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Coal Avenue
Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 3, 2012
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When his father called, on a hot summer morning, Lamar was sitting on the living room floor, his back against the sofa, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto, and reading, again, from his wife’s journal.
Dust motes swam in a shaft of sunlight and tears streamed down his face, one dripping onto the page, smudging Janis’ tight handwriting.
He did not want to talk with anyone, least of all his father.
It had been a year since Lamar’s mother and his wife had died, within four months of each other, and he was stunned by how immobilized he continued to be—every day a climb through blackberry thickets with open sores.
He was grateful for his therapy practice and his uncanny ability to care about other people’s problems when his own were so daunting. It was a blessing to be good at something. He packed his schedule as tight as he could, and volunteered at the local mental health clinic. The nights and weekends challenged him the most.
But Lamar’s demons were nowhere near as ferocious as Janis’ had been. Her journal entries were repetitive, her writing overwrought, but the rawness of her emotions was powerful. He had read some passages five or six times. She had been in so much misery.
She used to say he didn’t understand how deep and debilitating her depression was.
She was right. He didn’t. Couldn’t.
He would never forgive himself for what he did to Janis.
The phone would not stop ringing. He answered it by mistake. Not used to his new phone.
“It’s your father.”
“Hi Dad, let me turn down the music.”
He and his father had been talking more since they both lost their wives.
“I called to see how you’re doing,” his father said.
“One foot in front of the other,” said Lamar.
“It’s going to take time to get over this.”
“Yeah,” he said, under his breath.
“You don’t feel like talking.”
“Not so much.”
“Look, we’re widowers together,” he said. “We’re both alone, and I’d like it if we kept in touch more.”
“Andrea says you’re not so alone,” Lamar said.
“Yes, I do have the good fortune of being surrounded, and I’m only exaggerating a bit, by women interested in me. I’m in a pickle actually.”
“What do you mean?”
That was all the encouragement he needed to regale Lamar with the tale of how Celeste’s best friend Brigid had moved quickly to “claim” him, but he had taken up with Fae, a younger African American nurse he had met when Celeste was undergoing treatment.
“Your mother’s friends are outraged. Not because Fae is black, they are quick to assert, not even because she’s younger, though I’m certain that has a lot to do with it. But apparently, there was this expectation that someone in your mother’s circle would get first dibs on me. Who knew?
“It’s not that I’m such a hot ticket,” he added. “There just aren’t a lot of tickets to be had.”
His father’s modesty came from his breeding, his DNA. But he was more than a bit disingenuous. He was only seventy-eight. There were plenty of men his age still kicking.
He was a thoughtful man, active physically and socially, and more gregarious than when he had been younger. He even had more hair than Lamar. It was no surprise Celeste and her friends were after him.
“So anyway,” Robert continued, “I got greedy.”
“What do you mean, greedy?” He knew his father wanted him to ask.
“I was a faithful husband to your mother for fifty-five years,” Robert said, “despite some rough patches and temptations. I know how to keep promises. But I have not made any promises, to anyone. That hasn’t stopped Fae, or Brigid, from expecting me to keep them.”
Lamar didn’t say anything, just hummed, “mm-hm.” He was standing now, pacing across his living room. He had engaged in plenty of frank discussions about sex with his clients, and, as a client, with his own therapists. He’d talked sex with friends and lovers, sometimes explicitly. Never with his father.
“Brigid has been relentless,” his father said, “and it’s not like I don’t care for her. It’s just that I thought I might explore the world before settling down.”
Lamar went back to packing Janis’ clothes into boxes for the St. Vincent de Paul store on Menaul. He folded a sweater that smelled of mothballs and detergent.
“Andy says this is too soon,” his father said. “That I haven’t allowed myself to fully grieve. It’s been over a year.”
Lamar folded a fleece bathrobe with one hand and placed it in an empty box. Lamar had called his sister Andy when they were little, but now their father was the only one she allowed to call her that.
“I’ll spare you the gory details,” Robert said, “but let’s just say I’ve become intimate with each of them, separately, of course, and I have been discreet, but they have not.”
Lamar tried to not listen.
The problem, his father said, was that Brigid was too dry, even with lubricant. “We wanted to have sex, but it was painful for her, and I didn’t want to hurt her, and then she started talking with her friends about the best lubrication.”
“Dad!”
“Well, you asked.”
“No. I didn’t.”
Lamar and his father could never have talked this way if they were in the same room. Waist deep in his own depression and self-loathing, and not having any sex or anticipating any, Lamar could barely stay on the line.
And yet, part of him cheered.
Underneath his pain, he was still capable of rational thought, and the conversation with his father reminded him of what he had lost sight of. That his life was far from over.
If his father, going on eighty, could get himself into trouble, so could he.