“I love you, son, okay?” I said, suddenly wanting to clear out and in a hurry. Enough was enough.
“Yep, me too,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll see you soon.”
“Ciao.”
And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.
I leaned and kissed his shoulder through his shirt. And it was, luckily, then that the nurses came to make him ready to fly far, far away.
Rotors, rotors, rotors, turning now in the warm afternoon. Strange faces appear in the open copter door. Henry Burris shakes my hand in his small trained one, ducks and goes stooping across the blue concrete to clamber in. Thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop. I give a thought to where Dr. Tisaris might be now — possibly playing mixed doubles on one of the cubed courts below. Well out of it.
Ann, bare-legged in her buttoned-up trench coat, shakes hands like a man with Irv. I see her lips moving and his seeming to mouth it all back verbatim: “Hope, hope, hope, hope, hope.” She turns then and walks straight across the grass to where I stand, slightly stooped, thinking about Henry Burris’s hands, small enough to get inside a head and fix things. He’s got a head for eyes and the hands to match.
“Okay?” Ann says brightly, indestructible. I no longer fear or suppose she could die before I die. I am not indestructible; do not even wish to be. “Where will you be tonight so I can call you?” she says over the thwop-thwop-thwop.
“Driving home.” I smile. (Her old home.)
“I’ll leave a number on your box. What time will you get there?”
“It’s just three hours. He and I talked about his coming down with me this fall. He wants to.”
“Well,” Ann says less loudly, tightening her lips.
“I do great with him almost all the time,” I say in the hot, racketing air. “That’s a good average for a father.”
“We’re interested in him doing well,” she says, then seems sorry. Though I am delivered to silence and perhaps a small catch of dread, a fear of disappearance all over again, a mind’s snapshot of my son standing with me on the small lawn of my house, doing nothing, just standing — canceled.
“He’d do great,” I say, meaning: I hope he’d do great. My right eye flickers with fatigue and, God knows, everything else.
“Do you really want to?” Her eyes squint in the rotor wash, as if I might be telling the biggest of all whoppers. “Don’t you think it’d cramp your style?”
“I don’t really have a style,” I say. “I could borrow his. I’ll drive him up to New Haven every week and wear a straitjacket if that’s what you want. It’ll be fun. I know he needs some help right now.” These words are not planned, possibly hysterical, unconvincing. I should probably mention the Markhams’ faith in the Haddam school system.
“Do you even like him?” Ann looks skeptical, her hair flattened by the swirling wind.
“I think so,” I say. “He’s mine. I lost almost everybody else.”
“Well,” she says and closes her eyes, then opens them, still looking at me. “We’ll just have to see when this is over. Your daughter thinks you’re great, by the way. You haven’t lost everybody.”
“That’s enough to say.” I smile again. “Do you know if he’s dyslexic?”
“No.” She looks out at the big rumbling copter, whose winds are beating us. She wants to be there, not here. “I don’t think he is. Why? Who said he was?”
“No reason, really. Just checking. You should get going.”
“Okay.” She quickly, harshly grabs me behind my head, her fingers taking my scalp where I’m tender and pulling my face to her mouth, and gives me a harder kiss on my cheek, a kiss in the manner of Sally’s kiss two nights ago, but in this instance a kiss to silence all.
Then off she goes toward an air ambulance. Henry Burris is waiting to gangway her in. I, of course, can’t see Paul on his strapped-in litter, and he can’t see me. I wave as the door slides slap-shut and the rotors rev. A helmeted pilot glances back to see who’s in and who’s not. I wave at no one. The red ground lights around the concrete square suddenly snap on. A swirl and then a pounding of hot air. Mown grass blasts my legs and into my face and hair. Fine sand dervishes around me. The wind sock flaps valiantly. And then their craft is aloft, its tail rising, miraculously orbiting, its motor gathering itself, and like a spaceship it moves off and begins swiftly to grow smaller, a little, and then more, then smaller and smaller yet, until the blue horizon and the southern mountains enclose it in lusterless, blameless light. And everything, every thing I have done today is over with.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Streets away, in the summoning, glimmery early-morning heat, a car alarm breaks into life, shattering all silences. Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! On the front steps of 46 Clio Street, reading my paper, I gaze up into the azure heavens through sycamore boughs, take a breath, blink and wait for peace.
I am here before nine, again in my red REALTOR jacket and my own The Rock shirt, awaiting the Markhams, currently on their way down from New Brunswick. Though unlike most of my previous intercourse with them, this time there is not a long story. Possibly there is even a hopeful one.
At the end of yesterday’s bewildering if not completely demoralizing events, Irv was good enough to chauffeur me back up to Cooperstown — a drive during which he talked a mile a minute and in an almost desperate way about needing to get out of the simulator business, except that in his current view and based on careful analysis, the rah-rah, back-slap, yahoo days in his industry were all done, so that a policy favoring a career move seemed foolhardy, whereas holding his cards seemed wise. Continuity — an earnest new commanding metaphor — was applicable to all and was taking up the slack for synchronicity (which never carries you far enough).
When we arrived long into the shaded dewy hours of early evening, the Deerslayer lot was jammed full of new vacationer cars and my Ford had been towed away, since inasmuch as I was no longer a paying guest my license number was no longer on file. Irv and I and the resurrected Erma then sat in the office at the Mobil station behind Doubleday Field and waited until the tow-truck driver arrived with keys to the razor-wire impoundment, during which time I decided to make my necessary calls before paying my sixty dollars, saying good-bye and turning homeward alone.
My second call and inexcusably late was to Rocky and Carlo’s, to leave a message with Nick the bartender. Sally would receive this when she got in from South Mantoloking, and among its profuse apologies were instructions to go straight to the Algonquin (my first call), where I’d reserved a big suite for her, there to check in and order room service. Later that night, from the village of Long Eddy, New York, halfway down the Delaware, we spoke and I told her all about the day’s lamentable happenings and some odd feeling of peculiar and not easily explainable hope I’d already started to revive by then, after which we were able to impress each other with our seriousness and the possibilities for commitment in ways we admitted were “dangerous” and “anxious-making” and that we had never quite advanced to in the solitary months of only “seeing” each other. (Who knows why we hadn’t, except there’s nothing like tragedy or at least a grave injury or major inconvenience to cut through red tape and bullshit and reveal anyone’s best nature.)