The Other Side of the World (9 page)

“So which was better,” Seana asked, “the dream or the reality?”

Trish laughed. “I'm not telling,” she said.

“Smart girl,” Seana said.

“I feel like I'm living in a book you wrote just for me.”

“For us,” I corrected.

“For
us
,” Trish said. “Even better.”

“My pleasure,” said Seana, who was spooned against my back, her breasts warm against my skin.

“God, I hope so!” Trish said.

I took Seana's hands in mine, at my chest, and pulled her closer while I tried to take in what was going on—what was actually
happening
. My head was clear, and my senses alert—I'd rarely if ever had hangovers from smoking pot; rather the
opposite—I'd usually woken up especially clear-headed after a night of smoking the stuff. I knew, of course, that I'd been drawn to Seana from the first time I'd met her, and had often
fantasized
moments like this, but now, even though the moment I was living in seemed a dream come true for me the way Trish said it was for her, there was a difference, I wanted to say: because of the fact that I'd
known
Seana for more than twenty years—for most of my life!—what had happened and what was happening seemed very
natural
somehow—as least as inevitable and familiar as it was wonderful…

“And oh—wait a minute,” Trish said. She was propped up on an elbow, facing me. “Before I go, I have to tell you something—a secret I've been saving. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Seana said.

“Okay. Here it is: Before you came, I took a chance and went off my meds—my anti-depressants.”

“Me too,” Seana said.

“
You
went off your meds?” Trish said.

“Yes, and a good thing too, to judge from the results.”

“I mean, are you
really
on meds?” Trish said.

“Many of our finest writers are on meds,” Seana said. “Mine's Celexa—twenty milligrams, once or twice a day, depending. RPN, as they say. And you?”

“Cymbalta—sixty milligrams a day, and it's a killer—wreaks havoc with my sexuality
and
my digestive system.”

“Sixty is too much,” Seana said. “Try going down to forty.”

“I'm not on
any
anti-depressants,” I said.

“Poor Charlie,” Trish said, kissing me on the nose. “So forlorn. But we love him anyway, don't we?”

Seana nuzzled the nape of my neck. “Mmmmm,” she said.

Trish got out of bed, dropped an orange muu-muu over her head, then kissed each of us, me on the forehead, Seana on the back of her neck, and, stepping over toys and around baskets of laundry, called out to Anna that she was on her way.

“Did Max ever tell you about his Uncle Ben?” I asked when Trish was gone.

“No,” Seana said. “Max never told me about his Uncle Ben.”

“Ben was his favorite—his father's younger brother, who died at sea while in with the merchant marines—but that's another story—and he was cremated. The ashes wound up with Max, who kept them in a small covered Japanese bowl on our fireplace mantle. This was when I was a little boy, and whenever I pointed to the bowl, he'd say, ‘The way I look at it, a Benny saved is a Benny urned.'”

Seana groaned and, both arms around my waist, pulled me tight against her. “I like you a lot, you know,” she said, “even though you're a much younger man, and more like Max than is good for me.”

 

When we woke the next time, I said I'd been thinking about Max—worrying about leaving him alone in our big house. I was feeling nostalgic about him—lonesome really, though perhaps not for him so much as for things we'd done together we wouldn't ever do again.

“Lonesome's okay,” Seana said. “But nostalgia's a bitch, a veil for rage most of the time.”

“‘A veil for rage,'” I said. “I like that—Wallace Stevens?”

“No.”

“Seana Shulamith McGee O'Sullivan?”

“No.”

“A veil for rage because remembering stuff that way, especially childhood, masks how miserable it really was?”

“You're smarter than you look,” she said.

“But I am definitely feeling lonesome for the guy,” I said, “and I'm wondering why I'm feeling this way
now
and if you're feeling the same…”

“You know it,” she said.

Earlier, I'd been remembering something that happened on
one of our first trips to New York. Max had given me a tour of his old neighborhood—shown me the famous places: the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park, where Ebbets Field used to be—but what I'd been remembering about the trip wasn't anything we did or saw, I told Seana, but what happened on the subway.

“Going into Brooklyn we'd stayed in the front car so I could watch the train rocketing through tunnels and switching tracks, and I remember being excited—and frightened—by the possibility we might crash into an oncoming train, or that I might see somebody fall from the platform onto the tracks as our train entered a station,” I said. “Then, on the way back to Manhattan, our subway car was crowded, lots of people standing. It must have been rush hour, and there was one huge black man taking up three seats and, with a glowering expression, daring anyone to question his right to do so. He wore a red bandana on his head, pirate-style, and a sleeveless T-shirt—the kind my father said Italians called wife-beater shirts—that showed off how buff he was.

“Without warning me about what he was going to do, Max bent over and spoke to the man. ‘Excuse me, sir,' Max said, ‘but I was wondering if you would be kind enough to make a bit of room so that my son and I might sit.' The man did a double-take, frowned, then said ‘Sorry,' shifted to the side, and made room for us, after which, at station stops, and when we were stuck between stations a few times, my father engaged him in conversation, starting off by admiring a tattoo of a large-breasted mermaid that adorned the man's shoulder—it turned out that the man, who gave his name as Willy Williams, had, like Max, served time at sea—and inquiring about Willy's line of work. Willy said that after a stint in the Navy he'd been a millwright—a kind of jack-of-all-trades—in an Indianapolis auto factory, but had come into hard times, and my father offered the fact that he was in the education business, and that he might be able to
provide useful contacts and information. Had Willy been to the local VA facility? he inquired—careful, I noticed, not to call it a hospital—and Willy said he'd been meaning to go, but hadn't gotten around to it.

“My father took out an index card on which he wrote his name, address, and phone numbers—office and home—and when we got out at Penn Station, Willy shook my father's hand. ‘You're the man,' he said, and then he shook my hand and said that one day I'd be the man too.”

“Did your father ever hear from him?” Seana asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I never asked, he never told.”

“Maybe he'll show up when we're in Brooklyn together,” Seana said. “You never know. Weird things happen if you make room for them.”

 

For breakfast Trish made blueberry pancakes, along with link sausage, fried scrapple, and hash browns. Anna, sitting in a high-chair and using her fingers, ate everything, and when I remarked on how unusual this seemed to me for a child her age—how un-American!—Trish beamed with pride and said she believed the best thing for children was to feed them what you fed yourself and not to give in to their whims because if you did you put limitations on what their taste buds would accept when they became grown-ups.

“And speaking of the future,” she said, “I forgot to tell you about something I was thinking last night about the past—about another one of my dreams. Do you want to hear?”

Gabe was sniffing at the air and talking about how good the house smelled. Not breakfast, but the other smell, like the smell in the kitchen whenever his mother spilled spices on a hot stove. His favorite smell of all, though, was burning wool or burning
hair
. Sometimes, after his mother gave him a haircut, he said that she let him take hair she'd cut off and he'd pinch the strands
with metal tongs and hold them over one of the burners until they sparked and sizzled.

“I never play with fire otherwise,” Gabe said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“What I remembered last night was about who I wanted to be,” Trish said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Who who,” Gabe said. “I'm an owl too.”

Anna giggled. “Hoo-hoo,” she said. “Hoo-hoo.”

“Who I wanted to be was the young woman who puts a daisy in the barrel of a soldier's rifle at an anti-war rally,” Trish said. “Do you remember her? I had a poster of her up on my wall at UMass.”

“My mother says she used to be a flower child,” Gabe said.

“Hoo-hoo,” Anna said again. “Hoo-hoo.”

“
Flo-wer pow-wer
,” Trish whispered in Anna's ear while she nuzzled her. “
Flo-wer pow-wer
. Do you have
flo-wer pow-wer
, sweetheart?”

Anna laughed, and repeated the words, which came out clearly, though without the ‘l': “
Fow-wer pow-wer
…
Fow-wer pow-wer
…”

Under the table, Seana took my hand in hers. “I like it here,” she said to Trish, “and I was wondering: Have you considered selling time-shares?”

“No,” Trish said. “But it sounds like an idea whose time may have come, even though with the money Nick left me I probably won't have to take in boarders for a while.”

“Can you tell me about my father?” Gabe asked.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Gabe said.

“As it happens, I may have a good deal for you this morning,” I said. “But you have to be patient. Can you be patient?”

“Sometimes,” Gabe said.

“Okay,” I said, and I took a deep breath, one eye on Seana while I spoke to Gabe. “So here's the scoop: My father and Seana
have been encouraging me to write a book about
your
father, and I've been thinking I might just do it.”

“
Really?
” Gabe said.

“A book about
Nick
?” Trish said.

“Not just about Nick. The book would be about Nick and me—about our lives in the Far East.”

“In Singapore,” Gabe corrected.

“In Singapore,” I said. “Yes. And if I write the book, I'm thinking I could also write about our lives before Singapore, when we were in college together.”

“Will you write about how my father
died
?” Gabe asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“Not good enough,” Seana said, and she went to the stove, where Trish was whipping up batter for another round of pancakes and spoke to Trish. “Will
you
tell us stories about Nick even if they're not for publication?”

“Maybe,” Trish said. “Who knows?”

“Stories that took place in the olden days?” Gabe said.

“Olden and golden,” Trish said. “When families were happy the way we are this morning.”

“In my family—O'Sullivans and McGees, and on my mother's side, Kearneys and Mahoneys—we found happiness and inner peace by humiliating one another on a regular basis,” Seana said.

“Though we're not Irish here in Thomaston, we still drink our fair share,” Trish said. “And rumor has it that Ozzie and Harriet retired to rural Maine and are living among us.”

“Ha ha,” Gabe said. “My mother tells a lot of jokes about Ozzie and Harriet, but I don't know who Ozzie and Harriet are.”

“They're illusions,” Seana said.

“My favorite family is Abbott and Costello,” Gabe said. “We have a collection of their movies on DVD. Do you like Abbott and Costello?”

“I
love
Abbott and Costello,” Seana said. “If Costello were still alive, I'd marry him.”

Gabe started to laugh, a high-pitched laugh that got louder and louder until, his face bright red, he gagged and had to spit out what was in his mouth.

“Can you tell us what was so funny?” Trish asked when Gabe had stopped coughing.

“What's so funny is Costello,” Gabe said. “But he'd make a silly husband because he'd do everything wrong all the time.”

“He'd keep me laughing, though,” Seana said, “and I believe he'd be wonderfully affectionate.”

“But he'd be—” Gabe paused, then did the best imitation he could of Costello—“a
baaaaad
boy…”

“Well, we like bad boys,” Seana said. “Don't we?”

“Story of my life,” Trish said.

“Because if you marry a bad boy,” Seana said, “you get a father, husband, and child all rolled up into one, and who could pass that up?”

“Would you marry me some day when I grow up if I'm still a
baaaaad
boy?” Gabe asked.

“Of course,” Seana said. She brought another stack of pancakes to the table, along with a fresh pitcher of warm maple syrup, and told me she was glad I was going to write
Charlie's Story
, because that was what she believed Max had intended in the first place.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered.

“Wrong?”

“Why'd you say you'd marry Gabe when he grew up?”

“Because I wanted to,” she said.

“But don't you know he's going to take your promise seriously?”

“The way he took
your
promise to write about his father?”