Whatever Lola Wants (12 page)

He let go of her, grabbed her briefcase, unclasped it, reached in, pulled out a bottle that looked nearly full. “This condition.”

She snatched it back. “It's none of your business.” She shoved it into the case again. “And I'm driving.” She glared at him.

“Okay,” he said. “Drive. Kill yourself. Just don't take anybody with you.”

She slammed the door.

Johnnie wished, so much, she wouldn't do this. Had she been drinking since she woke up? His father called it her bottled escape. Soon after, in the middle of the academic year, Johnnie was sent to boarding school.

Even in those
days Beth still insisted that her work came first, second, third. She fought for her time. And she drank to leave Johnnie's father behind, as he had left her. When she came to visit Johnnie at school, at those times she wouldn't be drinking. Or only a little. One day, as they walked along the stream at the edge of the campus grounds, he forced himself to ask, “Why are you and Father so angry with each other?”

“Oh dear,” she said.

He waited. They walked.

“How can I say this, Johnnie?” She stopped, and leaned against a tree.

He folded his arms and watched her. Her face had many hard lines now. On her cheeks and by her eyes, on her temples.

“I think, in a shared life you've got to be able to have—if not love, at least respect.”

“You and Father don't respect each other, do you?”

She shook her head. “Respect when it's regularly denied can't ever be reclaimed.”

The absolute sense of
not ever
seared into Johnnie's brain. Everything she said he found complicated, painfully so. Others saw his father as an important man, a wise man, a man who dined at the White House with the president, who received national and international awards, who owned a sixty-four-foot yacht he rarely sailed and had taken Johnnie on only once.

He was told years later that the happiest day in his mother's life had come not on winning the Philipis Prize at age twenty-three nor the Marcus Attenborough Award for Achievement in Biology, the most yearned-for accolade by scientists under thirty-five, but at being told her husband's mistress had overdosed and was dead.

Only twice during
his boarding school time did his father visit. The first time, the annual and compulsory meeting with parents, Joe Cochan substituting for Beth, unavailable, her first hospitalization. Joe and John spoke little. The second, in John's last year of school, on a sunny spring afternoon, they drove to a pond north of the school, to walk, for some warm air, perhaps to talk. There was little conversation. Even when John asked, “Will Mother ever get better?”

Joe shook his head, as much a statement of not knowing as a no.

“Father? What really is wrong with her? I mean, why does she drink?”

Again that shake of Joe's head. “I can only say, her work. Her failure in her work.”

When John was younger he'd assumed the cell-transforming compounds she'd long experimented with had attacked her mind. In a recurring nightmare the chemicals appeared as thin brimstone fumes breathed out by giant spiders, fumes that befouled the atmosphere in his mother's laboratory. In another the chemicals were tiny lines of gasses carried by bright red earwigs hiding in his mother's hair while she worked, and as she slept in her bed they crawled into her ear and excreted their gasses directly into his mother's brain. Often he woke screaming.

•

“I'm glad I don't remember things,” said Lola. “I'm glad my brain isn't full of memories.”

I nodded. “But not everything back then is horrible.”

“Yeah, I know. And you're going to prove it to me.”

Her voice had taken on a new irked tone. And I thought Gods were supposed to bask in ongoing pleasure. Ha! I figured I'd better say something about that. “If you want, I can quit. It's your story. You can tell me to stop.”

She looked at me, her forehead furrowed. “Stop? Why?”

“I think maybe I'm upsetting you.”

“No. Don't stop.”

“You sure?”

She slid over closer to me. “Course I'm sure. If you don't go on, I'll never find out what happened, what's gonna happen to them all.” She lay her hand on my arm. “Please.”

A god with a paradoxical nature. I decided I was liking it a lot more than finding it off-putting. I stared down over the edge of cloud and searched. This looking back business, trying to find their memories, wasn't that simple. Snatches of memories, wisps. But no story. I shook my head. I made myself come closer in time. Okay: there, and maybe there.

“What?”

“I can't find any memories of note till six years later. 1974.”

She smiled, an eager glance now taking her face. “Good. Who?”

•

3. (1974)

C.C. had nowhere he could
call home. His apartment wasn't a home. Now with Thea gone, it could never become one.

He tossed the gym bag onto the back seat of the old Dodge, got in behind the wheel, and willed the car to start. He turned the key, a wheeze, couple of grunts, and the motor did turn over. He stared absently through the windshield, sort of at the hood, sort of at the occasional flakes of snow dropping heavily onto it. Parts of the engine down under the hood were as rusted out as the bottom of the driver-side door but the old girl did run. Advantage of keeping a heap like this in the city, nobody's tempted to steal it. Its hubcaps had disappeared a long time ago.

He gave the engine a minute to warm up. In the side mirror he saw blue smoke belching out the tailpipe. Hey, this was New York, that's what cars did in New York. The clock on the dash said 8:19. Late. Thea's early morning announcement had kept him up from half past three on, no way now to beat the rush hour traffic. True, he'd be heading out of the city. Except in the city there's traffic everywhere, always, no escape.

Goddamn Thea. Goddamn snow. More than two hundred goddamn miles to Boston. With a speedy car, dry roads, no problem. But since his presence there would be a surprise, if he didn't make it, Bobbie would never know he tried. But damn, the whole event was a big deal for Bobbie. Even if she scoffed at it. Ricardo had told C.C. she was downplaying it but both of them—the three of them—knew: a top-notch achievement.

He'd had enough coffee, he wouldn't fall asleep. How could Thea have blasted him like that? In the middle of the night? Oh, he knew how, and why. Because Thea was a bitch, a manipulator. And very sexy. Could be any of those, separately or in various combos, at will.

By getting out of the dorms in the fall, taking the apartment on 115th Street, he thought he'd set himself up a home of a kind. The royalties from his father's books even now covered the rent. In that sense it was his home. Then Thea moved in. Okay, he'd invited her, did she want to share his apartment, his life, and of course she said nothing would please her more and then went about not sharing but bending the place into her shape, her style, her mood. Thea was impressive, he admitted this. But to have dumped all her shit on him five hours ago just before he had to leave— Except that was pure Thea.

He'd sold the house in Median, he and Bobbie, early in the summer after his first year at Columbia. He helped fix it up to raise the asking price. Bobbie handled the sale. Gramma had died blessedly quickly, as her friends repeated, after the liver cancer diagnosis the winter before, seven weeks from finding out to the funeral. It could have been there for years, her doctor said, no one knew, no pain until close to the end. Then the morphine, and the second day of C.C. home for spring break she slid away. At least he'd had the chance to see her that one more time. C.C. and Bobbie had mourned with each other, Bobbie actually going to the synagogue because she knew her mother would have been pleased, or at least relieved. Rabbi Grossman delivered a fine eulogy for Barbara Feyerlicht. Even C.C. thought so.

Julie, also home, had come by the house to offer condolences. She was more beautiful than he'd ever seen her but she stayed only a few minutes, talking mainly with Bobbie. At the funeral she sat with Bobbie and him. She'd never been to a synagogue before. He appreciated her deciding to be at his side. First step in coming together again? After the service he asked her if he could visit her at her parents' house, they could talk, figure where each of them— No, she interrupted him, not a good idea, they each had become different people, let's leave it at that. He tried to argue, to explain, to apologize. No, no reprieve. She left. He watched her go. It hurt too much to look away.

Bobbie had tried to make her apartment in Somerville into a home for C.C. He appreciated this. But it could never become more than a base, a resting place at best. She gave him a room where he could leave his things—books, memory bits and pieces from Gramma's house, seasonal clothes—but it remained for him an abstract place.

The summer after his first year he found a Parks and Playgrounds job in Cambridge, and a pizza delivery job in Boston, and slept in the Somerville apartment; usually, anyway. Most of his non-work time was given over to the anti-Vietnam War movement, to participating in the battle against Nixon's version of American madness. His second summer his friend, friend only, Julie suggested they go west together, plant trees in British Columbia, good money in that. And maybe, maybe, out there in the wilderness— In the end Julie didn't go, though C.C. had committed himself. It was an inordinately dry summer. Instead of planting trees he ended up saving trees, fighting forest fires, reducing disasters, sweating soot off face and arms. The spring of his third year he decided to cancel school for a while. He gave his time in the struggle to defeat Nixon, whatever that took. For fifteen months he worked with a series of organizations devoted to the cause. Met some decent conservatives, and some smart radicals. Including Thea.

He stepped on the clutch, slipped into first gear, engaged, turned the wheel hard, pulled around the car in front, and headed west, then north. Checked out the Drive entry. Decided no, it looked crowded as usual. He'd stay on city streets a while longer. He wasn't a New Yorker yet, figured he'd likely never be, but he had learned some of the traffic patterns. Which was all he needed, only this last semester to finish, double major in geography and government, then he was gone. To where, he didn't know. Not likely a city. The time he'd enjoyed most was the summer out west, living in a tent colony for the short time he planted firs and cedar, then just sleeping on the ground, little spurts of rest in lulls as the forest burned.

No, Bobbie's apartment wasn't a home for him. But it had become Bobbie's home. And increasingly Ricardo's. Ricardo was good for Bobbie. The second best thing that ever happened to her, she said. The first? Getting to be big sister to C.C. Who hoped she stressed it the other way around to Ricardo; C.C. liked Ricardo, a lot. In truth, Bobbie made it clear, the apartment was her first real home. She'd lived with Gramma in the Median house where she'd grown up but after her nine months in San Francisco—a rented room, kitchenette, tiny bathroom—her mother's home never became a home for her, couldn't have.

Why did she live in her mother's house? When C.C. had first asked her she'd said, “Because it's free. I can do whatever I want here in Median. I don't have to worry about a roof over my head. A part-time job and I can pay more than my share of food and heat and help Gramma with insurance and taxes. And I can write my poetry.”

Later when he asked she said, “So I can raise you in a small town, keep you out of trouble. Spend time with you. Watch you grow up. And that's kinda neat.”

Around the time he began dating Julie he discovered a third reason, saw it in the past over his shoulder, and was relieved he'd not recognized it back then. When he was eleven-twelve-thirteen, more often than he'd liked, she'd go away, overnight, a weekend, sometimes a week or two. Gramma looked after him then. Sometimes spoiled him. But Gramma wasn't Bobbie. Bobbie took complete interest in whatever he thought, needed, did. Which was great then, a bit embarrassing now. Because he never took the same complete interest in Bobbie, what she wanted, what happened in her life beyond him, beyond the house. She went away. He might have asked her a few times where she'd gone but had no real interest in any details, just glad she'd come back. Only much later did he understand she had to have a real piece of life to herself. And as far as he knew Gramma had never asked Bobbie where she'd been, what she'd done. That seemed okay between the two of them. So there'd never been a reason for him to ask.

He eased onto the Drive north of George Washington Bridge. Three-quarters of the cars, buses, and trucks from Jersey turned south toward midtown so traffic northward flowed smoothly. The snow had thickened. Worse than the grayish-white stuff coming down was the splashed-up sludge from tires in front of him, next to him. At least he'd replaced the wipers back in December and filled the windshield spray reservoir last week. With his fingers he searched the radio for some listenable music and found the Beatles singing “Eleanor Rigby.” The song ended and the
DJ
reminded his listeners how lucky they were to be tuned in, it'd be an all-Beatles show till noon. Okay, C.C. could handle that. Though he'd lose the station well before then.

Ricardo was the greatest Beatles fan in the world; anyway, that's how he described himself. Long ago, in Santiago, he'd learned his English from pop songs. He'd cut his syntax teeth on Elvis, got his grammar toilet trained by the Stones, and conjugated his virginity with John, George, Paul, and Ringo. From them he got all the language background he needed, he liked to say, to come up to the
US
, get a brilliant doctorate in biology with expertise in freshwater invertebrates, go back home and become full professor of biology by thirty-four. Not enough genius, his wife, Natalia, had taunted him, to keep him down under the water staring at fishes with his mouth shut. What kind of honored scientist shoots his mouth off daily at campus rallies and civic forums in support of Allende and those Communists? At last, with Allende elected democratically and popularly, Ricardo figured he could take a one-year leave from Valparaiso and accept the long-offered professorship at Boston University. Natalia would not join him, their sons were still at the lyceum, the city, in fact the whole country, was becoming increasingly dangerous with that Communist in power, how could Ricardo even think of going to the
US
right now? Ricardo had wanted the boys to spend a couple of semesters in an American school, let them see how Chile was viewed from outside the country, improve their English. Natalia said no no no. Ricardo left anyway, his main reason Natalia herself. This much Bobbie, then Ricardo himself, had told C.C.