Sun House, page 54
There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.
—Wisława Szymborska
IN THE THIRD week of August, while TJ McGraff was exploring sixteen carefully chosen Italian provinces on a long-planned food research trip, his interim boss and restaurant business factotum, Risa, checked his itinerary, then sent him this emergency fax:
Mother-Brother,
I’m writing for a hard reason. A crisis just pulled me off the Rasta Pasta to Tiny Joseph’s conversion, which has been going so well we’re down to finish work. But it’s a question when I’ll be able to return. Here’s what’s happening:
Several hours ago, before I got home from work, Dave broke our no-phone agreement and left a message on my machine. I just listened to it. “Sorry to call,” he says, “and sorrier still to shock you, but after two weeks of being sliced and diced by Seattle’s finest techno-shamans” (yes, this is how he actually talks) “I’m in the oncology wing at Harborview Medical Center. It’s cancer, Risa. Lots of it. My prognosis is poor. But I have much more to tell you and the rest verges on the miraculous. Thanks to you I have gone through sea changes. Thanks to you I feel almost ready for this. Thanks to you I even feel a kind of elation.”
This totally mystifies me, TJ, because not only have I not helped him, I’ve banned him from my life for years and feel sick with shame as I type this.
Another reason he called: his “great friend Bart Simonsen,” a lawyer, is “helping us with estate planning.” Typical of our relationship, I’ve never heard of Bart, or of Dave owning anything resembling an estate. As far as I know he owns a house in Seattle, period. But he says my help is “urgently needed to complete my bequest to you,” left Bart’s number, asked if I’d catch the soonest possible flight to Seattle, and said this Bart person volunteered to pick me up at SeaTac. I tried to call Dave back to say how sorry I am and learn more about his condition, but the hospital told me he was unavailable. That scared me into booking the next flight.
At Tiny Joseph’s, as I said, we’re down to installation and finish work. Of course the need to monitor that is huge, so I’ve hired Othello to be my eyes when I’m in Seattle. He and I will go over everything by phone daily, and I hope to slip down to inspect from time to time. But oops. I said Othello. I mean Daniel Bern. He and I got into a Shakespearean “merry war” at work when he decided I was Much Ado’s Beatrice, who I’m nothing like, so I called him Othello, who he’s nothing like…but why am I telling you this? I guess a little shock has set in.
Before I started this letter I called Dave’s friend Bart, called a cab, threw stuff in a suitcase, and the cab’s outside. But I repeat, TJ: yes, this is a crisis for me, but not for you. Othello’s a sharp cookie. Don’t abort your trip. Just call me and we’ll work out the best plan. Love love love!
Risa
Two hours later Bart Simonsen met Risa at the SeaTac baggage claim.
She liked him on sight. Kind hazel eyes; good-humored face; a slight Western drawl similar to Dave’s. He also insisted, Dave-like, on carrying her suitcase.
As they headed for short-term parking she asked how he and Dave met. “Freshman year, Princeton, he was the lone Montanan, me the lone Idahoan amongst five thousand funny-talkin’ Eastern bluebloods. We became each other’s Western home ground.”
Risa wanted to hear more, but Bart was on a mission: “Listen, Risa. I really look forward to getting to know you, but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we get to the hospital, so right now we need to cut to the chase. Dave’s always been too much the cowboy. He toughed out what he called ‘tummy trouble’ for two months. It was pancreatic cancer. Metastasizing. Now it’s everywhere. His prognosis could hardly be worse. The doctors can give you details but I’m going to skip to the bottom line. Dave believes Harborview will be the last roof he sleeps under, and I do too. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
Bart gave Risa a moment to take this in. She needed years. Dave was dying now. Her mind went into a tailspin. What made his doom hurt even worse was the fact that she’d shunned him for the last eight years of his life.
Bart stepped up to an immaculate crimson Ford Explorer with dealer’s plates still on it and set her suitcase in the back. As she climbed in Risa was surprised to see white leather seats, a sunroof, a custom Bose six-speaker stereo, a CB radio, and more. Bart and the decked-out vehicle didn’t match.
After starting the engine, Bart left it in park. “Something you should know, Risa. Dave’s been my closest friend for thirty years and change. I know his foibles and his virtues. But when I mention the foibles, bear in mind…” Emotion stole Bart’s voice for a moment. “Bear in mind I really love your dad. You and I are losing someone who’s played an epic part in our lives. So I wonder. Can we skip the getting-to-know-each-other part and start a friendship? I know he was a lousy father. I know he’s hurt you. I also know good things about him you don’t know. If we jump into friendship I can mention both good and bad stuff without tiptoeing around. What do you think?”
Risa studied Bart’s kind eyes for a moment, then extended her hand. Bart took it. They shook. As they started toward the city they wore matching sorrowful smiles. The smiles lasted five minutes, then I-5 northbound came to a standstill. “Must be a wreck,” Bart muttered.
“It’s a nightmare being stuck with Dave dying up ahead!” Risa burst out. “Can I get out and run?”
Bart said, “We’ve got so much ground to cover, you’re about to feel you are running. Everything related to Dave is going to come flying at you faster and harder than I’d like. I’m sorry for that, Risa. But we should get started even so.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said.
“The first thing is this factory-fresh, tricked-out SUV with the Thule canoe rack, CB radio, and custom everything. It’s not mine. But, starting today, Dave would like it to be yours.”
Risa’s feelings did a somersault. “I knew he hated my old Volvo. But are you telling me he hates it so much he replaced it with a crimson Exploiter without asking what kind of car I might actually like?”
Bart smiled as he winced. “‘The Crimson Exploiter.’ Let’s call it that. But that’s not what happened. This rig was to be Dave’s. It won’t be. We’re sitting in your dad’s last indulgence in his Highland love of finery. Before he got sick his aim was to return to his Montana roots for the rest of his life. Launch date: April. The Crimson Exploiter was his escape vehicle.”
As soon as Bart shared the car’s purpose, the crimson paint, sunroof, deluxe stereo, and impractical white leather all turned so stupidly poignant a lump rose in Risa’s throat. “If he weren’t dying,” she croaked, “this decked-out harlot of a car would strike me as the best purchase he ever made.”
“I feel the same,” Bart said. “Four years back Dave finally got a clear read on himself for reasons he’ll tell you. Great reasons, Risa. Involving you. He became a changed man, and I mean completely. Amid a hundred new insights, he’d seen that Montana was the one place that might restore a late wholeness to him, and he was so desperate to end his addiction to lady friends that he asked me to help him plan his Montana escape in secret. I only agreed when he promised: no last-minute new woman joining his Montana plans. Dave not only heard me, Risa, he pulled it off. Ready or not, this makes you an heiress. This vehicle is part of your inheritance. So is his home, which was recently appraised at 850K. Dave didn’t want to tie you down with it so it’s currently occupied by a woman, the one former lady friend I could mostly stand, who’s staging it for sale as a favor to Dave, all proceeds of which sale will go to you. She’s moving out September 30th and it’ll go on the market October 1st. A nice twist is, she’s a stickler for spare interior decor, even in the full basement and two-car garage, so Dave had to move fast to put what she calls Dave’s ‘endless piles of old ranch junk’ in storage. And I would call this junk treasure, including all kinds of heirlooms from your namesake, Grandma Stella the Elkmoon Valley homesteader. Dave was approaching the move like a homesteader himself. Two huge moving vans transferred enormous loads of things perfect for life in Montana. Two E City storage units await you, and I urge you to take your time with their contents. I’ll give you the keys to the units tomorrow.”
“It kills me that Dave won’t get to live his great escape,” Risa said.
“Keep your eye on the best part of this, daughter of Dave. Starting four years ago his Montana dream, and your part in a very different kind of effort, made him happier than I’ve ever seen him, even despite his doom. You will see and feel this, Risa.”
Risa tried to imagine, but couldn’t. The I-5 traffic began to creep forward. They drove in silence for a while. “How are you feeling?” Bart asked.
“Spun in directions there’s no way to understand. I’ve never even seen Montana. I’m losing my dad. But we’re moving toward him. What’s left of him.”
“He’s still there,” Bart said, “and I’d like to talk frankly, as a close friend who loves him, about some of his biggest blunders. You okay with that?”
“We don’t have time to wonder if I’m okay, Bart. Just go ahead.”
“Thanks for grasping that, Risa. First blunder. Despite being a great talker and storyteller, Dave has always been close-lipped about his deepest hurts. The cowboy way, I guess. He’s had a broken heart all his life. Losing the Elkmoon ranch and his Grandma Stella, bam, bam, is what broke it. You know that. From my perspective, heartbreak turned a kind and capable man into one of the biggest fools I ever met in three ways. One, his dead-end career at the bank. A shocking underachievement for a man so gifted. Two, his taste in lady friends. More gross underachievement. Three: his treatment of you. And the three were intertwined. I can’t imagine what it was like for you as a kid, but it drove my wife, Cindy, and me crazy that Dave couldn’t see why a string of romances begun over loan contracts wouldn’t work out just fine for him and his child.”
The skyscrapers of Seattle came into view. Risa hardly noticed. “I can tell you what it was like, Bart. All of Dave’s women except Moira struck me as the same type. Superficially attractive via synthetics. High-maintenance as hell. Self-centered. And cold as ice especially when they tried to feign warmth. Pardon a barroom expression, but to me as a kid, watching Dave choose that kind of woman again and again was a total mind fuck.”
Bart nodded. “The last time my wife, Cindy, and I had Dave and one of his women to dinner Cindy told me, ‘Never again, Bart. Socializing with Dave’s women is like sitting in a closed garage with the car engine running.’”
Risa smiled. “I have got to meet Cindy.”
“You will. And when you do, ask her about Dave’s biggest blunder. When he left you with Moira after the divorce, he didn’t just break your heart. He broke his own. And Cindy nailed his motivation. ‘Dave loves that girl more than anyone or anything on Earth,’ she told me. ‘That’s why he left her with Moira. He thinks the life he’s leading would contaminate Risa. Thinks he’s keeping her pure. As if a heartbroken and abandoned purity is preferable to a little rough-and-tumble contamination. And as if alcoholic Moira is capable of keeping anything pure!’”
This analysis didn’t just ring a bell for Risa, it smashed an enormous gong. “Good God! Another mind fuck! If Cindy was here I’d spill my guts.”
“You’ll meet her tomorrow,” Bart said. “But we agreed we’re friends. If it helps, please, Risa, spill away.”
“That word ‘purity.’ Oh, that’s big! It makes me realize Dave opened a vein in me that’s still bleeding. Subconsciously, but still, the part of me wounded by being abandoned as a kid always wondered just what I was abandoned for. So, at RISD, I got involved with a man I found aesthetically pleasing, and that was it. Physical aesthetics, the entire attraction. Yet I stayed with him for five years. And why? Cindy named it. I wanted to annihilate any purity that would ever cause a man to put me away for my protection. But you know what happened instead, Bart? Thanks to the edifying shame of a five-year romantic ride to nowhere, I not only grew to understand Dave’s similar rides, I was ready to forgive and love him in spite of them!”
With brimming eyes she turned and gave Bart a smile so big it revealed the gap between her teeth for the first time. It nearly knocked him over. “A pure child’s heart could never have felt that forgiveness!” she cried. “But my contaminated heart loved him just as he is! I was so ready! I couldn’t wait to sit down with my reprobate dad, talk story over too much wine, laugh all night at our scuzzy-hearted antics! But instead…four hours ago…his brave voice on my phone machine. ‘Cancer, Risa. Lots of it.’ How useless, the waves of forgiveness I’m feeling!”
Risa and Bart got busy with Kleenex and a handkerchief for a while.“God, Cindy’s going to like you!” Bart said. “And listen to your attorney on this one, Risa. Your love and forgiveness have never been so needed as now. And if you ask me, my friend Dave is one very lucky dad.”
WHEN BART PARKED in the garage beneath Harborview Medical Center, he said, “There’s one more estate item I want to mention before we go in. I should leave the description of it to Dave, since this was his achievement. But he’s so self-deprecating he wouldn’t be fair to himself. So may I please spill his best beans?”
Mystified, Risa nodded.
“When you were nine, you may remember, Dave divorced Mitzy just a year after he’d divorced Moira. I was in law school, Cindy and I were expecting, the pregnancy got complicated, and life was hard, so when Dave came over one night, drank too much, and confessed to us that he had created nothing solid in his life, or in your life either, I blew a fuse. ‘True,’ I said. ‘The way you’re going, that child you claim to love so much will end up as fucked up as you are. But what can you do to change that? Nothing! Manly men are manly, hot loan clients are irresistible, fate is cruel, and that beguiling young daughter of yours is just shit outta luck.’ You should’ve seen Dave’s face, Risa. If Cindy hadn’t been unwell he would have clocked me.
“He stormed off without a word and Cindy and I didn’t see him till our son’s third birthday. But when friendship resumed, Dave and I grew close as ever. So close I thought we knew each other’s secrets. Not till his recent cancer diagnosis, when we cracked into estate matters, did I learn that, within days of me telling him his daughter was SOL, he took out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy with one beneficiary: you. A remote way of loving somebody, maybe. But think on this. While keeping Moira’s child support steady, paying alimony to both his exes, and going nowhere career-wise, Dave kept that policy paid up in hope of helping some dream of yours eventually come true. I’m damned proud of him for that. I hope you are too.”
“Bart!” Risa piped. “All of this is…really a lot! So before I…go in to see him…I need to just sit here and cry awhile. Okay?”
Bart gave her the kindest nod ever, and waited outside the car.
THEY ENTERED THE building, took the elevator up to oncology, and turned down the long hall toward Dave’s room. As they neared his door, Bart said, “I feel this will go best if you two meet solo. Don’t you?”
Risa nodded. Bart opened Dave’s door, gently closed it behind her—and there lay her father, opening his eyes at the sound of the door’s closing.
She saw in an instant how much the cancer had taken. He was being eaten alive. It took all her strength to register this and still give him a full-on smile.
But oh, Dave’s reaction! His bony, jaundiced face turned so joyful at the sight of her that his love hit her in a wave, her heart flew all the way back to age seven, she adored him as unconditionally now as then, and there was no way not to throw herself into his arms. “I’m so glad to see you!” she sobbed. “And so sorry it’s been so long. I’m so sorry, Dave! I’m so sorry!”
Holding her as tight as he could, which was not tight at all, he murmured words that made no sense to her: “There’ll be no more sorries between you and me, Risa. Never again, ever. Because, listen to me. You have saved my life. Believe it, my girl. You have saved my life.”
IV. Genesis
(late July 1997)
Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain.
Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling? Who is the person in the person, prompting the whole endeavor?
—James Hillman, “Peaks and Vales”
From the Elkmoon Mountain Journals of Grady Haynes:
“Keep an early morning eye out,” Gladys Wax told me as she, Mo, Anon, and Ho left Lake Pipsissewa yesterday. “The weather patterns we’re having, you might wake up on the first page of Genesis.” She then rode off with a blithe wave, leaving me no idea what she was talking about—till it happened:
At first light this morning I woke in a perfect stillness, poked my head out of the tent, turned to the lovely lake I remembered camping beside, and it was gone : uncreated in the night. A gray fog lay so heavy upon me I couldn’t see the edge of Pipsissewa twenty feet away. I crawled out, pissed, washed, built a bigger than usual fire against the cold, made espresso. I’m now sitting on a log ten feet from water I still can’t see, hear, or sense except as an odor so faint it’s more an intuition than a smell. A fifty-acre lake and the intricate ridges and peaks encircling it vanished. Egypt Peak, rising from the east end of the lake a short walk away, is only a memory. No wind. No sound. No world. I’m hunched in a void of the sort my poet hero Jim Harrison calls “the gray egg.” Even time seems to have stopped. The world is so stripped it feels like a Before Time. If this were my permanent reality I’d be terrified, but I don’t rise to the fear. I sit motionless, as with every kind of mountain weather, trying to open to the gray nada itself; appreciate it; fuse with it.
After a duration I can only call “two slowly sipped drams of espresso,” the nothingness begins to exude a hint of somethingness and Gladys’s first page of Genesis sure enough begins to unfold:
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.
—Wisława Szymborska
IN THE THIRD week of August, while TJ McGraff was exploring sixteen carefully chosen Italian provinces on a long-planned food research trip, his interim boss and restaurant business factotum, Risa, checked his itinerary, then sent him this emergency fax:
Mother-Brother,
I’m writing for a hard reason. A crisis just pulled me off the Rasta Pasta to Tiny Joseph’s conversion, which has been going so well we’re down to finish work. But it’s a question when I’ll be able to return. Here’s what’s happening:
Several hours ago, before I got home from work, Dave broke our no-phone agreement and left a message on my machine. I just listened to it. “Sorry to call,” he says, “and sorrier still to shock you, but after two weeks of being sliced and diced by Seattle’s finest techno-shamans” (yes, this is how he actually talks) “I’m in the oncology wing at Harborview Medical Center. It’s cancer, Risa. Lots of it. My prognosis is poor. But I have much more to tell you and the rest verges on the miraculous. Thanks to you I have gone through sea changes. Thanks to you I feel almost ready for this. Thanks to you I even feel a kind of elation.”
This totally mystifies me, TJ, because not only have I not helped him, I’ve banned him from my life for years and feel sick with shame as I type this.
Another reason he called: his “great friend Bart Simonsen,” a lawyer, is “helping us with estate planning.” Typical of our relationship, I’ve never heard of Bart, or of Dave owning anything resembling an estate. As far as I know he owns a house in Seattle, period. But he says my help is “urgently needed to complete my bequest to you,” left Bart’s number, asked if I’d catch the soonest possible flight to Seattle, and said this Bart person volunteered to pick me up at SeaTac. I tried to call Dave back to say how sorry I am and learn more about his condition, but the hospital told me he was unavailable. That scared me into booking the next flight.
At Tiny Joseph’s, as I said, we’re down to installation and finish work. Of course the need to monitor that is huge, so I’ve hired Othello to be my eyes when I’m in Seattle. He and I will go over everything by phone daily, and I hope to slip down to inspect from time to time. But oops. I said Othello. I mean Daniel Bern. He and I got into a Shakespearean “merry war” at work when he decided I was Much Ado’s Beatrice, who I’m nothing like, so I called him Othello, who he’s nothing like…but why am I telling you this? I guess a little shock has set in.
Before I started this letter I called Dave’s friend Bart, called a cab, threw stuff in a suitcase, and the cab’s outside. But I repeat, TJ: yes, this is a crisis for me, but not for you. Othello’s a sharp cookie. Don’t abort your trip. Just call me and we’ll work out the best plan. Love love love!
Risa
Two hours later Bart Simonsen met Risa at the SeaTac baggage claim.
She liked him on sight. Kind hazel eyes; good-humored face; a slight Western drawl similar to Dave’s. He also insisted, Dave-like, on carrying her suitcase.
As they headed for short-term parking she asked how he and Dave met. “Freshman year, Princeton, he was the lone Montanan, me the lone Idahoan amongst five thousand funny-talkin’ Eastern bluebloods. We became each other’s Western home ground.”
Risa wanted to hear more, but Bart was on a mission: “Listen, Risa. I really look forward to getting to know you, but we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we get to the hospital, so right now we need to cut to the chase. Dave’s always been too much the cowboy. He toughed out what he called ‘tummy trouble’ for two months. It was pancreatic cancer. Metastasizing. Now it’s everywhere. His prognosis could hardly be worse. The doctors can give you details but I’m going to skip to the bottom line. Dave believes Harborview will be the last roof he sleeps under, and I do too. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
Bart gave Risa a moment to take this in. She needed years. Dave was dying now. Her mind went into a tailspin. What made his doom hurt even worse was the fact that she’d shunned him for the last eight years of his life.
Bart stepped up to an immaculate crimson Ford Explorer with dealer’s plates still on it and set her suitcase in the back. As she climbed in Risa was surprised to see white leather seats, a sunroof, a custom Bose six-speaker stereo, a CB radio, and more. Bart and the decked-out vehicle didn’t match.
After starting the engine, Bart left it in park. “Something you should know, Risa. Dave’s been my closest friend for thirty years and change. I know his foibles and his virtues. But when I mention the foibles, bear in mind…” Emotion stole Bart’s voice for a moment. “Bear in mind I really love your dad. You and I are losing someone who’s played an epic part in our lives. So I wonder. Can we skip the getting-to-know-each-other part and start a friendship? I know he was a lousy father. I know he’s hurt you. I also know good things about him you don’t know. If we jump into friendship I can mention both good and bad stuff without tiptoeing around. What do you think?”
Risa studied Bart’s kind eyes for a moment, then extended her hand. Bart took it. They shook. As they started toward the city they wore matching sorrowful smiles. The smiles lasted five minutes, then I-5 northbound came to a standstill. “Must be a wreck,” Bart muttered.
“It’s a nightmare being stuck with Dave dying up ahead!” Risa burst out. “Can I get out and run?”
Bart said, “We’ve got so much ground to cover, you’re about to feel you are running. Everything related to Dave is going to come flying at you faster and harder than I’d like. I’m sorry for that, Risa. But we should get started even so.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said.
“The first thing is this factory-fresh, tricked-out SUV with the Thule canoe rack, CB radio, and custom everything. It’s not mine. But, starting today, Dave would like it to be yours.”
Risa’s feelings did a somersault. “I knew he hated my old Volvo. But are you telling me he hates it so much he replaced it with a crimson Exploiter without asking what kind of car I might actually like?”
Bart smiled as he winced. “‘The Crimson Exploiter.’ Let’s call it that. But that’s not what happened. This rig was to be Dave’s. It won’t be. We’re sitting in your dad’s last indulgence in his Highland love of finery. Before he got sick his aim was to return to his Montana roots for the rest of his life. Launch date: April. The Crimson Exploiter was his escape vehicle.”
As soon as Bart shared the car’s purpose, the crimson paint, sunroof, deluxe stereo, and impractical white leather all turned so stupidly poignant a lump rose in Risa’s throat. “If he weren’t dying,” she croaked, “this decked-out harlot of a car would strike me as the best purchase he ever made.”
“I feel the same,” Bart said. “Four years back Dave finally got a clear read on himself for reasons he’ll tell you. Great reasons, Risa. Involving you. He became a changed man, and I mean completely. Amid a hundred new insights, he’d seen that Montana was the one place that might restore a late wholeness to him, and he was so desperate to end his addiction to lady friends that he asked me to help him plan his Montana escape in secret. I only agreed when he promised: no last-minute new woman joining his Montana plans. Dave not only heard me, Risa, he pulled it off. Ready or not, this makes you an heiress. This vehicle is part of your inheritance. So is his home, which was recently appraised at 850K. Dave didn’t want to tie you down with it so it’s currently occupied by a woman, the one former lady friend I could mostly stand, who’s staging it for sale as a favor to Dave, all proceeds of which sale will go to you. She’s moving out September 30th and it’ll go on the market October 1st. A nice twist is, she’s a stickler for spare interior decor, even in the full basement and two-car garage, so Dave had to move fast to put what she calls Dave’s ‘endless piles of old ranch junk’ in storage. And I would call this junk treasure, including all kinds of heirlooms from your namesake, Grandma Stella the Elkmoon Valley homesteader. Dave was approaching the move like a homesteader himself. Two huge moving vans transferred enormous loads of things perfect for life in Montana. Two E City storage units await you, and I urge you to take your time with their contents. I’ll give you the keys to the units tomorrow.”
“It kills me that Dave won’t get to live his great escape,” Risa said.
“Keep your eye on the best part of this, daughter of Dave. Starting four years ago his Montana dream, and your part in a very different kind of effort, made him happier than I’ve ever seen him, even despite his doom. You will see and feel this, Risa.”
Risa tried to imagine, but couldn’t. The I-5 traffic began to creep forward. They drove in silence for a while. “How are you feeling?” Bart asked.
“Spun in directions there’s no way to understand. I’ve never even seen Montana. I’m losing my dad. But we’re moving toward him. What’s left of him.”
“He’s still there,” Bart said, “and I’d like to talk frankly, as a close friend who loves him, about some of his biggest blunders. You okay with that?”
“We don’t have time to wonder if I’m okay, Bart. Just go ahead.”
“Thanks for grasping that, Risa. First blunder. Despite being a great talker and storyteller, Dave has always been close-lipped about his deepest hurts. The cowboy way, I guess. He’s had a broken heart all his life. Losing the Elkmoon ranch and his Grandma Stella, bam, bam, is what broke it. You know that. From my perspective, heartbreak turned a kind and capable man into one of the biggest fools I ever met in three ways. One, his dead-end career at the bank. A shocking underachievement for a man so gifted. Two, his taste in lady friends. More gross underachievement. Three: his treatment of you. And the three were intertwined. I can’t imagine what it was like for you as a kid, but it drove my wife, Cindy, and me crazy that Dave couldn’t see why a string of romances begun over loan contracts wouldn’t work out just fine for him and his child.”
The skyscrapers of Seattle came into view. Risa hardly noticed. “I can tell you what it was like, Bart. All of Dave’s women except Moira struck me as the same type. Superficially attractive via synthetics. High-maintenance as hell. Self-centered. And cold as ice especially when they tried to feign warmth. Pardon a barroom expression, but to me as a kid, watching Dave choose that kind of woman again and again was a total mind fuck.”
Bart nodded. “The last time my wife, Cindy, and I had Dave and one of his women to dinner Cindy told me, ‘Never again, Bart. Socializing with Dave’s women is like sitting in a closed garage with the car engine running.’”
Risa smiled. “I have got to meet Cindy.”
“You will. And when you do, ask her about Dave’s biggest blunder. When he left you with Moira after the divorce, he didn’t just break your heart. He broke his own. And Cindy nailed his motivation. ‘Dave loves that girl more than anyone or anything on Earth,’ she told me. ‘That’s why he left her with Moira. He thinks the life he’s leading would contaminate Risa. Thinks he’s keeping her pure. As if a heartbroken and abandoned purity is preferable to a little rough-and-tumble contamination. And as if alcoholic Moira is capable of keeping anything pure!’”
This analysis didn’t just ring a bell for Risa, it smashed an enormous gong. “Good God! Another mind fuck! If Cindy was here I’d spill my guts.”
“You’ll meet her tomorrow,” Bart said. “But we agreed we’re friends. If it helps, please, Risa, spill away.”
“That word ‘purity.’ Oh, that’s big! It makes me realize Dave opened a vein in me that’s still bleeding. Subconsciously, but still, the part of me wounded by being abandoned as a kid always wondered just what I was abandoned for. So, at RISD, I got involved with a man I found aesthetically pleasing, and that was it. Physical aesthetics, the entire attraction. Yet I stayed with him for five years. And why? Cindy named it. I wanted to annihilate any purity that would ever cause a man to put me away for my protection. But you know what happened instead, Bart? Thanks to the edifying shame of a five-year romantic ride to nowhere, I not only grew to understand Dave’s similar rides, I was ready to forgive and love him in spite of them!”
With brimming eyes she turned and gave Bart a smile so big it revealed the gap between her teeth for the first time. It nearly knocked him over. “A pure child’s heart could never have felt that forgiveness!” she cried. “But my contaminated heart loved him just as he is! I was so ready! I couldn’t wait to sit down with my reprobate dad, talk story over too much wine, laugh all night at our scuzzy-hearted antics! But instead…four hours ago…his brave voice on my phone machine. ‘Cancer, Risa. Lots of it.’ How useless, the waves of forgiveness I’m feeling!”
Risa and Bart got busy with Kleenex and a handkerchief for a while.“God, Cindy’s going to like you!” Bart said. “And listen to your attorney on this one, Risa. Your love and forgiveness have never been so needed as now. And if you ask me, my friend Dave is one very lucky dad.”
WHEN BART PARKED in the garage beneath Harborview Medical Center, he said, “There’s one more estate item I want to mention before we go in. I should leave the description of it to Dave, since this was his achievement. But he’s so self-deprecating he wouldn’t be fair to himself. So may I please spill his best beans?”
Mystified, Risa nodded.
“When you were nine, you may remember, Dave divorced Mitzy just a year after he’d divorced Moira. I was in law school, Cindy and I were expecting, the pregnancy got complicated, and life was hard, so when Dave came over one night, drank too much, and confessed to us that he had created nothing solid in his life, or in your life either, I blew a fuse. ‘True,’ I said. ‘The way you’re going, that child you claim to love so much will end up as fucked up as you are. But what can you do to change that? Nothing! Manly men are manly, hot loan clients are irresistible, fate is cruel, and that beguiling young daughter of yours is just shit outta luck.’ You should’ve seen Dave’s face, Risa. If Cindy hadn’t been unwell he would have clocked me.
“He stormed off without a word and Cindy and I didn’t see him till our son’s third birthday. But when friendship resumed, Dave and I grew close as ever. So close I thought we knew each other’s secrets. Not till his recent cancer diagnosis, when we cracked into estate matters, did I learn that, within days of me telling him his daughter was SOL, he took out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy with one beneficiary: you. A remote way of loving somebody, maybe. But think on this. While keeping Moira’s child support steady, paying alimony to both his exes, and going nowhere career-wise, Dave kept that policy paid up in hope of helping some dream of yours eventually come true. I’m damned proud of him for that. I hope you are too.”
“Bart!” Risa piped. “All of this is…really a lot! So before I…go in to see him…I need to just sit here and cry awhile. Okay?”
Bart gave her the kindest nod ever, and waited outside the car.
THEY ENTERED THE building, took the elevator up to oncology, and turned down the long hall toward Dave’s room. As they neared his door, Bart said, “I feel this will go best if you two meet solo. Don’t you?”
Risa nodded. Bart opened Dave’s door, gently closed it behind her—and there lay her father, opening his eyes at the sound of the door’s closing.
She saw in an instant how much the cancer had taken. He was being eaten alive. It took all her strength to register this and still give him a full-on smile.
But oh, Dave’s reaction! His bony, jaundiced face turned so joyful at the sight of her that his love hit her in a wave, her heart flew all the way back to age seven, she adored him as unconditionally now as then, and there was no way not to throw herself into his arms. “I’m so glad to see you!” she sobbed. “And so sorry it’s been so long. I’m so sorry, Dave! I’m so sorry!”
Holding her as tight as he could, which was not tight at all, he murmured words that made no sense to her: “There’ll be no more sorries between you and me, Risa. Never again, ever. Because, listen to me. You have saved my life. Believe it, my girl. You have saved my life.”
IV. Genesis
(late July 1997)
Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain.
Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling? Who is the person in the person, prompting the whole endeavor?
—James Hillman, “Peaks and Vales”
From the Elkmoon Mountain Journals of Grady Haynes:
“Keep an early morning eye out,” Gladys Wax told me as she, Mo, Anon, and Ho left Lake Pipsissewa yesterday. “The weather patterns we’re having, you might wake up on the first page of Genesis.” She then rode off with a blithe wave, leaving me no idea what she was talking about—till it happened:
At first light this morning I woke in a perfect stillness, poked my head out of the tent, turned to the lovely lake I remembered camping beside, and it was gone : uncreated in the night. A gray fog lay so heavy upon me I couldn’t see the edge of Pipsissewa twenty feet away. I crawled out, pissed, washed, built a bigger than usual fire against the cold, made espresso. I’m now sitting on a log ten feet from water I still can’t see, hear, or sense except as an odor so faint it’s more an intuition than a smell. A fifty-acre lake and the intricate ridges and peaks encircling it vanished. Egypt Peak, rising from the east end of the lake a short walk away, is only a memory. No wind. No sound. No world. I’m hunched in a void of the sort my poet hero Jim Harrison calls “the gray egg.” Even time seems to have stopped. The world is so stripped it feels like a Before Time. If this were my permanent reality I’d be terrified, but I don’t rise to the fear. I sit motionless, as with every kind of mountain weather, trying to open to the gray nada itself; appreciate it; fuse with it.
After a duration I can only call “two slowly sipped drams of espresso,” the nothingness begins to exude a hint of somethingness and Gladys’s first page of Genesis sure enough begins to unfold:
