Luminous Airplanes
Paul La Farge
In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died, and that he has to return to Thebes, a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and mourns the loss of Swan, a madman who may have been the only person to understand what was happening to the city, and to the world.Nearly ten years in the making, La Farge’s ambitious new work considers large worlds and small ones, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.
LUMINOUS AIRPLANES
PAUL LA FARGE
Dedication
For Sarah
Epigraph
“Run!” —Hal Hartley
Contents
Cover (#ud06a57c4-de66-59fb-9d6d-7c503ef509b3)
Title Page (#ub4632c69-3251-5d11-a0eb-9fc1d5c08f34)
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Also by Paul La Farge
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CONTACT WITH OTHER WORLDS
I had just come home from a festival in Nevada, the theme of which was Contact with Other Worlds, when my mother, or, I should say, one of my mothers, called to tell me that my grandfather had died.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” she said. “Where were you?”
I told her I’d been camping. I didn’t tell her I was at a pagan celebration where people danced around bonfires, a kind of dress rehearsal for the end of the world. I didn’t mention the huge glowing fish or the women with wings.
Celeste told me that my grandfather had died on Thursday morning, around the time when I was leaving San Francisco in my friends’ big white RV. My uncle Charles found him collapsed at his desk. He’d had a heart attack, the doctor said. His death was quick and probably not painful.
“That’s good,” I said, still dazed from the drugs I’d taken at the festival and the nights I’d gone without sleep. “When is the funeral?”
“It was this morning.”
“You had it without me?”
“We couldn’t wait,” Celeste said in the tone of voice she uses when eliding facts that might put her in the wrong. “Marie is closing an issue and she has to go back to work.” Marie is Celeste’s twin sister: by birth Marie Celeste, as Celeste was by birth Celeste Marie: another story. She works for S, a women’s magazine.
“But,” I began to protest, but Celeste wasn’t finished catching me up on what I’d missed. “We’re going to sell the house,” she said. “Do you want any of your grandparents’ things?” It would mean going back to upstate New York, she said, because the house was full from attic to basement with junk, and my mothers had no intention of sorting through it. They never got along with my grandfather, and my grandmother, with whom, to be honest, they also didn’t get along, had given them the few items they wanted before she died. Celeste said that unless I wanted to clean out the house myself, they would be happy to turn it over to one of the people who specialized in estate sales. Probably the antiques dealers would take a few pieces my grandfather had inherited from his parents, and the rest would be thrown away or given to orphans.
“Which orphans?” I asked.
“Whichever ones they have up there,” Celeste said. Then, as if she realized that she’d overplayed her frustration at not having been able to reach me, she asked, “Since when do you like camping?”
“I always liked camping.”
“You did?”
“Since I was a kid.”
Celeste hesitated. “Think it over,” she said, “but don’t take too long. The real-estate agent says our best chance of selling is before the ski season starts.”
Our conversation ended awkwardly, and I stood in my kitchen, not sure what to do next. Eight hours ago, I’d been sitting in the middle of a desert, eating instant oatmeal from a plastic cup and watching the remains of a giant wooden structure called the Exosphere smolder. Now my grandfather was dead, and Celeste wanted me to return to Thebes, where I hadn’t been for ten years. It was as if my life had cut abruptly from one record to another, and my thoughts were still dancing to the wrong beat: that was the image that occurred to me after three days of watching DJs perform at the festival. I tried to feel grief at my grandfather’s death. I tried to imagine him dying, to see him being buried, but all I could see was Nevada, the long line of the horizon with sharp brown mountains rising up in the distance. A silver pinwheel turned slowly in the wind. I wondered if I was all right, if there was something wrong with me. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently, and the answer I keep coming up with is, yes, something is wrong.
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
I had been living in San Francisco at that point for seven years, an amount of time that has always seemed to me to have magical properties. Tannhäuser lives in the Venusberg for seven years and Hans Castorp spends seven years on the magic mountain; there are the seven fat years and the seven lean years of Pharaoh’s dream, not to mention the seven-year itch and the seven-year ache. As the seven-year mark approached I found myself thinking about leaving the city. I thought about going back to the East Coast, and even considered living in New York again, although the forbidding presence of my mothers on the Upper West Side acted as a repelling magnet and sent my thoughts farther afield, to Europe, where we had almost moved, once, or to Canada, where I’d heard it was possible to live well for not very much money, and where the politics weren’t so frightening. In the end I made no plans to go anywhere, and the only result of all my thinking was that I ceased to do many of the things I had once enjoyed. I didn’t go to the Blue Study on Thursday nights; I didn’t assume the pose of a dog, a tree, a monkey or a corpse at the Yoga Tree on Valencia Street; I didn’t take my bicycle and ride out to the ocean, the way I had almost every week when I first moved to the city. Overall, my life in San Francisco was so greatly reduced that it felt like an afterlife, as though I were a ghost condemned to remain in the city until I accomplished a particular task, or got someone to accomplish it for me. I wondered how long I could go on living like that. Quite long, probably. San Francisco is a good city to be a ghost in. My upstairs neighbor, Robert, had lived in his apartment for many years before I moved in. He saw no one and never went out; on Saturday nights he snorted cocaine and listened to Dylan at top volume until one of the people downstairs complained. He worked at home, proofreading legal documents that appeared on his doorstep and were taken away by messengers whom neither of us ever saw. Once a month his ex-wife brought a little girl to visit him, I think it was his daughter. Sometimes I saw the three of them in the park, the daughter holding the mother’s hand and Robert walking beside her, stiff and serious, like a decrepit hippie bodyguard. The ex-wife and the girl were gone by nightfall; on those nights Dylan was always singing, and no one had the heart to ask Robert to turn the music down. I worried that I might become like him if I stayed in San Francisco too long. Or that I might be like that already. More than once, when I ran into a neighbor, I found myself cringing, as though the fact that I used to have a life was somehow visible— although if that was how ghosts really felt then they would never show themselves. They would wait in their attics, work their ghost jobs, and wait for their real afterlives to begin.
I came home from the festival on Sunday night. The next day was a holiday, and because I still didn’t know what to do, I went for a walk. The air was hot, and the sky was the bright, uninterrupted blue you get in San Francisco in the late summer, a sky so blue it looks opaque, as though it were just a shell hung over the city, hiding the real weather. It was the end of Labor Day weekend and the Mission was quiet. It made me think of when I first came to the city, before the boom of the nineties, when this had been a savage neighborhood, where crazy people and heroin addicts sat at the mouths of alleys, looking up at you with flat, hurtful eyes. Then money came and swept those people away; it replaced them with stores specializing in a single brand of shoe, and restaurants named with a compound of the word fire. Now, in September 2000, the restaurants were in trouble. Signs in their windows offered seven-dollar lunch specials and still no one came to fill their chrome-edged tables, their cushioned nooks. I walked up to Dolores Park, which was empty, apart from some children swinging in the playground and a handful of dogs wearied by the hot weather, walking around with their heads down, like people looking for change in the grass. From the top of the park I could see downtown San Francisco, the gray towers of the Bay Bridge, the brownish line of Berkeley beyond. And beyond that was all of California, Nevada, Utah, et cetera, all the way to New York State, to Thebes. But my ambivalence about San Francisco had vanished as I climbed the hill; the city was beautiful and I wanted to live there forever. I sat on a bench, relieved that I had come home from the festival when I did— if I’d returned a day earlier I would have had to bundle myself onto a plane for the funeral. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Alice, my ex-girlfriend, calling to see if I was back yet.
“I’m back,” I said, “but my grandfather died.”
“What?”
I told her what had happened, and how my mothers had the funeral without me because of Marie’s job at S.
“God, how vile,” Alice said. “Do you want to come over?”
Alice and I had broken up months before, but we still saw each other more often than we saw anyone else, or at least, I saw her more often than I saw anyone except my coworkers. Our conversations were frequently difficult, but Alice was the only person who made me feel solid. If we threw ourselves together at least a collision would happen.
“I’m tired,” I said, “I want to stay in my neighborhood. Do you want to come here?”
“You’re so far away,” Alice said.
I lived twenty minutes from her by foot, or half an hour on the bus. Finally we agreed to meet at the Doghouse, a bar halfway between her apartment and mine. It looked like bikers went there, so no one else went, though in fact the bikers didn’t go there either.
LOST THINGS
For a long time, from when I was very little and don’t remember years or stories, until I was thirteen, I spent every summer with my grandparents in Thebes. My mothers would have preferred to send me somewhere else, but they didn’t have the money for summer camp, and the free day programs in New York were frightening: this was the scary seventies, when the city was almost bankrupt and you could get attacked with a knife on the Upper West Side in the daytime. But I couldn’t just stay at home, because there was nothing for me to do, and my mothers wanted a vacation from being parents, a job neither of them had ever wanted to turn into a career. The summer was their time to make art, which was what they really did: Celeste was a sculptor and Marie took photographs. So, Thebes. I looked forward to it every year as soon as the trees began to blossom in Riverside Park. They produced flowers and I produced memories: of the man-made lake with the sandy beach, of the green mountains that rose up on either side of town, the stream, or kill, that ran through the middle of it, the old wooden bridge that crossed the stream, and the cool hollow under the bridge. I remembered the Regenzeit children who lived next door to my grandparents, Kerem and Yesim, pronounced YAY-shum, which were Turkish names because their parents were Turkish although they, the children, had grown up in the U. S. of A. The first days of spring tortured me; the future tied my thought in knots. By the time June came around, I watched my mothers as a hungry dog watches its humans, waiting for the sign that it was time for me to go. But my mothers were proud. They ran away from Thebes when they were seventeen, and had vowed never to go back; sending me to stay with my grandparents wasn’t breaking their promise, exactly, but it was close, and their way of keeping themselves aloof from this difficult fact was to pretend that it wouldn’t happen.
“I hear they cleaned up the Y,” Marie said one year. “It has a new swimming pool. Maybe you’d like to give it a try?” I told her the story I’d heard at school about a kid who went into that pool and didn’t come out again. “Hm,” Marie said, and the Y took its place again at the end of the alphabet. School ended and the real hot weather came. The windows were always open; our living room became a big, dusty receiver for the dramas broadcast from the street. The Celestes sprawled in side-by-side chairs in front of the electric fan, waiting for it to be night. They talked about the opening they’d gone to in SoHo, the artist who’d got the show by sleeping with the dealer, the writer who’d written about the show but didn’t know what the word lacuna meant. Just when I thought they had forgotten about me completely, suddenly they turned to each other, their mirror-faces wrinkled by mirror-frowns, and one said to the other, “Don’t you think it’s time to send him to Thebes?”
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
The Doghouse was crowded with Labor Day drinkers trying noisily to give substance to the illusion that San Francisco had had a summer. There was a back patio with a phenomenal view of the underside of Highway 101; as traffic whooshed by overhead, I told Alice how my mothers wanted me to pack up my grandparents’ house.
“Don’t they live in New York?” Alice asked. “Let them do it.”
“They don’t like the house. They hate going there.”
“Too bad for them.”
Alice had never met my mothers, but over the years she had acquired a kind of sympathetic dislike for them, which I sometimes felt guilty about instilling in her. She would have told me to stand up to them even if she liked them better, though: Alice was in favor of standing up to people. She stood up to her professors at Berkeley, who thought that a nobody girl from the Central Valley couldn’t know anything about American lit; she stood up to her college boyfriend, who was just a version, she realized afterward, of her Christ-nut father; and she stood up to me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not going.”
We got drinks and alit on a free table out back. “How was the festival?” Alice asked.
“Windy,” I said. “There were dust storms.” Alice hated dirt; she was the only person I knew in San Francisco with white wall-to-wall carpet in her apartment.
“That must have been tricky when you were tripping your brains out.”
“Ha. We didn’t do drugs, just some pot.” I had, in fact, taken a mescaline derivative, synthesized by a friend of Star’s, which made everything give off blue sparks, as if the landscape were effervescing in the cold night air, but I didn’t want Alice to be jealous.
“I see.” Wary of learning more than she wanted to know, she changed the subject. “Were you close to your grandfather?”
“I wouldn’t say close. I spent the summers with him when I was a kid, but he wasn’t easy to know.” I told Alice about the basement workshop where my grandfather restored old tables and chairs, or rather, given that nothing he touched ever returned to anything like the life it once had, it might be more accurate to say that he reincarnated them. When confronted with an old table, unsteady on its feet, topped with warped boards that had begun to detach from one another, his ordinarily serious face would soften, and as he stroked the table’s uneven surface he’d murmur, “Good grain. Good wood.” I knew what was going to happen: the table would come home with us; we’d carry it into the garage, where it would linger until my grandfather tried to correct its irregularities or it fell apart of its own accord, which amounted to more or less the same thing. Even then he would save the timbers that hadn’t rotted or been planed down to nothing. “Might patch something with these,” he’d say. “It’s good wood.”
“He sounds sweet,” Alice said.
“He wasn’t. Kind, sure. But not sweet.” Every year, he had sent me the same card on my birthday, with a picture of a Japanese fisherman in a little boat caught in the crook of an enormous wave, and each year the message inside the card was shorter. The last of the cards came just a month before he died. Happy birthday to my great grandson, it read, which confused me, because I was only his grandson. Finally I’d decided that he must have preferred the pun to the reality of the situation, but still, as a grandson, it made me feel less than great.
There was nothing to say about that, though, so I asked Alice how she was doing with her LSAT review class and she told me the class was for idiots, and I said yes, the point is they make an idiot out of you, and she scowled at me and said she knew some lawyers who were very intelligent. Until earlier that year, Alice had been an editor for a company in Mountain View that made Web browsers, but she’d been laid off along with half the people who worked there, so for the last three or four months she’d been freelancing, which meant spending her severance pay while she decided what to do next. She wasn’t certain she’d apply to law school; other prospects beckoned with lovely phantom hands. She might become a massage therapist, or teach English to businessmen in Japan.
The wind picked up, chilling the patio, driving the summer drinkers indoors. Alice said she ought to go home, she had to get up early the next morning.
“Have dinner with me,” I suggested. “Where?”
We argued for a little while, but it really was getting cold out, and Alice agreed to a Thai place next to my apartment. I put my arm around her and we walked back to the Mission as the fog came in over our heads, white rags of mist flying past like foam in a fast stream, covering up the empty sky.
After dinner we went to my apartment and sat in the kitchen drinking whiskey. “I don’t want to get drunk,” Alice said, “I’ve got yoga in the morning.”
“I don’t either.” I poured myself another drink and Alice motioned for me to pour her another also.
“Tell me about the music,” she said. “Who was there?”
I mentioned people we’d heard at the Sno-Drop, at the Red Room. That was again an omission. Pearl Fabula had played at the festival, but I hoped Alice didn’t know. We’d gone to hear Pearl too many times together before he became famous and left San Francisco.
“Ugh, Lorin,” Alice said. “That guy’s too ironic for me.”
We talked about how it had been all the way back in 1998, when we saw Hope Sandoval dancing next to us at Liquid, and the DJ from Portishead spun a set at the Blue Study, and how we’d gone to see Pearl when he played the impossible sample from Lady Di in the car. Dodi . . . Dodi . . . But we couldn’t stay in those memories for long. Soon we were talking about the signs that our music was in decline: the burly fraternity types we had seen dancing the pogo at an Underworld show, the long line of high school kids outside Community on Wednesday nights, the various laws that Congress was preparing to close the dance clubs down, Junior Vasquez selling CD players and Moby selling cars, the tendency of money to ruin everything.
“I feel like DJ culture is played out,” Alice said. Which I thought was her way of saying, I wish I had gone to Nevada.
“You may be right,” I said, “but what’s next?”
“I don’t know. There’s got to be something.”
Our faces touched. We kissed, we dug our fingers into each other’s backs. We made love and it was just the way I remembered it, not from the last, grudging months, nor from the beginning, when our sex was wild and tentative, like a dream you don’t want to write down for fear of losing track of its form, but from the middle of the relationship, however long that lasted, a year, a month. It was a solid thing, like putting two puzzle pieces together the right way, that gave us a glimpse of a larger picture, as yet unfinished. Then we fell asleep. I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a headache. Alice’s back was to me, her kinky blond hair spread out on the comforter. I thought of the foam on the crest of the wave on my grandfather’s cards. For years the fisherman had been waiting for that wave to break, and it never had. I used to want it to break, not because I wanted the fisherman to drown, but so that he wouldn’t have to wait any longer. I closed my eyes and imagined it breaking, a dark-blue wave with streaks of black in it, edged with white foam, crashing over the stern of the little boat, and afterward, when there was nothing to look at but blue water and wreckage, a timber, an oar. I opened my eyes. Alice was still there. The wave hadn’t broken yet and maybe it never would.
LOST THINGS
Thebes was never what my memories made it. My grandmother was a good cook but she loved her garden too well, and served us vegetables that only a mother could love, wormholed lettuces, cracked tomatoes, small starchy beans. My grandfather was frequently in a bad mood and spent whole days in his workshop, sawing and pounding some hapless antique into submission. I played with Kerem and Yesim, the children next door, but this too had its perils. There was bad blood between the Rowlands and the Regenzeits: my grandfather had sued Joe Regenzeit before I was born, and lost. Regenzeit owned the Snowbird ski resort, a couple of bald stripes shaved into the side of a mountain just past the west end of town, and the lawsuit was in some way connected to the resort, but I couldn’t guess how. My grandparents didn’t even own skis. It was bad enough that the Regenzeits lived next door, that my grandmother had to watch Mrs. Regenzeit gardening when she was in her garden, that my grandfather had to speak to Joe Regenzeit at town meetings, but when I went over to play with the Regenzeit children, it was too much, it was Montague cozying up to Capulet. If only there had been anyone else for me to play with, my grandparents would have forbidden me to see Kerem and Yesim, but there wasn’t anyone else, apart from a few strange children who haunted the steps of the public library, children no one knew and no one wanted me to know. Although I would know them, later on.
I wasn’t in love with Yesim at first— that came later— but from the very beginning I liked the ordinariness of the Regenzeits’ lives. The furniture in their house was all brand-new; they had a glass-topped dinner table, which I found fascinating, and a spotless white sofa where children were not allowed to sit. Kerem and Yesim had only one mother, the formidable Mrs. Regenzeit, who was barely five feet tall, wore a pink jogging suit, and spent her days talking on the telephone. I don’t know who she called, or who called her, but her remarks were merciless. “I don’t give one shit about that,” she said, stabbing the air with a long cigarette stained red with her lipstick. “You tell him I am fucking pissed off.” She had an accent that made shit into sheet and pissed into peaced, a Turkish accent, I assumed, but later I learned that it was German. Mrs. Regenzeit wasn’t fierce to me; she daubed iodine on the blood that welled up when I cut myself; she fed me plates of strange Turkish cookies. Then there was Mr. Regenzeit, an ordinary father, the only one I knew. He was a short, muscular man who spent most of his time at work. Later I’d learn that he was not ordinary— but what did I know about fathers? I thought they were all like that, compact, fussy men who reserved Friday afternoons to teach their children the customs of their native land. As a non-Turk, I was sent home, and it was only when I came to the other side of the fence that separated our houses, and saw my grandmother kneeling in the garden, and heard my grandfather sawing in his workshop, that I remembered the bad blood.
“You’d better wash up,” my grandmother called to me, although our dinner would not be for a while yet. I went to the bathroom and rubbed my hands under the faucet for a long time, thinking about blood, blood and fathers.
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
Alice left at six-thirty the next morning for yoga. Now that she was unemployed she clung even more fiercely to a schedule than she had when she was working. I got up an hour later, made coffee, and sat looking out the window at the parking lot behind my building. Norman Mailer’s car was parked just beneath my window, its royal-blue roof spotted with pigeon shit. When I bought the car from Peter, the owner of the used-book store down the street, I planned to take all kinds of trips: up to Seattle, down to Los Angeles, and farther south, into Mexico, where I had never been. But in fact I had been no farther away than Point Reyes, two hours north of the city, where Alice and I camped in the state forest one foggy summer weekend. Idly, like an astronomer thinking about some distant eclipse, I wondered how hard it would be to drive to Thebes. I looked in a road atlas and discovered that, thanks to Interstate 80, driving from San Francisco to upstate New York was ridiculously easy. Once you crossed the Bay Bridge, you had to make a total of three turns before you pulled into my grandfather’s driveway. I estimated that the trip would take about four and a half days, then I took a shower and left for work.
Cetacean Solutions, LLC, a provider of content-management solutions (a.k.a. laboriously customized databases) to enterprise clients (a.k.a. businesses), was in a slump. All spring we had been overrun by orders, which we worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day to fill, but in the fourth quarter of 2000 the orders suddenly ceased. Cetacean, which our company’s logo instructed us to picture as a mighty whale diving deep into the ocean, presumably to do battle with the giant squid of unmanaged user content, now seemed less like a whale than like a whaling ship roaming an ocean from which whales had largely vanished. Dave, our captain, sent the sales team to the top of the mizzenmast to scan the water with their telescopes; meanwhile on deck the engineers mended the boats, sharpened the harpoons and polished the brass fittings. Even the maintenance work we did for our existing clients had slowed to almost nothing by August. It was like the middle of Moby-Dick: no whale in sight, only occasional contact with another passing ship, and nothing to fill the time except digression. Our office, a converted Victorian on the eastern flank of Potrero Hill, within sniffing distance of the Anchor Brewery, had a Fun Room in the basement: a brightly carpeted lounge where, in busy times, we rested our brains while playing ping-pong or foosball. Now that there was no work and our days could, in theory, have been all fun, the Fun Room had taken on a new, sinister purpose. Every third or fourth day we assembled there for an all-hands meeting on a different theme: Defining Standards in Code Creation, Measuring the User Experience, Working in the Cloud. Employees with vacation days suddenly experienced a desire to go on vacation; those without them petitioned for unpaid leave. I was hoping that when I came back from the desert meaningful work would be in sight, but on Tuesday morning I found Mac, my boss, looking at boat trailers on the Internet. He didn’t own a car, much less a boat, but there was something about the structure of the boat trailer that interested him, he said, something about the way it suggested absent realities. I asked if there was going to be a meeting.
“Will you look at this thing,” Mac said. “This is for sure a nuclear-sub trailer.”
“What happened to the sub,” I asked, “that it’s for sale?”
He thought about this. “Maybe there are no bridges rated for sub transport.”
We fell together into silent estimation of submarine tonnage vs. bridge loads, then Mac snorted and switched to his e-mail. “All-hands meeting at eleven.”
“What’s the topic?”
“Hydration for Performance,” he read off the screen. “Did you know that twenty percent of human fatigue is caused by improper or insufficient hydration? An optimal fluid-consumption program developed by NASA for long-duration space missions will be presented. But, aren’t astronauts catheterized?”
“Does it matter?”
“Depends.”
I groaned at his pun and went down to the Fun Room to get a free Coke. I twiddled the handles of the foosball machine. Something had to happen, I thought. Any minute the cry would go up from the lookouts and someone would claim the gold doubloon nailed to the mast, but nothing happened, nothing at all. Eventually I heard people coming down the stairs for the performance-hydration meeting, and slipped out the fire exit.
I took my filthy festival clothes to the laundromat, and while they washed I called Alice. The call went straight to voicemail, and I left a message, asking her whether what had happened last night meant that we were on again, whether she wanted to be on again, what being on again might mean. I went across the street and bought an iced coffee, and while I was standing outside the laundromat drinking my coffee, I saw a man in a green Army jacket crossing Seventeenth Street. From the back he looked like Swan, a homeless man who used to distribute leaflets in my neighborhood. For years I saw him every day, handing out his leaflets, or typing them, or feeding the pigeons who were his other chief occupation. He was angry, dirty, taciturn and paranoid, but at the same time he was completely extraordinary. It was as if mysterious powers had put a light house in the Mission, a strange beacon left over from an era when people traveled differently and different things mattered. Like a light house, Swan stood all by himself, marking a place no one else had reached— warning us off, I sometimes thought, and sometimes I thought, inviting us to follow him. Swan disappeared in the winter of 1997. My friends held a rally to protest the city’s policy of driving its homeless citizens from gentrifying neighborhoods like ours, but it didn’t bring Swan back. That was when my life in San Francisco began to feel ghostly. And now, I thought, here he was, as if nothing had happened! “Swan!” I cried, and I ran after him. The old man was quick; I didn’t catch up with him until Church Street. And of course it was someone else. Swan was gone.
I went back to the laundromat and retrieved my clothes from the dryer. I carried the clean clothes back to my apartment, but now my apartment itself looked wrong. The living room contained only a coffee table and an ancient red futon; the dining room had an even older sofa, a TV set, and a white imitation bearskin rug that my ex-housemate Victor had inherited from an uncle in Moscow. When Alice and I were going out, she nagged me to redecorate, but I said I liked my old things. “Your things aren’t old,” she said, “they’re just ugly.” She was right, but I refused to see it. Whenever she pointed out a chair or table or sofa in the window of a store downtown and said, “Why don’t you get one of those?” I objected that it wouldn’t go with the furniture I already had, even though nothing would have gone with my furniture. It was a question of living with it or replacing everything. That afternoon I considered replacing everything; there was a store on Seventeenth and Valencia that catered to people like me, bohemian types who had a little money, and if I had gone there, everything might have turned out differently. The desperation of my heart, the feeling of loss that I still couldn’t connect to my grandfather’s death, all that emotion might have resolved itself in a sofa and loveseat, a leather armchair, a media center made from salvaged pine flooring. I might be in San Francisco now, living with Alice in my redecorated apartment; we might be happy together. But in fact I didn’t have the energy or the will to buy furniture, and here I am in New York, living with a stranger.
I went out for a super vegetarian burrito, came home, opened a beer and took it into my study, which was cluttered with books and papers from the days when I had been a graduate student in history at Stanford, the pre-Cetacean era. Now I didn’t use the study for anything; on the whole it depressed me. I rummaged through the drawers of my fireproof filing cabinet for Swan’s leaflets, hoping that his talk of laser wolves and spirit flight and the Coming of the Great Ghosts would somehow cheer me up, but what I found were the notes for my dissertation. They were the opposite of what I wanted, but I was in that totally exhausted state where you don’t think clearly and your goals and objectives shift around like shadows, leading you from one bad idea to the next. Soon I was leafing through xeroxed microfilms of nineteenth-century newspapers, my annotations squiggling past in the margins like flipbook animations. Was there any use for this stuff, I wondered, or was it just lost time, and not even lost time in the Proustian sense, time that comes surging back to you out of a cup of cooling tea, but time truly squandered, irrecoverable, lost to a kind of academic coma? My head hurt just thinking about it. I left the papers heaped on the desk and went to bed, and the last thing I noticed before I fell asleep was that Robert was playing “Positively 4th Street” upstairs at top volume, and that I didn’t care.
THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT
My dissertation was, or would have been, about the “doom-minded Millerites,” a group of radical Protestants who believed the world would end in 1843. They were named for William Miller, a New York State farmer who had added up the years of the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation, according to a complex and not obviously correct system of his own, and fixed 1843 as the deadline for the apocalypse. Tens of thousands of people were convinced by his calculations, and as the final year approached they prayed and read and danced themselves into a frenzy of anticipated salvation. But the world did not end. Late in the year one of Miller’s disciples added up the numbers again, and concluded that the world would end on October 22, 1844. On that day, somewhere between fifty thousand and half a million Millerites gathered in churches, on hilltops and in cemeteries. They sang; they prayed; they waited. Nothing happened. Eventually they returned home to sleep.
After the Great Disappointment, as the day when the world didn’t end came to be known, most of the Millerites renounced their faith and went on with their lives. Some recalculated the date of the apocalypse: it was going to happen in 1846, or 1853, or, anyway, soon. And a few asserted that Jesus had come back, and that he’d shut the doors of salvation to all unbelievers— in other words, to anyone who wasn’t them. Believing that their souls were out of danger, they gave themselves over to free love and “promiscuous foot-washing,” something I’ve always wondered about. For these “shut-door” Millerites, the world had ended; what they continued to experience was only a sort of appendix to history, in which a few problems that remained obscure in the body of the text would be resolved. What led these otherwise reasonable people to believe that the world was going to end, that it had ended? It was an interesting question.
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
I woke up at dawn the next day, to the sound of a fire truck headed east on Sixteenth Street— for some reason they always went east. My body hurt with tiredness, but I dragged myself out of bed, made coffee and began mechanically to put my notes back in their filing cabinet; then with a sudden rush of resentment I carried the files downstairs and dumped them in the recycling bin. I went upstairs, put my clean laundry in the bag I’d just unpacked and wrote an e-mail to Mac, saying that an emergency had come up and I needed two weeks off. I left Alice a message, threw out the uneaten food in my refrigerator, emptied the trash and carried my bag down to Norman Mailer’s car.
Four days and three turns later I was in Thebes.
LOST THINGS
Thebes is tucked away in the northeastern corner of the Catskills, more or less where Washington Irving set the story of Rip Van Winkle, and even as a child it wasn’t hard for me to see why Irving chose that location. As you drive east on the only road that leads into Thebes, the mountains seem to close their gray shoulders behind you, cutting you off from the rest of the world. The valley looks older and stiller than the rest of the country, as though the land itself were asleep. There are billboards for things no one sells anymore, their photographs bleached blue by the sun, and signs for Summerland, a resort that closed a few years before I was born. It isn’t a place that promises great excitement, and in fact, with the exception of my last two summers there, when marvelous and unprecedented things happened, my memories of Thebes have a Rip Van Winkle– ish quality to them, as though I and the town and everyone in it were not so much living as dreaming.
In fact the town was bigger than I remembered, and richer. It began with a sign for the Snowbird ski resort, then the self-storage complex, the graveyard, a stand of trees, a bar called Fire and Ice, a bed-and-breakfast decked out prematurely with orange Halloween bunting, and the ski shop, which had taken over the house next door to it and become a kind of sports emporium. Across the street, the Kozy Korner gift shop and the Kountry Kitchen, then Arturo’s, the Italian deli, which had a new sign with golden letters carved into a green oval of wood, then a video store and the Country Barn Antique Emporium, the crossroads, the gas station, the church, the public library, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, which I didn’t remember having been there before. Just past the bank, on the lot which used to have a drugstore, there was an organic grocery. An organic grocery! When I was little, you could barely get vegetables in Thebes unless you grew them yourself. Now there were bins of late-season tomatoes, apples and squashes, all faintly luminous in the late-afternoon sun.
I wondered what my grandfather had thought of it. When I was a child, he was always telling me about how things used to be in Thebes. He spoke of the town, which was founded by his ancestor Jean Roland in the early part of the nineteenth century, like an heirloom that had passed into the hands of strangers who were treating it badly. He knew what everything had once been: the Kountry Kitchen was the lunch counter for workers at the Rowland Mill until the mill closed in the 1940s, and Arturo’s was a smithy. Sheep had grazed where the ski shop stood, and I got the impression that my grandfather would have much preferred the sheep. He reserved his greatest displeasure, however, for Snowbird, the ski resort. Not only had it disfigured a swath of Mount Espy; it brought outsiders to Thebes: not workers who would buy houses and send their children to the public school and be humbled and annealed by the long winters, but seasonal people who had no respect for the town’s history or its way of doing things. It didn’t help that Snowbird’s owner was Joe Regenzeit, a Turk. My grandfather had never been to Turkey, and surely he exaggerated the Turkish people’s fondness for winter sports, but to him the resort was un-American, maybe even un-Western. It was the intrusion of a foreign culture into the deepest, best-hidden fold of his native land. And not just any foreign culture, but the Turks, hereditary enemies of the French ever since the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 c.e., which was the historical basis of the Song of Roland (and here I hear my ex-housemate Victor, the medievalist, correcting me: Those weren’t Turks who slew Roland, they were Basques— but be quiet, Victor). “The Turks don’t understand what these mountains are for,” my grandfather complained. “The Catskills aren’t the Alps. They aren’t the Rockies. These are old mountains. You can climb them, but you can’t ski them. It’s ridiculous.”
Compared with the rest of the town, my grandparents’ house was reassuringly unchanged. A white Colonial three stories tall, with flaps of black tar paper on the pitched roof, gray shutters and a gray porch with white posts, the exterior almost entirely devoid of color, as though it belonged to an era before things had been colored, or, more accurately, as if it were one of the Greek temples that had once been gaudily painted but were now worn down to a white austerity that they seemed, in retrospect, always to have possessed. The old oak tree that menaced the house was larger than ever, its leaves a dusty late-summer green. There was a pickup truck parked in front of the garage, with rowland’s towing and salvage painted on the driver’s door in yellow cursive: my uncle Charles was there. The kitchen door was open; I went in. The white linoleum floor was tracked with muddy footprints, which my grandmother would never have allowed; the radio was tuned to a call-in show. “OK, OK, I’m going to admit it,” the caller said, “I really like fat women. The bigger, the better.”
“Say it!” shouted the host. “Let it out!”
I called out, “Charles?”
A door shut above me, feet on the stairs. “Well, hey! It’s Mr. California!”
We embraced, and I breathed in Charles’s atmosphere of cigarettes and Dial soap. “Thought you’d be tan,” Charles said.
I explained that San Francisco wasn’t always sunny, and besides I didn’t spend that much time outside. I didn’t say what I had expected him to be, the Uncle Charles I remembered from my summers in Thebes, a giant in an undershirt, with a walrus mustache and red stubble on his chin, who chewed tobacco and spat in a coffee can outside the kitchen door, to the great disgust of my grandmother, who told him that one day he’d go out to spit and wouldn’t be allowed back in. He was no longer that person. There was a bend in his back that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him, at my grandmother’s funeral, and as he led me in he picked up an ugly black cane and leaned his weight on it. White hairs poked up north of the collar of his undershirt, in the hollow of his shrunken neck.
“So, you were out of town when Oliver died?” he asked.
“Camping,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”
“Don’t hold it against yourself. Hell, I’m surprised the twins came. Not that they stayed. No. It was whup! Shovel of dirt on the coffin, whup! Off to the train. You’d think they were afraid the ground would catch fire.” He laughed at his own turn of speech. “They didn’t even stay for the reception, not that I blame them. You know, they don’t speak the language.” Charles meant this literally. The old people in Thebes have their own vocabulary, a couple dozen French phrases handed down from the original settlers. Langue d’up, my grandfather called it jokingly, langue from the French for language, and up for upstate. Further evidence of how tightly the Thebans cling to the past.
“Anyway,” my uncle went on, “it was just a bunch of old Thebes farts talking about the nice things Oliver Rowland did for them in the long ago and far away. For example, Mo Oton made a joke about how Oliver was generuz de son esprit, generous with his spirit. What Mo meant was, he was a skinflint. His spirit was the only thing he ever gave away! Gabby Thule told a story about how he came to visit her in the hospital when she had her gallbladder out. And how he brought her the nicest bunch of wildflowers. Of course he did! Nothing’s free like wildflowers!”
He got us each a beer from the refrigerator. “You’re still living in Frisco, am I right?”
“San Francisco. No one who lives there calls it Frisco.”
“Is that so?” Charles lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You know, I had my heart set on going out there, back when. San Francisco, or Big Sur, more like it. One of those hippie places right on the ocean.”
“You were a hippie?”
“I wasn’t anything. I was just a kid.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
Charles coughed. “Things got in the way.”
I wondered if he meant the war. Around the time I was born, Charles had enlisted in the Army, against the wishes of my grandfather, who wanted him to become a lawyer, or a banker, something commensurate with the family’s status in Thebes. Instead he went to Vietnam. No one in the family was entirely clear on what he’d done there; all we knew was that he came home knowing how to fix cars. With money grudgingly loaned him by Oliver, he opened a garage in Maplecrest, the next town over. The business grew quickly; by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, Charles had four tow trucks, a half dozen drivers, and a pretty secretary named Mrs. Bunce who gave me sour-cherry sucking candies.
“You should come visit,” I said. “I’ll go to Big Sur with you.”
Charles looked at me in a way that I didn’t understand, as if, I thought, he’d known what I was going to say before I said it. “Maybe in a while,” he said.
He left a few minutes later. I walked him out, and when he saw Norman Mailer’s car in the driveway he stopped, transfixed by horror. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Tell me you didn’t drive across the country in that.”
“It runs OK. It just makes a grinding sound when it goes uphill.”
“I’ll bet it does. What is it, a seventy-seven?”
“Seventy-six. It used to belong to Norman Mailer, the Norman Mailer. My ex-girlfriend thinks I was stupid to buy it, but it turns out to be a pretty good car.”
My uncle laughed. “At least you aren’t gay.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, or even why Charles would think I was gay, until I remembered that he hadn’t seen me since I moved to San Francisco. No gay man in the city would have thought for even a second of dressing like I did, but my uncle couldn’t be expected to know that.
Charles said he’d come back in a couple of days to see if I was still alive. He climbed into his truck. I wanted to stop him from going, because it hurt me to think that after ten years apart we had made such poor impressions on each other, and also because I was afraid to be alone in the house, but it was too late; his truck honked and was gone, two red lights dropping into the deep blue of twilight in the country.
The radio was still on in the kitchen. “Speaking as a woman of generous proportions,” a caller said, “I just want to let everybody know that I feel good.”
I opened a can of chicken noodle soup and heated it on the stove. Outside, the wind whispered in the oak tree. In my hurry to leave San Francisco I’d packed only one book, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I’d been meaning to read for months; but as soon as I started it I realized that I was not in the mood. Reading a novel, especially a contemporary novel, with its small stock of characters and situations, felt like being stuffed into a sleeping bag head-first: it was warm and dark and there wasn’t a lot of room to move around. I looked through my grandparents’ books and eventually chose Progress in Flying Machines, a purplish hardback with a winged contraption stamped on the front cover in gold. My grandfather had liked reading to me from it when I was a child. Published in 1894, it was, he said, the book that inspired the Wright brothers to build their airplane. What this meant was that none of the flying machines described in Progress in Flying Machines had ever flown. The book was a catalog of failures: giant wooden birds with flapping wings, aerial rowboats beyond the power of any human being to propel, corkscrew-crazy helicopters which under the best of circumstances never left the ground. I often wondered why my grandfather thought this was appropriate bedtime reading for a child. Maybe he hoped the book would teach me the importance of hard work and persistence, and give me faith that what looked like failure could be transformed, by history’s alchemy, into magnificent success. Perhaps he was also preparing me for the likely if not delightful possibility that the success would belong to someone else. As he didn’t tire of telling me, “Remember, it isn’t just the successes who matter. Even the ones who fail get us somewhere, if we learn from their mistakes.”
He meant this to be reassuring, but I found it sad: even as a child I suspected that the person he was reassuring was himself. And in fact my grandfather’s history, like that of many of the so-called pioneers of flight, was largely the story of his failure to get off the ground. My grandparents lived on the rent from properties they owned in Thebes, but over the years my grandfather had tried to increase this income by means of various schemes, not one of which did anything but fail. My mothers told me about them with acid glee: there was the time your grandfather bought real estate in Catskill, they said, he took a bath on that. There was the time he sold seeds from your grandmother’s garden! Even Mary couldn’t believe it and she loved those plants. And then of course there was the lawsuit, the great battle with Joe Regenzeit, which he lost. Oliver was not discouraged. That was what irked my mothers most of all: to see my grandfather fail, and fail again, and not give up. It wasn’t just that my grandfather’s hopefulness reflected badly on his common sense; it also made him unbeatable. No matter how high my mothers climbed, they could never have the satisfaction of getting above Oliver, who was always, in his sober way, hoping for something better.
My soup was ready when I came back to the kitchen. I opened a beer and sat down to read. At midnight, half drunk and far from sleep, I called Alice. Her voicemail picked up again so I read it a sentence from the book in front of me: “If one had an unlimited height to fall in, affording time to think and to act, he would probably succeed in guiding himself at will.” I added: “Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know I got here OK. The house is a disaster, it’s going to take like a hundred years to clear it out. And my uncle is dying. Miss you. Bye.” I made up a bed on the sofa. The bedroom where I used to sleep was full of boxes, and I didn’t want to sleep in my mothers’ room, because I was haunted by the memory of what had happened there thirty years ago.
THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD
Whenever Celeste said my father’s name, she made a face; the four syllables, RICH-ard EN-tee, left her pursed lips like the taste of something rotten. Richard Empty, she called him, but when I asked what she meant, whether my father had really been empty, she only shook her head, as though to say that actually she had meant the opposite, and I was not supposed to understand. Despite my mothers, and to spite them, I was endlessly curious about Richard Ente. I collected facts about him the way other children collect stamps or baseball cards, and I assembled them into a story that I reviewed from time to time, solemnly, just as I went over the deposits and withdrawals in my savings account, checking and double-checking the total even though it was never more than a hundred dollars.
This is my father’s story: once upon a time there was a lawyer named Richard Ente. Six foot two, eyes of blue, nonetheless a New York Jew, Richard came to Thebes in 1969 to sue Joe Regenzeit on my grandfather’s behalf. Richard was handsome, and my mothers didn’t meet many strangers. They couldn’t get enough of him and— to their surprise, probably— he didn’t find them silly, or provincial, or young. Richard must have been fifty at the time, my grandfather’s age; my mothers were sixteen. I don’t know how Richard chose between them, but in the end, the one he fell in love with was Marie, and their love was, what, I don’t know, lovely, but brief. Oliver caught his lawyer romancing his daughter; Richard fled in my grandfather’s sports car, and my grandfather chased him in my grandmother’s station wagon. For some reason the two cars collided, and it was a miracle neither Richard nor my grandfather was hurt. The love-suit was over but the lawsuit went on, until, on the morning of the day when the jury was to announce the verdict in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc., Richard Ente ran away from Thebes. He died of a heart attack in Denver that summer, three months before I was born.
I tried to supplement this little collection of facts with information from my grandparents, but they had less to offer than I hoped. “Richard was a genius,” my grandfather said, but when I asked him how my father was a genius he declined to give concrete examples. The most he would say was, “It was impossible to beat him in an argument, although I certainly tried.”
My further questions got no answer so I turned to my grandmother. “What was my father like?”
“He was very intelligent,” she said judiciously. “He worked very hard.” I had the feeling she was sugarcoating the truth, in the hope that she could create a better father in my mind than the one who was already working mischief in my blood.
“Was he a good arguer?”
“I suppose he must have been. He was a lawyer, after all.”
“Why did he run away?”
My grandmother shrugged.
“Did he know he was going to lose the lawsuit?”
“I have no idea. Now stop grilling me, and get some peas from the garden. They’re just big enough to eat.”
That was the sum of the information I had about the Richard Ente Period, which lasted from the summer of 1969 until the spring of 1970, from Woodstock until about Kent State. Over the years I added to it scraps of less relevant or less assimilable information which my mothers let slip in careless moments. When I said I didn’t want to go to school, because I was smarter than everyone there, Celeste said I sounded just like my father. When I wouldn’t go to bed before my mothers, when I protested that if there were rules, then they ought to apply to everyone, adult and child, equally, Marie told me to stop lawyering, for Christ’s sake, it made me sound like a little Richard Ente. From these and other reproaches I learned that my father was a selfish person who didn’t do homework and hardly ever slept, who didn’t say thank you when he received a gift, who forgot to call when he was going to be late, who watched television during the day, who made up stories about places he had not been and people he had not met and told them as if they were the truth. All of which made me think he must have been very interesting, and made me regret not having known him.
Years later, when I was in college, I learned that Richard hadn’t died of a heart attack. My grandmother was very ill; she had a rare blood disease that carried her off to a teaching hospital in Syracuse. I went to see her there, and came in as a medical student was drawing her blood. “Does this hurt, Mrs., uh, Rowland?” he asked, as though he had been thinking about her disease so intently he’d forgotten that she was a person also.
“Of course it hurts,” she said.
The medical student left, and we talked about her illness, which was causing quite a sensation in the hospital. Specialists from several departments had been in to see her; she showed me the bruises on her forearms where they’d drawn vial after vial of blood. On the whole, she seemed pleased to be the object of so much attention. “If I’m lucky,” she said dryly, “they’ll publish me. I asked if there’s any chance they can use my real name.” My grandmother told me about the people who had been to visit: an aunt I hadn’t seen in years, cousins I barely knew. Charles had come several times to resupply her with the mystery novels she loved. My mothers came once. “For an hour,” my grandmother said. “It takes four hours to get here.”
“They should have stayed longer,” I said.
“I worry about them,” my grandmother said. “They want to live like they came out of a clamshell.” It took me a long moment to understand that she was referring to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “But everyone has a family, even in New York City.” She looked at me with alarming lucidity. “Do they ever talk to you about what happened?”
“In New York?”
“With Richard,” my grandmother said impatiently. She took my hand. She must have known that her own life would soon be over, and that what ever secrets she kept would then be known by no one at all. Her time to tell was limited. And she was selfish, as I imagine many people are at the end of their lives; my feelings mattered less to her than they had when she was well. “You poor boy,” she said, “do you even know Richard shot himself?”
So it came out. One night in the summer of 1970, a police detective called from Denver and told Oliver that Richard Ente was dead of a gunshot wound, in all likelihood self-inflicted. The detective wanted to know if Richard had any next of kin. The only reason he called Oliver was because he’d found a check from him in Richard’s wallet. “We couldn’t help the gentleman,” my grandmother said. “Richard never talked about his family.”
“They didn’t tell me,” I said numbly.
“Exactly,” my grandmother said.
This story flattened me, and it weakened my grandmother also: maybe she had come without knowing it to the age when her last few secrets were what kept her alive. She leaned back against the pillows of her hospital bed. Her eyes closed and her lips trembled, as though she wanted to say more, but when she did speak, finally, what she said was, “Ring for the nurse.” I did, and a minute later the nurse came in and chided my grandmother because she hadn’t eaten her vegetables. “These aren’t vegetables,” my grandmother said, “they’re,” and she shrugged, her face lit up with disgust.
I called my mothers that night from my motel room in Syracuse and had a bad conversation. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had Richard shot himself in Denver? The first question was easier to answer than the second. My mothers had been trying to protect me from having to feel what they still felt, a kind of baffled sadness, which made Richard Ente impossible either to dismiss or to forgive. They wanted me to have two parents and not be haunted by the ghost of a third. But why did he do it? My mothers didn’t know. Celeste believed Richard’s suicide had to do with things that had happened a long time ago, before he came to Thebes. “Any fifty-year-old man who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl has serious problems,” she said.
Marie sobbed into the phone; she didn’t know either.
“Let him go,” Celeste said. “Suicide is a mystery with no solution.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marie said. “I wish I could have done something to stop him.” She could have done something, but I wouldn’t know that until much later. Finally I got off the phone with my mothers, wiped my eyes and tried to take Celeste’s advice and put Richard out of my mind. Dead was dead. The fact that Richard had killed himself didn’t make him any more lost to me than he had been already. How could it matter if he died of a bullet or a heart attack? But I couldn’t let go of the question why?
When I came back from Syracuse, I looked for my father in the Bleak College (not its real name, but that’s another story) library, but nothing I found cast any light on his death. The membership directories of the New York State Bar Association told me that Richard Ente practiced law in New York from 1949 until 1970. He worked for Silberman & Mischeaux, a personal-injury firm, then in 1961 he went into private practice. His office was a few blocks from Times Square, in a building that has since been demolished. Lexis, which was just becoming available at the time, and which I got access to with the help of a friend in the law school, confirmed that my father was of counsel in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc. The lawsuit, which my family had talked about only in vague terms, turned out to be stranger and more significant than I’d expected. According to Lexis, my grandfather sued for an injunction to prevent Joe Regenzeit from “interfering with the clouds and the natural condition of the air, sky, atmosphere and air space over plaintiffs’ lands and in the area of plaintiffs’ lands to in any manner, degree or way affect, control or modify the weather conditions on or about said lands,” which, reading farther down in the document, seems to have been a response to Joe Regenzeit’s “cloud-seeding devices and equipment generally used in a weather modification program,” the purpose of which was, in short, to make it snow. As if it didn’t snow enough in Thebes! Beginning sometime in the autumn of 1968, Joe Regenzeit was sprinkling the clouds with silver iodide, bringing further gloom to the gloomy mountain town, with the intention of turning it into a winter paradise. My grandfather objected. He, or rather his counsel, Richard Ente, Esq., argued that Regenzeit’s snow had encumbered the land, choked the roads, and clouded the minds of Thebes’s inhabitants, who were already unhappy enough come winter. He did not prevail. Having failed to demonstrate, in the first place, that Joe Regenzeit’s weather modification program was responsible for any particular snowfall, and, in the second, that the plaintiffs’ hardships were brought on by snow, specifically, as distinguished from cold, darkness, old age, excessive consumption of alcohol, rheumatoid arthritis, poor eyesight, poor diet, unusual devotion to their domestic animals, acts of God, or any other cause, the injunction was not granted, and Rowland v. Snowbird assumed its place in the history of weather-modification law, an important precedent, but one with few successors. According to an articled titled “Who Owns the Clouds Now?” 73 Mich. L. Rev. 129, Rowland v. Snowbird established, tacitly, a doctrine of “modified natural rights,” which is to say that if Regenzeit could make money off the clouds, and my grandfather didn’t lose any money thereby, then the clouds belonged to Regenzeit, which would have made him, my law-school friend said, the first person in American history ever to own a cloud. I took copious notes, and even thought of writing a science-fiction story that would take the case as its starting point, and project from it a world where not only the clouds but all natural phenomena, rain, wind, sunlight, fog, and even such intangibles as “clear skies” and “autumn chill,” were privately owned, so that the experience of the outdoors would involve an endless series of payments, and become in all likelihood a pastime for the rich.
Lexis had nothing to say on the subject of Richard Ente’s character. Since childhood, I had pictured my father as a handsome man, a distinguished lawyer in a dark suit and a blue-and-gold Bleak College necktie, because yes, he went to Bleak, just the same as my grandfather, the same as me, and I wonder if I didn’t go there in part because I hoped I’d find some trace of him. I imagined Richard Ente sitting at dinner with my grandfather, twirling a glass of wine between his fingers, like an old version of the young Sean Connery, if you see what I mean. Richard Ente offering his considered opinion on legal matters, then turning and catching Marie’s eye. Richard Ente pressing my mother’s hand as they said goodbye, and murmuring something in her ear. Richard Ente under cover of darkness climbing the roof of the garage, still in his dark suit, and slipping through my mothers’ open window. My love! said his love. Ssh, Richard Ente murmured, a cross now between James Bond and Humbert Humbert, although I suppose Humbert Humbert is already that. We don’t want to wake them, do we? Marie’s hands at the knot of his tie. Richard’s hairy fingers— with a ring, perhaps, on the third left one?— undoing the top of Marie’s dress. Then an unclarity, willful, on my part. Then Richard Ente murmured, You mustn’t tell your father. —Damn my father, Marie said, rolling away from him and snugging her back to his chest. He’s a good man, Richard said softly. Not as good as you, Marie said. Hm, said Richard. He got up and dressed in the moonlight. Is my tie straight? —You look dashing, Marie said. —Then adieu. —No! But Richard Ente was gone; he had climbed out the window and down to the ground, and now he walked to where his car idled silently among the trees. None of this explained him taking his own life. I invented other scenes in which Richard Ente’s suicidal tendency would be manifest: Richard draining a flask before he gets into his car. Richard growling, I can’t go on with this charade! Richard speeding around a curve and closing his eyes. No. The story I’d made up about my father had petrified in my memory; adding the story of his death in Denver didn’t change him any more than the addition of paint to a rock would make it not a rock. My story was beyond contradiction, to the point where even now I think of it as being about my real father, even though I know for a fact that it is wrong in almost every particular.
Finally I stopped looking for the truth about Richard Ente. I was left with a mystery, a love of library research and a desire to get as far away from my family as I could: these last two came in handy when I went to Stanford to study American history.
LOST THINGS
The sun was already high over the mountains when I woke up, my neck and back frozen at bad angles from sleeping on the sofa. I washed my face and drank sulfurous water from the tap. By day, the house didn’t seem haunted, only cluttered. Four generations of Rowlands had lived there and as far as I could tell not one of them had ever thrown anything out. Cigar boxes and tobacco tins from the early twentieth century were heaped on a table in the hall, teapots, hatracks, mugs, pens, bowls full of buttons and pins, vases, stacks of old magazines, china statuettes of shepherds and milkmaids, candlesticks, bundles of letters, books, albums, records, telephone directories, ashtrays, bottle openers and pens given away by businesses that no longer existed, framed photographs of long-dead cousins, sewing kits, skeins of wool, coasters, place mats, watercolors of the Catskills that my grandmother had painted in her youth, road maps, paperweights, letter openers, seashells, lamps. Every horizontal surface in the house was heaped with stuff; every cabinet was full. There was no separation between the priceless things and the worthless ones: in the parlor, the silver inkwell which supposedly came over from France with Jean Roland was full of paper clips.
I went upstairs to my mothers’ bedroom, which looked just as it had when they ran away from Thebes in the spring of 1970. Embroidered bedspreads covered the twin beds; the trunks where Celeste kept her art things stood against the wall. There were two windows and two desks, and a poster tacked to the wall between them: Russian Folk Music, University Performing Arts Center, December 19, 1969. Their closet was a museum of fashion from the late sixties. Their bookshelf was the summum of thought from the same era: The Bell Jar, Being and Nothingness, Steppenwolf, The Stranger. The room had always seemed strange to me, and it was strange that my grandparents hadn’t done anything with it, the way they’d changed my uncle’s room into a study. It was as if they were still hoping my mothers would come back. But the room was creepy, and I could understand why the Celestes hadn’t wanted to come back. I felt like an idiot for agreeing to come in their place. I should have let them hire someone to get rid of everything. Without looking at my grandparents’ room, or the study, or the attic, my god, the attic, I got dressed and drove into town.
I parked in back of the Kountry Kitchen, took a booth by the window and looked blankly at the big sign outside the ski shop, which said
GOD BLESS AMERICA
WINTERS COMING
GET UR GEAR
There was almost no one in the restaurant, a couple of teenage girls in purple parkas smoking at the counter and a large party at the other end of the room, it looked like a business lunch, three men and a woman in suits, their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs, their cuff links gleaming. As I ate, I thought one of the men was trying to get my attention. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows inquisitively, and I wondered if it was because of my San Francisco clothes, my burgundy leather jacket and thrift-store shirt with the monkey Curious George depicted performing various activities against a yellow background. I nodded in what I hoped was a friendly, masculine way, as if to say yup, and went back to my lunch. Each time I looked up, he was watching me. I wondered if he was trying to pick me up, if he had come to the same conclusion about me that Charles had. A middle-aged businessman with curly gray hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, a dark-green suit a shade nattier than the suits around him, it was possible. My yup might have sent him the wrong signal; I didn’t know how grown-ups communicated in this part of the world. It was too bad, the woman sitting beside him was attractive. I would have liked to look at her wide mouth, her thick red lips and narrow chin. Even the faintly perceptible shadow of hairs on her upper lip was enticing. She would probably have fine brown hairs all down her back and arms. Instead I had to look at my lunch special, a breaded pork chop snuggled against the flank of a mountain of mashed potatoes and bathed in brown gravy. Then, suddenly, the man was standing in front of me, leaning toward me, eager, worried, saying my name. “Kerem,” he said, and held out his hand. “Do you remember me?” It was Joe Regenzeit’s son, grown and changed, thick where he used to be thin, shorter than me now. We embraced and his chin hit my shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. The last time I saw Kerem, he was fifteen years old, and bound, I thought, for fame in the world of professional soccer or notoriety in the underworld of punk rock.
“Running the family business,” Kerem said, grinning. He put his hand on my back. “Come say hello to my sister.”
He guided me to their table, where the woman, who had looked mysterious and attractive before I knew who she was, transformed herself into Yesim, Kerem’s younger sister, the way a certain shape beloved of psychologists changes from a rabbit into a duck. The hairs on her lip multiplied; her eyebrows grew closer to each other; her thick black hair became unruly. She stood up and shook my hand.
“We heard about your grandfather,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Meanwhile Kerem was introducing me to the other men, who were up from New York, “to give me a shot in the arm,” he said. They shook my hand and offered me truncated, almost furtive smiles, as though they could tell I was a negligible person, and regulations forbade them from associating with negligible persons while on duty. Still Kerem insisted on telling them who I was.
“We used to party together,” Kerem said, which wasn’t entirely true: we’d only gone to one party together. I kissed his girlfriend, but I don’t think he ever found out. Yesim looked at her brother anxiously.
“Are you in town long?” Kerem asked.
“A few days,” I said. “I’ve got to clean out my grandparents’ house.”
“Well, come have dinner with us. Come to night!”
The city people glanced at each other. I wanted to warn Kerem that by talking to me he was reducing his importance in their eyes, but there was no way to do it and he wouldn’t have listened. Kerem had always been like that, generous when it would have been better to be selfish. I thanked him and paid my check. I looked back at Yesim, but she was talking to the city people, explaining that in a small town you were always running into people from the past.
REGENZEIT
That afternoon, instead of getting to work on the house, I picked up Progress in Flying Machines and read about M. Hureau de Villeneuve, the permanent secretary of the French Aeronautical Society, who built more than three hundred model flying machines, all of them with flapping wings. His experiments culminated with the construction of a giant steam-powered bat, which was connected by a hose to a boiler on the ground. When M. de Villeneuve turned the machine on, it flapped its wings violently and did, in fact, rise into the air— at which point M. de Villeneuve became afraid that it would pull free of the hose, and switched it off. The bat fell to the ground and smashed one of its wings, and the story ended with M. de Villeneuve waiting for someone to invent a lighter motor so he could resume his experiments. I wondered what, if anything, the early-aviation community had learned from his failure. Don’t make any more giant bats? Hose-tethered flying machines not a good idea? The hard fact of it was that ornithopters, machines with flapping wings, were a digression from the path that led to the airplane. No matter what motor you used, none of them would ever really work. M. de Villeneuve had devoted his life to something, but I couldn’t think of exactly what it was: flight’s penumbra, maybe, the weird shadow of hopeless invention against which the Wrights’ brightness defined itself.
After a few pages of Progress in Flying Machines, my attention wandered, and I found myself thinking again about my grandfather. I remembered how he used to entertain me and my grandmother with stories from the Catskill Eagle: a police station was opening in Jewett, there was an art fair in Woodstock, the new pizzeria in Hunter was a big success. “Run by actual Italians, that’s their secret,” my grandfather said, as though we were the owners of a rival pizzeria wondering at our own sluggish business. “Apparently they import their flour from Italy.” My grandfather reflected on what he had just said, and frowned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with American flour. Mary, don’t you bake with American flour?” My grandmother affirmed that she did. “Perfectly good flour,” my grandfather said. He considered how much more he should say about it, or whether he ought to praise my grandmother’s baking. Instead he said, “It must be a question of technique. The Italians have been making pizza for a long time, you know.”
My grandmother rolled her eyes. “Do tell. Did the ancient Romans have pizza?”
But my grandfather was immune to her teasing. “I don’t believe so,” he said, “at least, not the kind we have today.” And he was off, explaining to us that the tomato, a relative of the deadly nightshade, was thought to be poisonous until the eighteenth century, and as for our modern pasteurized cheeses, the Romans had never known anything like them. I wondered when my grandfather had developed his taste for puns. I thought about how life turns people into the opposite of what you would expect them to be, as it had with Charles, and now with Kerem. I wondered if I seemed as strange to Kerem as he did to me, and, if so, what I was the opposite of.
It took me a long time to decide what to wear to dinner. All my clothes were wrong, and in the end I put on a white button-down shirt and one of my grandfather’s jackets, which was tight across the stomach but all right if I left it unbuttoned. I looked like my adviser at Stanford, a portly ex-Jesuit named Schönhoff. What was worse, the jacket smelled like my grandfather’s closet, like naphtha and wool and ever so faintly of aftershave. At various points in the evening I would catch myself sniffing my own shoulder, wondering if it still smelled, and whether Kerem and Yesim could smell it too.
Kerem greeted me at the door. He was wearing a black sweatsuit that made him look even older than the business suit had, and at the same time recalled his athletic youth. He hugged me and I pulled back, trying to protect him from the jacket. “You’re looking great,” he said. “Come in, hey, you didn’t have to get dressed up.”
The house had changed, but my memories of it were too old to say how, exactly. The black leather sofa and the enormous television were certainly new, as was the tiny silver stereo playing almost inaudible jazz. But the rugs were the same, and the smells, too, of cumin and cloves, onions and meat.
“My sister’s cooking,” Kerem said, “but don’t think it’s like this every night. We’re a take-out family, most nights we eat the most amazing junk. Do you drink martinis?” He came back with two of them, big ones, in highball glasses. “Sit.”
Kerem lowered himself into a black leather recliner that tried to open up its footrest. “I’m a lazy bastard,” he said. “What can I do?” He kicked the footrest back. “Welcome to Thebes!”
We drank. Kerem explained how they had come back to the old house: after he flunked out of Cornell, he’d scraped through SUNY Purchase and got a law degree from Villanova. He’d married a lawyer named Kathy and they had a son, Max, who looked down on us from a brass-framed photograph on the windowsill, a small fair boy with an overbite. Two years ago Kerem’s father was diagnosed with a cancer of the pancreas that was fatal in about 95 percent of all cases, but not Joe Regenzeit’s. It was a miracle he lived, and when the cancer went into remission he had a, “What could you call it? A mid-death crisis,” and decided that he was through with America. He and his wife returned to the village where his ancestors had come from, “a place in Anatolia with about three goats and a well,” and he lived there to this day. Yesim had already moved back to Thebes to take care of her father, and when he went off to this village, which was called Akbez, and really was so small you couldn’t find it on most maps, she stayed on and took care of the ski resort. At first Kerem had helped her only a little; then he became interested in the business, and then: “I had this idea, I want to take what we’re doing here in a new direction. I can’t talk about it yet. You understand, right? You can’t show anyone until it’s finished?” He moved back up to Thebes; Kathy stayed in Philadelphia; they agreed to separate. “I have to tell you, I miss the hell out of Max, but I’m happy here. And it wasn’t good for my sister to be alone. Now,” he concluded quickly, as if he regretted having told me so much, “what about you?”
I told Kerem how I’d gone to Stanford for history, dropped out of the program and gone to work at Cetacean, then Yesim called to us that dinner was ready. I followed Kerem into the dining room, pursued by the jazz, which could be piped, he explained, into every room of the house, including the bathrooms. The dining-room table was covered with dishes. Yesim was still wearing her business clothes, but she’d exchanged her contact lenses for large eyeglasses with square red frames. Her hair was restrained by a flock of bobby pins. Kerem maneuvered me into a chair to his right, and his sister sat facing me. “Did you know he’s an Internet entrepreneur?” Kerem asked.
“How would I know that?” Yesim said. “He hasn’t told me anything.”
“I’m not an entrepreneur,” I said.
“I should have known you’d end up in the computer business,” Kerem went on. “Do you remember when I had that computer? You made it do the most amazing stuff.”
“Not really,” I said. “I just copied some programs from a manual.”
“You wrote that game, didn’t you? We played it for days. We played it all summer.” Actually Kerem hadn’t played it at all. I was amused at what his memory was doing to the past, how he was making me grander than I had ever been. One look at Yesim and I decided to let his misrepresentations stand.
We finished the bottle of wine, and Kerem remembered another, a gift from the Karmans last Christmas. Soon I was telling Kerem and Yesim that content management was a misnomer, actually what I had managed was discontent, my own, mostly. Every project was the same, every client was looking for a way to turn the Internet into one of those ads you see on late-night television, for the carrot peeler that also makes soup. The only difference among them was that some clients wanted to give you the peeler for free and charge for the carrots, whereas others wanted you to pay for the peeler up front. Yesim’s lips and teeth were stained purple. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, and our eyes met. She seemed to be asking me, what do you want? A question to which I had no answer.
Finally the meal was over. Kerem said, “How about some coffee, sis?” and Yesim carried our plates into the kitchen. “We have this great Chilean coffee,” Kerem told me. “Can you believe it, great coffee in Thebes? We get it from the new grocery, they have everything.” He grinned. “You know who owns that place?” I couldn’t imagine why he thought I would care, but before he could tell me, Yesim came in with the coffee. I asked what she had been doing since I saw her last.
“Oh, me,” she said. “Actually, there isn’t much to tell. I was living in Albany, then my father got sick, and I came back up here. Now I’m a ski-resort administrator.” She looked at Kerem, as if, oddly, she were judging him.
I asked what she had been doing in Albany, but Yesim didn’t answer, and it fell to Kerem to wave his hand vaguely over his glass. “Yesim is a born manager. She’s the one who keeps things going. I like to think of myself as an idea guy, but the truth is, without Yesim, I’d be nowhere. Snowbird would be nowhere. Even my father admits it.”
“My brother is a little drunk,” Yesim said.
Kerem lifted his glass. “Drunk enough to tell the truth. To my sister!” But the glass was empty. “Yesim, there’s a bottle of Scotch in the cabinet over the refrigerator . . .”
“You can get it. I’m going upstairs.” Yesim touched my shoulder as she went past and said I shouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.
Kerem got the bottle of Scotch and two glasses and I followed him into the living room, where he poured us about half a glass each. He used to hate the stuff, he said, but there was some kind of rule that lawyers had to drink Scotch. He stuck his hands into the tangles of his hair. “Holy shit, I’m a lawyer,” he said, and collapsed into his recliner. This time the footrest came up.
I slumped on the sofa, and we drank what he told me was a very good Scotch, from an island where they fertilized the soil with goat shit, could I believe that, goat shit? No, it wasn’t goat shit, really, you can’t trust what lawyers say, lawyers are always making up the most fantastic crap. The conversation slipped away from me. Kerem was talking about how his wife had been freaking out ever since someone broke into her Lincoln Navigator, and wanted to bring Max to live with Kerem in the mountains, the mountains, she said, as though these were real mountains, as though this was fucking Colorado, and of course it wasn’t going to happen, in a couple of weeks she’d calm down and tease him again for being a survivalist, which, in fact, she’d already called him, as though his move to Thebes had been part of some plan, Kerem said, as though he had planned any of this.
Then he was telling me about his sister, who was, he said, a poet, and had been in trouble. “What she needs,” Kerem said, “is encouragement.” He made me promise that I would encourage her. “We’re going to get through this,” he said, and he told me that, if I stayed around, I would see, the glory days were coming back to Thebes, but by this point the conversation had escaped from me entirely, and all I remember are images: rosy clouds against a pale-blue sky, trumpets, people dancing in a tent, things Kerem can’t have said. I had to go to the bathroom, so I stood up and hit my shin against the coffee table. The pain was unbearable. I hopped around the living room, and when I stopped I was sober again, but exhausted, as though I’d just sat through a very long film. Yesim had already gone to bed. I said goodbye to her brother and staggered across the little gulf that separated the Regenzeits from the Rowlands. I lay on the sofa, got up, took off my clothes and lay down again. I thought of Yesim, and what it would have been like if I had followed her into the kitchen, reached around from behind and cupped her breasts, and if I had just, and if I had only.
REGENZEIT
Kerem was four years older than I was; in the beginning he was my champion, my protector. In the stories I told myself, which were largely plagiarized from J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, Kerem was the prince and I was the squire. I trudged across the wilderness in his footsteps, because even my most fantastic daydreams involved a fair amount of trudging, and when the imaginary wind froze me, Kerem loaned me his cloak and I was warm. This went on until puberty stripped Kerem of his princely qualities. One summer he went away to a soccer camp and returned with formidable legs, a slouch and a new way of talking, or, more precisely, of not talking. I had no claim on his attention; the most I could get from him was “Unh,” as he noodled past on his way to some incomprehensible teenage activity. That summer I was friends only with Yesim, who was just my age. She was willing to try my games, but with her for a companion all our quests got muddled. We trudged across the landscape, but I didn’t know what we were trudging toward or what we’d do when we got there. Then it became clear that we were headed toward Yesim’s bedroom.
“You are Prince Charming,” she said, “and I am Sleeping Beauty.”
She threw herself onto her twin bed and closed her eyes. For a long time neither of us moved. Then Yesim looked at me and said, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. What happens now?”
“You kiss me, and I wake up.”
She returned to her slumber. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Yesim burst out laughing. “That’s not how you do it.”
“You’re awake,” I pointed out.
“If you can’t do better than that,” she said, “I’m going to make you a dwarf.”
I didn’t have anything against dwarves, who were, in Tolkien’s work at least, noble and tough, dwarves who had their own runic alphabet and their kingdom underground, but I didn’t want Yesim to be unhappy. “OK,” I said. I leaned toward her.
Yesim recoiled. “What are you doing? You have to wait for me to go to sleep.”
We tried the whole thing again. I leaned in and kissed her lips. Yesim opened her eyes. “Finally,” she said. “Now, go out, and come back in.”
“Why?”
“Narcolepsy,” Yesim hissed, a word I didn’t understand.
I knew we were playing a strange game, but I didn’t know what was strange about it until Mrs. Regenzeit caught me coming down the stairs and said, “You are a leetle beet in love with my daughter. That is all right. Just you do not try to marry her.”
“I’m not in love with her,” I said. “Besides, I’m too young to be married.”
“This is true, fortunately for us all.”
I asked if Yesim was engaged, which sent Mrs. Regenzeit into a coughing fit of malicious amusement. “No,” she said. “She is too young, also. But when the time comes, she will marry a Turkish boy.”
I accepted her proclamation dutifully. Besides, I knew for a fact that there were no Turkish boys in Thebes but her brother. I had time. So I played along with Yesim’s stories, which only got stranger as the summer went on. I sat for an afternoon at the foot of the forbidden tower (or bed), listening to the princess read aloud from Nancy Drew’s Dos and Don’ts for Girls; I stumbled around in the enchanted forest (Yesim’s bedroom, with the lights off) and was thwacked with cushions by spiteful forest creatures. Yesim and I drank “poison,” actually grape soda with a St. Joseph’s baby aspirin crumbled into it, and lay side by side on her bed, feigning eternal sleep. Even then I knew that something was wrong with Yesim’s imagination: it stored its kisses too close to its tears. But I had no idea how to tell her so, and would not have spoken if I could. I loved Yesim a leetle beet too much for that.
Earlier that year, I had stolen a book called Man and Woman from my mothers’ shelves, at least, I thought I’d stolen it. In retrospect I think they must have left it out for me, as no book like that existed during the era when my mothers could have learned anything from it. Man and Woman was written in simple, direct language, and illustrated with pencil line drawings, carefully shaded, of men and women who were supposed to look ordinary, but in fact, because of the changes of hairstyle that had taken place since the book was published, seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s. For the first time, I saw clearly the difference between the sexes: the woman’s arms were crossed over her stomach, while the man rested a confident hand on his buttock. Late that summer I shared this information with Yesim. I told her solemnly that she had a uterus, as though I were a scout returning from a mission to a forbidden city.
Yesim nodded regally. “Let’s see,” she said, and we did. Our bodies looked nothing like the illustrations in Man and Woman, so I put my hand on my buttock and told Yesim to cross her arms over her stomach. The likeness wasn’t even approximate; I thought it would be better if Yesim wore her hair in a braid, but it was cut too short. Still we touched, and retreated, neither of us certain what had happened. Yesim pulled her pants up and we sat on the floor, not talking, because Man and Woman didn’t say what we were supposed to do in that moment, although it had a certain amount of information about what would come later, not all of it incorrect, as it turned out. And that was all. We didn’t take off our clothes again. The game of men and women ended and another began, I don’t remember which, maybe it was the game of Life, which Yesim liked, or Uno, which she also liked, but which I liked less than Life because it had no finely molded pieces.
For years afterward Yesim came to see me at night. She touched my imaginary hair, and in time she learned to do other things as well, but by then she wasn’t Yesim anymore, or not only Yesim; she had put on other faces and become general, a warm weight by my hip, a hand on my chest, she could have been anybody. I didn’t even remember what she looked like with her clothes off, I thought. But apparently I was wrong. As I lay on my grandparents’ sofa, drunk, my knuckles rubbing against the waistband of my underwear, I thought of Yesim again, not the woman but the girl, standing with her arms crossed over her stomach. I imagined myself placing my hands on her shoulders, kissing her, moving her arms out of the way, pressing myself to her flat chest. Was I grown up in this scene, or was I a child? We were both soft, I know.
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
The phone rang just as I was falling asleep. It was Alice. She wanted to know if I was all right.
“I’m dead drunk,” I said.
“Your message was scary,” Alice said. “Are you losing your mind?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It sounded like you were going through some kind of Shining thing.”
“Ha. I’m not even alone up here. My childhood friends live next door.”
“But you’re drinking. You’re going to start seeing the twins.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m trying to go to sleep.”
“Redrum, redrum.”
Alice was coming home from a party too, it turned out. Her friend Raoul . . .
“Raoul? Who’s Raoul?”
“You met him, he came to the salon a couple of times.” No hair parlor this but a group of writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”
“How glamorous,” I said.
There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”
“I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”
“It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”
“And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”
“Will you be jealous if I say yes?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”
“Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”
“Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”
Beat. “Maybe we are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.
“I guess we’ll find out then.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Beat. Beat.
LOST THINGS
My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.
Charles laughed. “I know that car.”
He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”
“I was at the Regenzeits’.”
“Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.
I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?
“Why are they our enemies?” I asked.
“Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”
“Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”
“Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”
“The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”
“But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”
“That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.
“Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”
“You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”
“You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”
Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing about Thebes, and I said I understood enough, Thebes was just a small town in the mountains that no one cared about, and there were more important things happening in the big world, and wasn’t it time to think about something else, and he said, what something else did I mean, which something else did I want him to think about, when every day they ruined Thebes a little more, and the old families were dying out, and people were tearing the old houses down and building Swiss chalets, and a barn sold for two hundred thousand dollars, a barn, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.
“Do you want some water?” I asked.
He waved me away, stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard him washing his coffee cup. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he shouted.
“Packing up the house,” I said.
“Then pack up the house, and don’t get mixed up with people who hate us.”
The screen door banged shut. I sat in the living room, hurt by my uncle’s words. Was he really so confused, I wondered, that he thought the Regenzeits were out to get us? It was ridiculous. People like Charles were the problem, I thought, intolerant people who can’t let go of the past.
After a while, I went up to my mothers’ room and opened one of Celeste’s trunks. It was full of magazines and newspapers heaped up roughly according to size, the raw materials of her work. What the Rowlands had accumulated, Celeste cut up: worn back numbers of Scribner’s Magazine, McClure’s, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, mixed in with issues of Life and Vogue and Look. I used to look in the trunks when I came to visit in the summer, each time stealthily, as though I were breaking a rule; in fact no one said anything to me about the trunks and I don’t think my grandparents would have minded if they’d known. I liked the way the holes Celeste had cut in the pages of the old magazines acted as windows onto the pages behind, so that where the head of, say, a Bohemian fortune-teller was supposed to be, you’d see words or parts of words:
little known epis
the remarkable discover
ich it directly and indirectly
properly be regarded as m
the progress of thought.
The central figur
young woman
ome scoundrel
oor of her cot
Now that I was looking at them again, the effect was completely different. The magazines seemed to me typical of Celeste’s angry way of dealing with the world: she took what she needed with no regard for anyone else.
I opened the second trunk, where she kept her collages. Each white sheet was kept safe in a big black sheet of paper folded in half. I unfolded the top sheet and picked up the collage beneath. It had a woodcut of a feather, angled as if drifting toward the bottom of the page; above it a slender hand in a lace cuff reached down, either to let it go or to pick it up again. Below the feather, at the center of the page, set between quotation marks that had been pasted down separately, was part of a typewritten phrase: “ollow me.” Follow me, it must have been, or, just possibly, hollow me. The date was penciled in the bottom right corner, in neat, small letters, July 1970. I was about to be born. I had seen the collage before, but something passed through me as I sat on the floor, looking at the paper, a cool dark something like the shadow of a cloud. It was as if Celeste were about to tell me something. I opened the second folder. This collage was from April of the same year; it showed a pair of hands on the keys of an enormous typewriter, and, emerging from the top of the machine, the prow of an airship. Cherubs beckoned to the airship from above, while from the bottom of the page a Chinese dragon rolled its eyes angrily. The references to birth, to my birth, were easier to spot than in the other: the cherubs, the round head of the zeppelin poking out of the typewriter’s slot. The dragon might have been my grandfather. Still, I was disappointed. Ollow me, the first picture said, and I wanted to ollow, to follow, but how could I follow when I didn’t know where it went? The collages led backward, further into the past, away from me and my time. Celeste’s style devolved, words and blocks of text appeared, floral borders, dancers, neckties and the heads of famous people. The collages retained their formal elegance but became, unmistakably, the work of a young person. Ollow me, ollow me. If only there had been another collage to show me where to go, but there was nothing, because, in July 1970, probably no more than a few days after she made this collage, Celeste and her sister left Thebes. They were seventeen and a half years old, and they took with them nothing, or almost nothing: a warm protrusion that would in a few months become a child.
LOW-FLYING STARS
It was for my sake that my mothers ran away from Thebes. They didn’t want to have their child in a little town in the Catskills where things happened so slowly that people were still speaking French six generations after the first settlers arrived. By Thebes standards, my mothers were more like weather than like people: they changed fast, and they moved on. They took me to New York, where they were going to be famous artists, only they had no idea about money and knew how to do nothing, nothing. For a few scary years in the 1970s my mothers barely scraped by, she, waitressing, and she, clerking in a photo lab; she, selling ladies’ clothes, and she, waitressing; she, answering telephones for a Senegalese clairvoyant, and she, answering telephones for an Israeli dentist. The three of us, she, she, and me, lived in an apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street, with two tiny bedrooms and a view, if you leaned dangerously far out the living-room window, of a blue-gray shard that was alleged to be the Hudson River.
Later, when they had real jobs and even health insurance, my mothers liked to tell stories about those years, to prove how tough we had all been and how close we’d come to not making it. There was the time, Celeste said, when she lit a fire in the ornamental fireplace, because the heat in the apartment was broken, and how was she supposed to know the chimney had been sealed since the nineteenth century? The apartment filled with smoke and the three of us were nearly evicted and if you lifted the living-room rug you could still see the burned boards where the fire had spread before the super put it out, using a blanket from my mothers’ bed, which was a technique for fire prevention that Celeste had never seen before. And the worst of it was, she said, that afterward the blanket was ruined, and she and her sister had to sleep in their coats.
“You slept in my coat,” Marie said, if she was present. “Your coat had those big horn buttons, remember? You said they dug into you?”
Celeste pretended to be perplexed. “But if I slept in your coat, what did you sleep in?”
“Sweaters, I guess.”
“Those were difficult times.”
There was something in Celeste’s voice, though, that made me think she missed those years, that in retrospect they seemed less difficult than the ones that came later. My mothers went to Hunter College; after they graduated Celeste got a job teaching art to middle-school students in the Bronx. Marie worked in the offices of semilegitimate publications with names like California Lifestyle and Platonic Caves, typing, making copies, answering the telephone, always in a short skirt, which Celeste didn’t approve of, but Marie rebutted that she couldn’t type to save her life, and without the skirts she’d be back to working for the clairvoyant, who could, presumably, see up her skirt no matter how long it was.
In the evenings my mothers sat at their worktables in the living room, making their art. They knitted sweaters for monsters with wrong arms and extra heads; they stamped papiermâché medallions of modern saints of their own invention; they mixed brightly colored fluids in the sink and bottled them in glass phials on which they pasted labels, Potion of Temporary Resistance to Temptation, Elixir of Getting That Opportunity Back, Low-Flying Potion, Potion for Those Afraid to Drink the Other Potions in This Collection. Celeste painted miniature landscapes in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, in which the Upper West Side revealed its true, hellish character; Marie applied a Ouija board to a subway map and took photographs of the places the spirits told her to go. I loved the things they made, which was fortunate, because our apartment was becoming a museum of their work. The potions took up residence in the medicine cabinet; the demons capered over the nonworking fireplace. I found a three-armed sweater in my dresser, a joke, I think, but maybe not; the apartment wasn’t big and my mothers were always making.
They weren’t famous yet, but they had friends, and those friends had friends who had taken steps in that direction. My mothers talked about them all the time, enthusiastically but not uncritically, as though they, my mothers, were commenting on a sport from which they themselves had retired some years before. From their conversation I got the impression that it wasn’t hard to become famous. One day a gallery owner came to visit, and the next you had a show; the critic from the Times praised your work even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Then collectors sought you out, and you had to be careful; it was important to turn away from the collectors and their vulgar need, to encapsulate yourself in solitude and silence, so that you could emerge a few years later with your mature work, which was extremely difficult and cut no deals with anybody. That’s when the museums took you on, and afterward things happened without you, international exhibitions, retrospectives, scholarly monographs; the secret nominators spoke your name in secret and you got the MacArthur genius grant and as to what happened after that, why, you could imagine it yourself. With a mixture of excitement and dread— I wanted them to get their wish, but I didn’t know what would happen to me when they did— I pictured my mothers rising into the sky like two unwinking stars, possessed, finally, of all the solitude and silence they could ask for. Mostly it was a matter of not making mistakes along the way. Not like Leonora Kurtz, who worked with Marie, and had talent but listened to her boyfriend too much; not like Donatello DelAmbrosio, Celeste’s friend of the wonderful name, who needed to get out of the shadow of Fluxus. Not like Katy Gladwin, whose paintings were too theoretical, or Hugh Heap, whose string sculptures were cute but not really about anything, or Guy Anstine, whose white boxes were just white boxes, you’ve seen one you’ve seen a thousand. Not like Javier Provo, whose murals were in a Warhol movie and who was becoming actually famous, but was nonetheless completely preoccupied with his own body image. My mothers would not make these mistakes. They were ready to go up; they were waiting in our apartment, waiting and making.
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