Something Is Out There (4 page)

“We’ve got to go now,” he says. “And I want to get drunk.”

“Oh,” she says. “God. You’re—oh, Christ.” She turns from him and starts back to the house. There isn’t anything else to do, nothing else she can think of. She hears him walking behind her.

“Josephine,” he says.

Approaching them from the other direction is the young couple walking the baby in the stroller. The man is pushing it now, and Josephine sees that the woman is really quite a bit taller than he. She stops to admire the baby, wanting Stanislowski to catch up to her. He does. Not quite looking at each other, they chat amiably with the couple about the fine weather, and they make a fuss over the infant, so pretty, only three months old. It’s as if Josephine and her husband are two separate
people, strangers to each other, who have stopped to gaze upon the child. Josephine leans down and smiles at the small, round, faintly disgruntled face, cooing, Stanislowski waiting there behind her with his terrible doubts and his fears and his hurt. She touches the top of the baby’s head and then sees that the two people are staring, and she realizes that tears are streaming down her face. She walks away, back to the house and in. The door slaps to behind her. The rooms are darker now, the sun having crossed over to the other side of the house. She sits in the living room with the guitar, and begins to tune it down again to the drop D. The window looking out on the backyard is full of the late light. He comes in and sits down, sighing wearily.

“I’m sorry. And we can’t not go.”

She says, “You know what?
You
can go. Or you can go back to your studio, okay? Really. Go. Take the car, take a cab, or walk it, hitchhike, steal a car for all I care about it.”

He’s looking at her. His face is haggard, pale, and grieving. “Look, I didn’t think you and Andrew—” he says. Then: “Really.” He sighs. “And have I made it so you have to worry about everything so much?”

She doesn’t answer.

“We can’t fail to show up. It’ll mean more than it could possibly really mean.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“It’s a surprise party to which we’ve said we’d go. We have to go.”

“So we’ll go,” she tells him. “But when
I’m
ready to.”

After a brief silence, he says, “It always calms you down, music. Me, it agitates. That’s one of the little differences between us.”

She begins to perform the song she’s been working on. It’s a thing she can do, play this instrument, any instrument. She can
make them come alive. People have spoken of their amazement. She’s good. And she’s innocent of any wrongdoing, too—guilty of nothing but the need to be admired. And she still loves him.

“Is that new?” he says quietly, tentatively. “That’s new.”

She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look up. The thought comes to her that this will never change between them; he’ll always doubt her feeling. She sees herself growing tired of it, weary enough to leave. The idea frightens her, and she stops playing for a moment. But she has command of her emotions now. She wipes her eyes and adjusts the tuning slightly while he watches.

“That was beautiful, what you played.” His voice is small, heavy with his sad imaginings, and with regret. “I’ve missed you, sweetheart. I’ve missed you bad.”

“I’ve been right here.” She resumes playing. The music as she has composed it involves a modulation into F sharp. She executes it, and then plays the melody line through in a slower tempo.

“That’s brilliant,” he says. His praise has always meant so much to her. “That’s just a wonderful piece of music.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“But you’re watching your playing hand again.”

She lifts her eyes and stares directly back into his, and, with a brittle smile, plays on.

She was eighty-nine and had lived a long, rich life, and she told her one son, Byron, that she was ready. Byron Mailley wept, putting his head down on her shoulder. Georgia’s shoulder. They were in her hospital room—the hospital wing of Brighton Creek Farm, the assisted living facility she had resided in over the last decade. She patted the back of his head. Always her most charming gesture of affection toward him—since he was nine or ten, and learning the complications of being a bookish boy on a street full of rough characters. Her name for them. She had a way of setting all his problems in terms of the books they read together in the evenings because he couldn’t sleep. The books were all adventure: Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore J. Waldeck’s book
Lions on the Hunt
, written from the point of view of the young lion. Byron the lyron, she called him. It was their little joke, just between them.

Byron the lyron had night terrors, panic attacks.

Fears of cancer, fears of madness, split personality, delusions, polio, tuberculosis, the atomic bomb, the death of parents. His father gone—first with the military, flying jets, then just gone. Remarried far away. Far away was good, actually, because Father had wanted Byron to be tough, and had worked
to accomplish it: drill-like discipline early; a looming displeased powerful presence early. Byron tried hard, and couldn’t make the grade, as Father put it. There were fights between Georgia and the old man about the boy. The old man was gone but the panic attacks started not long after he left.

Night was a terrible prospect. He’d sit crying, nine years old, and she, pregnant with the child she would lose, her husband gone away, sat up with Byron, patiently holding him, humming to him, patting the back of his head; then, on into the next year, the terrors recurring, and it was really just the two of them for good (her words). And she’d read other things to him: Dickens, the Bible—laughing about all the
begots
, and showing a slight impatience with the heavy seriousness. Well, it was explaining, after all,
everything
. But language is fun, too, she told him. Play.

Let’s play.

He had always felt that she was more friend than mother.

Now he wept, and she patted his head and murmured, “Stop. Stop.”

So he stopped.
Brave girl
, he thought. But kept still.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

She meant this about Reese. “I’m not crying about Reese,” he told her. But partly he was. The look in his own eyes, he knew, admitted it. She patted the side of his face.

“Just tell me.”

He kissed her hand, and held it. “Georgia,” he murmured. “What will I do?”

“Tell me about Reese.”

Last week, after twelve years, Reese had announced tearfully that he was leaving—this just two days past a big surprise party, Byron’s fifty-fifth birthday. He’d invited everyone
Byron knew, going back to school days. Even Ms. Evelyn Wasson, his seventh-grade teacher. She read a wonderful tribute she had written about her certainty that Byron Mailley would make something of himself. Such a bright, look-right-at-you little boy, she said, with her endearing habit of using hyphenated expressions in her talk. She went on about Byron, about his work as a magazine photographer, his time in Rome in his twenties, sending her postcards and pictures he had taken of the magnificent places and the wonderful people he had come to know. Several other people spoke as well. Reese stood there proudly, smiling during it all. He’d arranged everything. He led the applause and finally offered a toast to Byron for his generosity and his goodness. Nobody more kindly than Byron, taking Reese in at such a time in his life, offering love, nurture, tolerating his neuroses, his failures of love and sensibility. A true artist, Byron. Not Reese—who was, in fact, a fairly successful painter. He said uncharacteristically self-deprecating things all evening. He had put together a show of some of Byron’s photographs.

Byron’s mother, ill, failing, already in the hospital wing, couldn’t be there, but Reese made a tape, and took it over there the next morning and played it for her. She was listening to it when Byron came to see her that evening, not twenty minutes past the revelation, delivered in the upstairs hallway of the house, in a weepy regretful voice by Reese, that he must find his way alone for a time, and was leaving. Byron had been an emotional nursemaid all these years, surely Byron could see this, that Reese would never reach any kind of autonomy if he stayed any longer. “We can be friends,” Reese said. “I so want that, Byron.”

Byron knew there must be someone else for Reese, now, though it was true that Byron had done plenty of nursemaiding
from the beginning. Reese had been Georgia’s physical therapist; that was how they had all met—Reese, a young artist, working for Blue Ridge Orthopedic Clinic to make enough money to put food on the table, had worked with Georgia after her knee replacement surgery, and Georgia had introduced him to Byron. Reese came over to see Georgia and to work with her, and then it was just visiting. They made each other laugh. Reese was sad a lot of the time and had other troubles, mostly having to do with confidence in his work, and confidence in general. There was a neediness in him, about which he often teased. It was charming, though like most teasing it hinted at the truth. Byron and Reese began going to see Georgia together, and everything progressed quite naturally to the next stage. They had lived together quite happily, it seemed to Byron, but then Reese had begun to do well enough with his painting to quit the physiotherapy, and there were, Byron had to admit, subtle changes.

The kindest way of seeing this was that Reese was being honest in his own self-deluding way; he had depended on Byron so long, and now wanted to strike out on his own. Byron chose to look at it this way. He was by nature kindly. Not that kindness came easily to him: kindliness is work. And perhaps Reese felt the necessity of the big surprise party and the tributes in order to salve his conscience for what he knew he was already doing. But the hundred and twenty townspeople who came to the party wanted to honor Byron. They all loved him, and for good reason.

Georgia reminded him of this, looking at him now, her still-dark hair spread on the pillow so lovely. “You know you could never hide anything from me. It hurts when someone leaves you. I felt it, too, you know.”

“I don’t want to talk about Reese anymore,” Byron said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Reese was here, today, too, son. Earlier.”

Byron couldn’t speak for a few seconds. “Well, he’s moving out.”

“He wants to come see me tomorrow.”

Byron shrugged. Again, there was a pause. “I guess that’s between the two of you.”

“Tell me about your party,” she said. “The good parts.”

But she was drugged, and the drowse began to work in her. And he felt uncomfortably sullen, because she had talked so casually about Reese coming to see her. He spoke halfheartedly about Ms. Wasson and her memory of him writing to her from Rome. Try as she might—and she did try—Georgia’s lids grew heavy; they closed and opened in that sluggish way, the eyes glazing over. Feeling the pressure to bring it up anyway, Byron went on to say that Reese had planned the party and seemed very happy doing that—deciding on the guest list, on the way it would all go. He drove a hundred miles west and south, to the Tennessee line, and bought five hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks, using his own savings account. Byron, seeing how much he apparently needed this, let him have his way about it. It was not in Byron’s makeup to seek this kind of thing. He liked a party; he was gregarious and—people talked about it—he had wonderful ability as a raconteur and storyteller, could do any accent in the world, and would do so, telling a joke, so that the experience of it was positively dramatic. But in truth, he was also rather self-effacing. He had known so many punk jerks parading themselves during his time in Rome and New York. All those years hustling photographs. His strongest sense of how life ought to be lived had
always involved the old idea that one didn’t let the right hand know what the left was doing. One was generous without considering who might know it. No telling how much can be accomplished if we don’t care who gets the credit. Byron had performed all sorts of kindnesses, the source of which the recipients of those kindnesses never knew. No one ever knew. Not even Georgia, who knew most everything else.

She slept now. He adjusted the blanket across her slowly rising and falling chest, kissed her cheek softly, and stood there weeping silently for a moment. Then he moved to the door and out. It would be soon, the doctors all said. A week, two weeks. Her heart was so tired; it was giving out slowly. Byron went to the nurse’s station and reiterated that he wished to be called if there was the slightest change. Each of the last five nights, he had left Georgia sleeping peacefully. She claimed no nightmares, no frights. It was all right. He held her hand and she went in and out of sleep, and when they talked it was nearly as it always had been—her interest in the world hadn’t flagged at all.

Outside, in the chill of early March, he walked to the car and got in. The street was windy; the traffic light wavered and threw its red light on the walls of the buildings at the first intersection. Byron drove there and waited for the light to change. The street looked empty, and the emptiness of it seemed a kind of anguish coming at him, not for himself, but for Georgia, lying alone in that narrow room in the coming night. He turned around in the middle of the intersection, drove back to the parking lot, and hurried into the building, hoping she hadn’t awakened, even for a moment, in his absence. At the nurse’s station the woman gave him a past-visiting-hours look. He nodded at her and went on to Georgia’s room, and took his chair.

•  •  •

When she woke again, she wanted to talk about the party, so he told how the fireworks went off among the branches of the trees and scared everyone; how there were hurrahs and shouts of excitement, and how everyone had a good time. As he talked, he remembered calling her from the bedroom telephone. She had sounded so chipper, so happy for him. He heard the weakness, and the slight breathlessness, but she had her wits about her in spite of the medicine, thinking to ask if his new next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ewing, had brought her dog with her to the party—Mrs. Ewing being one of those people who treated her dogs and cats better than she ever treated any human being, including her own daughter, Marvina, who was a good friend of Georgia’s and Byron’s. Mrs. Ewing had recently come to Marvina’s house to restore order, as she saw it, Marvina being undisciplined and still single at forty-three.