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I had no intention of hauling those damn paintings from Edinboro to Ithaca when I drove RTT to his uncle’s house.
I was gonna drive RTT there so we could figure out an assessment process. So, the paintings could be sold—assuming Ben hadn’t been a complete liar (always an iffy proposition), and the paintings had some small value.
Mid-19th century stuff from a handful of Scandinavian artists whom I’d never heard of. I found one on eBay; the seller was asking $600.
But Lew browbeat me.
Over the years, Lew has browbeat me into doing any number of things it either hadn’t occurred to me to do, or I hadn’t wanted to do. He is kinda like Jiminy Cricket. A portable conscience. He never even has to work that hard. All he has to do is look at me with a certain degree of exasperation, exhale loudly, and say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Patrizia. You have to do it,” and I crumble immediately.
I can’t figure out why I care what Lew thinks of me, but it’s apparent that I do.
And I mean, yes, of course, I had to haul the damn paintings.
Because how else would they leave Lew's house?
It wasn’t as if RTT had enough executive function to organize a trucking company to come get them.
But the thing was—and this was an impossible thing to explain to any rational human being, and don’t I spend most of my life struggling to be a rational human being?—on some very deep level, I was convinced the paintings were cursed and that it would do me irreparable psychic harm to have them in my car.
###
It’s so strange to be in a location where you were once very miserable when you are no longer very miserable, when you’ve moved on to a place of reasonable contentment such that the very reasons why you were once so very miserable strike you now as kind of absurd, and ridiculous, and easily avoided if only you’d had a smidgeon of common sense once upon a time.
After Culpepper & Merriweather’s season ended, B and I and RTT and the assorted pets drove to Edinboro and camped out on the periphery of Lew’s property.
I woke up in the RV on the morning after we arrived, and it was snowing.
I got up. Got dressed. No heat in the RV; it was freezing. Let Milo out to pee. Fed Milo.
Broke a path through eight inches of snow to the kitchen of the house where Lew was sitting. He poured me a cup of coffee. He did not meet my eyes.
“So, how long are you planning on staying here?” Lew asked.
“I don’t know,” I stammered. “I mean—I’d need to talk to Ben—"
“Well,” he said. “It’s something you need to figure out fast. And soon.”
That was the year I’d lost my business, lost my house, lost all my money, lost every material thing that anchored me to a life, to an ego, to an identity. I’d given up making decisions. It was all I could do to float.
“You need to start thinking about the future,” Lew said. His voice was neither kind nor unkind. He was merely stating a fact. He could have been saying, “The sun rises in the east.”
But I didn’t even know I had a future.
So how could I think about it?
I mean, right, obviously, moments would continue arranging themselves in a chronological fashion, a then followed by a now.
Was that the same thing as a future?
It was all on me, right? I’d been a grasshopper. I should have been an ant.
(The worst was yet to come, but I didn’t know it at the time.)
###
My relationship with Lew improved after Lew (eventually) came to realize that I wasn’t Ben’s co-conspirator, that I’d never been Ben’s co-conspirator, that I’d simply been trying (desperately) to hold things together because… family. That I’d been every bit as much of a victim of the lies and the grift and the flimflam as Lew’s own sainted mother.
And on this trip, in fact, Lew was entirely pleasant except for when he rolled his eyes and said, “You have to do it.”
I mostly hung out with Ed, Lew’s partner of 22 years with whom Lew is finally moving in. Ed is an artist and a sweetheart in all the ways that Lew is not—proof of my thesis that we always bond closest to the people who have no problem saying, “No!” to the things we can’t bring ourselves to say, “No,” to—and Ed and I chattered about growing up gay in Meadville and cats and drawing while we wrapped all the breakables going into storage in 100-proof bubble wrap. Meanwhile, RTT—on his best behavior—was helping Lew move dead mattresses into a dumpster. In the evening, we did the Edinboro equivalent of fine dining at a restaurant overlooking the point where French Creek flows into the lake:
But that night, I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t even drift off into that realm of half-sleep.
And if I couldn’t sleep, how the hell was I supposed to drive 250 miles along the mostly deserted Southern Tier highway to Ithaca and then another 250 miles back to the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?
###
Somehow, I managed to get to Ithaca.
It was a complete fuckin’ nightmare but somehow I managed to keep my attention on the road.
Cthulu did not rise from the Alleghany Gap to reclaim his Master’s art collection, though I kept expecting him to.
In Ithaca, RTT unloaded the paintings and a couple of other hideous Ben artifacts. He intends to hang them on the walls of his apartment. Fine, I thought. Turn your entire life into a museum to your creepy dead father. In 15 years, you won’t be a pretty boy anymore, and you’ll realize how you wasted your youth, and then you’ll really have a reason to be depressed. But that won’t be on me. I tried to tell you, and all you did was get surly.
RTT really needs to go back into therapy.
I got a hotel room and a bottle of Tylenol PM. Crashed for 12 hours.
Drove home to my pretty little place, and my friends, and my cat, and my pleasant little life.
Thought, That’s it. My karmic indenture to those people is over.
It’s sad to think of my own son as "those people" but right now, that’s exactly how I’m thinking of him.
I was gonna drive RTT there so we could figure out an assessment process. So, the paintings could be sold—assuming Ben hadn’t been a complete liar (always an iffy proposition), and the paintings had some small value.
Mid-19th century stuff from a handful of Scandinavian artists whom I’d never heard of. I found one on eBay; the seller was asking $600.
But Lew browbeat me.
Over the years, Lew has browbeat me into doing any number of things it either hadn’t occurred to me to do, or I hadn’t wanted to do. He is kinda like Jiminy Cricket. A portable conscience. He never even has to work that hard. All he has to do is look at me with a certain degree of exasperation, exhale loudly, and say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Patrizia. You have to do it,” and I crumble immediately.
I can’t figure out why I care what Lew thinks of me, but it’s apparent that I do.
And I mean, yes, of course, I had to haul the damn paintings.
Because how else would they leave Lew's house?
It wasn’t as if RTT had enough executive function to organize a trucking company to come get them.
But the thing was—and this was an impossible thing to explain to any rational human being, and don’t I spend most of my life struggling to be a rational human being?—on some very deep level, I was convinced the paintings were cursed and that it would do me irreparable psychic harm to have them in my car.
###
It’s so strange to be in a location where you were once very miserable when you are no longer very miserable, when you’ve moved on to a place of reasonable contentment such that the very reasons why you were once so very miserable strike you now as kind of absurd, and ridiculous, and easily avoided if only you’d had a smidgeon of common sense once upon a time.
After Culpepper & Merriweather’s season ended, B and I and RTT and the assorted pets drove to Edinboro and camped out on the periphery of Lew’s property.
I woke up in the RV on the morning after we arrived, and it was snowing.
I got up. Got dressed. No heat in the RV; it was freezing. Let Milo out to pee. Fed Milo.
Broke a path through eight inches of snow to the kitchen of the house where Lew was sitting. He poured me a cup of coffee. He did not meet my eyes.
“So, how long are you planning on staying here?” Lew asked.
“I don’t know,” I stammered. “I mean—I’d need to talk to Ben—"
“Well,” he said. “It’s something you need to figure out fast. And soon.”
That was the year I’d lost my business, lost my house, lost all my money, lost every material thing that anchored me to a life, to an ego, to an identity. I’d given up making decisions. It was all I could do to float.
“You need to start thinking about the future,” Lew said. His voice was neither kind nor unkind. He was merely stating a fact. He could have been saying, “The sun rises in the east.”
But I didn’t even know I had a future.
So how could I think about it?
I mean, right, obviously, moments would continue arranging themselves in a chronological fashion, a then followed by a now.
Was that the same thing as a future?
It was all on me, right? I’d been a grasshopper. I should have been an ant.
(The worst was yet to come, but I didn’t know it at the time.)
###
My relationship with Lew improved after Lew (eventually) came to realize that I wasn’t Ben’s co-conspirator, that I’d never been Ben’s co-conspirator, that I’d simply been trying (desperately) to hold things together because… family. That I’d been every bit as much of a victim of the lies and the grift and the flimflam as Lew’s own sainted mother.
And on this trip, in fact, Lew was entirely pleasant except for when he rolled his eyes and said, “You have to do it.”
I mostly hung out with Ed, Lew’s partner of 22 years with whom Lew is finally moving in. Ed is an artist and a sweetheart in all the ways that Lew is not—proof of my thesis that we always bond closest to the people who have no problem saying, “No!” to the things we can’t bring ourselves to say, “No,” to—and Ed and I chattered about growing up gay in Meadville and cats and drawing while we wrapped all the breakables going into storage in 100-proof bubble wrap. Meanwhile, RTT—on his best behavior—was helping Lew move dead mattresses into a dumpster. In the evening, we did the Edinboro equivalent of fine dining at a restaurant overlooking the point where French Creek flows into the lake:
But that night, I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t even drift off into that realm of half-sleep.
And if I couldn’t sleep, how the hell was I supposed to drive 250 miles along the mostly deserted Southern Tier highway to Ithaca and then another 250 miles back to the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?
###
Somehow, I managed to get to Ithaca.
It was a complete fuckin’ nightmare but somehow I managed to keep my attention on the road.
Cthulu did not rise from the Alleghany Gap to reclaim his Master’s art collection, though I kept expecting him to.
In Ithaca, RTT unloaded the paintings and a couple of other hideous Ben artifacts. He intends to hang them on the walls of his apartment. Fine, I thought. Turn your entire life into a museum to your creepy dead father. In 15 years, you won’t be a pretty boy anymore, and you’ll realize how you wasted your youth, and then you’ll really have a reason to be depressed. But that won’t be on me. I tried to tell you, and all you did was get surly.
RTT really needs to go back into therapy.
I got a hotel room and a bottle of Tylenol PM. Crashed for 12 hours.
Drove home to my pretty little place, and my friends, and my cat, and my pleasant little life.
Thought, That’s it. My karmic indenture to those people is over.
It’s sad to think of my own son as "those people" but right now, that’s exactly how I’m thinking of him.
