“You said we could be in and out in five minutes!” my brother snapped. “You said we could drain half the neighborhood in one night! But we only got through one, Angus. You’re the water-systems expert, you were supposed to deal with the logistics, and we only did one pool!”
“So it’s my fault?” Angus still didn’t look upset. He was just lying there, every once in a while drinking from his beer bottle. In the glow of the candles his hair looked darker than usual, its red turning to rust.
“I depended on your expertise,” Wylie said, “and it was a mistake.” He slowly lowered himself to the dusty floor and crossed his legs. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
“Hey, buddy,” Angus said. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Don’t call me that,” Wylie said. “I’m not your buddy.”
“You sure as hell are, buddy.”
Angus was still smiling, which annoyed me, but my brother was seething. Watching the both of them, knowing they’d be up all night arguing, I sighed. “I’m going back to Mom’s,” I said then. “I feel bad. I haven’t seen her in ages. I don’t even know how she’s doing.”
“She’s fine,” Wylie said.
“Oh, how would you know?”
“Do you think I don’t go by to check on her?” His dark eyes were flashing. He was just as mad at me as he was at Angus, as he was at the rest of the world.
“I don’t know what to think about you, Wylie,” I said. “And you don’t exactly help me figure it out.”
He tapped his fingers on the floor and nodded in a tight staccato. “That must be tough for you,” he said.
I left them all behind, their floor squatting and arguments and plans, the baby still mewling in the bedroom. My mother didn’t wake up when I came in, and in her little guest room I crawled between soft clean sheets. I’d thought that it would feel like coming home. Nowhere else in the world promised that sensation — not Brooklyn, not cheap motel rooms or my brother’s apartment, certainly not Paris or the Upper West Side — but my last thoughts before sleep were uneasy. I wished I knew where else on earth I should have gone.
Eleven
David Michaelson served me coffee. When I stumbled into the kitchen and saw him in a red-striped bathrobe, smiling at me, I realized I’d almost forgotten he existed.
My mother was sitting at the table with her coffee, her short hair unmussed by sleep. “Look what the cat dragged in,” she said in an even tone.
“I’ve been with Wylie,” I said, as if this excused everything, and took the cup from David’s large hand. After the relentless grunge of recent days my mother’s place seemed unbearably clean and orderly; I practically had to squint to look at it. Even the utensils sparkled alarmingly.
“How is old Wylie?” David set his own cup down on the table, sat down opposite me, and met my gaze without any sign of awkwardness. “I felt real bad about the way things ended last time. There’s no reason we can’t have a civil discussion about environmental issues. No reason at all.”
“David,” my mother said.
He smiled at her, pleasantly, then turned back to me, gesticulating in a lawyerly manner, his elbows on the table. “But if people just storm out every time there’s a disagreement, well, civility doesn’t stand a chance, now does it?” His reasonableness was making me queasy, or maybe it was the triangle of curly chest hair his bathrobe exposed when he leaned forward. I focused instead on my coffee, which was simultaneously bitter and enjoyable. It felt good to wake up and drink coffee in a normal cup, in a normal kitchen, with no hangover at all.
“David,” my mother said again.
“Well, does it stand a chance?”
“You’ll be late.”
Lifting his meaty wrist, David checked his watch and nodded.
“You’re right,” he said, “as always,” and then he winked at me. I squinted back. He left the table, lumbered out of the kitchen, and disappeared. My mother finished her final sip of coffee and stood up. “I’d better get ready too. By the way, someone called for you this morning before you were up. I didn’t even know you were here, of course.”
“Who?”
“Angus. Wylie’s friend. If that’s what he is.”
“Angus called here?” Saying his name in front of her felt weird.
“At seven. He said he’d be out of town for a few days but that you shouldn’t worry. He said he’d be working.” Her emphasis on “working” made clear how little she believed this statement.
“He’s a plumber,” I said.
“I see.”
“Have you ever even met him?”
“No,” she said. She cleared the dishes and I followed her into the kitchen. “But Wylie used to talk about him all the time. Back when he actually talked. So you like him, do you?”
“Not exactly. It’s more like — I can’t seem to leave him alone.” She turned to face me, and the look in her eyes was unexpectedly mild.
“Well, that’s how it is sometimes,” she said.
David Michaelson reappeared in a gray double-breasted suit and cowboy boots, presenting himself to us with open arms. “I’m in court today,” he told me. “Gotta look shiny and new.”
“Good,” I said faintly.
He pecked my mother on the cheek — like a dutiful husband — winked at me again, then left. My mother changed into her sensible travel-agent clothes and left, too. I felt tremendously happy to be alone.
After roaming through the house for a while I came to her bedroom. She hadn’t neglected to make the bed, and even the pillows beneath the covers were arranged to geometric perfection. I thought about passing out on the floor of Wylie’s unfurnished apartment, with my brother sprawled beside me. It seemed highly unlikely that we were her actual children. But on the bureau, next to her small jewelry box, were pictures of Wylie and me in the grip of goofy, soft-cheeked adolescence, complete with rolled eyes and acne. And there, visiting family in Chicago, were all four of us, skyscrapers looming behind us, the wind lifting our hair.
Finding the red-striped bathrobe hanging inside her closet, I wondered how often David stayed over, and what he told his wife when he did. In my last snooping spree I hadn’t noticed any conspicuous male clothing, and none was apparent now. There wasn’t even an extra toothbrush in the bathroom; but maybe he toted one with him, or maybe my mother shared hers. Some things were impossible for a person to contemplate and still want to live.
I went out in the Caprice, determined to see the house I still thought of as home, and drove through endless residential neighborhoods toward the bare mountains. The dead air of mid-July rendered the city flat and even. I listened to country music and tapped my fingers on the vinyl steering wheel.
Though two years had gone by since I’d seen the house, and though I’d lived through those years and recorded their passing, I was nonetheless shocked to find that the place did not look the same. It had been repainted a cotton-candy pink, first of all, and the people who lived there now had fixed to its exterior several gigantic plastic butterflies who were mounting an attack in a zigzag pattern, seemingly aimed at my old bedroom window. On the front door hung a wreath made of braided wheat and blue-checked Indian corn. I felt sure that somewhere in the vicinity, lurking, there were garden gnomes. The driveway, freshly asphalted, spread dark crumbles across the bordering expanse of our old lawn.
The last time I’d been here was a week after the funeral. A couple of days later my mother explained, briskly and undebatably, that she saw no sense in waiting and would be packing everything up and moving. I’d said fine, there was nothing I wanted anyway, and she smiled tightly and said she doubted this was true. Seeing the house now made me realize how much work it must have been for her and Wylie, and how drastic her resolve to break with the past. I wondered if this was when Wylie had decided to empty his apartment of its possessions, when he saw all of ours in moving boxes.