Authors: Newton Thornburg
“Why don’t you help me? You give me one.”
“I don’t know what it’s about, remember?”
“Well, what kind of titles do you like?”
“Something snappy. Something that promises dirt. That’s what people like. That’s what they buy.”
“You could be right.”
“Of course I am.”
I poured myself another drink, making a great show of concentration as I tried to come up with something both snappy and dirty.
“How about this?” I asked. “
My Sister, My Love
. How do you like that?”
Toni considered it. She cocked her head and her mouth rounded into a pensive pout. She repeated the words, and suddenly there was light.
“
Whose
sister?” she asked. “
Whose
love?”
I gave her a bored look. “I’m putting you on, baby. I’m making fun of you—with all your fantastic tales of incest from Junior.”
Not unexpectedly, I had made her angry. She stood there for a moment, one hand on her hip, the other working her earlobe. And then she lunged past me, knocking over my glass and snatching up the legal pad I had been writing on. She turned and almost made it out the door before I caught her by the arm, whipping her back into the room and making her drop the pad. In a rage now, she slapped my face, hard enough to cause me to swing back at her in mindless alcoholic reaction, smacking her on the side of the head and knocking her onto the bed. I immediately put out my hands to her, hoping somehow to absolve myself, to undo what I had done. But all I got was a snarl.
“You get away! Hear me? Get away from me!”
I put the tablet in the desk drawer with the others and locked the drawer. Then I picked up my bottle and my glass and I left the room. Surprisingly I was beginning to feel almost good about having hit her. She shouldn’t have pressed me about the book, I told myself. She shouldn’t have teased me. It was not a laughing matter.
After leaving Toni, I went down to Jason’s library and locked the door. Increasingly in recent weeks I have begun to use the room as a place to get away from the others, a place to drink alone. I love the old black leather furniture and the walls of books, the bay window looking out upon the suburban blight. And best of all, with the door closed, I can’t hear the television blaring in the kitchen, where Jason and Toni and Junior usually stay on and watch after supper. (It is warmer there, and they have moved a sofa and a La-Z-Boy in from the living room.)
On one occasion I tried to write in the library but soon gave it up, possibly because I felt Jason’s frosty spirit peering over my shoulder and I sensed that I couldn’t dredge all this out of me in there, that I’d dissemble and fudge and put a nice warm gloss on it, make it a piece for
McCalls
or the
Ladies’ Home Journal
. So, besides drinking, I don’t do much of anything when I’m there. I just sit with my feet up on the desk or I stretch out on the sofa, and that’s about it. Oddly, this is something of a discovery for me, the considerable pleasures one can derive from total indolence. I don’t write, I don’t read, I don’t listen to the radio, I don’t feel the need for talk or any other form of human intercourse. I have no desire to swim or play tennis or work out. And for that matter, I don’t even do much in the way of thinking, except in a rambling, woolgathering sort of way.
As for what I’ll be writing in these tablets the next day, I give the matter no thought at all, because of course it requires none. I lived through these heroic events, so I don’t have to make them up. I don’t have to organize them. I don’t have to cheat and lie. No, about all I have to do is endure them in memory, as they track through my head, much like random particles of radioactivity. One barely feels himself dying.
Sarah has called twice from Florida in the last ten days, the first time to whine about the weather and the Cubans and the second time to inform us with a bubbling, breathless joy that she had a new friend, one Hector Ortega, who came over with the boat people in 1980 and now has his own taxicab as well as a luxury apartment. He is “so chivalrous,” she said, “so gallant.” She had never before met a man like him, and because of him she was thinking of staying on in Miami at least another week or two. (Phoning a fellow teacher, she had learned that the strike was still on, with no prospect of early settlement.)
Jason’s only reaction to all this was to repeat the man’s name in a scornful snort, as if it were a profanity.
“
Ortega!
” he swore. “
Ortega!
What could she be thinking?
Ortega!
”
Junior, however, seemed to consider it just about the funniest story he had ever heard. “Little Sarah’s got a boy friend!” he howled. “A spic! Oh Jesus, I’d love to see them in bed! Can you picture it? Can you believe it? Sarah and Hector!”
Toni said that it was about time, that even if the man dumped Sarah, it would be a good thing. “At least she’ll know she’s been alive. Not just passing through this messed-up world.”
“But
Hector
!” Junior roared. “Sarah and Hector!”
For myself, slurping up scotch in the library, I didn’t give the matter much thought at all. If anything, I probably agreed with Toni that the affair would be good for Sarah, no matter how it came out. Better to have loved and lost, and all that. But I didn’t really care. I almost forgot what my little sister looked like—and the others too, for that matter—Toni and Junior and Jason. Or at least I wanted to, wanted to forget about them altogether, for as the days of this chapter have dragged on, the reality of Kate and Cliff, the
vividness
of my remembering of them, has become such that I feel almost as if I had stepped over the edge of this boring dimension of ours into something totally beyond my experience. I have become an addict of recollection. I write with a trembling pen. Tears glaze my eyes. My cock fills and drains. I am living
then
, not now.
The day I hit Toni had been a particularly difficult one for me, because it was on that day that I had begun to write about Kate coming to my room. And it seemed there was no way I could open the doors to that memory without seeing myself all over again, in all my banal guilt. I was young, yes, but not so young I should not have recognized the element of emotional illness in Kate’s behavior. The trouble is that it has always been so easy for me to rationalize what I did—and did not do, to stop her—on the basis of Kate’s then long-standing history of eccentricity and willfulness. If her coming to me was but another example of that willfulness, though admittedly an extreme one, still what was I to do? Chase her off? Run to Mother and Jason with the problem and risk destroying not only our own lives but those of everyone in the family?
Oh, it can be rationalized, all right. There’s no end to the cologne and makeup I can dump on this venal face of mine. But what I cannot change is the acuity of memory, the killing detail with which I recall my feelings as she slipped under the covers and took hold of me: confusion, yes, and panic too. But mostly I remember the cool and stabbing joy of sexual gratification. And to sustain that gratification I did just as she told me: I lay in the resounding silence of this house and this room and let her bring me to orgasm, without kissing her or fondling her or in fact doing anything except hold her in my arms, as she instructed. That, she said, was all she wanted: to be held and to give me pleasure—why, I didn’t know or even care at that point. Much later—years later—I would begin to realize that it was probably only normality that she sought in my bed, the proof that she was not the cold and loveless loner everyone thought her to be, including herself—that, and her pathetic need to recover the lost intimacies of our childhood together.
Whatever her reasons, I went along with her, went along in precisely the sense that a dog accedes to the wishes of a bone. And that is why the writing of this temporarily at least has turned me into the same foul breast-thumping souse that Ellen dumped in Santa Barbara. It is why I stayed down in the library drinking all night after finishing those pages—and after hitting Toni. And it is why I’ve managed to darken this old doorstep only on four brief occasions over the past quarter century—because I knew that all I had to do was settle back just once, put up my feet and close my eyes, and I would be
gone
, just as I am now, lost somewhere in the past, hemorrhaging from my guts instead of tending tidily to that small open wound I’ve carried next to my heart all these years, my own little red badge of guilt.
I sat at Jason’s desk and let the scotch do its curious work, until in time the victim was not Kate but Cliff, and the villain not me but Jason. I kept thinking of Cliff dragging himself home, probably not even aware of the pain and the bleeding in his great hunger to get here and put an end to his sister’s murderer before Jason did it for him, with his killing eyes and his killing words—a death worse than dying, it must have seemed to Cliff. And I kept telling myself that the whole thing would never have ended that way if it had not been for Jason and the brutal stringency with which he treated his oldest son.
I walked the room and drank and I sat again at the dinner table with the rest of the family, listening as Jason interrogated Cliff about his responsibilities.
“Did you give the Eskimo notice yet?”
“Not exactly.”
“And what does that mean—not exactly?”
“I just haven’t put a date on it yet, that’s all. I told them I’d be leaving when they—”
“When they what?”
“When they don’t need me so much. Right now they’re pretty short-handed.”
Jason’s eyes blazed with pleasure. “I see. The fact that I want you to quit the job and go to work at the bank—in a position that I personally went out of my way to get for you—that doesn’t cut any ice. But now, that bunch of dagos at the Eskimo—what they want—that
is
important, eh?”
“No, Father. It’s just that I’ve worked there for so long. All through high school. And it’s hard to just up and quit.”
“Not if you’re a man, it isn’t.”
Kate started to say something, but Jason quelled her with a look. Then he returned to the culprit.
“You hear me, Clifford? It isn’t hard if you’re a man. If you’ve got some fiber in your guts. You just tell yourself,
This is what my father wants. This is what is good for me and my family
. And you do it. And the hell with other considerations.”
“I said I’d do it,” Cliff mumbled. “And I will.”
Jason snorted with contempt. “Sure you will—after fretting and fussing over it like some pathetic old woman.”
And that finally was enough even for Cliff, who rebelled in the only way he ever did. He got up and left the table, tossing down his napkin with a modest show of anger. And when Kate and I both immediately got up and followed him outside, ignoring Jason’s shouted orders for us to stay seated, Cliff only fled all the faster, apparently needing our sympathies no more then he did his father’s constant derogation.
I sat at Jason’s desk with my disappearing bottle of scotch and went through the breakfasts and dinners of our young lives, the imperial summonings into that selfsame room, and I became drunk, I became stoned on rage and loathing, to the point finally where the bottle was empty and I could barely stand. Nevertheless I managed somehow to make it out of the library and through the living room and up the undulating stairway to the old man’s door, which I kicked open, splintering wood and breaking the jamb, even though the door had not been locked. And I saw him in the scarlet glow of his clock radio, a cadaver propped up on pillows, robed and mufflered under a pile of blankets, his black eyes widening in fear and surprise as I crossed to his bed. I distinctly remember the numerals 3:09 burning in the darkness and I remember the droning sound of a man’s voice, some anonymous caller-in to the talk show playing on the radio, a southern male softly explaining why a sawed-off four-ten shotgun was his weapon of choice for the coming race riots and social upheaval.
You won’t have to shoot twice’t
, he said.
Once’t will do jist fine
.
As I took hold of Jason’s robe, bunching the lapels and pulling him up out of the bed, the talk-show host was answering his caller. But I did not hear him, for I was talking now too. I was shaking my father and cursing him and laying upon his head the deaths of my brother and my sister. I called him a monster and a liar and a leech, and I told him that if he didn’t hurry up and die soon I would kill him myself, just for the pleasure of it. By then, Junior and Toni had come in from their rooms and they tried to pull me off but got nowhere until I decided to throw the old man back down onto the bed. And then I turned, charging out of the room and down the stairs and outside, slipping on the porch ice and falling onto the walk. I picked myself up and stumbled out to the street and headed north, not even feeling the cold as I lurched along, slipping and sliding on the icy, week-old snow.
I vaguely remember going along for miles that way, seeing no one except an occasional car and driver moving past. I even remember crawling along at times, mushing through the December snow like a malamute. And most of all, I remember calling out for Kate and Cliff.