When Abner and I were growing up, he never gave me good advice. It's true that I rarely asked for his advice; why ask for advice from a nerdish-but-lovable-little-brother type? That's the type I gave advice to. But there were a few times when, out of adolescent desperation, I did go to him for advice. Once I asked him which girl to ask to the freshman hop.
"Belinda Becker," he said. "She likes you."
That was what I wanted to hear, because I liked her and had all kinds of fantasies about her; but when I called her she said, "Drop dead, weasel!"
Another time he advised me to see a movie called The Blob, which he swore was just about the greatest thing since ice cream. I paid good money to see it, and I thought it was the worst thing since visible nose hairs. So I didn't grow too fond of Abner's advice. That's one reason I stayed put when he advised me to get out of the Malibu—his advice had always been so lousy.
He was also intriguing the hell out of me.
He drove the last hundred feet to the house.
"Yours?" I asked. We got out of the car and walked toward the beach house. It sat virtually alone on the beach, and though it did indeed look "tumbledown" it didn't look abandoned. It looked very comfortable, at least from the outside. The wide, wraparound porch had something to do with that look. I've always liked porches; they're great places to sit and listen to crickets and peel apples.
"No," Abner answered, "it's not mine, it's a friend's—it's Art DeGraff's. Do you remember him?"
I nodded. "I remember he was an asshole. What's he doing these days?"
Abner had his hands in the pockets of his shiny brown pants, and his head down. I saw him smile slightly, as if at some secret. "Looking backward," he said, and didn't elaborate.
We were within fifty feet of the house then. My eyes were on Abner. I heard, "Hello, Abner." I looked toward the house. A tall woman in her early twenties was standing in the doorway. She was wearing very tight jeans, a loose-fitting long-sleeved white blouse which she filled wonderfully, and I said to Abner, my eyes glued to her, "Who's that?"
"That's Al," he answered. ''
“’Al’?”
He nodded. "Her real name's Allison, but she likes to be called Al—I call her Al."
She stepped back from the doorway and closed the door. I glanced at Abner. His head was still lowered. He stopped walking and looked sadly at me. "She's not what she appears to be, Sam."
"Who is?" I asked.
He continued looking at me for a few seconds, then he said, "No one. Not me, not her. No one."
I smiled broadly, as if I knew he was trying to be coy and cryptic. "It sounds like you're lost in a world of confusion."
"No," he said, "not quite yet. Soon, though. The signs are there, I'm making plans—I'll tell you about them sometime."
"You worry me, Abner." I added, "Of course, you always did."
He stared at me; his sad, pleading look changed to a look of resignation, as if he'd been expecting steak and potatoes all day but was getting carrot salad instead. Then he started walking again, his head down, hands in his pockets, and I said, as we stepped onto the porch, "We've got quite a bit to talk about, Abner. We've got a lot of years to catch up with." I spoke casually, cheerfully, the way I would have if we'd just that moment happened upon each other and were going to have dinner to hash over old times. "I mean, we haven't seen each other in twenty years—"
"Twenty years," he said. "So what?!"
"Sorry?"
"Two hundred years, a thousand years—"
"I don't understand, Abner."
"It is a world of confusion, Sam. You're right. I can see that."
"Good for you," I said, and added, "Abner, I think you've gone over into Munchkin Land. Why don't you let your big brother Sam help you back?"
"No," he said, his tone suddenly clipped, and deadly serious. He looked questioningly at me: "Munchkin Land—that's from The Wizard of Oz, isn't it?"
"I think so," I said.
He shook his head, frowning a little. "No," he repeated, "it's not Munchkin Land." He opened the front door of the beach house. "And you're not my big brother."
~ * ~
It was a very large room I entered; "the great room," Abner called it. There were at least a hundred photographs on the walls, some in black and white, some in color, most of them five by seven or eight by ten, some larger. Abner told me he'd taken them for the photographic book he'd once planned to do—"About Manhattan," he said. Indeed, most of the pictures had a nice Manhattan flavor to them. "They remind me of who I am," he said.
"Sure," I said, "I guess we all need that." I was still feeling the sting from his "And you're not my big brother" remark.
There were at least a dozen plants in the room, although there was very little direct sunlight because the two windows faced north. Several of the plants were of the large, floor-standing variety that would have dominated a smaller room. Abner said they were "a kind of fern" and went on to give me their scientific name, which I can't remember and couldn't spell if I did. Some of the others were in small clay pots that had been hung from the ceiling on lengths of decorative reddish-brown twine. I recognized some of these; one was a nerve plant—so named because its leaves curl up when touched—and another was clover, which I like because it's so simple. The plants gave the room a slight tangy smell, "the smell of the earth," Abner said, "a good smell, a real smell."
A huge gray stone fireplace took up half the north wall. Several large, brightly colored throw pillows lay in various places around it.
"The plants don't live long," Abner said. "About a week, most of them, then I've got to throw them out and buy new ones."
"Don't they need more light?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yes. That's one of the reasons they don't live long."
"Then why have them at all?"
He answered simply, in the same vaguely pleading tone he'd used earlier, "Because I need them, Sam. Because they're alive."
~ * ~
When I was growing up, there were a few words that I regularly used to describe Abner W. Cray. "Nerd," of course, fit him well. But he was also a pretender, and an actor, like Art DeGraff, though, unlike Art DeGraff, Abner is just about the gentlest person I've known.
He was an actor when he was holding one of his séances, for instance, and wanted to impress one of the women there with how sensitive he was. He'd sit down with someone he hardly knew, get this earnest and interested look on his face, and let the other person talk, and talk, and talk. I supposed it was either because he had precious little to say or because he thought that if he kept quiet, and didn't offer anything of himself, he'd be less vulnerable. But most of the people he listened to thought it was because he was especially interested in them, and especially sensitive, and especially caring.
So there in his tumbledown beach house, surrounded by his photographs, his plants, and his brightly colored throw pillows, I suspected that Because I need them, Sam. Because they're alive! was only an example of what I'd first seen twenty years earlier—an Abner W. Cray pose, a way of demonstrating his incredible sensitivity. But I was wrong.
~ * ~
"Why do you live here, Abner?" I asked. He'd led me through the great room, down a narrow hallway—also festooned with his photographs of Manhattan—and into the kitchen, which was, oddly, at the beach side of the house. I thought, following him, that the inside of the house, in stark contrast to the way it looked outside, had the same dead-end feel to it as that mausoleum we'd broken into twenty years earlier, like a still life of stale beer. I couldn't imagine anyone, even Abner, actually wanting to live in it.
"It's safe," he answered. "For now, it's safe, and I can live here. Alone, if I want."
The kitchen was tidy, which surprised me—I'd always thought of Abner as a slob. One wall, opposite four large windows and a door that faced the beach, had an upper row of freshly polished knotty-pine cupboards on it, a stainless-steel double sink below, more knotty-pine cupboards to the left of it. At the center of the room there was a small table with a white enamel top and wooden base, painted white, and three old ladder-back chairs with cane seats. A rounded-top General Electric refrigerator, circa 1960, stood next to the sink, and a huge, battered gas stove was kitty-corner to it. The side of the stove next to the outside door—the door that led to the beach was badly chipped, and I guessed that the door hit it every time it was opened. There was a cream-colored cereal bowl in the sink that had a spoon in it, a little milk, and some remnants of what looked like Rice Krispies.
I sat in one of the ladder-back chairs. It wobbled. I hoped it would hold me. Abner stood in front of me, at the sink, with his arms folded in front of him. I asked him, "What do you mean, 'alone'? What about that woman I saw—what was her name? Al? What about her?"
"She doesn't live here. She's a guest."
"Oh," I said. "It must be nice to have guests like that."
"I've got lots of guests here. I've got at least a dozen guests. Maybe you'll meet some of them." This seemed to amuse him.
I stared at him for a few moments, then I said, "Where, Abner?"
"Where what?"
"For God's sake, where are your guests?" I held my hand up, palm out, as if stopping traffic. "Sorry, Abner. It's just that I hate to see a friend . . . teetering on the edge—"
"The edge of what, Sam?" He was clearly confused.
I sighed. "Abner, I'm sorry, but maybe I'd better go."
"Go?" He shook his head. "You can't go, Sam. They won't let you."
Another sigh. " 'They' won't let me? Who's 'they,' Abner?"
"My guests, the people in the house."
"Abner, Christ!" I pushed my chair back noisily. The racket seemed to jar Abner because he stiffened up. I stood, glanced first at the door to the beach, then toward the hallway that led back to the great room. "There are no 'other people' in this house!"
"Yes, Sam, there are. They live in the walls. Most of them. Except Madeline, of course. She lives upstairs." He grinned flatly.
Again I stared at him, and for a moment I felt an incredible urge to slap him around, as if that might shake the rocks out of his head. Instead I said, "Abner, you need help, probably a lot more than I can give you." Then I turned, went quickly down the hallway, to the great room, and out the door.
I had to walk at least three or four miles until I found a bus stop, but I was back in my apartment early that evening.