But he is, Elliot realizes. He is alone and untethered.
ELLIOT DRAGS GORBACHEV’S head from the backyard, where he left it, up to his room. The temperature has dropped and a thin layer of ice has formed across the top of the vodka that was left. Like an ice fisherman, Elliot breaks through it, then begins to drink, lying naked on his bed in his room. He wonders if Georgia had known she was living a few blocks from her son all those years. Had she moved there to watch him grow up after all? He does not remember any children his age on those long-ago Saturday trips to Manhattan and Georgia’s apartment. But why would he? They had only sat up there, listening to Georgia talk, trying to sort out the loose ends of her life.
When the bedroom door opens, the smell of fresh paint floats in.
“It’s me,” the Rickey sister says.
It is the same one as last night. She has on the same long, white nightgown, but as soon as she closes the door she takes it off and, naked, climbs onto the bed with him. He hands her Gorbachev’s head, and she gulps from it.
When she hands it back, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, “We used to have one like this.”
“You told me that already,” Elliot says.
“Where’s the rest? There’s a bottom and other dolls, you know.”
“I know. They’re next door.”
“At my house?” she says in her flat voice.
Elliot nods.
“You mean this is ours?” she says.
He nods again.
“Is that what your entire family does? They take things that aren’t theirs? What kind of people are you?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
She drinks more, taking in huge gulps. “The point here is to get totally wasted,” she says.
After he left St. Gregory’s, Elliot went to a phone booth and called information, looking for an Alexander Lewis in Manhattan on Bank Street, then just in Manhattan, then in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island. He was desperate to find Georgia’s son. He checked for a Margaret Lewis. He checked for them in Long Island and Westchester and Albany and New Jersey and Connecticut. He began to call random Informations—Denver, Seattle, Miami. But the Lewises had disappeared.
“It’s working,” the Rickey sister is saying. “I’m getting drunk this fast. This is good to know. That it’s possible to do this.”
He takes the head from her and drinks.
“My mother is so depressed,” she says. “She’s on Prozac. Can you believe that? She told us everything. How once she came home and found your mother fucking my father in their bed. In my parents’ bed, I mean. During the day. And another time, during one of their Russian Night parties, she went downstairs to get more ice, and they were doing it right on the floor. Like animals, my mother said.” Her words are starting to slur. “She said she took him back time and again because she loved him, but it was like your mother had put a spell on him. He’d apologize and promise never to do it again, but then she’d start calling, asking him to come over, to do this or that.”
Elliot tries to imagine this vixen mother she is describing. His mother wears white cotton underwear, for God’s sake. She wears chinos. How sexy is that?
The Rickey sister is looming over him now, her face pasty and drunk looking, sloppy. “He told my mother, ‘She’s in my blood. I’m sorry.’ Then my parents went to Russia to make amends. My mother is a forgiving person—”
“A saint,” Elliot says.
“Yes. That’s right. A saint. They went to Russia and came back in love and your mother went nuts. She took a key and scratched my mother’s car. Her Saab. Ran a key along one whole side.”
“My mother?” Elliot says.
“She freaked out. She called him all night sometimes. She threatened to kill herself if he didn’t come over. And he resisted.”
Elliot tries to imagine this. All the while he was at Brown, was this going on? As he wandered along Thayer Street at night, half stoned, peering into the weird fluorescent lights of the Gap, was his mother doing these things? Or even last summer, while he worked his ridiculous jobs and wasted time?
“And then one night my mother wakes up. It’s hot. Summer. And my father isn’t in bed. She thinks maybe he’s sick. The heat gets to him, you know? So she starts looking for him. She looks around the whole house, and he’s not there and she’s worried. Then from somewhere outside she hears this sound, this kind of screaming, and she thinks it’s two cats fucking on the lawn but then she hears my father’s name, and she steps outside and follows the sounds right to your yard. They’re coming from your whore mother’s bedroom and that’s where my father is and that’s when she got knocked up. Okay? Are you happy?”