Sleep Page 9

  “I’m just saying the truth, that’s all. He is what he is.”

  David turns away. He downs his cognac and sets the glass in the bin, then wanders off along the row of tombstones.

  “You go too far sometimes, Ma,” he hears Danny say.

  “Never mind too far. It’s the only way to make him hear. Your father knew that.”

  The surrounding graves read like a street plan from the old neighbourhood in the west end, the half-familiar names, the half-familiar faces staring out from the porcelain cameos. Bouquets of flowers in various stages of decay spew out from metal urns set into the bases of the graves. David remembers his mother once railing against all the rotting flowers, seeing them as some kind of desecration. As if they could matter. As if any of this does, these rites for the dead still as steeped in unreason as the ancestor worship of the Romans, with their death masks and their house shrines and their offerings of cake and wine to appease the underworld’s demons.

  David had not made it in time for his father’s last moments. There was a call one morning from Danny at the hospital saying he was close to the end, but by the time David arrived from downtown he was gone. He had visited a few days earlier and his father had still had the indestructible air of someone who might go on for months yet or years, though he was reduced by then to little more than a sack of bones.

  David was left alone with him while his mother went down to eat.

  “Call the nurse,” he said. It was hard to tell by then what was his old hardness and what just him conserving his breath. “I need to get out of this room.”

  The nurse hooked up a tank for his oxygen and David wheeled him out to the hospital garden. The sun was out, one of the first warm days, and a forsythia bush was in full bloom and around it a bed of tulips, also yellow, so that the effect was like a child’s papier-mâché model of a sunflower or of the sun itself. David parked his father next to the flowers thinking, This is what you won’t have, hardly knowing whether he meant it in anguish or in spite.

  “You finish school yet?”

  David had cause to wonder afterwards if this had been his father’s stab at some sort of reconciliation, though at the time all he let himself hear was the familiar contempt.

  “Not yet, Dad.” He had started his doctorate by then, but this was a level of detail he would never have gone into with his father. “A few more years still.”

  His father grunted.

  “Always a few more.” Pause. Breath. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing what I like, Dad. I’m doing what I want.”

  “I know what you want. You want me dead.”

  David felt his whole body go weak. To answer him would just be to fall into his trap.

  “Take me back. I don’t want your mother to worry.”

  It was their last exchange.

  After his father died David left almost at once for Rome, to do research for his dissertation. He remembers that time now as if it were part of some different life he had led. The ochre-coloured walls of the university, the cavernous lecture halls, the midnight walks past the Pantheon and the Campidoglio and the Colosseum; the smell that he remembered still from childhood, of sweat and car exhaust and history. By mid-October the tourists had gone and he had the city practically to himself, wandering the Forum from morning to dusk until he had covered every inch of it, every ruined temple and state house, every heaved-up back alley, every shop. The weather had been perfect for touring, day after day the same cloudless skies, the cool mornings, the dry midday heat, the long sunsets with their light like the last gasp of the fallen world. And the whole time he had felt, for what seemed the first time in his life, utterly self-sufficient, complete, with no sense of striving beyond that of immersing himself in his work. The clearest mark of the change in him was that he hardly so much as looked at a woman his entire stay, though in his former life it had felt like his very being had depended on the ceaseless job of coupling and disengaging.

  He gave barely a thought to his father. It was as if every trace of him had been stripped away with his death, as easily as that. Then one week he rented a car to visit some Roman sites in the north of the country and his second day out he passed a direction sign on the expressway listing a name that seemed to come out of a dream: his father’s hometown.

  On impulse he took the exit. Soon the flatlands of the Po had given way to gloomy foothills that felt still as raw and lost to the world as they might have been when the Gauls had scrounged their living among them. He had to stop for directions at every village, each one more insular and becalmed than the last, with the same central bar with a few thatch chairs out front, the same old men who would argue and contradict and fail to come to consensus.

  After hours of driving he reached the town. It was bigger than he’d expected, sitting on a slope that overlooked a river valley and spread along a series of switchbacks that tentacled out at every curve into spruce-looking residential enclaves. He passed houses in pink and yellow stucco, children in pressed uniforms, balconies where women had set out their linens to air or old people sat watching television or playing cards. There was a jewellery shop on the main strip, a shop that sold baby clothes; there were pedestrians, cars, a cenotaph, two sets of traffic lights. At the bottom of the town, a factory that made hardware for windows and doors, its parking lot packed, its loading bays bustling. A display board in the lobby window showed off its wares, beneath the motto “From our house to yours.”

  The town was nothing like David had imagined it. Or rather, he hadn’t imagined it, except as a backdrop to his made-up histories, vaguely rundown and miserable and grey, not this burgher’s town practically Swiss in its air of prosperity and self-satisfaction. Yet somehow it felt more sinister in its ordinariness than the colourless place of his fantasies. He stopped at a public phone to check the directory and there they were, half a dozen listings under his own family name, he had only to drop a token into the phone and dial the numbers. He thought of showing up at some stranger’s door, of seeing his father’s face again, of having it seen in his own, and already felt steeped in lies. Felt that whatever he was after would only recede the more he sought it.

  He got back in his car and drove on.

  It is getting late. He can feel his guts starting to tighten at the prospect of the shouting match with Julia that his mother has made clear she will make no effort to avert. This is how she guards her place at the centre, by sowing dissension in every quarter, dividing and conquering. Who knows if she hadn’t done the same between him and his father. “Just between you and me,” she used to say, when she’d given him some special indulgence or concession. “Your father doesn’t have to know.”

  Without realizing it he has wandered halfway across the cemetery.

  “David, we’re waiting for you!” his mother calls out. “Then you complain you’re in a hurry!”

  Riding home he can’t get the cameo of his father out of his mind, staring out from his grave so hearty and hale.

  “You know what it is,” his mother says. “It’s because you weren’t there at the end. That’s why you can’t make your peace.”

  “Ma, don’t,” Danny says.

  “I’m just trying to help him. It has to weigh on him. Even Nelda was there, you weren’t even married yet.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ma, it wasn’t his fault. It’s not like he had a cell phone or anything back then.”

  “Your father was waiting for him, you could see it. That’s why he held on. And then he couldn’t wait.”

  You want me dead. What if that had been a chance his father had offered him, something to push past? What if the only real obstacle between them had been that they’d both clung to the same insoluble lump, their stupid pride?

  He had slept at some girl’s place that night, which was why Danny hadn’t reached him until the morning. “A couple of hours, maybe,” was what Danny said. “It’s hard to tell.” David showered and shaved, ate his breakfast. Got stuck in
traffic. The whole time in a sort of fugue state, outside of himself, pretending not to hear the voice at the back of his head telling him that if he was lucky, he’d be too late.

  “Davie, don’t listen to her, it wasn’t like that. It was his time, that’s all. You came as fast as you could.”

  David sits silent.

  By the time they get back to Danny’s, David feels wound up like a caged animal. He hears a movie blaring from the basement, probably one he’ll end up catching grief over from Julia, and starts down to get Marcus, the unreasonableness swirling in him, looking for an outlet. All he needs now to make the day complete is to blow up at Marcus over some trifle.

  A war movie is raging on the projection screen but the boys aren’t attending to it. Instead they are huddled on the floor with a furtive air around some object Jamie has apparently laid out for them.

  “Marcus! We have to go.”

  They start at the sound of his voice and David sees what it is they are gawking at. It is so far from anything he has expected that he can’t quite process it at first. Some sort of replica or toy, he thinks, though it is so convincing-looking, right down to its dull metallic sheen, that he feels a shiver.

  The boys have gone silent.

  “Nice piece. Mind if I take a look?”

  He takes it up from the wooden case it sits in. The instant he feels the solidity of it, he knows in his bones it is real.

  He tries to keep his voice even.

  “Where’d you get this thing?”

  “Grandma gave it to me. She said it belonged to Grandpa.”

  The shiver has become a throb. It is as if the clue he searched for his whole childhood has suddenly been handed to him.

  “She gave it to you?”

  “She said it wasn’t loaded or anything.”

  It is not much larger than the palm of his hand. The grips on the handle are embossed with a logo done in an elaborate Gothic script, though what strikes David is the rough machining of the rest, the metal ridged and notched as if some last finishing pass has been skipped. The only markings are a tiny one above one of the grips like a silver mark and a serial number above the trigger guard.

  The boys’ eyes are riveted on him, Marcus’s as much as the others’. On impulse he drops the gun’s magazine. The dulled copper heads of several bullets show in it.

  The boys stare open-mouthed.

  “Ma! Ma! Would you get down here please? Danny, you might want to see this!”

  By the time everyone has gathered, his mother is already in full denial mode.

  “You and Danny had guns when you were younger than he is! What’s the big deal?”

  “Did you think to ask his parents before you gave it to him? Did you think what might have happened if he’d taken it to school to show his friends? A loaded handgun?”

  Nelda flushes.

  “My God, Danny. A loaded gun.”

  “Who knew it was loaded, for God’s sake? I took it out on the balcony and pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so I figured it was safe. If it isn’t working, what difference does it make if it’s loaded?”

  Danny has taken over. He pulls the slide back on the gun and jiggles his pinky around in the chamber, then peers into the barrel.

  “What were you thinking, Ma? This isn’t something you give to a kid.”

  “I just wanted him to have a keepsake, that’s all. Something of his grandfather’s.”

  Danny eases the bullets out of the magazine and sets the gun back in its case.

  “Sorry, son, I think we’ll have to turn this sucker in. It’s not like the old days when I used to keep my Winchester out in the garden shed.”

  Somehow, in this gutless scolding, it seems their mother has prevailed again.

  “Why do you have to turn it in?” she says. “It’s ours, isn’t it? Just keep it for him until he’s older.”

  “It doesn’t really work that way, Ma. I mean, where did it even come from? It doesn’t even have a brand name on it. Don’t tell me he brought the thing with him from the old country.”

  “You know how he was. The past was the past. He used to keep it at the top of the closet, that’s all I knew. I didn’t ask questions.”

  David wonders how he could have missed it in all those years of prying. What dark theories it might have confirmed for him if he had found it.

  “Why don’t you let me take it in?”

  “Nah, Davie, it’s no trouble. I know people here.”

  “That’s why it should be me. The word goes around someone from the tribe brought in a gun, right away all the old bullshit gets trotted out.”

  “Let him take it, Danny,” Nelda says. “Just the thought of it here even one more night—”

  “Fine, then. Just don’t shoot yourself with it. And Marcus, not a word to your mother about any of this or we won’t see you again till you’re twenty-one.”

  David takes the bullets as well, dropping them into a jacket pocket. He can feel Marcus eyeing the gun case as they walk out to his mother’s car.

  “When are you going to take it in?”

  It is out of character for Marcus to break a silence like this.

  “I dunno.” All David can think of is what the gun felt like in his hand. “Maybe tomorrow. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering, that’s all.”

  Clearly Julia’s prohibitions against guns haven’t stopped Marcus from being fascinated with them. David, too, though he had hidden it, had been drawn to them: more than once he had snuck Danny’s Winchester or .22 out of the house to hunt groundhogs and squirrels or to shoot out the windows of an abandoned factory near their place. A couple of times, though it boggles his mind to think of it now, he had hidden himself on a hill overlooking the uptown expressway extension and taken potshots at the licence plates of passing vehicles.

  In the car, he sets the gun case at his feet.

  “You know, I’m thinking they’d probably let me keep the thing as long as it’s registered. It’s a family heirloom, after all.”

  “Keep it for what?” his mother says. “What do you need it for? You said you’d turn it in, so turn it in.”

  He shoots a complicit look at Marcus in back.

  “Listen to yourself, Ma. You were the one who wanted to keep it in the family.”

  He is anxious to get home so he can try to trace the gun’s origins. So he can hold it in his hands again.

  He presses his feet to the case, keeping it close.

  David opens his eyes to darkness, fighting to get his bearings like someone awaking to the sound of a threat. He is in his mother’s car still, alone; he has fallen asleep.

  The car is parked in front of Julia’s house. Clearly his mother has taken it upon herself to come here directly instead of letting him collect his car at her place and bring Marcus down on his own. Because of the time, she’ll say; because he fell asleep.

  She and Julia stand talking in the sallow light of the front veranda with what seems a grotesque complicity, as if he were some problem child they were consulting over. Marcus, meanwhile, is nowhere in sight, spirited away from him without so much as a goodbye between them. David has half a mind to waltz into the house to claim his due. His house, a part of him still thinks of it as, maybe more now than when he actually lived in it. The house he bled for.

  He feels the gun case at his feet and thinks, Fuck it.

  Julia actually takes his mother’s hand in both of hers when they part as if she has saved Marcus from certain death.

  “Please don’t do that again,” he says when his mother returns. “Please don’t humiliate me like that in front of her.”

  She doesn’t fight him. It feels like the first concession she has made to him the entire day.

  They drive up to her condo in silence. His mother takes the parkway for a stretch but then cuts up through a complicated series of backstreets that she manoeuvres with practised ease. Maybe she isn’t losing it after all. The truth is that David hardly sees her enough anymore to b
e able to judge. That there hasn’t been any real connection between them for years, probably, since before his marriage at least. Since his father’s death, in short, though he has never admitted as much. He remembers standing in the rec room of their house after he died watching her pack things for her move and thinking that all this was dead to him now, that he wanted only to be gone, free and clear. That he didn’t want to know.

  She had given him a box of photographs then from their Italy trip. For years he had carted them around with him with each move, going through them for probably the first time only when he moved into the condo after the divorce. Half of them were from a visit they’d made to her hometown in the south, of people and places he had barely any recollection of now, the rest from the couple of weeks they’d spent as tourists in Rome. Of these the bulk were from their visit to Ostia Antica, mostly close-ups of him and his mother that had surely been taken by their young guide, who appeared in none of them. His mother looked younger than he remembered her, girlish, almost, but elegant, dressed in a form-fitting sleeveless dress she had probably picked up in one of the high-end shops that flanked their hotel in Rome. It was something she had fostered in him, an appreciation for style, taking him shopping downtown at the end of every summer to pick out his clothes for the fall. “Danny doesn’t care,” she would say. “But you know what it means to look good.”

  From Ostia Antica there was a shot of him and his mother at the Thermopolium, with its fresco of food and wine and still-intact bar; another of his mother laughing at the picnic lunch their guide had laid out for them in the courtyard garden beyond it. His mother had been different those weeks in Rome. The whole time of her marriage David had never once heard his father raise his voice against her, had never seen him be anything other than the gentleman, attentive, indulgent, everything that David knows he himself has never been to a woman. Yet in Rome it was as if his mother, too, was suddenly free of some shadow, some darkness.

  She turns into the visitors’ lot at her building and pulls up next to the no-options hatchback David picked up used after the divorce.

  “David, don’t think I don’t see it. Don’t think I don’t know how hard all this stuff has been for you.”