Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 2

"Jack was in terrible trouble-the business was failing. I didn't know a thing," she said. "He jerry-rigged the books and took out a loan. Then he cashed in whatever he could and made it look like the office had been burglarized."

"You don't say."

"Yes! The package poor Billy stole was full of cash."

"Who sends cash through the mail?" I felt a loony laugh coming up fast. I had already read about Billy being picked up. It seems he'd been heading due south but got sidetracked. In his haste to reach an ocean, he rear-ended a police car in downtown Providence, and when the officers got out, he did too, and ran, briefly, away. "Was LeeAnne involved?"

"That little b.i.t.c.h." Mrs. G. shook her bangles with a shaman's briskness. "Don't laugh, Cleave. Like father, like daughter. Now, settle down. They tell me you're going home today. What will you do?"

Through my tears, I said, "I thought I'd retire."

But the HangUps man just shrugs and shows me the door. I try to walk through it as little like a mental patient as possible. *

Deciding to loosen up, I throw away my Paxil and feel better (I think) immediately. January thaw helps-who minds being made a fool of at midwinter?-and so does walking. The schedule of cla.s.s es taped to the door of the Eight Smiles High yoga studio tells me to bring myself and ten dollars on Monday afternoon, and on the day, I roll out my mat and await instructions. The studio's in a cor ner of an old factory, and stern light sits up straight in the tall win dows. Cathy, the teacher, modulates the stereo's wood-flute-and whale song and I attempt to do as she asks, bending and unbending myself discreetly. "Form an intention for your practice today," she tells us. "Breathe." More specific, but puzzling, instructions follow.

"Locate your abdominal muscles. Find your shoulder blades." By the end of the hour, I'm tired and cranky. I throw my mat into the basket and go home.

The next sessions are better. I can't stretch, breathe, or bend with anything like intention, but I fake it until something like intention happens. I attempt a simple mountain pose-arms up, hipbones floating over the feet, spine stretching-and wonder if my neck is supposed to hurt this much. Cathy circulates in my direction, then steps up to my mat and touches the small of my back. "Drop your b.u.t.t," she says softly. "Let your shoulders go. Feel your feet. Press those index fingers through the ceiling." She observes my effort.

"And breathe, Cleave."

We end the hours lying on our backs in corpse pose. "Practice,"

Cathy smiles, "for the day when we'll stop breathing." I want to hear this? An Eastern bell's note goes on and on. Cathy drifts above us, turning off the lights until only one lamp is left burning. Layers of denser shadow wash over my eyelids; my backbone comes close to being one with the mat. When the session ends, I sit up slowly, reluctantly, and breathe deeply. Bonnnnng, (bo(bong)nnngg) goes the bell. Nothing hurts. I breathe again, pull on my socks and hold on to my feet. Again, tears. And a snake of joy hustles through me at a crazy angle.

The following week, I bring Dad. He's a big hit. He finds his shoulder blades right away. He immediately has three or four girl friends, middle-aged women who can't pay enough attention to him. He buys a CD from Cathy. That night, whales sing while we have dinner, and we grin at one another across the table. We both start sleeping better.

Then one night I awaken to the sound of a voice, soft as a wom an's, speaking my name. It comes again and I follow the sound to his bedroom. "Did you call me?"

"No," he says, bewildered. His eyes glisten in the fall of light from the hallway. Then: "Yes. Yes, I heard it, too, Cleave." *

The sky is hard and bright after a brief, early shower of snow. By the time I leave the house, the storm clouds have moved into the east, and I follow these ghosts as far as Jill's house, where I pause to knock on the door. I hold my breath-then I breathe. The door opens.

She says she is glad to see me.

She says she'd love to go for a walk.

She tells me she's been wondering about me.

We walk through the village and then out of it, pa.s.sing the hang er plant, where the workers having a smoke on the loading dock raise their braced and bandaged forearms to return our greeting.

The wind bears down, blowing our breath back down the hill as we cut across Idle Road and walk up through a development of newer houses. To the top, where the street ends in a cul-de-sac and barren plots slotted with driveways await the promised homes. Turning, we look down on the way we've come. The broad roofs of the split-levels and capes and ranches glimmer like the blades of a magnifi-cent mobile, but all that moves is the wind.

Vanishing World.

part 1.

I work small, with brush and paint, knives and files, a scalpel, wire and solder, a magnifying gla.s.s, sandpaper, every kind of cloth, string and fabric, and the sound, somewhere back in the distance of my mind and memory, of a train whistle.

We were barely two generations of miniaturists; after me, there's no one. And we were a big family, at least by the non-Catholic west Connecticut standards of the day, Catholic meaning six to eight kids in worn-out sweaters and the day being that season between the whitewashed housing project of the early fifties and the happy slum of 1969.

Four kids: Michele, me, and the twins, Eve and Peggy, who be came the business's expert tree painters-what Dad called mock flockers. Of all our tedious jobs, the one that accounted for a third of our man-, woman-, and child-hours. Sitting and chatting together, breathless, pauseless, the twins could settle a Christmasy snow on the branches of a miniature spruce forest in about the time it takes nature to do the same in the larger sphere. In our bas.e.m.e.nt shop, boxes and rows and groves and shelves-full and forests of mock- flocked trees glimmered in the moon's-glow of a night light all spring and summer, waiting on the orders of October. *

Eve and Peggy: Mom's little mid-thirties surprise party. They didn't add to the family, they redefined it, the way a hailstorm reckons with a car. Dad handed out orders to Michele and me while in the upper reaches of the house the storm raged. The girls began talk ing (to each other) at the breast, one offering loud encouragement while the other suckled. They did their best to defy Mother's grav ity, but her pepper-and-cream Irish prevailed-just. She pulled them down to earth, got them on their feet, ran them to ground. Their lights went out nightly at eight; they fell as if stricken and slept as if comatose. We approached their crib with the loony reverence of UFO watchers: Could they be real? What did they want? "They need to grow up," Dad growled. "We're getting behind."

We called him the Chief.

The Chief announced at the dinner table that he'd decided to mod ernize the shop. He dished scalloped potatoes onto Peggy's plate.

"Don't everyone talk at once," he said. Mom diddled her fork in a puddle of sauce, the smile she usually ran up at such announce ments caught at half-mast. Michele and I exchanged looks. I figured life was hard enough without overtime, and even though Dad paid us, fumbling fives and tens from his pockets as he calculated aloud our weekend and after-school hours, I saw small towns in my sleep.

Sometimes, in my dreams, ca.n.a.l-side villages burned to the water line. Other times I walked weightless as lint and voiceless as a fly through the rooms of tiny, empty, silent stations.

The Chief and I studded the bas.e.m.e.nt, walled off the furnace and carpeted an area beneath the stairs he'd designated Staff Lounge. We hung a false ceiling, installed a table saw he'd rebuilt, and set new, larger fluorescent trays over the work tables-and then he said he wanted to add a bar. Michele popped her eyes and twirled a crazy- circle finger at her temple, and the twins did whatever Michele did, so there seemed to be a consensus. I looked him in the eye and de livered the most devastating line I knew: "You're kidding, right?"

Mother-whose architectural ambitions had been siphoned into the family business before you could say, I spent four years in college for this?-hit the stairs. "I'd never kid a kidder, my boy," the Chief said, with his eye on Mom's exit.

We went at it for three days. With a lackey's compliance, I en dured his pictographic and inspired instructions-there were no plans-shaped and fitted Formica, cut and re-cut and measured mahogany and pine and held tools while he fussed the plumbing into a miracle of cooperation. On break in the Lounge, I chewed to death the sandwiches Michele brought down. I was fifteen, and my soul ached. The twins shouted like gulls through the gate at the top of the stairs. Mother sang something French in the kitchen. A false ceiling, I fumed. False! And now this!

When we were finished, it looked like a really nice bar into which someone had brought work tables and benches. Our shop s.p.a.ce had actually been reduced. Mom chattered that it looked fine. Michele laughed. The twins laughed. *

At the end of the day, Dad would announce he was knocking off, then he'd stroll across the room to the bar, build a drink, and climb onto a barstool. But the little world impinged on this new s.p.a.ce just as it had long since crept into the upstairs rooms. The back bar was lined with houses, sheds and poles, radio towers, groves of the aforementioned spruce forest, and odd bits of parapherna lia, the stuff you couldn't buy out of a catalog and for which we were known: a bucket so small its contents wouldn't fill a thimble, tin-shiny, with a printed paper label and an eyelash-fine brush fro zen in its drop of red enamel; a half-rusted tricycle with wedding ringsized whitewall tires; Michele's silkscreened or painted signs and banners and billboards, their perfection skillfully marred with tea, plaster dust, and spit; the Chief 's houses, so perfect-so much better, apparently, than the real thing-that they brought tears to clients' eyes; Mother's hand and eye over and under all, shaping, defining, foundational; my wiring, lighting, plumbing-my doing whatever needed doing-and the girls' trees, shrubs, gra.s.ses, gar dens. Tumbleweeds. Dead limbs, rusty confetti-piles of oak leaves.

Cemetery bouquets colorless, stiff, and dry. *

Michele's bedroom was hipness itself. Eve and Peggy (as they got older), Mrs. Claus the cat, and the occasional slumming parent-less often Dad, who seldom left the shop-all wound up there from time to time. Lying on Michele's bed, the twins sipped coffee from demi ta.s.se-just the thing for their unevolved but tap-dancing nervous systems-and sang along with Michele's Dylan records. Michele brooded over them in a swishy kimono, and in turn they wrapped themselves in towels and fashioned their hair into slithery b.u.mps into which they stuck pencils. When the parents finally banned cof fee absolutely and attempted to snuff out the early, querulous Dylan, Michele subst.i.tuted mint tea and played Dad's Nat Cole: anything to please. The somewhat quieted twins slipped around the house in their off-hours in velvet-topped flip-flops, chanting together in a low, faux-Oriental lingo. They wouldn't use forks and couldn't use chopsticks. Drove Mother crazy. *

We didn't give them nostalgia. "They want the good old days, they can read a book," Dad said of the clients. He didn't read much him self except mechanical trades magazines and Popular Mechanics; didn't take time off, didn't believe in leisure, idleness, or speculation.

He would, from time to time, take one of his pipes out of the drawer, fire it up, and walk around the house trailing an acrid cloud of Eng lish blend. Like ducklings, the twins followed, quacking. Mother coughed and opened windows. Michele liked the aroma, she said: it was "manly." The Chief puffed up and down the stairs with his pipe in his teeth, his normal pace halved. "Dad, what are you thinking about?" I asked him once-an impulsive question that left us both aghast. He looked at me with wide, bland eyes. "Nothing."

Life was not so strange. The twins had their friends over. In tenth grade, Michele had a boyfriend, Willie, who came in after school and sat on the sofa like a stone. You wanted to hold a mirror to his nostrils. I had friends, too, all of them curious: What went on at our house? I took them down for the tour. Dad looked up, scowled. He put them to work-anything simple-Mother fed them, and they went away. But clients never came to the house. Dad worked the phone and wrote letters, his Remington solid as a cinderblock on the bar, his drink jumping with the pounding of the keys. Strangely enough, the orders-and the money-came in.

But all was not well. *

Mother, who had been flickering on and off our radar screen for a couple of weeks, came in one afternoon and began banging around the kitchen. I wandered in there to observe this shift in her style.

Michele entered stage left. The twins were partying in the living room. The Chief was out.

Mom took a bottle of white wine from the fridge, dropped ice cubes into a winegla.s.s, sloshed in the wine and took a drink. She took out a knife, a package of cut-up chicken, a bag of celery. "You two," she said over her shoulder, "help me get this dinner ready." But before we could leap into action, she turned to face us and her eyes flicked around the room as if she were appraising its value. The look she settled on me suggested she was wondering what I was worth, too. "Johnny. Tell your father we'll eat in less than an hour."

"Bold Eagle meet with client, Mom."

"Oh." She took another slug. "Michele, see if you can do some thing with those girls."

"Let's have them for dinner," I suggested.

"They're fine, Mom." Michele slipped her arm around Mother's shoulders. "Mom, are you all right? You're acting a little weird."

Mother closed her eyes. "I'm all right. I just need-" She opened her eyes. "You two," she said. "What do you know? Nothing. You want to know something? I never thought this would happen. I had some idea, but it wasn't"-she raised her gla.s.s as if she were about to propose a toast-"it wasn't this."

The twins screamed and thundered toward the sound of the front door creaking open: The Chief was home.

Michele spoke low. "What is it, Mom?"

But Mother just shook her head vaguely, turned, leaned over, and threw up into the sink.

She's pregnant, I thought. Again! *

Mother was not pregnant. She was having an affair. With the son of a client.

Mom was a landscape designer, at first in the real world, briefly, where she was one of about fifty of the female variety, and then here at home, in the bas.e.m.e.nt. If you wanted something done small, and you wanted a substantial landscape-hills and water to go with your small-town-whistle-stop-she was the one to make your tiny dream come true. Or the backdrop for your Venusian heliport, or your own Mount Rushmore fashioned into an island whose waters teemed with nineteenth-century Taiwanese fishing vessels. Or what-ever. Dad brought in the job, and they discussed it over dinner. He opened and closed the deal, but in between, there was Mother.

Dad: "I got a call from Ed Wexler today."

Mother: "What does he want?"

"Well, you know that room they have? Off the living room? With all the windows?"

"A sunroom?" Mom's voice rose to meet the word "sun." She shad-ed her eyes as if to ward it off.

"That's right, doll, the sunroom."

"Oh, G.o.d."

"Okay, now, hon, look: They now have grandchildren. They want it done right."

"River?"

Dad grinned, breaking bread and feeding it by hand to the twins, who were perched on their chairs, pretending to be border collies. "Two," he said. "Two rivers. Or a river and a stream."

"I can't believe I'm even-will you girls stop!" The twins were barking at Mrs. Claus, who was slinking along the wall. "They're going to have to do something about those windows." Mom hated doing water, and she hated natural light. She wanted to be the one to provide the sun and decide if water would flow.

Dad's smile grew to idiot proportions. "I know," he said. "But they won't. They love sunlight. Ed says-"

"Don't tell me: Ed says the setting sun will only add to the charm of the etcetera."

"Yes," Dad said. "Isn't it wonderful? They want us to do it. They want it by Christmas."

During the war, Dad had designed and built models for tanks and airplanes and weapons systems. After the war, he worked for a while for General Motors. But the Chief needed room: One day he walked away from GM, and the next morning he was in the base ment, building tables and giving orders to his team.

"Oh, my goodness, they'll have it by Christmas," Mother said. "I don't need to actually have a life. The children and I will just put our beds downstairs and devote the rest of our days to Ed Wexler and his sunroom, won't we, children?"

The twins began to bay.

"Could anyone just pa.s.s me, like, anything to eat?" Michele said.

When Mom went the next day to the Wexlers' to size up the room, she met their son Jeffrey, who, it turned out, was a town plan ner. It was his kids the grandparents were about to drop eight grand to please. He and Mother talked about the job, the elder Wexlers canoed quietly in and out, wine was poured and Mother, Michele told me later, fell in love while listening to Jeffrey Wexler describe a housing scheme he'd developed for the munic.i.p.ality of Ensena da, Mexico. *

The s.h.i.t hit the fan about six weeks later. Michele and I were relax ing in the Lounge when it happened.

Mother and I had built the Wexlers' lagoon-they wanted more and more water, so we just went all the way-and she'd roughed out, sculpted, and plastered a landscape that approximated the bone structure of a Baja fishing hamlet, the south-of-the-border theme having sort of developed as we worked. In a six-hour sprint, we chopped the waterways, braced and roughly plumbed the works (all in pieces, for transport), and wired it, and then Mother stepped back, stared for a long sixty seconds, and said, "I don't like it."

The Chief was at that moment coming down the stairs. "Don't be silly," he said. The twins clunked down behind him.

"Thank you, I'm not being silly." Mother turned from the piece and slung her gloves onto the floor as if ridding herself of stupid hands.

"Some of your best work," Dad said, busy behind the bar. He looked up. "What?"

Michele: "No one said anything, Dad."

"Oh. So when I said it was some of your mother's best work, I guess I said it just to hear myself say it."

"Please, Ray."

"No, I mean it." Dad crossed to the shop with his drink. "Very good. I'll put it this way: One would think almost that you'd been there. Very authentic. I'm sure the Wexlers will be pleased."

Mother stood there with her arms crossed, her Irish way down, frowning into his face. I suddenly wanted to be somewhere else. Michele made a sound and I looked and saw her tears.

"Right here," Dad said, pointing. "Where you have this ridge com-ing into this greater ma.s.s, it's too big. All this is too big. But then you balance it with this hilly thing and a road coming around over here. Nice."

"It's not too big."

"Bulky is what I meant, Helen." He spoke harshly. "The propor-tions. But you've solved it beautifully." The ice tinkled in his gla.s.s in the silence. "Wouldn't you say, Johnny? And Michele, if you need a tissue, doll, there are some behind the bar."

"Stop it," Mother said. The twins had placed themselves uncer-tainly between the parents and turned distressed faces from one to the other.

"Stop what? It's good work. Jeff Wexler will love it. Has he seen it?"

"Please."

"No? No private viewing? Not even a sketch? In how many of your long, everlasting f.u.c.king afternoon meetings, or should I say, after-noon f.u.c.kings? Jesus, Helen, you're slipping! I'd have thought-"

Dad was no good at this. He was shaking so hard, he shimmied.

He walked back over to the bar and set his gla.s.s down and put his face in his hands and wept. Michele became a fountain of tears. The twins clung to Mother's legs and howled. Mother sobbed.

"How could you?" Dad cried out. "How?"

"You make me what I am," Mother replied. But she went to him, and they went upstairs together. *