In Blue Grass

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It is never possible to be truly alone in this place. One must work at it, diligently and deliberately, seeking solace and solitude on the city’s terms, not on one’s own. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere in this city, what green there is is limned and lined with gray, and hard edges, and people.

For me, here, now, it’s Bryant Park and the great bulk of the library rearing up behind me. This is a beautiful place, one of the best in the city, elegant and formal. Here, more than anywhere else—even Central Park—I can find my solitude.

It’s crowded, of course; what place here isn’t? Students, tourists, executives and secretaries, mothers with children, professional men and women of a certain age, as am I. All of us bound together by sound and motion: the thudding beat of rap, the happy laughter of children, the inquisitive coo of pigeons, the honk and bleat of traffic.

One accepts this place on its own terms, or one does not. It’s that simple. It’s easy to lose oneself in a place like this. One of the paradoxes of living among these many millions is that, by and large, every one of them will do what they can to avoid having to deal with you.

For twenty years, I have done the same.

And now I have to go home.

—

Two hours ago, this morning, my mobile buzzes in my pocket. I fish it out; it’s my sister. And, somehow, I know. “Teresa,” I say.

“Hi.” Silence. Then “She… wants you here.”

“Command performance.”

“No. It’s not like that. She… well, I don’t know what she wants, not really. She’s in one of her moods, again.” My sister’s voice is tired and resigned. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t even bother you with it. But… ”

“But she can’t call me directly and say that.”

“Mark… ”

I can leave. It will be difficult, but I can. One of the perks of being the one of the owners of your own firm is that you can, within reason, do whatever you want, whenever you want. Not that I want to do this. “How soon?”

“Well… as soon as you can swing it.”

“Months? Weeks? Days?”

Teresa hesitates. “Weeks… probably. But not very many.”

I hesitate. She should see a doctor, is on my lips, but that’s all she’s done, almost her entire life, at least since I’ve known her. Never a time when she wasn’t suffering, some of it real, most of it not, until this last time. And I think it surprised her. I think she’d built another construction on top of some phantasm and it had, very concretely and somewhat awkwardly, become real and tripped her up.

“Mark, please. If it means anything, she did ask me directly. She wants you here.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll have to… ”

“Well, let me know when you know more. Arrangements, and stuff.”

I let her go, and she me. I get up and go to the window, a narrow strip of glass that gives out onto the heart of Midtown, into other rooms and other lives ranked around me, cities stacked on top of cities. I can see other me’s there, on the phone, or bent over a table or mesmerized by a computer screen or in a meeting.

I can do this, I know. Projects wrapping up, halfway done, pending… I can transfer them as I need to, if I need to, could and probably will work remotely as I am able—as I am allowed to—among the many small theaters in the denouement of my mother’s life.

I have not been back home since I left it, twenty years ago, full of myself, willing to slough off that rough and rural life for this one, of business and busyness and industry and self. Going home will not be pleasant.

After I make arrangements—a flight tomorrow morning whose cost is very nearly that of a month’s rent on my apartment—I try to work but I can’t, so I excuse myself and go outside. Hence, the park.

—

A car—one of thousands of black Lincolns scuttling around the city like roaches under a kitchen light—picks me up at my apartment early. The driver is a handsome young man, Hector, Puerto Rican by the small flag of a pin affixed discreetly to a lapel; he tries for some light conversation as I nurse the now lukewarm coffee I’d taken with me but he can see that I’m not interested and falls silent as we angle and curve our way through the city and out of it, heading for the airport. Brooklyn and Queens stir themselves in the wake of our passing.

I call the office, one more time, ever the inveterate modern New Yorker (by adoption), unwilling to let even one minute pass by unencumbered. I talk to the various project architects handling the day-to-day of our work, micro-managing with the best of them; I can sense eyes rolling and the blah-blah-blah of their hands mimicking my instructions. Make sure you and see that he and take a meeting as soon as, and then I’m done.

—

The airport is the airport, a bazaar of both the bizarre and the pedestrian. The city, having managed to snare you once, is unwilling to let you leave it without exacting its pound and then some of your flesh and soul. You endure it as you must, thinking of the labors of Hercules, the Crusades, the Bataan Death March.

Hector, at the curb, is unflappable and pleasant as I tip him; with the transfer of money there is something else there, something secret and furtive in his eyes even as I see the glint of gold on his left hand, on a certain finger, and I know that he is taken, but perhaps not completely. I pocket his proffered card with a smile.

—

Inside, I surrender my bag to the agent behind the counter and my dignity to the TSA as I do the hokey-pokey inside the Star Trek glass cylinder, and am deemed acceptable even as gamma rays ping off my chromosomes.

I find myself with a few minutes to spare at the terminal before we board and I call Teresa, knowing she’ll be up.

“Hey,” she says; in the background, I can hear Duane exhorting Corbin and Grace, trying to get them roused for school.

“I’m at the airport.”

“Lexington? Shit… you should have—”

“What? No, no—New York.”

“Oh. So, when do you—

“Uh… four-ish. I go through Atlanta.”

“Of course you do. Doesn’t everybody? Okay.”

“How is she?”

“Good. I told her you were coming, a few days ago. She seemed happy about it.”

“Well, shoot. There goes my surprise.”

Teresa laughs through her nose, and I can hear the sniffsniffsniff of it. I smile. “Plenty of time later for a parade,” she quips.

“I’ll be there, with bells on.”

Again the sniffsniffsniff. “Thank you for doing this,” she answers, her voice quiet.

“Not a problem,” I respond. There’s a staticky squawk from the overhead. “I have to go. We’re boarding.”

“Oh. Okay. See you this afternoon.”

—

Although I’m thirty-seven years old, inside me still is the twelve-year-old who loves getting the window seat on the airplane, and I make full use of it even as the harried-looking fifty-something executive next to me reluctantly surrenders the use of her laptop as we taxi slowly along, waiting for clearance.

And then we’re up and the city falls away beneath us, and I pick out familiar landmarks. Some small part of me is down there in the vastness and the complexity, and I feel a certain pride that I have made my mark on this place even as it has done the same to me.

—

The vast urban sprawl cedes reluctantly to more and more rural landscape as we slide south and west across the country. The Appalachians, no stranger to me, ripple and curl beneath the belly of this plane. Some small part of me is there, too. I’ve just forgotten it. I’ve made myself forget it.

Cities come and go, gray scratches among the green, some familiar—if that’s Washington then that’s Baltimore—some of them not. Charlotte? Richmond? I don’t know.

And then the plane bumps and whirs and we drop a bit as we start introducing ourselves to Atlanta’s airspace. The cabin stirs; attendants go through, brisk and efficient as the first leg of my journey comes to an end.

—

Atlanta was my first stop after college; briefly here, but long enough to begin to understand myself and what was locked up inside me for the past twenty years. It was a heady time, I young and foolish with the rest of us, a vast handful of time before me. I grabbed greedily.

No one particular man stands out in the several that I knew in my time here, save for the last: Patrick, a fair Irish beauty of a boy, sweet and shy and as new to this life as I was. We’d come within a hairsbreadth of making an offer on a house before other things beckoned, and I’d let him slip away into the past, my past.

—

There is time here, between my flights, to slip away into the city and—for a small time—walk the streets of my younger self, a faint half-smile on my face of memory dancing with incredulity as things and places I remember have succumbed with alacrity to the implacable demands of progress.

I don’t. I am good, I am responsible, I sit in the waiting area, coffee perched alongside something nearly inedible, pecking away at my computer, again issuing instructions. One cruel paradox about architecture is that, the further one goes along in it, the less one is able to spend time actually designing something. My life seems bounded by memos and status reports and meetings and change orders.

When I am done, I call Teresa and get her voice mail. Not a big deal; we’re still on schedule, and I mumble something to that effect and end the call.

I salve the wounds of my unwillingly-abandoned career by pulling out the stylus for my pad and sketching; nothing much—no Pritzker Prize winners here—but it helps to ease the psychic pain to create something, even if it might never get built. Patrick once laughingly accused me of sketching the same structure over and over, and perhaps he was right and that it simply hasn’t found a home yet.

The phone buzzes. Teresa. I pick up. “Hi.” Silence. “Teresa?” Perhaps she’s dialed my number by mistake. “Teresa.” Then, a choked sob and a sniff, but she’s not laughing. And, again, I know. But I make her say it. “Teresa, what’s wrong?”

“Where—” she starts; her voice is clotted thick with pain. “Mark, where are you?”

My heart thuds in my chest. “Atlanta.”

Her breath comes through the phone’s tiny speaker as a thready exhalation of sound. “She’s … Mark, she’s gone.”

Somehow, I knew she would do this. I knew. “What happened?”

“She just… she didn’t want to wait, I guess. For it to come to her. I—”

“What happened, Teresa?”

“The neighbor… uh, Frank?… thought he smelled something, smoke, or… and he went over and she’d… well, the car, and… ”

I can give her credit for that, at least. She decided to spare us the Grand Guignol of this, unwilling minor walk-ons in this her latest show.

“Mark?”

“I’m here, Teresa. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Just… wait for me.”

I end the call and stare mutely down at its candy-colored face.

Months, weeks, days. Hours, it turns out.

We board.

—

The same but different, this time. We’re down almost before we’re up, in a smaller plane this time; Lexington does not rate the adult airplanes, only these little toy things. We scud low over a bucolic landscape tousled by the tail-end of the mountains I’d only just crossed. Neatly-cropped fields in every color of green plait the landscape; the mid-afternoon sun slants obliquely across the land and the ponds and rivers weaving through the farms shine like copper dragons chasing golden coins.

I stare out the tiny window in lieu of thinking about my mother. I assume that at some point, grief will find me. It hasn’t yet. Anger, perhaps, is there at first, that she couldn’t have waited until I’d arrived.

And, perhaps, a little bit of admiration as well, that she’d had the courage to go through it.

—

Duane is at the airport to meet me instead of Teresa; he’s there when I walk past all of the screening apparatus for outgoing passengers. We give each other a lopsided smile; he greets me with a lean-in, cheek-brushing bro-hug kind of thing, and by some mutual agreement we don’t talk about Teresa or Nancy.

“I’ve got a bag,” I announce.

“Oh. Okay.”

We walk down to baggage claim side-by-side; our conversation is aleatory and non-committal, the kind of conversation people have when they don’t want to talk about the thing they really should be talking about. What few people are in the airport are different from the throngs that ply the concourses back home: more-casually dressed, quieter and more subdued, with little of the hurly-burly I am used to.

Duane’s not a bad sort; we’ve always gotten along, not only because we’d had to. Luckily, Teresa had found him early on, before our mother’s delusions could take hold of her. He’s religious, but not like Nancy was; it didn’t consume him even as it did her. I’d sloughed all that business off like so much dead skin when I’d begun my life of unrepentant sodomy.

Duane knows I’m gay, is okay with it. Were I forced to admit it, I might twig to a certain attraction to my brother-in-law; there’s a certain appeal to his country-rough features and good ol’ boy demeanor. I’ve never tried anything, of course, and I never will; he’s managed to make a life with my sister, even coaxing two kids out of her, and I want Teresa to be happy more than anything. She deserves to be happy.

—

I throw my bag into the back seat of his truck, a loud, red thing half again as tall as me and I understand that our Duane is doing pretty well for himself despite barely squeaking through high school. I can’t remember exactly what he does; some kind of contracting work… trees? Septic tanks? Landscaping? Murder for hire?

I buckle myself in as the truck rumbles to life around us, watch silently as he threads his way out of the airport and onto the road leading west to their house outside of Versailles. Only then do we talk.

“So… ” I start.

He glances at me and his expression is a strange but understandable mix of rueful smile and grimace. “Fuck, dude…” he starts, the eternal statement of all men everywhere who have resigned to things—and people—outside of their control.

“What happened?”

He glances at me, returns his attention to the road as afternoon traffic flows around us. He makes a gesture with his hands, his thumbs, really, some gesture of futility. “Man, I don’t know. She just… well, of course it wasn’t just the usual Nancy drama, not this time, but it wasn’t that bad. We all thought she’d… fight it.”

“What was it?” I persist.

Duane glances at me again. “You don’t know?”

I shake my head. “Last thing I knew, she was trying to convince the government to declare her disabled.”

“Well, she did that, but… ” He stops speaking, marshaling his thoughts. “That was a few years back, Mark.”

I can hear it, the tacit disapproval. “We’re not particularly close.” So, fuck you, Duane. You have no idea.

“Dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just… ”

I say nothing, turn my attention to the passing landscape. In mid-summer, it’s beautiful here. Horses are the main crop in this part of the state and I watch the neatly-fenced farms slide past, crisp and gleaming against the bluegrass. There is a settled aspect to this country, something quaint and English about it. Low stone walls rise and fall with the hills and hollows. I grew up here, went to school here, and all of this just became so much visual static. I stopped seeing it a long time ago.

Duane tries again. “She wasn’t feeling all that good a few weeks ago, so she went in… and went back in, and went back in again and they told her it was cervical.”

“Teresa never told me that.”

“Well… I think Nancy told her not to.”

“Why?”

“Dude, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a genius. Just another way for Nancy to… well, to be Nancy, I guess.”

“So, cancer… ” I start. “How bad?”

“Mmm… bad, but not all that bad. I guess she could have fought it.”

“But she didn’t.”

“No. We thought she would. I mean, Terri had it all lined up in Lexington, take her there and wait and bring her back. It wasn’t going to be easy, but… ”

“It would be just her, this time. She couldn’t drag anyone else into it,” I suggested.

Duane favors me with a long look. “No.”

—

Duane skirts the edge of town, continues a little further west. Old houses become younger and younger until finally we turn into a hot-off-the-press subdivision with some meaningless name. Each house here is allotted five acres of land and the structures stand isolated; this was obviously somebody’s farm until quite recently. There’s a certain forlorn aspect to the place, a “Christina’s World” look to it. I’ve always hated development like this; there’s a certain “fuck you, I’ve got my own” feel to it. Little chance of this happening in New York, where every square foot is fought over and contested and priced up in the stratosphere.

Duane pulls the truck into a long, winding driveway. His house is an incongruous mix of Queen Anne and Craftsman; the two have obviously been fighting and the house is not a happy one architecturally. He goes around the side of the house to a four-car garage nearly the size of the structure he and his family occupy. He presses the button to the door opener, and one of them trundles up and out of the way as he slips the truck into its berth. Another truck is to my right, a more workaday vehicle, crimped and battle-scarred, festooned with ladders and other equipment. Bradshaw Painting is written on a magnetic sticker applied to the driver’s door, and only now do I remember what it is that Duane does for a living.

—

I can hear Teresa’s voice on the phone as we enter the house through the side door, leading into the kitchen. The house is open and airy, which surprises me, but it also serves to dwarf the few pieces of furniture arranged in isolated archipelagoes on a sea of red oak flooring.

“… not sure what we’re doing—oh, they’re here,” I hear as she winds up a conversation with someone.

Duane bumps my arm. “I’ll take your bag upstairs,” he murmurs, and I let him.

I go into the living room and she’s there, my twin, and we go to each other.

I cry because she cries as we embrace.

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