Commonwealth(71)

“It isn’t you,” Leo had said when she finished reading the book. “It isn’t any of you.” He was sitting in the second bedroom he used as an office in their apartment in Chicago, the little apartment they had before there was money. He held her in his lap and stroked her hair while she cried. She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but a day all the way back in Iowa when Leo, brushing his teeth while Franny was in the shower, had spit out his toothpaste, pulled back the curtain just a bit, and said, “I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about your stepbrother.”

What she had thought at that moment, naked in the water, the shampoo running down her neck, was that Leo Posen had listened to her, that he had found Cal’s death worthy of his further reflection. He reached into the water, ran his finger in a circle around her small soapy breast.

What she hadn’t thought of in the shower was that one day she would be fifty-two and have to watch the outcome of her smiling acquiescence play out on a screen. Cal’s character wasn’t dead yet, that was waiting up ahead. Albie’s character had been drugged a couple of times by the other children, the character who was Caroline had slapped and pinched the character who was Franny every time the camera panned in their direction, and the movie wasn’t even about the children. It was about the mother of one family and the father of the other and how they looked at each other at night from across the driveway. The character who was Franny’s mother pushed her hand repeatedly through her long blond hair while staring off into the distance, proof that she struggled with the weight of her infidelity. She wore blue surgical scrubs that seemed to have been tailored to her pretty figure. The mother in the movie was pulled in so many directions: the hospital, her children, her neighbor who was her lover, his wife who was her friend. Only her hapless husband seemed to ask nothing of her. He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. She was being called away again.

“Enough,” Fix howled. He pushed himself halfway up to standing, as if he meant to walk out of the theater on his own, but his feet were still on the paddles. Caroline shot from her seat, catching him just as he pitched forward into the wide open space in front of handicapped seating, breaking his fall with her body. They were clambering around in the darkness, each with a knee and both hands on the sticky floor. Franny had her arms around her father’s chest but he was thrashing, fighting her off.

“I can get up!” he said.

The collective eyes of the movie theater fell upon them. No one hushed them. Up on the screen the scene had changed. Now Cal’s character was running down the street past the neighbors’ houses in the middle of the day, his brother running behind him, trying to catch up. There was for that moment enough light that the patrons could see the noise was coming from an old man in a wheelchair. There were two women trying to help him up. No one knew that they were the movie.

“Get out of here,” Fix said, his voice keening. “Get out!” They had him back in his seat but his legs were still twisted. He kicked at Franny but she got his feet back on the paddles. Caroline got behind the chair and Franny grabbed their purses. They were not exactly running with their father but they were going as fast as they could. Franny raced ahead and held open the door to the long, carpeted hallway, and then they were through the lobby, past the crazy neon rainbow pulsing above the popcorn stand, past the teenaged ticket-takers in their brown polyester vests. Bang! They burst through the glass double doors and out into the unbearable flood of sunlight.

“Fuck that!” Fix screamed at the parking lot. A mother with two children was crossing towards them but then stopped, reconsidered, and went the other way. Franny laughed and then buried her face in her hands. Caroline bent from the waist, putting her head on the curve of her father’s shoulder.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said. She gave him a small kiss on the neck.

“Fuck that,” Fix said again, this time discouraged.

“Yeah,” Franny said, and rubbed his other shoulder. “Fuck that.”

After the movie they went to the beach. Franny and Fix were against it. They said they were tired and wanted to go home, but Caroline was the one who was driving the car.

“I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday,” she said, tapping at the accelerator to remind them what the car was capable of, what she was capable of. “I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean.”

“Turn on Altamont,” he said. His voice half-vanished, as if the roar of his invective to the movie theater parking lot was all he had left.

“Do you think we might kill him, going to the beach now?” Franny said to Caroline.

Fix smiled. “That’s how I want to go. I want to die at the beach with my girls. We could call Joe Mike to come out and give me last rites.”

“Joe Mike’s not a priest anymore,” Caroline said.

“He’d do it for me.”

It was harder getting their father out of the car the second time. He wasn’t as able to help them, but Franny and Caroline managed. Caroline had, of course, been right about the beach. Almost all of the days in Santa Monica were beautiful, and this one, by virtue of the fact that it was no longer playing out in a movie theater, was more beautiful than most. Fix had a permanent handicapped placard for the Crown Victoria and they got a magnificent parking space when no parking spaces were available.