home, I'll see if I have an Old English font and print myself up some awards to hang in my studio.”

This was good. He spoke slowly. He could imagine the smile on her face. She'd said she loved the way he made her laugh. This was worth points.

“I know I promised not to ramble on and on and fill up your whole tape, and I won't, I swear, but right now I wish you were home. If I was there, I'd get
Casablanca
from Blockbuster and put it in the VCR because you said you've never seen it, and then I'd rub your feet while we watched it. Tell the truth, it's a little weird to be sitting on this bed, having fantasies about you. I don't know if I told you this, but all the prepubescent fantasies I had as a kid generally involved situations where girls were forced to sleep with me, where we'd be trapped in cave-ins or shipwrecked on a deserted island or stranded by a plane crash at the North Pole and I'd rescue these various damsels in distress and none of them ever voluntarily offered their affections. They only kissed me because I saved their lives and because I was literally the last man on earth. Doesn't say much for my self-esteem, does it? Anyway, we can talk further about this, but I'd really hate to ramble on and fill up your entire tape.”

He paused, counting slowly to five.

“Gosh. It's really cold here. Is it cold there? It's cold here. How
much snow did you get? I'm really sorry to just ramble on and on like this. Seriously. Anyway, I shouldn't ramble on and on and on, but I wanted to tell you I miss you and I wish I could talk to you. To tell the truth, part of me hopes my dad gets better so that someday he can meet you, because it would make me sad to think he never did …”

He caught himself. He'd broken an unwritten rule, a tacit clause in their agreement to live fully in the present moment and not talk too much about the future. He needed to put the cat back in the toothpaste, as his mother, prone to malapropisms, might have said.

“Okay, now I definitely think I shouldn't have said that. Don't get me wrong, I would love for you to meet my family, obviously, someday — not right now, necessarily — and I'd obviously love to meet your mom and all that, but we're probably not at that point yet in our relationship where we can start talking about meeting each other's families … not that there's any reason …”

“Beeeeeeeeeeep.”

“Sonofabitch!” he said, slamming the phone back in its cradle.

It had been a long day. He hoped he would be back on his game tomorrow.

T
hat's
what you fought about?” Stella said. “Paul — a
fortune cookie
?”

“There was a little more to it than that,” Paul said.

“Not even that he ate your cookie,” Stella continued. “I can understand getting mad at somebody if they ate your cookie. You're telling me he was trying to get
you
to eat your
own
cookie — do I have that right? I'm just trying to understand this.”

“He's controlling,” Paul said. “He thinks he knows what's best for everybody. I suppose he means well, but it's so irritating.”

When Paul got back to Northampton, he'd taken the trash out, watered his plants, and then dumped the contents of his suitcase into the laundry basket. He'd played the messages on his answering machine, the last of which was from Tamsen, saying she wanted to drive up to see him that night. He'd called her back, got her machine, told her he was heading to the Bay State for a beer later and to find him there, and then drove to collect Stella, who'd been staying with her friend Chester, the retriever with the heart of gold and the brain of stone.

Her first question, once he'd lifted her into the car, was how his father was feeling. He told her what he knew. He'd visited the hospital every day during his stay, sometimes with his mother, sometimes with his sister or alone, reading out loud to his father from the newspaper and adopting a disparaging tone when mentioning those goddamn Democrats, which he assumed his father
would find therapeutic. On Paul's final visit, his father had been conscious and awake, his eyes open and able to follow people around the room, but he was otherwise unresponsive. Paul had sat by his father's bedside and held Harrold's hand (he hadn't done that since he was four) and felt it twitch slightly.

“I think he was glad we were there,” Paul had explained to Stella, “but it was hard to tell. It's very strange when you can't look at someone's face and guess what they're thinking. You don't realize how much that matters until it's absent.”

“How's your mom dealing with it?”

“She's upbeat, actually,” Paul said. “Everybody's rolling up their sleeves and saying, ‘Let's get to work.' ”

“Why do you need to roll up your sleeves?”

“It's just an expression.”

Stella silently considered Paul's report, then said she thought something was still bothering him. That's when he told her he'd had a fight with his brother, adding the story about the fortune cookie because he thought it was funny.

“I don't think it would have killed you to eat the cookie,” Stella said dryly. “Just to keep the peace. That's all I'm saying.”

“It's the principle,” Paul said. “That's what you would have done?”

“And the fortune too,” she said. “That would have solved both your problems. Besides, if you eat something you don't want to eat, you can always swallow grass and throw it all up later.”

“Easy for you to say,” Paul said, but she was right, again. Blessed was the peacemaker. “In humans, they call that bulimia. Plus there wasn't any grass. There was snow on the ground. What do dogs do in the winter when they need to throw up?”

“Change the subject if you want to,” Stella said. “I just think you have a really strange relationship with your brother. It sounds so petty. And I mean that in the pejorative sense. Don't you love your brother?”

“Of course I love my brother,” Paul said. “I just wish he lived in New Zealand.”

“Is that a nice place?” Stella asked.

“It's a very nice place,” Paul said. “Good location too.”

As Paul drove, he thought of all the times, growing up, when he'd wished far worse for his brother. The time Carl had walked away from the chessboard, refusing to either finish the game or officially resign, with Paul two moves from checkmate and about to beat his brother for the first time in his life at anything. Then there was the time Carl stole the shoelaces out of Paul's sneakers when his own broke, or finished the milk when Paul still had cereal left, or licked the centers out of the Oreos and then put them back in the bag, or the times he'd made Paul burn his marshmallows making s'mores by outfencing him over the campfire with his roasting stick (for years, Paul pretended he liked burnt marshmallows). Yet despite the basic sibling rivalry stuff of early childhood, for the first ten years of his life, Paul had wanted to do everything Carl did, wear the same clothes, get his hair cut the same way. When Paul entered junior high and the war between them intensified, Paul couldn't help thinking, “This is how you repay me for a lifetime of adoration?”

He looked at Stella, who was staring at him, her head cocked.

“It's hard to explain,” he told Stella. “Do you remember when you were just a puppy and you lived on a farm with your brothers and sisters, and you were” — he had told Stella once that she was the runt of her litter, and that had hurt her feelings — “the
nicest
dog in your family, but your older brothers were bigger than you, so if there was a bowl of food on the floor or a table scrap, they ate it first and never let you have any?”

“Vaguely,” Stella said.

“Well, it's sort of like that,” Paul said. “With people, you get in these relationships and you never grow out of them.”

“With dogs, you don't have to grow out of them,” Stella said.
“There's a social order. That's what you want. I understand if you don't know what your place is. That could be confusing.”

“It never bothered you when your brothers got to eat first?”