Love and Death in the Sunshine State Read online

  My mother held a small coffee cup, part of my grandmother’s old green-and-white Corelle set. She’d filled it three-quarters full with gin. “Can you believe this?” she said, nodding up toward my dad. “I can’t believe it. He’s shoveling walnuts when he should be making funeral arrangements. This looks just like a big pile of shit.” She sipped meditatively, then called up at the house, “Jim! This looks like a pile of shit down here, you know.” She sighed and drank again. “I couldn’t find the martini glasses. It’s nice to see you, honey.”

  In the twenty-four hours that preceded the funeral, my father absorbed himself in a flurry of senseless activity. He ripped out all the closets in the house and began to put up new drywall, bought and returned a series of dressers, mowed the lawn, harvested beans by flashlight, purchased a chain saw, and ironed a single tie over and over again. And he left behind him in every room he visited something that he’d inexplicably been carrying: one of his many tape measures, a pistol from the Civil War, a box of lead soldiers, the chain saw’s crumpled instruction manual, handfuls of rusted square-head nails, sketches for a calendar that, by a series of rotations, could be used forever, his good shoes.

  The morning of the funeral, the sky opened up suddenly, and the assembled family sat trapped in the summer kitchen watching the rain pour down. I had just received my first pair of eyeglasses, and every object seemed to stand out with an almost crystalline clarity. Limbs of walnut and lilac, their bark mottled with lichen, had been stacked beside the fireplace and gave off a pungent, mossy perfume as the flames warmed them. Coffee and bourbon circulated, along with plates of warm peach custard pie, beside which the vanilla ice cream had gone glossy and begun to pool. The rain fell very precisely into the grass and disappeared, and every so often, the wind blew the trees, and the tin roof resounded with a rifle-crack report. “Walnuts,” my father said under his breath.

  I ducked back into the house to sit alone in my grandfather’s office. Behind his desk was a swivel chair of orange burnished leather, which squealed on its casters when I dragged it into the middle of the room. That morning, I sat in the chair and, as I’d often done as a boy, spun myself slowly in circles. It seemed to me that the burial would be an almost-perfunctory act. Those my grandfather had loved, to whatever degree he was able, had mostly preceded him. The last decade of his life, he’d already tenanted a world populated mostly by ghosts, and in death he only made official what had previously been, as he would have said, ipso facto. His few remaining friends would sit in the chairs nearest the grave, waiting their turn. Neither then, as I spun listlessly in circles, listening to the rain, nor for a long while after did it occur to me that much of the grieving after a death is done not so much for the loss of the loved one but for the simple passage of time, which so gently obliterates everything before it.

  At the funeral, five nearly identical great-grandsons were tucked like dolls into their suits and seated one after another in the pew with lemon candies in their mouths and their feet dangling above the tile floor. Old men were helped to their feet, spoke, and sat down. “I was stationed in North Africa when I sent Tom Wood a letter by V-mail. That’s V-mail, not email. It was February 19, 1943, a Friday . . .” The organist sat facing the chancel, shoulders hunched beneath a wide lace collar.

  The entire day bent itself toward that hole in the ground, and when the grave finally lay open before us, the uneasy relationship of the living to the dead was summed up not by the pastor, who cleared his throat and lowered his eyes, saying, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” but by one of the grave-digging crew, a man with a camouflage cap and a ruffle of brown hair hanging halfway down his back. His sneakers were dirty with the muck of the grave, and he’d misbuttoned his shirt so that one side of his collar sat higher than the other. Beneath it, a hunter-orange fabric showed out. As the pallbearers approached with the casket, he stood at the head of the hole, holding his hands out parallel before him saying, “Square her up, y’all . . . Square her up . . .”

  The effect of the death of a person does not necessarily correlate with how well you knew them or whether you bore them any affection. No one can say whether the funeral of an aunt will plunge you into deepest depression or profoundest meditation, or will only take up four hours of the afternoon. You may sleep as softly as a child that night, wake chipper, and breakfast on potato salad and hot egg sandwiches on a patio covered in wisteria, and two hours later be brought to your knees with despair at the sight of a little clubfooted pigeon in the gas station parking lot. Or the grief, if grief even is the right word, will manifest itself only years or decades later, as an inability to eat the licorice your aunt always ate, the smell of which seemed to exude from her very skin.

  In my case, I slipped away from the wake, declining the plate of fried chicken and the slice of watermelon, and drove around in the rain until I’d found a hotel bar where I felt I could be certain of seeing no one I’d ever known. I sat with a book and tried to make some sense of the tumult of the past weeks. In the lobby, a stream of old Indian women in gaily colored saris were passing back and forth between the restroom and a wedding in the banquet hall across the way, and through the open doors, I could just make out the bride and groom as they were led in a circle by an officiant with a Rasputinish glare. At each successful circumnavigation of the marriage bower, he paused, looked gravely at the crowd, and said, “Please make them a hand.” A hesitant applause followed. The saturated shades of the women’s garments, cerulean and crimson and chartreuse; the eyes of the officiant glowering beneath his brow; and the murmurs of the wedding, sounding to my ear like a kind of musical drowning: it was against this background that I attempted to come to terms with the death of a man I’d both respected and despised, the Honorable Thomas Wood, judge in the Lycoming County Court of Common Pleas.

  Well before I was born, my grandfather had been elected to the court, a position that, to preserve the objectivity of the office, came with a ten-year term. He lived with my grandmother in the dilapidated farmhouse in Muncy, and Monday to Friday he drove the fifteen miles to Williamsport to sit for cases ranging from divorce to delinquency to the fluoridation of the water supply. He was highly regarded, I’d been told at the funeral, lenient in his sentences and ahead of his time in his notions of justice, and after we’d lowered the casket into the grave, a stooped old man had pulled me aside to say there was never anyone as honest and compassionate as Judge Wood.

  I spent a great deal of my childhood with only my grandparents as company, and one would have thought that I’d have sensed that honesty and compassion. A photograph I have above my desk shows my grandfather kneeling beside me in the grass in front of a broken lawn mower. I am perhaps three or four as his hand guides mine. But my memory had retained little from those earliest years, and as I sat in the hotel bar watching the wedding couple circle the bower yet another time, I could recall only the man whose sharp tongue had often been employed against those closest to him.

  After my grandmother’s death, he had decided that the two of us would travel together to England, and I remembered those miserable weeks in the British Isles in livid detail. I a giddy twelve, he eighty-two and sliding into dementia, we composed in my memory an almost comic pair, the old man obstinate and furious and wandering aimlessly across cobble and heath, through fog and rain, and behind him the gangly boy, helpless and near tears, pleading with him to stop, turn around, this was not the way to the hotel. He had given me my first journal in anticipation of that trip, a hardcover notebook clothbound in black linen with clean cream paper, and it was on those pages that I’d recorded my earliest written pledge to the task of honesty:

  I fear I have been avoiding writing my feelings so as not to hurt the feelings of others, and I will continue to do so, I must, but I will try to chart as many of my feelings as possible. I would rather remember how things felt than what time we got up in the morning.

  These feelings, about which I felt so strongly, were by and large
feelings of utter loathing for my traveling companion. On that trip, removed by only a few months from my grandmother’s death and forced for weeks on end into my grandfather’s capricious company, I had begun to understand all too well how, subjected for decades to his ire, she might have slipped so meekly from this life. The journal ended as we dined with his acquaintances. In a much-draped room, over a meal of haggis, my grandfather quizzed me on my knowledge of literature, and having satisfied himself with my ignorance, suggested to the assembled company that if I really wanted to write, I should be given five hundred dollars and put out on the street. I hated him, I wrote (I could not muster the courage to use the present tense). I just hated him.

  So lost was I in my recollection of his indictment and of that fragile pubescent era, which seemed in retrospect like some awful foreshadowing of my future failures, that the appearance of a woman in the doorway of the banquet hall hardly stirred my attention. Only as she crossed the lobby did she begin to edge into my consciousness. She wore a tube dress, coral pink, and yellow heels on which she tottered with a studied care, and as my eyes regained their focus, it was as if the memory of those middle-school years had produced a figure of its own accord. In one of those eerie fortuities of small-town life, I recognized this woman at once—taller but with the same sharp chin, the darkly circled eyes, the long, faintly freckled Parisian nose—as my now-grown seventh-grade crush.

  “Erin,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Cutter. I have to pee so bad.”

  As she swept past, bracing herself on the bar for support, it was as if a ghost had been resurrected, and I felt a sense, as I hadn’t in some time, of life’s purpose. I busied myself looking at my book, and she appeared again a few minutes later and took the stool beside me.

  “Good wedding?” I said.

  “Oh, a friend of a friend.” She leaned over and took the book from my lap. “Beowulf? That’s very old-fashioned of you.”

  “It’s gory,” I said. “Bones cracking, heads getting cut off, the limitless woe of Hrothgar. Really great.”

  “This is going to sound stupid,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But I think I thought it had wolves in it.”

  In Iowa City, in the company of aspiring writers, arguments could burst into being and friendships could be broken by merely mentioning the work of Baudelaire in a roomful of people who had never read a single line of his poetry. The week before, I had spent two excruciating hours pretending to have read a number of Montaigne’s essays, excusing myself from time to time to use the bathroom, where in the cramped stall I would pull out my phone and absorb everything I could on the ponderous Frenchman.

  It may have been her disarming statement, it may have been the thoughts of my grandparents or the harpsichord music drifting from the lobby, or it may only have been the whiskey, but looking at Erin, as she stood at my shoulder, mouthing the words on the open page of my book (A few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch above a mere . . .), I seemed to see her as through a caul, and with hardly any sense of what I was doing, I said to her, “You know, I had a terrible crush on you in seventh grade.”

  “Yeah.” She looked up from the book. “I guess I had a crush on you, too.”

  I knew then how the soldier feels when the grenade lands squarely in his lap. She settled onto the stool beside me, and we covered the intervening years quickly. And as effortlessly as I’d lost it during my first weeks in Iowa, I resurrected that ideal image of myself: the ascetic, sensitive, diligent writer; victim of great emotions; haver of excellent thoughts. I offered some daring little vignettes of the writing life. I put two extra windows on my turret. She, in turn, offered a charming description of the city of Pittsburgh, where she currently lived in an apartment of five people—one, a drunk who regularly collapsed in a pool of his own urine on the kitchen floor. She made ends meet with a variety of jobs: running the register at a café, supervising a gymnastics camp, dog-sitting. Half her week, she taught at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a job that allowed her free rein of the museum’s collection, and as she sat on the stool next to me now, our knees nearly touching, she described in great detail her most recent area of interest: Abbey’s hallucinatory Penance of Eleanor and its division of the world into black, white, and red. I had eaten lunch with this woman every day when we were twelve, and as she spoke, I found each gesture of her hand, each raising of her eyebrows unerringly familiar, and though I can’t remember now how the conversation led us out of the bar, Erin holding her heels in one hand, me carrying our two whiskeys, I recall well the events that followed. We had decided to reenact a challenge from our childhood, a simple footrace. We walked to the end of an empty hall, and setting my drink down on the floor, I looked up to see her already sprinting away.

  As I drew even with her, she threw a shoulder into me, sending me careening against the wall, but it was a glancing blow and I slipped past easily. How different was this sprint from our youthful ones. Flushed with whiskey and exertion, I seemed to glide down the hall, my feet only grazing the carpet. I was maybe ten strides ahead of her when I turned to look back. She streaked toward me, still pumping her arms. Her dark hair streamed behind her, her mouth was set and her fists were clenched, and as I watched, one of her feet just nicked the heel of the other. In an instant, her legs had tangled beneath her, she looked up at me with a kind of perplexity, and her body launched into the air.

  During this airborne moment, as she floated down the hallway, her body perfectly parallel to the ground, her high heels preceding her, past a framed still life of daisies and grapes, past a teenaged bellhop with his first hint of mustache, I saw her seventh-grade self, the young girl still in the heyday of a gymnastics career. She had shown an extraordinary talent for the sport, particularly on the bars, where for a time she’d held some notable rank. And more to the point, she had been quite accomplished at tumbling. As she flew down the hall, I imagined her twisting in the air, bouncing, somersaulting, and landing again on her feet, but her impact with the industrial hotel carpet, sudden and calamitous, brought with it only the oof of unexpectedly expelled breath. She slid, rolled to a stop at my feet, and looked up at me. I looked back at her, the bellhop grinned at both of us sleepily, and only then did she realize that the friction of the rug had peeled her dress down to her waist as neatly as a banana.

  What hope was there for me then? There lay before me a fully formed woman, flushed, panting, knees bloodied, hair tousled as if by cherubs. I wanted to lie down at her side like a dog and whimper over her wounds, and I hardly knew how I came to be kneeling beside her, at a bench in one of the lobby’s little alcoves, between two large potted ferns, holding her shoes in one hand, looking into two eyes that brimmed with tears, not of pain but of surprise. I was smitten, and I felt very valiant as with little puffs of Bactine (offered by the bellhop), I moistened her skinned knees.

  Love, of course, always has its impediments. In this case, seven hundred miles. When finally she had to return to the wedding, I placed the bottle of Bactine in her hands, and I said goodbye. I stepped out into the warm, foggy evening and walked the streets for some time, and only late that night, as I lay in the hard bed at my grandfather’s house, did I discover that some rough indelible impression had been made on my thoughts, an embossment of her face as she hurtled down the hallway, to which I returned again and again even as I was pulled off into sleep.

  A few days later, I returned to Iowa with my inheritance—an ailing Ford Taurus wagon, previously my grandmother’s—and a Pittsburgh address in my notebook, and for two months, I sat immobilized and heartbroken as winter bore down.

  That December, the wind howled in my turret, the river froze over in the span of a few hours, and one night a storm blanketed the city in ice. Trees, houses, telephone wires, mailboxes, the ranks of abandoned student bicycles: all were covered in a thick gloss of ice, and for days after the storm it was as if we lived our lives in the cold heart of a chandelier. I received occasional letters from Erin and w
rote to her in return, the resurrection of a note-passing habit we’d carried on a decade previously. She was delighted to have reconnected after all these years, was grateful for the “intellectual [she could not have used this word unintentionally] stimulation.” Confoundingly, so was I. To the face of this woman, once familiar and seen again only for a night, I could return at my convenience, no matter the time of day, and I could imagine whatever I wanted there.

  When my mother sent the newspaper clipping, the motel in flames, the palm trees, the disappearance, I made no connection between those events and my own circumstances. But as I read first one article on the case, then another, I felt an uncanny rousing of my interest. In particular, I fixed upon a single detail. The missing woman had kept her pet parrot in the building that had burned, but the fire marshal had not found its bones. It seemed that if someone had murdered Sabine Musil-Buehler and set fire to her motel, he had saved her parrot first. There was something so entirely human in this mixing of good and evil intentions, so familiar, that as I sat in my turret, I had the sudden sense, almost like a shock of static electricity, that I needed to know more. The longer I thought about it, looking out my window at the snow piled in the street, the more certain I became that I had to go to Florida. I had to find out what had happened.

  If someone had pointed out to me then that I was using this excursion to distract myself from my own longing for Erin, I would have scoffed. I hummed as I drove, and never once did it cross my mind that having been frustrated in my pursuit of one woman, I had set off in search of another.

  3: The Idea of a Woman

  It’s hard to say if anyone ever really intended to go to Florida. The soil is poor, the heat unforgiving. The refinement and the social organization of the Maya or the Inca were an impossibility on that peninsula. When de Soto made landfall near Anna Maria, he found only a smattering of warring tribes who wore inflated fish bladders in their ears and built their homes and charnel houses atop vast piles of discarded oyster shells. De Soto himself had believed Florida to contain something it did not, the city of gold, and when he died there after years of searching, I suspect he had begun to realize the vanity of his dream.