THROUGH THE WRONG SIDE of the peephole I saw a light come on. A shadow approached, unbolted locks, then the door opened and he stood in the doorway, in his pajamas and robe, squinting into the light.
“Julian?”
“Dad.”
It was past midnight. A pillow crease marked one side of his face. His hair stood up like the wind-torn crest of a wave. He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Has something happened? Are you all right?”
The worry in his voice and the weak, questioning touch of his hand caused a bubble of sadness to rise up in my chest; my whole body tensed with the effort not to give in to it. My father misunderstood this, or perhaps not, because he quickly pulled back his hand, as though afraid he’d offended me.
I told him that nothing had happened.
He nodded. Then, looking down, he noticed my suitcase and the concern began to lift from his face. “You’ve come for a visit?”
“If it’s all right.”
“You know it is. When was it ever not all right?”
“I caught the late train. I should have called first.”
He studied me, the corners of his pale eyes starting to bunch again with worry. “You’re really all right?”
Secretly he wanted an answer that would explain things, but not too much.
“I’m just worn out, Dad.”
After a moment he nodded.
I followed him into the apartment. Smells of old rugs, wood, potted plants, bric-a-brac. Years of Kraft mac and cheese, Stouffer’s frozen, Jell-O pudding cups, canned soups. Piles of papers, the faded useless manuscripts of old college textbooks he’d edited, their versions long since revised, their figures and theories and declarations no longer sound, and yet here preserved and collected, offered their own museum. Strata of anxiety, ninety-nine percent of it untold, closeted, held mute, stoically and for years, all the years of sitting by himself, married and divorced, eons of woolgathering. And books, not to be forgotten, easily over a thousand volumes, fiction in the living room, biography in the master, philosophy and psychoanalysis in the little study at the end of the hall that once had been my bedroom, books like paving stones to a quiet man’s fortress.
Through all these essences, remembered and literal, I followed my father, his slippers scuffing the worn floorboards, the belt of his robe dragging.
We came to his study, my old room. He switched on the light. “I would have cleaned up if I’d known you were coming. But it’s been … well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it.”
“Yes.” It had been ten months since my last visit.
I set down my suitcase. The room looked almost as it had always looked. An old corduroy sleeper sofa where, during my teens, my bed had rested; his desk, now, where my desk had stood. Otherwise the same. Change had never been his friend. He was like a man who, try as he might, could not get a weather report—not on TV, not in the papers, not in any almanac—and so regarded the ever-shifting sky with incredulity and suspicion.
“That old sofa,” he said, shaking his head.
“Do you still have the number for that chiropractor?”
He laughed softly, touching my shoulder, shyly glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. We stood looking at the room. The silence was familiar to him, seemed to remind him of something. He took back his hand and asked, “Have you eaten?”
“No,” I answered.
We went into the kitchen. This too was unchanged. When she’d gone to Houston, my mother had taken with her just her most personal belongings, her essential clothes and papers. As if there had been no joint enterprise here, no real union, ever. As if, for all those years, we’d been merely passengers in a lifeboat, lumped together by circumstance and the brute laws of survival, and then one day we’d landed, and she had climbed onto that new shore by herself and never looked back.
My father stood staring into the refrigerator, cold white light flooding out around him: no matter how long he stood there, we both knew, the kitchen would always be hers.
“Scrambled eggs all right?”
“Sure, Dad, but let me do it.”
“No, no. You must be tired.”
I removed the cushions and unfolded the sofa. I made the bed with the sheets my father had given me, and got undressed, and lay down in the dark.
A long night. The room airless, with just one small window that looked out onto an air shaft. My back ached from the steel crossbar that ran under the two-inch-thick mattress, and my mind would not let me go. Every time my thoughts began to return—to the day’s events; to Claire and Davis standing together in that room and her turning her back on me; to the mistakes I had made and kept making despite my overwhelming desire not to; to the possibility, so awful to contemplate that it repeatedly forced my eyes open in the darkness, that she would never love me as I loved her—every time these thoughts came near, I tried to divert them. But I could not. There are some thoughts that can be manipulated in this way, ideas which seem to come from outside the self like choices waiting to be made. But there are other kinds too. Intuitions which, like water mysteriously seeping from the ground during a drought, are born so deep within the self that their source, finally, is beyond reckoning.
I stayed with my father all that summer. A placid time, still and flat, despite the city’s racing pulse. The city hardly touched us. It was a time of known silences and familiar oblique glances—an interlude of implicit understanding to the extent that certain long-standing arrangements between us were maintained without argument, like an anachronistic treaty:
It was not to be assumed by my sudden reappearance that there had been any fundamental change in my thinking with regard to family.
Whatever general lassitude and rudderless deportment he observed in me at present was not to be interpreted or commented upon.
No more than half of all the movies we saw could be subtitled.
Oh, we were a pair, the two of us. He was sixty-three and prematurely retired and probably lonely and his days were his own. I was twenty-seven and heartsick and my days too were my own, utterly free, though I doubted very much if I could have given them away had I tried.
And so that summer passed.