He lives at their house now and is mostly happy, his whims indulged, all the time to write songs he can manage and a ration of two beers a day (against doctor’s orders but my father insisted the man be allowed his hops). He is frustrated by not being able to go more than a couple blocks alone, but it being our hometown he pretty intelligently realizes he knows it all intimately and so is content to bake with Julia or just eat her baking, excel at the crossword puzzle and put it on the fridge, watch a marathon of The Twilight Zone.
~ ~ ~
Airports and airplanes, to me, still seem like the happy future we’ve all been told so much about. So many small pleasures exist in hurtling toward the ones we miss: the cheerful assistance of the steel moving walkway, the ready availability of anything we might need in miniature or in excess, the series of immaculate and anonymous spaces. Today is dark and I should not find joy in so many colors of toothbrushes, their frills reduced to syllogism — you will find no tongue scraper on this product, sir, only reds and blues and simple utility — but I can’t help it.
Today is dark and I should not take pleasure in the toilets that flush so promptly and politely, but I cannot help but find them kind and I thank them silently for removing the evidence I was there. I may be losing my mind.
I am hurtling toward what, today? What will I answer if a kind old woman happens to sit next to me in seat 17C (aisle)? Am I allowed to simply state, “Going to see my father”? And why should I feel guilty for not revealing the very whole truth to a woman I don’t know and will never see again? Why should I let my time in the air be about a funeral? I have paid several hundred dollars for the clear space, the small oval window, the seat designed to recline farther than ever, the odd-sized can of Coca-Cola, and I intend to enjoy them anyway I please.
I am going to see my father today, though he promises to look very much different and remain silent. That ghostliness aside, today I am also hurtling toward Jackson; I will see him for the first time in two years, four months, and sixteen days. When he began calling so casually seven months ago, just after I finally exited the city we’d called ours, I never once said: Please explain yourself. Please help me to understand what you did to me, what I did to you, what we did to each other. Instead I rose to the occasion of witty banter, and when he mentioned her I covered the mouthpiece so he would not hear the gnarled cough-sob that escaped without my permission. I was esoteric and clever and not actively kind, and made every effort to receive his phone calls but not dial his number and generally achieved the flippancy he had provided as the tone of our telephone interactions.
Oh-ha-ha, how very funny it all was — that the problem had ceased since us but he was pretending it hadn’t in order to save his ass. What a terrible person I am, he mused, and I laughed with him as if I hadn’t been directly ravaged by his terribleness. It was my fault just as much as his: I gave him permission to walk right back into the us versus them we’d spent so many years practicing.
I let him drop her name, her boring Midwestern name with its bland consonance, and said nothing when he went on about her virtues, how he didn’t quite appreciate them as much as he should, but was trying; how he knew blaming it on the sleepwalking was immoral but felt she’d be more hurt if she knew the full truth; how he just didn’t think she could handle that sort of pain and so it felt like the only option. And I didn’t need to say — then why not leave her? He answered that, too, as if I had asked: “She’s the sort of person I should love, I, and I think I will if I work at it.”
~ ~ ~
I had plotted the joining of our new adult-sized bodies carefully, certain that an event so many years in the making demanded forethought and atmospheric perfection. The afternoon preceding it, fifteen-year-old Jackson sat on my toilet while I cut my hair, bits of his face showing up in the mirror with the movement of my hands and elbows, his lips in the glass image positioned just so in the curvature of my armpit. The bathtub, once a container for our naked bodies and more innocent mischief, reflected also. Did he receive the glances I designed as seductive bouncing toward him? Did he understand that the thin black cotton of my shirt intentionally highlighted my chest? Did he have any idea?
I pushed the broom with efficiency and gestured for him to follow me. My mother’s long-weary bag, patched and repatched for over a decade, already packed with the supplies I’d deemed necessary. We took our normal route downtown, through the streets where our peers sat on benches waiting for their lives to start, down the cobbled alley that ran along the west side of the river, past the same waterside café where our parents had jiggled us on their laps and first begun to realize the full weight of adulthood. On the backside of the long-obsolete mill, which became a home to women’s clothing stores and wine bars and shops that sold rocks and candles, we climbed a set of steps to get to a balcony we frequented. From there, one could look down on the water and see it almost as innocent as the tourists did, feel a civic pride.
A few weeks before, I’d discovered a series of beams and pipes at the landing of the stairs. With a few shifts of weight they served as a ladder to a ledge onto the roof. The top of the mill was like an uninhabited city; it sloped in on itself and rose up again in tens of different places. Much of it was the corrugated steel of the exterior that was visible to passersby below, and other parts were gravel-covered concrete. It spanned almost two blocks. I’d begun escaping up there and eventually assembling a landscape with which to surprise Jackson. In a rectangular area lower than the rest, with four walls and the sky overhead, I’d placed sunflowers in pots around the perimeter, spread a quilt in the center.
He smiled when he saw it, threw his arms skyward in surrender. He’d lived alongside my elaborate plots long enough, seen them both fail and flourish. This one, surely, a success we could settle into for the afternoon. Feeling freed by the scenery, as I hoped he would, Jackson settled his head into my lap and I dared to stroke his hair behind his ears. Growing bolder, I asked him to sit, brought out the pint of whiskey and pulled on it and passed him the bottle. I started coughing, and so did he, and we slapped each other on the back until the coughing had ceased and we started to laugh. We passed the bottle back and forth in silence, both feeling a little sick. We talked about my father, about his mother, about people we found boring, the whole time trying to catch glances of the other like we so often do while passing by windows and wanting to get a look at ourselves. With the end of the bottle, my heart felt rich, and we were confusing syllables more often than not.
He cleared his throat in a serious manner, and I worried he suspected me, that he’d subvert my intentions before even exploring them.
“I have to tell you something,” he whispered.
“You have a very pretty hair and mouth”—I took his hand—“and also … I like boobs. I mean your boobs. I mean I like lots of boobs but I mean I think your brets are beautiful. Breasts.”