Someone They Had Waited to Become

 

By Renee Lynn Hansen

 

 

I

 

It was a hot, blue summer. Nearly every boat glistened the color of cool egg whites. Diligent young men and women—college students, off for the summer—snaked yellow rubber hoses in front of them as they moved methodically, washing the decks. Geyser waterbottles, apples, and power bars were strewn mid-deck, along with cleaning crates filled with chrome polishes, brushes, rags, and cans of Min Wood Wax. The youthful workers would stop now and then, mesmerized by the hot day, the water spray of their hoses, and they would stare off, perhaps forgetting that they were pre-med majors, or UC technology club members, and re­member only that the water and sun were here yesterday, and here the day before that.

When you see them you wonder if any of them could be as lost as you were that summer. You used to come here often—laid in the sun, on the bow of the glistening deck, iced tea in one hand, phone in the other. You made calls while flat on the beach towel. You would plan your evening: which bars, which people, which drugs, which party afterwards. It was not that you were a drug addict, you were too responsible for that. But you did have a des­perate need to feel “of your time.” Sometimes just getting in the car for an afternoon and driving to any destination in Wisconsin would do that. You would arrive at some river and look at it, and feel sure enough, that you were of it, and then slam, back in the car, gun it for Chicago, and slam, you’d jump in other cars, of friends you only saw at night, and go to a lot of bars, and do a few drugs that no one you knew would ever do. “Kiddie cocktails,” they said. “You may as well be on aspirin.” They were brown her­oin and cocaine users. You stuck with aspirin flavored white cross speed, purple micro-dots, guaranteed never to give you halluci­nations.

The oddest thing that summer was your family. They kept having summer bar-b-ques. They kept ordering birthday cakes. They kept having their afternoons at the boat. The croquet set came out every Saturday, the bocce ball set every Sunday. Your old uncles, “The First-generation Bonellis” they called themselves, set up a bocce ball court in the park next to the boat. Your mother began to collect sunhats, and these were often discussed. Your cousins with MBAs all came with their rollerblades. Truly, you felt you might as well have been a visitor. You and Thomas were the quiet ones. Thomas was your brother.

You and Thomas stood at the chrome rails that summer listen­ing to your mother as she sat on her lounger and talked excitedly into the hot, blue days, “Tonight, we’re going across the lake, did I tell you?” or “. . . that is, if Thomas agrees. I guess he is the only one who can drive this thing. I told Dan and Susan they could use the boat for the week of the wedding. I told them, crab meat sal­ads and light lemon chicken for the wedding. We could have it catered here at the boat. And they’ll want to take people out, you know?” That summer your brother, Dan was getting married, and you believed that for some, the days were made of this blueness and such events.

The wedding day came and you remember that you and Tho­mas stood as far away as possible—you were on the boat standing at the rails. The wedding was on a neatly trimmed green below, the same one used for the bocce ball court. The rhythm of slow bobbing boats, clanging sails, gave you that feeling—that life was romantic, that your family was a group of secure and handsome people.

 Lately it has come to you this idea that you do not recognize yourself. Nor do you recognize your brother, Thomas. You came from another time. Things happened in your life, and the thing that happened, your handsome family knows about, but they have gotten past it. In fact, your mother is always saying to you, “you have to get past it.” She means the death of your father—the way he died.

And so your brother had finally married that summer. All the Bonellis had been on the boat that day. Grandma Josephena was carried on by the two Uncles. She waved to the crowd still ashore to much applause. You had dated a woman whom you brought to the wedding, and your loving family had embraced her. Soon af-
ter, your relationship with her soured. She was now consumed with moving on to Taos. You told her that Taos had been stolen from the Native Americans. “We stole Taos?” she asked. She was beautiful; you had met her at one of the clubs. She did drugs, while you had a beer. She also drank vodka martinis, “The next trend. They are dicey!” she exclaimed throwing her vodka martini back in her throat. She had the thick red-gold hair of Gene Tierney; you were sure you were one of the last Gene Tierney fans left on the continent. Thomas liked Jack Lemon. Mr. Roberts was his favorite movie. Laura was yours. Anyway, she sort of looked like Gene Tierny and for a solid eight weeks after the wedding, you were in love. You walked the lakefront at 2 a.m., visited a puppy store, bought a puppy, and rode the old motorcycle that she had. Then one night she told you she wasn’t that interested anymore in being in a relationship. She wanted something more “universal.” Really, you had had it. “And what’s ‘universal?’ Buying land in Santa Fe for vacation homes? And fitted sheets from Macy’s with Petroglyphic prints, and getting cow skulls at K-Mart for our living rooms?” You continued. You couldn’t help yourself. “I am really sick of the whole world. I am sick of people needing to drive everywhere in new cars, and spend all their money at expensive restaurants, I am sick of people buying junk food and junk books and not even knowing it. I’m sick of art talk. And talk about Taos. And I’m sick of talking about post-modern culture and lifestyle. So go to Taos, and meditate. I’m sick of that too. I’m sick of everyone going to Taos to meditate.”

She sort of crossed her arms as she responded. It was a look you had never seen before, because in the two months you had dated her, she had never gotten angry. “ I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. Why are you trying to bring me down? You’re sick. You’re really sick,” she said as she walked out the door, and you wondered for half a second if it could be true.

Thomas would know what you meant when you said we had stolen Taos. Thomas would understand that. As would your fa­ther who would take nightly walks in the cornfields. “You can get lost in those rows,” he’d say, thrilled at the thought of it. And you and Thomas would walk behind him, never quite losing sight of the shirttails, which flapped in the moonlight, after coming home late from work, he would get you and Thomas out of bed and drag you out there, because he knew you wanted to see it too—
and so you would all stand there, in what he called “the darkest spot on earth, or at least in this cornfield,” staring up at the stars and he would say, “You know, we’re not even that. We’re smaller dots, much smaller.”

Your father committed suicide—a suicide that is so benign you don’t even refer to it as that anymore. But when your mother called recently and asked if you’d seen Thomas, and mentioned that she was getting worried, you hung up the phone and started pacing around your attic apartment. If you added up all the con­versations with Thomas for your entire life, it probably amounted to a few hours of talk. But you figured he might be in trouble be­cause you were in trouble. Lately, for no reason at all you had thought about suicide. You figured that if you found him, you might both feel better.

 You took a run, the last time you’d done that had been with Thomas, in high school. He was on the track team. No one would think that of him now. He’s all pumped up, works out with a per­sonal trainer. You had read about him a few weeks ago in a small article in the Herald Tribune. “Thomas Bonelli Running for Re­corder of Deeds,” said the headlines. The Tribune had sent a pho­tographer to one of the clubs he worked out in to snap a photo.

 You thought you’d run down to the harbor in search of Tho­mas. Recently, Thomas had bought his own boat, a shiny yachty thing called the Glenda-Sue, named after someone that he too was dating that summer. When you arrived you were not too sur­prised to see that the boat was listing, probably sinking. The hull was cracked. It looked as if someone had put a hatchet through the deck, and from this wound, threadlike lines, spiderwebbed the boat.

A fisherman approached you at that moment, holding the end of his line in his hand. “She did it,” he said, “the girlfriend.” You remembered Glenda-Sue, the real one—a striking blond, always tan, with orange painted fingernails, bubbly, as all of Thomas’s girlfriends were, but smart, Glenda-Sue, the real one, had lasted only four months but her repulsion for Thomas had been so fierce that when he broke up with her, she took the fire extinguisher and sprayed the cabin walls with foam. “She took an ax to the side of the boat,” said the old fishermen. “Created all these spider webs.”

“Thanks for telling me,” you said. “I’m his sister.”

“Oh,” the fisherman said a little livelier, “It looks like a cracked egg, don’t it?”

“Do you know where he is?” you asked.

“Don’t,” said the fisherman, quieter. The fishermen had always been protective of Thomas. You felt a secret kinship with them because of this.

 Glenda-Sue was visited by a constant stream of local fisher­men, who set their poles against the chrome rail, took swigs of beer, and surreptitiously grabbed a rag now and then to polish the deck. You guessed that there were a couple of hundred people who knew that the key was under the rubber mat by the cabin. Another fisherman waved to you, as did his son sitting next to him on the lawn chair. “Do you know Thomas?” he asked. “I’m his sister, have you seen him?”

“No,” the older man said. “Not in a few weeks. But you’re his sister, how lucky!”

You have seen Thomas about as much as anyone has lately. You imagine him as ghostly. This is certain: when you were eight, and he twelve, you would go out to the middle of the cornfield. A farmer had left a mowed out circle there for turning his tractor around. You would both go to the circle, and lie on your backs there, stare up at the sun. Your father had recently committed sui­cide and now you were able to contemplate the unfathomable, and the obscure. People die. Thousands of people die in thou­sands of ways. Death seemed the irrevocable conclusion of life, and in the light of the blinding sun, you both concluded that maybe your father knew what he was doing. Maybe your father was valiant and brave, brilliant. The snaking sadness of that reali­zation left you and Thomas with the same genetic material—like ghostly Siamese twins—fierce lovers of life with fierce fears of living it. This you have theorized.

The last time you saw Thomas was when the Garcia family had their reunion on his boat. Freddie Garcia invited 70 of his closest friends and family. Your family had been invited, but no one knew who Freddie Garcia was. “He fishes by the boat,” you ex­plained to your aunt and uncle. You were the only relative of Thomas’s at the Garcia family reunion. You and Thomas again stood at the rails as the Garcia family sang songs and drank punch from a cooler. Five Garcia grandchildren docked the boat at mid­night, with Thomas standing steadily behind them, telling them when to throttle forwards, when to throw it in reverse. You knew you would remember this sight. You had theorized long ago, when it came to Thomas, all you could do was remember time.

That night, a small wooden skiff had split the waters, as it made its way past you and Thomas, on its way out of the harbor. The boat was not much longer than the length of the man who sat in its cradle-sized hull. Its sides were painted and buffed, a gleaming yellow, it was like a ball of fire on the water. It was blinding, really. On the back, was the word Monsoon, written across in sketchy black letters. Above was its rice paper sail, crackling in the wind. “Now there’s a boat,” Thomas had said as the skiff slid across the water, and the t-shirted young man with bare feet worked quickly to set a pole in the center cradle. “That boat is a bird,” said Thomas enviously, “and that man is free.”

You remembered the day after your father’s funeral, walking through the cornfields with Thomas, theorizing about his suicide. “Dad wasn’t free,” you explained to Thomas. “See, now he’s free.” It made sense to both of you.

There was a Thomas Bonelli for Recorder of Deeds poster in the lower stateroom window. The poster had slashes across it, as if someone had taken a razor blade to the back. The red background was faded to orange, and the blue borders were becoming violet. In the center was a grainy picture of Thomas, and there were a few razor slashes across his cheeks, but his eyes looked clear enough. The photographer had caught the silver in his hair. It made him look like he could be of this decade’s young-haggard hero or the hero of decades ago—the man in the Gobi Desert, you had seen that photo in an old Life magazine, the WWI tank driver, standing astride his metal machine, his black eyes telling of his commune with the dark world inside the tank.

You had first read about Thomas’s political ambitions in the Herald, one of six daily newspapers you subscribe to because you were going to start writing again soon.

These are the paths you have taken: after your father’s suicide, your mother got a job as a teller at a bank. She discovered she loved the bank—and they were fairly high on her—which is how you finally got to the city—they promoted the hell out of her until finally she was a vice-president. Thomas discovered he had an aptitude for wiring switches and lamps, and finally cars. At about the same time your mother became vice-president of the bank, Thomas was stealing cars. It was also at this time that you devel­oped crushes on five different girls, doing drugs with all of them, in the hopes of rescuing them. When you were young, you had a rescue complex. Hell would freeze over, before someone else you knew committed suicide. You were rather fixed on the problems of all desperate people.

You graduated from high school about the time that you started doing THC with an addict because she said you couldn’t understand her unless you did something once in a while, and so you did. And you remember Thomas driving you up to college in his very big banana yellow, white-leather-interior Lincoln Conti­nental. The conversation was sparse that day. You were intent on rescuing more women, he was talking about getting back to Chi­cago so that he could “run numbers” and buy a commercial de­velopment. He was getting into urban shopping malls.

“The urban market is untapped,” he had said, and it turned out to be true. When he dropped you off outside a sorority house, you could only look up at the windows and wonder if there were any women in there who might need rescuing. As you saw the square taillights of the car disappearing into the late sun of the afternoon, you thought of shouting something to him, but you did not know what.

When you were young, your father had been fascinated with the story of a boat which capsized. It seems a pleasure-boat had been skirting a barge, when the current from the barge pulled it under. Your father loved telling the story of how it went down nose first like a doomed rocket, and of how the boat was fully submerged for ten minutes, how the captain of the barge thought all was lost for the ten aboard, when suddenly it popped up like a cork, on the other side of the barge. It looked eerily like it had be­fore it before it went down, except now only eight people were seated on deck, and two people were missing. The boat, which had been under the barge, was able to float safely back to shore. Your father loved to embellish about the eight people who popped up with the boat. He said they were still in their chairs, legs were crossed, sitting there, he said, as if the catastrophe had not happened. But your father also liked to embellish upon the two who had drown beneath the boat. “Their bodies, never found,” he said bowing to whisper it in your ear as if it were a great secret, “But they are in Tahiti,” he said. “They hitched a ride on the next ship out. They are living in Tahiti now, never to be troubled by life again.” Of course, you have applied the survivor-in-Tahiti story to the life of you and Thomas.

The whole quiet harbor knew now, that you had arrived to search for him. The fisherman at the bow dropped his pole and took a walk, as you stared at the poster. Eight or nine men at the lip of the harbor, stared at you in a slow, rotating, motion—first a look at you, then their chairs, then the quiet disappearance of their lines into the water, and then to the boat, the Glenda-Sue, con­firming in those last split second glances, what they believed—that their lives were nearly the same as his—wherever he was. You theorized this at least.

Your father had spent a year of his spare time chiseling a canoe out of a log. In this canoe, your father would implore you and Thomas to play that game with him, of gazing across the river. “Now we’ll try to see, exactly what they saw . . . the Potowatome Indians, as they canoed, yes, exactly on the very spot you are now, and they saw too, this rippling water, these bursts of light. They are in our skins,” your father would say. “Can’t you feel them?”

 “And we probably lived then too,” said Thomas, and you and your father and Thomas all nodded in agreement. You left the harbor with these thoughts. The fishermen waved and stared as you turned and started your walk back home.

 

II

 

Castle Club was a long white warehouse situated in a trendy area of warehouses and lofts along the Chicago River. In fact, it was built from an old sewing machine factory.

The old bricks had been sandblasted and then glazed in a thick, white, paint, with birthday cake ribbons of blue trim at the top. And on top of this blue icing sat the battlements.” The battlements had become Castle Developers signature motif. Lookout towers, battlements, were in. “We’ve gotten in on a fantastic trend here,” Thomas said after his first battlement topped development sold out. “Who would have guessed that rich urbanite would want his very own battlement tower.”

A work out club was part of castle development and was called “Club Castle,” and as you approached you craned your neck back and saw young bodies in black spandex and sunglasses, leaning against the battlements, liter waterbottles dangled from their hands as they took in the view of the city. The health club sat at the front of the castle walls, which hemmed the tiny castles which took up a half mile of urban land behind the castle gates.

There were a hundred bikes at the castle club bike rack but you found a place for yours and wandered in. The desk staff knew you. “Thomas is upstairs, conference room,” one said and you moved past the glass rooms filled with stationary bicycles. The conference room was part of a suite of offices that were discretely placed behind the battlements on the roof.

The room was draped in red, white, and blue banners. A TV crew was setting up. A young, blond man in a dark suit seemed in charge. “We’re filming a commercial. Are you here for someone?” he asked quickly, flatly.

“I was told Thomas might be here today,” you said.

“And who may I say is here for him?” the young man asked professionally.

“Alex, Alex Bonelli,” you said. “His sister.” The latter seemed to mean something and the young man disappeared into a room from which Thomas soon emerged. Thomas was dressed in a similar dark suit to the young man, though you guessed it was more than likely that the young man was wearing his to imitate Thomas.

“Come here. Come here. Come here, Alex.” Thomas was on a cell phone. He motioned to you with his free hand and held an arm out for a hug. “Give me a minute,” he whispered away from the phone. “Listen, I’m on my way to a meeting now. . . . It’s a bad time for me, “ he said to the caller, then folded the phone and put it in his inside suit pocket. “I’m glad you came. I don’t have a lot of time, but glad you came,” he said and pushed you to the corner of the room where the man who greeted you was taping down cables. “John, John, this is my little sister, Alex.” The man named John, who had greeted you, got up to shake your hand then went to the camera set on a tripod to check its angle.

“He only looks busy,” Thomas whispered in your ear. “Everyone around here wants to look busy for me.”

The man named John approached. “Jack,” he said as he handed Thomas a script. “Jacky, you’re going to start by saying that the crime rate has gone up in Cook County and you’re against that, ok?”

Thomas took the script and looked at it for a moment. “Why would I say I’m against crime?” he asked in earnest.

The man named John stiffened and rolled his eyes. His white skin became plastered to his forehead and his suit seemed to tighten on him. “What do you mean why are you against crime? It’s crime. You’re either for crime or against crime. Criminals are for crime. If you’re not a criminal you’re against crime. So you’re against crime, see? You’re a recorder of deeds, honest, forthright recorder of deeds, never a criminal, get it? You’re against crime, get it?”

“But what if I’m not against crime?” asked Thomas. “Crime is a relative thing. Crime according to whom?”

 John touched Thomas on the sleeve. “It’s fine. What matters is the image they take to the polls. They did-in the last guy, you know.”

“Who?” Thomas asked, truly mystified.

“What was his name . . .” John said pausing, “You should know. The last recorder. Donny Steward. Charged him with reck­less driving, spent 60 days in jail. He had a habit of running red lights.”

 The guy was an idiot, not a criminal,” said Thomas.

“The man was a criminal, he was convicted. People won’t vote for a convicted criminal.”

“What was his record on the job?”

“Doesn’t matter, they’ll fuck you over if they want to,” John answered with an intensity that made you and Thomas silent. “The man was a criminal,” he continued, perhaps feeling his own power. “Bad guys don’t get anywhere. Good guys do. Be a good guy, Jack, and read the script.”

Thomas looked at you as he put the script on the table. He shrugged his shoulders, “He’s supposed to be the best in the busi­ness.”

“Why does he call you Jack Castle?” you whispered to him.

“Why do you call me Jack, John? Tell her,” Thomas said as John fiddle with some wires going up to the podium.

John came to life, jumping in front of you and extending his arm toward your throat with his explanation. “We did a poll. 65% of our respondents thought Thomas’s last name was Castle. No one in this city had heard of Mr. Bonelli. They all thought his name was Castle. So why not go with that? Just listen to it! Hear it! That’s all you gotta do,” said John, aiming his hand. “Jack Castle. Hear it? Jack Castle. Vote for Jack Castle. Jack Castle, Cook County Recorder. ‘Jack’s the man,’ Hear it? Thomas doesn’t make any sense. We’re changing his name to Jack. Besides, his middle name is Jack. It’s not like we are lying about it. At the polls, Jack’s a winner. Worked for Kennedy, right?”

Thomas put his hand to his head as if he had to take it all in, then he touched your shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s a roof garden, work out area on the roof, really popular with the kids, ever see it?

“John, I’ll be out on the roof,” Thomas said, and he grabbed a bottle of cranberry juice off a small bar set up in the corner. He grabbed a HiLo Orange juice and threw it to you. “You drink that, don’t you?” he asked, seeming to remember something from your childhood, and you walked away as John began to collect loose cables.

You and Thomas stood by the battlements facing the city. The high-rises loomed in black silhouettes. “Easy stuff,” said Thomas. You had no idea what he was talking about. “Too easy.”

You thought you may as well get to it. “Thomas,” you paused. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been here.” Thomas said. You were silent.

“At the club?”

“They keep a bed for me. I have maid service. It works out.”

“Mom’s worried,” you said. “I don’t know if that matters,” you added.

“About what?”

“About not seeing you, I guess.”

“It matters. It matters,” he said and then after a pause, he said, “Look, I haven’t been returning any family calls. I don’t have time for it right now. But it’s important. I’ll get to it.”

You nodded in recognition of that thousand year old ritual, of going back to something familiar when you were lost.

You waited for Thomas to continue. “Look, don’t worry,” he said.

“No? You’re ok?” you asked.

He set his drink on the ledge and wiped the perspiration from his face with his hands. “I want to die, ok? Don’t tell anyone. No, I’m kidding. Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

“That’s not funny, Thomas,” you said.

He began to pace and shout in front of you. He held his cran­berry juice in one hand. He took the phone from his pocket and held it in the other. “Mom!” he said, as if she were on the other end, “I’m living the fucking idiotic life of a politician. I don’t know why I’m doing this damned commercial. This guy John is killing me. What a phony. Crap. It’s all crap.” He put the phone down. “No answer,” he said.

“You don’t have to go through with it, Thomas,” you said.

“Crap, you think I don’t know that? It’s just so much crap. How the hell am I going to get any zoning changes unless I’m the recorder of deeds in this town?”

“We should try to be happy,” you said. The words sounded strange. They seemed to drop and disappear as you said them. “The problem is,” said Thomas, “you have to believe in all this.” He swept his hand out across the horizon, fanning past the Castle Apartments he had recently built.

“Ever think about Dad?” It seemed an appropriate thing to ask.

“Jesus,” Thomas said.

“He believed in something, don’t you think?”

“He believed in everything,” Thomas responded. “He was nuts. I mean the county nearly took us away from him because we were living in a damned tent instead of a house. What was that about? Oh, I remember. His belief in ‘self-reliance.’ Good thing mom came back,” he said referring to your rescue, when she came one late summer night and took you back to her mother’s where she was living.

“You’re hiding from life, just like he did,” you said, quietly.

“Ah crap,” he said. “I’m not hiding anymore, ok? I’m living. I’m living here,” he said, pointing to another conference suite op­posite from where you were standing.

“You’re living in a conference room?” you asked.

“Shut-up, you,” he said and brushed your hair with his fist. “It’s not like the tent. It’s like a loft. It’s got a bed.”

“We’ve been worried,” you said, bringing the ancient news from the familiars.

“Who?” he asked.

You rattled off the names. “Aunt Ag, cousin Bobbie, Mom, Dan, Uncle Bill.”

Thomas’s cell phone rang in his pocket and he turned to answer. “Can you believe it? It’s that commercial guy, John, calling me from 50 feet away. Listen, I got to go make my damned commercial,” he said smiling. “Stop doing all your drugs, alright? And write something. You’re a writer, right?”

“Stop hiding from everyone,” you said. “And don’t change you’re damned name.” You stood in the shadows of the battle­ments and gave each other fierce hugs, and held onto each other, in that kind of clingy way you see in old movies, but it felt very real. You could feel the heat of your brother’s torso as his muscles
stretched to hug you. You remembered he had a boy’s, black Schwinn. He’d wear your father’s dark Raybans as he rode it. He’d get on his bike, and you would get on your bike, and you would ride out to the cornfields, searching for dead birds, the ones which had fallen from the sky, so that you could bury them. You brought this up just then. “Remember the birds in the cornfields?” you said. “Oh yes,” he said. “And Dad’s suicide. He shot himself out there, remember?” How could you not remember. It was what you had been waiting to remember.

You thought then, of your father’s story, of the capsized pleas­ure boat, of the two who supposedly were living it up in Tahiti, and of those who had survived the submersion. What you won­dered was—did they grab for each other down there, did they somehow see each other beneath all the churning water. And in their panicked moments, did they finally become someone they had waited to become.