Look at me: (13 page)

So I left.

I flew back to New York to tell him. And in the moments after I did (because it was near his birthday, he thought I’d come to celebrate and had filled the apartment with flowers), after I told him everything, after he’d turned in confusion to look at the garden, flooded with sunset (asters, gladiolus, anemones, phlox), after he’d finished his glass of brandy in one shaking gulp, his first impulse, strangely, was to cleave to me, the person he trusted, the person he loved, and for a tiny pocket of time we held each other and the small life we had made, and I felt the sweetness of that life as I never had before. No! I thought, we can keep this, it doesn’t have to end! But my words were already moving through Hansen, seeping through his veins toward his heart. I felt it happening, felt him beginning to seize up in my arms and realized with a kind of horror that I hadn’t poisoned him before, as I’d thought; I’d done it now, here, all at once, and my punishment was to sit by and watch it work. I hadn’t protected him from anything. As the revulsion overcame him, the disgust and rage, he shoved me, knocking me onto the bricks, and hit my face, and I watched the innocence leave him like a spirit leaving a corpse.

But what had killed that innocence—my betrayal, or the telling? Which was the poison? Ah, philosophy.

After Hansen, I was careful to limit my promises. If I cared about someone, I did my best to mean what I said as I said it. But I’d given up on the whole truth, much less my ability to tell it. Most of the time, I didn’t even try. My philosophy, if you will, was eerily suited to what became my life; different cities week to week, a constant flow of settings and people; as my surroundings dissolved and reconstituted themselves, it seemed only natural that I do the same. I avoided the sorts of places where I’d been with Hansen—museums, for example. Or perhaps I simply lost interest.

Still, I had wondered many times, in the years since leaving Hansen, years during which I had promised almost nothing to a great, great many, whether we might both have been better off if I’d sealed my lips and led a double life, like everyone else.

Chapter Five

East High School
was vast, just as Charlotte had wished, corridors lined with hundreds of red lockers, corridors so long she could barely see to the end of one, even with her glasses on. Everyone was a stranger, and this infused the air with a glittering sense of promise. Charlotte knew better than to try to sit with the preppy kids in the lunchroom, but she could walk by and smile, and they would smile back.

She met Uncle Moose for one or two hours on alternate weeks at his office at Winnebago College on East State Street, a ten-minute bike ride from her high school. After the crescendo with which their accord had been reached, a certain letdown was inevitable. Her uncle remained awkward, aloof, rarely meeting Charlotte’s eyes. Alone with him she felt a spooky kind of banishment, as if she might leave his office, which reeked of tomato sauce and stale Chinese takeout cartons mashed in the garbage, to find that the world as she knew it had ceased to exist. History meant little to Charlotte: facts about dead people. And Moose, deeply attuned to the apathy most people felt toward the pursuits he held most dear, achingly conscious of the erasure of history from this land without context, perceived his niece’s indifference and was bewildered; what was she doing here?

Sometimes they met at Moose and Priscilla’s apartment in a complex called Versailles, a half mile east of Winnebago College. They sat on Moose’s tiny second-floor balcony, just big enough for two chairs and a small glass-topped table. Below, a boy rode a tractor-mower over the undulating grass around Versailles, and Charlotte blamed this mower for the many occasions when she and Moose began speaking at once and then stopped—then started—then stopped. But on her next visit the lawn boy was gone and a disastrous silence remained, an enormous stretch of nothing in which she and Moose foundered gloomily, solitarily. No more, Charlotte thought, mounting her bicycle with relief at finding herself back among the wind and cars and trees turning gold. I’m not going back, it’s too strange.

At home, she felt the push of her mother’s curiosity. Ellen had never been inside Moose and Priscilla’s apartment. Were there many pictures on the walls? Did the phone ring often? Was the refrigerator full? Her mother’s hunger for news of her brother exposed itself helplessly to Charlotte, and she felt her privilege at being allowed inside her uncle’s life. Blue round soaps in the bathroom. Towels smelling faintly of flowers. Once, Aunt Priscilla left a banana bread in the kitchen, and her uncle, barefoot, had cut himself and Charlotte each a slice. She told her mother almost nothing.

In an album by her mother’s desk, a younger version of Moose stared mockingly at Charlotte from old photographs. One in particular: her uncle standing in water to his thighs wearing neon-green swim trunks, torso broadening toward the shoulders like the flare of a cobra’s head. The picture fascinated her. She’d pried it from the album and brought it to her room, where she kept it hidden between the layers of her blotter.

Late in September, she began writing short conversational essays on the reading Moose had assigned her, and these helped to alleviate their mutual shyness. Her uncle spoke to the essays and scrawled corrections upon them, waved them in the air and once was robbed of a page by a gust of wind. Moose leapt from his chair and sprinted from the apartment, and Charlotte seized upon his absence to push open the door to the bedroom, which she’d never seen. A bed with a green silken spread, a pair of giant fur-lined slippers poised beside it. A forest of prescription bottles on one bedside table. She peeked in Moose’s closet: five worn tweed jackets, three pairs of black shoes. Soft plaid work shirts.

By October, they were able to engage in normal conversation.

“How’s the family?” Moose asked with an ironic lilt, as if both asking the question and posing as someone asking the question. And Charlotte told him how the tension in their house rose each month before Ricky’s tests, which were later that week. “Your folks must be scared,” Moose said.

“It’s all they think about.”

“And you?”

“It’s weird,” she said. “I know he’ll be okay.”

Moose cleared his throat. “I meant: How are you?” he asked, rather stiffly.

Charlotte glanced at him, but her uncle was looking over the balcony, where the lawn boy had raked piles of leaves into orange plastic bags that looked like jack-o’-lanterns. It was the first time Moose had asked a question about herself, personally. Charlotte waited, wanting to take full advantage of this pulse of interest, to answer him with absolute precision.

“I’m waiting for something to happen,” she said.

Two Men Take a Gamble

In the 1830s, when this part of the world was still untouched, the first speculator came to Rockford: Germanicus Kent. In 1834 he and his partner founded a town on the west side of the Rock River next to Kent Creek, where our downtown is now. They built a sawmill, which was one of the three things you needed for a town (the others were: a saloon and a blacksmith shop). Meanwhile, another speculator, Daniel Haight, settled on the east side of the river that very same year
.

So Rockford started out as Kentville and Haightville, two almost invisible towns glaring at each other across the river and getting competitive before they practically existed
.…

Pedaling home from Versailles, Charlotte wove among the Cadillacs on State Street, cruising the slight downhills standing up, the fall wind boxing her body, stinging her ears. She imagined herself at the opening of a tunnel, tipped forward on its downward slope. Something moved in her: a slow, sweet unraveling of anticipation.

After they combined their towns into Rockford, Germanicus Kent and Daniel Haight were like actors in a play with twenty-five different parts: Haight was the first sheriff, first postmaster, first commissioner to decide where the State Road (which is State Street today) should go. Kent was the first election judge, first representative in the Illinois General Assembly, and first ferrymaster across the river
.…

On the day of Ricky’s tests, Charlotte met a strange woman in her mother’s dressing room. She’d been listening to Alanis on her Walkman and reading about Rockford’s first bridge, a graduate student’s paper so old it had been typed on a typewriter. Headphones still on, she wandered into her mother’s bathroom to look for the lotion she’d brought back from Florida last spring. White, pearlized lotion that smelled of the beach, of coconuts. And there Charlotte found the woman: a stranger in scarf and sunglasses. “I’m an old friend of your mother’s,” she said.

Looking back, Charlotte was mortified by the many suspicious details of this “old friend” she had somehow failed to notice: the woman knew nothing of Ricky’s illness; hadn’t called before arriving or rung the bell; had walked around the house alone; then rushed away (limping!) without leaving any message for Charlotte’s mother, whose “old friend” she supposedly was. A thief—what else could she be? And Charlotte had stood there, making conversation. Had shown the thief her fish!

She’d been absorbed by the question of what was wrong with her. The woman wasn’t old. She was very tall, but seemed narrow inside her heavy coat. Her voice was raw. A car accident, she finally said. Last August. Then she took off her glasses, baring to Charlotte her broken, vermilion eyes.

Later, as Ellen was getting dressed for a wedding reception at the country club (an ordeal she dreaded), Charlotte moseyed into her dressing room and loitered there. This was unusual, but Ellen paved over her surprise. Displays of eagerness tended to drive Charlotte away.

“Your jewelry is in this room, right?” Charlotte asked.

“In that drawer,” Ellen said, pointing. “Would you like to borrow something?”

“Is it valuable?”

Ellen turned to her, trying to read her shuttered, tricky face. “The really valuable things are at the bank,” she said. “Why?”

Without answering, Charlotte went in the bathroom and stood by her mother’s sink, scanning the miniature skyline of bottles and lotions and creams and sprays and different kinds of makeup. In their midst she spied the pearlized lotion from Florida. Charlotte opened the bottle, poured some into her palm and rubbed it on her arm. She closed her eyes and lifted the smell to her face.

“Why don’t you keep that, honey? I almost never use it.”

Charlotte cracked her eyes, glimpsed her mother beside her in the mirror and moved quickly away. The image of herself and her mother together—in a mirror, a window, a photograph—flattened her with a blunt hopelessness, a sense that she might as well be dead. Her mother was beautiful and Charlotte was not; she knew this always, of course, and yet a defiant optimism hummed within her, a faith that she had forfeited beauty for some extraordinary compensation. Seeing her mother beside her annihilated that hope, leaving Charlotte to wonder whether someone so unbeautiful as herself would be allowed to go on, to have anything. Wouldn’t someone more beautiful get it, whatever it was?

Stung, Ellen ran a brush through her hair. She was used to Charlotte’s rebuffs, but now, after a whole afternoon at the hospital with Ricky, her eyes filled with tears.

“You don’t worry about someone stealing the jewelry that’s in here?”

Christ, why was she harping on the jewelry? Ellen looped her hair around and pinned it onto her head, waiting for her eyes to clear before she answered. “Not really. I mean, we’ve got the burglar alarm.”

Still, after finishing her hair, she slid open the jewelry drawer and looked at the tray of velvet cups, Charlotte lurking nearby while she checked her favorites: the Elsa Peretti bracelet, the jade lozenge Harris had brought from Singapore, the tiny yellow diamond cuffs. The amethyst pin, a gift from Moose years ago. She wore it for luck when Ricky was tested each month. “The important stuff is all there,” she said. “Why?”

Charlotte gave a disinterested shrug and left the room, as if Ellen were the one dwelling on the topic.

Harris stood at his dresser, assembling the oblong gold studs and cufflinks engraved with his initials that he wore to dressy events. Charlotte watched his meticulous toilette from her parents’ bed, thrilling at each gust of irritation her father provoked in her. His shirt was flawlessly pressed, sections of fine, translucent netting in the arms. Had he ever worn a soft flannel shirt, even once? Did he even eat banana bread?

“No plans!” Harris exclaimed, as if this were out of the ordinary. “No friends coming over, nothing?”

“I have plans with Ricky. When he’s done skateboarding.”

Her father looked disappointed, as if this were a feeble excuse for nothing.

“Plus I’ve got tons of reading for Uncle Moose,” Charlotte threw in, purely to annoy him.

Her father frowned, and installed his cufflinks in silence.

Driving to the club through the azure dusk, Harris thought of his daughter alone before the TV set and felt a twist of anxiety. “She doesn’t seem to be making many friends at East,” he said.

“No,” Ellen said. “She doesn’t.”

“I worry she’s gotten lost in the shuffle,” he said, turning to his wife. “This whole Ricky saga.”

Ellen sighed. “I can only worry about one kid at a time.”

“How was today?”

“Fine,” she said. “Afterwards he ran out the door with that skateboard.”

Harris whistled. “Busy life.”

Since the beginning of school, Ricky had assumed a new identity as a skateboarder, an identity whose component parts were baggy pants worn so low that Harris expected to see his son’s bare ass any minute, and a partially shaved head, a thin sheet of hair dangling over baldness. “Kid’s hair finally grows back,” he said, “and he shaves it.”

Ellen shook her head. She hated the hospital; even now the smell of illness, of hospital food, made her almost gag. From the moment she and Ricky walked through those glass doors, her brain objected to every sight they passed: The veal-complexioned people in their paper outfits—no. People crumpled in wheelchairs or walking feebly, dragging IVs alongside them on wheels. No! No! They stared at Ricky ravenously, these failing creatures, as if he were a gatekeeper jingling the keys to their release. Ellen’s son had never looked more beautiful than shuffling beside her over the hospital linoleum; she imagined these sad, broken figures grasping for his narrow eyes and lingering summer tan—

“Let go, Mom!” Ricky barked, shaking free of her grasp and pounding ahead down the hall in his oversized skateboarding shoes. Ellen understood, from her sessions with Dr. Alwyn, that her feelings about the hospital were freighted with memories of her mother, who had taken to bed for whole years, swaddled in her mysterious illness, ringing a little bell—deceptively tiny, for it had made a sound like breaking glass that filled the house—asking for cranberry juice. And Ellen would bring it, climbing the stairs with the small silver tray to her mother’s room, which was always dark. No matter how bright or pretty a day might be—soccer games, damp summer grass, diving lessons at the country club—Ellen always felt inside her the weight of that dark room; only Moose had the power to dispel it. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to sell the house! Now, with Dr. Alwyn’s help, she had come to see that her reluctance was not so very strange—that the urge to return to the scene of unhappiness with the hope of undoing it was natural, if not necessarily good. “Bigger windows!” she’d exhorted the architect. But your furniture will fade. Screw the furniture, Ellen had parried, taking a certain delight in shocking the man. She wanted light, light. Fresh air to wash away the smell of her mother’s illness—her mother, now hale and robust at seventy-two, living in Palm Beach with a Cuban immigration lawyer. Who took lessons in the tango, the mambo, the hustle, and had wallpapered a bathroom by herself. Who, it now appeared, had never really been ill in the first place.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Harris said. He’d been hoping she would ask about his golf—he’d played under par and won a client, Matthew Krane, a consultant to the Radisson Hotel chain. But nowadays she rarely asked.