Shelter in Place (32 page)

There was little difference except the crowd and the urn and the presence of my mother, who sat back by the entrance flanked by two guards. It was the first time in many years that I'd seen her in sunlight. She was so small there between those massive men, beneath that vaulted ceiling, with the great ocean and giant sky outside. For such a long time I had seen her always in that terrible visit room, in that sickening fluorescent light where the perspective was always the same—woman to chair, woman to table, woman to wall, woman to guard.

She kept her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed. She watched the ocean as if she were trying to find some specific object out on the water.

Her skin was pale, so fine. There was so little fat on her body. So little muscle. I thought of her filters. I thought, they must be so much worse than mine.

There was nothing to defend her from the blitzing light, the roar of all those people pouring in, whispering and shifting in their seats, the waves, the creaking building, the wind pushing against the glass. I saw it all driving into her, passing through her rice paper skin, swirling behind her eyes, swelling and twisting in her chest.

I wanted to protect her. Wrap her in a blanket. Cover her eyes with dark glasses.

I wanted to say, I know what it means when the filters fail. I understand. But you sink or swim, I wanted to say, Mom, you fight or you die.

Though now, I have to allow for the possibility that I was wrong, have been wrong all this time. Perhaps my mother knew nothing of tar and filters and all the rest of that bullshit.

Perhaps my insistence on some magical correlation between us is only wishful, an invention without evidence. Perhaps in the end there is no shared beast, no common fog.

S
ome of them watched the vicious killer in the back of the meetinghouse, the mad widow at her husband's funeral.

It was difficult for me not to tear their pews from the ground, difficult not to fling those tourists through that glass. But Tess squeezed my hand, she kept me still. As always, she knew before I did. She knew and I stayed where I was.

Someone rang a bell.

Then we were all quiet.

We waited and we listened for God.

After a while, I stood. I had to break my hand away from her.

I didn't see it, but I know she dropped her head in fear, in fatigue.

I said that my father had found a home first in White Pine, and then at the meetinghouse. I said that he had found friendship and peace in both places and I believed he had been happy when he died. I said that he had been the strongest, most courageous, kindest man I'd ever known.

I can't remember what else. I'm sure there was more, but believe me, it was inadequate.

I was just trying to fill the room with words.

I looked at my mother, who smiled at me in a way I hadn't seen for many years. What was it? Pride? Certainty? Maybe it was simple tenderness. Maybe it was love that I saw.

Seymour gave me a nod. A greeting, but also, I thought, I hoped, a gesture of approval and encouragement. He was sitting toward the back, not far from my mother. He was heavier, softer. He'd lost a lot of hair. There were none of those frightening angles left in his face.

I saw a young woman, too. She was the right age, had the right eyes. She seemed to be alone. She could have been Anna. Might have been.

Whoever she was, when the service ended, she was gone.

We walked down to the beach. Me and Hank and Tess and my mother and the two stony guards who allowed her to stand in the sunshine with her wrists unbound.

They allowed her to bend at the waist and remove her shoes and socks.

The tide was high and the wind was blowing strong offshore. I took the top off the urn and shook the ashes free. They blew across the sand and scattered and dissolved over the water.

That was it, the end of my father's funeral, the end of my father's body.

My mother was so bright in the sun. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a white sweatshirt. They'd run a piece of webbing through the belt loops and tied it tight with a tidy bow knot. I try to imagine what it must have been for her, after nearly nineteen years locked away, to smell the ocean, to feel the cold sand against her bare feet, the wind on her body, the warm light. To be, all of a sudden, in one fail
 
swoop, in the center of the whole whirling world.

She closed her eyes and cried. I don't know if it was for my father, or because she was overcome by sensation, or because she wasn't free. She began to walk toward the water, but the guards held her back. Maybe they were afraid she'd drown herself.

Tess said, “Come on, let her feel it, goddamn it, you assholes.”

But one of them was already kneeling at my mother's feet, slipping her shoes on, while the other was closing the cuffs.

We followed those three up past the promenade to the prison van. And then they drove her away.

In the evening we had dinner with Hank. We invited Seymour, but he didn't come. I don't remember much else. Not in terms of event, or language.

I do remember the physical world, but really, how many more descriptions of the vast ocean and blue sky can you possibly endure?

W
e returned to Seattle. We went on living. The odd thing is that I recall so little of that time. It is an indistinct shape, a hum of years.

We owned a bar, we bought another. Both thrived. We worked hard. We were making more money than either of us had ever imagined. We were good at what we did. We provided health insurance. We hired more women than men. We paid a wage better than any bar in the city. There was no miniskirt obligation. We had no tolerance for assholes. We had good bouncers, though none better than Seymour Strout.

We were always on patrol.

We ran our empire the way we wished to run the world.

And that, I'm afraid, was the sum total of our activism.

These the remnants of our war.

Time passes. It smells mostly of beer and whiskey and searing meat. It is a smear of sensation. It all blends.

It does not have the sharp edges of our earlier lives.

On a Sunday morning, our sacred day of rest, I brought Tess breakfast in bed. I put a ring in the center of a pat of butter. I pretended to read the paper. I heard her knife against the metal.

I said, “Tess Wolff will you marry me?”

She said, “Joe, Joey, Joseph, it would be my honor. Yes.”

She put the ring in her mouth, sucked it clean, let it fall from her tongue into my palm, and I slid it onto her finger. We spilled our coffee, and made love and were engaged, but we never married.

The years went on. We were making our fortune.

Time was blurred. It was overwhelmed by minutiae.

Or composed of it.

W
e benefited from our fortune—of circumstance, of class, of education, of race, of our intelligences in their various and respective forms. We replaced passion with work. We replaced desire with work. We were never lazy. We bought property. We were never punished for our crime. We were savvy. We began with a little money and we went on to have more of it. We divided and filled our days. We killed our time. From the moment we abandoned our dreams of war and honor and good, there were tasks to complete. They were to do with the bars. They were to do with the people we knew, with our home, with our possessions. We took our store of time and used it to tend to the life we were constructing. We bought clothes and wore them. We saw doctors. We had our teeth polished. We bought food and we ate it. We bought a new car. We argued about its color. We took it to be repaired. When it was empty, we filled it with gas. We washed its body, its windows. We liked to see it shine. We liked to see the needle on full. We bought so many objects. Thousands and thousands and thousands of objects. We talked about them and celebrated them and argued over them. We arranged them in our minds and on our shelves. We put numbers in columns. We put art in frames and hung those frames on our walls, in our bars. We gave gifts. We made donations and called them acts of principle. We cleaned our skin. We gave things away. We bought new things. We gambled and won. There were periods of satisfaction, and of pleasure. There were periods of frustration and of exhaustion. The tar came and went. As did Tess's patience.

W
hat remained of those lost days of fire were books. We continued to read. We said to each other, “This is good, this is extraordinary, you should read this.” We said, “This is very bad, what a faker, what a fraud.”

It's easy for me to recall those years. Even if they blend. Even if I confuse the shops, the streets, the shelves, the authors, the weather, the months, the years, the lines we loved.

Even if I confuse poems for prose, prose for lyrics.

Tess Wolff hidden away in a good corner of one bookstore or another, the rain beating down outside as always. I'm bringing her something from some other section, a book I wonder if she's read, or one I think she should, or a line I want her to see. I'm coming through the store in a hurry.

“Wait,” she says, holding her hand out to me. “Come here,” she says.

I come and take it and she whispers.

Sometimes the line, sometimes the whole poem.

Tess, I am here in the present praying and you are out there in the past whispering:

 

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through

your limbs

that you love what you are.

 

I have her book on the table. I have all her brackets and stars. I do not remember when she found it. Or where. There is just the poem and a building which may no longer exist.

There are lines at the corners of her eyes. She has lost something in her cheeks. Her skin appears thinner, drawn tighter over her bones.

She is no longer young.

That's all it is.

Just that she is no longer young when I find her tucked in, secreted away.

She says, “Here, come here.”  

She whispers.

She hated loud people.

“Will you please shut the fuck up, please,” she said to a man chattering to his wife. Not
said
. I should say,
asked him
. “Will you?” As if she truly wanted to know the answer, so that she could decide whether to stay or go.

The man and his wife stared. Affronted. And then left.

You see? It wasn't that she'd gone totally cold. It wasn't that she was dead. She was still a fighter. There was still some shit she would not eat. It's just that it wasn't the same. It's just that she was unhappy the way people are when they fail so completely to do what they expected they would.

You might say, yes, like anyone, like every single one.

But no, I cannot see it the same. It was different with her. It was more. It was worse.

The afternoon that Tess found this poem, after she whispered those lines, it was toward the end of our life in Seattle.

Yes, I'm certain of it.

And after she'd finished reading, she looked at me, shook her head and said, “But I don't, Joe. Goddamn it, I don't.”

O
nce, years ago on a city bus in Seattle, a lunatic woman turned to me and whispered right into my ear, “You want to know what it's like? It's like a furnace between your legs. All your life it's burning, burning, and then, snap, it goes out. So now you know, asshole.”

I've never forgotten it. Her breath on my ear.

A thing possesses you and then it's gone. There's so much pain in that desertion. It's not, as you get older, that you miss your young body, your smooth skin, your strong back, your lean legs.

It's that you miss desire.

Better to be a hideous man on fire than a handsome man drowning.

What am I saying? That it's difficult for all of us—growing older, time, all the rest. But for Tess it is different. It is worse.

Truth be told, I have found the feeling of desire slipping away to be a relief. When I was young it was tyrannical. I wanted everything always. A generic and scorching desire for more. Sex above all. But later, when it subsided, that blazing furnace beneath my skirts, I was grateful. I was at peace.

All I want to say is that while it's difficult for any one of us, for Tess it was harder, it was unbearable.

And I understand.

Because of my bad filters. Because of the way I am inundated by sound and light, I believe I know what it was for a thing to hurt more than it should. For it to overwhelm and submerge and drown a person. And because I know, and because I love her as I do, I am tolerant in ways many others could not be. Or so I insist, so I have convinced myself.

Listen, Tess is a pain in the ass. Let us not pretend she is otherwise. Petulant, impatient, selfish, erratic, arrogant, unhappy. For all my shifting selves, my precious longing, my pathetic nostalgia, let me please say, Tess was a terrible pain in the ass, and it would have been so much simpler, so much easier to go off in search of someone else.

But it wasn't what I wanted. Never. It wasn't that I was
sticking it out
, either. I want no prize for
hanging in there
.

It's just that in spite of it all, I loved her.

It's just that I do.

I
t was six years between leaving White Pine and seeing my father again. Six years to the day, and a year before his death, when he appeared in the afternoon. He knew a bar's drowsy hours of calm—after lunch, after closing—and so, with his great passion for ceremony, timed his entrance accordingly.

He is pacing the sidewalk.

He is waiting until precisely three o'clock.

He is striding through the door.

In those six years we spoke only a few times, and that was early on. Tess and I often called, but after a while he wouldn't answer and wouldn't call back.