The Peacock Feast, page 14
“I don’t want to play lacrosse anymore.”
Coach crumples another piece of paper. “Is there some other sport you want to play? You can’t go out for baseball for the first time as a senior. They might put you on the team, but you’d never get off the bench.”
“No. No other sport.” Leo cannot tell this machine of a man, dull-witted but well-intentioned, that what he wants is to come back every afternoon to Jacie’s apartment and read William Carlos Williams and Federico García Lorca, whom he can now understand in Spanish, and this new book of poetry Jacie bought him by a woman named Diane di Prima. Smoke a joint and go up to the roof and write in his notebook fragments of thoughts and poems until Jacie gets home from her job and comes to find him, after which they’ll go back to the apartment, hot with the afternoon sun, where he’ll take off her clothes and bury his face in her damp breasts and wait for her breathing to sharpen and her thighs to go soft. That he’ll then go see one of his customers, guys who he sells quarter pounds to now that Jimmy has quit the business and Leo is on his own—enough to handle what he smokes himself and the rent and concert tickets for Jacie and him. Jacie will meet him at the vegetarian Indian place on Divisadero Street and they’ll eat saag paneer and chana masala and drink rosewater lassi, and then he’ll sit at Jacie’s table and do his homework while she does her macramé until they climb into bed together, both of them naked under the goose-down comforter he’s bought them now that it’s cooler at night, the rice shades open so they can watch the moon.
* * *
A week before Leo turns eighteen, his father asks him to come to the house for dinner on the night of his birthday. It’s February, seven months since he moved in with Jacie. He’s refused to give his father their address, but he says yes—if he can bring Jacie. It will be his father and Angela’s first time meeting her, her first time at the house where he grew up.
Leo has never before seen Jacie nervous about her appearance. She irons the floor-length Indian skirt she wore the night they met, the one that looks like a bedspread, and shaves the pills off a black turtleneck. She washes her hair and wraps it wet around her head, securing it with bobby pins and then sleeping with it that way so as to tame the frizz and curl. After she gets dressed, she timidly asks Leo if she looks okay. “You look beautiful, Jacie,” he says, but in truth he knows she will seem dumpy next to Mrs. Cecelia Brown in her Chanel suit, whom his father has invited along with Leo’s grandparents, Gary, and Jimmy.
Seated in the parlor before dinner, Leo realizes that it’s the only occasion he’s observed Jacie with what he thinks of as adults. He is surprised by how polite and natural she is, talking with Mrs. Brown about the Houston art museum where, Jacie explains, her mother is a docent, and with his grandfather about her father’s medical practice. His father, Leo can tell, is pleased, despite himself, by Jacie’s appreciation of his garden, her interest in Leo’s mother’s sheet music, still stacked atop the piano. Only his grandmother seems overtly disapproving—disapproving, Leo is certain, of Jacie’s clothes, her hair, the very idea of a girl living with a man, even if that man is her eighteen-year-old grandson.
Halfway through dinner, Leo catches Gary’s eye and they sneak up to the roof for some tokes from a joint.
“My old man would never say it, but I think he kind of likes Jacie.”
“No, duh,” Gary says.
“What do you mean, ‘no, duh’?”
Gary looks at him bemusedly. “Well, she’s kinda like your mom.”
Leo holds back from snapping, Are you nuts? My mom was blonde and slender. Beautiful.
“Artistic. Independent.”
Leo feels a wave of shame. He’s no better than his grandmother, who’d looked down her nose at his father. Glued to the surface. Gary means in essence: how Jacie refused Vassar because she neither could nor would ever attend League of Women Voters meetings in stockings and sensible pumps; how Leo’s mother married a man whose father had been a gardener and mother a maid because she loved and believed in him.
* * *
In early March, Leo’s midterm grades, which have already been sent to the handful of colleges where he managed to get applications in on time, arrive in his father’s mailbox, each having slipped at least half a grade from the low they’d reached the last marking period. His father doesn’t say it, but Leo knows he is thinking that Leo can now kiss Stanford and Berkeley goodbye. A week later, a teacher passes the headmaster a tip he heard from the most suck-up of the twelfth-grade boys: in his locker Leo has a plastic bag filled with joints that he is selling by the dozen count.
When the headmaster calls Leo in to tell him that his locker has been searched and marijuana has been found, Leo offers no defense.
“I am certain,” the headmaster says, glancing over at the plastic bag now on his desk, “that you know the next steps. I will telephone your father. There will be a disciplinary meeting.”
“And I will be expelled. Don’t waste your time. I’m withdrawing.” Leo stands. He points at the bag. “Keep it. It’s good shit. My goodbye gift.”
* * *
After ten days, Leo goes to see his father. He parks the VW by the Lyon Street steps and walks partway down. He smokes a joint while he watches the fog curling around the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, which he used to tell his mother should be called the Red Gate Bridge. He is glad that she is dead so that he doesn’t have to see her sadness at his throwing everything he’s had overboard.
They sit in his father’s study, his father behind his desk and Leo in the chair opposite. His father has clearly lost weight, the cords in his neck now visible. On the credenza are photographs Leo hasn’t seen before of floral arrangements his father must have designed for events this past year.
Leo scans the shelves of books his father read with his mother and then, since her death, on his own. The wooden box with the peacock feather and the old newspaper articles and the letters from Leo’s father’s mother and sister is still on an upper shelf. Leo can’t remember when he last looked inside that box. Could it have been before his mother died? He dimly recalls the other items inside. Stones from the place where his father had been born. A blue tile.
His father tells him that he has hired an attorney. In the negotiations with the school, the headmaster has agreed not to turn over the evidence from Leo’s locker to the police under the condition that Leo, “so as to protect the honor of the school,” withdraw his college applications. If Leo complies, the school will offer no information to the college admissions offices, but if he does not, a letter will be sent stating that Leo has been expelled.
Leo knows that he should be listening more carefully to what his father is saying, but in truth, it doesn’t matter. Leo has had no intention of going to college in the fall. He’d put in the applications because it would have been more work to explain to everyone why he wasn’t. He and Jacie have already decided that they are moving north, to Mendocino, to live on a commune started by Pippy, a girl Jacie met through Lake. Learning that Pippy had gone to Vassar, Jacie had decided it was a sign that Pippy’s commune was the place they should go.
As soon as Leo saves up a little more money, he is going to stop smoking, go squeaky-clean and Zen and maybe even vegetarian too. He’ll buy camping gear and they’ll head north. Once they get settled, he’s going to turn some of his poems into song lyrics and take up the drums, since he’s decided that percussion is poetry without words.
“Okay, Dad,” he says. “I’ll withdraw everywhere.”
* * *
In June, Leo sells his last cache of pot. He smokes a ceremonial final joint and gives his scale and other paraphernalia to Shane, home from Williams for the summer and happy to have his clientele back. Leo and Gary get a job on a painting crew.
For most of the summer, they work on a Victorian in the Mission District. The house belongs to a lady with long silver hair and drawstring paisley pants who insists on serving them lunch: oversize bowls of homemade soup and millet bread she bakes herself. They sit in her garden, slurping their soup under the palm tree that shades the table.
“How’s Jacie doing?” Gary asks.
Leo feels a stab of jealousy. Ever since his birthday dinner when Gary had said that Jacie was like Leo’s mother, Leo’s been aware that Gary seems to have a bead on Jacie, sometimes noticing things that Leo himself hasn’t seen. Even that first night he’d met Jacie, at the Grace Slick concert, it was Gary who’d known that she was tripping. At times, watching the two of them quietly talking, he thinks Jacie is closer to Gary than to him. Once he even told her that. “Leo,” she cooed, putting her arms around him, “I love Gary. He’s an old soul, one of those people who’s lived a lot of lives. But I could never sleep with him. He’s like the yang of my brother: my brother with his hostility washed away.”
“Why are you asking?” Leo says.
“She just seems kind of out of it.”
“I think she’s adjusting to my being clean. She’s never known me when I wasn’t getting high. Her sleep’s all messed up. If I get up to take a piss, I’ll see her sitting at her easel or in a chair by the window, staring out at the street.”
When Gary puts down his spoon to listen closer, Leo wants to slap him. Slap him or smoke a joint. Instead, he pushes back the bowl of soup. Fuck, he is going to go nuts if he has to eat another bowl of this lady’s gassy soup tomorrow.
He doesn’t tell Gary that it’s actually much worse than staring out the window at three in the morning—that Jacie switched to the afternoon shift at the coffee shop so she can go back to bed after Leo leaves for work. He has no idea how much of the day she sleeps, but there have been evenings he’s come home to find her still in her nightshirt, not having made it to work at all. Some days, she has no appetite, eating nothing until dark. Other days, standing at the kitchen counter, she can eat an entire box of oatmeal-raisin cookies. When she gets to the last few, he’ll see her miserably chewing, as though finishing the box is at least finishing something. Afterward, she’ll cry that she is getting fat, and the truth is, she is getting a little thick around the middle.
* * *
At the end of August, Gary leaves for Johns Hopkins and Jimmy heads south to UCLA. By then, Jacie seems to have snapped out of it. She’s gone back to the morning shift at the café and has started walking home from work. They decide to spend the fall and winter saving up money and move to Pippy’s commune in the spring.
Leo signs up for a poetry workshop he sees advertised on a flyer at City Lights bookstore. In the evenings, Jacie works on her pastels and he does the exercises from the workshop: write a sonnet, a villanelle, a poem in iambic pentameter.
Grace Slick leaves the Great Society and joins the Jefferson Airplane. Leo and Jacie go to an Airplane concert. When Slick sings “Somebody to Love,” Jacie squeezes Leo’s hand and doesn’t let go. Later, after they have sex, she looks so searingly at him, he forces himself not to roll over, not to fall asleep as he wants to do. To instead prop up on an elbow and ask “What’s the matter?” He refrains from adding the beat of the now that’s in his head: What’s the matter now?
“I know you are going to leave me. Not now”—that same now—“but one day.”
Leo puts his arms around Jacie, tries to draw her to him, but she pushes back so she can see his eyes. “You can be honest. It would help. Then I could trust you. I could trust that for now you are here with me.”
He feels confused and then irritated.
“I don’t mean this month or anytime soon. Just one day, you’re going to wake up and want someone different. Prettier, skinnier. Less depressed. Someone who can live with you in that big house of your father’s and looks right to be your wife.”
He’s never thought this way. But now that she’s said it, he does think about it. It is hard to imagine Jacie fitting into the life he had with his father and grandparents. Perhaps if his mother were alive, it would be different. She would have appreciated Jacie for her intelligence and artist’s soul. For the softness at the center of her being. His mother’s view of Jacie would have prevailed, at least for Leo’s father, over the narrow-minded one of his grandparents.
The softness at the center of her being. He’s not had that idea before, but it strikes him as profoundly true. True about Jacie and true about Gary too: the reason they connect with each other in a way that he cannot with them. Cannot because whatever was once soft in him is now hard.
“Hush. Go to sleep.” He kisses the top of Jacie’s frizzy head and turns to the wall.
10
Prudence
New York, 1937—1938
When Carlton told Prudence that he’d found a doctor, a man with a small office in White Plains, to do the procedure, her only request was that he not tell CCB about the abortion.
Carlton paused before he nodded his assent, and in that pause, Prudence saw both Carlton’s attempt to decipher what she was asking and that she was right: it had occurred to him to confide in CCB. For over a decade, Carlton had been CCB’s sounding board about both Robert, whose manic agitations could exceed CCB’s powers of restraint, and Dorothy, who believed it necessary to keep an ocean between the Four (as CCB referred to his grandchildren) and their father’s mental instability, a decision that had caused Robert enormous pain. Only with CCB, who’d revealed so much about his own family, would Carlton ever consider discussing a matter so personal.
It was not that Prudence was afraid of CCB knowing she’d become pregnant outside of marriage. The conservative customs he and Louie maintained in their home notwithstanding, he was dedicated to the betterment of those without his advantages, an empathy, she’d often thought, he’d acquired from his own episodes of melancholia. She felt certain that CCB understood that women have unwanted and accidental pregnancies and that they are no more to blame than the fathers of these unborn babes. Nor did she believe that he would condemn an abortion. What she was afraid of was that CCB might find occasion to tell Dorothy, not out of malice or an instinct for gossip, but because Prudence’s situation would be a way of engaging his daughter-in-law in an intimate conversation, as he worked hard to do for the benefit of his son and grandchildren. And it was this that was unbearable: the thought of Dorothy knowing Prudence’s cowardice in acceding to Carlton’s will. Of Dorothy seeing Prudence’s lack of faith in her capacity to have a child on her own. Her unwillingness to let go of Carlton and the life he offered.
In her mind, Prudence argued her case with Dorothy: Working for Harriet, I earn a decent wage, but after I pay the rent and put aside enough for carfare and groceries, it requires diligent and relentless budgeting to be able to purchase a pair of shoes or a gift for anyone.
You, born with so much, with ponies and pillars topped with ceramic peonies, with money to take an ocean liner whenever you please, you cannot know what it is like to never be able to attend a concert or travel.
You cannot know what it is like to want more …
Prudence blushed just imagining uttering these words. She felt too ashamed to even finish the thought. To suggest that she was giving up a baby so she could go to Carnegie Hall or Rome.
Carlton hired a car to drive them to White Plains. When the nurse brusquely instructed her to follow along, “miss,” she saw Carlton looking at her, knew he wanted her to catch his eye and take his concern for her into the makeshift operating room, wanted her to believe, as he most sincerely did, that the abortion was not the measure of his affection for her but rather an immutable limit, like that of a Jewish person, as he’d observed once of a colleague at a funeral mass, unable to put a proffered Communion wafer on his tongue. Those were her last thoughts, the blood and body of Jesus Christ our Lord, as the chloroform mask was lowered over her mouth and nose. She woke with the nurse pressing a cloth between her legs.
She bled for two months. Although Prudence could not bring herself to confide in Elaine, she sensed that Elaine, seeing Prudence’s cheeks drained of color, knew. “You need iron,” Elaine announced. Sundays and Wednesdays, Elaine took to cooking liver steaks, wrapping the offal in wax paper, and bringing it to work the next morning for the maid Harriet retained at Masters Design to warm for Prudence’s lunch.
* * *
Carlton’s marriage proposal three months later—by then, her body had righted itself—was accompanied by a speech during which he explained in further detail his aspirations. As he’d previously stated, his goals—the ascent of the highest peak on each of the seven continents, the mastery of Bach’s compositions for piano, the expansion of his rare-book collection, and, in general, a life of aesthetic and intellectual refinement—were not compatible with raising children. He loved her and, were she to marry him, would cherish and care for her until the end of his days, but he would soldier on to find a different woman to be his wife if she could not accept this condition.
“There are so many men who do both. Have families and pursue their ambitions.”
“Because they neglect their children.”
“No,” she quietly said. “There are men who do both.”
“Name one.”
“Mr. Tiffany. My father told me he always came home by five to be with his children. They would accompany him while he inspected his flowers each evening.”
“They would accompany him. Trail behind him. That is not what I would want for a child.”
She’d not felt that she could argue further with Carlton. What was the point of adding the example of Teddy Roosevelt, who Harriet, having worked on his home in Oyster Bay, a short drive from the Tiffany mansion, reported had set aside an hour each day before dinner to play with his children on the lawn? Carlton would produce a superior contradictory piece of evidence provided by CCB and Louie, intimates of Teddy’s cousin Franklin and his wife, Eleanor.
