I stared writing memoirs because I was in love with a man named Arthur Dub. I’d been living in California, but I flew back to Baltimore when my father called to say that Uncle Arthur was dying, and wanted me to transcribe his memoirs. He wanted two hundred copies printed, to be handed out to loved ones at his funeral. I only parted with one hundred of them, but it was enough to put my work on the bookshelves of a hefty circle of influential and dying elite, victims of smoking and drinking and leisure, who wanted their memoirs written, too. In exchange for this favor, Arthur told me he forgave me. Then he died.
He was my father’s best friend, and his first patron – my father is an obscure but important minimalist composer, Arthur Dub was heir to the largest potato chip fortune on the East Coast. Before he got tenure at Bucknell University, Dad lived on Arthur’s hospitality. They met, in their giddy student days, in a city new to both of them. Arthur footed rent and heating bills for the house they shared, in exchange, he used to tell us, for nothing more than a late night binge-drinking partner, someone who could play the spinet piano that had come with the house. “Nobody plays the piano like your father,” he told me, at midnight. We were all of us awake at Arthur’s beach house playing canasta.
“Don’t tell my kids I used to drink,” Dad would say.
“You’re drinking now,” Arthur would say.
“You’re a bad influence,” Dad would say, and lay down his cards.
My father and his best friend grew up and moved to different states, but every summer Arthur again extended his hospitality, and our family went to stay at his vacation home on Ocracoke Island. It was a big old farmhouse at the edge of a thin woods, built from the lumber of a dismantled historic barn. It had survived hurricanes and a termite infestation and when Arthur told us it was magic we believed him.
It was the kind of house where you ate fresh apple pie every Sunday afternoon. You washed dishes in a kitchen sink that was as wide and as deep as our bathtub in Ohio, but not as deep as the claw-footed tub with the golden spigot in the guest room on Arthur’s second floor, where you and your two younger brothers could wash out your bathing suits slung heavy with beach sand. You got your own bedroom – mine was a tiny closet at the top of the stairs with a rose quilt. There was a back porch ashtray where you could pick out the half-end butt of a cigarette and there was a secret hall window big enough to climb out onto the roof and smoke when you were fifteen and nobody wanted you anymore. It was a house you’d write if you wanted the happy ending to a children’s book and I spent infinite summer weeks there. I haven’t seen it in ten years; but every time I drive to meet a new client, I hope to see that house, with that giant man walking across the lawn in running shorts and a suntan.
As a child I was a terrible insomniac, which, since it frightened my father, I’d learned to hide. In our house in Ohio I knew which steps creaked and it was easy every morning to creep into the rec room to read or braid friendship bracelets. But in Ocracoke I always went down to the beach. I usually fell asleep on a couch in my bathing suit and woke up in my bed, wondering who’d carried me there. I’d creep down the stairs and leave through the sliding glass door, cross the wide grassy lawn and sprint onto the beach, where sharks’ teeth, gnarled wood and dead animals had washed up overnight.
And sometimes Arthur Dub would wash up, too. More than once I met him as the sun burned eight o’clock and he was panting and wet from an eight mile run and a cool-down swim. “Hey, baby girl,” he would say, “Who wants a hug?” And he’d chase me across the beach, back through the dunes and into the kitchen where everyone else was just waking up to breakfast.
In the afternoon the others were napping off their morning sunburns and Arthur and I would meet, again, always, on the beach, both of us baked invulnerable. “We are two birds of one feather, aren’t we?” he’d say, holding his dark forearm next to mine for comparison. He gave me a dime every time I brought him a piece of sea glass. He taught me that seaweed pods were really mermaid eggs. He found big seashells and held them next to my head and told me to listen for the sound of the ocean.
In the years since, I’ve often thought about those early years, when what happened later between us was still a secret promise for the future. I’ve comforted myself with imagining what Arthur did when I was still eleven. I hope that his heart skipped a beat when I giggled at a win in canasta. I hope he has scars on the insides of his lips, where his teeth chewed his skin to keep from saying my name.
And in the evenings, I’d know he’d gone back near the waves before dinner when I saw the piles of change he’d left like droppings on the kitchen table, emptying his pockets, his wallet and keys and the tissues he carried, all left on the sliding glass door by his flat shoes. I’d slip off my pink jelly flip flops and set them next to his, like they were holding hands, and run off down between the dunes. Teenage girls, or slightly younger, have great big generous hearts. But they never know what they should love.
On my twelfth birthday he couldn’t wait anymore; or I was old enough; or in some other way, I got lucky. He was up that day before me, standing on the beach with a yellow helium balloon. “Happy birthday, baby girl,” he said. He took my chin in his palm and held it towards his face, while I blinked at him and blushed.
“Thank you,” I told him earnestly, not sure what to say. It seemed important that he’d known yellow was my favorite color. “Blue balloons are my favorite.”
“This is a yellow balloon,” he said. I laughed and sat down on the sand, pulling away from him, pretending to pout, knowing already how women behave.
“No, it’s a blue.” He frowned down at me. I was still laughing. He sat down beside me. He pulled me, giggling, onto his lap. “It’s a blue,” I said, “Say ‘it’s a blue,’ say it, say it,” I said.
He pinned my arms in a bear hug and his face nuzzled under my ear and he said, okay, breathing, it’s a blue and he held his breath and me and I listened in his head for the sound of the ocean.
That was the first of just three infinite short summers. We two insomniac birds of a feather became zombies, hidden in the dunes, surviving on secret cuddles instead of food or rest. For all of our time together, he never took anything from me, satisfied with gentle petting, leaving his own frightening sex hidden in his perfect pants. I always wanted more. Back at school in Ohio when I was fifteen and missing him six months I found a boyfriend at the high school, a pimply boy with baggy pants named Greg, who showed me videos in his mother’s basement and, on that rec room couch, taught me after school what teenage boys do with their palms. I couldn’t wait to see Arthur that fourth summer; I had learned Greg for his sake. I broke his child’s heart on the first of June and was packed and ready to go at dawn the next day, eager in my first two-pieced bathing suit. But Arthur met me in the foyer by the spinet piano with the same sterile hug he gave my brother and, although I was up nearly the entire night waiting on the beach for the dawn, he did not come out for a run.
“It’s my knee,” he told us, when I asked him bravely in front of the rest of my family, “Been giving us some trouble.”
For the next few days, when I found his pile of things by the sliding screen door, I’d leave my own shoes next to his and run down to the beach, nearly wild. In my insomnia I started wandering the halls of the house like a lonely ghost, wondering what I’d done that he hated me for it. I lost weight and my father bought books on eating disorders, leaving them on the shelf for me to find. We left in August, and I suffered the same sterile hug goodbye, the last I would let him give me.
When I was sixteen I spent the summer sullen, reading every day and showing Arthur how I hated him by skipping afternoon ice cream trips, hoping to impress him by refusing to have fun when we all played canasta. When I was seventeen I didn’t go to the beach. I spent my summer working at the Icee Blast stand in Ohio and living with a cousin, reading about pedophiles in the newspapers and understanding that, at fifteen, I’d grown too old for his tastes. The summer before college I slept with every boy who called me, and turned eighteen.
I went to college on the Arthur Dub scholarship believing he was only testing me, to see whether I would grow into the kind of woman he could marry. When I was twenty I wondered how many others there had been, other girls on ice cream trips. I remembered, especially, a ten year old girl with lovely wide eyes who had come by selling girl scout cookies one afternoon– and Arthur had bought ten boxes. When I was twenty-one I dropped out of school.
It was my father’s voice on the phone, that Wednesday in California, when I learned Arthur was dying. He went briefly through the last six months of Arthur’s testicular cancer, a bout of hope in February, an inevitable decline ever since; a surgery, a removal. Dad’s voice sounded higher than I remembered, and he’d picked up a soft stutter. “And they think it might be soon; they think it might be any day,” he said. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in my family for eleven months. On the phone with my father, I could only think to ask why he’d always called Arthur my uncle.
“He was like your uncle,” my father said, “What else should I have called him?” With each sentence, his pitch rose: “It’s what you say to children. He was my best friend.”
“Is your best friend,” I corrected. But I agreed to go. We worked out the details; Dad offered to change the sheets in my old bedroom, but I said that I would just book a hotel room, and he said that would be fine, too. We hung up and I booked a discount airline ticket online, and I ate a frozen pizza, and I packed, and tried to sleep. The next morning as I stood by the door with my suitcase, putting my wallet, my keys and a pile of change into my pocket, I wondered, for the first time, how long my father had known.
Before Arthur’s wake, my father warned me that the man had not been fully embalmed, and would not look much like the Arthur I remembered. But the Arthur I remembered had already disappeared. Two weeks earlier I had walked into his hospice apartment, and when the nurse told him I had arrived, this man had asked, “Who?” I spent three days by his side with a tape recorder, and three more days typing transcripts of his life story, his last words. In all of his ten-thousand words, Arthur never once mentioned me. He sat in his wheelchair with an acrylic blanket over his legs, and the bag of an IV hanging from the metal stand behind him, hooked like a scythe. He talked about potato chips and beach houses and the people to whom he owed his happiness; but I had been forgotten. It was the same as forgiveness, and I dutifully handed out copies of the memoir, and kept the extra hundred in a pile in my living room, and so I have proof: he didn’t say my name.
Without the wheelchair, without the IV, Arthur’s body looked just like the man I remembered. I’d never seen him asleep, but, lying still, he looked young again, and they had painted his dead skin to look somehow tan and warm. I didn’t feel any kind of grief. I could only think to wonder if he had always had hair in his nose, and eyebrows that were so thin. I felt sorry for him, lying exposed in front of everyone.
Around his casket his loved ones hugged each other and their copies of his book. I sighed, too loudly, and felt my stomach lift into my throat, as I realize I would leave him behind me: when my own death came, in some plush down bed of the future, I would write my own memoirs and never say, “Arthur Dub.” When it was our turn, my father put his hands on my shoulders and we walked up close to the body. I looked down, and touched his forehead, and meant to say goodbye. I thought of how this was done on television: a kiss, an appropriate tear. And then I climbed into his casket and into his mouth, and pulled back his lips, and looked for the scars of not saying my name.
