Witness This, and: Return

Witness This

Every April we unsheathed sofa cushions from their glassy wrappers, perched tea on our laps, and became an audience for his four-decade victory lap, the Great Wall, the Blue Lagoon, the Panama Canal, the unsmiling projection of him and his second wife against the world’s great achievements, as if his dodging the sinkhole were an epic that needed witnesses other than his own camera.

Each photo narrated, lingered, without joy but studious observation, while dust swirled in the projector’s haze, and you sat, middle-aged, your own family seated in halo, swallowing your rage and your grief. It should have been your mother there, dressed in linen, leaning against the cool crutch of a terrace railing, the half-drunk glass of rosé ghosting a day’s pleasure spent peering into Capri’s too-green- to-believe water.

She was the worker, though, the one who plated dinners at five, and wiped your tears and kept you company and mixed the drinks, and told you secrets, and huddled you against her sisters’ menthol’d embraces in their tiny apartments above the capitol, where they lived alone, except for when certain men came to visit and they put on furs and stepped in and out of Buicks with the practiced step of women who knew how easily gladness could combust.

Your mother’s heart burst of this pain while you were away, and so there was a life, foresworn of travel, its decadence and abandonment of what mattered. So we carved our way down interstates, crammed into a car with holes in the undercarriage, inscribing our childhoods onto the hot blank slate of the Central Valley, its mean brown flats, the spooky irrigation canals, the fields your father once worked a long time ago, before he grabbed a rung and held on with the clench of a man who knew how to survive.

He traveled into his middle nineties, the leaf season in New Hampshire, the Alaskan coastline in April, the Rocky Mountain express across Canada, but he never visited your dying wife, the one who also dreamed of Paris, and ordered cakes from England, and who read of Russian revolutions, but who saw none of it, even when you knew she was dying, and then it was too late: the sons arrowing back, the taking turns sleeping on the sofas, the theater of morphine, the curtains’ pleas for privacy.

Fifty years later the post brings me your first Christmas card together, a photograph snapped from the summit of Machu Picchu, you and your second wife, the one who gets to travel, peering into the mist of this stony place, and I wonder what it is I am supposed to witness, other than your happiness. I wonder who this picture is for. Only my heart refuses what the eye cannot deny. And I wonder if its clench is the one which will help me survive, or the one that will keep this absurd carousel turning.

Return

I went back to the city we visited, to the restaurant that we ate in and to the bar where we saw the twilight fade from blue to green to black, and I stood outside the hotel we returned to in the noisy night with the sleepless doorman always reading a hardboiled crime novel,

and he was not there, and after hours the city convulsed with ugliness, helicopters pulsing over head to keep the crowds of tourists at bay, and at the bar the crowd was not so nice, and in the restaurant I tried to find in that evening’s diners some flash of your hair or

our hands across the table, but instead I could only catch my reflection in the smoky mirror, blurred and only apparently mine when he bent as I did to finish the meal, which tasted of nothing, not even the memory of what it once was.