As compelling as this event was, I did not infuse it with either the tangible heat of desire or the cool distance of appreciation. For whichever approach I chose, I knew it was bound to be unrequited, and so my dominant feeling for the rest of the night was one of isolation.
The morning was a blur of Teddy’s needs. Things clanked and jars were opened and Clarissa turned herself away for breast-feeding. Though we slept well, we were both tired and car-lagged from the travel. Still, we were on the road by 7 A.M. and very soon we were in New Mexico.
New Mexico held me in a nostalgic grip, even though I had never been there. Only after we’d spent six hours crossing it before arriving in El Paso did I realize what was affecting me. It was that southern New Mexico was beginning to look, feel, and taste like Texas. Northern New Mexico was comparatively a rain forest; it looked as if an extremely choosy nutrient were coursing underground. Rocks burst with colour. Rainbow striations shot across the walls of mesas, then disappeared into the ground. Dusky green succulents vividly dotted the tan hills, and the occasional saguaro stood in the distance with its hand raised in peace like a planetary alien.
But southern New Mexico was arid, eroded, and flat. As we drove, Clarissa liked to turn off the air-conditioning, roll down the window, and be dust-blown. I was beginning to sunburn on the right side of my face, and we screamed a conversation over the wind that ripped through the car. She told me that her bank account was being depleted fast, that she was worried she would have to quit school, thus ruining her chances of ultimately achieving a higher income. She said she was concerned that she would have to move back to Boston per her ex’s demand, and she didn’t understand why her ex even cared about whether they were in Boston as he seldom exhibited any interest in Teddy. All this bad news was delivered without self-pity, as if it were just fact, and I felt a strong urge to cushion her fall as her life was collapsing. But I lacked any ideas to support her except cheerleading. I suppose I could have been a moral voice, but I was beginning to doubt my status in that department, too.
Our conversation reminded me that I was also in financial trouble. Granny’s intuition had saved me many times, but that form of rescue was now over. I wondered if my pretence of having no need of money, to myself and to Granny, was childish. My paltry government check was insufficient to support my grand—compared to some—lifestyle. I knew that without Granny’s occasional rain of money, there was going to be, upon my return to Santa Monica, a housing, clothing, and food crisis.
In El Paso we found a Jimmy Crack Corn motel that fit within my new scaled-down notion of budget. I joked, “Discomfort is our byword.” To her credit Clarissa laughed and agreed. We stayed in separate rooms as we sensed a wretched bathroom situation, and we were right. Barely enough room for the knees.
The motel had made one attempt at landscaping, a ramshackle wooden walkway arcing over a concrete-bottomed pond. However disgusting it was for Clarissa and me to look into its murk, Teddy considered it Lake Geneva; he wanted to swim, frolic, water ski, and sail in its green sludge. We wouldn’t let him come in contact with the mossy soup, so dense that it left a green ring around the edge of the concrete, but I did make paper boats that Teddy was allowed to throw stones at and sink.
In the morning, Clarissa’s shower woke me and I could time my ablutions to hers thanks to the paper-thin walls. We cleaned our teeth, peed, and washed simultaneously, enabling me to appear outside my door at the same time she appeared outside hers, and by 7 A.M., with Teddy already lulled into a stupor by the motion of the car, we were on the final stretch to Helmut, Texas.
What happened under the pecan tree qualifies as one of those events in life that is as small as an atom but with nuclear implications.
Clarissa and I had checked into a local motel, just a short hop from Granny’s, that practically straddled the Llano River. It was set in a gnarly copse of juniper trees whose branches had woven themselves into a canopy that threw a wide net of shade. We were lucky to have found a low-cost paradise that had a number of natural amusements for Teddy, including nut-finding, water-squatting, and leaf-eating, and it was easy to idle away a few hours in the morning while we laboriously digested our manly Texas breakfasts.
Before lunch, Clarissa drove me to Granny’s. I had no recollection of how to get there, though a few landmarks—the broadside of a white barn, a derelict gas pump, a cattle grate—did jog my memory. But when we left the highway and drove among the pecan groves whose trees overhung the road to the farm, I experienced an unbroken wave of familiarity. The trees grew in height and density as we neared the farmhouse, which was sheltered by a dozen more trees towering 150 feet in the air, protecting it from the coming summer heat. The house was a single-story hacienda, wrapped around a massive pecan tree that stood in the middle of a courtyard. The exterior walls were bleached adobe and the roof-line was studded with wooden vigas. A long porch with mesquite supports, sagging with age, ran the length of the house on three sides, and a horse and goat were tied up near a water trough. The trees overhead were so dense that sunlight only dappled the house even at this moment of high noon. A few rough-hewn benches were situated among the trees. Attached to the house was a ramada woven with climbing plants, at the end of which a tiled Mexican fountain flowed with gurgling water, completing this picture of serenity.
There were three cars parked outside, two were dilapidated agricultural trucks and one a dusty black Mercedes. We pulled up and got out. A man in a tan suit swung open the screen door. He held a slim leather portfolio that indicated he was official. He said hello to us with a relaxed voice and we heard the first southern drawl of the entire trip. We introduced ourselves and when I said I was “Dan, grandson of Granny,” there was a frozen moment followed by, “Oh yes, we’ve been looking for you.”
Clarissa went off to the fountain to show Teddy its delights. I went into the farmhouse with Morton Dean Argus, who turned out to be the lawyer for the estate. He explained he had driven all the way from San Antonio and had stayed here on the farm for the last three days to sort out issues among the few relatives who had arrived in pickup trucks after the news got out. “Y’all arrive a half hour later and I would-of been gone,” he said.
Everything useful in the house had been sacked. Everything personal remained. Antique family photos still hung on the walls, but the microwave oven had been removed. The stove, a 1930 Magic Chef Range, was too ancient to loot, the marauders having no idea of its value to the right aesthete chef. A cedar chest filled with Indian rugs had been mysteriously overlooked. There were the occasional goodies, including period equestrian tack used as wall decor, as well as a small collection of heavy clay curios of sleeping Mexicans, whose original bright colours had patinated to soft pastels.
Morton Argus told me that Granny had been cremated and interred on the property under a tree of her designation. He told me that a one-page will had been read and that certain items— really merchandise—had been distributed to a few workers and relatives. My sister, Ida, had been there, he said, and I felt a pang of guilt that my sequestered lifestyle hadn’t allowed her to contact me more quickly so I could have met her at the house. It was Ida, he said, who coordinated the dispersal of furniture to a small swarm of needy relatives.
Ida was three years younger than me. She’d moved to Dallas, married young, and borne children, and she seemed untouched by the impulses that took me inside myself. “Did my dad show up?” I said. Morton asked me his name. “Jack,” I said. No, he hadn’t.
Accompanied by Morton, I nosed through the house and came into a room piled with cardboard boxes and empty picture frames. An oval mirror leaned precariously against the floor. Four wooden kitchen chairs were alternately inverted and nested on each other.
“Anything you want in here?” asked Morton.
“I’ll look,” I said.
Morton excused himself, saying he had to sort out some papers. I knelt down and browsed through a couple of boxes. At the bottom of one I found a metal container the size
of a shoe box. It had a built-in lock but the key was long gone. I thought it would take a screwdriver to bust it open, but I gave it an extra tug and it had enough give to tell me it had only rusted shut. A little prying and the lid popped up. Inside were a bundle of letters, all addressed to Granny, all postmarked in the late ‘70s. Two of them had return addresses with the hand-printed initials J.C. They were from my father. I picked up the box, knowing that this would be the only thing I would take from the house.
I found Morton in the living room, which, because of the exterior shade and small windows, was exceedingly dark. He sat in an armchair that had been upholstered with a sun-bleached Indian blanket. He had a handful of papers that he shuffled then spread open and rearranged like a bridge hand.
“Has your sister contacted you?” he said.
“Not that I know of.” I loved my rejoinder, grounded as it was in a fabulous paradoxical matrix, and perfectly e-less.
“So you don’t know?” he said.
“Know what?”
“You and your sister,” he said, “are splitting approximately six hundred and ninety thousand dollars.”
I stayed in the house for another hour, glimpsing faint memories as I moved from one room to another. These were not memories of incidents, but were much more vague and beyond my reach. They were like ghosts who sweep through rooms, are sensed by the clairvoyant, and then are gone.
Clarissa and Teddy had wandered far away from the house and now had wandered back. She appeared at the screen door with a “How’s it goin’?” that expressed an impatience to leave. I said good-bye to Morton, slid an arm around Teddy, and lifted him into his car seat, which made him scream. I put the metal box in the backseat and we drove back to the motel.
We sat in the dining room and I could tell that the trip was starting to wear on Clarissa. Our blistering escape had not solved her problems back home. Earlier I watched her call her sister as the phone battery gave out, and now she seemed in her own world, one that excluded me. Then she laid her hand across her wrist and jumped. “I lost my watch!” she said. She checked around her, then left me with Teddy while she searched the room and car. She returned—no watch—and explained that it had been a gift to herself from herself, and I assumed it had a greater history than she was telling me. Perhaps a reward for a personal accomplishment whose value only she could understand. “What do you think,” she said, are we ready to head home?”
“Now?” I said.
“In the morning.”
“I want to go back to Granny’s for an hour or so.
This annoyed her. She wanted to leave before dawn, and she persevered. “I need to get back,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” This was the first time Clarissa had had a hint of surliness, but she made up for it later that night.
She and I were bunked in the same room. This motel was the kind a traveller would consider a charming, memorable find, as its architecture and decoration perfectly identified a specific year in a specific decade in a specific location that could not be seen anywhere else. Built in the ‘30s, the bathrooms had porcelain sinks and tubs that weighed a ton. The rooms were long and narrow and the ceilings and walls were lined with long planks of dark pine. Wrought-iron hardware strapped each doorway and artisan-crafted sconces silhouetted tin cut-outs of cowboy scenes through translucent leather shades. Clarissa and Teddy took one end of the room and I slept at the distant other on a sofa bed that sunk in the middle with a human imprint. We had amused each other by spreading ourselves on the floor and playing a game with a deck of cards that at one time had been so waterlogged it was three times its normal height. Clarissa and I tried to play gin, though we struggled to remember the rules, but Teddy made it impossible because he kept grabbing the cards and rearranging them. Clarissa began calling him Hoyle and I would say to him, “What do you think, Billy Bob, can I play that card?” And he would either pick up the card and drool on it or slide it back to one of us, which would make us laugh.
Clarissa and I were now used to seeing each other in our underwear. We both slept in T-shirts and underpants. She turned out the lights and we slipped into our respective beds. She spoke softly to me from across the room. “What was it like today?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“For asking,” I said.
“Daniel,” she whispered, I think to say, of course she would ask.
We didn’t speak for several minutes. I didn’t want to tell Clarissa about the inheritance because I wanted to digest it myself first, and I didn’t want anything external to affect our little trio. Then there was a rustle of sheets, then footsteps. Clarissa came across the room and knelt beside my bed. She reached her arm across the blanket until she found my shoulder and laid her hand on it. Her fingers crawled under my sleeve and began a small back-and-forth motion. She rested her head on the bed and her hair fell against my arm. I didn’t move.
“Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Oh, Daniel,” she whispered.
I didn’t know what to do.
“I love that you love Teddy.” The upper one-eighth of her body caressed the upper one-eighth of my body. She moved her hand from my shoulder and laid her palm against my neck with a slight clutch.
“We should go to the house tomorrow, if that’s what you want. I’m sorry about today. I’m just impatient; impatient for nothing.”
She closed her eyes. My arm, with the bed as a fulcrum, was locked open at the elbow and sticking dumbly out into the room. It was the part a painter would have to leave out if he were going to make the scene at all elegant. I evaluated Clarissa’s tender contact and I decided that it was possible for me to put my free hand on her shoulder and not have the action considered improper. I bent my elbow and touched her on the back. She didn’t recoil, nor did she advance.
I didn’t know if Clarissa’s gestures toward me were platonic, Aristotelian, Hegelian, or erotic. So I just lay there, connected to her at three points: her hand on my neck, my hand on her back, her hair brushing against my side. I stared at the ceiling and wondered how I could be in love with someone whose name had no anagram.
Later, she dragged her hand sleepily across my chest and went back to her bed, leaving a ghostly impression on me like a hand-print of phosphorus.
Teddy woke later than usual and Clarissa and I slept through our usual 7 A.M. get-up. By nine, though, we had eaten, packed, and loaded the car. We got to the end of the motel driveway and when we stopped, I said, “I don’t want to go back to Granny’s.” And then Clarissa argued, “But you said you did.” Then I came back, “It’s out of our way.” Then Clarissa said, “I don’t mind. I think you should go.” Out of politeness, we had switched sides and argued against ourselves for a while to show that we understood and cared about each other’s position. Clarissa turned right and we eventually found ourselves once again driving among the pecan trees.
There were no cars out front and the house was locked up. I knew what I wanted to do, find Granny’s grave. Clarissa said, “I’ll leave you,” and ran after Teddy, who had charged immediately toward the river. I stood before the house and listened to the breeze that rustled through the groves. I decided to walk near the river, upstream, to avoid the bustle of Clarissa and Teddy, who were downstream. I started out, but the pink Dodge caught my eye. I returned to it, felt around under the paper sacks filled with dirty laundry, and got the metal box I had chosen as my sole artefact of my life with Granny.
I walked through the forest and came upon a wooden bench—a half slice of a tree trunk—that faced the shallow and crystalline river. There was a hand-painted stone with Granny’s name and dates on it, and a small recently disturbed patch of dirt. This diminutive marker was under the tallest and most majestic pecan tree on the farm, and I guessed that was why Granny chose the spot. I sat on the bench and looked toward the river, trying to meditate on this house and land, but couldn’t. My mind has always been independent of my plans for it. I reached in the metal box and picked u
p the small cache of letters. I thumbed through them and took out the two from my father. I read the earlier one from 1979, which was about Granny. It was a snide criticism of how she ran her property, followed by some tactlessly delivered advice on how to fix things.
The second one was about me:
January 8, 1980
Dear G.,
I’m so glad you were able to see Ida before the trip. She’s our little heartbreaker don’t you think? I have a photo of her with a cotton candy we took at the San Antonio Fair. She looks like an angel. She knows exactly who Granny is too. We show her your photo and she says Granny.
She’s only four and she seems brighter than everyone around her. The song says there is nothing like a dame and there ain’t. I didn’t know how much I wanted a girl, but when Ida was born, that was it for Daniel.