6

Ted’s light was on, the top of his gray head just visible in his basement. I hesitated outside my own house, then trotted across the street. I knocked on his basement door, and winced. I withdrew my hand and held it close to me.

“Peter! How are you? Come in, I’m just setting up something new.”

“What happened to the village?”

“I destroyed it. Like a god, I took it down. I’m making mountains now.” He held up a box of wallpaper paste. “I’m getting bridges in.”

“Where are the trains?”

“They’re put away, but they’ll come back. This whole table will be an Alpine village, circa 1900. I went to the Alps once, you know.”

The smell of wallpaper paste was bland but overpowering. The stir-stick made a solid, sticky noise in a bucket of it. “I mix newspaper with this stuff, and lay it over mountains made of chicken wire.”

“I can’t believe you took down your village. It was so pretty.”

“Nothing. Wait’ll you see this. I’m buying new trains, too. Hundreds of dollars. Made in Austria. Precision and detail you wouldn’t believe.”

“Will there be a town?”

“A village. Twenty or thirty people. And this.” He picked up a small mirror from the clutter of his worktable. “Do you know what this is?”

“What is it?” I said, to please him.

“A pond for ice skaters. I think of everything.”

I was sorry to not be able to see his trains run their circuits around the table. There had always been something comforting about watching the trains arrive again and again, with a miniature rumble past the man with the dog, and the boy selling the newspaper, and the gardener with his shovel, none of them moving. Only the train moved, an illogical event in all that stillness, but a sight that always comforted. But I was excited that something new was coming: mountains. An iced pond. And bridges across valleys that did not yet exist.

Ted fumbled at his workbench and found a small black radio with his paste-sticky hand, working the dial with difficulty. A Warriors game sputtered. He adjusted the dial and it came in clearly. The score was tied in the first quarter.

“I’ll even have an elk. See him?”

I nudged a small figure on the table beside me. It looked very much unlike a real elk, but I knew that realism was not the point. I wasn’t sure what the point was, but I understood it. “When will you be done?”

“Months from now. What’s the sense of hurrying? The longer I take, the more satisfying it is. When you’re finished, you really don’t have anything to do but start all over again.”

“It takes so much patience.”

“No, it doesn’t. It takes steady, quiet impatience. The kind that builds real villages. Real mountains, too, I suppose.”

There was a figure leaning against the hood of a car as I crossed the street. I hesitated, power emptying from my body. I kept moving, even though his car was parked directly in my path and there was no way I could reach my doorstep without walking right past him. The figure straightened as I approached and, although I could not see his face in the darkness, I could tell he was looking very closely at me, studying me, taking me in as if he wanted to know everything there was to know about me. I wanted to run; the only thing I could think about was running, and yet I knew if I ran, it would be all over, that the only thing to do was to act calm and behave like nothing in the whole world was wrong.

“Peter?”

I took a step.

“It is you,” he said.

I moved to where the streetlight fell across his face.

“You’ve grown so much. And look at those shoulders.”

“I’m still not very tall,” I managed.

“No, but I’m not either. Not short. But not tall. Just right. Here. Get in the car.”

“I—”

“She knows.”

“I’m surprised to see you.”

“Get in the car. Good Lord, we can’t stand around in the street like a couple of complete strangers. Come on. Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go. What would you like? Steak? I feel like a big steak.”

“Nice car,” I said, shutting the door.

“Rented.” He had trouble finding the key slot. “Didn’t your mother tell you I was coming?”

“No. She never mentioned it.”

He looked into me for a moment, not at me but into me. “I’m not surprised,” he said.

My father drove fast, and sloppily, unfamiliar with the car, and like he was impatient with other cars for existing, like he wanted a bare world, all flat, where he and I could barrel along and talk without having to notice anyone else.

“Where’s a good steak house? Here?”

He had been driving so fast I was confused. “I don’t know.”

“We’ll stop here. What difference does it make? I’m hungry. How about you? You must be hungry. Good Lord. A growing boy. A junior.” He said “junior” as if to reassure me that he knew what grade I was in and everything. I fumbled awkwardly with the door handle. “Come on, let’s go eat,” he said outside the car. “I’m starving.”

I couldn’t open my side of the car, so I crawled across the front seat and got out on the driver’s side. My father hurried ahead, and I followed him, wondering if the car would be stolen. “I forgot to lock the car,” I said at last.

“Forget it.”

“There are thieves all over this town.”

“Forget it. They steal the car, we’ll call the place I rented it from.”

We entered the restaurant. It was warm inside, and the lights were comfortably dim. My father strode across the room and chose a booth with large, plastic-upholstered seats. I slid into mine. My father opened a menu with a flick of his wrist. I had not seen him in years, and I was fascinated to look at him, although I could not simply sit and stare at him like he was a television. I looked sideways at him, and every time he looked down, or looked away, I looked at him carefully to see what he looked like, and to see how much he had changed. He was not as blond as I am, and not as muscular, and his hair had receded above his temples.

He looked handsome, in a thin, beat-up way, but he did not have a face that was easy to look at. He was quick, and his eyes went here and there, and he made a person feel that he was friendly, but in a hurry. He also made a person feel that he could get very angry in about two seconds.

“Slow service,” he said.

I nodded.

“Grown-up, practically.”

I made the same blank expression I make every time an older person states the obvious.

“What do you want? Here’s a menu. Take your pick. I feel like a steak.”

We ordered New York steaks, both rare. As soon as the waitress, who had hair piled up nearly to the ceiling, had tucked her pencil into her bib and minced away, my father slid his water glass slightly away from him and said, “I’m here to talk about something fairly serious.”

I toyed with a fork and put it down.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about. And it’s something your mother has been thinking about.”

I waited.

“I might as well plow right ahead, right?”

I tried to say “right.”

“How would you like to come live with me?”

I clasped my hands together to keep them from trembling, but I couldn’t control them.

“I know this is sudden, but the situation is this. Now, you don’t have to say yea or nay right now, but the situation is this: you and your mother don’t get along. Correct?”

“We get along okay.”

“You have trouble getting along with her—which I can understand perfectly well—and like anyone your age, you could use a change of scenery.”

“I get along with her. There’s no problem.”

“She says there’s been a problem.”

I felt betrayed. I did not look at my father. I felt a tine on the fork like I was checking it for sharpness, a field tester the fork companies send out to check up on the quality of their products. “Sometimes we have arguments,” I said finally.

“Of course you do. Lord, I had arguments with her, too. It’s not a big deal.”

“But we get along okay, basically.”

“She says you stay out till all hours and come back like you’ve been drinking.”

“That’s not true. She just wants to get rid of me so she can carry on with her Ivy League boyfriends. She has them all wowed, and then they drop by and there I am, all imperfect and abnormal. It embarrasses her and makes her think of some way she can get rid of me and start all over.”

His face tightened like a hard fist, and I knew he didn’t like to hear me talking about my mother that way, even if he didn’t like her himself. He relaxed, though, and looked down in a way that made me stop talking. He nodded. “Sure. What you say is probably true. But there’s more to it than that.”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling sullen, and wanting to be somewhere else, away from adults with their wooden, creaking plans for other people’s lives, and yet, at the same time, not wanting to feel sullen, wanting to appreciate my father and enjoy his company, and also wanting him to think that I was a mature, sophisticated person, not some foul-tempered delinquent.

“She says you threw a jar of mustard at her.”

My mouth hung open all by itself.

“That’s what she says,” he added, looking up at me like he was trying to read my mind.

“A jar of mustard.”

“She says you yell at her, and that she has no control over you, and that she is afraid of you.”

“A jar of mustard,” was all I could say.

“She says your grades stink.”

“That’s not true,” I blurted, and then I sank back. I didn’t want to lie right then, and I clasped my hands like I was getting ready to pray. “Actually, my grades haven’t been all that good.” Excellent excuses bobbed into my mind: idiot teachers, thumb-worn books, doodled and defaced by decades of bored juniors, dull, itching, pimple-picking fellow students. But I didn’t want my father to see me making excuses, either, so I moved the saltshaker a little closer to me and didn’t say anything.

“So, to make a long story short, there are problems. Right?”

Neither of us said anything. He wanted me to agree with him, but I felt like my mother had complained about me to a higher power, and I hated her for it. I stared through my reflection in the window and watched the headlights and taillights glide by outside. They look comforting, cars do, at night when a person looks out at them and watches them go by, silent and pretty, like something that isn’t really there, an illusion of other people living simple, quiet lives.

“The situation is that you don’t have to decide anything right now.”

“It wasn’t a jar of mustard.”

He didn’t say anything.

“It was not a jar of mustard. You believe anything she tells you, don’t you.” I suddenly had tears, and I couldn’t talk, and I felt humiliated that my father was seeing me with tears on my face. I gripped myself hard.

“Tell me what happened.” His voice was soft for the first time, and I hated him for caring.

“It wasn’t a jar. You picture one of those fat jars made of glass hurtling through the air exploding against the wall, almost killing my mother.”

He watched me.

“Isn’t that what you picture?”

He looked thoughtful for a second. “Something like that.”

“That’s not what it was. It was a plastic squeeze tube. One of those cylinders with a nozzle that you stand on a table when people eat hot dogs.”

“You threw it at her.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t have hurt her anyway, and I missed. She got one little speck of mustard on her eyebrow. Just one. That’s all. She said I was a homosexual. Just dropped it out. It was the end of a long argument about her not having a job. I said she could get one if she really wanted one.”

My father held up a hand like he didn’t really want to hear the entire argument verbatim. He rubbed his temple with his finger. He held out his fingers like they were needed to help the words get to me. “You give me mixed messages. You get along, you don’t get along. You do well at school, you don’t do well. And do you know what? I don’t care.”

I waited.

“I don’t care,” he continued, “because all I am looking for is a good excuse to have you come live with me. I want you around. I want you to be a part of my life. You’re almost a man. I want to see more of you.”

The words made his face change color, a pale, lunar white with specks of pink, and I saw that he cared for me very deeply. I resented his caring, but I also felt pleased that he was paying so much attention to me. I also realized that he was serious. He wanted me to live with him.

“I’m doing pretty well. I design safety devices for airplanes. Ejection seats, things like that. I have a nice house in Newport Beach. You can walk to the ocean. It’s not a ratty city like this hellhole.”

I opened my mouth to say that Oakland wasn’t such a bad city, but I shut it again.

“You would like it there. I wish I’d grown up there instead of that stupid apartment off Fruitvale. I have some money, Peter. Not tons of it, but enough so that, for the first time in my life, I can really help you. If you get your schoolwork in order, you can go to college. I can afford any school you want. I feel like I owe it to you.”

“I’ll be a senior.”

“I know. You don’t want to leave and take up another life right now. I appreciate that.”

I nodded dumbly. He wasn’t understanding what I was thinking, though. I wasn’t really thinking anything. I was numb. His caring for me seemed like such a waste on his part. I felt sorry for him.

“The situation is this: I want you to fly down and visit me in a couple of weeks. Just walk around, see what the town looks like, just spend a weekend doing not much of anything.”

I looked at my swollen, goofy reflection in the spoon.

“I’ll send you a ticket. What do you think? Can’t hurt to pay a visit, can it?”

The steaks came after a while, my father looking over his shoulder to see why things were taking so long, talking about airplanes and Chinese tungsten and drumming his fingers on the table like the world would be a lot better if he could run it and get things done on time.

When I put my hand on the door knob, my hand was trembling, and so cold the brass knob felt warm. I let the door close behind me softly, and I let the darkness of the stairs take me in like I was made of sugar and I was slowly dissolving.

“Did you have a nice time?”

I felt the banister. “It was all right.”

My mother leaned in the doorway of her bedroom. The light was behind her; I could not see her face. “Nice of him to come see you,” she said, sarcastically but in a voice so smooth you would have to know her to understand what she meant. “He’s a success now. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?”

“He’s not so successful. His clothes are too big for him.”

“So are you. He’s wasting his time with you. You ought to be put to sleep.”

“Thanks.”

She sighed, and it was as though all the misery of all the times, everywhere, stood there in the doorway wearing a blue bathrobe. “Oh, Peter. You know I don’t mean that. You’re just so much trouble, that’s all. And I worry about you.”

“You lied to him.”

“Oh?”

“You told him I tried to kill you.”

“What?”

“With a jar of mustard.”

She laughed.

I locked my bedroom door, and sat on my bed. I wished Lani was there to talk to, but all I had was half a bottle of Cream Sherry, really terrible, sweet-sick brake fluid.

I could, I knew, kill myself. This was a very real thought. It seemed like a logical alternate route. But as long as Mead’s parents thought Mead was alive, it was almost like having Mead alive and well, happy somewhere.

I practiced his voice. “Hello, Mother …”

And I shivered. I felt like Mead. I felt clever, and quick.

I wept, calling Mead’s name.