William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Probably threw him in the garbage, Tyler thought to himself.

Bending over, the waitress reached beneath the table, turned on the gas jet, and then lit it. Blue flames danced evilly up. With tongs and scissors, the waitress took the kalbi and bulgoki strips out of the marinade and laid them into the grill, where they began to sizzle loudly. With a mechanical smile, Irene accepted the tongs from her and began to turn the meat. Then the waitress thrust the scissors into the marinade bowl and carried it away.

So they got me another cat, Irene said. Another boy cat. I was about fifteen then. I was late starting my period, but one day it came. And the cat knew right off. He started to lick me.

Were your parents happy that you’d become a woman?

I didn’t tell them. In my family we don’t talk about those things.

I know one Japanese girl whose mother cooked red beans that night to celebrate, said Tyler. And when her father wanted to know what the fuss was all about, her mother just said that a very good thing had happened.

I guess my mother must have known, because my underpants were bloody, Irene said, picking up strips of well-done meat with the tongs and putting them on his plate. — My cat sure knew. In our house the cats weren’t supposed to sleep inside. But every night at around midnight this cat would scratch at my window, and I’d get up and let him in. And he’d come into my bed and lick my nightgown all night, right between my breasts. His tongue was kind of rough, and sometimes it almost hurt, but it also felt really good. He licked so much that my nightgown turned black there. Every night he’d come and do that, and sleep with me. It was kind of my secret, I guess. It made me feel special. And in the morning when I went to school, that cat would follow me along the top of the wall as far as he could, and then in the afternoon when I came home he’d be waiting for me. Well, we were getting ready to move to America then. My grandmother was already in Los Angeles, and then my big aunt and uncle, and then little aunt and uncle, and then it was just us and we’d already sold our house. I asked my mother what was going to happen to my cat, and she didn’t answer. And one night that cat didn’t come scratching at my window. I kind of wondered and worried about that, ’cause he’d never failed to come to me before. And in the morning I didn’t see him. My mother said that he knew we were going to leave him, so he was sad and ran away. Cats just know.

Your mother probably gave him away and didn’t have the guts to tell you, Tyler thought.

You want another beer, Irene? he said. Here’s to fetal alcohol syndrome!

Oh, Henry, I’m feeling — I don’t know how I’m feeling. Can we please please finish? I want to go home and lie down…

Irene…

I don’t know. I’ve almost had it with everything.

And John?

He’s good at digging into everything. I used to tell my parents and they’d say trust your busband, but they are not saying trust your husband anymore. He’s taken away all my credit cards. He takes all my paycheck. He’s never satisfied. I’m sorry; he’s your brother; maybe you—

You know better than that, Irene.

Can we please please go now? I want to lie down. I want to go to bed.

Irene was supposed to meet him on Union Street. He stood waiting in front of the shop with the phony picket fence below the window. Inside lay a long narrow glass table whose legs were naked bronze women bending backward and supporting the top with their outstretched arms. Behind the table he perceived stained glass lamps (he didn’t know whether they were real Tiffanys or not,) and green drinking glasses like magnifying lenses. — He looked at his watch. — Another shop window boasting of gold-ivied dinner plates as round and white as the breasts of a girl with whom he’d once gone skinnydipping in high school, a shy girl who probably never undressed except at night, for her skin had been as pale and perfect as a hardwood floor kept under a ratty old carpet. In the next window he saw a cat made of milk-porcelain, watching herself in the mirror, a seven-drawer lingerie chest in the Queen Anne style on sale for $279.00—how many pairs of underpants did a woman need, to take up seven drawers? Next was the window of the optometrist’s shop, whose many double lenses, yes, those, too, reminded him of breasts.

Irene had not arrived. He went to the espresso bar and ordered a double shot. The coffee soon began to kick in, rewarding him with a pleasantly twitchy feeling. He went out and looked for her black Volkswagen Rabbit but didn’t see it. The orange and white # 45 bus with its long feelers drank from wires and disappeared, and that moment he knew that she was not going to show up. A watch-gaze: Forty minutes late. Irene was never late.

He began to walk east, toward the Tenderloin, and suddenly right in front of the next coffeehouse or maybe the next he met a grizzled grimy panhandler whose hands were streaked with blackish-grey, as if human flesh, like the silver it so often sells for, could tarnish; and the panhandler said: Can you give me anything?

Why, sure I can, said Tyler, grateful that for the next twenty to thirty seconds that heavy sadness in his chest and the nervousness in the cesspool of his churning stomach and the anger against Irene that dwelled behind his eyes might not be felt. He turned out his pocket, finding three dimes, which he gave the man, for the first time looking into his face. But the panhandler was gazing far beyond him. Tyler would never see what he saw.

Past Buchanan the shops were not so fancy, the jewelry plated rather than solid, the shop windows weary with glass eggs or glass snail shells or cast ballerinas whose tits he could barely see. Skinny, hairy-legged joggers headed back toward their medium-rent apartments, clutching freshly purchased cappuccinos and raspberry-papaya smoothies, emanations of royalty.

He gazed down the gentle slope between white houses that led to the Marina district where John and Irene lived.

When he got to the next pay phone he reached into his pocket and then remembered that he’d given all his change to that panhandler. He went into the corner deli and bought a candy bar with a dollar bill. They gave him two quarters back. He dialled.

Yes? said his brother before the second ring.

Hello, John, he said as mildly as he could.

What did you have to do with this? said the cruelly level voice.

His heart sank. — What do you mean?

Don’t lie to me ever again, said John in the weariest voice that he had ever heard. I just don’t have any more time for your lies.

Tyler thought for a moment. Then he hung up the phone, changed another dollar, and called his mother, who also answered before the second ring.

How’s everything, Mom?

His mother began to cry. — Oh, Henry, she wept. John just called. Oh, poor, poor Irene.

Tyler’s car still smelled of flowers. Just before driving down to Los Angeles, he’d stopped at a florist’s in the Mission and filled the back seat with funeral wreaths upon double plastic bags of melting ice.

A blonde salesgirl stood outside of a bridal shop, leaning against one of the parted steel shutters and smoking a cigarette. Her windows screamed with whiteness.

Previously Tyler had allowed himself to blueprint the structure of a future life lonely but not unpleasant, a life of sitting on empty bleachers on Sundays and holidays, gazing unseeing through the mesh of some park fence, politely oriented toward the baseball diamond upon which shouting Little Leaguers might or might not be practicing as he listened to the crows declaim: Ewww, ewww! in demagogic accents — not a bad life at all, a privileged one, in fact, a thickening-around-the-middle life of birthday cards to nieces and nephews, of going to movies; maybe he’d take up fine art photography in earnest some day. He already had the equipment and the technique; it sounded less tedious than jerking off into the locator fluid. And John and Irene would have their mixed-race children, the ones to whom on birthdays he’d send stupid cards; Irene, who’d owned cats as a child, but always wanted a dog, would have a German shepherd or maybe a border collie by then — the eternal Mugsy. Irene and John could visit Tyler’s mother in the nursing home in which she’d surely be settled, if in fact she were still above the dirt. Tyler himself would accordingly be free to relocate. His needs were low; perhaps he couldn’t live on three hundred a year, like the Unabomber, but ten grand per annum might well see him through. — No more photography, then, and no fancy women — maybe a bottle of bourbon when he wanted it. His grandfather had done nicely on Black Velvet. In the old man’s accounts of his vacations, whiskey of some sort would always figure. — I remember when Elma and I took a trip out to Salt Lake in a Pullman car, he’d say. Those were good times, Henry; you can’t imagine how good. Elma liked to rest, of course, so I’d sit with her and we’d have a few nips, and then when I got sick of that, why, I’d leave her alone and head to the dining car, order a couple shots… — Now his grandfather was dead. Life passed, full of passions like a van crammed with shouting dogs; every year there’d come another Easter without a resurrection, a Fourth of July without children or hot dogs or fireworks, a silent telephone, every month half a dozen bills in the mail.