The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (2 page)

After dinner we took another cab to the helicopter pad in the harbor, where it seemed to take forever, the four of us standing around in the windy cold, waiting for the helicopter to come to pick up me and Jocelyn. It was odd to have made such an intimate and important journey with another human, a life-changing journey, to be more deeply changed in twenty-four hours than I had been my whole life, and then just to nod goodbye to this witness, no hug or kiss or acknowledgment of a shared experience because, truthfully, there hadn't been one. It had been mine alone. Hers was just a job. It underlined my sudden aloneness, that although people might help me if it was how they earned their living, there was no longer anyone out there who really cared who I was or what happened to me.

I dithered about how to say goodbye in such a situation and was thankful for the chaos of noise and whirling blades. Finally, we were inside the helicopter and waved our goodbyes, Jocelyn's an irritatingly polite and composed white-handed stiff wave, as if she'd been taught at her mother's knee how to wave goodbye to social workers at helicopter pads. My wave was no better. I began it tentatively and took it back several times in indecision, and I could feel the sickly smile on my face as I made it, coming and going the same, but it didn't matter anyway because the social worker had already turned, her head bent toward Marie as they made their way off the pad without looking back.

I tried to distract myself from the view as we flew along, all those lights so far below the seemingly flimsy door, so easy, it seemed to me, to fall out or be
sucked
out by a passing breeze. Before yesterday I would have calmed myself, saying such things never happened, but now I knew such things did happen and sometimes they happened to
you
and there would never be comfort in that thought again.

I wanted to ask Jocelyn what had really happened that night. After all, she had been there. The social worker had given me no details at all. Just that there was some civil unrest in Zimbabwe and there had been a train accident. But I knew it was like putting your tongue on a sore tooth. You knew it was unwise, but you wanted confirmation of what you only suspected. You wanted to know for sure that there was pain there, but then you were sorry that you had. It seemed the height of folly. Then, when your tongue was off, and the throbbing had subsided, you wondered again if the tooth was really sore, so you put out your tongue again. Once, with such a toothache from a cracked tooth, I had done this so often I actually made the crack worse, and the pain was overwhelming until I got to the emergency dentist, and I swore never to do it again. It was better not to know. It was good to have had the tooth experience because I remembered it now and kept my mouth shut. Jocelyn seemed always to keep her mouth shut. I wasn't sure if she knew anything about toothaches. But then, I reasoned, she had the events in Zimbabwe seared in her imagination forever. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she had seen nothing, known nothing, been whisked off in the dead of night, only told about her parents, only told about mine. It was my tongue circling again.

When my parents had informed me that Jocelyn would get to go with her parents to Zimbabwe while I had to stay behind in the company of Tiffany, even though I understood, even though I knew this wasn't a vacation for my parents, that they had musician friends there who were helping them look for property and they were checking out the political climate—that seemed like a bad joke now—I had still been jealous. I knew fairness had nothing to do with anything: Jocelyn's parents could afford to take her, mine could not. And my mom and dad and I would have the rest of our lives in Zimbabwe if we wanted, on our own farm with our own guesthouse if my mother could scout out a property and, with the help of friends there, buy it. So there was no sense being resentful or whiny.

But now I held it against Jocelyn that, as it turned out, the little time remaining to my parents belonged to her and not to me. What did she care about my mother or father? Yet she was the one who got to spend their last days with them. Again, I knew she hadn't done this on purpose, but it felt as if she had grabbed the last piece of cake, eating it alone, when not only was it the last on the plate, but cake had disappeared from the planet and would never be made again. And instead of apologizing for this, or even seeming a little guilty, she sat next to me in the helicopter, dispassionately watching the lights below disappear, unmindful of this transgression, or uncaring, as we crossed the ocean. Half the time on the ride I felt like this, poisonous and full of loathing for her, the other half I felt lucky that whatever there was to see on that horrible night she had seen and I had been spared. That there were some things you never wanted in your memory bank. Seeing the unseeable, the unthinkable, hearing things I didn't want to hear, being pulled away from the bodies I most wanted to stay with, when all my instincts would say to stay, don't leave. I so tortured myself with these two ideas that they consumed me silently for the entire ride, and by the time we got to the house on the island I was staring as blankly and unseeingly as Jocelyn and we must have crossed my uncle's threshold like two zombies. Sam landed the helicopter—an anomaly I didn't at the time appreciate. We took our bags down under the whirring blades and he was off like the social workers, like my whole previous life, without a backward look.

My uncle showed a great deal of immediate sense, I thought at the time, by hardly speaking to us but showing us our rooms and the bathroom and where the extra towels and blankets were and bringing us each a box of cookies and a mug of hot chocolate and then leaving us alone. Later I found out that only the making of the hot chocolate and bringing it to our rooms was uncharacteristic. The rest, what I took to be his sensitivity in remaining quiet and not forcing on us a bunch of sprightly chatter, had nothing to do with deference to our traumatized sensibilities. It was just who he was.

*   *   *

Almost immediately I had a closer relationship to the island than I had to either my uncle or my cousin. The island with its wind and waves and pounding rain seemed alive. I wasn't so sure about Uncle Marten or Jocelyn. They were remote in different ways. Jocelyn remained cold and contained and Uncle Marten was never around except at dinner. We ate dinner every night at a long table that sat twenty. I sat at one end, Jocelyn in the middle, and my uncle at the other end. Uncle Marten made the same thing every night, hot dogs and mac and cheese. We ate silently in the drafty dining room with the roar of the fire in the large hearth in the living room, the sound of the ubiquitous wind in the eaves and the rain hitting the windows. Jocelyn cut her hot dogs up with her knife and fork, even the bun, and ate them in tiny, neat pieces. She wiped her mouth on her paper napkin between every bite. My uncle always brought a book down to the table and would read and take notes and then wish us good evening and go to bed. I wasn't sure if he thought that he was being tactful, allowing us the luxury of silence in our grief, or if he regarded us as birds that had accidentally landed in the house and about which he was too distracted to do anything. If Uncle Marten was disturbed by his brothers' deaths he didn't seem to let it interfere with his work. I was surprised then on the third night when he looked up from his book, turned to Jocelyn, and said, “Motoring vacations are all very well, but you can't read in a car. At least, I can't. Nothing worse for motion sickness. That's why I was so pleased when I found out you were taking the train through Zimbabwe. I know Donald said that your mother was afraid of crocodiles.”

“Yes,” said Jocelyn. “But in the end, it was a waste of time being afraid of crocodiles, wasn't it?”

“Yes, yes, perhaps you're right, well … didn't mean to dredge it all up again,” he said as if he had mentioned it even once up until then, but perhaps, I thought, he was keeping a tight rein on his desire to talk about it with us, guessing we preferred to be left alone, not to have to think about it if we chose not to. It's so hard to know why anyone really does anything. “Anyhow,” he said, rising and putting a marker in his book and shuffling his papers together, “help yourselves to whatever you'd like. I do beg you, whatever you find anywhere. Help yourselves to the um…” He looked around the room wildly as if desperate to find something that would tempt us from our sorrows. “Help yourselves to the books!”

There were books in every room. The kitchen was full of shelves of cookbooks and books on food, on the customs of dinner, everything related to the ritual of eating, the gathering, the growing, the hunting of food. Similarly the bathrooms were full of books about water, oceans, sea life, novels like
Moby Dick
and
The Old Man and the Sea
that had nautical themes;
Treasure Island
was there, and
Robinson Crusoe.
Uncle Marten seemed very methodical in this way. The living room and dining room had built-in bookshelves that reached to the high cathedral ceilings. It was impractical if you wanted something from a top shelf, but I guess Uncle Marten had already read those books a long time ago because those shelves were festooned with cobwebs.

All the books on the living room shelves were leatherbound. I asked Uncle Marten where he found so many leatherbound books, and he said he had them custom-done, books he liked or, after reading their reviews online in
The New York Times,
thought he
would
like, he ordered and had sent to a bookbinder and bound in leather before being dropped off on the island. It must have cost a fortune. This, more than the size of the house, so large for one person, underscored for me the kind of money Uncle Marten had. It was such an unnecessary thing to do with money. As if you didn't know what to do with the dollar bills that kept piling up.

I came from a house where every dollar was earmarked. Where carrot tops were saved for soup. Where you didn't buy a book you could get from the library. I didn't mind him having so much, why shouldn't he? And why shouldn't he spend it as he liked? But the difference in the way people lived interested me. There was a kind of comfort in the Baggie full of vegetable peelings for soup always in our fridge. It had my mother written all over it. That's a kind of comfort he would never know because he would never have to. There was no need for the security of the soup bag. He could afford to fly in soup from a fine restaurant if that's what he wanted. But it wouldn't be the same. On the other hand, there was probably a kind of comfort for Uncle Marten when another leatherbound book was dropped on the island. That's all those things ever were, comfort, they didn't mean more than that. Like a rug being pulled from beneath us, Jocelyn's and my familiar comforts were gone. I wondered if someday I would regard the arrival of a new leatherbound book with the contentment of continuity. If it would ever be
my
life. Even if it was, it would never be my life as it had been before, believing that all rested solidly in permanence. Not knowing that everything built could be unbuilt in the blink of an eye.

 

MARTEN KNOCKERS

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG TIME
since I thought about anyone on earth being connected to me, and so when I heard that my brothers were dead and I was responsible for two girls it hardly seemed possible. Who were they and why would they suddenly be appearing on my doorstep? It was like having cats drop down from the sky along with the rain. It was familiar ordinary things behaving in unexpected ways. They weren't there and then they suddenly were, and none of it made any sense really. I didn't know what to do with living things suddenly
appearing.
Oh well, I thought, I'll just move over and give them a couple of rooms. I had, fortunately, quite a lot of rooms. I hoped they liked books. I had a lot of those, too. I couldn't really think of much else I had to offer them, but perhaps they wouldn't require much. Cats didn't. My roommate in college had a cat, and as I recall all it required was a bit of water and some dry cat food. Of course, I knew better than to give the girls cat food. I didn't mean that literally. And I supposed they would leave me alone to continue working. That was the crucial thing.

As soon as I made my fortune and quit being a stockbroker, I built myself a large Victorian-style mansion and filled it with books because I couldn't wait to go back to what I liked best, reading and studying and
this
time without the kind of nonsense you got at a university. I'd really had enough of all that when I was going for my degrees. You'd think it would be about knowledge at a university, but it isn't. It's about all kinds of other things that are, I suppose, what make up most people's lives. I saw that if I got a university job, my life as a professor would be full of things like acquiring a university wife or, worse, another professor as a spouse, someone who would always tell me I was saying the wrong thing, and having to go to endless parties with other professors and pretend to be interested in their self-interested pursuits and listen to their dull prattle and eat shrimp balls and iffy homemade sushi made by someone in, as I recalled from attending university functions, khakis and Birkenstocks. You always knew when you were at a party because the professors switched from blue jeans to khakis. As a graduate student I did not have to worry about clothes protocol, but if I became a professor I
would
have to and I was sure I would forget to change into my khakis and arrive in blue jeans and become a social pariah. And
this
is what I would worry about. Not undiscovered knowledge—but pants. I would spend endless hours worried about my pants. I decided I'd rather make a heaping mound of money and worry about what I liked. But I was aware, of course, of the disappointment the family, what was left of it, felt when after what had appeared to be a promising blossoming into respectability and normalcy, I returned to my shameful oddness.