Duplicity

Chapter 8

I know, I know, Dear Reader. You’re thinking: this isn’t what you bargained for. At best we’ve wandered into metaphysical territory, at worst into science fiction — or, even worse, some form of domestic magic realism, which is no better than domestic Parmesan cheese. I can’t help it. It’s what happened. I’m merely the messenger here.

Determined to have a closer look, I rowed up to the dock. There, with my shadow looming over its boards, I noticed more differences. The dock’s boards were warped, splintered, and rotted (to keep them from rotting, you had to seal them once every two or three years). They obviously hadn’t been treated in decades. The dock ladder was coated with rust, so were all the cleats and the nails poking up out of the warped decking. Other nails were broken or missing. From frayed ropes three plastic dock bumpers hung, waterlogged and black with lake algae. Like my father’s dock, it had a pair of cleats on it.

I secured the boat to the cleats. Then I climbed up on and walked the dock’s length to the shore, noting, as I did so, how in need of repair the seawall was, with boards missing and weeds sprouting through the gaps, with some areas entirely breached and sink holes yawning behind the breaches. The hammock was heavy with stagnant green water and rotting leaves. As for the lawn, it hadn’t been mowed in a long time. Dirt, weeds, leaves, and fallen branches replaced grass. The house itself, I saw as I drew nearer to it, was in disrepair, the siding cracked, a few shutters gone. Two of the French doors were covered with plywood. A carpet of mulch covered the deck, from which a section of railing was missing. Needless to say the place was abandoned. It looked, come to think of it, like this house when I arrived here eight weeks or so ago, but worse.

A chill passed through me, as if I’d stepped, rowed, into the future, one I’d arrive at again thirty-seven years later in a Mazda with a blown muffler, the one confronting me now, parked in that vehicle in this driveway looking at my father’s former house in which I’ll discover —

But that hasn’t happened, not yet. Well, it has yet to happen for you, Dear Reader. As with anything that has yet to happen, there is always the possibility, however slim, that it will not happen, that somehow the tragedy will be averted. Think positive.

• •

Like the front door of my father’s house, the door to this one had been painted red, though now it looked pink, it was so badly faded. Why was I not surprised when it opened? Inside, darkness and must. I half-expected to encounter not only my father’s living room, but Dad himself sitting there on his wicker chair, reading a philosophical tract, smoking one of his plethora of pipes. Instead I found the cathedral-ceilinged space empty, save for a big plastic blue marlin over the mantle, the irons in the fireplace, and a few furnishings.

The furnishings: an artist’s taboret, a worktable, and a pair of wooden H-frame easels, all thickly encrusted with paint. Both easels had paintings on them. Whoever lived there was obviously an artist. I examined the works-in-progress. I guessed they were works-in-progress, since they held no discernable subjects, only solid fields of pale color, the canvas on the easel to the right a wan ochre, the one to the left a grayish pastel pink. Leaning against both easels, piled and staggered on the taboret and across the worktable, were other paintings or would-be paintings, on canvases and tablets and other surfaces, all different muted shades: sand, smoke, butter, paste, powder — plowed fields ready to be seeded, cloudless skies yearning for a kite or a dirigible. From a rack on the wall I pulled down one painting after another, eager for a subject, any subject. They were all the same, or rather they were all different except for their subjects, which were identical, which were nothing.

As I stood holding a canvas, gawking at it, I was overcome by a sense of — I was going to say emptiness, but that’s not right. It wasn’t emptiness I felt, but something closer to what you feel when you gaze at the stars and try to wrap your mind around infinity. I was reminded of those conversations I’d had with my father, if they counted as conversations with one of us doing all the talking, when he’d try to engage me on some philosophical issue, monologues that went on until at last my silence got the last word. Now that same silence shut me out. It was like flipping through the pages of a blank notebook. Yet in their silences somehow those empty paintings spoke to me, whispering softly — so softly I couldn’t hear them, let alone make out what they were saying, or trying to say. I picked up another, and another, always with the same result: more muted whispers. Each blank canvas added to the chorus, until that cathedral-ceilinged space throbbed and echoed with its mute requiem mass of sublime nothingness.

My head ached. I’d seen, or heard, enough. I put the last painting back where I’d found it and went out the way I had come.

• •

The air had turned dark. I’d lost all track of time. Before leaving, I walked to the side of the house facing the road. Sure enough, there was a realtor’s sign there, overgrown with weeds. As I stood looking at that weed-covered sign, shivering, I realized my shivering wasn’t just out of fear, but that it had gotten cold. I looked up and saw the clouds closing in overhead, dark ones, and heard the wind rustling the leaves of a nearby sweetgum tree. A storm was coming. I hurried to the dock, untied the boat. By the time I started rowing, the sky was black, the wind kicked whitecaps across the lake. I felt a drop of rain and heard thunder. It started pouring. I rowed like mad.

I thought I’d die out there.

By the time I got back I was soaked. My father’s boat was half-swamped. There, standing in the pouring rain at the edge of his dock in his sopping cap with his shillelagh, in a picture that would etch itself permanently into my brain, stood my philosophy professor father, his rain-drenched face contorted with tears, regret, relief. He stood there waiting for me, his son.