O My Darling Page 4

  Then one day, Clark slipped while chaining Tecumseh to his doghouse. After a split second, in which dog and man were mutually surprised, the dog bounded off with such energy that it was clear he had been eagerly awaiting the opportunity. Clark was temporarily paralyzed by the revelation that the dog did not feel indebted to him at all, that love was not a certain byproduct of two beings sticking it out through time. He shouted after the dog, but Tecumseh only looked back once before pushing through the hedges and his look asked, Why did you try to keep me, when there is nothing that stays?

  Clark combed the neighborhood all day, calling for him.

  Tecumseh! Tecuhhhhmseh!

  He was irate with himself. How could he have bungled this, his one final responsibility to his mother? Perhaps he should not have kept the dog; perhaps it was not what she would have wanted. Now he had to keep swatting her disappointed face from his mind. He did not enjoy remembering her anyway except in his earliest memories, when she was a gorgeous and exotic young woman in Carnifex Ferry and he her cherubim, her favorite, her favorite by leagues, strolling around ponds together making fun of the frogs, botanizing together in the damp woods behind the house, staying home from school sometimes. He could even remember as far back to sleeping on her breast, he could remember that primitively. It made him feel like a good son not to remember her after she started to become… well, strange. She had been strange for as long as he could remember, but strange in a marvelous way, a child’s way. A circus, a smear of pinwheels. But then something happened. He grew up? The memory of her eyes those final years, dark and detached and accusing, how her body almost smoldered with misery, he refused it. She had ended her life. This was a point she was making. She had pointedly ended the discussion.

  In bed that night, Charlotte touched her husband’s arm.

  “He’ll come back,” she said. “The dog will come back.”

  “Charlotte,” Clark said. “If you were chained to a post all day, then you escaped, would you come back?”

  She chewed the side of her cheek. “Well. Being chained to a post has its pros and cons.”

  “Oh God, who knows,” Clark said, sighing. “Maybe he’s on a quest. Maybe… maybe he’s gone looking for someone. Maybe he’s gone looking for my mother.”

  Charlotte squirmed. She had grown attached to the dog, and the sudden recognition of this was unpleasant to her.

  “Get real,” she said, gritting her teeth. “He’s just a dog. He’ll take anybody. He doesn’t know love from rawhide.”

  Clark looked at her with empty eyes. “Well, then,” he murmured, “maybe he’s angry. Maybe he thinks we’re not good people.”

  “Ridiculous. A dog can’t get angry. A dog can’t hold a grudge.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Everything in the whole world has a memory. The land has a memory. Didn’t you ever think about what a fossil is? And what about the rings in a tree? Try flying in a plane—”

  “I’ve flown in a plane.”

  “—and you can see scars in the vegetation, from where there were fires, and nothing grows there. In memoriam. Out of respect. The Indians,” he continued, wagging his finger, “they thought you kept your body in the afterlife. They used to cut their signatures into their victims’ bodies so that the victims would remember who killed them once they were dead.”

  Clark turned on his side and stared out at the moon. The moon was low. It looked burdened, and its face was pocked with craters. Suddenly he felt very angry. The china was gone, and now the dog. All he had left of his mother were some keys and a hairbrush and a couple of unpleasant images. After a moment, the grip the anger had on his throat relaxed, and left him with a smaller, bitterer thing. He thought of his mother and Charlotte bickering, in distant rooms of memories.

  “Besides,” he said, “you ought to know about grudges.”

  He turned heavily on the bed, facing away. And then, as if alerted to the very moods of his heart, the shadow crossed the doorway again, carrying a wine glass.

  He sat up.

  Charlotte’s back was turned away from him, toward the window. He looked beyond her at the tree trunks out the window, womanish in shape. Had the figure been a very realistic illusion cast across the room by headlights?

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  He lay back down.

  “What,” said Charlotte. “What is it now?”

  Then an enormous fatigue overcame him, and suddenly he did not care to understand anything. He did not even care if a real woman had strolled past his bedroom door. It did not matter. He felt enormously tired, asked for one thing too many.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  A SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

  The summer in Clementine grew hot and gusty. The wind at night kept Clark awake, and husband and wife traded shifts of sleeplessness, grousing in sleepy talk about the smallness of the bed and the length of Clark’s limbs. The superficiality of sleep was making Clark’s dreams more vivid to him—thunderstorms, the thunderstorms at Carnifex Ferry, the shaking of God’s great cookie sheet over his boyhood. And when he awoke late in the darkness, he could not resist staring at the doorway. He began to believe it would only be a matter of time—days, minutes—before he’d be confronted again by the impossible shape. He watched Charlotte’s lovely back in the darkness. If he were to wake her, what would he say?

  The summer had grown so hot that Clark had taken to spending his days at the local swimming pool. He spent the long days wading through the cool blue water among children and housewives and old, chicken-armed men, and then retreating, temporarily refreshed, to his chair on the grass. In the summer heat, the walk to the pool almost killed him, making the vision of the pool all the more Elysian. He was reminded, unpleasantly, that certain animals come to the water to die.

  But it was so hot. Even the sky was parched. It had not rained in weeks. Only sitting there on the poolside grass, turning brown and watching the kids play, did Clark feel relieved from both the heat and the fear. He felt normal and refreshed and not at all bothered by shadows. It was good to get out of the house. If you immersed yourself in normal American pastimes, he found, you could quite easily reap the benefits of normality. No one was asking you to be a visionary.

  Besides, he liked to watch the kids play. They gave him energy, in an abstract sense. He liked kids a great deal, though he did not like guiding them. He liked childhood. Before everything. He liked to watch kids be kids, bellyflopping off the low dive, falling down violently like big branches, without the remotest regard for their own well-being. He liked to see them running around shivering and picking shamelessly at their crotches, their heads slick like seals, and sometimes it took a lot of effort for him not to run out and join them but to stay in the sun, baking himself into a palsy along with the other adults, whose large hips and hairy paunches made them appear, sprawled across the pool-side grass, like slaughtered buffalo.

  Clark propped a leg up on the lounge chair and gazed out through his sunglasses. It was Free Swim, and the kids in the pool were performing for him. He laughed and clapped. They liked having his attention. He was good with kids, and had very recently felt a yearning for one of his own. Some of the kids seemed to know him from school and bumped into each other getting in line. Smiling at him, one of them ran down the board and sailed out over the water in consummate flop position, his face making a wet slap against the surface. The flop was so perfect that when the boy emerged from the pool he staggered over to his mother, trying not to cry.

  The mother, a pretty young brunette with chunky shoulders that glistened with baby oil, comforted the boy in her arms. Clark watched them, as the boy fell magically to sleep against her. There was something heroic about parenthood, Clark thought. It made heroes out of people, ordinary people, tax accountants and dental assistants and even flawed, crazy people. Such people were always in the paper, saving their children from runaway buses and threshing machines, putting their bodies in harm’s way, developing
superhuman strength and acuity. So much did their children rely on them that they became everyday gods, emerging from a cloud of baking flour, an umbrella for a staff.

  He and Charlotte weren’t going to have any children. She didn’t want any. Before their marriage, she had stated this very clearly as a precondition. She said it was entirely too easy to be a wretched parent, and then had laughed lightly, saying, Look at us. Clark agreed. He said of course he didn’t want any either and also laughed, and buried his nose in her hair.

  But the truth was he hadn’t thought about it at all. He had wanted to get married to Charlotte so badly that when he looked at her, she was the only thing he saw. His parents’ marriage was in shambles by then, thanks to Mrs. Flanigan, his sister Mary had moved to Detroit with her husband, Jerome, and had washed her hands of them, and his mother was changing into a woman he barely recognized. Charlotte was the one vibrant thing in the world. She crackled. She glowed. She made the most fascinating fusses. He loved her light touch, her diffidence, the way she walked ahead without waiting, he loved the damp silk blouse she wore one evening to a summer concert and the very shoots of grass that she wore unknowingly in her pale yellow hair. He even loved her mysterious origins, because it reinforced his suspicion that he had a princess on his hands. Everything else fell away. She had a lean, untrammeled, hitchless body. It ran in milk rivers to the ground. And now he knew they could be happy and they could live well. They could be well and happy, but maybe they would never be heroes.

  Clark leaned back and shut his eyes. He felt a prick of pain in his heart, but smiled anyway. Up at the sun he smiled. He heard the thump of a ball being volleyed, and the register bell at the snack bar, and the chanting of a group of girls sitting nearby, a soft patty cake, You said I said he said so. He said you said I said no. One for the east. One for the west. One for the one that I love best. Soon, these sounds became distant and all he heard, between the distant, sea-sound of his blood, was his heartbeat.

  A cold hand touched his shoulder.

  “Hey,” a voice was saying. “Hey. Excuse me.”

  Clark opened his eyes to see a teenage girl wearing gigantic sunglasses.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said. “You’re Mr. Adair, right? You were my guidance counselor last year.” Clark tried to focus on her, but she split into six identical teenage girls.

  She raised her sunglasses. “It’s Judy.”

  “Oh, hey, Judy,” he lied. “How’s your summer going?”

  “Pretty good. I don’t belong to this pool but today I’m a guest. My kid brother has a friend who’s a member.” She lowered her glasses and surveyed the pool. Her hair was dark and coarse, and she wore a sagging pink swimsuit with a black sash. He didn’t remember her whatsoever. She must have been all right. He only remembered the lost and troubled ones, the medicated ones, the ones he had to send away to St. Luke’s. He looked back up at the girl. Judy, he thought, Judy… Suddenly, he felt utterly confused.

  “Listen,” the girl said, “it’s none of my business, but you’ve been sleeping out here in the sun for hours. You’re red as a lobster. I thought maybe you should move into the shade.”

  Clark looked at the sky, and indeed, the sun was much further west. Surrounding him, the grass was almost empty, but for two rumpled towels. He stood up quickly, and his vision filled with blackness.

  “Are you okay?” Judy asked.

  “I’m completely fine,” said Clark, falling back blind into his chair.

  The girl trotted off toward the snack bar and gestured for service. Clark edged his way poolside and stood transfixed by the faint, shimmering, chemical blueness.

  “Whoa,” said Judy, coming up out of nowhere. She led him back to his chair and put a cup of water in his hands. “No swimmy swim for you yet. Drink this first. Besides, you shouldn’t go in there during Free Swim. Wait for Adult Swim. It’s chaos during Free Swim. I’m surprised there aren’t more fatalities.”

  She stood and watched him until he finished drinking.

  “Thanks,” he said. But he didn’t feel any better.

  They sat quietly for several moments. Clark hoped she wasn’t looking for some guidance. Then he wondered if he should be chatting with her socially at all, what the rules were about that. Then he wondered if she was real or if she was a shadow. He swung his heavy head in her direction and gave her a sideways look. He slapped the arms of his beach chair with finality.

  But Judy said, “Listen.” She reached into her sash and took out a tightly folded piece of paper. “This your dog?”

  Clark started. He pointed to the poster he’d stapled to telephone poles all around town. “Tecumseh!”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Gray dog? Big paws?”

  “Yes,” he said, though all of this was obvious in the photograph.

  “I think I know where he is,” said Judy. “But don’t get excited. I can’t promise. It’s just I’ve got a knack for these things. I take down every lost pet poster I see. It’s kind of a side business. Sometimes they give rewards and things.”

  “Oh,” said Clark. “Sure. We’ll give a reward.”

  Judy leaned back. “Oh, no, I couldn’t take money from you, Mr. Adair, not after how much you helped me out in school last year.”

  Clark smiled, nodding, though his head felt like hot pudding and he had no bloody idea what she was talking about. He was starting to feel slightly panicked.

  “I do have one itty-bitty thing to ask of you,” said Judy, pushing her sunglasses up with one finger. She turned and gestured up the hill, where a small boy was hugging a volleyball to his chest. “You see that kid up there on the volleyball court? Little guy, with glasses?”

  Clark looked up the hill.

  “His name is James. He’s my kid brother. He’s a good little guy. Very smart. I’d say—and I can say this word without cheapening it?—genius.”

  “Mm,” said Clark.

  “He’s small for his age. All the nutrients go straight to his brain. But, you know, so what if he can’t swim? So what if he can’t do a pull-up? Could Einstein swim? Could Amerigo Vespucci do a pull-up?”

  Just then, the lifeguard—a skinny immigrant named Gundars who had an impenetrable accent and who wore his regulation red windbreaker zipped to the throat—blew his whistle. Everyone stopped and looked up at him, wondering if they were going to be able to understand what he had to say. Gundars shifted in his chair, cleared his throat. Then he cried, “Adult Svim!”

  The children moaned. They rubbed their eyes, and pulled themselves out of the pool. Meanwhile, several corpulent adults rolled into the pool like great fleshy hulls and began to swim laps. A group of young mothers tread in the deep end talking, their bright bathing caps like a basket of colored eggs.

  Judy cleared her throat. “Well, anyway,” she continued, “James is small for his age. You wouldn’t know it, but he’s going to Clementine Junior High next fall, where you work.” Then she added, with sudden heartiness, “Isn’t that great?” She spoke in a stagy, unnatural way, as if she were reading from enormous cue cards above Clark’s head.

  “Yes,” said Clark. “That’s great.”

  Clark looked at the probing blue of the pool and felt an almost rapacious desire for it. It swung back and forth in his vision like a portrait on a hook. Licking his lips, he imagined the chilliness of the deep end against his burnt skin.

  “I need to ask you a favor,” the girl said. She put her hand on his arm, and its coldness shocked him and caused him to look down at her. She took off her sunglasses, revealing large, oil-dark eyes with discolored circles underneath, the fatigued eyes of an adult. “See, sometimes he gets picked on. In fact, he gets picked on all the time. I’ll be up at the high school. I won’t be able to keep an eye on him this year. Could you? Could you guide him, as you so kindly did for me?”

  Clark looked up at the volleyball court, where a pack of older boys were moving toward the unnaturally small kid, gesturing for the volleyball. Instead
of forking it over, the boy clutched it to his chest. One by one, the older boys took off their baseball caps and began swatting James in the head with them.

  “All right,” said Clark. “You know, it’s my job anyway.”

  “No,” said Judy. “It needs to be more than that. A special arrangement.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Clark, heading off in something of a stagger toward the low dive, “I promise already.”

  “Thank you,” Judy said, beaming. She waved the poster at him. “A promise is a promise!” Then she began scrambling up the hill, toward her brother. She stopped several paces off. “Don’t forget his name,” she called over her shoulder, “James. James Nye!”

  Clark waved and nodded and then turned his attention to the pool. He stuck his toe in the water. It was cool and anesthetizingly, tropically blue. Once he got in, he was going to drink the whole damn thing.

  He smiled at the women treading nearby, and then found himself climbing the rings to the diving board. Walking out on its rough tongue, the reverberations rushed up his body, and in the refracted water below the women smiled, cheeks illuminated, kicking like cherubs stuck in smog. He bounced once, twice. He felt his flesh sag and spring back up. And when he jumped, he was acutely aware of the feeling of weightlessness, of nothing. For it was this sensation he’d been feeling since their arrival at I 2 Quail Hollow Road, a feeling of not rising and not falling, a feeling of not being quite oneself, of not quite being.

  BARBECUE

  “And this,” Charlotte turned to him, indicating him with her palm, “is my wonderful husband, Clark.”

  The old couple looked up and squinted. Clark folded his arms and unfolded them. They were burnt the color of mangos, as was his forehead. He had brushed his hair back with pomade because the slightest touch hurt his sunburn.

  “You’re too tall to see,” said the old man. His eyeglasses were smudged. “And where do you live, Clark?”