16

Visitations

WEEKENDS THAT WINTER, Flora stayed at Paul’s, stuffing her schoolbag with underwear, her toothbrush, a fresh shirt or two, another pair of shoes, maybe. It reminded her of packing for her father’s after the divorce, as though Paul and her father’s house now shared custody of her. One never had the right things. Something critical always left behind. Larks went, too, though you could tell he was reluctant to be so long away from his post by the kitchen window—what if he came home, after all this time, and Larks wasn’t there to greet him? But Larks had little choice in the matter.

Weekdays, Flora spent alone. Paul worked long hours, and she had grown to like her time on her own in her father’s house. She now knew the creaks and moans. She’d become expert at building fires and preparing simple, tasty meals for one, which she’d never mastered living in the city, that mecca of plastic and delivery. Fried eggs, sole sustenance of the fall, no longer sufficed. She made stir-fries and soups, salads and the occasional fillet. She spent her evenings reading before the fire on the gold chair, or in the study on the Shaker chair, reading her way across her father’s bookshelves, retracing the silences of his life. How many hours had he spent alone here with Thomas Hardy or Philip Larkin? More than he had with her—his fellow poets a more reliable presence in his life than his own blood. Flora learned she loved Elizabeth Bishop—the poems, the paintings, the letters, the stories; she learned to love the wicked grimness of Larkin. Hardy, though, she couldn’t quite get-why the great appeal? Hardy was still his.

In spite of the weekend visitations, Cynthia’s question remained: What was the story with Paul? Something more serious between them had seemed to begin with the new year, when he was away in the city visiting the Apostles and his sister. He had called to tell her she was on his mind—but which part of her exactly? And in what capacity? The vagueness of his endearments left too much room for invention, and doubt. But what did she want from him anyway? She barely knew him. Flora hated people who said things like “I met him and I just knew.” Maybe some days you just knew you’d want him forever; other days you just knew what a colossal schmuck he’d turn out to be.

A few times they went out to dinner and to the movies at the desultory, popcorn-grimed art-house cinema in town, but mostly they stayed in bed, ordering food from the Burmese place downstairs—green-tea noodles and mango salads. Was this to save money, or to stave off the public humiliation of being caught together, or was it simply hard to beat the pairing of sex and Burmese food? Flora wasn’t sure. But it contributed to the unreality of their relationship—if that’s what it was—as if it were a play staged weekly in Paul’s apartment, in which they were both actors and audience.

Flora slept better the nights she slept in her father’s bed, but there was still the awkwardness of the house’s niceness, and after that first time she never invited Paul back. But Paul did not sleep well in his own bed, either—a double bed his feet hung off of, a lumpen futon couch rendered perpetually prostrate. One night she woke and found him in the other room, with a book in his hands, a finished crossword puzzle in his lap, his eyes strained and tired in the weak overhead light.

“What’s keeping you up?” she asked him, and he smiled as though she’d made a raunchy joke, but then looked suddenly serious.

“Waiting for the phone to ring,” he said. “Waiting for my dad.”

And she climbed onto the chair with him, the crossword puzzle crinkling beneath her, and kissed him. Kissing Paul was one of life’s great pleasures. They could kiss for hours; they were Olympian kissers. When they kissed, what was happening between them made sense.

His sleeplessness made sense, too, when later the phone did ring, waking them both, the bartender from the pub where Paul had worked years before asking him to come pick up his father and take him home. Flora could hear his voice through the phone. Paul’s father was in no condition to drive, in no condition to be alone.

“Yup” was all Paul said, and he threw on his clothes without switching on the light—an expert.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Flora asked him.

He left without answering.

In the grayness of the early morning when he returned, she could feel the sharp prod of his resentment against her skin, his silent accusations as he slid into bed beside her, his long body rigid, forbidding. Why did she not have a job? Was all she’d done that week read and take the dog for walks?

“What are you thinking?” she asked him, hoping he would tell her he was thinking about breakfast or some such mundanity, but he said, “Your dad.”

He could not understand her secrecy. Why did she want no one to know of the poems? Why wait? If there was an editor, if Cynthia had already done the work of finding him, and he was smart enough and legit and willing to pay money to bring her father’s work to the literary world, why say no?

“Isn’t it nearly impossible to sell a collection of poems?” he asked rhetorically.

He pressed: “What do the poems reveal? What makes them so awful?”

And he was further baffled when she assured him that they revealed little beyond the way her father had felt about his own life. No lifelong habit of closeted relations with male students. No presidential embezzlement of college funds. No Internet pornography ring. No extramarital shenanigans. It would almost be easier if they did contain some shocking revelation, some specific humiliation she could point to and say, There, see that? That’s why.

Paul didn’t ask directly if he could read them, but wondered aloud whether it was useful to have multiple readers—readers who could be more objective. He mentioned the fellowship he had received from Princeton but could not accept, and referred again to his friend the Apostle with the online journal, who would jump at the chance to get his hands on the Dempsey poems.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?” she asked him.

“No, of course not,” he said.

She didn’t like the bragging, the name-dropping, the eagerness. Why was everyone so fucking eager, everyone she’d inherited from her father—Larks, Cynthia, Paul, and Carpenter—rendered drool-some, slavering, and toothy at the thought of all that was Lewis Dempsey. Like predators to bones. Obsequious piranhas.

“How’s your father doing?” she asked, anticipating rightly it would be the end of any conversation between them.

As winters went, this one turned strange, with stretches of days of sun and balm, days of sweaters and no jackets. The months were mixed up—February a lamb—and Flora let Paul convince her to buy a bicycle. And so they left the black-box theater of his apartment and went to the cluttered local shop where her parents had bought her bikes as a child. She bought an old white Peugeot that made her feel old-fashioned, and she bought a dark brown basket that hooked to the handlebars with leather straps, its very own purse. It was the first item she’d bought for herself in months; life in Darwin, if nothing else, cheap. But when Paul suggested they go for a ride, Flora resisted. Weren’t Saturdays for pajamas? Or matinees? Once out on her graceful bike, though, the whirring of the wheels below, and the eerily springlike smell in the air, she forgot her sluggishness; she was in the world entirely. The riding brought her back. She had loved biking when she was little, the speed and smoothness, the freedom from adults. She’d taken a pride in her bicycles as physical objects, as certain grown-ups love their cars, and had mourned the passing of each one she outgrew, first the tiny aqua-and-white one, the one she learned on, then the tough-looking quasi mountain bike with its black Velcroed padding on all the bars.

The Darwin bike path—an endless tongue of asphalt lapping up the countryside—ran along the old railroad tracks beside the Bird Sanctuary, where Flora used to walk with her father. No self-respecting New England town was without one. It had been laid back when she was in high school, and such projects had come into vogue, bourgeois recreation covering up outdated industry. At the time, the transformation of the tracks had seemed a grave improvement, the best spot in town for chain-smoking remade into a place for healthy adult fitness and play. But now it comforted Flora with its reassuring flatness, so reliable—a small part of life to be counted on.

Riding along the path, Flora spotted Esther Moon—her lost friend from high school, Esther of the immortal car—walking a small child along the side. Esther was pointing out some object on the ground to the child, who looked no more than three, and Flora could easily have escaped unseen. She surprised herself by slowing down. Esther Moon, a mom after all. In high school, Esther had been the girl who suffered every known teenage affliction—bulimia, date rape, summer school; she’d been diagnosed with ADD and charged with DUI. At one point she’d become convinced she had repressed memories of her stepbrother molesting her, and had a brief bisexual period. Beyond the drama, though, Esther had been funny and wild and that all-important high school girl attribute, a good listener. Flora had been friends with her, though she’d had a hard time believing Esther’s stories; her list of misfortunes had seemed more symptom than cause.

“Esther!” Flora called as she came to a stop and pulled over to the side.

Esther turned, a quiet smile of recognition passing over her face. She looked good, like an architect: in black, with well-chosen boxy-framed glasses, artfully choppy hair. “Oh, hey, Flora,” she said, as though they hadn’t seen each other in weeks or months rather than years. “Good to see you.”

“You, too!” Flora said. With the bike and the child held by the hand and Esther’s breezy affect, Flora decided against a hug, but then Esther swooped in and squeezed her.

“This is Lily.” She looked down at the child. “Can you say hello to Flora?”

“Hello, Flora,” Lily said with alarming politeness.

“Hello there, Lily.”

“Hey, you both have flower names, isn’t that cool, Lil?” Esther said. The girl nodded a solemn nod. “What are you up to, Flo?”

“I’m just taking a ride with my—” Flora gestured in the direction of the path, but Paul had ridden ahead, so there was no need to explain what exactly he was to her.

“No, I mean in Darwin, in February?”

Flora started to answer, but Esther cut her off again. “No, wait, sorry, whoa. I heard about your father, Flora. I’m really, really so sorry about that. How horrible. Super intense. Are you okay?”

Tears welled in Flora’s eyes. Those three short words—“Are you okay?”—were so demolishing. Esther swooped in and hugged her again.

After a moment, Flora pulled away. “I’m okay,” she said, sweeping her knuckle below her eye. Esther reached up and brushed away the tears on her other cheek.

“I know you are,” she said. “But shit, it sucks. He was such a charmer, your dad.”

It would require so much less energy to cry in front of this old friend who’d seen her cry many times before, years ago, in a different life, to let herself weep right there on that path devoted to physical fitness and satisfaction in the natural world, but Flora caught her breath and rubbed her face dry, and Esther didn’t take her eyes off her as she did. “What about you, Esther? Tell me about you.”

“Me? Yeah, well. I have a kid.” She fanned her arms toward Lily in a sweeping game-show-hostess motion. “Wasn’t quite banking on that, but you know, shit happens, right? And so I had to move back in with my mom and stepdad—oh joy, right? You know how excited I must have been about that. Remember in high school how crazy they made me? And they still do, but things are much better now, I mean, much, much better. I guess I’ve finally grown up a little, I don’t know, or maybe they’ve mellowed with age, but whatever it is, it’s totally manageable. And totally necessary because the prick f-a-t-h-e-r kind of vanished when we got the news, and I was not up for being the single mom of a newborn, you know? And while I’ve been here, to prevent myself from completely dying of boredom, I started this nonprofit, kind of a political thing. It just seemed like Darwin was a good place to do it, with all the self-righteous old lefties running about—I mean, look at these people.” Esther pointed to the cyclists cruising by. “The whole sanctimonious ‘Darwin knows best’ thing, I get so tired of it, you know? Sometimes I can’t believe I’m really living here again.”

Flora watched the Darwinians in their unflattering spandex and conscientious helmets. “God, I know,” she said.

“But, yeah, it’s going pretty well. And I think I’ll be moving out soon. Now that Lily is older, we can hack it alone, right, Lil?” Another solemn nod. “I hope so. Wow, I really hope so.”

Flora laughed, giddy, exhausted. “Wow, Esther, it sounds great. So impressive you’re doing all that.”

“Yeah? Thanks, Flo.”

“Really. A big day for me lately is going into town to run errands.”

Esther’s forehead creased in concern. “I’ll keep you in my prayers. I know you’re going to get through it.”

Was that a joke? But then Flora noticed a delicate gold cross hanging around Esther’s neck. Not an architect; a Christian. “It’s so good to see you,” Flora said.

“You too, you too.”

“So what’s it called, your organization?”

“Oh, man, I wrestled with that one. It seemed so important, and on the other hand totally trivial. So I’m just calling it Intelligent Darwin. Kind of a play on Intelligent Design, but also that’s what it’s about, how this place desperately needs to wake up from its liberal elitist hypocrisy and accept that there are other ways of looking at the world. That there is room out there for both ways to be taught, side by side. I’m proselytizing, aren’t I? I’m so used to making my pitch, it’s hard to turn that mode off. Wow. Who would have thought back in high school, when I was baked out of my brains, smoking those Parliament Lights like it was my life’s work, that it would come to this.”

“P-Funks,” Flora said, their name for the cigarettes.

“I mean, could those things have been any worse for the environment? With those plastic filters. Shit. But what did we know, right?”

“So wait,” Flora said. She scanned Esther’s face. Her sincerity was plain. But then, Esther had met all her wildly divergent phases with smooth-faced earnestness, as if the contradictions were a problem of interpretation. “Your organization is pro–Intelligent Design?”

“Don’t look so shocked, Flo.” Esther laughed, clapping her hands together, a gesture Lily echoed. “I’m not a leper, just a Christian. I got pregnant, the guy flaked, and I was all set to get an—well, to end it, and then I couldn’t. And I began to see things differently. To understand what my parents had been trying to tell me all those years. That they weren’t trying to control me, though it really felt like that. But no, they were trying to save me. I know, Flo, you should see your face right now. It must be super weird for you, hearing me talk like this, seeing my conversion. But I’m still the same Esther, just a little less messed up.”

Flora felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Paul. She had almost forgotten she had come there with him. It had taken him a while to notice she was gone.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“Esther, this is Paul,” Flora said. “Esther and I went to high school together.”

“How do you know this character?” Esther asked her. “How are ya, Paul?”

“You two know each other?” Flora said.

“I roped Paul into doing some pro bono stuff for me—you know, dealing with some IRS nonsense for I.D., et cetera.”

I.D.? Id. Flora waited for Paul to explain their connection. He was smiling widely, dimpling them indiscriminately. Obviously, he found Esther quite amusing. Who was this man? Volunteering his time to the anti-Darwin lobby? She hoped to God Paul and Esther had never had sex.

“Paul was my father’s lawyer,” she felt she had to say. “He drew up his will. That’s how we met.”

“That’s intense,” Esther said. “And now you’re—”

“Biking,” Paul said. “You can’t put it off forever.” He nudged Flora with his elbow—a pal-like, brotherly nudge.

“Cool,” Esther said, turning from Paul to Flora. “So, Flo, give me your number and I’ll call you. I’ll ditch the missus”—she nodded toward Lily—“and we’ll catch up.”

“Good luck with that,” Paul said. “She doesn’t answer the phone.”

“That’s not true.” How did he know that? She hadn’t known he’d noticed.

“Okay, well then, here’s my card. I know, weird, I have cards, right? But call me sometime.” Across the bottom, below the contact information, ran a single line of Scripture printed in cursive: And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Esther thought herself so different, so far from all the other Darwinians; in truth, they were all seeking illumination, a way out of the darkness through their separate and opposing methodologies. But what was so bad about darkness? And wasn’t faith, of any sort, a whole lot of trouble to go to?

Flora slid Esther’s card into her back pocket and climbed onto her bike. How did one take leave of a believer? “Peace be with you”? “Take care, Esther,” she said, and she pedaled off down the path without waiting for Paul, into the uncomprehending darkness, to which she was accustomed.

Her parents might have let life go on as it was, but it was Dr. Berry who said no. A terrible thing had happened, but her father was still her father. She couldn’t keep avoiding him and his house; she couldn’t keep running away.

“You’re a horseback rider, you know the expression—‘You have to get back on the horse,’” Dr. Berry said.

That was a metaphor. Studying poetry in school, Flora had learned about metaphors. She’d known about them for a while, but now she understood them, mostly. Dr. Berry wasn’t really talking about horses. So it wasn’t worth explaining that she had never gotten on the horse in the first place.

“I don’t want to get back on,” Flora told her. “I didn’t like it that much to begin with.”

“Didn’t like what?”

“The house.” That’s what they were talking about, wasn’t it? “It’s not even our house anyway. It’s Darwin’s house.”

“You never liked it? Never liked living there?”

Flora thought it through. “I loved it. But I didn’t like it much.”

That earned a slight smile. “Is there anything you could do to make you like it more, to make it feel more like your house?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

She did not ever want to see those bunk beds again, with their glow-in-the-dark star stickers spelling out FLORA across the top headboard and GEORGIA across the bottom. She did not want to climb the steps they’d jumped from or see the emptiness of the third floor. “If it looked different, maybe. New furniture, a new wardrobe for the house.”

Flora guessed Dr. Berry would laugh, but she said, “Sounds like a good idea.”

So the next week, they went shopping, Flora and her father, performing their shrink-certified homework, at a department store in the mall, over an hour away. It was the longest they’d been alone together in months, and soon they exhausted all their topics of conversation.

He told her again how impressed he’d been with her Macbeth, her sense of the language. “It’s hard stuff,” he said. “But you’re a natural. As if you’d been speaking in iambic pentameter from the word go. You have poetry in your soul, Flora-Girl.”

“Thank you,” she said, formal and shy, as if he were someone else’s parent.

They were silent for a while and then he asked, “Any word from the Wizard?” and Flora turned and looked out the window at the other cars as they passed them.

“Not yet,” she said.

Her mother had gone shopping on the day they moved to Darwin, but she had made mistakes—the point had been to make mistakes. At the mall, in the home department of the windowless store, with its furniture arranged as though in rooms—bedroom after bedroom, den upon den—Flora was careful not to make mistakes. They bought a new rug and a new lamp and a new desk. Best of all, they bought a bed to replace her old bunk beds—a canopy bed, something she’d always coveted now hers, like the bed of a girl in a story. She couldn’t quite believe it was hers, strange to have the longing no longer necessary. If you wanted to, you could swing from the thin wrought-iron bars, from which a gauzy white fabric hung, but Flora didn’t want to.

The new furniture was delivered and the old given away and the workmen from Darwin Buildings and Grounds came and they pulled up the carpeting and they pulled down the paisley wallpaper, and Flora helped. It was her first afternoon in the house, and she spent it scraping, yanking, tearing, gummy grime embedding itself beneath her fingernails. Destruction felt good, though she saved a small strip of the paisley, folding it into the pocket of her pants and later tucking it into the top drawer of her new dresser. They listened to Top 40 on the radio on a scratchy, paint-flecked boom box, and drank cold soda Betsy brought up for them when it was time to take a break. “The guys,” as Betsy called them, teased Flora: What, was she trying to take away their jobs, working so hard like that? Trying to make them look lazy? She laughed and shook her head no. That was the thing about the President’s House—there were so many people around and it was never boring, never empty. It was her mother who had hated living in the house, not Flora.

A week later, there was newness—the bed where the dresser had been, and the lamp, which was a standing lamp, now by the bed, not on the desk, and the rug blue and pink and fringed, and on the walls they’d painted wide blue and pink stripes and the room looked like wrapping paper; it looked like a present.

The Tuesday after the room was done, she and her father went back to Ponzu for the first time in ages, the last time they would ever go.

The hostess asked, “Where’s your sister?”

Flora looked at her father. “It’s just us tonight,” he said.

On the car ride home, he said, “That Chinese restaurant in town is pretty good.”

The next day, Flora told her mother how much she liked the new room, how it was better being in the house than she’d thought it would be, thinking her mother would be glad for her, but what she said was, “Funny. He was so reluctant to change anything when we first moved in.” Though Flora could remember her mother saying, “Why bother?”

“Would you rather I hate it there?” Flora asked her.

“No, of course not.”

“You don’t think I should have a new room?”

“Don’t you think you and your father need to talk about all that’s happened, too?” her mother said. “Shouldn’t you tell him how you’re feeling? I don’t know that problems can be solved in the long run through furniture.”

Then Flora felt a little bad about the new room, too, in addition to loving it so much. She cared about the wrong things. She was materialistic, a bad thing to be in most places, but especially in Darwin. She was not too good for this world, like Georgia, who almost was. No, she was just bad enough for it. But the room was so beautiful—Flora couldn’t believe it was hers. It was just how she wanted it. She loved it guiltily, madly.