Mom sat in the den wailing gently into a black-rayon handkerchief, surrounded by her bridge-club ladies with whom she shared soap-opera gossip and grocery bags full of paperback romances.
I could not get out of my head the time I had punched Rob in the nose in the middle of a heated argument about who would get to date a certain girl. We had been eighteen years old. We had stood beside this very maple dining table, words getting hotter and hotter, each convinced the other was over the line and in need of severe correction. I had moved first and caught him completely by surprise. Rob had dropped like a sack of beans.
His nose had bled like a sonofabitch all over the floor.
Right now, I wanted to crawl into a deep hole and pull the hole in after me. But I could not help checking out Lissa.
Women complain that men are all alike. That’s not true. We just share some common goals. In the middle of my shame and my grief, and with my mother sobbing in the other room, I appraised my brother’s estranged wife, his widow, and knew that at twenty-six years of age she was about as prime as a beautiful woman could get.
It’s useless reining in all the horses in one’s herd. They just kick the fence harder when death is in the air.
“Have you heard anything?” Lissa asked, drawing back a pale wisp of hair. She seemed to want to keep her elbows crooked and her hands near her face. She had quit smoking, I guessed, some months ago, but the urge was on her with feline tenacity.
“No,” I said.
I had gone to the funeral home and signed the proper forms. Their driver had received my brother from air freight at the Miami airport, delivered him to the stainless-steel tables, and made sure all the proper chemicals were injected. There had been an autopsy in New York. No one had wanted an open casket anyway.
I would have given anything for a few minutes alone with a living Rob. I wanted one last chance to apologize for a few things, not the least of them that sucker punch in the nose.
“I’d give anything to apologize to him,” Lissa said, making me jump at our synchrony. She looked straight at me. Brown eyes a little small, topped by squared-off and serious wheat-colored eyebrows in a head also a tad small in its average measurements, considering the dimensions of her body. These disparities, framed by that casual but orderly butter blond hair, made her even more sensual.
“Beg pardon?”
“We did some things to each other that weren’t very kind, and I feel the need to confess. To him. How sorry I am.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Your mother . . .” she said, looking in the direction of the quiet sobbing in the other room. Lissa grimaced as if at the rasp of fingernails on a blackboard.
“Her son,” I said, defending our mother against this disturbing beauty, who had put Rob through the wringer in a way I never could.
“No arrests,” she said.
“No arrests,” I confirmed.
We picked from trays of finger sandwiches and vegetables on Rob’s behalf and sipped punch, and when most of the people had gone and Mother was in the bathroom, tidying up, I cracked two cold beers in the shadowy kitchen and gave one to the funeral director, a black-haired guy with admirable cheekbones, younger than me by a couple of years.
Lissa had gone somewhere else for the moment. I actually did not notice her leaving.
“Funerals are the worst in hot weather,” the funeral director confided. “We feel so alive in the heat. That hurts us in the twilight hours, when the air cools and we’re reminded of the long, deep earth.”
I had little time to respond to his surreal burst of eloquence. Lissa came into the kitchen with Mother on her arm.
“Lissa tells me they were thinking about getting together again,” Mom said, as if it mattered, as if that peculiar, possibly kind little white lie could make any difference, stuck as Rob was in a waterproof Aztec Bronze casket in the long, deep earth.
We watched Mother thank the funeral director. I accompanied him outside to where the limo was parked, behind the garage.
He removed his jacket and slung it across the front bench seat in the Lincoln. “Sometimes,” he said, “mothers give me a tip when the service is over and the caterers have departed. I have to return it with graceful apologies.” He smiled and shook his head with sad understanding.
He must have thought I was a stronger sort, able to listen to his professional tales with amused objectivity. I hated his guts. He had seen Rob dead.
All I could do, lying in our old bedroom, the last room we had shared together, listening to the nighttime breezes blow through the backyard palms and dance invisibly across Florida, was imagine the very worst.
They cut him open and took out his mangled brain, then stuffed it back. Or maybe they didn’t bother and his head is empty. Either way, the toy will never run again.
That boy will never run again.
In the early morning, I woke from dreams of impossibly devious plumbing in huge bathrooms and went down the hall to relieve myself. I saw my mother sitting with Lissa in the battered and frayed rattan chairs in the living room. They must have been up all night. They were talking about Rob. Mom had her back to me.
“How they fought,” she was saying for the ten thousandth time. “Sometimes when their father was away, I didn’t dare even reach between them, they were like two wildcats. When they were three, they loved for me to read to them. The only way I could make them stop fighting was take out some picture books. I’d say, ‘Break it up, cut it loose. Shall we visit Dr. Seuss?’ And they would come running like nothing was wrong and sit on my knees.”
Lissa looked up and saw me standing in the hall, my BVDs tented by a piss hard-on. I felt like a ten-year-old boy caught doing the rude. Her eyes widened a fraction, then, with a slow blink, she looked away and resumed her vigil with Mom.
Women do hang together.
19
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA • JULY
The requests for interviews stopped coming. The Sea Messenger disaster became old news, and old news without a juicy update is deeper than history, darker than forgotten. Mauritz had gone crazy and shot up a ship, crew members had acted strangely, Dave Press had drowned, a few biologists had been murdered, including Rob. Other than Mauritz, no arrests, no suspects. End of the trail.
I slipped quietly away from Coral Gables and returned to the West Coast. I cleaned out my small apartment in Oakland, a shabby, temporary place at best, and wiped away a few obvious traces. No forwarding mail, and I canceled my cell phones.
I needed time and a place to think. Under an assumed name, I rented a mother-in-law apartment in Berkeley, which was, on any given sunny summer morning, literally in the shadow of the beautiful white Claremont Hotel. My landlady was an elderly artist who thought it lovely to have a scientist living and thinking over her garage. She shared the main house with two younger female companions with short hair and no patience for men. I came to her highly recommended by a professor of microbiology at San Francisco State University, a Fellow Traveler who had hidden radicals far more controversial than me in the 1970s.
