Treasure Island!!!

bizarre, but I can’t figure out . . . what on earth could have . . . why is she so upset?”
    “Let me see it.”
    The letter was written in a crazy hand, cursive loping across the page like antelope across the plain; and from what unseen predator?
    “I’m baffled,” Lars said. “She’s demanding an apology, and yet I don’t know what for . . . Who do you think—I can’t believe—oh no. Do you think my sister—?”
    “Look here, Lars,” I said, guiding his distressed person gently to the sofa. “Your mother called the other day when you weren’t home, and I took the occasion to have a bit of a talk. I’ve never felt drawn to your mother, but some intimacy was long overdue. We had a bout of it.”
    When Lars sunk back against the cushions, I explained what I’d long observed as his extremely fucked-up relationship with his mother, citing among other weirdnesses his habit of calling her every single Saturday at one in the afternoon, and speaking to her for precisely an hour, always about the most superficial things, unless for some reason he was unable to get her on the phone, in which case he insisted on calling her at the same time on Sunday and plodding through his dreary conversational routine then. This mode of communication, which he stubbornly preferred to anything more natural and spontaneous, not only disrupted the easy artless flow of my weekend life, but perpetuated the false relations he’d always had with his mother, a weak-headed but controlling woman whom he’d never risked telling anything that he truly thought, preferring instead to reflect back her own shallow opinions so as to keep himself in her good graces.
    This discourse about himself and his mother Lars tried to divert by rising up hastily and insisting that I’d had no right to speak to his mother about private things.
    “Well, Lars, the only things I told your mother were things that directly concerned her; opinions of her that you, her son, have been withholding; and though you’re upset now—I see your neck is getting that patch of red it always does when you try to suppress a true emotion—once you calm down, you’ll thank me for bringing some emotional honesty into your life.”
    But Lars, who has never been a genius about feelings, accused me of calling up his mother to make trouble. This was a terrible distortion, since his mother had in fact called me.
    “‘Well,’ she says, ‘do you think Lars would like a sweater for Christmas?’ ‘What kind of sweater?’ A holiday sweater with fifteen different colors in a crisscrossing acrylic design—but that’s not the point. So I say, ‘Look, I’m neutral as Sweden on the subject of this sweater, but I do happen to know that Lars has a drawer full of acrylic sweaters you’ve given him that he never wears; and it’s not lost on him that you always give his sister more expensive gifts such as Cheese of the Month Club and electronics.’ ‘Electronics?’ she says. ‘That iPod Shuffle,’ I remind her. ‘And also, some year before that, a clock radio.’”
    Lars’s frantic mind could not absorb the details as I repeated them.
    “Listen to me. You don’t know my mother. My mother can’t bear to hear that stuff! My mother doesn’t go in for honesty! What were you thinking?”
    “Lars, you underestimate your mother. She’s not a little old lady with a bone china heart. Your family could stand to tell her the truth about all kinds of things.”
    Lars stared fixedly at a pile of index cards I’d left on the table, but it was clear he wasn’t reading them. “At least, by lying a little, we’ve always managed to get along.”
    “Lars, I know that letter of your mother’s is a good thing. The first honest exchange in your family ever and the start of authentic relations. I saw she called you a ‘spoiled brat’—and that seems harsh, but can’t you feel the air getting clearer?”
    “She called
you
a spoiled brat,” Lars said, fingering the letter.
    “Really?” I insisted on checking it.
     

CHAPTER 13
     
    I put your stuff in the basement,” Lars said. “I didn’t know if you’d be taking it to your parents’ right away.”
Yes, Reader, Lars had put all of my things into boxes and moved them into that infernal part of his apartment building known as “the cage,” a floor to ceiling metal box on the basement level, near to the laundry room, lit by a solitary bulb streaked with dead bugs. Lars didn’t store any of his own things there;