We Are Gathered Page 11

  “Come sit down,” he said.

  “I just want to call,” I confessed.

  “Come sit down,” he repeated.

  “Let me call.”

  “Helen, come sit down.” Larry’s face was steely. I saw his jaw tighten, then relax. “If you would just come sit down . . .”

  “What?” I asked. I put my hand back on the receiver. I was holding a quarter, ready to drop it in. “Why?”

  “Helen. Please. Amelia and Will asked where you went. They think something is wrong.” I missed the slot when I went to put the quarter in. It dropped onto the carpet, and we both stared at it, this bright spot winking up at us. I went to pick it up, and he covered it with his shoe. I was squatting at his feet, looking at where my hand was about to reach. Larry bent down and slipped his hands under my arms and raised me up. “Come back,” he said. “Everything is fine. Just come back and see the ending with me and Amelia and Will.” He started to guide me back toward the theater. I followed him for a minute, but then I pictured the quarter behind me, embedded in the red carpet, and I said, “I’m sorry. They can tell me how it ends.” I broke away from him. I walked over to the telephone, afraid to look back to see if he was watching me. I made the phone call, and it turned out that Jeffrey had thrown up, and the nurse was worried about him and hoping I would call. I calmed her down and told her I would be right home, but I stopped myself from going into the theater and finding Larry.

  I asked an usher how long until the movie ended. He told me five minutes. A line of people was already waiting for the next show. I sat on a red-velvet bench and waited. It wasn’t long until Larry came out, holding Amelia’s and Will’s hands. They were excited and jabbering away about the movie, and I pretended to listen as they told me the ending. The ending of the second movie in a trilogy that is, in fact, not an ending at all. There will be other movies for Amelia and Will—I know it—and I hope one day they will understand why I had to give so much to Jeffrey. They will do the math and see I concentrated my love for Jeffrey into a very short span of time and stretched my love for them out over decades and generations. Maybe Larry will see it too. In his old age, I will care for him with the same skills I have learned caring for Jeffrey; I will bathe him, feed him, arrange his pillows, and smooth out the creases in his pajamas. He does not appear interested in the wedding; I can see him looking at his shoes, then up at the sky. Jeffrey has fallen asleep. I have one hand on Jeffrey’s, and with the other, I reach for Larry. He smiles weakly at me, then glances past me at Jeffrey, takes in that he is asleep and looks away.

  Elizabeth Gottlieb will soon be a married woman. Amazing. I knew her when she was in diapers. Jeffrey and I were at one of her birthday parties, seven or eight, when she got a bicycle with training wheels. I reach for a rose petal that has fallen into the grass. It’s been crushed and creased, but it still has a scent. I place it on Jeffrey’s lap, and his eyes flutter open. I can’t stop myself from caressing his face with the back of my hand. We were sitting on the porch yesterday, and he got some sun, so there are two swirls of pink on his cheeks. It looks like he wants to say something, so I move my face closer to his. When I am closer to him, I feel I am in a better position to receive his thoughts. His head trembles slightly. I hold the rose petal up before his eyes, and I follow an imaginary line from the fragment of the flower to his face. Suddenly, I see something strange in his eyes, an expression I have never seen before, and it stops me for a minute. I try to decipher it. Is it sorrow? His eyes are rolled closer together, and his long lashes droop, and his mouth is opened to an oblong O. I hold the rose petal between two fingers and look more closely at him. Is it sorrow? No, no. It cannot be.

  Come in

  There were four of us in a quad room our first year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This was 1960, before there were any ideas about diversity and mixing it up and everyone getting to know one another and kumbaya. I must have been on a list of leftovers, stragglers who had to be plugged in here and there, because I was the fourth one in that quad of Jewish kids: Josh Gottlieb, Larry Wolf, Martin Lefkowitz, and me, Jack Chandler, a poor white kid from Troy, North Carolina. Before that day, I’d never met a Jew. Okay, I didn’t think they had horns or anything, but there was an inkling that all the other things people said about them were true: they ran the world, they owned all the banks, they were cheap and show-offy and weaselly and small and stuck together in some secret cabal that worked to the detriment of the rest of humanity, especially Christians, a group that, at the time, I still considered myself a part of. I thought it was enough that I actually pried up a piece of the floorboard with my pocketknife and hid my cash there even though the minute I met those kids, some of those stereotypes started to go away. For one thing, Larry was over six feet tall and played high school football. He’d had some interest from recruiters, but that had all gone away when they found out he was Jewish. Marty sort of looked the part, but he was friendly with a great laugh that started quietly and rose in strength while it fell in pitch to a great guffaw. Josh was shy and quiet, but he has turned out to be the most generous guy I’ve ever known, and if anyone was cheap, if anyone was eyeing the other guys’ wads of dough, if anyone wanted to show off what they knew, well, I guess that was me.

  But man, forty-one years have passed. Marty’s dead of lung cancer that hit him hard and had him carrying around an oxygen tank at our twenty-fifth reunion. Larry’s got the best job title—senior vice president—which is funny since Marty and Josh were the A students, but that’s what they say about C students—the A students work for them. They don’t talk about D students, which explains why I had to find my own way. I should probably be the dead one, seeing as I was the one who kept going into the dragon’s den, sometimes by choice (heroin) and sometimes not (Vietnam), but instead I’m at Josh’s daughter’s wedding, at Josh’s big house in Atlanta, overdressed in a rented tux, all this for Elizabeth, who I held in my big paws seven days after she was born. I’m the one with the twee job teaching painting and photography to privileged kids who just missed the Ivies and spend the first two years at my institution convincing themselves that their lives have not been derailed and the next two years—if I have anything to do with it—changing their ambitions altogether and telling law school or B-school and Mom and Dad to kiss off and putting on a backpack and heading off to Myanmar.

  Elizabeth, Elizabeth, come here a minute. Step away from those other girls, none as beautiful as you. I see Marty’s kid there, but I can’t remember her name. She’s still got that birthmark, makes her look like a Picasso with a divided face, half pale, half purple, I’d call it quinacridone violet to be exact. She has a face Oskar Kokoschka could love. Nevertheless, she looks pretty in her radiant yellow dress; all young girls look pretty in their dresses on a day like today, under a cloudless blue sky with a slight breeze and distant birdsong. Come here, Elizabeth. Uncle Jack has something to tell you. You look absolutely beautiful, perfect, that long neck so kissable, that tiny waist. Back in the day, if you hadn’t been the daughter of the guy I guess I would say after all these years is my one true friend, I would have held you close and tried to feel your breasts against what was once my strong, fearless chest, but then if that was you back in the day, you would look, well, you would look like your mother now, attractive but not ravishing, doable but also forgettable. These are shitty things to say about a woman. Maybe it’s just because I remember what she used to look like. She had a sweet, soft face with a little plump mouth, kissable lips. You wanted to trace them with your fingertip before you touched your mouth to hers. Her face is still relatively lineless—in fact, her forehead is as smooth as an egg—except for the crinkles around her eyes and the few brown splotches peeking through her makeup. The lips are thinner. The eyes not as fresh or liquid, like there’s some kind of stale skin over them, the congealed oil that floats on top of a rain slick. She has spread out a little bit—Hey, who am I to talk?—but those legs are still tan and strong, golfer’s legs swishin
g past me in her mother-of-the-bride pink chiffon number that probably set Josh back a grand or two. The first time I met Annette was on a golf course. She had on Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless top, and her breasts were perky in the way breasts were perky in 1960—I miss those Playtex bras that lifted everything up so high and wide that breasts looked like two torpedoes heading off for different targets.

  Okay, I’ll stop thinking about breasts on your wedding day and what I used to dream about doing with your mother, Elizabeth. How about this? I am thinking that you are still the smallest and most beautiful thing I have ever held in my two clumsy hands, and the things that I have held in my hands are more glorious and more horrible than I hope you will ever know. Oh, yes, I have held things in these hands; I have held the heavy sun-soaked head of a woman I loved while it rested in my lap; and I have held the heavy blood-soaked head of a man who died in my arms. I have held and hoisted over my head a ten-foot canvas I have poured my soul onto; and I have held the last crinkled dollar that I fished from behind the stained brown sofa of one of a series of shitty apartments I have lived in. I have held a 1.2-carat crystal, a diamond attached to a ring that I hoped to put on someone’s finger; and I have held the white crystals of opium and the burned shards of tinfoil and a dirty needle crusted with blood; and you, I held you when you were just born and during a few birthday parties when I happened to be in town; I held you when you were wearing a tutu and a costume that I think was supposed to be a lion because I remember the long tail that you used to tickle my face—you a child for a man with no children, who ran to me when I showed up, oblivious to whatever state I was in, and looked through my coat pockets for a present and masked your disappointment when they were empty.

  You are getting married. I was married once and came close a few more times. I married Jenny Paxton at the ripe old age of twenty-two; that’s what everyone did in North Carolina, married by twenty, three kids by twenty-five. She came from Troy too, though she went to the other high school, so I didn’t know her when I was a kid, which is probably why she would even consider me. She didn’t know that I was the one who slashed the principal’s tires, the one who smoked behind the school instead of eating lunch so that I stood almost six feet and weighed 130 pounds my senior year. She didn’t know that I stole and crashed the driver’s ed car (and neither did anyone else, thank God, because that might have truly got me in trouble, and I didn’t really want to get in trouble). Like all skinny teenagers with a brain, I just wanted to be someone else. I was smart and ashamed of being smart because it meant something somewhere had gone wrong—Mom must have screwed the mailman or they mixed up the kids in the hospital. Smart was nothing in that town of football-playing farmers, and if I didn’t have the exact same crooked nose and close-set blue eyes of my father, he probably would have thought the same thing I thought—what the hell kind of alien life-form is this that reads poetry and wants to go to fucking Paris, France, with all the queers and cowards.

  I married Jenny under false pretenses. We met in the spring of my senior year of college when I was starting to realize that I didn’t know what I was going to do when I finished school. Gottlieb, Lefkowitz, and Wolf knew—saying that together sounds like a law firm—law school, med school, family business. That’s not to say they didn’t have dreams—Marty was hilarious, funnier than Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen—and who knows what he could have done if he hadn’t loved his parents, but they all loved their parents—shit, I loved their parents, their mothers with their pots of soup and handwritten letters with ten-dollar bills inside and instructions to have a little fun; their fathers who had grandfathers who had all been poor, not the way we were poor in Troy, but poor like the roof’s caving in and the ground is crumbling and the soldiers are closing in and people you love are going to die in horrible ways; their fathers who were so proud of them and wanted nothing more than to see them wear a black cap and gown, and take their rightful place on the golf course. I loved my mother, but she was dead, and my father and I didn’t have anything to say to each other because everything I did was an insult to him—going to college, being skinny, smoking weed, leaving home, knowing Jews and blacks and thinking that other people in the world might be as worthy of God’s love as the Christians of Troy, North Carolina.

  I spotted Jenny in church, and in the last throes of thinking I could be happy being what everyone I grew up with was going to be, I kissed and screwed and married Jenny Paxton in that order. Jenny of the milky white skin and wide-set green eyes and strawberry blond hair, Jenny with acne scars on her back and Roman toes and a hip that jutted out in a way that I first thought meant she was challenging the world but later realized meant she was perpetually in fear of falling down. Thank God something was wrong with our parts—or maybe nothing was wrong with us individually, but the God that I don’t believe in saw that we were mismatched. Through two years of marriage and plenty of sex—the only thing that both of us liked—Jenny never got pregnant. Her sisters got pregnant; all her friends got pregnant. Jenny did not. She blamed it on the books I read, she blamed it on the paint fumes I inhaled, she blamed it on the way I slept late and the fact that I drank too much and didn’t talk to my dad or my brothers and didn’t go to church enough. I knew then and still know that it was a gift, her barrenness, and if there had been a child wandering around this planet that I had created and been unable to love, I would feel really, really bad about that, and if I added it to the list of things I felt bad about, it might have been enough to make me want to die. And I am happy to say that at the age of sixty, I do not want to die. On this bright day I want to live, paint, dance, read, fall in love, and, yes, maybe even marry a woman I love while a string quartet plays classical music and someone arranges yellow flowers on tables with pressed tablecloths. I might, in fact, want to live the life that you, my dear Elizabeth, are heir to.

  My wedding was nothing as elaborate as this, Elizabeth. We had a church wedding. Jenny wore a white dress but not a wedding dress. She bought it at Penney’s, and her older sister sewed on some beading and extra lace and removed the black bow it came with since black isn’t right at a wedding, although over there, being led out of your father’s car by your brother, is a woman in a black dress and sensible shoes who is blinking in the bright sun of the beautiful day that Mother Earth has given us for your wedding, and she looks very much like she doesn’t belong here, and I suspect that there are many people here thinking the same about me. This country boy married his country girl in the First Pentecostal Church on a sunny day too. Sunny days are among the few things that don’t change with time, and maybe someday you will be attending the wedding of a child you love—your own, I would imagine—on a sunny day. I hope that child—and you, Elizabeth—are loved more than I loved Jenny Paxton. I didn’t love Jenny Paxton. I liked her fine. She was a sweet girl, and she was deserving of love; she was deserving of someone who would make her breakfast in bed and watch her while she slept and have a ridiculous sloppy smile on his face when she did simple things like rising dripping wet from the bathtub or cleaning the muddy feet of a puppy, but I was not that man. Who are you marrying, Elizabeth? Your father told me his name and that he likes him, but he’s not a Jew, apparently. Still, he thinks he will make you happy. He better, or he will have to answer to Uncle Jack, and I do not want to tell you, Elizabeth, the things that your uncle Jack can do when he goes to a dark place. With great shame, I will admit this silently to you now though I will never say it out loud: Jenny Paxton knows.

  Your father and I did not move in the same social circles at UNC. The law firm of Gottlieb, Lefkowitz, and Wolf all pledged Alpha Epsilon Pi, and sophomore year they moved into the fraternity house full of Jews that, I am ashamed to admit, no good southern Christian boy or girl would ever enter. I didn’t pledge a fraternity. I didn’t have the money. I stayed in campus housing and lived in a shitty gray concrete building designed by some reject from the Soviet system of architecture with rooms built on a grid like a prison. I wish I was lying when I s
aid there were visible diamonds of chicken wire built into the glass of the windows to make them shatterproof. The poor kids were cordoned off there in a far corner that the rich kids didn’t know existed. Seriously, at our twenty-fifth I took your father to see the building, and he said that he didn’t think that was even part of the campus. But I ran into Josh from time to time, in the dining hall or on his way to and from campus, and he always smiled big and stopped to talk. Your father is a generous man, and when I confessed I was flunking my math requirement, he tutored me. He got me through history, taught me how to write a paper. We used to sit by the fire—it snowed more in the sixties—and Josh would ask me, “What do you want to say in this paper?” My history requirement was American 101 and 102. George Washington to FDR. It stopped after World War II, before the country lost its way and started getting soft. Sorry, Elizabeth, the USA you live in now seems a land of plenty, but believe me, it is starting to live off its own fat, and I fear lean years lie ahead. My father thought the Commies would destroy America, but like most everyone, we’ll destroy ourselves if you just leave us alone. Solitary confinement is the most dreaded punishment, hurts worse than bullets.

  We would meet on Sunday mornings when the girls I wanted to date were in church and the Jews were studying—an activity that yields more immediate dividends than prayers do—and sometimes your mother would show up in her knee-length wool skirt and her oxford shirts, a strand of pearls around her perfect neck. Your father used to get flustered when she arrived. They were kids. I was actually the one to teach your father to shave. He didn’t even own a razor freshman year. Annette was tiny; I could wrap my hands around her waist. She called me Jackeroo. When she leaned over to see what we were working on, she lifted up one foot, and your father grabbed it and kissed her ankle. Anyone would have loved her if she’d let them. She was the first girl I ever met who spoke a foreign language, French, and I used to tease her and say that in Troy we considered Birmingham, Alabama, a foreign city. She laughed when I called it that, and said, “Birmingham’s not even a big city. New York is big.” She and her mother went there twice a year to buy their wardrobes. Until I started teaching at my hoity-toity college, I never knew anyone who even had a wardrobe. Your mother was in the teachers’ college, and she would pick up a pencil and correct my grammar, blaming all the mistakes on Josh though she must have known they were mine.