Ellen was sautéing mushrooms. “So you felt that if you could make yourself available to Jack, maybe you could have him around, in your life.”
“I thought he might, you know, need me, I don’t know, like, as a father. I thought I might be able to figure out how to do that. But it turns out that they have someone for that already. They’re all set.”
She said, “Are you devastated?”
“I don’t know what I am. I mean, first, I was all panicked that I might have to do something for them, that they might want something from me. But I came around. I kind of worked on myself, you know, tried to improve.”
Ellen didn’t stir for a second. She didn’t want to turn and look at me and make me get all self-conscious. But she was listening hard, willing me to say more.
“I went to a Point Blank concert in L.A. I offered to sell them some songs. I thought I could sort of pick up where I left off, give myself a real job.”
Now she opened her eyes wide, afraid to move, in case I clammed up again.
“Yeah. I gave them a tape.” I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. “They didn’t want the songs.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “You’re kidding? You must have felt awful. But, Tom!” Ellen almost yelled. “This is important progress! Do you know how long it’s been since you—”
“Yeah, I know. It wasn’t so great. I sweated buckets and threw up in the bathroom.”
“But still! You did it! That’s—oh, my God!—that’s—”
“Right. But what I was saying was that in the beginning I was worried that Diana and Jack would want something from me, that I would have to protect myself from them trying to get at me. But I’ve come to this other place. I puffed myself into a whole new shape so that I could be, you know, more, for them! And now I’m all deflated because they don’t want anything. Well, she did get a little excited about the money. She asked me to pay for a camp and a Playstation 2. I saw a little spark of desire when I told her about the royalties. They can have it all, if they want. I sure don’t care about it.”
Ellen went back to stirring.
I sat there a minute. “I thought I was in love with her. All this time. Then once I got close to her again, come to find out I’m not. I probably knew that before, I just forgot. I liked the fantasy better than I liked her. Isn’t the human mind just the most interesting thing?” I smirked.
“So maybe your initial motivation was Diana and Jack, but now that you’ve gotten to this other place, the reason you went there doesn’t matter so much? Now you can just keep going from where you are. This is a good thing, Tom.”
“Do you think he took a look at me and kind of shook his head and walked away?” Even before she answered, I was thinking of using the phrase “shook his head and walked away” in a song.
“Oh, no,” Ellen said. “No! Is that what you think? Kids don’t—”
“I mean, it’s not like I’m some, you know, orthodontist, or software engineer, or anything normal.”
“Tom, no one is normal.”
“Some are closer to the bulge in the old bell curve than others. I mean some people are, well, orthodontists.”
“But I hope you’re at least acknowledging that just knowing about Jack motivated you to move forward in your life. You do see that, right? And you have to at least feel a little bit grateful that, now that you know about the kid, he’s well taken care of. Aren’t you happy that you found this boy in great shape with all of his needs met?”
I hung my head even lower than it already was. “I know it’s selfish of me, but I was hoping that I was the only one who could do certain things. I was hoping that only his biological father would do for birthdays and Christmas and, I don’t know, guitar lessons. Do you know what the weirdest thing is?”
“What?”
“He doesn’t like music. He has no interest in guitar lessons.”
Ellen looked at me. “Ah,” she said.
“Yeah.” For some reason, I wanted to go then. She wasn’t even finished making my dinner, and I was ready to head for the door. I should have brought a guitar, I thought, something to hold and make noise with.
Ellen looked at the mushrooms and took the pan off the burner. “I think it’s a good thing that Diana has this man in her life who’s willing to be Jack’s father.”
All of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe for a minute, and my throat felt closed. I put my hands over my face to try to block everything out.
“Tom?” Ellen said. “Are you OK?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things wrong, and I don’t know how to fix them.”
Ellen had a metal grater in one hand and a piece of cheese in the other. There was a long pause while she thought about what to say. “I was reading a column on how to get organized. This woman wrote in to say that she had all these pictures of her family that she hadn’t put in albums, something like fifteen years’ worth of snapshots. She kept taking pictures and not putting them in the books. They were all in shopping bags in her closet. So the columnist told her not to go back to day one but to start from her most recent roll of pictures.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Yeah. So do you get it?”
“What?” I said.
“What I’m saying?”
“About pictures?”
“I’m saying, starting now, be whatever you want.”
I looked at her.
“Starting now, if you want to do something else with your music, do it. If you want to, I don’t know, move to a new place, do that. Don’t worry so much about where you’ve been, what you’ve done, what you’ve missed, all that. Think about what you’re going to do next.”
I said, “See, I just tried that. It didn’t work.”
She poured eggs into the pan. There was a big hiss. She waited a minute. The eggs started to get firm, and she sprinkled in the grated cheese and mushrooms. Some people are good at everything.