“I’m so glad I got you,” he said. “I miss you. I’m standing beside the highway sweating, and it’s not that hot here. I’m—”
“I know you hate it when I do this, but I’ve really got to put you on hold,” she said.
Her voice sounded official. She did not sound delighted to hear from him. Probably Tony was standing right in front of her. Probably she and Tony were having a discussion. Even Gwen might be in on it.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry.”
“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I don’t know how things went so out of focus”—he saw the white line painted up the center of the highway running along, as if it were a conveyor belt—“I’m here without you. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I thought you had to see your brother, and McCallum had to have a vacation,” she said.
“You’re furious at me,” he said. “Why? Why are you?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I thought a trip would do you good.”
“Why?” he said.
“Have you called to start a fight about a trip you told me you wanted to take?”
“Is he standing right there?” he said.
“ ‘He’ Tony? No, he’s not in the office. He does own the place, though.”
“I don’t care what he fucking owns, he doesn’t own you.”
“I realize that,” she said.
“You just don’t realize that I love you,” he said. “And maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe I’ve really blown it. McCallum — McCallum went off to apologize to some woman he knew from years ago when they were kids in summer camp. After all this time, he needed to apologize to her. I understand that. It’s not easy, sometimes. Too much time passes. You don’t know what to say. I don’t exactly know what to say now.”
“Write me a love poem,” she said. Her voice softened slightly.
“I’ll build you that tree house and climb up into it with you and read it to you there. How’s that?”
“It’s funny you teach poetry and you never write poems,” she said. “Do you write them and keep them hidden from me?”
“No,” he said. He shuddered as he remembered the grotesquely inept poem written by Mrs. Adam Barrows. “What are you doing?” he said quickly.
“Sitting here, waiting for an electrician to stop by and explain something to me about an exploding stove,” she said.
“You could fly to Key West,” he said. “Meet me.”
“Maybe we should take another vacation. Another time.” A pause. “McCallum is setting right some wrong? New lease on life and all that?”
“He jumped ship. He’s flying back.”
“And you wouldn’t be calling just to get me to pinch-hit for McCallum, would you?”
“I love you. Don’t you know that I love you?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
He looked again at the highway. The line was no longer moving, but cars were. The sun had begun to shine on his back. He turned away from it, facing into the phone booth. “The reason I called was to say I loved you. I’m afraid you’re going to leave. Have you been thinking about leaving?”
“I’ve given some thought to a brief vacation in Santa Fe, floating over the desert and eating blue corn tortillas.”
“That would be great,” he said. It sounded terrible. Far away, and pointless.
“I think I’m going with Jenny. Maybe after you write me your poem, you and I can go to, oh, Niagara Falls.”
“Anywhere,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“I love you. Can you say you love me even if you’re at work?”
“I love you,” she said.
“You’d say it if Tony was there, right?”
“I’m not in love with Tony,” she said.
“Does Gwen know about this? Did everybody besides me know?”
“You mean, did I confide in McCallum that night we had our little chat?”
“You did?”
“In fact, I didn’t. Listen: here’s the electrician. Once this stove situation gets fixed, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll be fine. Write the poem. Buy the lumber.”
“Niagara Falls. Hell, I really will take you, if you want to go.”
“I was kidding,” she said.
“But not about the other?” he said.
“No,” she said, lowering her voice. “I do love you. You’re always so distracted. I mean, you didn’t even pay attention to Evie. I don’t know if it was your class you were thinking about, or—”
“Don’t say any more,” he said. “This isn’t sounding as good as when you just said, ‘I love you.’ ”
She laughed. “You do make me laugh,” she said.
“I didn’t do well enough by Evie. I haven’t done well enough with you.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said.
“I will,” he said. “I’ll get back.”
He looked around him, smacking his lips dryly to send her a small kiss as he hung up, his hand still shaking as he replaced the phone in its cradle.
It would be good to get to Gordon and Beth’s. That would be his own version of McCallum’s sitting by the hearth, nestled in a chair, himself the center of attention, a drink on the table, forget the coffee and tea, a drink. It would be interesting to start from the beginning, with two people who knew nothing about the situation except its outcome — its ostensible outcome, since who knew what McCallum would do, and who knew what would happen to Susan, when and if she was released from the prison psychiatric ward to stand trial? — to discuss how McCallum had for reasons of his own decided he was entitled to be a part of Marshall’s life, which was in counterpoint to Marshall’s having decided he would distance himself from Gordon. Absenting yourself was a decision made by default, wasn’t it? What had happened that he and Gordon had for years kept a distance from one another? Wives? Geography? Their jobs? All those things, though Sonja had encouraged him to see more of his brother (more time for Tony?), and he’d always had the same amount of vacation time he had now, he could have gotten on a plane. It was too far to drive. He’d just driven because McCallum had stars in his eyes about being out on the road, though now he saw that McCallum had an ulterior motive. That left the category “jobs.” Okay: his had allowed him to turn inward, to spend his time passively, reading and thinking. Things that had once seemed a great luxury had become habit. Following the complexities of books had ultimately made him naïve about what was happening around him: everyone’s complicated lives; their difficult-to-articulate desires. Perhaps, having no ability to compete with his brother, he’d taken the opposite path, learned vocabulary while Gordon was learning skills, surrounded himself with other thoughtful people, while Gordon had concluded the optimal life was about more action and less thought.
He was worried that he’d dropped out of Gordon’s life too long, that it was going to be difficult to reconnect. There was every possibility Gordon thought that too; that Gordon was signalling he’d left not only Marshall, but the whole family behind when he didn’t come to Evie’s funeral. Gordon had said that exact day was when a Japanese businessman would be meeting with him to discuss buying the dive shop. But who knew? And what should his brother have done? Put everything on hold, since no doctor would say whether she was getting better or worse? Truth was, Gordon had never been as attached to Evie as Marshall. He had liked her, but not loved her. As a child, Marshall had thought that admirable: that Gordon was still loyal in his thoughts to their mother, while Evie’s kindness eroded more and more of their mother’s memory. It had been easier, probably, for Evie to embrace the younger child — physically embrace him — because Gordon was standoffish; Gordon saw his mother’s death as a way to increase his independence, because the adults were so preoccupied. And Gordon didn’t want his father to have any excuse to think him the sissy he thought his younger son. They had both known that was the way he had thought of Marshall. His father had asked Gordon to repair things, while he’d asked Marshall to help Evie wash dishes. It was to Gordon’s credit that he deemphasized his own achievements, that he had so convincingly made their father seem silly in his reactions toward Marshall. Well, Marshall thought, what if the payoff for having been such a good person was that one day Mr. Watanabe from Tokyo, Japan, made Gordon a rich man. What if Mr. Watanabe was an original thinker — no taking over Hollywood, no buyouts of companies in Silicon Valley: acquiring a diving-supply and boat-chartering business in Key West, Florida, the end of the line, Cuba floating ninety miles away, across all the gleaming water filled with million-dollar fish that were loaded onto airplanes still flopping, flown to Japan to be filigreed into sashimi. According to Sonja, who had talked to Beth, Mr. Watanabe’s other businesses included a drugstore chain in Kansas, and a meatpacking factory in Omaha. That sounded so dreary that the guy was probably looking for a business that would provide a little excitement.