Robert Butler - Perfume River

For his part, this silence is not in expectation of more from Mavis but in idle curiosity over where Linda might be.

Mavis, for her part, is moved to elaborate. “I didn’t expect her and didn’t think to look for her.”

“Ah,” says Jimmy.

Another beat of silence and she says, “We’ve got some bags for you.”

Jimmy thinks to call Linda on her cell. Or to go into the house and see if she left a note. But instead he says, “Good,” and he moves off to the far end of the central bay to his worktable and his pots of wax and paint, his trimming tools and heating wand, his sander and his various favorite buffers — the tine of a deer antler; pieces of sheep wool and blue denim and brain-tanned camel hide.

He works a while, and in his concentration he does not even register the buzz of the intercom and the murmur of Mavis’s voice, and then she is standing before him. This he is aware of, and he lifts his face.

“Linda is home,” she says.

He’s a little slow to react and Mavis is very quick in turning away, so his acknowledgment is nodded to her retreating back.

But he goes out at once.

As Jimmy nears the end of the connecting drive, he sees Linda emerge from the front door and come down the few steps of the porch, her focus on him. He approaches.

It was not so long ago that he began to think she was starting to seem her age. Not that he could quite say why. She is still white-oak-hard and sturdy and upright, a thing she was when he first met her on a beach in Alameda with flowers in her hair and flowers painted beneath her eyes and with her breasts bare in solidarity with some other young women on the shore. He would soon feel the toned hardness in her body when they were in each other’s arms, hard enough that he was surprised at how gentle she was with her hands and in her voice and with her mouth. And in her eyes. They were as dark and fetching as a seal pup’s, but her brows were thick and severe in their arch. In heart and mind, as well as body and face, she was so very much a child of that era. An era of militant gentleness, judgmental tolerance. Over the years, paradox continued to shine through her, and it masked the inevitable weathering and wrinkling and sagging of her body. Masked them utterly. She still seemed to him young. She remained interesting. And so the source of this recent sense of her aging was surprising and hard to identify, and it came clear to him now only in its abrupt absence: She is striding to him and there is a thing about her that those of the Summer of Love would have called an aura. An aura. Yes. He is, in this moment, acutely aware of an aura about her, of energy, of something like youth, and he realizes that for the past weeks, months even, it was something else.

And as she draws near, she says, sharply, “How do you think your mother got our home number?”

“Did she?” he says, thinking: So that’s the transformed aura. Anger. Thinking too that the discovered phone number might be a simple thing, an oversight on his part committed sometime along the way; perhaps it did not occur to him to register the number as unlisted when they moved up here to Twelve Mile.

She sets her arms akimbo. “She left a message on the machine.”

“What did she say?”

“You need to hear for yourself.”

They head off toward the house, side by side.

“You’re home early,” she says. “Did Guy cancel?”

“No. We had coffee instead.”

“I was at Becca’s. She’s not good. She and Paul may be through.”

Her anger at his mother seems to have dissipated quickly. She’s put the whole thing off on him now, and he’s okay with that. He says, “Is somebody dead?”

“Dead?” She looks at him.

He realizes she’s still thinking about their friends. He’s asking, of course, about his mother’s message.

They go up the porch steps.

He concedes to her agenda. “This is nothing new, is it?” he says.

They’ve reached the door, and they pause. She gives him another look. He’s confused her again.

He clarifies: “Becca and Paul.”

She shrugs. “Not yet,” she says.

Now it’s he who’s lost the thread.

She reads it in his face. “Dead?” she says. “No one’s dead yet.”

He leads her inside and into the front parlor, which they’ve filled with Mennonite furniture. He approaches the sideboard.

He stands hesitating over the answering machine.

He could simply erase the message. Right now. Erase it and change the number. His mother knows his wishes in this matter. It has always been best for all of them.

But he touches the play button.

Her voice wheedles into the room. Darling Jimmy. It’s your mother. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how much I regret how things went between us. Between your father and you. I’ve always loved you, my son. He has too. That’s important to say. He has too. I don’t mean to push my way now into your life when I know you’re trying so hard … Not trying. Succeeding, I’m sure, in your new homeland. I don’t mean to … I’m sorry. But your father is in a bad way, physically. The doctor is very very concerned about him. He may not live long. Whatever that might mean to you. At least just for you to know.

This all came out in a blathering rush, and then she fell silent, though she did not hang up. Perhaps she heard herself. Perhaps she knew that all she could do next was ask directly for something he’d long ago made clear he had no intention of giving. Not that his father wished to hear from him, even if he was dying. His mother was no doubt doing this on her own. He could hear her breathing heavily. The machine will cut her off soon , he thinks. He waits.

But before this can happen, she says, Your brother loves you too. We all do.

She pauses again. Then: Does your phone give you my number? Maybe not.

And she speaks her phone number into the message. Jimmy has no intention of remembering it.

In case you want it , she says.

And the answering machine clicks into silence.

He hesitates.

Humming in him is an apparatus of thought he assembled years ago. For him at least, blood ties are overrated. It’s only people who have a deeply intractable sense of their own identity — an identity that has been created through parents or siblings or grandparents, through those of their own blood — it’s only people like that who can’t imagine an actual, irrevocable break from family. But you drift apart from acquaintances. You even drift apart from previously close friends. Why? Because your interests and tastes, ideas and values, personalities and character — the things that truly make up who you are — shift and change and disconnect. Indeed, it’s harder for friends to part: you came together at all only because those things were once compatible. With your kin, that compatibility may never even have existed. The same is true of a country. You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose your land of birth. If you and they have nothing in common, if they have nothing to do with who you are now, if you are always, irrevocably at odds with each other, is it betrayal simply to leave family and country behind?

No.

Fuck no.

Jimmy extends his finger, touches the erase button. With only a quick sniff of hesitation, he pushes it.

Bob is on his back. And he starts to slide, feeling the movement first in the front of his head and then running down his body like nausea. He opens his eyes. He was upright a moment ago. Under a sky. After a talk with Pastor Somebody. After a sleep. But a cold sleep. Very cold. He’s been outside somewhere. Now, though, there’s a low, dark ceiling above. It’s not just him moving. Everything is moving. A face looms suddenly over him. A jowly, red-cheeked face, a bulbous nose. They are moving together, Bob and this man. From the front of Bob’s head: a knot of pain pressing there, pressing outward.