Marginalia by Doran Larson

Author:Doran Larson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023221
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

5.

The difficulty of this confession was to make clear that the blame and humiliation are mine alone. But something has gone wrong. I switch the TV back to Godzilla wagging a train car in his teeth.

“You’ve constructed the story that suits you. I just want to know what you plan to do.”

I tell her, “I’m going back.”

“Where are you?”

“I mean I’ll talk to her. To Elaine.”

It was nearly ten when I called a cab from my study. The night express arrived in Albany at 4:15 A.M. And as the train rolled into the white of the moon on the Hudson, after the miles of black cornfields and forest skirting the Mohawk River listening to the man across the aisle unwrap toffees from red cellophane, I had imagined spotting my mother’s angular face on the station platform. Despite Dain’s smirking from the luggage rack, we would share a subtle smile to say, What a lark, that we should always be so glad to see each other, after the blasted hopes and untimely deaths of the other half of this family … what strange irony that it is still so good to see you. So good.

But she was not there. I hadn’t told her I was coming. And I felt pathetic for imagining this scene. At the station curb I turned down three cabs, walked two blocks and took a room on the third floor of a cheap hotel. I sat on the nubby concave bed, slipped off my shoes and watched a Godzilla movie, then pay-per-view pornography. The sight and sound of enormous wet anatomy had a strangely calming effect. I called her hotel. It was 5 A.M. But she would be awake, reading budget assessments and impact reports for her interview.

I did not tell her where I was. She seemed glad to hear my voice. We discussed her talks with the firm the day before, assessing its tactics against development in the Adirondacks.

Then there was a pause. I watched the cock of a blonde man ripple down the throat of a woman wearing gold earrings. She asked, “There anything wrong?” I shut the thing off.

Despite their bickering over how well he had tied down the suitcases, the thing I kept wondering, as we continued the drive to the Kennebucks, was whether I might have a moment alone with Uncle Charlie. After Angelica’s magical touch to my private parts, hope was mixed with dread that while Dottie passed around snapshots of their last trip to Las Vegas, Charlie would wink and lead me up to his musty attic. He would take out his gun collection, his rack of pipes the doctor had made him stop using—which we would look over distractedly, until he brought the magazines from a small green trunk. The ones I could not believe the women inside posed for—on their hands and knees, wearing what seemed completely superfluous underwear—and then went out shopping and mailing letters like everyone else in the world.

In the early months after Dain was

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