World Famous Love Acts

Gideon dials slowly, leaning against the wall of his empty kitchen. He closes his eyes, allowing everything around him to fall away. The ringing on the other end of the phone sounds like the reverberation of a hammer on nails. When it stops, his mother is on the line. Gideon takes a breath of the warm autumn air.

It will take her three hours to arrive from San Diego. Gideon walks into the living room with its picture windows allowing the late morning light to intensify the white of the now barren walls. In the corner stands a vacuum. It has become a kind of urn, sucking up the large gray flakes falling from Gideon more frequently now. He uses it to remove the evidence of his presence from the dark upholstery of his chairs and most recently has begun running the hose down his arms to the tips of his dry, opaque fingers. “Death by evaporation,” he tells friends. The treatments are over. His illness is no longer a dismissible visitor but has, in fact, become his primary companion.

After the final hospital stay, Gideon removed the photographs from the walls of his home and now sits himself among them, chilled by a thin band of air hovering above the oak floor. He considers the photos an index of his life. There are the bakedporcelain framed pictures of friends with red reflecting eyes at parties, and a trip in 1988 to Brazil for a television project. A single black-and-white of a little girl rests in a small gold-plated frame, the only picture his family has of an aunt he never met. The photos of himself record the high cheekbones and sepia-toned skin inherited from his mother. He feels as if he is viewing a former lover. The appeal or even chance of posterity is some hectic blue gesture like a last affair.

He picks up a single 5 X 7, stepping over the piles of photos. Someone will want the frames, he thinks. The redwood chaise on the sun deck is not facing exactly as he prefers but he seldom bothers with this kind of correction anymore. Most of the flowers in his backyard have died back, but seven white roses remain, clustered together like the flared underside of a Spanish skirt. When it is clear, he can see the Hollywood sign on his right and downtown Los Angeles on the left. But it is one of those windless days when the air is imperfectly still and embalmed with a white haze, leaving the impression of something vacant and ruined you expect to come upon at the equator. Gideon has this sense more often now, of a failed civilization offering the invention of time and then surrendering under the force of the millennium it created.

He considers the 5 X 7 of the family reunion nine months earlier sent to him by his mother. The photograph was taken on the porch of his mother’s white dairy house in San Diego—five rows, eight and ten across, of women in pink and green pastel sundresses and men folding their thick brown arms across their chests or using them to pull someone closer. His mother was frozen in a laugh, her black hair scrunched back in a pencil-secured bun, enhancing his resemblance to her. She was leaning on his Uncle Stan. One of her hands rested on his stomach, the other held a rifle by its barrel. She had come out of the kitchen spinning the weapon, walking across the wood porch when his uncle grabbed her. “Soak that apron in a pot of hot water,” he said, “and we’ll all have soup.” And then the picture.

Gideon notices in the photograph for the first time that his mother is looking at him in the front row, reclined across the laps of several of his cousins. It is that kind of search done in large groups when seeking the connection of an intimate. Had she caught his eye? He remembers avoiding her most of the day. He entertained his relatives as they always expected, but stayed away from her. Gideon wonders, looking at his glassy hands, if he had been doing the same thing all along. The doctor’s best estimate was two months, the ironically phrased deadline which had at last convinced him to ask his mother to come get him.

He has gotten out of Los Angeles just twice since he moved into this house he used to keep for guests. The first time he left was for his father’s funeral, and the second for the reunion in the El Monte valley in San Diego. He left for his mother’s house two days before the reunion to help her prepare. He drove down Interstate 5, cutting along the edge of the Pacific at six A.M. It was the only time he had seen this ocean when it was not remarkable to him. Fog the color of lead hung tight above the quelled water, releasing infrequent spots of light. He felt superstitious.

Gideon pulled off the freeway at San Onofre and got out of his car. He was close enough to hear waves manipulating the sand. Leaning on the open door of his car, he allowed his face to collect a mist which felt as cold and sharp as metal shavings. He considered the indefinite shore and this fifth year in which he had gone beyond positive. The apocalypse has fooled us all, he thought. It has come up the back road. While we look to the stars it overtakes the avenues. This is its method. The canals are almost captured and the boulevards are collapsing like bad veins. We have read the Bible and thought we would get off easy. It’s too late to run, Gideon realized. He listened for the silken pressure just before a breaking wave, wanting to simply be with his mother.

This quiet desire, to be home, to be someone’s son again, propelled the rest of his trip. As he pulled onto the gravel driveway of the former dairy, Gideon focused on the changes his mother had made, surprised at how much she forced out of the old, hoof-packed ground. Thick, controlled stands of bird of paradise led up from the mailbox like purple and orange flocks at the edge of a river. The bougainvillea, pruned from its former mounded sprawl, now trellised over the broadest side of the house so that its greenish white bracts looked like pods of ripening fruit. She had brought the lawn back all the way to the drive and he imagined her coaxing it with weekly increments of water.

The sky was a heavy blue, a ceramic shade which made the house look freshly painted white. Pansies and California poppies grew all around in tin saucepans and old pressure cookers. “You going to gawk all day?” his mother said from an upstairs window. “Put some work clothes on and meet me out back.” Her voice was to him light and direct, like falling ash. How could he tell this woman he was sick, he wondered. He blocked the sun from his eyes to locate her, but only saw the empty space where she had been. All the windows on the second floor were original; wavy-looking, even from the outside. His mother liked the effect and he was not surprised there were still no screens.

Knowing she would not come out front, he went to his old room to change into jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Gideon stood still, looking at the new wallpaper—lime green with lateral rows of purple specks, visible up close as African violets. His mother had replaced his single bed with a queen size, covered by a white chenille spread hanging to the floor. He opened the closet and looked directly to the center of the empty hanger pole. His deeply scratched initials stained with black ink were preserved, everything around them recently painted.

He listened for the sounds a house makes when it seems there are no sounds at all. When he was young, his mother told him there were people who lived in the walls and the creaks he heard were their tiny doors opening and closing. Over a period of time, his mother named these little beings, gave them each a story, and told him how they visited with her at midnight. Now, as he stared up at the old ceiling, a broad, private smile came over his face. He remembered the room cast in a dark, cloistered blue and the times he left his closet door cracked open, pretending to sleep in order to catch a miniature person walking across the floor. Sometimes he convinced himself he could see a head peeking around the bottom edge. In the morning he would tell his mother and it would be a secret between them.

After he put on his yard clothes, Gideon located his mother in back of the house pulling chaparral stumps from the ground. She breathed through a red bandanna tied at the back of her head. The dust and pollen she stirred were primary to him, like the peppery smell before a thunderstorm. He walked to his mother, twigs crushing beneath his feet. “Anna Jo Cavanaugh, your son is here,” he said.

“Gideon James Cavanaugh, grab a pick.” She turned around and slipped off the bandanna revealing the distinct swath of dirt on her upper face. Standing next to his mother, he felt the perspective of looking up even though he was eight inches taller than she. She was still beautiful to him; something produced by the West, he thought, rugged and exotic like manzanita in September. She hugged him, leaving her gloves on. “How’s television production?” she continued. “Still brainwashing?”

Anna smiled quickly and pulled her son by the arm to the cleared area to mark out where the roasting pits would be. They startled a covey of quail out of the brush, the birds flying just over their heads, a dozen brown spades disappearing into the sage on the upper hillside.

“This is where we had the fire walk,” Gideon said, remembering the scarred ground left by a bed of oak cinders. When he was eleven his mother hosted a self-confidence seminar culminating in a walk across fifteen feet of hot coals. The cinderous gash in the lawn was the only source of light other than two red paper lanterns moving in the night like hot cigarette tips. The guests sat listening to the speaker who wore a black jump suit, making his head look detached from his body in the dim glow. Gideon detected a pattern early—the repeated words “conquer” and “overcome” and “visualize.”

After three hours, the guests moved to the edge of the fire bed. One by one they stepped across the coals like they were charging a door. The objective was to focus on the end, concentrate on the wetted grass and feel nothing during the dash over the coals. Gideon watched the participants’ faces as they finished their crossings. No one smiled or spoke. A woman squinted and checked her feet for blisters. She came and sat close to Gideon, watching the rest of the group go through the process. Their faces were cast in a hot, bleached orange. “What did it feel like?” Gideon asked the woman.

Even years later, Gideon could pick out the bare spot in the ground where the coals had been and where he sat with the woman on the grass. “We’re going to cook three lambs and a pig,” Anna continued, breaking Gideon out of thought. “I’m expecting about two hundred, everybody that’s even slightly related. You’re the only one I wasn’t sure would make it. Your track record isn’t so great.”

“I told you I was coming,” Gideon said. But there was no heart in his reply. He thought of all the times he had been invited home but canceled at the last minute. His family had been the casualty of his success and he knew it. He had given them up for evenings watching friends sing at the CineGrill, or going dancing at warehouse clubs which changed locations every weekend. But most often, Gideon was simply immersed in production, and looking back, he realized his family was the first part of him he let go.

“You’re here now,” Gideon’s mother said. “I guess I better put you to work.” She smiled and pulled the bandanna over her mouth again. Gideon quickly surveyed the area she had already cleared. It was not large enough and he was glad he was there to help her. They began removing the remaining dandelion and wild mustard, working together on a larger perimeter.

The night of the reunion, when most of the relatives had gone, a few remained in the anesthesia of the warm evening. They sat in the bourbon-tinted light of the living room, finishing dishes of vanilla ice cream as the chime of spoons on glass gave way to the sound of crickets and air seasoned by pomegranate and trampled grass.

“I can’t believe we did it,” his mother said, putting her hands behind her head. “One hundred-and-eighty-three people and not one argument. That’s a record on both counts for this family.”

But Gideon was not listening. He sat at the edge of the room near the windows, aware of his own breathing, of his chest rising and falling, keeping time to the quiet pace of night. He wondered whether he had missed some change in himself which was only obvious to those who hadn’t seen him in a long time.

“You were amazing,” Gideon said, lobbing the pillow back. “I can’t believe you got everyone to come.” He looked at the few family members sitting around the room. His Great-uncle Ed slept, leaning on Gideon’s grandmother. Ed junior sat across from his father, looking like a “before” picture, black hair and wide shoulders, always wearing an optimistic smile. Gideon felt he should have said more but he had no words, and the small group turned to his grandmother as she began to straighten out the lineages of people who had been there that day, doubling back on herself to correct links, then lingering over certain details. Gideon watched his family and thought about the black-and-white photograph at home of his Aunt Helen as a young girl. His mother had sent it to him. Except for her, he had rarely heard anyone speak of his aunt.

“It’s funny how you forget about time. When I was a little girl I clocked the day by how the sun hit my body.” She stopped for a moment, raking Great-uncle Ed’s white hair as he continued to sleep, then turned to Gideon’s mother.

“Your father and I would sit straight through the summer on the wood porch, in earshot of our parents, of course. If it was late, twilight divided the barnyard into purple and black. He’d hold my hand and tell me what they had planted. All they tried to do all day was keep the insects away and the ground wet. He told me he fell asleep at night imagining the crickets were saying my name. He was a good man.”

The family sat for a moment, still and uncomfortable in the ticking surge of yellow light. Anna got up and nervously gathered their ice-cream dishes, taking them into the summer kitchen. The door flapped dull in its frame. Years of paint left tiny enamel stalactites hanging from the hinges.

But Gideon had not wanted to talk about Helen either. It had just come out, perhaps a simple claim of space for his aunt, the girl in the picture with two long braids and a plaid dress. Now, Gideon listened for sounds from the kitchen, for the clap of a closing cupboard or drawer. There was nothing. Outside, the breeze changed direction over the roasting pits, sending the smell of their insulation into the house, tin roofing, burlap and palm fronds—the mixture buttery and toxic like a serum for fever.

Gideon knew of his aunt only from the fragments of information he had collected over the years, brief unintended disclosures prompted by family parties and quilted photo albums. Helen was fourteen years older than his mother. On her eighteenth birthday she announced she was going to be married to a man whose name changed in the family stories. Sometimes it was Chavez, other times Rodriguez. There was not much more reliable in Gideon’s memory. The rest was his deduction that she was also pregnant and that his grandfather disowned her.

Gideon leaned back in his chair. He looked for words. The kitchen was ventilated on three sides by open windows lined with Depression glassware. In the only closed window, a slip of ivy had invaded an old bullet hole in the pane. The vine wound in and out of the creamers, tea cups, and saucers which tossed pastel clumps of pink and green light on the wood floor. Originally, the room had been used for cooking in the summer but Gideon remembered his mother rarely used the other kitchen. She liked it here because no matter what she was cooking, it smelled of the yard.

Anna got up and went to the cupboard, pulling down two cans of cat food, then cranking them on an opener bolted to the wall. “I’m your mother. Don’t you think I already know? I understand the difference between best friend and boyfriend.” Anna took the opened containers and set them on the stairs outside. She stood watching out the screen door. “The possums will be up shortly.”

“Because I wonder. For your sake, do you want to bring that into this family? When I left that room, you were the only one who came after me. They can turn things off so easily. I don’t want my son forgotten.”

Gideon stood up and walked to his mother, feeling armed. He heard the cat food already being dragged down the steps. They might have more than one reason to forget, he thought to himself. The dark was warm and uncomfortably familiar. Gideon shook because he had been to this precipice before. It had ended his last relationship. We mark time by the calm of night, he thought. It is a coalescence of disclosure, words filtered over candles or bridged between pillows. “Mom, I’m sick,” he said.

She pulled the pencil from her hair, something she did when she was most relaxed. Gideon remembered this was how she appeared when she read to him at night when he was a boy, her black hair stricken white by reflection. She reached out from her side without turning to him. “Is this between us, Gideon?” She allowed her son to consider the history of the people who had come to the reunion that day, knowing he would not want to become a family myth. “You can come home,” his mother said.

“I’m no better than them, Mom. I’ve pushed my family to the back of my life.” Gideon took a deep breath and managed a smile, hoping his mother understood this was not another act of separation. “Besides, this seems scary now, but someday I’ll just be an old-fashioned AIDS story.”

It is this night Gideon thinks of as he sits on his deck, waiting for his mother to arrive from San Diego. A pair of jets make vaportrail sutures across the sky, the scars healing from their farthest point. He knows it is five o’clock by the specific gradation of yellow. It is the easiest time for him to breathe, looking at the back-lit olive trees and Spanish-style homes, the increasing sound of traffic washing insinuation from the air. He realizes he is waiting for that transition which never comes to Los Angeles: people, like certain perennials, coaxed into extended seasons. He examines his hands, convinced he can feel the skin pulling back from his nails. They are dry and peeling in minute strands.

Gideon looks at the adjacent hill a mile off, everything behind it a vague, petroleum orange. At the top of the hill stands a single palm, a black and accidental keyhole after the sunset. He drove to it once. The tree’s base was covered with nails and staples from years of lost dogs and yard sales. It seemed unaffected, it’s rustling crown of fronds thick and new, making the air sound carbonated. But now its form is simply dark and distant.

Looking out at Los Angeles from his home, he begins to understand the geometry of lights, a plain of red dust and halogen shards. It is like a bed of hot coals he has just crossed. A quarter moon sits low in the sky, tinted orange like a dim lantern. The light falls on Gideon’s skin like dying flame. He feels the oncoming night and people like himself making decisions that will change their lives. We are consumed like fuel, he thinks, and we are cautious because every twilight is a fire walk.

He considers the intricate processes of preparation and how he will be remembered. They will say he was successful. He had a career and a house with a view. But it has all come down to reversion, as if he has recreated an expectant mother waiting for his birth. I have relinquished myself, Gideon thinks. He had counted on his life’s momentum and now it is leaving him as he sits alone on the deck of his backyard. He accepts the conditions of this final inertia, the feeling he is slipping, falling back, and he hopes his mother will arrive in time to catch him.