A Theory of Relativity (47 page)
“Well, what are we going to do, then? Just all of us curl up and die?”
“You don’t know how this feels, Gordie.” Yes, he’d thought, I do. I’ve lost my child, too, he thought. “Take it easy, Mom,” he’d pleaded, his voice syrupy even to his own ears, patronizing, false. “Take it easy. It’ll all work out.” Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 316
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“It’s not that I don’t want you to have your own life.”
“I know.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to have what you want.”
“Mom, you weren’t like this when I went to Florida.”
“That was a beginning, Gordie! This is an ending. This is an ending.
I don’t know how I’ll feel without—”
“Without me?”
“Without you, and without . . . the quest. Everything I had, everything I was went into trying to get the law changed, trying to make it possible to keep Keefer, trying to do what Georgia wanted.”
“I think that this is what Georgia would have wanted. She would have wanted me to be there, going to the school play, taking Keefer to the museum, you know?”
“It’s just that I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. Your dad and I, we hardly talk anymore. I don’t know him. Maybe you never know people.”
Gordon had been blown back. His parents’ small circle of reliance on each other’s companionship had been the substructure of his entire life. He’d always assumed, watching them fold into one another, their backs turned to the outer world in the cozy declaration of their unity, that his folks rushed eagerly to one another when he and Georgia were gone. He’d overheard them, when he was in sixth or seventh grade, poring over travel folders Mark had picked up on the way home from work, chatting about bicycling through Ireland, backpacking in Italy, Lorraine pointing out with wry weariness that they’d started so late as parents, by the time the kids were grown, they’d be wheelchairing through Ireland.
“There were always so many things you wanted to do,” he said after a pause.
“We wanted to,” Lorraine sighed, “but it’s not the same now. We can’t just pick up and go on as if none of this ever happened. It’s . . .
Gordie, it’s as if we were owed, and we ended up paying. We have a mountain of debt, and all for nothing. And we’re not young . . .” She sounded, Gordon thought in terror, whiny. Old. The burden of Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 317
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her need for him would devastate his resolve, and in giving in, he would give up, give up as she had. He could feel his very brain relent, softening.
He could not leave her. He could not leave.
He must leave. He must leave or they would all drown.
“I have to do this,” he’d said.
I have to do this
, he’d told Lindsay, the following night, a Friday, when she opened the door of his apartment with her own key to find him sleeping among his cartons on the folded pillow of Keefer’s dog bed. He fought the instinctive pull to amend his statements, to make this somehow easier for both of them to bear.
When Lindsay sat down, sobbing, on a taped box, he wanted to enfold her, cradle her. When her weight collapsed the top, and she fell backward, floundering, the helpless, undignified splay of her legs van-quished him, even as they laughed together. Gordon wanted to strip her, bathe and smooth her, bandage her against the wound he had caused, pet her not like a lover, but like a father.
“I knew how upset you would be,” she told him, patting at her tears with the heels of both hands. Gordon saw plainly how badly he did love her, how he would never see a redhead, her curtain of burnished hair divided by one innocent ear, and not think of Lindsay, his dear and clean and loyal Lindsay.
“It’s not that I’m upset, though I am,” he said. “It’s that I have to change my whole way of living now. It sounds as though I’m running away, and maybe I am. And if I am, I hope I’ll be enough of a . . . man to figure that out and come home. Come back.”
“I’ll wait for that,” Lindsay wept. “It’s not as if I haven’t waited.”
“You’ve waited way too long, Lins. Since we were kids. It’s not as though we’re old people, or anything. Maybe there was a time for us to get married, or whatever, and we missed it. I blew it.”
“Or maybe it isn’t here yet.”
“That’s possible. But I don’t want to offer it as a reality because I’m not sure.”
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“Not sure if you love me?”
“Not sure if the way I feel is the way people should feel when they start a life with someone.”
“How will you know? How will you know, in Madison? You’ll be all by yourself—though, knowing you, not for long—”
“Don’t, Lins. Don’t cross us . . . what we have, with that stuff.
Because that’s not at all what this is about. I’m not saying it wasn’t about that when I went to college. I’m not saying it wasn’t about that ever. But it isn’t now. This is first, about Keefer, and second, about me. What kind of person I’m going to be.”
“You’ll be all alone. You’ll be all alone,” she said.
“I’ll be all alone and I’ll be fucking miserable. But I think I need to . . .
be miserable alone. In a way, having you and my folks has made it too easy for me.”
“What will happen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll grow up. Maybe I’ll realize I’ve already grown up. But I don’t think, I just don’t think marriage is in the cards for me, Lins. Not with you now, or with anybody ever. The way I feel now, I have one space in me, and it’s for Keefer, and that’s all I can handle.”
“How can you know how you’ll feel in six months? In a year?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want to let you think I’m doing this . . .
on a whim. Just for a while. As far as I know, right now, I’m going, Lins.
I’m going for good. If I didn’t think that was true, I would never hurt you like this.”
She got up from the box, leaning on his extended hand. “May I touch you?”
“I’m here,” he said, opening wide his arms. She sat on his lap, stroking his neck, until he felt himself begin to be aroused, and urged her to one side. There would be no farewell romp, though at the instant she stood, straight-backed, to leave, he desired her more than he had since images of her butt and her lower lip had frenzied his seventeen-year-old dreams. He pulled her back down, beside him.
The light drained into a pewter afterlight—the days, Gordon noticed, were already diminishing; he could no longer pretend it was high summer. Neither of them moved to turn on the lamps. He asked Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 319
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Lindsay whether she was hungry. She asked if he had any wine. They drank a whole bottle of merlot, the last liquid he had in his fridge, and then slept, side by side, clinging together as chaste as a brother and sister. When Lindsay left in the morning, she had not wakened him to say good-bye.
That morning, he was sorting through more papers when he uncovered the folder of Georgia’s his mother had given him. The one he’d noticed in her apartment, containing a thick envelope from an organization called Families United. He shook out the contents, and began to read a letter referring to Georgia’s “initial inquiries” and “possible contact.” The research carried out by someone named Blair Bell, had, Georgia would be happy to learn, uncovered some very interesting possibilities about Georgia’s birth family. The last name “Kiss” was not uncommon in Hungary, but it was in the United States. It was the surname of cousins of her birth mother, for whom Blair Bell had no current address, only a work number from a hospital in San Diego. There, the personnel department had no record of future employment, but Georgia’s birth mother, whose name was Hannah, had been a physician’s assistant in 1988, and could well have married. Locating her would not prove difficult, should Georgia instruct Families United to authorize further inquiries. What was most compelling, the letter pointed out, was the ancestral surname, the name of cousins of her birth mother, and also the last name of her adoptive mother. The next steps should be exciting. The health information Georgia had initially requested would also be forthcoming. Blair Bell wished Georgia well as she contemplated her own path toward parenthood. There was an invoice, dated February 6, with the year of Keefer’s birth.
Georgia had been eight months’ pregnant then. Had she already felt sick? The head’s premonition of the body’s betrayal? Or had she simply, suffused with her own expectancy, longed for the ratification of the biological bond? Longed for deeper insights than her mirror’s messages about the heritable forces she had unleashed to build the being that would be her child? The name! Gordon ripped the letter once, and with difficulty because of the thickness of the stock, and folded it to rip again. What could it have meant to Georgia, the possibility that Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 320
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on some removed rung of ancestry, her beloved mother was her blood relative?
What could that possibility mean to Gordon?
He could dial the 800 number.
He tore the paper again, into fourths. He needed it gone. To live with it among his things was untenable. Why? He was ready to hear the correct multiple-choice plug-in, announced quickly, but shrank from an analysis. At last, he stuffed the fragments back into the envelope. For Keefer. This key was Keefer’s.
On the last day, he offered Judy Wilton his eggs and fresh vegetables, which she nodded at and received. Gruffly she told him, “I’m sorry about what happened last winter.”
“No, you’re not,” Gordon said easily. “But you were wrong. You were dead wrong.”
“I am sorry,” Judy Wilton said, and to his fascinated horror, began to weep, with a caliber of snorts he hadn’t heard since
Mister Ed
. “I really am sorry. I talked about it with my mother. And she said I don’t know a thing about how kids behave. She said my sister and I screamed all the time. We screamed so much she would put us in one crib and go out in the yard and smoke my dad’s cigars.” Gordon could not help it. The snapshot of Helen Wilton puffing a stogie overcame him, and he laughed.
“It didn’t have anything to do with what happened, Judy,” he said.
“If it did, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Forgive yourself,” Gordon told her.
There was no need to say good-bye to Tim, who was planning to drive down with him Friday and help him tackle the fabled terrors of the piss-permeated farmhouse, and he had no heart for a mock-rousing mustering of his old friends. He’d had enough of gatherings to last him a decade, and he set his thoughts on the week he would have in Madison to paint and fumigate and make ready for a week from Thursday, when he would have Keefer for a full four days, a gift Delia had offered on a postcard she’d written him earlier in the week.
A few days after the postcard arrived, Craig Cady had left him a message on his machine. Their actual filing for the adoption would Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 321
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have to wait. Delia had been hospitalized, at least for a few days’ observation, and would probably be on bed rest for the duration of the pregnancy. He would have his hands full. They were both relieved, Craig’s bluff, uncomfortable message informed Gordon, that he would soon be in town.
A drive out to the farm would have taken more stuffing than Gordon had left. He expected that even the sight of the farm, where a brand-new sign now proudly proclaimed HORIZON PRODUCE, HAYES
NORDSTROM AND SON, would provoke such a sentimental response that he would be unable to leave it, in case it should disappear when he turned his back. So he sent flowers to his aunt Nora—aware that this constituted sending a case of coals to Newcastle—six white roses, for each of the children she’d loved, and an orchid for no reason except that he knew how the color purple always lifted her spirits.
The daylight hours on Friday were crowded with securing a rental trailer and loading it, tying down his bike, securing his guitar with a bungee cord in the bunting of Keefer’s dog bed, wedging in his six raggedy boxes of books and pots, the same ones he’d packed to move from Florida to Tall Trees and from the slum to the Victorian—he was so green, Gordon congratulated himself wryly. He then made phone calls, to the biology department in Madison, to his mother and father—
he knew she’d been at her water aerobics class; he’d timed the call to catch her out—letting them know what time he’d stop by, to the guys who were taking the sublet. He scoured the oven he’d never used and swept the floor. He sealed his keys in an envelope and closed the windows. Just before he closed the door, he looked back and noticed one last task and used his Swiss Army knife to pry the little plastic covers from all the outlets.
Just before six, he rattled up in front of his parents’ house on Cleveland Avenue. There was a note on the blue stationery he’d read from all his life, which featured an ink sketch that was something of a cross between an open poppy and a plat map of a river, the stem of which formed the
L
in “Lorraine K. McKenna.” It read, “There are sandwich makings in the fridge. We are eating over at Nora’s. Come by if you want. You said this is not a good-bye, so Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 322
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we’re not treating it that way. P.S. Ray and Diane Nye have asked us to have dinner with them next Saturday at their palatial Madison estate.
We are going, though they will probably poison our food. We will then visit you and Miss Keefer at your hovel. Be there, or you will be out of the will.” The note went on, “P.P.S. Gordie, do not put up any pest strips in that farmhouse. They are dangerous to breathe, no matter what the labels say.” It finished, “I love you.” She had inked out the “I” and replaced it with “We.”
She signed “Mom,” crossed it out, wrote “Mom” a second time, crossed that out, and wrote, “Mommy,” but let the
y
trail down into a deadly cruel caricature of him, all teeth and cowlicks. Gordon removed the tack, put it in his shirt pocket and held the blue sheet to his nose.