I laugh. “Ms. Kane, you sure know how to romanticize the past.”
“If you give me three days—just seventy-two hours—and at the end of it, you still don’t want to teach again, I’ll leave you alone forever.”
“If I give you but three little days, you’ll leave me the hell alone afterward? I’ll be able to kill myself in peace? No more interruptions? You promise?”
She nods.
“And you aren’t going to drive me to some psych ward and lock me away, right? Tell them I’m a threat to myself and throw away the key? I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket drugged out of my mind, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.”
“Paranoid much?”
“Your showing up like this is enough to make anyone paranoid!”
“I swear I will not take you to a psych ward. I don’t even know where the psych ward is! Swear,” she says, drawing an X on her chest with her index finger.
It’s strange that I’m actually considering going—but maybe I’m just embracing the absurd. Why the hell not, at this point?
“If I agree, will you promise not to hit me again and refrain from calling me ‘a pussy’?” I say, making air quotes with my middle and index fingers.
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Where are you going to take me?”
“You’ll see,” she says, smiling now, as if all that has transpired so far is part of some elaborate plan, like she’s been in complete control from the very beginning.
I fear I might be caught in her web, that Portia Kane is a hungry spider toying with my emotions.
But then somehow it’s settled.
CHAPTER 13
As Portia loads my duffel bag into the back of her rented car, I get an up-close look at her suitcases for the first time and see that they’re designer, just like the clothes that she wears—except the retro jean jacket—and I begin to understand that this woman has the funds and the means to take me anywhere, which is not exactly a pleasant feeling. I get into the passenger side and rest my cane between my legs.
She starts the car. “Put on your seat belt.”
“You’re joking, right, Mom?” I say, staring at my ruined truck, which is still embedded in the tree.
She sighs. “The car will make an annoying beeping noise, and I could get pulled over by a cop if you don’t buckle up.”
When the car starts to beep, she points to a little flashing yellow light on the dash that depicts a man properly strapped into a car seat, which is indeed annoying, so I return her sigh and buckle up. “I’m old enough to remember when no one wore seat belts.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” she says, and then smiles.
“Getting cocky, are you?” I say as we navigate the dirt roads through the long piles of snow pushed to the sides by plows. “Where are we headed?”
“You’ll see,” she says, smiling again.
And then she drives in silence for a long time on the highway, headed south, following the dashes, becoming part of the blur of vehicles doing sixty to eighty miles an hour, like so many drops of blood flowing through a countrywide system of arteries.
Are we any different than the molecules that make up our bodies, I think, or are we just the molecules that make up something larger that we can’t even fathom?
“What are you thinking about, Mr. Vernon?” she asks.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“No.”
“You’re a prison warden!”
And then we drive on for hours.
At one point she asks if I want to listen to music and what kind. I tell her, “Classical, please,” and she searches until she finds a station that’s playing Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor, op. 23.
“Is this good?” she says.
“It’s divine.” I remember listening to this very composition many times with Albert Camus curled up on my lap. He’d beat out the dramatic and wonderful piano notes with his little tail.
I lose myself in the music, and as the road dashes dance with the notes, I wonder if I could be dead. Could I have already killed myself, and might this be some sort of existential purgatory?
Massachusetts zooms by uneventfully, and then we are in Hartford, Connecticut, turning off the highway and entering what appears to be a financially challenged neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Portia smiles coyly.
But I see a sign for the Mark Twain house, and suddenly I know exactly where we are headed.
From taking my class, she must remember that I am a huge fan of Mr. Clemens’s work. While I’ve never visited his home in Hartford, it’s going to take a lot more than this to help me answer the first question, and so I’m afraid Ms. Kane has underestimated her sizable task.
“You do know that Mark Twain was an extremely ornery man,” I say, “especially at the end of his life. If you read No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, you’ll see that ultimately Twain was not very optimistic. Vonnegut loved Twain, and he tried to kill himself. Are you sure this is a good idea?”
Portia ignores my comments as she pulls into the parking lot and shifts into park. “In your classroom you used to have a poster of Mark Twain and his quote: ‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.’ Do you remember?”
I do remember, but instead of acknowledging that, I say, “Well, then, maybe you should keep away from me.”
“Come on,” she says and gets out of the car.
I follow and cane my way to the Twain house, which is brick, quite large, beautiful, and mysterious-looking.
Inside, Ms. Kane buys us tour tickets and we join a small group led by an almost oppressively eager young man who—to be fair—really does know a lot about Mark Twain, although he has an unfortunate love for posing unanswerable questions like, “If you were Mark Twain, living here back in 1885, what would you hope to have seen when you looked out this window?”
Our peppy guide leads us through various rooms as he discusses the “happiest time” in Mark Twain’s life, showing us his telephone even, one of the first in the world, the angels carved into his headboard, and his attic billiards room, where he shot pool and smoked cigars (always in moderation, Twain said, “one at a time”) and looked out from his lofty perch.
It’s a little hard for me to do the steep stairs with my cane, but the tour is nice enough, and I think about how I haven’t done anything like this in years—how once upon a time I would have been thrilled to be in Mark Twain’s home.
Mark Twain!
The father of American literature!
And I would have schemed ways to get my students here too.
In the gift shop, Portia buys us matching little white pins with cartoons of Mark Twain’s face in profile. She pins hers on her white jean jacket, adding to her collection of rock groups, Sylvia Plath, and my favorite, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I allow her to pin Mark Twain to my own jacket, right over my heart. “You know, Hemingway said that ‘All American literature comes from—’”
“‘—one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’”
“You know that quote?”
“Learned it in your class,” she says. “And it’s on the T-shirt behind you.”
I turn around and see that she’s quite correct.
She says, “Your pin looks cool.”
I look down at Mark Twain displayed on my chest like a military medal, and I have to admit the former English teacher hiding deep within does think it’s “cool,” but I don’t tell Portia that because I don’t want to let on that it was a pleasurable experience—and I sure as hell don’t want to get her hopes up.
“I still have
no desire to teach, let alone live,” I say. “Nothing’s changed.”
“This is just day one,” she says, far too cockily. “You ready to go?”
“Well, while we’re here, we might as well see Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house too, don’t you think? It’s right next door, after all.”
“Isn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin considered racist now?” she asks. “It’s super uncool to call a black person an Uncle Tom. That’s worse than the N-word, right?”
“I have no idea,” I say as I cane my way toward the museum. But for some reason it’s closed today, which disappoints me greatly, and so we get back in the car and continue driving south.
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t kill yourself yesterday?” she says to me.
“Because I got to see Mark Twain’s home?” I say, thinking how silly that seems. How can seeing the home of one of your favorite authors help you answer the first question?
“No,” she says, and then laughs mischievously. “Because now we’re wearing matching Mark Twain buttons. That’s pretty killer, right?”
It takes me a second to realize that she is serious—that she thinks wearing the same button is actually a significant gesture that implies or maybe even proves in her mind that we have made some sort of meaningful connection. This is the logic of an eleven-year-old girl—the equivalent of buying one of those cheap heart necklaces that breaks in two so that each friend can wear a jagged-edged half and yet the pieces can be put back together to form this phrase:
Best Friends Forever!
“I’m afraid it’s going to take more than a button—albeit a ‘cool’ and ‘killer’ one—to save me, Ms. Kane. I wish it were that easy, but it’s not.”
“Okay,” she says, but when I look over, she’s smiling from ear to ear.
“You like that we are wearing matching pins—why does this mean something to you?”
“I don’t know—you’ll probably be mad at me if I tell you, anyway.”
“Now you have to tell me!”
She pulls back onto I-84 South, speeds up, and says, “When I was in your class, I used to pretend you were my father, because I never had one—and if I got to pick, I would have wanted a father exactly like you. I used to fantasize about you taking me places like the Mark Twain House and teaching me about great writers, the way other fathers might teach their sons about baseball players at the ballpark. And now we’ve been to the home of a famous writer together. It’s kind of like a childhood dream come true for me.”
“So that little pit stop was for you and not me, Ms. Kane?”
“It was for us. Both of us.”
“Why aren’t you married?” I ask—out of the blue, I admit. “You are a smart, attractive woman. So why are you driving around with your fat old crippled former English teacher instead of doing something productive with an age-appropriate life partner? Why aren’t you with a family of your own?”
“I am married—legally, anyway. To an asshole named Ken Humes. He cheated on me with a teenager. I caught him just a month ago. And this was after he treated me like shit for years, cheating on me many times, belittling my ambitions too. But catching him in the act, actually seeing him fuck a teenager, led to my getting on a plane home, which is where I met your mother, remember? Ken’s moral low point started this whole chain of events.”
I can hear the pain in her voice.
“Well, he’s a fool to let you go,” I say, almost reflexively, knowing that it’s a mistake to offer her kindness. She will amplify it to mythical proportions until I can no longer possibly live up to her expectations, even if I try, which I am not about to.
“Was that a positive remark from Mr. Suicide? Mr. Gloom-and-Doom?” she says, beginning already with the amplification.
I do my best to redirect her emotions back to a safe place by saying, “Your husband let you down.”
“He did.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Kane, but I will let you down too. It’s inevitable. Fair warning.”
“You may surprise yourself,” she says in a way that depresses me. She’s like a poor kid the night before her birthday who believes she will wake up to a surprise party and endless presents and a pony just because she’s tried to wish these things into existence, and I’m the father who owes money to every bill collector in town and has no way of providing what his daughter needs, let alone what she wants—except that I am not even Portia’s father but a man who was once paid to teach her how to write a five-paragraph essay and make sure she didn’t graduate without knowing the difference between then and than—and let me tell you that an alarming amount of twelfth-grade students didn’t know that difference when they first entered my room.
“Technically, you kidnapped me,” I say after almost an hour of silent driving and thinking. “I’m not even here of my free will.”
“What?” she says, snapping out of a daydream, oblivious. It would be disconcerting—she is behind the wheel of a car, after all—if I didn’t wish to end my life.
“Nothing,” I say, and we drive on south.
CHAPTER 14
“We’re not going to the Empire State Building to throw airplanes off the top, are we?” I say, when it becomes apparent that we are heading into New York City. “Because I think that’s illegal and dangerous.”
“Now there’s an idea!” she says.
“Why New York City?”
“We’re going to have a Holden Caulfield day. Look for the ducks in Central Park, drink scotch and sodas in jazz bars, watch kids ride merry-go-rounds and reach for the gold ring—maybe even visit the museum and erase all of the Fuck You graffiti we can find.”
“Are you serious?” I say, wondering how that would be beneficial for either of us.
“I’m joking, of course,” she says. “Just a little American literature humor to get you back into the right head space.”
“J. D. Salinger is always good for a laugh, right? What a role model for hope and living with open arms. I envy his solitude at this moment. You would have never even made it onto my property if I had a wall and maybe a moat. Did Salinger have a moat?” I sigh. “I wonder—in all that time alone—if he ever found an answer to the first question. Publishing became his boulder—like in Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus.”
“You have to stop obsessing about Camus. Jesus Christ.”
It takes her a long time to navigate the traffic into Manhattan, but somehow she gets us to a hotel, and then she’s handing the keys to a valet in a red monkey suit and men in green monkey suits are retrieving our luggage from the trunk.
Standing on a red carpet under heat lamps, leaning on my cane, I say, “I’m not sure I’m dressed appropriately for this sort of thing.” I’m wearing jeans, a sweater with snowflakes stitched into it, a puffy ski jacket from the 1980s, a five- or six-day beard, and a black knit hat that makes me look like a cat burglar from the neck up.
Portia ignores me, and I follow her like a child to the front desk, where she refers to me as her father and checks us into a room.
In the elevator with us now there’s a man in a blue monkey suit, whose job it is to push the proper button and carry our bags. I don’t say anything. I’ve never before stayed in a fancy hotel like this, so I don’t know the etiquette.
When we enter our “room,” I see it’s more like an apartment—two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a TV room, and even a formal dining room with a crystal chandelier, all of it overlooking Central Park.
The man in the monkey suit shows us how to turn on the lights and work the TV and close the curtains and offers suggestions for restaurants until Portia hands him some money and he leaves.
“You’ve done this before, I see,” I say.
She smiles. “Surprised?”
“Who the hell is your husband, and what does he do?”
“What, you don’t think a woman metalhead from the good ol’ HTHS can earn her
way up to this sort of lifestyle?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“My soon-to-be-ex-husband made his millions in the pornography business, if you really must know. His is the misogynistic kind of porn, too. Made for misogynistic men. There’s nothing even remotely artistic or empowering about his movies, at least from the feminist point of view. He’s a producer-slash-owner. And he’s subhuman, capable of turning ‘the endless well of human lust into mountains of capital’—his words, not mine. Likes to use first-time college girls on spring break because they don’t know how much they should get paid. Many of them will sign a legal document and appear on film for free drinks and a T-shirt. He also has a sex addiction problem. Ken’ll stick his dick into anything blond with an IQ under seventy.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“Anyway, he’s a complete asshole, but he knows how to travel. I charged the room to his account here, the prick. So drink and eat as much as you want from the mini bar. Take a bathrobe, if you like. Trash the place. Smash the jumbo TV set with that expensive-looking floor vase over there, if you feel so inclined. Live it up like a rock star.”
I raise my eyebrows ever so slightly in disapproval, or maybe pity.
She smiles at me, but it’s a sad smile. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Um,” I say, and suddenly I feel sorry for this woman who can stay in posh hotels because she married a pornographer. While I have nothing against what consenting adults do with each other behind closed doors, Portia’s face tells me that her Ken is not a very nice pornographer. Maybe I should have taught more female authors when I was a teacher? Maybe I should have emphasized the importance of having one’s own room, like Virginia Woolf suggested?
“Well, do you like the place?” she says, letting me off the hook.
“It’s lovely.”
“Hungry?”
I nod, and shortly after that we are eating room service—ginormous lobster salads, chilled sweet Riesling wine, and carrot cake for dessert—in our private dining room overlooking Central Park.