Part 8 (1/2)

Stupid, inconsiderate boy. Around now, his father would have been pacing, threatening to beat him senseless when he walked in, and I would have been calming Lionel down, trying to get him to come to bed.

At about three, when I was thinking of calling the hospital, I heard my car coming up the street slowly. I looked out the kitchen window and saw him pull into the drive, minus the right front fender.

He came inside quietly, pale gray around his mouth and eyes. There was blood on his s.h.i.+rt, but he was walking okay. I grabbed him by the shoulders and he winced and I dug my hands into him in the dark of the hallway.

”What is wrong with you? I don't have enough to contend with? Do you know it's three o'clock in the morning? There were no phones where you were, or what? It was too inconvenient to call home, to tell me you weren't lying dead somewhere? Am I talking to myself, G.o.ddammit?”

I was shaking him hard, wanting him to talk back so I could slap his face, and he was crying, turning his face away from me. I pulled him into the light of the kitchen and saw the purple bruise, the s.h.i.+ny puff of skin above his right eyebrow. There was a cut in his upper lip, making it lift and twist like a harelip.

”What the h.e.l.l happened to you?”

”I got into a little fight at the Navigator and then I had sort of an accident, nothing serious. I just hit a little tree and b.u.mped my head.”

”You are an a.s.shole.”

”I know, Ma, I'm sorry. I'll pay you back for the car so your insurance won't go up. I'm really sorry.”

I put my hands in my pockets and waited for my adrenaline to subside.

I steered him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet while I got some ice cubes and wrapped them in a dish towel; that year I was always making compresses for Buster's skinned knees, busted lips, black eyes. Lion sat there holding the ice to his forehead. The lip was too far gone.

I wasn't angry anymore and I said so. He smiled lopsidedly and leaned against me for a second. I moved away and told him to wash up.

”All right, I'll be out in a minute.”

”Take your time.”

I sat on the couch, thinking about his going away and whether or not Jeffrey would be good company for him. Lion came out of the bathroom without his b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt, the dish towel in his hand. He stood in the middle of the room, like he didn't know where to sit, and then he eased down onto the couch, tossing the towel from hand to hand.

”Don't send me away. I don't want to go away from you and Grandma and Buster. I just can't leave home this summer. Please, Ma, it won't-what happened won't happen again. Please let me stay home.” He kept looking at his hands, smoothing the towel over his knees and then balling it up.

How could I do that to him?

”All right, let's not talk about it any more tonight.”

He put his head back on the couch and sighed, sliding over so his cheek was on my shoulder. I patted his good cheek and went to sit in the brown chair.

I started to say more, to explain to him how it was going to be, but then I thought I shouldn't. I would tell him that we were looking at wreckage and he would not want to know.

I said good night and went to my bedroom. He was still on the couch in the morning.

We tried for a few weeks, but toward the end of the summer Lion got so obnoxious I could barely speak to him. Ruth kept an uncertain peace for the first two weeks and then blew up at him. ”Where have your manners gone, young man? After all she did for you, this is the thanks she gets? And Julia, when did you get so mush-mouthed that you can't tell him to behave himself?” Lion and I looked at our plates, and Ruth stared at us, puzzled and cross. I came home from work on a Friday and found a note on the kitchen table: Friends called with a housepainting job in Nantucket. Will call before I go to Paris. Will still do junior year abroad, if that's okay. L. ”If that's okay” meant that he wanted me to foot the bill, and I did. I would have done more if I had known how.

It's almost summer again. Buster and I do pretty well, and we have dinner every Sunday with Ruth, and more often than not, we drive her over to bingo on Thursday evenings and play a few games ourselves. I see my husband everywhere; in the deft hands of the man handing out the bingo cards, in the black-olive eyes of the boy sitting next to me on the bench, in the thick, curved back of the man moving my new piano. I am starting to play again and I'm teaching Buster.

Most nights, after I have gone to bed, I find myself in the living room or standing on the porch in the cold night air. I tell myself that I am not waiting, it's just that I'm not yet awake.

NIGHT VISION.

For fifteen years, I saw my stepmother only in my dreams.

After my father got sick in the spring of my soph.o.m.ore year, dying fast and ugly in the middle of June, I went to Paris to recover, to become someone else, un homme du monde, an expert in international maritime law, nothing like the college boy who slept with his step mother the day after his father's funeral. We grieved apart after that night, and I left Julia to raise my little brother, Buster, and pay all the bills, including mine. Buster shuttled back and forth for holidays, even as a grown man, calm and affectionate with us both, bringing me Deaf Smith County peanut b.u.t.ter from my mother for Christmas morning, carrying home jars of Fauchon jam from me, packed in three of his sweat socks. My mother's letters came on the first of every month for fifteen years, news of home, of my soccer coach's retirement, newspaper clippings about maritime law and French s.h.i.+pping lines, her new address in Ma.s.sachusetts, a collection of her essays on jazz. I turned the book over and learned that her hair had turned gray.

”You gotta come home, Lionel,” my brother said last time, his wife sprawled beside him on my couch, her long, pretty feet resting on his crotch.

”I don't think so.”

”She misses you. You know that. You should go see her.”

Jewelle nodded, digging her feet a little further, and Buster grinned hugely and closed his eyes.

”You guys,” I said.

My brother married someone more beautiful and wild than I would have chosen. They had terrible, flying-dishes fights and pa.s.sionate reconciliations every few months, and they managed to divorce and remarry in one year, without even embarra.s.sing themselves. Jewelle loved Buster to death and told me she only left when he needed leaving, and my brother would say in her defense that it was nothing less than the truth. He never said what he had done that would deserve leaving, and I can't think that it was anything very bad. There is no bad even in the depths of Buster's soul, and when I am sick of him, his undaunted, fat-and-sa.s.sy younger-brotherness, I think that there are no depths.

When Buster and Jewelle were together (usually Columbus Day through July Fourth weekend), happiness poured out of them. Buster showed slides of Jewelle's artwork, thickly layered slashes of dark paint, and Jewelle cooked platters of fried chicken and bragged on his triumphs as a public defender. When they were apart, they both lost weight and s.h.i.+ne and acted like people in the final stage of terminal heartbreak. Since Jewelle's arrival in Buster's life, I have had a whole secondhand love affair and pa.s.sionate marriage, and in return Buster got use of my apartment in New York and six consecutive Labor Days in Paris.

”Ma misses you,” he said again. He held Jewelle's feet in one hand. ”You know she does. She's getting old.”

”I definitely don't believe that. She's fifty, fifty-five. That's not old. We'll be there ourselves in no time.”

My mother, my stepmother, my only mother, is fifty-four and I am thirty-four and it has comforted me over the years to picture myself in what I expect to be a pretty vigorous middle age and to contemplate poor Julia tottering along, nylon knee-highs slos.h.i.+ng around her ankles, chin hairs and dewlaps flapping in the breeze.

”Fine. She's a spring chicken.” Buster cut four inches of Brie and chewed on it. ”She's not a real young fifty-five. What did she do so wrong, Lionel? Tell me. I know she loves you, I know she loves me. She loved Pop; she saved his life as far as I can tell. Jesus, she took care of Grammy Ruth for three years when anyone else would've put a pillow over the woman's face. Ma is really a good person, and whatever has p.i.s.sed you off, you could let it go now. You know, she can't help being white.”

Jewelle, of whom we could say the same thing, pulled her feet out of his hand and curled her toes over his waistband, under his round belly.

”If she died tomorrow, how sorry would you be?” she said.

Buster and I stared at her, brothers again, because in our family you did not say things like that, not even with good intentions.

I poured wine for us all and pa.s.sed around the fat green olives Jewelle liked.

”Well. Color is not the issue. You can tell her I'll come in June.”

Buster went into my bedroom. ”I'm calling Ma,” he said. ”I'm telling her June.”

Jewelle gently spat olive pits into her hand and shaped them into a neat pyramid on the coffee table.

I flew home with my new girlfriend, Claudine, and her little girl, Mirabelle. Claudine had business and a father in Boston, and a small hotel and me in Paris. She was lean as a boy and treated me with wry Parisian affection, as if all kisses were mildly amusing if one gave it any thought. Claudine's consistent, insouciant aridity was easy on me; I'd come to prefer my lack of intimacy straight up. Mirabelle was my true sweetheart. I loved her orange cartoon curls, her red gla.s.ses, and her welterweight swagger. She was Ma Poupee and I was her Bel Homme.

Claudine's father left a new black Crown Victoria for us at Logan, with chocolates and a Tintin comic on the backseat and Joan Sutherland in the CD player. Claudine folded up her black travel sweater and hung a white linen jacket on the back hook. There was five hundred dollars in the glove compartment, and I was apparently the only one who thought that if you were lucky enough to have a father, you might reasonably expect him to meet you at the airport after a two-year separation. My father would have been at that gate, drunk or sober. Mirabelle kicked the back of the driver's seat all the way from the airport, singing what the little boy from Dallas had taught her on the flight over: ”I'm gonna kick you. I'm gonna kick you. I'm gonna kick you. I'm gonna kick you, right in your big old heinie.” Claudine watched out the window until I pulled onto the turnpike, and then she closed her eyes. Anything in English was my department.

I recognized the new house right away. My mother had dreamed and sketched its front porch and its swing a hundred times during my childhood, on every telephone-book cover and notepad we ever had. For years my father talked big about a gla.s.s-and-steel house on the water, recording studio overlooking the ocean, wrap around deck for major partying and jam sessions, and for years I sat next to him on the couch while he read the paper and I read the funnies and we listened to my mother tuck my brother in: ”Once upon a time, there were two handsome princes, Prince Fric, who was a little older, and Prince Frac, who was a little younger. They lived with their parents, the King and Queen, in a beautiful little cottage with a beautiful front porch looking out over the River Wilde. They lived in the little cottage because a big old castle with a wraparound deck and a million windows is simply more trouble than it's worth.”

Julia stood before us on the porch, both arms upraised, her body pale and square in front of an old willow, its branches pooling on the lawn. Claudine pulled off her sungla.s.ses and said, ”You don't resemble her,” and I explained, as I thought I had several times between rue de Birague and the Ma.s.sachusetts border, that this was my stepmother, that my real mother had died when I was five and Julia had married my father and adopted me. ”Ah,” said Claudine, ”not your real mother.”