Читать книгу Stella Maris - Michael Carroll - Страница 10

Stella Maris, Star of the Sea

(to Giuseppe Gullo)

KAREN HAD DIED on the trip down from Ohio. The heart: something they had known about for a while. She’d even sing jokily about it during rare drunken moments: “Oh, I’ve got a hole in my heart, / and that’s a mighty bad place to start!”

They were over the Gulf. They’d connected in Charlotte from Cleveland—with two hours to go before the Florida leg—and they’d enjoyed barbecue and beer, and there was always great felicity between them, even after fifty years, especially after fifty years.

Dale had smoked until forty and drunk, on and off—and still he checked out in his annual physicals, was only on statins, and popped a beta blocker for his blood pressure but was otherwise hale at seventy-five. The dick still worked. That was one more pill. Only three pills a day and a baby aspirin, and he could do forty-five minutes of cardio three times a week and barely got winded. And all of that sweat and later the muscle-burn in his legs felt good. Satisfying. Rewarding.

Karen had not been so lucky. The atrial septal defect had been discovered late and so her cardiologist had warned her of the risks of surgery. Otherwise, she’d always seemed healthy. They’d never had kids. A little partnership was what they’d had. Dale had been in sales for Graustark Systems and Karen had volunteered to teach reading. For five-plus decades the two had taken a snug, comfortable voyage together toward the horizon, a cozy procession of trips and luxuries, high-quality durable possessions, and a fat, remunerative portfolio.

They were over the Gulf and, unusually, she didn’t have a book with her. Earlier, they’d looked up from their phones—Karen would tirelessly keep up with their nephews and nieces—then, seeing the boarding call for their flight on the overhead screen, they’d thrown down money (Dale preferred to use cash) and hurried out of the roped-in dining area, laughing at first as they sprinted through the terminal to the nearby gate. Then she laughed less, while still in the mode of giddiness she got into whenever they were headed to Key West.

They hadn’t been too late to board but Dale noticed a hectic shift in her breathing. They were about to step into the Jetway when a concerned, fretting gate agent invited her to sit in the lounge and collect herself. Then, when Karen got up, there was a little glazy craziness in her eyes, a bit of confusion as Karen dug around in her pockets and purse for her boarding pass. An unsteadiness, a confusion, the uncertainty of it tore quickly at him, pity having always produced in Dale the deepest affection. And he’d watched with a perplexing sweetness.

It passed. The plane left on time. To avoid what the pilot called “some weather over the Atlantic,” they were rerouted over the Gulf. Karen was seated next to a window in business class, and it was her last glimpse of the famously intermingled emerald and azure: her words: “That’s what it is,” she’d said, and he took her hand, and he was almost crying even though she was better already and for all he knew, and trusted, it was just an episode caused by his not watching the time. What a jerk. He’d nearly killed her; no, he was grateful for another chance to be with her on earth. And when he’d woken up from his nap, she was staring at the ceiling.

KAREN’S LATE-LIFE revival (renaissance, as their friend Lyle had called it) came shortly after her first stroke—when they’d discovered the hole in her heart. Neither she nor Dale fished. Karen had hated West Palm Beach, Sanibel Island, Captiva. She had nearly liked St. Augustine except that they didn’t play golf or tennis. Recreationally, Karen only liked smart talk, about books and things. She had had worlds inside her, great silent continents. She was the smartest person Dale had ever met, but she’d been raised Christian Scientist and had always avoided doctors.

He’d loved her, respected her, and no one was dearer to him, though secretly he’d wished for a young man to rival if not take the place of her. Instead of being able to give her the great passion of her lifetime, he’d given her everything else. So they’d traveled. Eaten well. Massaged each other’s feet. Talked together into the latest hours.

And Hilton Head had been doubly cold—socially and climate-wise—in January, and good-bye Cracker South. He wasn’t a raving liberal, but really, these Trumpy-Heads.

Something about the Trumpers you saw getting off the cruise ships here and doing the Duval Street crawl reminded him, this year, of their deceased friend Lyle, the folksy B.S.

“When did I last dare to visit Sugar Top Ridge?” a typical Lyle Pickett Roche novel began.

Dale could hear Lyle’s genteel, gasped drawl whenever he’d share new work, a precise verbal prance that kept Karen enraptured, urging her to the edge of her chair as he read from his manually typed pages. He held up one starchy 100 percent linen sheet at a time close to his face and you saw the pinholes of light where he’d hammered the punctuation keys.

They’d met Lyle at a cocktail party given by the first literary seminar Karen had attended in the middle of a very late-midlife crisis. She’d get up early in the condo time share and leave Dale in bed, bike downtown, and attend dozens of speeches and panels. In the evening, there were parties and buffets (the registration fees were steep), and they’d dress in country club casual and Dale would hang back and watch Karen approach the featured authors, and soon he’d see her from across a brick patio laughing, holding a wine glass up to her shoulder, rotating it lightly against her palm.

And yes, Karen had blossomed a little. Dale was full of admiration as he looked around the venue, the Eastern European cater waiters so hot. He would not phrase this the way Lyle might, even though they were both gay. Lyle would have called them delicious and delectable, scrumptious, and Lyle indeed had done so later when they were all sitting together in his pretty wood-frame house and it was just the three of them and Karen had come suddenly, infectiously alive, completely snockered as Lyle camped. That was the exact conversational style Karen had responded so happily to. Dale wondered if Karen would almost have preferred Dale vamp it up every once in a while. But during the days while Karen was out, Dale masturbated thinking of the Eastern Europeans and some of the out men he saw holding hands on Duval Street. Now some of the younger, sissier ones were suddenly gorgeous, and this was Dale’s own renaissance.

He had thought of men and boys his whole life, but down here was suddenly able to imagine using the word beauty for a male, not just for a little boy wheeling about in the living room for his mother and her guests. He liked the ones just leaving their boyhoods. He liked looking at their mouths, the curved-up corners where the upper lip overlapped in delicate flap-like fashion, just so, just slightly protuberant, the lower lip. He liked a little femininity but not always. He liked all of this with broad shoulders, raw flared hips and a big prominent ass. And he was afraid of these boys and shy around them as a younger Karen had been around boys when he’d first met her, even though she was four years older than Dale. He liked the wide chest he would’ve had to lift weights to get. And yet now the timid narrow chests were cute. He thought he didn’t like the ethnics so much, the darker ones, although in his mind Jewish and Eastern European were suitably exotic. He knew he was still, and always would be, from the fifties. Once, his most imaginable taboo had happened. That time, a slight, pretty blond had taken a hundred dollars for drink money and let him watch his dark Dominican boyfriend undress, fellate, lick the ass of, and fuck him, while Dale watched, and was mesmerized, and knew secrets about himself. Seven years ago.

Once Karen had told Lyle that in West Virginia her great-aunt had self-published several poetry books eons ago—and had had something of a following in that neck of the Appalachians: “My Aunt Poppy?” Karen would remind him. “From Wheeling?”

Aunt Poppy was single all her life. For a while all Dale had thought was: that lesbian.

He’d grown up a good deal since then. Now he hoped Aunt Poppy had been gay.

The maybe-lesbianism now seemed more interesting than Aunt Poppy’s poetry thing.

But once with Dale, Lyle had treated this revelation about Aunt Poppy’s literary identity as though it were the most astonishing fact of both their existences, precious cargo for Dale to freight carefully in his mind—foretelling great potential in Karen’s own personal life trajectory. Karen had never mentioned to Dale any literary ambitions of her own, only her love of reading.

He knew of secrets no one else did, not even Lyle. Her dread of doctors, her fear that having kids would destroy/kill her. (She’d maintained a slender, boyish figure, never adding more than a pound or two to it.) When they’d met she was a part-time student taking night classes at a girls’ college, working as a secretary in the daytime. It had taken her a year into their dating to tell him she’d lied about her age originally. Dale was an OSU junior dating a shy twenty-five-year-old. To save money while still working, she’d brushed her teeth with baking soda. There was no reason to be delicate or sentimental about Karen—only adoring, singing chesty praise, if he could do this without breaking up now.

“We must be cautious, proceeding with all manner of wisdom, keen, gravely argus-eyed! We must not treat Karen as some mere housewife, and yet we must be wise!”

As far as Dale could tell, Lyle no longer got laid.

A very long time ago, Lyle’s tendency toward hyper-ventilative melodrama had made him famous. He was that thing that could give you notoriety, “a Sawth’n authah.”

For years Karen and Dale had exchanged birthday and holiday cards with Lyle.

“He’ll outlive us both,” Karen said, but Lyle had died in bed alone, a massive stroke.

Dale had hoped that he would die first, leaving Karen to enjoy Lyle’s attentions.

It was a beautiful town, Key West, the last bastion, the place of the just-misfits.

He would have pushed on, but Karen would never have heard of it. Her love of the place had been passionate enough for them both, until he himself had been infected.

That was it, wasn’t it? Karen all along, seducing Dale, in her way?

FOR THE LAST several years he’d gotten them into a sweet dilly of a house on Amelia, three quiet, safe blocks off the main drag of Duval, gingerbread trim, tight coat of bright white paint, bougainvillea of magenta and violet and snow climbing over the picket; palms and a massive, shady gumbo-limbo to guard their room from its southern exposure; eyebrow windows, wraparound porch, a nickle-dull tin roof, a fully modern kitchen so they could have breakfast quietly, and where they could make a simple fish dinner or else pour their drinks and take them to the veranda. Karen loved the word veranda, once announcing over a spiked punch, “Veranda, a Portuguese word coming only into usage during colonialism.”

One year the literary seminar had done colonial literature—and she’d followed that word veranda from the East Indies to the Caribbean, from every satisfyingly crumbly, lusty port to the next in literature, stopping deliciously, and unguiltily, in some part of Asia that Dale knew absolutely nothing about in order to inhale, for example, all of Somerset Maugham: “A poofter, you know.”

She’d pronounced poofter as they’d first heard it together in Edinburgh, a weird word. A cute one, suitably prissy. A word they’d end up sharing. And then she’d laughed, high on books. High on fantasy. High on possibilities. A sensation rejecting quotidian disappointments. She’d spill her excitements out across the veranda floorboards, upsetting her drink, laughing.

It was their second life, but it was Dale’s new life, and he was grateful for himself, and he was grateful to her for taking them there and for having seen it and for projecting ahead for them.

Not a dumb partner but his greater self, the definition, practically, of better half.

HE WAS ALONE in the house now. He wandered its rooms. He brought home a few bottles of wine and a fifth of rum and a quart of vodka. Dale did a lot of musing, but only when he drank. He wandered the town but avoided their old lunch spots. Dale didn’t want pity. Dale didn’t think he could bear it; he was in that curious stage of grief where he wanted to believe Karen might come back from Duval Street or any of the shops where she bought fish or flowers, whatever place she had relied on to create their long final act together: a last staging he’d imagined himself exiting before Karen. Dale talked to Karen, getting intoxicated. He sat on the back veranda with a glass and his bottle and the ice bucket, where no one could stop and offer condolences to him, or ask about Karen, or ask him questions, or just be friendly—kindness being the most intolerable emotional reaction, coming from the locals or anybody else.