Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  “Something peculiar, anyway.”

  “One man’s rejection is another man’s invitation. Remember that, son.”

  Then, on what seemed like the fortieth night of the fortieth day of rain, Biffi Deutsch, age thirty-one, birthplace Budapest, which he pronounced as if it were spelled Budapesht, announced he had enlisted.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Lady said.

  “I am absurd. That is my charm.”

  “You did not enlist. You’re too old.”

  “Apparently I am not.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, quit joking around, Biffi.”

  “I am in the United States Air Force. And that is that, with no jokes.”

  At his tone, which was serious, and a little angry, Lady sat down. “Shit,” she said. “Shit.” Then: “Come on, Biffi. You didn’t. It’s a rotten joke to play on me.”

  And me, Fin thought. But he said nothing. He was lying on the floor behind the couch reading the paper. Woody Guthrie had died. Nine years in a nursing home. Dying for nine years. Fin felt he himself had barely been living for nine years. The obit said Guthrie said he knew his voice did not sound “like dew dripping off the petals of the morning violets.” But it does, Fin thought. Though he had never seen dew dripping off the petals of the morning violets. He wondered if Biffi had seen dew dripping off the petals of morning violets. Or heard it.

  “But you’re a pacifist,” Lady was saying.

  “No. You are a pacifist. I have never chosen to argue about it with you. That’s all.”

  “But you’re not even American.”

  “I am American. I am a citizen, and a very proud, grateful one.”

  “You know what I mean. Oh God, everyone is trying to get out of the draft and you enlist?”

  Woody Guthrie said, “I had rather sound like the ashcans of the early morning, like the cabdrivers cursing at one another, like the cowhands whooping, and like the lone wolf barking.” And you did, Fin thought. Like ashcans, cabdrivers, cowhands, barking wolves. Like Walt Whitman, too. Was that what Biffi thought he would be fighting for? For Woody Guthrie, for Walt Whitman? Was that what he was proud of?

  “You don’t understand,” Biffi said.

  No, Fin thought. No, I don’t, either. But why don’t I? You have been my friend for three years, my pretend father, my idol. And I know nothing about you. Maybe because I never asked. Fin stood up from behind the couch. “Hello,” he said. “Please don’t go to Vietnam.”

  Biffi threw his head back and groaned.

  “Just don’t go. Just don’t.”

  “See?” Lady said. “You can’t do it. Think of Fin. That’s what you always say to me.”

  “Think of ashcans in the early morning,” Fin said. “Think of morning violets.” Think of me, he meant. Think of Fin, think of me.

  “Do you give him LSD?” Biffi said, turning on Lady. They were all standing now, a triangle, a circle, a shapeless shape of three.

  “How dare you?” Lady said. “You … you … warmonger.”

  The house rang with arguments for the next few days.

  “This is something I have to do,” Biffi would say.

  “No, you don’t,” Lady would cry out miserably. “Of course you don’t. That’s the point. You weren’t drafted. You can still get out of it. You can get a doctor, a shrink … to say you’re crazy. Which you fucking are, you crazy motherfucking bastard.”

  The house rang with arguments. And declarations of undying love.

  “I wish you to marry me,” Biffi said. “I love you, Lady.”

  “You want me to be a widow. I see. Fuck you.”

  “I’ve waited for you. Because I love you.”

  “I said no before. Do you think I’ll say yes now? And have you go off and die in the jungle?”

  “Yes. I think you will say yes.”

  Fin could hear them. Who couldn’t? They hollered. They stamped up and down stairs. They threw dishes. They made love.

  How could Biffi leave Fin alone? How could he? What difference did it make if Biffi got Lady to marry him? He still wouldn’t be around. They still wouldn’t be a family.

  “Don’t you care about us?” Fin asked him. “Don’t you care about Lady and me?”

  “More than anything in the world.”

  “Then why are you going? You’ll have to kill people. Real people. For a stupid domino theory.”

  Biffi began to talk about Hitler and Czechoslovakia.

  “It’s not the same,” Fin said. “China and Vietnam are traditional enemies. Everyone knows that.”

  “You’re fourteen years old. Do you study history in that foolish school? Maybe one week you have studied World War II. I lived World War II, do you understand? One country falls, then the next. It will stop here, you think. Surely it will stop here, on this border. No? Not on this border? Well then—on the next border. We are sure of that. But then that border is no more a border. It is a doorstep. Your doorstep…”

  “It’s a civil war.”

  Now they were yelling. Biffi and Fin, not Biffi and Lady. Now Fin was running up the stairs, not Lady. Now Biffi was slamming the front door. Again.

  But still Biffi Deutsch was enlisted in the United States Air Force.

  No amount of yelling changed that. No door slamming. Nothing.

  * * *

  One night when Lady sat glumly in the living room listening to Billie Holiday, cursing Biffi every once in a while, and drinking her third martini, mixed by an equally glum Fin, Tyler Morrison arrived. Fin opened the door.

  “Salutations,” said Tyler.

  “Uncle Tyler!” Lady called from the living room. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “I have homework,” Fin said, and he started up the stairs.

  “Uncle Tyler, you’re not enlisting in the United States Air Force, are you?” She was clearly drunk. Drunk and scared. Fin heard it in her voice.

  Fin sat on the top step, the way he used to when he was little. He hated it, these days, when Lady drank too much, which was a lot in the last week, since Biffi’s patriotic, idiotic announcement. Usually Fin hid out upstairs and watched television. But now he sat there on the top step. How could he leave her alone with just Billie Holiday and Uncle Tyler? Anything could happen.

  “No,” Uncle Tyler said. “I’m not enlisting.”

  “You’re still Uncle Tyler? Not Uncle Sam?”

  “Yes, babe,” Uncle Tyler said. “Still me. The one and only.”

  Just one of him. You had to be grateful for small things.

  “I’d like to stay that way,” Uncle Tyler continued. “In one piece, that is. No one wants to be a soldier. Not in this war.”

  “Unless you’re a fucking Hungarian.”

  “Well, no one’s ever mistaken me for a Hungarian,” said Uncle Tyler. “God, she’s depressing.” And Billie Holiday was switched off. Fin heard ice cubes dropped into the shaker. Tyler still acted as if he owned the place. “You’re out of vermouth? What kind of a gin joint is this?”

  “Shut up, Tyler,” Lady said. “You’re interrupting my wallowing.”

  “You mean I’m cheering you up?”

  Lady gave a short laugh.

  “You see?” Tyler said. “I am cheering you up.” A pause, then: “That’s all I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

  “Sit down, you lousy hypocrite.”

  Another short silence, then the smell of pot, then coughing. Then Tyler: “I’m still here, right? All these years. And we’ve been through so much together. All I want to do now, Lady, is make you happy.”

  Fin thought, You? Make Lady happy? What a joke.

  “What a joke,” Lady said.

  Fin smiled. He knew Lady. He knew her so well.

  “It’s no joke, Lady. I’m asking you to marry me.”

  “Again? We’ve been through this.” She noisily inhaled, waited, continued in her hoarse exhale voice, “So many times. I don’t even know why you’d want to.”

  “Lady.” Something in Tyler’s voice change
d now, too. But it wasn’t smoke. It was desperation. Or sounded like it. “I’m begging you.”

  Fin the eavesdropper, Fin the spy felt sick. He did not want to hear Uncle Ty open his heart to Lady. He didn’t want to think Ty had a heart to open.

  “Hey. Calm down. Tyler, Jeez Louise, what’s wrong?”

  “Forget it.”

  “What are you on?” she asked harshly.

  “You have to marry me. You have to.”

  “Okay,” Lady said. “Okay, just sit quietly, Ty. I’m right here … I’ll get you through this.”

  “I got drafted, goddamn it.”

  Uncle Ty, man of principled action: Marry me to get me out of the draft. Perfect.

  “You got fucking drafted? You got drafted?”

  “You have to marry me, Lady. Okay? Get it? You have to. We can start a family right away…”

  She has a family, Fin almost shouted. He thought wildly that he should stomp down the stairs, interrupt them, ask if anyone had seen his notebook or his protractor, anything to make Lady stop and think. She was so impulsive. She was such a contrarian. She was nuts. And she hated the war. So much. She talked about it all the time. She went to a peace vigil every Sunday. She made Fin come, too. “Karma,” she said. “You need to build up good antiwar karma so you don’t get drafted.” They would stand in the cold or the heat or the rain or the wind. Newspaper would swirl around their feet. They did not speak. It was a silent peace vigil. It was excruciatingly boring, but Fin didn’t mind. It had to be done, he understood that. Not just for his own karma, which, really, why not? And not just so they wouldn’t have to move to Canada. But because the war was wrong and too many people were dying for no reason. And now Tyler, the odious Uncle Tyler, was supposed to go to Vietnam and get killed. What would Lady do about it? Would she marry him, someone she had known forever, someone she had almost married once before, would she do that to save him from the draft? It seemed horribly possible. Fin knew her so well—he’d just had that thought—but nobody knew Lady, knew what she would do, not really. Not even him.

  “At my age, married, pregnant wife … You owe me,” Tyler said.

  You owe me?

  Tyler began to sob.

  “Stop it, Tyler,” Lady said. “Immediately. Godfrey fucking Daniels. You’re not going to Vietnam. No way. So just stop it.”

  “You mean…”

  “That I’ll marry you?”

  Fin put his head in his hands. Not possible. This could not really be happening. To have gotten so far, and then, poof, the end of life, the beginning of everything he had forgotten to be afraid of …

  “Don’t be absurd,” Lady said. “I’m not marrying you. And you’re not going to Vietnam. You’re a lawyer, Ty. You’ll find a way out. Everyone does. Except poor people. And black people.”

  “You’re my way out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My way out, my way in, you’re everything, Lady. I’ve been in love with you since you were eighteen years old.”

  “You knocked me up and agreed to marry me. That’s not love.”

  You knocked me up …

  “Not for you, maybe,” Ty was saying. “But it was for me. It was love.”

  You’re the child Lady never has to have.

  I took care of it, she’d said on the boat.

  And Fin knew, suddenly and with certainty; and he knew that he’d always known without realizing it. Lady had been pregnant. Knocked up. She took care of it, took care of being knocked up, knocked up by Tyler. Fin felt ill. Lady and Tyler. They had almost had a child, that was the bond between them. They were tied by what had almost happened, what had never happened.

  He stood up as quietly as he could.

  “Fin!” Lady called, before he could take one step. “Fin! Get down here.”

  He scrambled down the stairs. Gus, who had been asleep in the kitchen, heard him and ran into the living room barking.

  “The whole damn menagerie,” said Uncle Tyler.

  Fin could have made Gus stop. He could have grabbed his collar, petted him, just said, Gus, quiet. But the loud shrill noise was a relief.

  Ty looked awful, angry and sheepish both. Lady sat in the lounge chair, her long legs folded beneath her. She wore a Russian peasant shirt, embroidered around the collar, and tight bell-bottomed jeans. She had sunglasses on, though it was eight o’clock at night and the room was dim. Perched there, thin and fragile in her sunglasses, she reminded Fin of the picture he’d seen before he met Lady: Lady on the beach in her bathing suit and sunglasses, legs folded beneath her, Lady at eighteen. Left her groom at the altar. Got rid of her baby.

  What Fin remembered all his life about this moment, what he never forgot, was a flash of something that felt like electricity: a painful flash of someone else’s pain. Lady’s pain. He couldn’t say anything. Gus barked and circled and nudged him and barked more.

  “He’s herding you,” Lady said with a smile.

  “Lunatic asylum,” Tyler muttered. “Even the dog is nuts.”

  “This morning Fin and I were talking about his grandparents’ house,” she said to Ty loudly, over the incessant barking. “We thought we could drive up there again, just to check up on things.”

  “The cows,” Ty said wearily. “The everlasting cows.”

  “It’s okay,” Fin said. “We don’t have to.”

  At the sound of Fin’s voice, Gus was suddenly quiet. He sat beside Fin and looked up at him.

  “Go see your cows,” Tyler said. “What’s it to me? Tell them I said hello.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fin said. It burst out of him, sounded odd, strangled.

  Lady said, “For what? Sorry for what?”

  She reached out, took his hand. Lowered her sunglasses, gave Fin her gentlest gaze. “What for, Finino?”

  For the child you didn’t have to have. For being the child you never have to have. For not being the child you didn’t have.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing, I guess.”

  April Fools’ Day

  If you’re the child someone never has to have, do you have to be an especially good one? Fin thought this late at night, a record playing softly on his stereo, Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell or Son House or Skip James. You know, I laid down last night, Skip James sang, and I thought to take me some rest; / But my mind got to rambling, / Like a wild geese from the west. This was also when he thought about his mother. This was the time he missed her, and when he missed her, he felt close to her. He could almost talk to her. Sometimes he dreamed about her, nothing special, but she would be there, sitting in a chair or walking down the road, while something else was happening around her, and he would say, “Mommy! I didn’t realize you were still alive. I’m so happy to see you. I’ve missed you so much!” And she would hug him. When he woke up, he would feel as though he had visited her, or she had visited him, and he would go about his business refreshed. They didn’t happen often, these visits. Sometimes he tried to make them happen. He would concentrate on his mother, willing her to appear in his dreams. Then his mind would get rambling. Like wild geese from the west.

  In the daytime, school; in the evening, suitors, feet up on the coffee table, reading the paper, discussing what to put on the record player, the ice clinking in their whiskey glasses.

  “It’s like Bizarro World. Sometimes they play cards. Biffi drinks, Jack is tripping, Tyler’s doing speed. It’s biblical,” Fin said to Phoebe. “They’re just there, all three of them. Together. Like a cloud of locusts.”

  “Those are mixed metaphors.”

  “Similes.”

  “Luckily, Lady has gumption.”

  Phoebe thought a lot of people had gumption that week. It was a word that had three consonants in a row. “What if you were French and had to learn how to pronounce ‘gumption’?” she said. “Goom-puh-tuh-ee-ow-nuh.”

  Did Lady have goom-puh-tuh-ee-ow-nuh? She was quick on her feet, sure. She could dance like Muhammad Ali. She could dance and quip and defend herself aga
inst the ropes. But why was she in the ring at all? Fin had been dispatched as an eleven-year-old to find her a suitable husband. He had seen for some time now that such a thing did not exist. Not for Lady. She could fight them off too well.

  “Why doesn’t she just tell them she does not love them and they should go away and leave her alone?”

  “Because then,” Phoebe said, “she’d be alone.”

  * * *

  Fin told himself that Lady was trying to find love and freedom, both together, in her own eccentric way, and he had no right to say a word. He tried not to say a word. He tried hard. But the deadpan melodrama taking place in the living room never stopped, never let up, and when he found Lady alone one afternoon, before the suitors drifted in to take their places on the uncomfortable lounge chairs, he could not help himself. He said, “When normal, sane people refuse to marry other normal, sane people, they stop seeing each other.”

  “How would you know?” Lady asked.

  “I read books.”

  “All I want is to be left alone,” Lady said.

  “No, you don’t. That’s what you say. You always say you want freedom, you want to be alone, you want to get away.”

  Lady was emptying ashtrays. “Slobs,” she said.

  “Then you surround yourself with men you don’t love, and it’s like you keep them on a leash. But that means you’re stuck on the other end of the leash.”

  “Please don’t lecture me, Fin. I’m so tired of people telling me what I want.”

  “You’re scared of being on your own.”

  “Seriously, Fin. Shut up.”

  But Fin was just getting going. He followed her from the coffee table to the side table down the steps to the kitchen, then to the garbage can outside, where she emptied the ashes.

  “You want to be tied down or you’ll be by yourself, and then you think you’ll just float away. That’s pathetic, Lady. That’s what’s pathetic. Not being single. Not being twenty-seven. But that.”

  Lady slammed the lid on the garbage. “You’re just like everyone else, you know that? Just exactly like everybody else.” She said it in a normal tone of voice; she turned back to the kitchen and went inside at her normal pace, all of which infuriated Fin. Didn’t she hear him? Didn’t she get what was happening? Didn’t she want to be free at all?