Huntington
Joseph Saling
I have this idea about how we live our lives — that there is no such
thing as foreplay or afterglow. Not that life’s one fantastic orgasm,
though sometimes it can be — laser light shows, the earth moving,
waves crashing on the beach, startled quail, like a fourth of July
fireburst, suddenly exploding from the bush in all directions
against the sky. But for most people, life is simply anticlimactic.
The kind of thing that sputters before you’re ready and doesn’t
leave you feeling any different after it’s done. A series of slow shudders that makes you wonder why you even bother at all.
By the summer of my forty-third year, my life had settled into one of those slow shudders. I lived in Huntington, West Virginia, a city made of churches and bars, where I taught literature and creative writing at Marshall University. I spent the summers, when I wasn’t giving occasional readings to ladies groups at local churches or prowling the bars in search of the perfect game of shuffleboard, revising thin manuscripts of poetry. These little books, at least the three I had finished, were all, in essence, the same volume. Yet somehow they managed to bear the weight of an otherwise lackluster academic career.
This was the summer before the great democratic upheaval in China, the summer before we realized that someday, sooner than we expected, the world might be different than it actually was. This was the summer of my fourth book, a dappled collection of mostly unpublished poems that had no particular reason for being together other than the fact that my editor wanted a finished work in her hands by the beginning of fall. “Something new,” she had demanded. “Something formal. We want to see the name Jason Larkson in every major literary journal in the country, and the way to do that is to give people something they’re not expecting. You write sonnets. I’ve seen them. Why not a whole book of them?”
She was, I figured, young, and so I decided to ignore her advice. A few sonnets here and there, and maybe a sestina or two, but most of the collection consisted of the same open-ended intellectual mumblings that had permeated the earlier books. The problem was none of it held together, and the mumblings, just barely audible in the third book, had sunk into a kind of solipsistic hiss that even I was having trouble hearing.
This was also the summer that Pop died on the third of July, just two days before my forty-second birthday. He died in his studio at the age of seventy-one while putting the final touch of paint on the last of four canvasses collectively called “The Seasons.” On the fifth of July, Aunt Margaret, who had found his body, took the carton with his ashes from the mortician’s hands and put it on the passenger seat of her car. She drove up the side of a small mountain that she sometimes referred to in her letters as “Our Hill.” At the summit, she parked next to a radio tower and carried the cardboard box up a small incline to a ledge from where she could see the Merrimack Valley and, on a truly clear day, all the way to Boston. Opening the top, she held the box in front of her and waited for just the right gust of wind before turning it over and letting the ashes blow free.
On the morning of the sixth, she called to tell me he had died and to say what she had done. Then she added, “You need to come to New Hampshire, Jason. You need to spend some time here.” Without waiting for a response, she added, “Howard will meet you at the airport and drive you up from Boston. I’ve arranged for your ticket. You’ll be able to meet his new family. I know they all want to meet you.”
Then there was silence on her end of the line, and a long silence on mine, punctuated by the humming fan on the back of my computer. “What are you saying?” I eventually asked.
“I’m saying I want you to come to New Hampshire and spend some time with us. I’ve taken care of all the arrangements for you.”
“Wait a minute,” I said back to her. “What do you mean spend some time? Didn’t you just say Pop died?”
“It was a stroke, Jason. He didn’t feel any pain.”
“And you want me to come up to spend some time?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh. “And you’ve already had him cremated?”
“Just like he asked I do. We can talk more about this when you get here.”
“I’m not coming up there,” I said. “What’s the point? Besides I. . .”
“You can bring your work with you,” she interrupted, “and you can use your father’s computer. I don’t want to interfere with your life. You know that. But I do need you here.”
“Jesus Christ, it’s not the work,” I began, but, remembering who it was I was talking to, I swallowed whatever other words were coming. Then both of us waited to see what I would say next. Finally, I said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” I was ready to hang up, but before I did and after she gave me the details for the flight, I added as sarcastically as I could, “By the way. You forgot my birthday.”
~ ~ ~
Huntington when I was there was one of those places where people sat and waited for something to change while they remained secure in the knowledge that nothing ever would. It was a city built on incest; its children’s eyes were too big, their heads too round. The major employer, the University, thought it a virtue to hire its own. Nearly half my closest colleagues at Marshall had done their undergraduate work there. People did leave. They went south to be educated or west to find a job. But no one ever left to find expanding horizons, and many who went eventually came back. It was almost as if the hills and hollows that surround this town and block it from the outside world demanded a deposit too big to leave behind. The city wraps around a bend in the Ohio River like a stretched out magnet, too weak to pull in anything new, but too strong not to pull back its own.
I was not one of its own. I was a flatlander. My family came from Indiana, where you could drive, it seemed, forever and never see a hill. But I liked the sense of being closed in and the fact that the city made no demands on me, and I called Huntington home. Its sheltering hills felt like a womb, its hot summers like the encompassing warmth of a mother’s body.
I came to the school on a one year contract as a visiting poet in residence after my first book was published. The next year, thanks largely to the efforts of my friend Jacob Taylor who was then acting chair of the English department and whose wife Laurie, an adjunct writing teacher, urged him to do something, I was offered tenure if I would stay. So I stayed, and for a few years, though I could feel her watching me, even from eight hundred miles away, I was able to live as though Aunt Margaret, my mother’s younger sister who became my father’s mistress when my mother died, were no more than a distant relative who had no particular hold over my life. “She doesn’t need me,” I told Lisa Vander as she sat across the table from me in Milo’s that evening. Milo’s was a small Italian restaurant in Downtown Huntington, tucked away below street level and decorated in early waterworks with rusty pipes and valves lining the walls and running across the ceiling. “There’s only one reason she’s asked me up there. I knew this day was coming,” I said. “I might as well have not even tried to build a life for myself. God, I don’t want to go there.”
Lisa was a pretty girl with shoulder length blond hair and shapely legs. Aunt Margaret would have thought her too thin, especially in the face, and would have asked if she had an eating disorder. At some point, as I walked around the city, contemplating my new state of orphanhood, I’d called her and asked her to meet me for dinner. She was surprised to hear my voice. “Jason,” she said, the surprise showing in hers. “We all thought you’d gone home. How are you doing?”
“New Hampshire’s not my home,” I said with more sneer than I had intended. “And it’s too soon to know how I’m doing. Aunt Margaret just called this morning.”
“But we heard about it on the news two days ago. Jacob said he tried to call and got your machine. He couldn’t think of any message to leave.”
Lisa and I belonged to the same circle of friends, a small mildly intellectual group of faculty and former students who liked to hang out together and tell one another how boring we all were while pretending not to be boring at all. That way we could feel we were in some state of permanent transition and our lives were not being wasted. Mostly we drank together and sometimes slept with one another — or acted as if we did. Lisa and I, though, had never gotten that far, despite the efforts of Laurie Taylor, the self-appointed queen mother (and finest poet) of the group, who tried to pair us off when I first got to Huntington. Laurie didn’t particularly think Lisa and I were right for each other. But Lisa was involved with a married minister from the Methodist church who was not and could never be a member of our group. So I, whom Laurie found utterly controllable, became in her mind a tether that could keep Lisa from straying too far. The problem was Lisa, though she knew her minister lover was being transferred at his wife’s request, had no intention of giving him up, and I, who still had not recovered from my second divorce, had had enough of pretty women to want to not get involved.
“I don’t answer the phone when I’m working” I said, "and I haven’t seen the news in a week. I figure if the world blows up, I’ll find out when my computer stops. Or I’ll learn about it when Aunt Margaret calls.”
“Oh no, Jason, you didn’t even know. How horrible.”
“That’s not the horrible part. The horrible part is she wants me up there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me explain it to you,” I said. “Have dinner with me tonight.”
“Of course. You can come here and I’ll cook.” Lisa never let anyone into her apartment, not even Laurie, who could go anywhere she wanted, because she was ashamed of her inability to keep it clean. So the offer to fix dinner at her place struck me as the height of compassion. I told her no.
“Let’s eat at Milo’s. I want to be somewhere public.” It seemed important to be someplace where people could see me. No one in Huntington knew the full extent of my dread of Aunt Margaret, but I still needed to show that, as much as she may have imagined she did, Aunt Margaret did not control my life. I wanted to be someplace where people could ask about the funeral, and I could tell them, with just the right amount of disdain, what Aunt Margaret had done. And I didn’t want to cry, which I knew I would if I were alone with Lisa.
~ ~ ~
“In Aunt Margaret’s world, everything has a purpose,” I explained shortly after Lisa joined me at the table and I had given her details of Aunt Margaret’s phone call. “There is no such thing in her repertoire as an unconsidered act. I knew the moment she asked me to come up that the last twenty-seven years might as well have not even happened. The only reason she goes on living is to direct people’s lives. She ran Pop’s, but now he’s dead, and my brother’s a wimp. So she wants mine.”
Lisa frowned. “Maybe she just needs your company.”
The idea of Aunt Margaret needing anyone was beyond my ability to comprehend. “I’m not being summoned to New Hampshire for comfort. And before you say it, any public image of family solidarity she might want to convey, she can arrange without my help. Believe it. Pop once said, `If it has to do with image, your Aunt Margaret’s a genius.’ He even suggested I let her advise me on my career.”
That suggestion had come during his last visit, and I was never sure that he simply wasn’t conveying a message from her to me. “She can do you a world of good,” Pop said. “It wouldn’t hurt to let her help you get away from this place and go somewhere you can get more attention.”
“I don’t want more attention,” I answered. “I have all the attention I need. Besides, what I don’t need is another article in Vanity Fair identifying me as your prodigal son.
“You have to admit it helped your sales.”
“I’m not sure it didn’t kill them. I mean you’re the most loved artist in America. Maybe the whole world. It made me look pretty stupid and ungrateful.” He was right, of course, about the article helping my sales. My first book, which had seen its way to print through the Yale Series of Younger Poets, had garnered a good deal of attention from both the regular poetry establishment and the popular press. But my second, published a year later, had gone virtually unnoticed until Aunt Margaret casually mentioned me to the freelance writer doing a profile on Pop as the “one un-repairable sadness” in my father’s life. Within a month of the article’s appearance, my publisher had a paperback edition of both books on store shelves across America and I had a new contract for a third and a fourth one.
“For the last twenty-five years,” I told Lisa, “ever since I moved out of her house, Aunt Margaret’s been waiting. She’s pretended to be content to leave me alone while she’s run Pop’s and my brother’s lives. Every once in a while, she’ll say something about one or the other of my failed marriages, or she’ll make a snide remark in a letter about this less than prestigious university. But that’s just her way of saying whatever happens to me is none of her doing. I always knew, though, one day she was going to reach out and I was going to be as helpless as one of those dogs you see people walking on a leash with a reel. Now that day’s come.” I shuddered, and I knew Lisa saw it.
Lisa took a cigarette from the pack I had on the table and leaned across for me to light it. Then she reached her hand across the table for me to take. She had long thin fingers, and her hand felt cold. “Can you stay at my place tonight?” I asked after cupping her hand with both of mine. I tried to sound casual. “It would help me if I didn’t have to think. And maybe, if you wouldn’t mind, you could take me to the airport in the morning?”
“Sure,” she said. Then she turned her hand so she could squeeze my fingers, but I slid my hands away. “What’s going on, Jason,” she asked. “What are you feeling?”
“I’ve spent most of the day trying not to feel anything,” I said. She looked puzzled. “I can’t afford feelings right now.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you imagine,” she said. I watched blue smoke rise from between her pursed lips, hesitate, and then swirl slowly upwards in front of her face. In the dim light of the restaurant she looked like a gypsy fortune teller, but I knew she didn’t believe what she had just said. When Lisa’s mother had gotten sick and went to the hospital, Lisa’s sisters called and told her someone had to go up to the house, which sat at the end of a dirt road on the side of a hill about twenty miles outside of town, to take care of their bed ridden father. Lisa went only because the other two wouldn’t. When she got there, all her father did was cuss at her, call her a whore, and try to hit her whenever she changed the sheets. Then, after her mother died and her brother moved back home, Lisa still went up on weekends to clean and cook meals for them. This went on for three months until the church her mother had belonged to hired a woman who could come in on Thursdays to clean and cook. She knew what families were like. “Then again,” she said.
“I knew you’d understand. That’s why I called you.”
I leaned back and watched her smile, and the waitress, when she brought Lisa a beer, must have seen the smile too because of the way she hesitated before asking if we were ready to order.
“Not yet,” I said. “Give us a few minutes.” The waitress winked at me as if she and I were partners in a conspiracy of seduction. Then after she left, I told Lisa, “It’s not fair. I’ve thought about it all afternoon, and it’s not fair.”
“I can’t believe she just called you today?”
I emptied my glass, but when I looked around for the waitress I’d just sent away so I could get another bourbon and water, I couldn’t catch her eye.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“He had a stroke.”
“And they’ve already had the funeral?”
“There wasn’t any. Aunt Margaret collected the body and had it burned. Then she dumped the ashes off some mountain. You know, in India, they had a custom where the bereaved widow was supposed to throw herself on the funeral pyre. Too bad they never went to India to live. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this at all.”
Lisa didn’t respond. She merely leaned back in her chair and sipped her beer from the bottle.
“My life works the way it is. We had an arrangement. Life works if people stick to the arrangements they’ve made. They’re there. I’m here. We’re family, so we’re civil. We interact when it’s mutually convenient. That should be enough.”
“So why go back?” she asked.
“I can’t answer that. I thought maybe you could help me decide not to go.”
She snickered, putting her cigarette out. “Right. Like I’m a perfect example. Do as I say, Jason, not as I do? I think we probably should order something.”
“But what do I say? What do I do when I get there?”
“Don’t go then. Or go and be your father’s oldest son, because that’s what you are. But don’t worry about it tonight.” She smiled again. “Tonight, all you have to do is be with me, and you can be any way you want. We don’t have an arrangement.”
We ate pasty spaghetti, and I drank bourbon while she drank beer. Before our meals were served, Milo Junior sat down at the piano and began to play, and Lisa changed her seat at the table so we could both watch and not have to talk to one another. Sometimes she would look at me and we would smile or she would reach down and put her hand on my leg. But mostly we just ate and listened. Then when the waitress cleared our plates and we waited for her to bring us coffee, Lisa moved her chair so she could sit closer to me. “You’ve been quiet,” she said, wrapping both her arms around one of mine and leaning her head against my shoulder.
“I was just sitting here wondering.”
“About your father?”
“No. About what would have happened if Laurie’s attempts to pair us up in the beginning had worked.”
“They almost did,” she said, lifting her head from my shoulder. “But then we all began to wonder if maybe you weren’t gay.”
I turned my head to look at her. “Are you serious?”
“For a while we thought maybe you were.”
“I’m surprised Laurie didn’t try to fix me up with a couple of guys.”
“She had them picked out,” Lisa said. “But then Jacob convinced her you were straight. Actually, it wasn’t Jacob. It was the night she and Jacob took you down to the river and you met that couple from Charleston and got high.”
“You mean the night I ended up sleeping on the park bench?” The story of my night by the river had taken on the life of legend. It happened after I’d been at Marshall for only a couple of months and was recounted every time a new faculty member applied for admission to our group. Some versions outside our circle had me trying to wade across the Ohio River and being pulled back to safety by a beautiful young woman from Charleston. Everyone on the inside, though, knew I had only thought about walking across the river, claiming I could do it as Jesus had, on top of the water. But then Renee, the man who had brought the pot, diverted me by offering to let me kiss his wife, which I did until he decided I had gotten her sufficiently warmed up. Then he came over and separated us and walked up the hill to their van with her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs around his hips, and I lay down on a park bench that faced the water and went to sleep.
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “She came back from that night convinced that at best you were bisexual but probably not. I think she was disappointed. She had such high hopes for you.”
“I guess I let her down.”
“She forgave you,” Lisa said, and we both laughed.
The waitress brought our coffee and Junior took a break from the piano. Lisa moved her chair back to where it originally was.
“You know, it wasn’t that I thought there was anything wrong with you,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s old stuff. Let’s drink our coffee so we can go before Laurie and Jacob show up here. She called last night and asked if I wanted to come hear Junior play, and you know if they show up we won’t get back to your place until after three.”
“Too late,” I said as Laurie and Jacob walked in the front door.
“Shit,” Lisa said. “Let’s just sit here and be quiet. Maybe they won’t see us.”
“Too late again,” I said. Laurie had already pointed towards where we were sitting and waved and then turned around and said something behind her hand to Jacob. As they made their way across the room, I could see Lisa readjust herself and plant a smile on her face. Laurie was looking at me with big round eyes, her head tilted to the side, and the corners of her mouth turned down in a sympathetic frown.
“My God,” Jacob said, having taken his ever present pipe out of his mouth and holding it against the middle of his chest. His free arm hung limply at his side, but he shrugged his shoulders and turned his empty palm up as he asked, “What are you doing here?”
Before I could say anything, Laurie pulled out a chair and sat down next to me. “How are you, Jason?” she said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees.
Jacob looked around as if trying to decide what to do before pulling out the remaining chair and sitting down. “We thought you’d be in New Hampshire,” he said.
“Well I’m not,” I answered.
Laurie leaned back. “They burned the body, didn’t they?”
“Maybe I should watch the news more often,” I said. “When did you find out?”
“Last night,” Laurie responded as the waitress came over with the check.
“Hi Millie,” Jacob said to her.
“Hello, Professor Taylor. You want your usual?”
“How dare you make this man pay for his meal,” Laurie said with just the right amount of indignation to make Millie pick the check back up from the table. “His father just died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Millie said looking at me with a shocked expression. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay. I just found out myself,” I said.
Jacob’s jaw came open and he leaned forward towards the table. “You’re kidding,” he said. Then when Laurie looked at him he leaned back. “No. I guess you wouldn’t kid about something like that.”
“Your aunt didn’t call you, did she?” Laurie said. “I told Jacob we should go over to your place to make sure you knew.”
“She was right,” Jacob said. “I should have listened. Here give me that check.”
“No. That’s okay,” Millie said. “Milo won’t mind. I’ll take care of it.”
“Then bring Jason a bourbon,” Jacob said. “You drinking Michelob?” he asked Lisa.
“Why not,” Lisa said.
“What time is it?” I asked as Millie left. “I have to catch a plane in the morning.”
“It’s about ten o’clock,” Jacob, who never wore a watch, said.
“Then I’ve only got time for one,” I said. “Lisa, you can stay if you want.”
“No. I’ll go when you go.” Then she looked over at Laurie. “I’m driving Jason to the airport in the morning.”
Laurie responded with a knowing smile, having already deduced that, for the present, Lisa and I were a couple. Jacob took out his pipe tool and emptied the bowl of his pipe into the ashtray and began scraping the sides of it.
“Did you guys walk here?” I asked, knowing that since they had come in alone, they had. Laurie had never learned to drive, and Jacob had given up driving ten years before, deciding one night that giving up driving before he killed someone was easier than giving up drinking.
“God, your aunt must be the ultimate bitch,” Laurie said. “Why are you even bothering to go home?”
“New Hampshire’s not his home,” Lisa said with a smile.
“Whatever,” Laurie responded. It was obvious that she didn’t approve of the two of us being together. “So why are you going?”
“I was summoned,” I said. “She’s a lot like you, Laurie. People just do what she tells them.”
Jacob laughed and Laurie smiled. Although there were times she would have acted offended at such a remark, Laurie usually didn’t mind people acknowledging her power over them. Besides, out of sympathy, something she needed to feel for someone almost all the time, she was willing to grant me more leeway than usual. “I’m going to write a poem about your aunt,” she said. “I’ll show it to you when you get back. When are you coming back?”
“In a few days. I really don’t know what’s going on or what she’s expecting,” I said. It was unusual for Laurie to announce she was going to write a poem. She hardly ever talked about her writing. She thought the process was too personal to share with anyone except Jacob. But she would show me drafts from time to time, and that made me one of a very select group in her circle.
“Well I think you should just go. Do whatever you have to do to pay your respects, and then come back. She’ll suck you in if you let her. You know she will.” I hadn’t realized Laurie knew so much about Aunt Margaret, but then Laurie made it a point to never forget anything someone told her that could someday be used against them. “When you come back, we’ll have a wake for your father. You’ll help me, won’t you Lisa?”
“That’s a great idea,” Jacob said. “I really liked your father when he was here.”
“Pop had admirers wherever he went,” I said. “Listen, I don’t think I can wait for that drink.” Laurie looked hurt. “I mean it’s going to be hard enough to make myself get up in the morning as it is, considering all I’ve got to look forward to is seeing my aunt.”
“Just remember that we’ll be here for you,” Laurie said as I pushed my chair back to stand. “We’ll have a real nice wake when you get back.”
Lisa stood up with me. “I’ve got to drive Jason in the morning so I better leave too,” she said.
Jacob stood up to shake my hand. “Do you need anything?”
“No, I’ll call you when I get back. A wake sounds good.”
Lisa and I left by the side door. “You really want to have a wake?” she asked as we stood next to our cars.
“Why not?” I said.
~ ~ ~
Sometime that night, after Lisa and I had made love and after she had gone to sleep beside me, I started to cry. I cried for no reason I could name. I cried for all the love I had lost in my life and all the love I had never found. I cried for the work I had not done because work had come to have no meaning. I cried for Lisa’s dead mother and for my own dead mother, whom I could barely remember, and for the city of Huntington with its churches and bars and its people for whom tomorrow would always be the same as today. I cried for Laurie and Jacob and their blessed oblivion. And I cried because I knew that once I left in the morning, I would never be back. But there was no more comfort in the tears than there had been in the mechanical coupling that Lisa and I had just worked our way through. And so I slept.
~ ~ ~
Lisa woke before I did and made coffee. Then she drove me to the airport and kissed me good-bye while we sat in her car. “Call me if you need anything,” she said. “Or if you want me to, I can call you and tell you there’s an emergency that you’ve got to come back for.”
“You’re sweet,” I said. “About last night. . .”
“Let’s wait ‘til you get back. We can see what happens then.”
~ ~ ~
To get from Huntington to Boston by air, I had to travel through Pittsburgh, and I spent most of the two hours I had between flights milling about in the bookstore at the Pittsburgh airport. Eugene Larkson’s America, a coffee table book of both color and black and white prints of Pop’s landscape work, was displayed prominently in the bookstore window. A large red and white tag covered the “a” at the end of America and announced that the book had originally sold for $76 but could now be purchased inside for only $24.90. Inside, in the middle of a remainder table close to the front door, ten copies of the book sat undisturbed by the browsing travelers.
thing as foreplay or afterglow. Not that life’s one fantastic orgasm,
though sometimes it can be — laser light shows, the earth moving,
waves crashing on the beach, startled quail, like a fourth of July
fireburst, suddenly exploding from the bush in all directions
against the sky. But for most people, life is simply anticlimactic.
The kind of thing that sputters before you’re ready and doesn’t
leave you feeling any different after it’s done. A series of slow shudders that makes you wonder why you even bother at all.
By the summer of my forty-third year, my life had settled into one of those slow shudders. I lived in Huntington, West Virginia, a city made of churches and bars, where I taught literature and creative writing at Marshall University. I spent the summers, when I wasn’t giving occasional readings to ladies groups at local churches or prowling the bars in search of the perfect game of shuffleboard, revising thin manuscripts of poetry. These little books, at least the three I had finished, were all, in essence, the same volume. Yet somehow they managed to bear the weight of an otherwise lackluster academic career.
This was the summer before the great democratic upheaval in China, the summer before we realized that someday, sooner than we expected, the world might be different than it actually was. This was the summer of my fourth book, a dappled collection of mostly unpublished poems that had no particular reason for being together other than the fact that my editor wanted a finished work in her hands by the beginning of fall. “Something new,” she had demanded. “Something formal. We want to see the name Jason Larkson in every major literary journal in the country, and the way to do that is to give people something they’re not expecting. You write sonnets. I’ve seen them. Why not a whole book of them?”
She was, I figured, young, and so I decided to ignore her advice. A few sonnets here and there, and maybe a sestina or two, but most of the collection consisted of the same open-ended intellectual mumblings that had permeated the earlier books. The problem was none of it held together, and the mumblings, just barely audible in the third book, had sunk into a kind of solipsistic hiss that even I was having trouble hearing.
This was also the summer that Pop died on the third of July, just two days before my forty-second birthday. He died in his studio at the age of seventy-one while putting the final touch of paint on the last of four canvasses collectively called “The Seasons.” On the fifth of July, Aunt Margaret, who had found his body, took the carton with his ashes from the mortician’s hands and put it on the passenger seat of her car. She drove up the side of a small mountain that she sometimes referred to in her letters as “Our Hill.” At the summit, she parked next to a radio tower and carried the cardboard box up a small incline to a ledge from where she could see the Merrimack Valley and, on a truly clear day, all the way to Boston. Opening the top, she held the box in front of her and waited for just the right gust of wind before turning it over and letting the ashes blow free.
On the morning of the sixth, she called to tell me he had died and to say what she had done. Then she added, “You need to come to New Hampshire, Jason. You need to spend some time here.” Without waiting for a response, she added, “Howard will meet you at the airport and drive you up from Boston. I’ve arranged for your ticket. You’ll be able to meet his new family. I know they all want to meet you.”
Then there was silence on her end of the line, and a long silence on mine, punctuated by the humming fan on the back of my computer. “What are you saying?” I eventually asked.
“I’m saying I want you to come to New Hampshire and spend some time with us. I’ve taken care of all the arrangements for you.”
“Wait a minute,” I said back to her. “What do you mean spend some time? Didn’t you just say Pop died?”
“It was a stroke, Jason. He didn’t feel any pain.”
“And you want me to come up to spend some time?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh. “And you’ve already had him cremated?”
“Just like he asked I do. We can talk more about this when you get here.”
“I’m not coming up there,” I said. “What’s the point? Besides I. . .”
“You can bring your work with you,” she interrupted, “and you can use your father’s computer. I don’t want to interfere with your life. You know that. But I do need you here.”
“Jesus Christ, it’s not the work,” I began, but, remembering who it was I was talking to, I swallowed whatever other words were coming. Then both of us waited to see what I would say next. Finally, I said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” I was ready to hang up, but before I did and after she gave me the details for the flight, I added as sarcastically as I could, “By the way. You forgot my birthday.”
~ ~ ~
Huntington when I was there was one of those places where people sat and waited for something to change while they remained secure in the knowledge that nothing ever would. It was a city built on incest; its children’s eyes were too big, their heads too round. The major employer, the University, thought it a virtue to hire its own. Nearly half my closest colleagues at Marshall had done their undergraduate work there. People did leave. They went south to be educated or west to find a job. But no one ever left to find expanding horizons, and many who went eventually came back. It was almost as if the hills and hollows that surround this town and block it from the outside world demanded a deposit too big to leave behind. The city wraps around a bend in the Ohio River like a stretched out magnet, too weak to pull in anything new, but too strong not to pull back its own.
I was not one of its own. I was a flatlander. My family came from Indiana, where you could drive, it seemed, forever and never see a hill. But I liked the sense of being closed in and the fact that the city made no demands on me, and I called Huntington home. Its sheltering hills felt like a womb, its hot summers like the encompassing warmth of a mother’s body.
I came to the school on a one year contract as a visiting poet in residence after my first book was published. The next year, thanks largely to the efforts of my friend Jacob Taylor who was then acting chair of the English department and whose wife Laurie, an adjunct writing teacher, urged him to do something, I was offered tenure if I would stay. So I stayed, and for a few years, though I could feel her watching me, even from eight hundred miles away, I was able to live as though Aunt Margaret, my mother’s younger sister who became my father’s mistress when my mother died, were no more than a distant relative who had no particular hold over my life. “She doesn’t need me,” I told Lisa Vander as she sat across the table from me in Milo’s that evening. Milo’s was a small Italian restaurant in Downtown Huntington, tucked away below street level and decorated in early waterworks with rusty pipes and valves lining the walls and running across the ceiling. “There’s only one reason she’s asked me up there. I knew this day was coming,” I said. “I might as well have not even tried to build a life for myself. God, I don’t want to go there.”
Lisa was a pretty girl with shoulder length blond hair and shapely legs. Aunt Margaret would have thought her too thin, especially in the face, and would have asked if she had an eating disorder. At some point, as I walked around the city, contemplating my new state of orphanhood, I’d called her and asked her to meet me for dinner. She was surprised to hear my voice. “Jason,” she said, the surprise showing in hers. “We all thought you’d gone home. How are you doing?”
“New Hampshire’s not my home,” I said with more sneer than I had intended. “And it’s too soon to know how I’m doing. Aunt Margaret just called this morning.”
“But we heard about it on the news two days ago. Jacob said he tried to call and got your machine. He couldn’t think of any message to leave.”
Lisa and I belonged to the same circle of friends, a small mildly intellectual group of faculty and former students who liked to hang out together and tell one another how boring we all were while pretending not to be boring at all. That way we could feel we were in some state of permanent transition and our lives were not being wasted. Mostly we drank together and sometimes slept with one another — or acted as if we did. Lisa and I, though, had never gotten that far, despite the efforts of Laurie Taylor, the self-appointed queen mother (and finest poet) of the group, who tried to pair us off when I first got to Huntington. Laurie didn’t particularly think Lisa and I were right for each other. But Lisa was involved with a married minister from the Methodist church who was not and could never be a member of our group. So I, whom Laurie found utterly controllable, became in her mind a tether that could keep Lisa from straying too far. The problem was Lisa, though she knew her minister lover was being transferred at his wife’s request, had no intention of giving him up, and I, who still had not recovered from my second divorce, had had enough of pretty women to want to not get involved.
“I don’t answer the phone when I’m working” I said, "and I haven’t seen the news in a week. I figure if the world blows up, I’ll find out when my computer stops. Or I’ll learn about it when Aunt Margaret calls.”
“Oh no, Jason, you didn’t even know. How horrible.”
“That’s not the horrible part. The horrible part is she wants me up there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me explain it to you,” I said. “Have dinner with me tonight.”
“Of course. You can come here and I’ll cook.” Lisa never let anyone into her apartment, not even Laurie, who could go anywhere she wanted, because she was ashamed of her inability to keep it clean. So the offer to fix dinner at her place struck me as the height of compassion. I told her no.
“Let’s eat at Milo’s. I want to be somewhere public.” It seemed important to be someplace where people could see me. No one in Huntington knew the full extent of my dread of Aunt Margaret, but I still needed to show that, as much as she may have imagined she did, Aunt Margaret did not control my life. I wanted to be someplace where people could ask about the funeral, and I could tell them, with just the right amount of disdain, what Aunt Margaret had done. And I didn’t want to cry, which I knew I would if I were alone with Lisa.
~ ~ ~
“In Aunt Margaret’s world, everything has a purpose,” I explained shortly after Lisa joined me at the table and I had given her details of Aunt Margaret’s phone call. “There is no such thing in her repertoire as an unconsidered act. I knew the moment she asked me to come up that the last twenty-seven years might as well have not even happened. The only reason she goes on living is to direct people’s lives. She ran Pop’s, but now he’s dead, and my brother’s a wimp. So she wants mine.”
Lisa frowned. “Maybe she just needs your company.”
The idea of Aunt Margaret needing anyone was beyond my ability to comprehend. “I’m not being summoned to New Hampshire for comfort. And before you say it, any public image of family solidarity she might want to convey, she can arrange without my help. Believe it. Pop once said, `If it has to do with image, your Aunt Margaret’s a genius.’ He even suggested I let her advise me on my career.”
That suggestion had come during his last visit, and I was never sure that he simply wasn’t conveying a message from her to me. “She can do you a world of good,” Pop said. “It wouldn’t hurt to let her help you get away from this place and go somewhere you can get more attention.”
“I don’t want more attention,” I answered. “I have all the attention I need. Besides, what I don’t need is another article in Vanity Fair identifying me as your prodigal son.
“You have to admit it helped your sales.”
“I’m not sure it didn’t kill them. I mean you’re the most loved artist in America. Maybe the whole world. It made me look pretty stupid and ungrateful.” He was right, of course, about the article helping my sales. My first book, which had seen its way to print through the Yale Series of Younger Poets, had garnered a good deal of attention from both the regular poetry establishment and the popular press. But my second, published a year later, had gone virtually unnoticed until Aunt Margaret casually mentioned me to the freelance writer doing a profile on Pop as the “one un-repairable sadness” in my father’s life. Within a month of the article’s appearance, my publisher had a paperback edition of both books on store shelves across America and I had a new contract for a third and a fourth one.
“For the last twenty-five years,” I told Lisa, “ever since I moved out of her house, Aunt Margaret’s been waiting. She’s pretended to be content to leave me alone while she’s run Pop’s and my brother’s lives. Every once in a while, she’ll say something about one or the other of my failed marriages, or she’ll make a snide remark in a letter about this less than prestigious university. But that’s just her way of saying whatever happens to me is none of her doing. I always knew, though, one day she was going to reach out and I was going to be as helpless as one of those dogs you see people walking on a leash with a reel. Now that day’s come.” I shuddered, and I knew Lisa saw it.
Lisa took a cigarette from the pack I had on the table and leaned across for me to light it. Then she reached her hand across the table for me to take. She had long thin fingers, and her hand felt cold. “Can you stay at my place tonight?” I asked after cupping her hand with both of mine. I tried to sound casual. “It would help me if I didn’t have to think. And maybe, if you wouldn’t mind, you could take me to the airport in the morning?”
“Sure,” she said. Then she turned her hand so she could squeeze my fingers, but I slid my hands away. “What’s going on, Jason,” she asked. “What are you feeling?”
“I’ve spent most of the day trying not to feel anything,” I said. She looked puzzled. “I can’t afford feelings right now.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you imagine,” she said. I watched blue smoke rise from between her pursed lips, hesitate, and then swirl slowly upwards in front of her face. In the dim light of the restaurant she looked like a gypsy fortune teller, but I knew she didn’t believe what she had just said. When Lisa’s mother had gotten sick and went to the hospital, Lisa’s sisters called and told her someone had to go up to the house, which sat at the end of a dirt road on the side of a hill about twenty miles outside of town, to take care of their bed ridden father. Lisa went only because the other two wouldn’t. When she got there, all her father did was cuss at her, call her a whore, and try to hit her whenever she changed the sheets. Then, after her mother died and her brother moved back home, Lisa still went up on weekends to clean and cook meals for them. This went on for three months until the church her mother had belonged to hired a woman who could come in on Thursdays to clean and cook. She knew what families were like. “Then again,” she said.
“I knew you’d understand. That’s why I called you.”
I leaned back and watched her smile, and the waitress, when she brought Lisa a beer, must have seen the smile too because of the way she hesitated before asking if we were ready to order.
“Not yet,” I said. “Give us a few minutes.” The waitress winked at me as if she and I were partners in a conspiracy of seduction. Then after she left, I told Lisa, “It’s not fair. I’ve thought about it all afternoon, and it’s not fair.”
“I can’t believe she just called you today?”
I emptied my glass, but when I looked around for the waitress I’d just sent away so I could get another bourbon and water, I couldn’t catch her eye.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“He had a stroke.”
“And they’ve already had the funeral?”
“There wasn’t any. Aunt Margaret collected the body and had it burned. Then she dumped the ashes off some mountain. You know, in India, they had a custom where the bereaved widow was supposed to throw herself on the funeral pyre. Too bad they never went to India to live. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this at all.”
Lisa didn’t respond. She merely leaned back in her chair and sipped her beer from the bottle.
“My life works the way it is. We had an arrangement. Life works if people stick to the arrangements they’ve made. They’re there. I’m here. We’re family, so we’re civil. We interact when it’s mutually convenient. That should be enough.”
“So why go back?” she asked.
“I can’t answer that. I thought maybe you could help me decide not to go.”
She snickered, putting her cigarette out. “Right. Like I’m a perfect example. Do as I say, Jason, not as I do? I think we probably should order something.”
“But what do I say? What do I do when I get there?”
“Don’t go then. Or go and be your father’s oldest son, because that’s what you are. But don’t worry about it tonight.” She smiled again. “Tonight, all you have to do is be with me, and you can be any way you want. We don’t have an arrangement.”
We ate pasty spaghetti, and I drank bourbon while she drank beer. Before our meals were served, Milo Junior sat down at the piano and began to play, and Lisa changed her seat at the table so we could both watch and not have to talk to one another. Sometimes she would look at me and we would smile or she would reach down and put her hand on my leg. But mostly we just ate and listened. Then when the waitress cleared our plates and we waited for her to bring us coffee, Lisa moved her chair so she could sit closer to me. “You’ve been quiet,” she said, wrapping both her arms around one of mine and leaning her head against my shoulder.
“I was just sitting here wondering.”
“About your father?”
“No. About what would have happened if Laurie’s attempts to pair us up in the beginning had worked.”
“They almost did,” she said, lifting her head from my shoulder. “But then we all began to wonder if maybe you weren’t gay.”
I turned my head to look at her. “Are you serious?”
“For a while we thought maybe you were.”
“I’m surprised Laurie didn’t try to fix me up with a couple of guys.”
“She had them picked out,” Lisa said. “But then Jacob convinced her you were straight. Actually, it wasn’t Jacob. It was the night she and Jacob took you down to the river and you met that couple from Charleston and got high.”
“You mean the night I ended up sleeping on the park bench?” The story of my night by the river had taken on the life of legend. It happened after I’d been at Marshall for only a couple of months and was recounted every time a new faculty member applied for admission to our group. Some versions outside our circle had me trying to wade across the Ohio River and being pulled back to safety by a beautiful young woman from Charleston. Everyone on the inside, though, knew I had only thought about walking across the river, claiming I could do it as Jesus had, on top of the water. But then Renee, the man who had brought the pot, diverted me by offering to let me kiss his wife, which I did until he decided I had gotten her sufficiently warmed up. Then he came over and separated us and walked up the hill to their van with her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs around his hips, and I lay down on a park bench that faced the water and went to sleep.
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “She came back from that night convinced that at best you were bisexual but probably not. I think she was disappointed. She had such high hopes for you.”
“I guess I let her down.”
“She forgave you,” Lisa said, and we both laughed.
The waitress brought our coffee and Junior took a break from the piano. Lisa moved her chair back to where it originally was.
“You know, it wasn’t that I thought there was anything wrong with you,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s old stuff. Let’s drink our coffee so we can go before Laurie and Jacob show up here. She called last night and asked if I wanted to come hear Junior play, and you know if they show up we won’t get back to your place until after three.”
“Too late,” I said as Laurie and Jacob walked in the front door.
“Shit,” Lisa said. “Let’s just sit here and be quiet. Maybe they won’t see us.”
“Too late again,” I said. Laurie had already pointed towards where we were sitting and waved and then turned around and said something behind her hand to Jacob. As they made their way across the room, I could see Lisa readjust herself and plant a smile on her face. Laurie was looking at me with big round eyes, her head tilted to the side, and the corners of her mouth turned down in a sympathetic frown.
“My God,” Jacob said, having taken his ever present pipe out of his mouth and holding it against the middle of his chest. His free arm hung limply at his side, but he shrugged his shoulders and turned his empty palm up as he asked, “What are you doing here?”
Before I could say anything, Laurie pulled out a chair and sat down next to me. “How are you, Jason?” she said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees.
Jacob looked around as if trying to decide what to do before pulling out the remaining chair and sitting down. “We thought you’d be in New Hampshire,” he said.
“Well I’m not,” I answered.
Laurie leaned back. “They burned the body, didn’t they?”
“Maybe I should watch the news more often,” I said. “When did you find out?”
“Last night,” Laurie responded as the waitress came over with the check.
“Hi Millie,” Jacob said to her.
“Hello, Professor Taylor. You want your usual?”
“How dare you make this man pay for his meal,” Laurie said with just the right amount of indignation to make Millie pick the check back up from the table. “His father just died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Millie said looking at me with a shocked expression. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay. I just found out myself,” I said.
Jacob’s jaw came open and he leaned forward towards the table. “You’re kidding,” he said. Then when Laurie looked at him he leaned back. “No. I guess you wouldn’t kid about something like that.”
“Your aunt didn’t call you, did she?” Laurie said. “I told Jacob we should go over to your place to make sure you knew.”
“She was right,” Jacob said. “I should have listened. Here give me that check.”
“No. That’s okay,” Millie said. “Milo won’t mind. I’ll take care of it.”
“Then bring Jason a bourbon,” Jacob said. “You drinking Michelob?” he asked Lisa.
“Why not,” Lisa said.
“What time is it?” I asked as Millie left. “I have to catch a plane in the morning.”
“It’s about ten o’clock,” Jacob, who never wore a watch, said.
“Then I’ve only got time for one,” I said. “Lisa, you can stay if you want.”
“No. I’ll go when you go.” Then she looked over at Laurie. “I’m driving Jason to the airport in the morning.”
Laurie responded with a knowing smile, having already deduced that, for the present, Lisa and I were a couple. Jacob took out his pipe tool and emptied the bowl of his pipe into the ashtray and began scraping the sides of it.
“Did you guys walk here?” I asked, knowing that since they had come in alone, they had. Laurie had never learned to drive, and Jacob had given up driving ten years before, deciding one night that giving up driving before he killed someone was easier than giving up drinking.
“God, your aunt must be the ultimate bitch,” Laurie said. “Why are you even bothering to go home?”
“New Hampshire’s not his home,” Lisa said with a smile.
“Whatever,” Laurie responded. It was obvious that she didn’t approve of the two of us being together. “So why are you going?”
“I was summoned,” I said. “She’s a lot like you, Laurie. People just do what she tells them.”
Jacob laughed and Laurie smiled. Although there were times she would have acted offended at such a remark, Laurie usually didn’t mind people acknowledging her power over them. Besides, out of sympathy, something she needed to feel for someone almost all the time, she was willing to grant me more leeway than usual. “I’m going to write a poem about your aunt,” she said. “I’ll show it to you when you get back. When are you coming back?”
“In a few days. I really don’t know what’s going on or what she’s expecting,” I said. It was unusual for Laurie to announce she was going to write a poem. She hardly ever talked about her writing. She thought the process was too personal to share with anyone except Jacob. But she would show me drafts from time to time, and that made me one of a very select group in her circle.
“Well I think you should just go. Do whatever you have to do to pay your respects, and then come back. She’ll suck you in if you let her. You know she will.” I hadn’t realized Laurie knew so much about Aunt Margaret, but then Laurie made it a point to never forget anything someone told her that could someday be used against them. “When you come back, we’ll have a wake for your father. You’ll help me, won’t you Lisa?”
“That’s a great idea,” Jacob said. “I really liked your father when he was here.”
“Pop had admirers wherever he went,” I said. “Listen, I don’t think I can wait for that drink.” Laurie looked hurt. “I mean it’s going to be hard enough to make myself get up in the morning as it is, considering all I’ve got to look forward to is seeing my aunt.”
“Just remember that we’ll be here for you,” Laurie said as I pushed my chair back to stand. “We’ll have a real nice wake when you get back.”
Lisa stood up with me. “I’ve got to drive Jason in the morning so I better leave too,” she said.
Jacob stood up to shake my hand. “Do you need anything?”
“No, I’ll call you when I get back. A wake sounds good.”
Lisa and I left by the side door. “You really want to have a wake?” she asked as we stood next to our cars.
“Why not?” I said.
~ ~ ~
Sometime that night, after Lisa and I had made love and after she had gone to sleep beside me, I started to cry. I cried for no reason I could name. I cried for all the love I had lost in my life and all the love I had never found. I cried for the work I had not done because work had come to have no meaning. I cried for Lisa’s dead mother and for my own dead mother, whom I could barely remember, and for the city of Huntington with its churches and bars and its people for whom tomorrow would always be the same as today. I cried for Laurie and Jacob and their blessed oblivion. And I cried because I knew that once I left in the morning, I would never be back. But there was no more comfort in the tears than there had been in the mechanical coupling that Lisa and I had just worked our way through. And so I slept.
~ ~ ~
Lisa woke before I did and made coffee. Then she drove me to the airport and kissed me good-bye while we sat in her car. “Call me if you need anything,” she said. “Or if you want me to, I can call you and tell you there’s an emergency that you’ve got to come back for.”
“You’re sweet,” I said. “About last night. . .”
“Let’s wait ‘til you get back. We can see what happens then.”
~ ~ ~
To get from Huntington to Boston by air, I had to travel through Pittsburgh, and I spent most of the two hours I had between flights milling about in the bookstore at the Pittsburgh airport. Eugene Larkson’s America, a coffee table book of both color and black and white prints of Pop’s landscape work, was displayed prominently in the bookstore window. A large red and white tag covered the “a” at the end of America and announced that the book had originally sold for $76 but could now be purchased inside for only $24.90. Inside, in the middle of a remainder table close to the front door, ten copies of the book sat undisturbed by the browsing travelers.
