18

The next afternoon, my father let me pick out a tie. An ugly one with poodles on it draped across my hand. I asked, “How about this one?”

“Oh, Christ. Someone at work gave me that as a joke. Pick out a normal tie. How about this one?”

I took an Ivy League tie, a wool tie of the sort a pipe-smoker might wear if he were an extreme conservative. My father tied it for me, muttering about how difficult it was to knot a tie on someone else. “What difference does it make?” I said. “I won’t wear one.”

He snapped the knot tight like he wished I would strangle on it, but as he did so, I studied his face up close, the lines of determination around his eyes, the pores in his nose that seemed put there to show how his skin worked, that he breathed through these little holes the way an orange breathed through its skin.

I had worn a tie only once or twice before in my life, and I craned my neck around trying to be comfortable. “She wants us to live together as a family,” my father was saying, “because she knows how important you are to me. She wants me to be happy.”

“Does she want me to be happy?” I said, sitting on his bed.

“I suppose so,” he said, combing his hair. “She doesn’t know you. Except what I’ve told her.”

“Which means she’ll be packing a gun.”

“Let’s go.”

“Of course, there’s no way it will work. My presence would poison your marriage. You might as well start out a marriage with a kangaroo in the house. A kangaroo would be a much better bet than I would.”

He ignored me. He drove quickly through streets that were bleached, like the sun was too much for them and all the color was long ago blasted away. The houses were all stucco, cheap stucco that had lost its color, too, a jumble of houses, parking meters grimy with salt air, and the long, thin stalks of palm trees. People dressed like poolside winos: bare feet, tight swimsuits, faded sweatshirts. Only their dark glasses looked expensive, and their cars, if I saw a person getting out of one.

My father was driving faster, now, leaning on his horn from time to time, chewing gum, the jaw muscle bunching in rhythm. He swung the car crazily to avoid an old lady in a straw hat that hung shadows of straw fringe over her face so that she looked like an elderly monster. My father drove like we were terribly late, almost so late we might as well not even bother going. The car lurched around a Cadillac convertible making a left turn, and my father floored the accelerator, forcing his car to make a raspy roar as it left behind a restaurant with a painting of a swordfish, and a bay forested with naked masts.

G forces pressed me back into my seat as my father careened up a hill, and I lurched into my seat belt as we whistled to a stop before a green duplex. “Here we are,” my father said.

I stepped out of the car like the survivor of a crash. The front yard was covered with a layer of snow-white gravel, and a spiky cactus grew out of the only exposed patch of dirt. The air, now that we were away from the ocean, had a flat, old-beer smell to it that made me not want to breathe.

My father stepped up to the front door, looking gawky and too old to be anyone’s boyfriend. I did not want to be visible; I willed myself into the shape and size of a lizard and crept along the sidewalk to the gutter, where a fingerwide stream of water pulsed. It didn’t work. My body remained human. My muscles bunched with tension as my father glanced around to see me standing there, wearing the semblance of his own face. He looked away again. I took my hands out of my pockets and craned my neck, appalled that humanity could have devised an article of clothing as uncomfortable and useless as the necktie.

She looked so much like my father I was disturbed. It was like he had searched the entire world and found someone who looked exactly like he would look if he changed his sex. She did not look like his sister so much as she looked like his twin. And yet she was pretty, in a way, a softer version of his gaunt quickness. She was slower-moving, and had a smile that made me look down at the brown rug. I murmured that I was happy to meet her, too. She said that I should call her Linda.

“Let’s have a drink before we go out, shall we?”

“Reservations at seven,” said my father.

“Oh, why then we have a few minutes. What would you like, Peter?”

I wanted a tall bourbon, but modesty stiffened my tongue and made my countenance that of a very badly made wax dummy.

“A Coke?” she suggested.

“That would be fine,” I said.

My father asked for a Bloody Mary, and joined Linda in the kitchen for some sotto voce love chatter, and when they both emerged I understood that she had said that I was so charming, and so handsome. I saw that my father was proud of me, and proud of Linda, and saw his future ahead of him, ahead of all of us, a fertile, happy country.

Although I wanted to tell him about Mead the way a drowning man wants to kick his way out of the trunk at the bottom of a river.