Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [26]
I dated a few boys of the kind you’d expect from a girl like me with a father like that, with no real harm done, and in the middle of law school, I met Jay Johnson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team. When we went to his family in Wisconsin to announce our engagement (on our side, my mother took us both to lunch at her favorite restaurant on Northern Boulevard and my father met Jay the night before the wedding), I found a second family; the Johnson women were good, tireless cooks and all the men, including mine, could build you a willow rocking chair or a pair of handsome nightstands in just a few afternoons. And, as it happened, almost all of them were recovering alcoholics. I fell in love with them all. The Johnsons drank coffee and Diet Coke all day (even the toddlers had highballs of fresh milk with a splash of black coffee at breakfast) and at cocktail hour my mother-in-law served Ritz crackers with cheddar cheese and a giant pitcher of Virgin Marys with Tabasco and celery sticks for garnish. You could smoke a pack of cigarettes or eat an entire sheet of crumb cake if you wanted and no one said a word. Most of the Johnsons are obese chain-smokers, and if, like me, you are not, and on top of that, never drank to excess, you are admired almost every day, from every angle. I am the Jackie Kennedy of the Johnson family and it’s been a wonderful thing. We still go to Racine for the major holidays.
My brother went a different way, as casting directors like to say in Hollywood, which is where he settled and what he became. After twenty years of smoking pot every day, for his health, as he put it, Andy found himself at a dinner party in West Hollywood, seated next to a handsome tree surgeon in good, but not coke-fueled, spirits, with compatible politics, no diseases, and absolutely no interest in celebrities. According to Andy, who was calling me with updates from restaurant vestibules, men’s clothing stores, and his own bathroom, they had amazing sex fourteen days in a row, without pot or liquor, at the end of which Andy said, Please, marry me, and Michael said, You bet, and they bought a house in Silver Lake the day it went on the market. Andy said that if Michael and affordable housing weren’t signs of a Higher Power, he didn’t know what were and he quit everything cold turkey the day they moved in, dropping off a four-hundred-dollar Moroccan hookah and a bunch of hand-blown glass bongs at the men’s homeless shelter on the way. For the last eight years, he’s been doing an hour of yoga every morning, much the way the Johnsons drink coffee, bake, and whittle. Aside from being in much better shape than he used to be, Andy is the same good and dear person he always was, although Michael says, when I’m visiting, as I’m sure Jay says about me, it’s not all sweetness and light. You will have noticed that neither of us has children.
I’d been waiting for the call about my father since he turned seventy. I thought that would be a nice gift from the universe—ten or fifteen healthy years of widowhood for my mother, traveling with friends, taking courses at the Elderhostel, and winding up in her eighties on a hotel veranda sipping a tall, fruity drink with someone who looked like Mr. Rachlin. I hoped Mr. Rachlin was still alive and I hoped that my father wouldn’t dawdle in shuffling off this mortal coil. He’d had a fairly serious car accident when he was sixty-eight, which left him limping a little, and he was a heavy cigar smoker, which seemed promising. I sent him crystal ashtrays and silver cigar cutters for his birthdays, expensive humidors and a subscription to that stupid cigar magazine for Christmas, and when friends went to Cuba, I’d ask them to bring back a box for my father. I was, roughly speaking, watching the clock.
Their next-door neighbor found my name on the tiny phone list my mother kept taped to the kitchen wall. Your