So far, George was just picking at the skin. He was looking through his father’s takeout menus, skimming the man’s Internet history. There were items of New Mexican pottery to destroy, shirts to try on.
Maybe he’d dress up like his father and take some selfies. Get the man online, if posthumously. If no one much liked him when he was alive, at least the old man could get some likes in the afterlife. Serious.
The woman remembered herself.
“I’m Trish, Jim’s… you know.”
“Uh-huh,” George said.
“I won’t even pretend to think he might have told you about me,” Trish said. “It’s not like we were married in any real official way. At least not yet.”
Oh god. A half wife.
The last time he spoke to his father—months ago now—George remembered not listening while his father said he had met someone, and that she—what was it?—provided the kind of service you didn’t really get paid for, or paid enough, because damn this country! And that this new girlfriend was from somewhere unique, and George knew to act impressed. Certainly his dad had seemed very proud, as if he’d met some dignitary from another planet.
So details had been shared, just not absorbed. Would she tell George now that his father had really loved him? Pined and whatever, wished for phone calls, had the boy’s name on Google Alert?
“Of course, Trish,” George said, and then he smacked his forehead, ever so lightly, to let her know just what he thought of his forgetfulness. She deserved as much. They embraced, at a distance, as if his father’s body were stretched out between them. Then she stepped closer and really wrapped him up. He felt her breath go out of her as she collapsed against him.
George knew he was supposed to feel something. Emotional, sexual. Rage and sorrow and a little bit of predatory hunger. Even a deeper shade of indifference? History virtually demanded that the errant son, upon packing up his estranged and dead father’s belongings, would seek closure with the new, younger wife. Half wife. Some sort of circuitry demanded to be completed. He had an obligation.
It felt pretty good to hold her. She softened, but didn’t go boneless. He dropped his face into her neck. Lately he’d consorted with some hug-proof men and women. They hardened when he closed in. Their bones came out. Not this one. She knew what she was doing.
“Well, you sure don’t smell like your father,” she said, breaking the hug. “And you don’t look like him. I mean not even close.”
She laughed.
“Oh I must,” said George. He honestly couldn’t be sure.
“Nope. Trust me. I have seen that man up close. You are a very handsome young man.”
“Thank you,” said George.
“I think I want to see some ID! I might have to cry foul!”
They met later for dinner at a taco garage on the beach. Their food arrived inside what looked like an industrial metal disk.
George dug in and wished it didn’t taste so ridiculously good.
“Oh my god,” he gushed.
It was sort of the problem with California, the unembarrassed way it delivered pleasure. It backed you into a corner.
After dinner they walked on the beach and tried to talk about George’s father without shitting directly inside the man’s urn, which was probably still ember hot. George hadn’t unboxed it yet.
“I loved him, I did. I’m sure of it,” Trish said. “When all the anger finally went out of him there was something so sweet there.”
George pictured his father deflated like a pool toy, crumpled in a garage.
“He called me by your mom’s name a lot. By mistake. Rina. Irene. Boy did he do that a lot.”
“Oh, that must have been hard,” said George. Who was Irene? he wondered. Had he ever met her? His mother’s name was Lydia.
“No, I get it. He had a life before me. We weren’t babies. It’s just that I suppose I want to be happy, too. Which is really a radical idea, if you think about it,” Trish said.
George thought about it, but he was tired and losing focus. He preferred a solitary loneliness to the kind he felt around other people. And this woman, Trish. Was she family to him now? Why did it feel like they were on a date?
“It’s just that my happiness, what I needed to do to get it, threatened your father,” continued Trish.
“My father, threatened,” George said. “But whatever could you mean?”
Trish laughed. “Oh I like you. You’re nothing like him.”
George took that in. It sounded fine, possibly true. He had no real way of knowing. He remembered his father’s new radio, which he had watched him build when he was a kid, and whose dial he twisted into static for hours and hours. He could make his dad laugh by pretending the static came from his mouth, lip-synching it. He remembered how frightened his father had been in New York when he visited so many years later. George held his arm everywhere they went. It had irritated him terribly.
What else? His father made him tomato soup once. His father slapped him while he was brushing his teeth, sending a spray of toothpaste across the mirror.
George was probably supposed to splurge on memories now. He wasn’t sure he had the energy. Maybe the thing was to let the memories hurl back and cripple him, months or years from now. They needed time, wherever they were hiding, to build force, so that when they returned to smother him, he might never recover.
After their walk, they stood in a cloud of charred smoke behind the restaurant. The ocean broke and swished somewhere over a dune. Trish arched her back and yawned.
“All of this death,” she said.
“Horn-y,” George shouted. He wasn’t, but still. Maybe if they stopped talking for a while they’d break this mood.
Trish tried not to laugh.
“No, uh, funny you should say that. I was just thinking, it makes me want to…” She smiled.
How George wished that this was the beginning of a suicide pact, after a pleasant dinner at the beach with your dead father’s mistress. Just walk out together into the waves. But something told him that he knew what was coming instead.
“I’m going to comfort myself tonight, with or without you,” Trish said. “Do you feel like scrubbing in?”
George looked away. The time was, he would sleep with anyone, of any physical style. Any make, any model. Pretty much any year. If only he could do away with the transactional phase, when the barter chips came out, when the language of seduction was suddenly spoken, rather than sung, in such non-melodious tones. It was often a deal breaker. Often. Not always.
After they’d had sex, which required one of them to leave the room to focus on the project alone, they washed up and had a drink. It felt good to sip some so-called legacy whiskey from his father’s Pueblo coffee mugs. Now that they’d stared into each other’s cold depravity, they could relax.
Trish circled around to the inevitable.
“So what’s up with Pattern?”
Here we go.
“What’s she like? Are you guys in touch? Your father never would speak of her.”
Probably due to the nondisclosure agreement she must have had him sign, George figured.
“You know,” he said, pausing, as if his answer was more than ordinarily true, “she’s really nice, really kind. I think she’s misunderstood.”
“Did I misunderstand it when her company, in eighteen months, caused more erosion to the Great Barrier Reef than had since been recorded in all of history?”
“She apologized for that.”
“I thought you were going to say she didn’t do it. Or that it didn’t happen that way.”
“No, she did do it, with great intention, I think. I bet at low tide she would have stood on the reef herself and smashed it into crumbs for whatever fungal fuel they were mining. But, you know, she apologized. In a way, that’s much better than never having done it. She has authority now. Gravity. She’s human.”