Alec hoisted the bag. It was huge yet weighed next to nothing. It came off the carousel effortlessly, wanting to fly into orbit in an arc way ahead of its plastic handle.
Once in the parking structure, he stashed his mother in the front seat, leaning forward to belt her in when she couldn’t work the mechanism. Her bad breath had taken on its own menacing proportions. He shut the car door, went then to shove her luggage into the back of the station wagon.
These were old-fashioned hard-sided bags made of cardboard printed like leather, then plasticked, both cases now badly gouged and dented. The basement on 219th was full of cheap crap like this—Alec’s father would buy set after set of luggage, essentially throwing away his money, refusing to ever invest in a single handsome piece. Why? Because, Alec, if you have something good, they know by that and that’s when they rob you. These had to be the oldest ones, suitcases with steamship stickers that showed they’d taken Stu and Viv to pre-Castro Cuba, to Bermuda and to Europe when it was cheap, more places than Alec would get Gina to ever go.
They were Road Runner cartoon bags, weightless as Wile E. Coyote before Isaac Newton came to believe in gravity and therefore defiant of all haptic expectation. Her luggage, made of paper, was filled with nothing.
Alec clicked one case open to make certain his mother’s things had not actually been stolen. In the overnight bag were a few old underclothes, a strange spiderwork of twisted and yellowed bras. In the other, bigger suitcase someone equally demented had packed a few old towels wrapped around a red-waxed ten-pound brick of Poverty Program cheese, date stamped from when Stuart was still alive.
“Mom?” Alec said.
10
Robbing the House
THE EAST WAS thick with humidity and guilt. In Berkeley, you didn’t go by that. If you were guilty or felt ashamed, you just spent more money on therapy in order to get over it.
Alec had himself recently done a few bad things, but because he had Fran Bloom to confess to, he didn’t need therapy. He had, for instance, started stealing from his parents’ house on 219th whenever he went home to visit. He’d taken a crystal decanter from his mother’s sideboard just the week before. This wasn’t something he could really tell anyone.
He and his sister had each agreed to reclaim the book or clock or the milkware pitcher they’d given their parents as presents over the years. They accomplished that much, then stopped, so much of the stuff in their parents’ house being so bad neither of them really wanted it.
But this was new, Alec’s stealing his parents’ actual objects. It started when he realized his mother no longer possessed the self with which she might really own something, either to keep it or to give away. In this she was like an infant, or less than an infant, really, since a baby would still be attached to its mother or bottle or blanket. Viv was out there now floating umbilically in the ether of disinterest. She still had style, gesture, but lacked the weight of ego heavy enough to achieve either desire or possessiveness.
“I guess I’ll take this then, Ma, if you’re sure you don’t need it?” He waved the decanter her way, nonchalantly. It was dusty, filled with soured wine.
Viv had come downstairs while he was robbing the sideboard and was staring at him from the living room, needing . . . ? she stopped, moved her hands up and down in front of herself in order to try to complete the faltering thought. She seemed bewildered by Alec’s question, both bewildered and annoyed. Why was he bothering her like this when she had more important things on her mind?
Her modesty having left her, Viv now stood before her son in only a bra and a pair of torn and baggy pantyhose held together at the one big rip in the calf with a rusted paper clip. She had on laceup walking shoes. He tried not to notice how the see-through nylon matted her thin gray pubic hair. When Alec mentioned that he thought she might have been looking for her dress, she stared at him dismissively. “What I need,” she said, “is my nightingale.” Her hat, as always, sat at a jaunty angle.
He and Betsy had been interviewing people to live in. The women who wanted this job appeared to each of them to be so obviously bored or criminal, so emotionally ill or mentally deficient they seemed of a lesser order than those who make a life’s work of passionately grooming dogs. His sister found someone who was adequate, and in so doing redefined the word adequate.
Alec flew home sadly, carrying the decanter on his lap. He and Carlo had been using the Duct Tape Airline because their offices had become somehow entwined in the complications of its frequentflier program. They found themselves, therefore, flying in and out of the most cracked and broken parts of airports, places that seemed much less than First World. The Employee-Owners of TWA had also just added another row of seats, he noticed, making the cabin so small Alec had to get a bulkhead seat in order to fit his legs in. He was going to have to begin to upgrade to First Class. This would cost him some of the miles he’d been trying to save for a vacation.
He’d only set the decanter down on the floor for a single moment to go to the toilet, but while he was gone one of the Employee-Owners rammed the decanter with her drink cart. She’d smacked it, took a chip out of it; still, it hadn’t broken. It was good stuff, cut crystal, heavy, leaded, not pressed glass. His father came up a bit in Alec’s estimation.
Home, Alec filled it with a good amontillado. He liked an excellent sherry now and then when he came in from work.
It was Alec’s now, yet his father hadn’t actually given it to him. He drank too much one evening while brooding on the death of cities—Gina was out at an opening, Cecily gone, Peter on an overnight—why was no one ever home anymore? He needed to call his sister, needed to have a nice long talk with her. He had this specific guilt: his grave-robbing, his vulturing of the not-yet-dead. He hit her button on autodial, then—realizing how late it would be for her—began to hang up, but Betsy had already answered.
“You what?” she asked.
He began again to recite the story—it was circular and he hadn’t quite come to the point of it—when his sister cut him off. “Alec, do you understand that you just woke me up in order to tell me something so trivial that it is putting me back to sleep just listening to it? Where’s Gina? Tell her to make you go to bed.”
“But it’s probably worth something,” Alec whispered. “This isn’t the usual junk Pop would get. It’s nice, maybe even a gift from somebody high up in Housing?”
“Alec, listen to me carefully. This is anxiety talking. Anxiety is the modern malady. My doctor suggests half a Xanax, a cup of hot tea, two cookies, to be followed by a good night’s sleep. My doctor talks like this.” She was talking very fast. “You’re my brother and I love you and I honestly mean this so listen to me carefully: I don’t care. I have three kids, plus Ben, plus Mom, plus the girl at Mom’s who isn’t fat like we thought but is soon to become what used to be called an Unwed Mother so I don’t want anything else, all right? So you have Pop’s whachacallit, so keep it, all right? So we settled that, so I love you and now I’m hanging up.”
Alec listened to the dial tone for a little while before remembering what it was he had meant to say. The curt voice of the woman he most especially hated came on to nag and vex him: If you wish to make a call, please do so. Please hang up and dial again.
It was so simple to dial Betsy, he felt so close to her—just the single button, the long-distance dialing system beamed up and down from the satellite. He admired the way it worked instantly, gathered no time to it, took nothing like the decades that used to erode when he was leaning over his desk, frowning down, patting his head and various pockets to try to find his glasses, laboriously dialing this number and then this number on the rotary—years fell away while he waited for the return after a nine or a zero.
Alec punched, got the