Nate had left Jim’s office-den for last in his increasingly inspired mission to clean up, clear out, organize, and personalize every room in the house. The real renovation work would have to wait, but this was a great start and helped Nate prioritize the swelling list of indoor projects he would eventually have to attack. (He realized the kitchen would take a lot more than new paint and wood stain.) Yet he remained committed to preserving what mattered to his father. That mainly involved the spare room that Jim disappeared to most nights of Nate’s tween and teen years to read, think, and prepare for his next day’s classes while Nate holed away in his own room doing homework, watching TV, playing video games, or hanging out with the occasional friend.
Nate rarely used those times to do what Jim hoped his son would: read a book. A real book—a novel, something enlightening, transporting, motivating, and not just something foisted upon him by a teacher following a perfunctory syllabus. “And no,” Jim would remind Nate, “comic books, graphic novels, and the Internet do not count as literature.”
Then there was the newspaper. Jim had the L.A. Times delivered every day until he died. (Nate still hadn’t canceled the subscription; didn’t yet have the heart.) Jim somehow managed to read the paper every day, even if it only meant scanning the bigger national stories and editorials and a sweep through the Calendar section. He would also never read it online; like his love of physical books, he was a purist about the press. Nate’s entire contact with the newspaper growing up was bringing it in off the front porch—or wherever the delivery guy’s haphazard aim landed it that morning—and depositing it on his father’s desk. Unlike with books, Jim never even tried to persuade his boy to read the newspaper. He knew it was a generational thing—a rapidly vanishing one at that—and a lost cause. Still, Nate would randomly zip through the sports section to see what the Dodgers or the Clippers were up to. And for a while, during his middle school days, he’d sneak a look at the horoscopes to maybe learn something—anything—about a girl he was liking, get a leg up so to speak. He eventually realized those forecasts were confusing and interchangeable and the girl wasn’t going to like him anyway.
So it was a shock to Jim, as well as to Nate, when, in his second year at Cal State LA, he decided to study to become a teacher. “Since when did you want to get into education?” Jim asked Nate when he heard the news.
“I thought you’d be happy,” Nate answered.
“I want you to be happy,” his father said in response.
Nate took that to heart and became something else.
As for books, the adult Nate did start to read them, took lots of recommendations from Jim, liked some, struggled with others, found his type, then found some more he liked until he was no longer wary or intimidated about what might lie between any two hard or softbound covers. Now that made his father happy. Nate would never read another book again without thinking of his dad and wanting to talk with him about it after.
When Nate finally did ensconce himself in the office-den one night to assess how to maintain the place, he found it as emotionally daunting a task as he expected, which was why he’d waited so long to deal with it. (Before that evening, every time Nate had to go in there, he made a bee-line for what he needed and acted as if he had no peripheral vision.) He was in the room until after midnight doing the memory lane thing, reliving, reappraising, and revisiting everything about the cozy space.
A gallery of framed photos of Nate and Jim throughout the years filled an entire wall, as did his dad’s diplomas, teaching certificates, and other honors (Nate had forgotten about the Distinguished Faculty Award Occidental gave him five years ago). There was an ancient, overstuffed couch covered in a faded floral print fabric that couldn’t have been less Jim’s style if he’d bought it blindfolded, which maybe he had. It was always less comfortable than it looked—still, his father napped on the couch every Saturday and Sunday after lunch and sometimes between classes. He wouldn’t get rid of it for all the coffee in Brazil, not that anyone had offered. Nate sat on it, for the first time in ages, and reconfirmed its scratchy, springy lumpiness, yet could swear he got a faint whiff of Jim’s aftershave off one of the flattened back pillows. And just when Nate had decided to dump it.
There was a solid oak desk with two file drawers that was not as old as the couch but Nate couldn’t remember a time there without it. It was neater than it should have been but only because Jim, while he still had the strength, had emptied and organized much of it so his son wouldn’t have to. He’d handed Nate all his important papers so they wouldn’t disappear, but Nate had put them back in the desk drawer—so they wouldn’t disappear.
And of course, there were the books, stacked around the room on bookcases of various heights and widths as well as on shelves in the office’s narrow walk-in closet that also held a collection of Jim’s clothes Nate swore went as far back as college.
He pulled a leather-bound volume off a shelf: The Great Gatsby. Of course. It stood next to a quartet of other Fitzgerald works, each one also nestled between beautifully etched red leather covers. They were far from collector’s items; Jim had bought the set about ten years ago in a used bookstore they’d stumbled into on a road trip to Carmel. Jim always liked the richness of those deep red covers: “Worthy of Fitzgerald,” he said when he first gave them a place of honor on that very same shelf. (Jim had about six other copies of Gatsby strewn around the bookcases—from paperbacks to hardcovers to even a Dutch translation because why not?)
Flipping through the volume in his hands, Nate thought back on his dad’s lecture that day about Nick Carraway and quickly slipped the slim book back in its place before he got weepy. Fuck you, Nick Carraway! Nate took a deep breath and went back to scanning the shelves that were filled with so many other familiar titles and authors—John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, and, of course, Joan Didion—who had become like veritable family members to Jim over all these years. There were also obscure works by obscure writers (not that Nate was the best judge of who was who) and a surprising number of “beach read”-type books—crime novels and thrillers and celebrity memoirs —that Jim certainly never taught but still knew how to enjoy.
Nate then picked up the one framed photo Jim had kept out on a shelf of himself and Nate’s mom, Eileen, taken sometime before they got married. They were posed in front of the Tower Theatre in the arts district of Fresno, the city in which they both were born and still lived at the time, about to go into a classical concert. They were each in their late twenties; Eileen was about six months younger than Jim. He was teaching at Fresno High, she was working as a dental assistant, and they were living together in a small house not far from where the photo was shot. She was on the tall side—almost as tall as Jim—and what one might call willowy, with long, medium-brown hair, light eyes, and, Nate always thought, a kind of faraway smile. Jim said she was an amazing cook, read as voraciously as he did (though they agreed on few books), and never forgot a face or a name. She died bringing Nate into the world.
He never saw her grave; like Jim, Eileen was cremated, her remains pitched into the ocean at Big Sur, where she and Jim had honeymooned. Nate spent much of his life missing someone he never met and knew only what his father had told him about her, which was less and less as the years went on. Jim apparently took Eileen’s loss quite badly, though never—ever—equated Nate’s existence to her demise. Once his son was born, Jim had a job to do and he threw himself into it fully, moving past the pain and regret, and loving Nate enough for two.
Nate scanned the room and decided he would thin out the bookshelves and wall photos, replace the fraying area rug, hang the Miró poster he’d brought over from his apartment, and clear out a corner for one of his tall indoor plants; the fiddle leaf fig would look great and the light was right. Neaten it all up and keep it the relaxed, unfussy spot it always was. Oh, and be sure to spend a lot of time in there.