Chapter 11 2008 #2
Sadie looks around. Over the years, the junk in her house has overtaken two corners of the living room and most of the staircase.
The door to the spare room will not open all the way; clutter lines the walls and spills out of the closet—clothes that Sadie couldn’t possibly fit into anymore jump off hangers, crawl out of large plastic containers.
And here, in the middle of all of her chaos, is her nephew, who wants to be nowhere else in the world. She should thank Al, really, for creating a plan that backfired so spectacularly. That’s the thing about kids: tell them they can’t have something, and they’ll never want anything else.
“Where are they?”
Sebastian smells his father before he sees him, or at least the fruits of his labor.
Chicken breasts sizzling on the stovetop, an onion roughly chopped.
Al is bathed in the smoke of it, a dishcloth thrown over his shoulder, his fogged glasses pushed up on top of his head. Stray capers. A gutted lemon.
“My day was great, thanks,” Al says. “How have you been?”
“Where are Mom’s videotapes?”
Al takes his glasses, rubs them with the dishcloth, places them back on his nose. He looks at Sebastian. His face is blank.
“The tapes that Sadie gave you? After the funeral? She said there were a hundred?”
“I don’t have them.”
“You don’t have them?”
The chicken sizzles. Lola sticks her head in and asks, “Can I help?” No one responds.
“I gave them away,” Al says.
“You gave them away?”
“What are we talking about?” Lola asks.
“Tapes. Of Mom.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“You didn’t think we’d be interested? Jesus, Dad, aren’t you supposed to be a historian? Aren’t you supposed to preserve things?”
“I don’t think it’s how she wanted you to see her.”
Lola raises her eyebrows and her hands and skitters out of the room. Like this doesn’t involve her too. Sebastian’s voice is pumping in his chest.
“You gave them away. To where? To who?”
“I don’t remember, Seb. I’m sorry. It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
His father looks like he has been punched.
After that, Sebastian does not speak. He has no words.
He waits for his plate and carries it up to his room.
His mind rolls over everything his father has ever claimed about their mother.
The Christmas presents, the moments she was around, moments he cannot remember, her happiness, here in this shitty little nothing town.
He hid her career. He hid her sister. He hid her life.
Maybe he just couldn’t stand that she existed beyond him.
That she had any success outside his narrow little world of Founding Fathers and ancient documents and bone-dry essays that nobody reads.
Maybe she showed him how little it mattered, trying to become Asshole Emeritus, all those patronizing nerds in turtlenecks.
Or maybe there is something else, something more damning.
Either way, Sebastian is going to find out.
In the morning he begs off school again.
Ankle-related reasons. His father, who normally wouldn’t tolerate this bullshit, says only: “If you must.” Lola looks at him like she wants to say something but doesn’t dare.
When they leave, he makes a mug of instant coffee and disinters his mother’s scripts.
On the living room floor, he spreads them apart, arranges them chronologically.
He follows his mother’s movements through the dialogue, the marginalia.
When she was pushed out of a taxi, she wrote: That asshole on Melrose Ave!
And when she was nursing a child and crying to herself, she wrote: Sebastian, week three. That’s him!
Everywhere, she’s written names, none of which have to do with any of the characters.
Women’s names, but also men’s: Rip. Mark.
Glen. Orson—Orson Grey! What could it mean?
Clearly, she was drawing from life, using the texture of California to inform Margie—fearless and reckless, good with being bad, taking whatever (whoever!) she wanted.
The thought was a profound relief; that she had not spent all her short hours in his father’s captivity, that she had experienced life in all its freedom and enormity, that she had maybe even loved other people.
Margie, Susan, Susan, Margie, blurring into a single force of nature.
His mother was an artist, a bombshell, a woman with the world in her hand. He turns another page. Ali. Richard.
Is she trying to tell him something?
This would all make more sense if he could see her in action.
Or smoke a joint. But given he’ll have to wait to score until school is out, he wanders to the kitchen, opens the drinks cabinet, and sniffs an ancient bottle of Madeira.
He could get drunk. He will get drunk. He is still only coming to understand the fluid fearlessness of alcohol, the way it moves through his body, clamoring for the arriving moment: Now!
He pours his coffee into the sink and fills the mug with a heavy dollop. It tastes sweet and rotten and good.
The scripts paper the entire carpet, and as he meditates on the scale of them, an anger builds.
Somehow, the most offensive thing is his father’s insistence that she left no trace.
Isn’t that the point of being an artist—to leave a mark?
He replays the conversation yesterday, Sadie’s anguished hands running through her bangs over and over again.
“Lots of people taped it,” she moaned. “I just never made copies.”
It’s out there, he thinks. Somewhere.
His face, his cheekbones, the inside of his mouth tingle as he crosses the room and boots up the desktop.
Why has he never thought to do this before?
The machine hums to life unfathomably slowly, junked up with viruses.
It’s LimeWire, he tells Lola, blaming his music piracy, failing to mention his forays into the X-rated underbelly of the web.
Videos take ages to download, but there’s pleasure in anticipation.
Knowing something magnificent and illicit is arriving.
Awaiting the slow, tantalizing load of a tit.
Don’t get distracted now, you’re on a mission. A whir of a desperate fan, the monitor flickering blue, a chord announcing the dawn of information. Open a browser and type: SUSAN BLISS.
Nothing.
Crushing, horrible nothing.
SUSAN BLISS LIFE AND TIMES
Did you mean Susan Byrne?
An explosion. Sebastian’s mother is everywhere, immortal, her headshot (how!) pinned to a forum page dedicated to Margie Ludlow.
He gorges: the time she tried to kill herself by overdosing.
The time she got in a knife fight with a pimp, carried a scar on her chest. So many strangers contain splinters of her!
These are his people: LATfan4ever, burger_mama, daytimemuse.
Fuck. He tips the chair back, almost far enough to be dangerous. Into the dead of the house, he emits a stunned little laugh. He needs to call his aunt, to tell her: it’s all here, it’s waiting for us! How many years has he spent without a trace of her when all of this was here to be known?
Click through the jungle, the vast soapy universe, until you come across a link—a full episode!
Sounds of a struggle. Men in torn suit jackets against a darkened backdrop.
Get up. Get up! Melodramatic percussion, choral synthesizers.
A heart being monitored from a hospital bed.
A title card falls—this is: LIFE AND TIMES.
It’s her, she’s coming! A gun is removed from a man’s back pocket, sirens blare to a conclusion and fade into the low tone of a cello.
Enter his mother. His mother! Sparkling earrings, rosy cheeks, clothes clinging tightly.
Look how she moves her mouth, how she leans to the side as she tells a joke.
His mother! All of her, the fleshy pinkness of her arms, the lightness of her.
Her hair! Long and dark, tumbling down past her shoulders.
The bounty of it. The camera caresses her legs, her back.
It grows dizzy on a prism of light refracting off of her earrings.
A young Orson Grey turns to combine a series of translucent liquids into a glass.
The camera looks longways down the bar. His mother is reflected into a mirror, doubled.
She is smiling a strange, coaxing smile.
His mother. In the overwhelming present tense, existing, now, here, existing and existing and existing. Maybe she has not actually died but just changed herself again, transformed into another character, living another life inside the internet.
He wants all of it.
Hours disappear. Sebastian searches involuntarily, urgently, sinking into the sound of her voice, pouring another Madeira and eating packet after packet of Fritos.
The way people talk about soap operas, Sebastian assumed they would be trite.
True, the sets are stagy and the dialogue isn’t always polished, but the stories are brave, with real drama and controversy, and his mother is fearless and free in all of them.
He follows along with the scripts, trying to piece together her thoughts in the margins with the actions on the screen.
If he looks hard enough, he’ll find it, the thing that brings everything together.
By the time Lola comes home he is pacing like a nutjob, scripts strewn across every surface.
She kicks off her shoes, pulls her hair out of her ponytail.
“Jesus. You might want to pick this all up before Dad gets home.”
“Or what?”
She shrugs. “Or you’ll have to talk about it again.”
“I want to talk about it.”
“What could you possibly want to say?”
He spreads his arms across the mess of her. “Look!”
Lola looks. Her eyes are his eyes, the same pristine green, but somehow, she is looking without seeing. “The tapes made him sad, Seb,” she says plainly.
“If he really missed her, he would have kept them.”
“I don’t think that’s true, necessarily.”
“Lola, he’s hiding something.”
In the background, their mother is talking to a man with slicked-back hair. Her hands are on her hips and she is facing away from the camera. She turns, and implores him not to leave her. Her lips are cherry-red and her voice is fraught.
“I think you should ask yourself if that’s something you really want to know.”
He eyes her, his twin. Sees her seriousness. It’s a look he knows well, Lola afraid of some nameless thing.
“Seb. Come on. Can we just talk about this when I’m back?”
Oh, right. He forgot: they’re leaving him behind.
Tonight, Lola and his father are lighting down the coast to look at universities well beyond his GPA.
What a bonding experience. But he can see how bad she feels, so he simply says: “Whatever.” Reluctantly, he stacks the papers, removes them to his room.
When his father comes home, he is humming: Let’s go fly a kite.
His father is not a man who hums. Nor is he a man who irons his shirts, but the iron was out on the table this morning, and his father’s collar freshly pressed.
Is he that happy to ditch me? When he sees Sebastian, he shifts, wary. “How was your day?” Al asks.
Sebastian can hardly speak through the anger in his chest at the unbelievable charade of all of this, but somehow, he manages: “Fine.”
“Did you make any progress on that essay?”
“Some.”
“I’m sorry there’s not much in the way of leftovers. There’s a frozen pizza in there, or I could leave you some cash for takeout?”
“I’ll take the cash.”
“Oh good, I was beginning to think you’d become monosyllabic.”
Al smiles as though this is hilarious, and Sebastian imagines choking him.
“It’s not too late, you know, if you want to come with us,” Al says, and he looks almost sorry, as if a weekend with his favorite child isn’t exactly what he wants.
“I’m good,” Sebastian says. “Have fun being high achievers.”
The sun sinks and the pair of them set off. In the morning they will wake up in a small ivy-clad town and Sebastian will wake up here, with his mother.
NEW TOPIC: BACKSTAGE ROMANCES
user: cutandpaste
anyone no about any secret relationships behind the scenes
like with Susan Byrne in particular
curious cuz i have herd rumors
thx