"It"s a phase," she said to Alex when she confessed the visit. "He wants to get a taste of independence."
"He can get a bellyful of it as far as I"m concerned."
Kent had not told her where he was living, but it did not matter, because when she made her next visit she was told that he had quit. She was embarra.s.sed-she thought she caught a smirk on the face of the employee who told her that-and she did not ask where Kent had gone. She thought he would get in touch, anyway, as soon as he had settled again.
He did that, three years later. His letter was mailed in Needles, California, but he told them not to take the trouble to trace him there-he was only pa.s.sing through. Like Blanche, he said, and Alex said, Who the h.e.l.l is Blanche?
"Just a joke," said Sally. "It doesn"t matter."
Kent did not say what he was working at or where he had been or whether he had formed any connections. He did not apologize for leaving them so long without any information or ask how they were, or how his brother and sister were. Instead he wrote pages about his own life. Not the practical side of his life but what he believed he should be doing-what he was doing-with it.
"It seems so ridiculous to me," he said, "that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can"t ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness-"
"He"s on drugs," said Alex. "You can tell a mile off. His brain"s rotted with drugs."
In the middle of the night he said, "s.e.x."
Sally was lying beside him wide awake.
"What about s.e.x?"
"That"s what makes you get into that state he"s talking about. Become a something-or-other so you can earn a living. So you can pay for your steady s.e.x and the consequences. That"s not a consideration for him."
Sally said, "My, how romantic."
"Getting down to basics is never very romantic. He"s not normal, is all I"m trying to say."
Further on in the letter-or the rampage, as Alex called it-Kent had said that he had been luckier than most people in having what he called his near-death experience, which had given him an extra awareness, and for this he must be forever grateful to his father who had lifted him back into the world and his mother who had lovingly received him there.
"Perhaps in those moments I was reborn."
Alex had groaned.
"No. I won"t say it."
"Don"t," said Sally. "You don"t mean it."
"I don"t know whether I do or not."
That letter, signed with love, was the last they had heard from him.
Peter went into medicine, Savanna into law.
Sally became interested in geology, to her own surprise. One time, in a trusting mood after s.e.x, she told Alex about the islands-though not about her fantasy that Kent was now living on one or another of them. She said that she had forgotten many of the details she used to know, and that she should look all these places up in the encyclopedia where she had first got her information. Alex said that everything she wanted to know could probably be found on the Internet. Surely not something so obscure, she said, and he got her out of bed and downstairs and there in no time before her eyes was Tristan da Cunha, a green plate in the South Atlantic Ocean, with information galore. She was shocked and turned away, and Alex who was disappointed in her-no wonder-asked why.
"I don"t know. I feel now as if I"d lost it."
He said that this was no good, she needed something real to do. He had just retired from his teaching at this time and was planning to write a book. He needed an a.s.sistant and he could not call on the graduate students now as he could when he was still on the faculty. (She didn"t know if this was true or not.) She reminded him that she knew nothing about rocks, and he said never mind that, he could use her for scale, in the photographs.
So she became the small figure in black or bright clothing, contrasting with the ribbons of Silurian or Devonian rock. Or with the gneiss formed by intense compression, folded and deformed by clashes of the American and Pacific plates to make the present continent. Gradually she learned to use her eyes and apply new knowledge, till she could stand in an empty suburban street and realize that far beneath her shoes was a crater filled with rubble never to be seen, that never had been seen, because there were no eyes to see it at its creation or throughout the long history of its being made and filled and hidden and lost. Alex did such things the honor of knowing about them, the very best he could, and she admired him for that, although she knew enough not to say so. They were good friends in these last years, which she did not know were their last years, though maybe he did. He went into the hospital for an operation, taking his charts and photographs with him, and on the day he was supposed to come home he died.
This was in the summer, and that fall there was a dramatic fire in Toronto. Sally sat in front of her television watching the fire for a while. It was in a district that she knew, or used to know, in the days when it was inhabited by hippies with their tarot cards and beads and paper flowers the size of pumpkins. And for a while after that when the vegetarian restaurants were being transformed into expensive bistros and boutiques. Now a block of those nineteenth-century buildings was being wiped out, and the newsman was bemoaning this, speaking of the people who had lived above the shops in old-fashioned apartments and who had now lost their homes, and were being dragged out of harm"s way onto the street.
Not mentioning the landlords of such buildings, thought Sally, who were probably getting away with substandard wiring as well as epidemics of c.o.c.kroaches and bedbugs, not to be complained about by the deluded or fearful poor.
She sometimes felt Alex talking in her head these days, and that was surely what was happening now. She turned off the fire.
No more than ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Savanna.
"Mom. Have you got your TV on? Did you see?"
"You mean the fire? I did have it on but I turned it off."
"No. Did you see-I"m looking for him right now-I saw him not five minutes ago. Mom, it"s Kent. Now I can"t find him. But I saw him."
"Is he hurt? I"m turning it on now. Was he hurt?"
"No, he was helping. He was carrying one end of a stretcher, there was a body on it, I don"t know if it was dead or just hurt. But Kent. It was him. You could even see him limping. Have you got it on now?"
"Yes."
"Okay, I"ll calm down. I bet he went back in the building."
"But surely they wouldn"t allow-"
"He could be a doctor for all we know. Oh f.u.c.k, now they"re doing that same old guy they talked to before, his family owned some business for a hundred years-let"s hang up and just keep our eyes on the screen. He"s sure to come in range again."
He didn"t. The shots became repet.i.tive.
Savanna phoned back.
"I"m going to get to the bottom of this. I know a guy that works on the news. I can get to see that shot again, we have to find out."
Savanna had never known her brother very well-what was all the fuss about? Did her father"s death make her feel the need of family? She should marry, soon; she should have children. But she had such a stubborn streak when she set her mind on something-was it possible she would find Kent? Her father had told her when she was about ten years old that she could gnaw an idea to the bone, she ought to be a lawyer. And from then on, that was what she said she would be.
Sally was overcome by a trembling, a longing, a weariness.
It was Kent, and within a week Savanna had found out all about him. No. Change that to found out all he meant to tell her. He had been living in Toronto for years. He had often pa.s.sed the building Savanna worked in and had spotted her a couple of times on the street. Once they were nearly face-to-face at an intersection. Of course she wouldn"t have recognized him because he was wearing a kind of robe.
"A Hare Krishna?" said Sally.
"Oh, Mom, if you"re a monk it doesn"t mean you"re a Hare Krishna. Anyway he"s not that now."
"So what is he?"
"He says he lives in the present. So I said well don"t we all, nowadays, and he said no, he meant in the real present."
Where they were now, he had said, and Savanna had said, "You mean in this dump?" Because it was, the coffee shop he had asked her to meet him in was a dump.
"I see it differently," he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody"s.
"Well, that"s big of you," said Savanna, but she made a joke of it and he sort of laughed.
He said that he had seen Alex"s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He thought Alex would have liked the geological references. He had wondered if his own name would appear, included in the family, and he was rather surprised that it was there. He wondered, had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died?
Savanna said no, he wasn"t planning on dying anything like so soon. It was the rest of the family who had a conference and decided Kent"s name should be there.
"Not Dad," Kent said. "Well no."
Then he asked about Sally.
Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.
"What did you say?"
"I said you were okay, maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and not much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said tell her she can come to see me if she wants to and I said I would ask you."
Sally didn"t reply.
"You there, Mom?"
"Did he say when or where?"
"No. I"m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you"d agree right away."
"Of course I agree."
"You aren"t alarmed at coming in by yourself?"
"Don"t be silly. Was he really the man you saw in the fire?"
"He wouldn"t say yes or no. But my information is yes. He"s quite well known as it turns out in certain parts of town and by certain people."
Sally receives a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad it wasn"t the phone. She did not trust herself to hear his voice yet. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station where she should get off and he would meet her.
She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, with all sorts of people hurrying and pushing past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarra.s.sment. Dismay because of Kent"s apparent absence, and embarra.s.sment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often seemed to feel, though she would never say what they said. You"d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam, they would say. Anyplace but Ontario. Turbans and saris and dashikis were much in evidence, and Sally was all in favor of their swish and bright colors. But they weren"t being worn as foreign costumes. The wearers hadn"t just arrived here; they had got past the moving-in phase. She was in their way.
On the steps of an old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. This was no longer a bank, of course, though its name was cut in stone. She looked at the name rather than the men, whose slouching or reclining or pa.s.sed-out postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building, and the hurry of the crowd coming out of the subway.
"Mom."
One of the men on the steps came towards her in no hurry, with a slight drag of one foot, and she realized that it was Kent and waited for him.
She would almost as soon have run away. But then she saw that not all the men were filthy or hopeless looking, and that some looked at her without menace or contempt and even with a friendly amus.e.m.e.nt now that she was identified as Kent"s mother.
Kent didn"t wear a robe. He wore gray pants that were too big for him, belted in, and a T-shirt with no message on it and a very worn jacket. His hair was cut so short you could hardly see the curl. He was quite gray, with a seamed face, some missing teeth, and a very thin body that made him look older than he was.
He did not embrace her-indeed she did not expect him to-but put his hand just lightly on her back to steer her in the direction they were supposed to go.
"Do you still smoke your pipe?" she said, sniffing the air and remembering how he had taken up pipe smoking in high school.
"Pipe? Oh. No. It"s the smoke from the fire you smell. We don"t notice it anymore. I"m afraid it"ll get stronger, in the direction we"re walking."
"Are we going to go through where it was?"
"No, no. We couldn"t, even if we wanted to. They"ve got it all blocked off. Too dangerous. Some buildings will have to be taken down. Don"t worry, it"s okay where we are. A good block and a half away from the mess."
"Your apartment building?" she said, alert to the "we."
"Sort of. Yes. You"ll see."
He spoke gently, readily, yet with an effort, like someone speaking, as a courtesy, in a foreign language. And he stooped a little, to make sure she heard him. The special effort, the slight labor involved in speaking to her, as if making a scrupulous translation, seemed something she was meant to notice.
The cost.
As they stepped off a curb he brushed her arm-perhaps he had stumbled a little-and he said, "Excuse me." And she thought he gave the least shiver.
AIDS. Why had that never occurred to her before?
"No," he said, though she had certainly not spoken aloud. "I"m quite well at present. I"m not HIV positive or anything like that. I contracted malaria years ago, but it"s under control. I may be a bit run-down at present but nothing to worry about. We turn here, we"re right in this block."
"We" again.
"I"m not psychic," he said. "I just figured out something that Savanna was trying to get at and I thought I"d put you at rest. Here we are then."
It was one of those houses whose front doors open only a few steps from the sidewalk.
"I"m celibate, actually," he said, holding open the door.
A piece of cardboard was tacked up where one of its panes should be.
The floorboards were bare and creaked underfoot. The smell was complicated, all-pervasive. The street smell of smoke had got in here, of course, but it was mixed with smells of ancient cooking, burnt coffee, toilets, sickness, decay.
"Though "celibate" might be the wrong word. That sounds as if there"s something to do with willpower. I guess I should have said "neuter." I don"t think of it as an achievement. It isn"t."
He was leading her around the stairs and into the kitchen. And there a gigantic woman stood with her back to them, stirring something on the stove.
Kent said, "Hi, Marnie. This is my mom. Can you say h.e.l.lo to my mom?"
Sally noticed a change in his voice. A relaxation, honesty, perhaps a respect, different from the forced lightness he managed with her.
She said, "h.e.l.lo, Marnie," and the woman half turned, showing a squeezed doll"s face in a loaf of flesh but not focusing her eyes.
"Marnie is our cook this week," said Kent. "Smells okay, Marnie."
To his mother he said, "We"ll go and sit in my sanctum, shall we?" and led the way down a couple of steps and along a back hall. It was hard to move there because of the stacks of newspapers, flyers, magazines neatly tied.
"Got to get these out of here," Kent said. "I told Steve this morning. Fire hazard. Jeez, I used to just say that. Now I know what it means."