The Land of Laughs (6 page)

We were both totally embarrassed, so I beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom.

“Do you like curry, Thomas?”

Halfway through the meal my tongue was a five-alarm fire, but I winked back the tears and nodded and pointed my fork at my plate a couple of times. “… love it.” It might have been the worst meal I’d ever eaten in my life. First her banana bread, then the curry …

In his mercy, God made her buy Sara Lee brownies for dessert, which, after three glasses of milk, calmed the fires in my mouth.

When the dishes were cleared, I began telling her about my cabdriver experience. I had gotten to where Tuto ordered me out of his car when she bit her lip and looked away.

“What’s the matter?” I was tempted to say something like, “I’m not boring you, am I?” But by then I knew it was wrong and unnecessary.

“I …” She looked at me, then away, at me, away. “I was really happy here this afternoon, Thomas. I came over right after I talked to you on the phone. I was really happy being here, cooking… . Do you understand what I mean?” Her glare dissolved back into lip biting, but she was watching me very carefully.

“Yes, well, sure. I mean, of course I understand… .
Boy
, that curry was excellent, Saxony.”

Later, when I gave her the big book on puppets, she took one look at it and started to cry. And then she wouldn’t pick it up: she got out of her chair and came over to me. She put her arms around my neck and hugged and hugged me.

We started necking, and moved over to the bed. We began undoing each other’s clothes as fast as we could. But it wasn’t fast enough, so we separated and undid our own buttons. Although her back was turned to me, I stopped when I saw her pull her shirt over her head. I love to watch a woman undress. No matter if you’re going to make love to her or you’re peeking at her through a window, there’s something tingly and wonderfully exciting about it.

I put my thumb on the back of her neck and slowly ran it down the bump-bridge of her spine. She looked over her shoulder and gave a little grimace. “Can I ask a favor?”

“Of course.”

“I’m very shy about undressing in front of someone. I’m sorry, but do you think you could close your eyes or look away while I do it?”

I leaned across the bed and kissed her shoulder. “Sure. I get embarrassed about that too.”

It was perfect. I hate taking off my pants in front of a woman I don’t know. So this was great — I’d turn my back to her, pull off my pants while she pulled off hers, we’d both slip under the covers at the same time, turn off the light for a little while . . ,

RRRrriiinnnggg!

I’d just stepped out of my boxer shorts when the phone rang. No one ever called me, especially not at twelve o’clock at night. The phone was on the other side of the room, so, naked, I sprang for it. Saxony let out a whoop, and unconsciously I turned and faced her. Her green panties were down around her knees, and from the look on her face, she didn’t know whether to push them down or pull them hack up.

“Thomas, where have you been? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for days!”

“Ma?”

“Yes. The only time I can ever get you is in the middle of the night. Did you get those pants that I sent you from Bloomingdale’s?”

“
Pants?
Ma …” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Saxony. “My mother wants to know if I got the pants she sent me from Bloomingdale’s.”

Sax immediately looked at the panties in her hand and then at me. We both started laughing. I got off the phone as fast as I could.

For the next few weeks we poked around more and more together. We went down to New Haven to see a play, drove all the way to Sturbridge Village for dinner one night, and sat out a freak hailstorm in a little cottage my mother owned on the Rhode Island shore.

One afternoon she sheepishly asked if she could go to Galen.

“Yes, but only if you promise to go with me.”

“Saxony, you can’t take all of those suitcases! What do you think this is,
Wagon Train
?”

All she needed was an ancient steamer trunk to complete her lineup. There was a delicate yellow-and-red wicker basket, a scruffy knapsack that bulged like a bratwurst, an old brown leather suitcase with brass locks and edges. She’d topped it all off with several things just back from the dry cleaner’s in plastic wrap on metal hangers.

She scowled at me and walked around to the back of the station wagon. She flipped down the gate and laid the first of her many things in.

“Don’t you hassle me, Thomas. I’ve had one lousy day so far, okay? Just don’t hassle me.”

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, looked at my new haircut in the rearview mirror, and wondered whether it was worth a fight. For a week I’d been telling her that I wanted to travel as light as possible on this trip. Since we had been together almost every day after my New York trip, I’d come to believe that she had about three shirts and two dresses and a white smock that looked like a peasant castoff. At one point I wanted to buy her an Indian dress she admired in a store window, but she wouldn’t let me, even when I insisted. “Not yet,” she said, whatever that was supposed to mean.

So what did she have in those bags? Another nightmare grew in my mind — groceries and a hot plate! She was going to cook our meals all the way to Galen! Banana bread … curry … apple tea …

“What’ve you got in those things anyway, Sax?”

“There’s no reason to yell!”

I looked at her in the mirror and saw her with her hands on her hips. I thought of how nice those hips were without any clothes on them.

“Okay, I’m sorry. But how come you’re taking so much?”

I heard gravel crunch, and then she was standing by my door. I looked up at her, but she was busy undoing the straps on the wicker basket.

“Just look.”

It was full of handwritten notes, magazine clippings, blank yellow pads, yellow pencils, and the fat pink erasers she liked to use.

“This one is my work bag. Am I allowed to take it?”

“Sax …”

“The duffel bag has all of my clothes in it… .”

“Look, I wasn’t saying …”

“And the suitcase has some marionettes in it that I’m working on.” She smiled and clicked the latches shut on the bag. “That’s the one thing that you’ll have to get used to around me, Thomas: wherever I go, I always carry my life around with me.”

“I would hope so.”

“Oh, you’re very funny, Thomas. So clever.”

June graduation ceremonies had taken place several days before, so the campus of my school was summer-green and silent and kind of sad when we drove away. Schools without students are always strangely ominous to me. All the rooms are too clean and the floors too polished. When a phone rings it echoes all over the place, and it will go eight or nine times before someone feels like answering it or the caller realizes that everyone’s gone and he hangs up. We passed a huge copper beech tree that was a great favorite of mine, and I realized that I wouldn’t sit under it again for a long time.

She reached over and turned on the radio. “Thomas, are you sad that you’re leaving?”

The last part of “Hey, Jude” was on, and I remembered the girl I was dating on Nantucket when the song first came out in the sixties.

“Sad? Yes, a little. But I’m pretty glad, too. After a while you discover that you’re talking and moving in a trance. Do you know that I taught
Huckleberry Finn
for the fourth time this year? It’s a great book and all, but it was getting to the point where I wasn’t even reading the stuff anymore. I didn’t have to be able to teach it. That kind of thing’s not good.”

We sat and listened to the song finish. I guess the station was doing a Beatles retrospective, because “Strawberry Fields Forever” came on next. I drove up a ramp onto the New England Thruway.

“Did you ever want to be an actor?” She pulled a thread off the sleeve of my shirt.

“An
actor?
No, not after my father, hell no.”

“I remember being madly in love with Stephen Abbey after I saw him in
The Beginners
.”

I snorted but didn’t say anything. What person in the world wasn’t in love with my father?

“Don’t laugh at me — it’s true!” Her voice was almost indignant. “I’d just gone into the hospital for the first time, so my parents got me a little portable television set. I remember the whole thing very clearly. It was on
Million Dollar Movie
, which showed the same old film every afternoon for a week. I watched every showing of both
The Beginners
and
Yankee Doodle Dandy
.”

“
Yankee Doodle Dandy
?”

“Yes, with James Cagney. I was madly in love with both James Cagney and your father when I was in the hospital.”

“How long were you in there?”

“The hospital? For four months the first time and two the second.”

“And what did they do — skin grafts and that kind of thing?”

She didn’t say anything. I looked over at her, but there was no expression on her face. I hadn’t meant to pry, and as the silence continued, I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t.

A big thunderstorm was brewing up over the hills in front of us, and we drove into a lowering curtain of smoky pearl clouds. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sun still shining down on where we’d just come from. I knew that most of the people back there had no idea of what they were in for later that afternoon.

“When did you fall out of love with my father?”

“Thomas, do you really want to know about when I was in the hospital? I’ve never liked to talk about it, but if you’d like to know, I’ll tell you.”

She said it with so much conviction in her voice that I didn’t know what to answer. She went on before I had a chance to say anything.

“The first time was horrible. They’d put me in these baths so that all of the dead skin would come off and the new could start to grow. I remember that there was this stupid nurse named Mrs. Rasmussen who took care of me and always talked to me like I was a moron. I don’t remember much else about it except that I was scared and hated everything. I guess I’ve blocked a lot out. The second time was a lot of therapy, and everyone seemed much nicer. It’s probably because they knew I’d be walking again. When I was in there, I discovered that people treat you much more … I don’t know, humanely, when they see that you’re going to be all right again.”

A snake of yellow lightning skittered across the clouds, followed closely by one of those quick cracks of thunder that make you jump a little in spite of yourself. The radio had become almost pure static, so I switched it off. Big marbles of rain began to fall, but I held off turning on the windshield wipers until the last moment. My side window was down, and I could feel the dying heat and heaviness on the air. I thought about a little Saxony Gardner sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed with her little-kid legs bandaged all the way up and down. The picture was so sad and sweet that it made me smile. If I’d had a kid like that, I would have bought her so many toys and books that she would have suffocated under them.

“What was it like being the son of Stephen Abbey?”

I took a deep breath to put her off for a minute. In the time that we’d been together she’d asked me very few questions about my family, and I was damned grateful.

“My mother called him Punch. Sometimes he’d walk off a set in the middle of the day, come home, and take us all out to someplace like Knott’s Berry Farm or the beach. He’d run around and buy us all hot dogs and Coke and ask us if this wasn’t the best time we’d ever had in our lives. He got pretty manic sometimes, but we loved it all. If he got too crazy, then my mother would say, ‘Take it easy, Punch,’ and I’d hate her for it. He always had to be the life of the party when he was around, but since he was around so little then, we all ate him up.”

The rain came down in transparent curtains, and you could hear it slooshing up under the wheels. I was driving in the slow lane, and whenever someone passed us there was so much water flung across the windshield that the poor wipers could barely keep up with it. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, so I knew that the storm was right over us.

“He took me to the studio once when they were filming
A Fire in Virginia
. In a way, it was one of the greatest days of my life, I guess. All I remember about it was that someone was always asking me if I wanted an ice cream, and that later I fell asleep and was carried into his dressing room. When I woke up he was standing over me like a white mountain, smiling that famous smile. He had on an all-white shirt and a huge cream panama hat with a black band.” I shook my head and tapped out a tune on the steering wheel to swish away the memory. A Grand Union trailer truck floated by in slow motion.

“Did you love him?” Her voice was quiet and held back, I guess a little afraid.

“No. Yes. I don’t know — how can you not love your father?”

“Very easily — I didn’t love mine. His greatest dream in life came true when one of his students got into Harvard.”

“What do you mean — your father was a teacher?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You never told me that.”

“Yes. He taught English too.”

I slid a quick look at her, and she puffed out her cheeks so that she looked like a squirrel with a lot of nuts in there.

“I guess I shouldn’t say this, but he was awful, from everything I remember about him.” She put her hands on the dashboard and patted out a kind of soft African beat. She spoke while she patted. “He used to eat sliced pineapple and read
Hiawatha
out loud to my mother and me.”

“
Hiawatha?
‘By the shores of Gitchy Gummi,
On the bottom of the lake,
Hiawatha and his buddies
Playing poker for a stake.’”p>

“Gee, you must be an English teacher too.”

The sky was so dark that I switched on the headlights and slowed down to forty. I had often wondered what she was like as a kid. That nice, moony-pale face in miniature. I could see her off in a dark corner of a dark living room playing with her marionettes until nine, when her mother would tell her to go to bed. White socks that were falling down, and black patent leather shoes with gold buckles.