May We Be Forgiven Part 74

We are in the backyard doing a strange dance: she takes one step towards, I take two steps back; she goes right, I go left.

"I don't believe you," she says. And, impulsively, she is on me, knocking me back into a lounge chair.

I see Madeline glance out the kitchen window into the backyard. "Cy," she screams, ear-piercingly loud. "Man down."

Like the college linebacker he once was, Cy is out the door and down the steps, charging towards Sofia, like a wrecking ball swinging in from the left. He hits hard, knocking her sideways.

A moment pa.s.ses; Sofia stands up, dusts herself off, and looks at Cy. "Thank you," she says, "I must have tripped over a root." Turning to me she says, "Be in touch," and then she's gone.

I text Cheryl and tell her she was right about Sofia. She writes back asking if Sofia suggested a three-way. "Yes, how did you know?"

"She asked me first," Cheryl types back. "I said it was up to you but that she had to ask." There's a pause. "You know me," she writes. "I'm interested in all kinds of things...."

Cheryl invites Madeline, Cy, and me to come for dinner later in the week-before heading off for a month in Maine. "A yar-becue," she types, "yard barbecue, just Ed and the boys."

Cy and Madeline are excited. "It's been a long time since we were invited to a dinner party," Madeline says, and then whispers loudly that after Cy's fall from grace they were dropped socially by pretty much everyone they knew.

"I didn't fall from anywhere," Cy mutters. "I stole some money. It's more common than you realize."

Madeline and I make a Jell-O mold-with pineapple chunks suspended in green, mandarine oranges in yellow, and green grapes in red. I've never made Jell-O before-it's magical.

We arrive at Cheryl's to find the yard thick with smoke and the dense perfume of hot meat.

The three boys, Tad, Brad, and Lad, are helping their father, who is hovering near something that looks like a cross between a fire pit and an antiquarian outhouse.

"We built our own smoker," Ed says, welcoming us.

"Is that backyard legal?" I ask.

He nods. "Homeowners have rights," he says.

"I hope your neighbors aren't vegetarian."

"I grew up smoking meat," Ed says. "My father and I would hunt and would dress whatever we killed-fowl, venison, and so on." Ed claps me on the back. "I miss having a hunting buddy," he says. "My boys never got into it-maybe that's something you and I could do?"

"Maybe," I say, sure that hunting with my s.e.x-tress's husband is a bad idea.

We sit down to dinner. I've got Madeline and Cy one on each side of me; Tad, Brad, and Lad take the other side of the picnic table, their swelling frames threatening to tip the balance entirely. The boys pa.s.s bowls of potato salad, coleslaw, and corn bread while Ed opens the smoker, nearly asphyxiating us all.

"You made all of this?"

Ed and Cheryl both nod. "We like to do it ourselves."

Everything is delicious, beyond pleasant, nearly heavenly. "I don't know how you do it," I say to Ed, when Cheryl is away from the table clearing plates. "I'm a lucky man, Har," he says, having coined a new nickname for me-Har. "Cheryl and me, we get each other-the good and the bad. Life is long, what's the point of being judgmental? I don't have any hard, fast rules-be happy, enjoy."

And I can't figure out if Ed is a genius or a moron.

Cheryl comes back with our Jell-O mold decanted onto a plate-shaking like a fat lady-and the boys bring out a tub of homemade peppermint ice cream.

We dig in, and all is good until Cy asks for a third helping, and then, when he's done, remembers that he's horribly lactose-intolerant, and we make a mad dash for home.

Despite the summer heat, the ninety-degree days, Madeline and Cy are always cold; they wear cardigans, inside and out. I extract the old window screens from the bas.e.m.e.nt, put them in, and skip turning on the air conditioning. It is like a summer from the past: the heat builds during the day. Tessie lies on the tile floor in the front hall, panting; in the afternoon there are thunderstorms, and at night there's the melancholy tap-tapping sounds of bugs on the screens.

It's near the end of July; everything is elongated, made languid and slow-motion by the heat. Madeline and Cy retreat into a world of long ago. There is something beautiful about their slowly evaporating ghostlike narration, which shows marks of revision, erasure, and locked doors-events long ago put away.

I take them to concerts at the bandsh.e.l.l in the park and watch them dance across the lawn like it is thirty years ago.

"What's your secret to a long marriage?" I ask Madeline one morning.

"We don't burden each other with our feelings," she says. "A woman friend of mine called it staying in the dance."

"The dance?"

"Of courts.h.i.+p. When you are courting, you are your best self, but then, too often, we devolve and reveal our worst selves. Why would you want the person you live with to wake up seeing your worst self every day?"

One day, when Cy is annoyed at one of the babies from South Africa, he fires him, tells him to "box it up and get out. There's no future for you here, sitting around thinking it's going to come right to you. It doesn't work that way, buster. I don't want to see you around here anymore," he says.

"That's not your baby," Madeline says, grabbing the plastic infant from him. "That one is mine."

"Mine," Cy says, surprisingly possessive, grabbing the baby back.

Just as I'm thinking I'll have to intervene, they make up.

"Fine," Cy says, annoyed. He looks the baby square in the eye. "I'll give you another chance, but don't blow it." From then on, Cy walks around carrying the baby under his arm-sideways, like a football. He takes it pretty much everywhere, calling it his brown brother and occasionally his wife.

I give myself until the children come home to finish the book. I set up shop on an old card table in the attic-surrounding myself with box fans that create windy white noise. I weigh down my papers with rocks from the garden. I find the heat inspiring, like being in a boxing gym. Stripped to a pair of gym shorts, I type as rivulets of sweat trickle down my face, the meaty smell of myself ripening pus.h.i.+ng me to work harder-ready or not, it needs to be over.

Using a sharp blade to crack the old paint off, I pop open the small window up in the eaves. The gla.s.s is wavy; the view doused in rainbow-reflected light makes everything look better than it is. I move about cautiously, careful not to b.u.mp my head on the beams. There are things up there from long ago, a World War II uniform, old teddy bears, an ancient crib that I dust off and bring down to Madeline, who immediately takes it and sets up a nursery by her side of the bed for the babies.

The phrase "while you were sleeping" takes on new meaning as I plow through the pages from the past fifteen years, noticing that everything I've written is couched in a protective tone, hemming and hawing, positing and pulling back. Time to rip out the stops-f.u.c.k it. d.i.c.k Nixon was the American man of that moment, swimming in the bitter supposition that for everyone else things came easily. He was the perfect storm of present, past, and future, of integrity and deceit, of moral superiority and arrogance, of the drug that was and is the American Dream, wanting more, wanting to have what someone else has, wanting to have it all.

I conclude that the 1970s court of public opinion was bourgeois and unforgiving in nature; once a politician's fate had been decided and his number in the global historic pecking order had been a.s.signed, there was precious little room for movement. I wonder if it would be different now: if Nixon owned up (deeply unlikely) and attributed his behavior, his failings, to a traumatic event-growing up in the Nixon household-would he have been exonerated? Is the rise or fall of popularity or historic significance a fixed game?

As I close in on the ending, I find myself thinking about Claire. Imagining if Claire could see me now...Would she be impressed? When I stop to think really hard about it, nothing I'm doing would make any sense to her. My fantasy moves on to Ben Schwartz, my former department Chair-Ben, who thought I'd never finish the book-what would Ben think? I belch. The flavor is overwhelming-Londisizwe's tea! This is the last of the pain, the foul smell coming out; these thoughts are the path of the old mind needing to be left behind.

I call Tuttle. It's the middle of the afternoon in early August; he answers his phone.

"Why are you there?" I ask. "I thought shrinks took August off?"

"I'm a contrarian," he says. "I take July. In August I make my nut working overtime, covering for my colleagues who prefer Wellfleet."

We make a time to meet. His office is freezing cold. Across the edge of his desk where last time there was a collection of cups from Smoothie King, there's a row of Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups. "They opened a drive-thru," he says.

"I'm almost finished with the book," I say. "But it's like I'm waiting for something to happen, some kind of relief or sense of relief."

"Are you pleased with your work?"

"I want someone to read it."

"Who is your fantasy, your muse?" he asks.

"Richard Milhous Nixon," I say.

"And what would you want him to say?"

"'Thank you'?" I suggest, plaintively. "'The world needs more men like you, Silver. You're a good man.'"

"Do you see Nixon as a father figure?"

"I wouldn't rule it out," I say after a long pause.

"Why can't you just say yes?" Tuttle asks. "What would it mean to you?"

I look to the floor, I break out in a cold sweat, I can't meet Tuttle's eye.

"What would it mean?" Tuttle asks again.

"I love him but I think he did wrong," I sputter.

"Do you say that in your book?"

"Not so much."

"Why not?"

"George is a paranoid bully who doesn't see what's good for him and looks at me as the enemy no matter what I do." I blurt it out, and then there's a very long silence.

"And Nixon?" Tuttle asks.

"I'm not sure Nixon could psychically afford to accept that he did anything wrong. He desperately needed to think of himself as decent."

"Do you think your book is good?"

"Sometimes I think it is a brilliant, reinvigorating discussion not only about Nixon but about an entire era. Other times I wonder if it's just a cultural hairball that took years to cough up."

"Among the living, whose opinion matters to you?"

"Remnick?" I suggest, tentatively. For whatever reason, since the phone call I've been fixated on Remnick.

"Are you really finished?"

"Pretty much. I'm just waiting for something to happen."

"Waiting for something to happen? Like what?"

I have no answer.

"Isn't it up to you," Tuttle suggests, "to make something happen?"

We sit in silence for the rest of the session. As I'm leaving, he hands me a folded mint-green sheet of paper. I'm blank.

"The Psychiatric Evaluation form from the New York Department of Social Services," Tuttle says.

"Thank you."

"I'm open to working with you further," Tuttle says. "Let me know if you'd like to schedule something."

From Tuttle's office, I go visit my mother. In the parking lot of the home, they have set up a large aboveground pool with a wide cedar deck, umbrellas, chairs, and a long wheelchair ramp from the front door of the facility to the edge of the pool, where residents can be deposited onto a slide, and-"wheee"-down they go. "More," a man shouts. "I want to go again. It's like Coney Island."

I spot my mother under an umbrella, holding court in a black-and-white polka-dot swimsuit, wearing Jackie Ostyle sungla.s.ses, and sipping a plastic tumbler of iced tea.

"Ma," I say. "You look ten years younger."

"I always liked being by the sh.o.r.e," she says.

"Where's your husband?" I ask.

Looking around, I realize that all the men and women are wearing variations on the same suit-basically, a men's version and a women's. All together, they look like a geriatric circus act.

"Big sale," one of the aides says. "Buy one at full price, get as many more as you want for half off-we bought them all."

"Geronimo," a man says, jumping in.

"Don't forget," the lifeguard calls out. "No pus.h.i.+ng, no splas.h.i.+ng, no p.o.o.ping in the pool."

"So how are you?" I ask my mother.

"Good," she says. "We went on a field trip to a lobster place and had the early bird, all you can eat. I myself don't eat so much, but Bobby thought it was well worth it. And you, where have you been?"

"South Africa," I say.

She looks at me strangely.

"Nate had been there on a school trip and wanted to go back, so we decided to have his bar mitzvah over there."

"And you didn't invite your mother?"

"I did," I say. "You sent back the RSVP card with some nasty remark about shvartzes written on it."

"I'm ent.i.tled to my opinion," she says.

"If you can call it an opinion," I say. "We have another word for it...."

"And what's that?"

"Racist?"

"Shhh," she says. "Not so loud, someone will hear you." We're quiet for a moment. "I don't get it," she says.