Some Can Whistle (21 page)

“There’s Gladys, but she’s not a girlfriend, she’s a housekeeper,” I said.

“In other words, you don’t have a girlfriend, right?” she said.

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Not precisely.”

“I guess that’s why you came down to Houston and got me,” she said. “You just felt like having a woman around.”

“I felt like having my daughter around,” I corrected.

She looked out the window for a bit. Then she felt my forehead, glanced out the window, reached over and took a few of the one-hundred-dollar bills, and stood up.

“You might have bit off more than you can chew this time, Mr. Polite,” she said as she was leaving.

While T.R. and her friends were out on a last little spree, my migraine finally left. Within the space of an hour, the barometer in the peculiar ecosystem of my skull began to rise; the pressure diminished, the thick, threatening cranial weather cleared, and I soon felt as light and fresh as if I had just stepped out into a fine spring morning.

The light feeling was partially deceptive—it had been a three-day visitation, and my hand still shook so that I could hardly get my socks on—but the headache, my demanding guest, was gone. As always, the first hour of release seemed like a miracle—almost a rebirth.

No one was there to share my return to life, so I picked up the telephone and made a few calls. The first was to my message machine. Calling it always involved a measure of apprehension, particularly when I’d been remiss and neglected strict message-machine discipline for three days. Lives can change completely in far less than three days, as I was well aware. By unilaterally absenting myself without consultation, I ran certain risks: friendships nurtured for years on the long, loose intimacies made possible by the telephone might, if a critical moment was missed through inattention, cease to be living friendships—the remoteness that Jeanie warned against might insinuate itself
too deeply, turning something vital, if peculiar, into something formal.

So I shook from more than the aftershocks of migraine when I hit the code and waited for the message machine to reveal where we all were at with one another, so to speak. I was remembering that in another migraine-induced period of dereliction I had had to wince my way through more than twenty messages from Nema, who was experiencing rough weather, thanks to the violent mood swings of a manic-depressive firearms instructor she had fallen in love with at a shooting range. Nema was a good shot who practiced often, and she was quite prepared to gun down anyone who gave her serious trouble, but the canker in this particular fruit was the knowledge that the firearms instructor—Rick was his name—might well be an even better shot; Nema’s imagination was nothing if not dramatic. Indeed, it was a Jungian goulash of warring archetypes seasoned with images from the lower depths of popular culture. In a sense, she saw life, particularly romantic life, as a series of shoot-outs in which the fastest gun survived. How she had evolved this crude dramatism puzzled me. No empress of old, not Theodora, not Cleopatra, not Catherine the Great, could have been more confident than Nema, but the confidence was based on the conviction that she would always be the fastest gun. In light of this, her dalliance with the firearms instructor was particularly unfortunate—somehow she had chosen to fuck the one gun who happened to be faster.

This resulted in a string of messages that quickly escalated from agitated to furious, the fury resulting from my failure to call her back. By the time I came out of that headache and did call her back the crisis was over and the firearms instructor in jail, not because he had tried to shoot Nema but because he had fallen for a sting operation and been arrested for selling fully automatic machine guns.

“I could have been killed,” Nema insisted for the next few months. “He was a Green Beret.”

“Did I tell you to get involved with a Green Beret?” I asked, taking what seemed to me a plausible line of defense.

“You didn’t stop me,” she said. In her book that amounted to the same thing. She was determined to wring an admission of remorse from me.

This time my tape was empty except for a three-second query from Jeanie.

“Are you there? Are you there? Bye,” she said.

Following that was a polite, nervous call from the local fire department inviting me to its annual picnic. As a big contributor, I always got invited to the annual picnic.

I toyed with the notion of calling Godwin and Gladys to inform them I was arriving with a considerable party, but I finally decided against it. Life held few surprises for Godwin and Gladys; their existences were complacent existences, essentially. All I had done for the last two years was lie around the house and watch European videos in the spaces between phone calls to women all over the world. In the past six months I had not even started my Mercedes, and they had not really started their cars either—if starting a car can be used as a metaphor for the active approach to life. In all that time Godwin had only written eight pages of his book on Euripides and the Rolling Stones; Gladys had not extended her reach much, either. She was nominally the cook, but instead of learning a new recipe once in a while, she had dropped most of what she did know from her repertoire, substituting a pantryful of cornflakes and a freezerful of frozen pizzas for the chicken-fried steaks, pinto beans, and cream gravy she had once produced with a certain flourish.

I could have picked up the phone and warned them that those languid days were over: T.R. and company were arriving. There were grandchildren to be raised, and a triracial assortment of permanent and semipermanent guests to absorb. Gladys might really have to cook again; Godwin would have to start wearing clothes, and exercise a little more discretion in the matter of whom he brought home.

I stood by the big picture window of the King Arthur suite, happy to be on my feet for the first time in days. I felt a little like King Arthur myself, or maybe like Richard the Lionhearted or
some triumphant Crusader. The trip to Houston had been my Crusade. I had awakened from deep slumber—the slumber of emotional withdrawal—and fought that well-armed Saracen, indifference. Somewhere in the sun-splashed water park across the teeming freeway, my family were probably swimming or otherwise disporting themselves. They were the Grail I had recovered. Standing by the window, I shed a tear or two—self-congratulatory tears, I imagine, but real nonetheless. It’s not every rich, middle-aged, totally self-indulgent man who suddenly gets the gift of human beings as unignorable as T.R. and Jesse.

I wandered over to the door between my suite and the Guinevere suite and peeked in; Froissart’s description (was it Froissart?) of the sack of Aleppo came to mind, if only because Crusader imagery had me in its grip. Open boxes from various department stores were scattered everywhere; tissue paper that had once enclosed new garments was in piles everywhere; some of it had floated into the Jacuzzi. The new clothes themselves were draped on chairs and couches; collectively they seemed pretty garish. Toys had proliferated: there was a giant green turtle that a child Jesse’s age could ride; there were heaps of half-assembled rubber monsters; there was a red bike with training wheels. Propped by the bed was a real, as opposed to a toy, AK-47; a case of ammunition sat on the coffee table. Transistors, tiny TV sets, and huge ghetto blasters were scattered around the room. I peeked into the bathroom, which contained a vast array of makeup, shampoos, lotions, oils, perfumes. T.R. had indeed learned to spend money.

I went back to my own suite, ordered up a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches and some lemonade. The two sandwiches tasted ambrosial. It occurred to me as I ate them that I might be eating my last orderly meal, or at least my last meal as a solitary.

I had never before actually admitted to myself that I was a solitary—perhaps it took the soaring sense of clarity that one is given for an hour or two after an intense migraine to bring that fact home. No one is supposed to be solitary—much less
a
solitary—in this relation-laden day and age. The planet is blanketed
now with the literature of relationships, most of it middlebrow at best. But there would seem to be no book for the solitary. It was just such a book that I had been setting out to write—a book about the splendors and miseries of being alone and about what it takes to sustain a cultivated and civilized aloneness.

It would be an irony, if a common one in literature, that I would be writing the book—
if
I wrote it, managed to write it—just as I lost the condition I aspired to describe. The deep harmonies of silence would soon be replaced by the screech of family life—loud, sharp tones—the very tones that, in “Al and Sal,” had made my fortune. Only this time I wouldn’t be imagining domestic life; this time I’d be living it.

For a moment I felt the same panic I had felt the morning T.R. called; the apprehension that had been with me on my drive to Houston came back. It wasn’t a simple fear of parental inadequacy, either; I wasn’t that worried about my ability to get along with T.R. and the kids. Rather, the panic was literary: What if I forgot the texture of solitude so fast that I couldn’t manage to write about it? Gaining my family at long last was great; what wasn’t great was the thought that I might lose my book. Already I was losing the subtle insights and high clarities of the solitary. Five minutes with T.R. and Jesse in the room and their immediacy robbed me not only of my old state but of my memory of it. There I was, and happy to be there; but what had become of the other, older, more familiar lonely me? The me that didn’t start his car for six months, the American Oblomov? What if that turned out to be not so much the real me—there could be several mes—as just the more fruitful me?

Such troubling questions could not be answered over a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of lemonade in an Arthurian motel in Arlington. I resolved, however, to call up Blackwell’s first thing in the morning and order all the books they had on hermits and hermitry. I could no longer be a hermit myself, but at least I could read about hermits: St. Anthony, St. Simon Stylites, and various others who had lived in caves or sat on pillars for forty years. I was not so much afraid of no longer
being solitary as I was of not being able to remember what being solitary felt like. Maybe the books would help.

It was annoying that it was already night in England; otherwise I would have called Blackwell’s right then; I still liked to act on my impulses immediately. Instead, I called Jeanie Vertus. I didn’t get her but I got her machine and a toneless, totally noncommittal invitation to leave a message.

“Hi,” I said. “I’ll be home in three hours. I found my daughter. She’s wonderful and so is my granddaughter. I’m taking eight people home with me, mainly her friends. My granddaughter’s father’s along too, we had to break him out of jail.”

At that point in the message I stopped to think. News such as that would startle Jeanie a lot. I wondered if I should explain that Muddy was only a burglar and not really harmful or dangerous. But if I started explaining in depth, my message might run for several hours.

“I have a lot more to tell you,” I said, deciding against extensive exposition, “but I can’t talk too long on this phone. I love you, call me soon.”

For some reason I didn’t feel satisfied with my message—it did no justice to the transitional mood I was in, whereas Jeanie’s brilliant messages always did justice to her transitions, which were frequent and in many cases extremely subtle. Just changing her outfit could mark a significant transition for Jeanie, involving, as it did, a decision about who she wanted to be on a given occasion.

The transition I was making, from solitude to family life, was more complicated than changing an outfit; I was going to change a
life
, or at least I was going to try. It would be a big change, and if I left a coherent message about the change I would not only be preparing Jeanie for it, I would be preparing myself as well. My message would be the moral equivalent of the first sentence of a book—the book of my new life.

A few seconds ticked by; the more I contemplated the change the less I felt prepared to summarize my anticipations on a message machine, even Jeanie’s, the machine of the person I felt the most compatible with.

“Things are going to be different now,” I added, not at all sure what I meant by the statement. It seemed an inadequate statement, too, but a few more seconds ticked by and I could think of nothing more satisfactory to say—nothing that wouldn’t take the equivalent of a chapter, at least. Finally, after another thoughtful pause, I just said “Bye,” and hung up.

Godwin was wearing only his ratty old green bathing trunks when he opened the front door of Los Dolores and confronted the mob of us for the first time. He looked as if he might have been bingeing for a few days, taking drugs, and listening to the Rolling Stones through his earphones.

“Where’s the yard?” T.R. asked, surveying my expensive adobe home. “This stupid house looks as if it was made of mud pies.”

“It’s nice inside,” I said meekly.