2 The Razor

BY MY OWN ESTIMATION I HAD BEEN A DECENT FATHER, IN every way a better father than my own, but the fact was that over the summer I had suffered one small failure of composure with my son.

It had happened in the attic.

Every year, I had given Elliot the option of going to camp, and every year, to my quiet gratification, he had chosen to pass the long hot months with me, improving something in our home. When he was younger, I’d picked the projects myself and kept them small—painting the exterior of the garage; installing a new washer and dryer in the basement—but as he got older, I tried to win another year of his company by inviting his suggestions. When he was thirteen, he drew a sketch of the tables and cabinets that became a custom workshop in the basement. The following summer he brought home a book from the library on installing central air-conditioning. And in April of that year, he led me up the narrow stairwell to my unfinished attic.

It had started well enough. I am a careful man—to a fault, I see now—and although by the standards of the average boy, Elliot had always been hyper-responsible, he had a boy’s overconfidence in his own abilities and ignorance of the dangers of the world, and sometimes this made him hasty. I’d done an excellent job, I think, over the years, of hiding my judgment of this. When, after several respectful hints from me about tensile strength, he’d whittled a good eighty-five percent off the body of his car for the Pinewood Derby, I suppressed my criticism and complimented him on the boldness of his experiment. When in an eight-year-old’s show of finesse he had insisted on carrying all three of our plates from the dinner table at once, I crouched to help him clean up the broken pieces and told him gently that more balance would come with practice and time.

But that year it had been harder. He was an adolescent, and maybe it is not so strange that some of his behavior had begun to bother me. Little things. Although I bought him a thermal cup with a flip top, he opened can after can of 7-Up and left them open and sweating on the plywood subfloor next to absorbent bats of insulation. Each day at the slightest rise in temperature, he took off his shirt and walked around the attic bare-chested, heedless of the raw boards certain to scrape his lean torso as we worked. When he was younger, he had listened to popular rock with Liz, upbeat songs that made her sashay across the kitchen, but now he set a boom box at the top of the stairs and played something so malevolent and percussive it was a menace to concentration.

To my small credit, I recognized these irritations as petty, and I knew better than to give them voice. A teenage boy is hungry for approval, especially from his father, and in the forced ease of these liberties, I thought I recognized a clumsy stab at the air of authority that flows from the unstudied habits of a man. As far as the carpentry went, he did a decent job, but not always with the method I would have chosen. He hammered in a stylized, self-conscious way that resulted in a lot of bent nails, but they were only nails, and I never corrected his form. I let him work for hours each day without my supervision, and even in cases where the cost of repairing an error would have been significant, in time and effort as well as money, I had done no more to assist him than review his progress when I got home from work. The plan was working well, and I’d felt certain he would leave the summer burnished by success and paternal praise, until in July he’d floated the idea of adding a bathroom.

I should pause here and explain that all of the pipes in my house are copper. Copper pipe is lightweight, strong, and more resistant to corrosion and scale than other metals, but it’s also the case that it’s difficult to install correctly. Before soldering, a substance called flux should be applied to remove surface oxide, but too much flux can cause corrosion and too little will create gaps in the integrity of the connection. Overheating will do the same. And then there is the danger. The flame on a propane torch is soundless, and, in light good enough to do the work, it’s invisible, too. If you char the wood on rough framing even slightly and don’t wash it down with water, the embers can linger for hours inside the wood and come to blaze in a breeze while you’re taking a break. After seeing my son’s pride at two months of largely solitary work on carpentry, I didn’t want to undermine his sense of competence with a month of micromanagement on a plumbing project.

For this reason, perhaps I can be forgiven for the small deception my misguided instincts supplied when he suggested the bathroom addition. I said, “Great idea. We can plumb it with plastic pipe.”

I still think, despite all that happened, that this was a good decision. He got started right away, and his surprise when I handed him the schematic and told him he could do all of the joining himself seemed well worth the lie my show of interest in trying plastic pipe represented. Although back then many people were excited about CPVC’s potential, I myself was skeptical, and despite what I’d implied, it offered me no mystery or challenge whatsoever. Joining plastic pipe is done with solvent cement that sets in thirty seconds, and you can cut some grades with nothing more aggressive than a sharp, sturdy knife. But I was banking on the chance that the very simplicity that secretly made it seem crude to me would allow my son an ego-bolstering success with installation.

And I was right. He had always been a hardworking boy, but the trust I granted him seemed to inspire him. Each evening when I got home from the office, he called me up to check his work. To my great relief, the joints appeared to be clean—with a steady bead of solvent rimming each one—and at my exclamations of pride at his craftsmanship he’d had to work hard to maintain his teenager’s air of bored composure. He roughed in a toilet bend, a drum trap for the bathtub, hot and cold water supply lines, a plastic revent. He installed the toilet, then a pedestal basin, and, after I helped him heft it up the stairs in my tie and suit pants one morning, even a prefab fiberglass tub. By the end of August, the only job that remained was joining his new plumbing to my old system.

It is a little hard to remember, honestly, what our relationship was like by that point in the summer without coloring it with hindsight. As I said, his impulsiveness had grated on my nerves some, but by and large I think what passed between us was fairly simple. He told me stories. He ate food from my refrigerator. He fell asleep at my side on the couch. In other words, he was a boy, and I assumed my company did not make him think too deeply. But perhaps this is just an example of my being less sensitive or observant than I should have been because when I followed him up to the attic with the propane torch, I was not yet looking for his words to mean any more than they said.

I sweated the first joint myself, and I worked slowly to make a point, but all the while, he kneeled beside me, leaning forward in a way that made it seem he was impatient to take over. I held the spool of solder steady, moving it around the pipe, and watched as the bead grew shiny and began to stream. Then I turned off the flame and set down the torch.

“Can I try?” he said.

His easy eagerness made me nervous, and I felt a quick rise of irritation, but I did not show it. I handed him the gloves and goggles, and I reminded myself that he was anxious to become a man. And the truth is, he followed my example almost flawlessly. He removed dirt from the inside of both fittings with gentle twists of a wire brush. He wiped the surfaces down with a cloth and applied a thin film of flux. He was quiet during all of this, asking no questions, and I can say honestly that at the sight of his competence what little irritation I had felt was displaced by genuine pride. It was not until he finished his prep work and picked up the torch that I felt it return. He flipped the switch and held the flame up to the pipe. “So where did you learn to do this?” he said.

It’s worth pointing out that, initially at least, very little of my stress was caused by the substance of his question. At that moment, it stemmed almost solely from the challenge of suppressing my shock at the fact that he would consider his first novice seconds manipulating a blowtorch inches from the tinder-dry framework of our house an appropriate time to strike up a conversation.

“Easy there,” I said. “Hold the flame back or you’ll burn away the flux.”

He moved the flame higher.

He said, “Do you remember who taught you?”

“Excuse me?”

His tone was casual, chatty. “Do you remember who taught you how to use a soldering iron?”

“Propane torch,” I said pedantically; then I pointed at it: “Don’t forget the other side.”

He moved it around the pipe. Without my reminding him, he also eased back the flame and touched the thread of solder to the seam above the fitting. Capillary action drew it swiftly into the joint.

“That’s perfect,” I said.

“Was it your father who taught you?”

“Now just wind it around—”

“He was a plumber, right?” he said, and he turned away from the flame to face me.

In fairness to him, he had already withdrawn the torch from the pipe, and he was holding it very steady. He was in danger of burning nothing, not even the flux, but the fact remained that he was working with an open flame for the very first time without paying full attention, without appearing to worry, without even keeping his eyes on his work, all while trying to carry on a conversation, and I guess after a summer of watching the seeds of boyish impulse threaten to flower into the habits of a reckless man, all of this simply overwhelmed me.

I said, “Jesus Christ, Elliot, what the hell do you think you’re doing!?”

I can still remember the look that came over his face. He was surprised, his face drained of color and tensed in a way that is hard to describe except to say that now he looked guarded. He was not wearing a shirt, and I could see in his thin chest the undeniable but poignantly slight outlines of pectoral muscles he had been working with a set of dumbbells in the privacy of his room. All at once it seemed painfully clear to me that in raising the subject of my own apprenticeship he had been struggling gamely to transcend the adolescence that had been drawing my secret reproach all summer long.

Right away I did some damage control. “Actually it looks like you’re better at multitasking safely than I’d be,” I said. I had to force myself not to reach and switch off the propane torch in his hand. “I was just worried about you looking away from that flame.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

He turned back to his work, and he passed the torch near the pipe to regenerate the heat that had dissipated during my outburst.

I said, “It just scared me for a second.”

He drew the flame away and touched the solder to the last gap in the seam.

I said, “I forgot how capable you are.”

There had been other moments when I’d lost my temper with him—when he was a toddler and ran into a busy parking lot; the year before when, without calling home, he had stayed out well after dark. Standing there in the sudden quiet of the attic, watching him wield an invisible fire, I’d reminded myself of these, but two months later, as I tried to decipher the strange runes of his piercing looks and choice of report topics, it occurred to me that this flash of anger had been different in a small but important way. It was the first that revealed feelings I’d been trying to hide.

 

A FILM REEL OF CLIPS FROM OUR PAST TOGETHER MIGHT MAKE my apprehension in the wake of the earthquake seem strange. Since his early boyhood, the first weekend of every month Elliot and I had gone out alone together for an activity of his choosing, and although I always worried as he grew older he would begin to postpone these dates, so far he had made careful plans for every one. In the evenings, when I settled in the basement fixing our toaster oven or cleaning the contacts on our water heater, he often slipped onto a stool with a stack of comic books to share my space in a silence so full of quiet affection, I was afraid to rupture it with speech. Even that Friday, the week I first noticed signs that things were changing, he phoned me at my office.

“It’s me,” he said.

In the background, boys were yelling. Car doors slamming. Three fifteen: he was just getting out of school. There was a familiar rustle that meant he was holding the receiver against his T-shirt, talking to a friend. I looked out my window. On the street below, a fat man in a suit dropped his keys and stared at them where they glinted. Elliot took the receiver away from his shirt; child noise replaced the static. “So there’s this great-sounding party tonight.”

“Wonderful.”

“Lots of guys from school are going, and Antonio’s mom can bring me home. Can I go?”

“Of course,” I said, and braced myself.

He said, “Why not?”

He had grown skilled at this. There was a sharp note of irritation in his voice that I never heard from him except over the phone, when he pretended I would not give him what he wanted. Behind him, I could hear a boy’s voice say, “Told you.” Another said, “Man,” an expletive among them for complaint. I’d found through experimentation that at this point it was best to remain quiet. I used to worry that he just hadn’t heard me correctly, but reiterating my consent sometimes confused him and made his act difficult. Once I’d tried speaking nonsense to him between his complaints, a private joke between us: “Mercury vapor,” I had said. “Rings of Saturn.” But the pause this engendered made me think I had upset his rhythm, and I didn’t want to risk embarrassing him in front of his friends. And the few times I had considered participating in his act, making up reasons why he could not go, I began to sweat. In the end, my silence seemed to work best for both of us.

Now he let it last, allowing time for a tirade of parental insensitivity. Then this: “You never let me do anything!” and the clatter of the phone in its cradle.

For over a year, Liz had assured me that this refusal of invitations to parties was born of a misconception about the after-school world of his peers that he would soon correct on his own. It was out of the sight of adults, she said, in fast-food parking lots and converted basements, that children forged their adult identities, and they did this by testing out views and postures more extreme than those they felt. Elliot would start going to parties when he figured out his friends were just exaggerating the secret feelings he was wrestling with himself. Until then, adults would seem safer. He would seek the stability of a world he felt he could predict and understand.

It assuaged my fears—both the plausibility of her explanation and the sound of her voice when she made it—but tonight for the first time I suspected him of an ulterior motive as well. When I got home, he was already there, sitting on the kitchen counter. Every Friday night, Liz experimented with a new cuisine, and that week she had asked Elliot to choose. The kitchen smelled sharply of fresh pineapple. She had cut one down the center, spilling its juice. Don Ho was playing on the stereo, and she had tucked a blossom behind one ear. As I came through the door, she was laughing, and immediately I was struck by the strange thought that he had been making jokes at my expense. In all honesty, in almost every case entering a room and catching a glimpse of the intimacy between my wife and son in their shared laughter or silence made me feel a large-hearted satisfaction, but from time to time I feared without proof that what drew them together was commiseration about me.

“Tell him, Luther,” Liz said. “Men hula in Hawaii. They do warrior dances, a high-stepping kind of thing. It’s not only for girls.”

Elliot grinned. Now that I had noticed it, I could detect his mustache in any light.

She said, “Big musclemen with swords. Sometimes they do it with fire sticks. Really, it can be very tough.”

He turned to me, and in a show of ignoring her, slipped for the last time into one of our old routines, one he’d picked up proudly years ago from listening to banter between me and Liz. “How was work?” he said.

“Excellent.”

“Move any mountains?”

“Just some rivers,” I said, but we both looked at the floor. In fourth grade he had learned that the California Aqueduct was visible from space, and for the first time my job had appeared heroic. A small part of me had panicked every time I fueled this fire, but then I thought it’s not so bad for a boy to lionize his father.

“Hey,” Liz said to him. “Hey, you.” Her hair fell over her shoulders, the iridescent blonde that lines the inside of some seashells. She enjoyed his show of neglect for the adolescent affection it was, but as he drew it out, spots of red appeared above her collarbone. His love meant too much to both of us. “What about my dance?”

Elliot slid off the counter and put his hands together, tracing waves to one side and then the other, shaking his hips. Her hand dropped from her chest to her waist. Don Ho started a new song, “Ain’t No Big Thing,” and Elliot shook faster. Liz laughed out loud, her short laugh of surprise, all air, eyes wide. Elliot high-stepped over to her and took her free hand, and when he bumped his hip to hers, she beamed and set down her knife.

During dinner, he told us stories: a split lip on the soccer field; a teacher who had conducted class in whispers to avoid waking a sleeping student. For a moment, they lulled me, but when Liz got up to go to the bathroom, he took his notepad and pencil from his back pocket and laid them next to his water glass.

“What’s the most surprising thing your dad ever did?” he said. Then he took a bite of his pork.

“Let me think about that,” I said, and I leaned away from the table into the rungs of the ladder-back chair to make it clear that this was what I was doing. Yesterday, we had spent an hour going over those facts that would form the bedrock of his report: date of birth, siblings, occupation. Now he was moving into what Mrs. Parks called Theme Development, the distinguishing feature of quality biographical research. He had explained that it was a long project, divided into three six-week segments: research, rough draft, and revision. I understood immediately that he would be interviewing me aggressively until Thanksgiving and peppering me with clarifying questions until well after the New Year, and lying in bed later I had settled on a strategy: I would tell no lies, but would rely heavily on omission.

I should pause here and say that I wasn’t so blunt-witted that I was incapable of connecting the dots. I knew there was more to his choice of subjects than an interest in pleasing his teacher. The problem was that to reveal why I always avoided talking about my father—to share the ways in which he failed my mother and me, the neat and inevitable unfolding of events from the tiny wellspring of his flaws—would be to repeat his mistake myself. In other words, to do so would be to infect my family with my old wounds and sorrows, and, unlike my father, I’m a man who chooses not to burden those he loves. Some might argue that if honest anger is what a loved one seeks, then it can only do more harm to withhold it, but I can say from hard witness that airing one’s baser feelings is a very slippery slope.

So now I was stalling. Elliot watched me and chewed. Liz had glazed the pork with pineapple, but she and Elliot had danced three songs before the high from his flirtation faded and she remembered to check the oven. By the time she returned from the bathroom, he was still working over the same bite.

She said, “The powder room sink isn’t draining.”

“Really?”

“Well it is, but slowly,” she said.

Across the table, I could see Elliot finally swallow. I raised my eyebrows at him. “I guess our services are needed,” I said.

He and I had removed tangles of Liz’s hair from the trap beneath my bathroom sink half-a-dozen times, and at this point he could do most of the work without me. Without having to be asked, he wrapped the jaws of the wrench with electrical tape to keep from scratching the copper pipe. When he backed the slip nut up the drain and swung the trap free, I shined the flashlight down it, and, as I suspected, there was nothing but water.

“Weird,” he said.

“Not really,” I said. In a sink used only for washing hands, a backup was more likely to be caused by something deeper, and I said so. But as he reattached the trap, I saw him roll his eyes. I had designed and built the house myself, included him in years of improvements that were integrated seamlessly into systems that had never failed in any way, and still this show of skepticism. He emptied the bottle of Drano into the basin and then leaned against the windowsill to wait. Liz appeared to fill our silence with a story about a friend of hers whose newly declawed cat had disappeared and barely survived a seven-day odyssey in the dog-filled wilds of their suburban neighborhood, and Elliot watched the basin full of chemicals as she spoke, his little mustache catching light from the frosted glass fixture above the mirror, until finally the mouth of the drain released two silver burps of air and swallowed the reservoir of Drano.

After dinner, I went outside to replace the spent bulbs that lit the leaves and tree trunks at the outer boundaries of our yard. I could see Elliot through the windows of my house, first at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes, and next huddled at the small desk in his bedroom over notes about my father. I watched him for a while, holding his head in his hands in a posture of sorrow or concentration, and suddenly my wife was beside me in the grass. My pulse leapt, not, I’m ashamed to say, out of love or even animal surprise, but out of a sense that she’d come for something I was afraid to give her.

I’d designed our house before I met Liz. It was a common floor plan, with a bedroom I referred to on blueprints as “Child’s,” but this was an act of optimism almost no deeper than the purchase of a lottery ticket. I hadn’t dated at all in high school, and my experiences with women in college had been unsatisfying. I’d been looking for something specific, but as so often happens, I was wrong about what I wanted. In my first semester, I sat down at the desk in my cinderblock dorm room and drew a matrix. Along one axis, I listed those attributes I felt would make a good girlfriend for me (quiet; patient; not too pretty), and along the other, the names of women I could not take my eyes from: a thin, freckled woman who wore a beret and an apron at the deli where I bought my sandwiches; a woman in my calculus class who picked at the chapped skin on her lips in a way that left them a deep, unlipsticked red. In almost every case, there was no intersection. I tore a fresh sheet of notebook paper, but, staring down at its whiteness, I was distressed to discover that I could not really think of anything these women held in common.

Nevertheless, I invited a long succession of them to my room. I had a routine. Before I left the dorm for a party, I took some clothes from the lidded hamper in my closet and scattered them around the room. Then I set a portable fan on my desk chair so that the only place to sit was the bed. This always worked perfectly. I poured us red wine from a jug into Dixie cups and initiated a discussion about the quiz show scandal or the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Although people spoke passionately about these topics in the halls and cafeterias, I myself did not have very strong feelings, but once I discerned my date’s, I would join in enough to get her talking. Then at a certain point, I’m sorry to say more out of boredom and grim purpose than affection or longing, I would pluck a few items of stray clothing from the surface of the mattress and say, “What do you know, there’s a bed under here!” Almost invariably, she would giggle at this, and I could place my hand at the small of her back and lower her down on the bed among my musty laundry.

I didn’t understand any better what I wanted after these episodes, and, more uncomfortable still, I didn’t like myself much. In the spring of my junior year, I woke up next to a woman with a bandage over one eye whose name I couldn’t even remember and lay awake next to her for an hour with an overfull bladder, smelling her sour breath, as a sort of penance. When I moved to Sacramento after graduation, I hadn’t invited a woman to my room in almost six months. I rented a small apartment on Marconi Avenue, went to banks in a tie, bought a piece of land, and began building a house. I did not think of my father in any direct way when I did this, but it is easy to see now that the way in which I researched the neighborhoods—through process of elimination picking the suburb and then the cul-de-sac and the plot and the design that would allow me to build an unimpeachable home for a hypothetical family I did not even really expect to have—stemmed from a desire to conjure a different possible ending to a family story into being. Every day after work, I changed into coveralls, and on weekends I spent whole days at the site with a cooler full of sandwiches I had fixed in my kitchenette at the Sunny Pines Apartments. I had no free time to date, and, to my surprise, standing next to pretty mothers at the grocery store, only the weakest flares of desire. It’s probably silly, I doubt this is actually the case, but I have sometimes had the thought that I might have spent my life alone had it not been for a strobe of red lights on my ceiling one night in my apartment. I drew back the thin curtain and saw a police cruiser idling in the parking lot. A burglary had taken place in the room next to mine. The next morning I took my valuables from a duffel bag in my closet and drove to the Wells Fargo Bank downtown to open a safe-deposit box, and it was Liz who issued me a key and led me into the vault. She wore low-cut blouses, and although I’ll admit I deposited items more frequently because of this, the truth is her conspicuous beauty made me nervous, and it was she who finally had to suggest I take her out to dinner.

I didn’t really expect anything to come of this. When I returned to my apartment that morning, I examined myself in the mirror. I am not an ugly man, but neither am I particularly attractive, and so I fall in with the majority of people whose fairly neutral looks become defined largely by the personality that filters through them. By then, I had been in Sacramento three months without talking to anyone but my coworkers, and in the evenings alone in my apartment I would spread a towel on my bed and eat a cold dinner in front of the TV. In my visits to the bank to deposit coins, I was sure I had revealed myself to be nothing more than lonely and strange, and Liz—well, she appeared to be something else altogether. She wore short skirts and shiny blouses and teased the men who stood in her line by slyly questioning their motives for opening accounts. With an alchemy of calculated looks and behavior I have only seen her use a handful of times since, she could draw all attention in that vast open lobby—men, women, children—even when she was doing nothing more remarkable than picking slowly through her big ring of keys.

But she surprised me. For that first date, I had taken her to the Coral Reef. She used a maraschino cherry to stir her rum and Coke, holding it by the stem. “Tell me about your family,” she had said, a date question. “Well,” I said. Three other couples sat around the hibachi table, obscured by steam. The chef’s knives were flashing. Little pieces of shrimp and steak flipped from the blades and sizzled fiercely. It was a sound I would have to speak over. This too was inhibition. I looked at her. She was wearing a necklace with a cluster of amber stones that were probably plastic, but it was beautiful. I kept my eyes there. I said it again, “Well,” and her cool palm covered my mouth completely. When I met her eye, she smiled and waited for me to absorb the strange comfort of this. Two seconds; maybe three. “Tell me about your job,” she said finally. And then she let her hand fall.

Within three dates, I had told her about the time as a boy I had watched a dog die without trying to help or kill it, an act that had filled me with so much horror, I had crept into the Episcopal church on a weekday and left with a leaflet on Guilt in my knapsack. Then other things: a lingering look at my aunt stepping out of the shower; the comics I stole from a grocer who gave me pieces of gum for free whenever I stopped by his store. In each case she listened with a bright intensity to disclosures at the periphery of my deepest fears, and although at first her interest in such a plainly uncomfortable man was a bafflement, one night it dawned on me that it was these uneasy confessions themselves that were drawing her to me.

At the time, I could not explain the certainty I felt about this—it was intuition—but after joining her for a family dinner, I felt I understood. Liz was one of five sisters, the youngest by six years and, it turned out, the most attractive by an unnatural margin. She met me at the door to her oldest sister’s house wearing a matronly gray dress and lipstick so pale it almost matched her skin, and led me to the living room where plain, dark-haired women and their husbands and half-a-dozen small children were packed in a confusing jumble. She introduced me to each of them with a small bit of description, Charlotte, “the doctor,” Eleanor, “the schoolteacher,” Pam, “mother of four out of six of the children in the room,” and Trish, whose engagement was the occasion we were celebrating. After an awkward flurry of handshaking, one of the husbands said, “We were just talking about the situation in Cuba, Luther. I polled everybody on what they think Kennedy should do. What’s your vote?”

When all of them looked at me for an answer, I turned to Liz and said, “Interesting. What did you recommend?”

Liz blushed, and an awkward silence came over the room.

“That’s a good question,” Charlotte’s husband said. Oddly, instead of addressing Liz, he turned to Pam. “What did Lizzie say?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, frowning.

“We skipped her,” Eleanor said. “Trish was bending her ear about bridesmaids’ dresses.”

“She’s the fashion expert,” Pam said kindly.

“Not the foreign-policy expert,” Eleanor added wryly.

“She’s always had the best eye,” Charlotte offered.

“Yeah, that,” said Eleanor, holding up her wineglass and winking, “and Trish wants to get her buy-in early on a frumpy tent so she doesn’t steal the show.”

Everyone laughed, including Liz, but by the end of the evening—an evening in which we talked about health care and public education and finished the debate about the Cuban Missile Crisis—it was not so difficult to imagine how she might have grown up believing her looks were her only power. In the end, I sometimes wonder if I owe my good fortune to nothing more than this: I was the first person who responded as attentively to her character as to her beauty.

I asked her to marry me after two months of dating and ten days later she had done so. At first she had sketched out a large Sacramento wedding, but one evening she knocked on the door to my apartment and told me she wanted to be married with me alone, in the house I was building near the river. I’m not sure which ardent therapeutic motive drove this—to shield me from social awkwardness, or let me live vicariously through her impulsive nature, or spare me the guest-list tabulation of what she had begun to suspect was my sheer, empty-handed lack of family and friends—but it was clear from the moment I arrived that she had done it for me. She stood alone with the minister, unflanked by guests or flowers, on the exposed earth in front of the frame of our house, and she had tethered helium balloons to the studs and window casings. When I stepped next to her, she brushed the hair from my forehead with an expression of joy I already recognized as the unambiguous, sure-footed pleasure she only seemed to feel when she had spared me some kind of pain. The day was breezy, and as we said our vows the taut skins of the balloons bobbed against each other with a solemn dun like struck drums.

But even women who fall in love with their power to soothe a crippled man find after a time they have only so much patience.

Now she followed my gaze up to our son’s window. “Penny for your thoughts, Inspector,” she said.

“A penny? I wouldn’t dream of overcharging so steeply.”

“It’d be a bargain, I’m guessing.” She glanced at the box of lightbulbs in my arms and raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Whatever it is, it’s fueled a week’s worth of obsessive maintenance work.”

“We did find a crack in the foundation,” I said.

“The earthquake, no doubt.” She looked at my mouth, my forehead, my hands. “I’m sure every house suffered some minor damage.”

“Probably.”

“More than ours.”

“Maybe.”

Above us, Elliot ran a hand through his hair at his desk. Crickets pulsed. From down the street came the sound of someone emptying trash into an outdoor can. Finally she said, “What is it, sweetie? What’s been bothering you?”

“Robert Belsky asked me to go to Shipley’s with him,” I said, and my chest filled like a flight of birds. It was something that had been on my mind, something I doubtless would have shared anyway, but it was not what had been bothering me.

Robert Belsky was a peer of mine at the Department of Water Resources, and Shipley’s was a topless bar in a bright pink building visible off Highway 50. A month ago, word had begun to spread that the Principal in our division would be retiring soon, and Robert and I were the only two engineers eligible for the promotion. Although we had both survived the cutbacks of the last decade, when there was not enough work to go around I was assigned the bigger projects. His strange way of equalizing the power between us in the face of this competition was to invite me out to a bar at times when he seemed to know I would refuse. He usually did this with other coworkers standing behind him in the hall, and when I took a rain check, he would joke that I was too good for him, or that I “didn’t like to mix with the hired hands.” It was an obvious manipulation, but it worked. Over time, the sheer number of refusals had filled me with a desire to accept.

I said, “He stopped by my office and said something like, ‘So, you ever going to say yes?’ and when I said, ‘How about tonight?’ he said, ‘Great, I’m meeting a couple guys at Shipley’s in half an hour.’” Although what I should feel when someone manipulates me is anger, my first feeling is an annoying flare of desire not to shame them.

I took Liz’s hand and led us silently across the lawn to the house, and briefly, opening my front door undercut the tension this conversation was stirring. The thick slab of oak is so perfectly balanced on its well-oiled hinges that despite its colossal moment of inertia I can push it closed by touching it with my pinky.

In the warm glow of our front hall, I crouched to set the box of lightbulbs at our feet and then stood to face my wife. Her arms lay still at her sides; the muscles in her face relaxed. A look of patience and attention. Sometimes now I conjure her limb by limb. It gives me peace, but it’s not the same. Since her first miscarriage, she had toyed almost annually with the idea of becoming a volunteer counselor on a call-in line, and at times like this it always struck me that she would be extraordinarily good at it. Although these were precisely the moments when such an observation might have given her confidence, instead I found I could only bring myself to say it other times—counting out flatware for dinner or unlocking the car—when the compliment would not call for demonstration with a frank discussion of my fears.

“So what did you say to him?” she asked.

“I told him I’d pass. Then he said, ‘Mr. High and Mighty,’ but I didn’t take the bait.”

“You didn’t say anything?”

“No.”

“What bothers you so much about him, do you think?”

There were so many safe answers to this question—that he was rude, that he was talented but irresponsible, that he was difficult to work with—but already the familiar mix of tenderness and well-veiled impatience with which she was focused on my lie was making me feel guilty for distracting her from the truth.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She closed her eyes—a kind of reflexive wince at this answer that she had developed over the years. This always bothered me some, but more troubling was the look she wore when she opened them: forgiveness and resolve, as if she’d decided one more time to wring satisfaction from helping me with the shallow fears I was willing to share. “He’s harmless, Luther. It’s mostly habit for him, that style, but he’s probably also trying to knock you off your guard a little. There’s that rumor about Don retiring, and didn’t you also say Howard’s assigning new offices next week?”

I nodded.

She said, “He thinks you’re about to get the nicer office and the promotion, and he’s probably right. He wants to punish you a little, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s also just curious. The two of you are so different.”

There were two light thuds above us, Elliot kicking off his shoes and letting them fall from his bed to the carpet. I felt a prick of heat beneath my arms, and a coolness on my forehead that meant moisture there: beads I knew she could see. She put her hand out to me. It was a foot from mine, but she did not reach to bridge that distance. It was different—better somehow—to make me take hers. She pressed each of my knuckles with her thumb. I suppose this was another moment when I might have told her what was really troubling me. But seconds later there was a rumble of footsteps on the stairs behind us, and she looked past me with the uncomplicated smile that sometimes graced her face in rooms with our son.

The following morning, I drove to a commercial plumbing-supply store where I had purchased all the pipe for my home. I told myself I was driving there to replace the empty jug of Drano, but I had no immediate need for more, and anyway Drano was something I could have bought at any grocery store. What I really wanted to do was talk to Larry Briggs. He was soft-spoken and knowledgeable, and even when five years had passed between my visits, he called me by name and offered me the contractor’s discount. As he rang me up, I could say something about Elliot’s reckless ways and my flare of temper, and Larry would laugh: because he’d worked with a blowtorch, because he had his own sons, and because my mistakes with Elliot could not hurt him.

I might have recognized this agenda in the sharp pang I felt when I entered his store, but I did not. I like to think that this was not because I was incapable of the kind of self-examination that might have spared me my losses, but because I was so surprised that Larry wasn’t there.

In his place was a woman in a white tank top watching a small TV and eating a bear claw. She did not look up at me when I entered, and while I walked the aisles she answered the TV’s false surges of laughter with her own. Only when I set the jug of Drano on the counter did she finally turn. She glanced at the jug and started to punch the register keys.

“I have an account,” I said.

She looked up at me. Although later I would learn she was only my age, she looked older. Her blonde hair was dry and her skin wrinkled from the sun. “What’s the name of your outfit?”

“I’m not in the business, but the owner gives me the discount because I bought all the pipe for my house here.”

“I do, do I?” She was the kind of woman least noticed: neither beautiful nor ugly.

“You’re the owner?”

“Afraid so.” She was grinning.

“What happened to Larry?”

“He had a heart attack last year. I’m his wife.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. I was home with our kids, and I can tell you this is a big step up.”

Some measure of my shock and discomfort must have shown on my face.

“Joke,” she said. “That was a joke.” She turned back to the register. “Anyway, I’ll give you the discount on principle. Do-it-yourselfers are great repeat business.” She punched the keys. On her television, an angry woman was sending her husband downstairs with a pillow and blanket to sleep on the living room sofa. This caught her eye. “Doghouse,” she said.

I handed her a five-dollar bill.

“Have you tried a plunger yet?” she said.

“Actually, I don’t have a clog.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

There was a small purple stain on the front of her tank top. It looked like grape juice. Something about her was infuriating. I might simply have ignored her baiting, but she was staring at me, holding on to my money, not opening the register waiting for me to respond.

I said, “I’m just stocking up.”

“Sure you are.”

“I don’t need any tips on how to clear a backup.”

“Right.”

“I designed and built my plumbing system myself.”

She winked. “My point exactly.”

I have come across so many people like this in my life that sometimes I am ashamed I have not numbed myself to the way they court confrontation. Maybe it is because my father was the first of them that they strip me of self-control.

I said, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Whoa!” She laughed and raised her hands in the air. “You’re the boss.”

She opened the register drawer, and I made a business of looking in my wallet: a sheaf of bills, some credit cards and a picture of the three of us at the Grand Canyon. I had taken it a few months ago. I had stood them at the observation wall and set the timer for thirty seconds, and captured a look on their faces that made me feel a lucky pressure in my chest, like the downward weight of hands. I am not proud of what I did next, but suddenly I had the impulse to take the photo out of its sleeve and hand it to her, not because I wanted her to know me, but because I wanted to show her what she didn’t have.

It didn’t have the effect I was expecting.

“Your family?” she said.

“Yes.”

She studied it a moment, smirking, and handed it back to me between two fingers, so that I had to reach for it. Then she took some change from the register drawer and extended a closed fist across the counter. Her knuckles were chapped, and she was still wearing a wedding band. She would hold her hand there forever, I thought, to force mine beneath it. Finally I extended my open palm and she dropped my change into it—a single penny I would have left without had I known this was all that held me hostage. She laughed. “See you soon,” she said. Then she turned back toward her TV.

 

IT WAS ABSURD TO PUT OFF SUCH A TRIVIAL PATERNAL DUTY; I knew this. The following night after dinner, I went into the kitchen and offered to dry.

“Thanks,” he said.

He took a serving dish from the sink and handed it to me. Thus far the physical changes he was going through had passed largely undiscussed. Six months ago, he had hefted a set of dumbbells into Liz’s shopping cart at Kmart, and since then each morning I had listened to his fierce breaths between lifts through the vent in the wall of my closet as I dressed. Now in his back pocket, I noticed the small notepad he had been using when he questioned me for his biography on my father. In these conversations, the deepening pitch of his speech was undermined by breaks into his old register at the ends of questions, and his hands, particularly at moments when he lost control of his own voice, trembled slightly, the way children’s never do. Water streamed out of the tap into the sink below, and he scoured the bottom of the saucepan with a square of green plastic wool. He never complained of chores, never complained, really, of anything, and although in the past this had filled me with a sense of accomplishment, more recently it had made me afraid. He inhaled sharply through his nose, as if to clear it, and I started where I stood.

“Jeez,” he said.

“Sorry.”

He dumped the water from the pan into the sink, and it splashed both of us. I did not flinch, but this time instead it was stillness that seemed awkward. I groped for the resolve I had felt before I entered the room. I was careful not to look at his face so that scrutiny wouldn’t lace my mention of his new mustache with a sense of invasion. I would like to say that when he finally broke the silence I myself had been seconds from speaking, but the truth was it had taken me less than five minutes to let go of my intentions completely. I was refining a plan to cut myself shaving the next morning, appearing at breakfast with a conversational dot of Kleenex glued to my chin by blood when he shut the water off and drew his notepad and pencil from his pocket.

“Quick: what’s the one adjective you would use to describe him?”

“Meticulous.”

He wrote this down.

“And what would your mom have said?”

“Perfect.”

And briefly the strain of answering newspaper questions about my father excused me from my resolution to talk to him about shaving.

In the beginning at least, it was not so hard to stick to my plan; the early stories about my father were so free of omen. I told him that my parents had met at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1938. My father was a plumber from Hoboken with a high school equivalency and a lone magazine photo of the Hoover Dam taped to the wall of his basement apartment, but he was a smart man with exacting standards, and it had occurred to him that this might be an excellent place to meet a woman. This is the way my mother always told the story. On Saturday afternoons when his friends were running combs through their hair in preparation for a night out in bars, my father was riding the Hudson Tubes into the city. He slipped the recommended donation into the admission box and picked a different exhibit each time. He had been doing this for six months when he saw my mother in the costume gallery in the basement. She was the first woman he had bothered to speak to. He liked the way she held a finger up to the descriptive copy on the tiny plaque beside each display. That, and she was wearing a bright red dress that was a little bit shiny—she was killing time before a party. He came up to her and told her the casework had been installed poorly. If it were level, a tube of lipstick set on top wouldn’t roll its length, and he waited for her to take hers from her purse to let him prove it. He was like a peacock, arraying his feathers. Or the frogs that puff up their throats to make an impression. When her lipstick dropped off the end, he caught it in his calloused palm. She was an hour late to her party.

All through my early boyhood, I was daily witness to a love between them that I took for granted. On the living room sofa after dinner, my mother might read a book of poetry while my father filed the metal burr from an imperfectly molded washer he had bought at the hardware store, not because it was necessary to the function of the washer, but because it bothered him in a way I grew to understand was both aesthetic and moral. The combination of ire and resourcefulness it ignited in him was the object of my mother’s passion. She left broken things out on the countertop—a kettle, a wristwatch, a jacket zipper—just to watch him take out his pocketknife and curse the manufacturers. She did not begrudge him swear words, even in front of me. He was a man of fire and impulse and she a woman of introspection and restraint, and I would learn that she loved him for the long reach—for better or for worse—of his frankness and passions.

Elliot took careful notes, and I talked continuously to discourage questions about the years I did not want to discuss. I kept shifting the focus to things like what he’d owned or the map names of places he had traveled, and just when Elliot appeared poised to interject, I wandered off toward the living room to find a book called America at War. “Historical context is essential to good reporting,” I said, and out of an impulse I imagine must have been born more of weariness than interest, he thanked me and took it up to his bedroom for the night.

But the following morning, he had a second wind.

“What did you admire most about him?” he said.

We were tucked in a booth at the International House of Pancakes. Liz was wiping down the syrup carafes with a paper napkin she had dipped in her tea. Elliot’s notepad was covered in words I could not read. With the advent of puberty, his handwriting had grown scratchy, indecipherable.

I sipped my coffee. “His exacting standards,” I said.

“Like on construction?” We had talked about this already.

“Yes.”

“Something else.”

“His resourcefulness then.”

Liz said, “What about that time he took apart the door at Macy’s?”

At Macy’s in New York one winter, my mother left us to go to the ladies’ room in the basement, and when she returned, she asked us to follow her back down to look at toasters. This alone should have aroused my curiosity. That fall my aunt had given her an electric mixer, and she had turned it on and then off just once before setting it at the back of a cupboard. But at six, I lacked this kind of suspicion. “I was thinking I might invest in one of these,” she said, and I leaned in to help with her decision. She pressed a chrome lever down. Beyond a pyramid of stock pots was a group of customers standing inside a small glass-walled room full of crystal. One of them rapped on the door. A manager in a suit and tie rushed over and put his mouth close to the crack so he would not have to yell. “The repairman will be here any moment,” he said, and when he left them to return to the telephone, my father shook his head and crossed the floor between the appliances. The plate-glass door was stuck shut, its hydraulic closing mechanism broken. In under five minutes he had removed the four screws that held the bracket to the door and pulled it aside. He moved us toward the Thirty-Fourth Street exit quickly, his hands at the smalls of our backs, and over my shoulder I caught sight of the manager scanning the floor in confusion. On the sidewalk my mother applauded. My father crossed his hairy arms. He was often in shirtsleeves, even in winter. It was not until I heard my mother retell the story for the third time that I realized she had lured us down there just to watch him rescue a group of strangers with his pocketknife.

I told a quick version of this story.

“Was it hard?” Elliot said.

“No. That’s what irritated him about the manager.”

“He was irritated?”

“I think so.”

“What did he say?”

I thought about this: on the way home in his service van, his voice rising. “I can’t really remember. But it was the kind of thing that annoyed him.”

The waitress brought our pancakes and sausages on platters and little side plates, all balanced on her forearms and splayed between her fingers. Elliot moved his notebook aside for her and kept scribbling.

“What didn’t you like about him?” he said.

Liz cleared a space for the food, repositioning flatware, moving packets of jam.

“He was my father,” I said.

Elliot said, “Well maybe once he irritated you or disappointed you or something.”

When I was twelve, I had won first prize in my school science fair, and then in my county, and went on to the state competition. I took my place there between two people whose display hinges were attached crookedly to boards that had not been beveled or sanded, and I made a note of this to point out to my father when he met us there after his morning service call. At two o’clock the judges came to shake my hand and examine my project. They made notes on clipboards. My mother looked at her watch. By four o’clock they had announced me the second-prize winner over a squeaky PA. They gave me a ribbon and people took photographs. Those who had won nothing began taking their boards down and carrying them out under their arms. We drove home in a car my mother had borrowed from a neighbor in exchange for a chicken casserole. Rows of poplars receded over the hills. Factories began to pop up and then again to disappear. When we got home, we found my father playing solitaire, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in the sink.

Elliot’s pancakes were steaming. In a minute he would pour too much syrup on them and eat them.

“He was my father,” I said.

 

THAT WEEK, ELLIOT BEGAN RESTORING THE FIVE-HORSEPOWER engine from our old push mower in the basement. It was his idea, and immediately, I assumed an assistant mechanic’s role. He cleaned and gapped the spark plugs, tinkered with the throttle, tightened the manifold screws and gasket. Now and then I went up to the kitchen for cool cans of soda and set them sweating on the pressboard where he bent over a plate of chrome, his breath clouding the surface. I handed him tools, and without turning, he checked the supervisory aspect of my assistance. “Not yet,” he said, and dawdled over the last moments of his task.

I learned a new rhythm. I searched for ways to help that did not seem to irritate him, and soon found the boundaries of his patience. Advice was acceptable only in the form of stories about a centrifugal pump I had tried to build when I was his age. Offerings to his cause were accepted as well. I brought him an engine compression tester and a three-gallon can of gas, and when after four days it was still stalling out, I went to the library.

I browsed the stacks for the manual with the most technical tone, one that appeared to have been written for mechanics themselves. This was all I had come for, but when I stepped up to the circulation desk, an onion-scented girl with an opal at her neck slipped a card into its pocket. She wore brown lipstick and her hair tight at her neck in a bun and a watch too large for her slender wrist. “Good day,” she said, and suddenly the plea implicit in these talismans of maturity moved me. I pictured my son beside me, our faces overlapping in his mirror, his face covered in foam. A towel swaddled his shoulders, making him look small. A conversation outside the bathroom would allow him more dignity. I thanked the girl and went back into the library.

There were a number of books in the young-adult section, but I spent an extra ten minutes searching the card catalog to find one in General Interest: The Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming. Shaving technique was tersely reduced to its essentials. “To begin, soften the beard.” “Address difficult areas last.” There were diagrams to clarify the orientation of the blade. By copying these onto the back of the text, I was able to fit it on a single page. The photocopy machine bulb flashed like sheet lightning, and I pictured myself mentioning it in the basement, maybe as he fitted his safety goggles over his head. I have a description somewhere that might save you some nicks. The physics are actually sort of interesting. His eyes would disappear behind a dull plane of reflected light. Metal contracts when it’s cold, as you know. A cold blade will give you a closer shave.

 

IT IS A SIGN OF HOW SUCCESSFULLY I HAD MISLED HER ABOUT my worries that that night after dinner, Liz suggested a neighborhood walk. We had begun them before Elliot was born. They’d been Liz’s idea, at first a way of learning about my interest in construction and later of working on what she had probably come to explain to herself as my insufficient store of self-esteem. After Elliot was born, they stopped, until he was of an age when she knew my knowledge would seem a kind of magic trick to him. We had not taken one in a long time.

Now the moon was nearly full, and the sidewalks, slick with late rain, were alive with lamplight. She wore a lavender windbreaker with its hood raised and the drawstrings pulled close across her bangs and beneath her chin and somehow still looked lovely; her beauty was that bright. Elliot’s jacket was open and caught gusts of wind. Years ago, Liz had purchased Thermos mugs with lids for these walks, and we each carried one filled with hot chocolate. When we got home, Elliot would open his to spoon cool marshmallows from its bottom.

“Find a really bad one,” Liz said to me.

“We’re coming up on one of the worst.”

“Oh goody,” she said.

I stopped in front of an older shingled rambler that had sold, I guessed, on the extravagance of its landscaping. Plum trees flanked the sidewalk, and the lawn was hemmed in by a series of carefully tended herb and flower beds. Wisteria vines overhung the front door, and the house itself seemed to rest on a foundation of enormous, dark-leafed camellia bushes. I said, “This garden is beautiful, but the house will have dry rot problems. The bushes will trap moisture against the shingles and breed fungi that will feed on the wood. Eventually, it will turn brown or white and crumble to the touch.”

The moonlight cast shadows on Elliot’s face. When I got home from work, I had given him the mechanic’s manual, and he had examined it silently in the basement, his arm touching mine once and recoiling. I had not mentioned the physics of shaving.

He sipped his hot chocolate.

I said, “The one next door will have rot problems too.” It was a new ranch house with a swing set in the front yard. “What’s causing it?”

Elliot said, “The gutter is blocked.”

“How can you tell?”

“Puddles next to the foundation.”

“And?”

“Those dirt stains under the downspout.”

I couldn’t help myself; I touched his hair.

Typically we stayed within blocks of our own home, but now Liz led us the quarter mile along the river to the new development that fronted onto the golf course. All of the houses were large, four thousand square feet or more, with Jacuzzi tubs sunken into their rear patios and flagstone driveways, but their unfortunate secret was that they were built on a site of soft clay. Clay drains poorly. In wet weather, it can compress unevenly, placing stress on the foundation. A contractor can reduce the risk of this by sinking the footings more deeply. It’s what I had hoped for when I saw the bulldozers pushing elm stumps and licorice weed across the field towards the access road, but the footings on these houses were not even as deep as those on my own.

When we passed between the lantern posts onto its wide streets, she led us downhill towards the artificial lake on the ninth hole. Rows of saplings with root-balls wrapped in burlap sat waiting in the muddy yards.

She stopped in front of a big one on a corner lot. “This is it,” she said.

“This is what?” I said, although suddenly I knew just what she meant.

“The house Robert Belsky bought.”

The house was huge, the largest we had yet passed, with a three-car garage and two-story columns flanking its front door.

She said, “What do you think?”

“It’s pretty,” I said.

“About the design, I mean.”

It was dark, but by taking a step into the yard, I could see that holes had been drilled around the base of the columns for drainage. A copper roof edge glinted along the eave, and a flat of clay tiles lay neatly stacked in the street.

“Not bad,” I said.

“But there are things, aren’t there?” she said. “Things any engineer worthy of promotion should have been able to see?”

Sometimes I think helping me must have been a very difficult calling.

I led them onto the unlandscaped lot. Gravel crunched beneath our feet. From the front, it appeared to be only two stories, but the property sloped to the rear, where the developers had included a daylight basement. The backyard half of the lot looked level, but if you walked north, you could see that it sloped slightly towards the house.

“It will have drainage problems as soon as the rain begins,” I said, and she leaned over and kissed me on the shoulder.

But in bed that night, she did not fall asleep. My wife’s sleep was distinguished by a slight sound she made with her tongue against her soft palate, as if she were tasting things in her dreams; and tonight, when I woke in the dark, she was silent. Downstairs in the living room, the grandfather clock I had built from a kit during her first pregnancy tolled the half hour, a single, muffled bong. The sheets tingled beneath my arms. My ears buzzed with the effort to hear her breathe. It was a shock when she spoke. “I can’t sleep,” she said.

“Neither can I.”

“I thought so.”

“What’s on your mind?” I said.

“What’s on your mind,” she said.

“Is that a question or an answer?”

She laughed, but still did not move.

When we were first married, she had wanted to get pregnant, and I had wanted to wait. After five years, I finally conceded, and then we had trouble. She kept a small calendar to keep track of her ovulation, then an extra pillow to slip under her hips after we tried, and she had two miscarriages, children we had already named. When we overheard those names in public, she was careful not to look at me. At first I made sure to mention these episodes later, in the car as we stared at the road ahead, or in the bathroom at night as we washed our faces, and she would kiss me in a spot more tender for its remoteness—at my jawline, or on the crown of my head. After a while, though, the repetition of these exchanges seemed painful in itself, the familiarity of the words and actions freighted with sadness, and I stopped. Elliot had no name until after the nurse took him down the hall to bathe him. It was the first time we had discussed it. We both suggested names far less popular than the ones we had chosen before, and it was clear from this to both of us that we had separately planned for disappointment.

The pause had lasted twenty seconds now, too long for a change of topic, and finally in a way that might have passed for answer to her question but was not lying, I reached under the sheet and drew her towards me in the dark. But this time I couldn’t silence her so easily. Each day her patience was thinning.

She said, “Is that meeting on Monday?”

“Which meeting?”

“New office assignments.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. Her grasping shamed me. “Nothing too exciting, I’m sure.”

I think on some level she may have known this was not at the core of my worries, but because I had given her nothing else to work with, she laid a hand on my chest and said this: “No, nothing too exciting. Just a high corner with a view of the capitol dome.” She talked about other favors I had been shown—invitations from Krepps; briefings with politicians—whispers between soft touches of her lips and hands, and afterwards slept soundly, making that sound with her palate, the savor that told me she was asleep.

To my small credit, I did lie awake for a time thinking maybe I should wake her and try to undo it. Say, “I think I may have hurt him.” Or even just this: “Sometimes I think he wishes I were a different man.” But there were things—the sad reckoning of our history together—that filled me with hesitation. After all my years of withholding and all her years of giving, the fact that I feared I might fail the only child my stalling had allowed her seemed an unfair burden to share.

Instead I tried for sleep—a little exercise I had been doing since I was a boy. When I was fifteen, I had worked for my father for a summer, and in early June, I had gone to the library and checked out a book. This alone should have been a clear sign to me that he was really changing. A few years before it never would have occurred to me to rely on anything but his tutelage, but already a mistrust of his word had crept into my thinking. Alone in my room in Trenton, I had read the introduction dozens of times, until I could see the pages long after I switched off my light. The publisher’s medallion with a hammer at its center. Then the dedication: “for Gladys,” who I had decided was the author’s wife. And finally the introduction: “Behind the walls of a house,” it read, “pipes do not always run straight. They curve, branch off, and may have to be connected to other pipes of different diameters or dissimilar composition. It is the design plumber’s duty to ensure that these awkward turns and connections are made cleanly and quietly. For example, because stopping the flow from a faucet causes a shock wave that may bang loudly and with enough force to damage the system, he must install capped pipe extensions that create a cushion of air to absorb these sounds and preserve the peace a family holds dear. Although plumbing in essence is not a difficult trade, it requires careful planning to build and maintain a properly functioning water system, by which I mean to say, one that is invisible to the residents of the house.”

Somehow the silent recitation of these lines never failed to soothe me. That night, when I’d finished them for the third time, I gave up the idea of waking her to confess my worry and resolved to seize the next good opportunity to talk to our son.

 

THAT WEEKEND, IT CAME. IT WAS THE FIRST SATURDAY IN November, and when he slipped into the passenger seat, he told me to drive to the Arden Fair Multiplex. Standing in line for tickets, I made guesses—comedies he had mentioned; things his friends had recommended—and he smirked at me, passing a hand over his mouth when I looked at him, a new gesture. In the last week, the roots of the hair above his lip had darkened. Now it was visible in moderate light.

“Dad?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

The skin on my neck tingled. “Of course.”

“Did you ever see him really angry?”

“Sure I did.”

“When?”

“That centrifugal pump I built. I let the parts start to rust in our backyard.”

Now his eyes fixed on mine. “What did he do?”

“He told me to finish it.”

“But what did he say?”

And all at once, the price I was paying for my outburst seemed unfairly high. The idea that Elliot might be wondering if he would have found a more temperate parent in my father was more irony than I could suffer without correction.

“He said, ‘Finish that pump by Friday or I’ll take the belt to your ass.’”

Elliot’s eyes widened. I had spanked him only once, when he was a toddler, for running into the street outside a grocery store. I still thought of this whenever he turned his eyes away from me, but I realize that probably he did not remember it.

“Was he kidding?”

“No, he wasn’t kidding.”

“What did you do?”

“I finished the pump.”

“I mean when he said that.”

“Which movie?” a voice said then, and instead of answering my son, I turned to it. We had reached the front of the line.

He bought tickets for On Golden Pond, a movie about a boy hungry for connection with a father, and the clumsy bluntness of the message in this choice made me feel ashamed of my feelings of persecution. I sobered myself with thoughts of the duty I’d been avoiding. In the last three days, I had been to the drugstore twice. The first time, I bought a packet of disposable razors and a canister of unscented shaving cream. The next day I went back and bought one with an odor, something called “Sport,” because I did not know what he wanted. Now in the darkened theater, the film’s bittersweet music moved me, and words began to take shape in my mind. But they soon left me. He stirred in his seat, glancing at me during scene changes. During one of these glances, I saw that his cheeks were damp, and—God forgive me—I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. He sniffled, and I leaned forward a bit, so that his face was outside my peripheral vision. But after a few minutes, he whispered to me. “Dad?”

On-screen, the boy and the old man were clinging to a rock in the darkening water.

“What?” I said.

“Want more popcorn?”

“No thanks.” I thought he would leave it at that, but soon he tapped my arm where it lay between us on the armrest, forcing me to turn. His face glistened in a flicker of light from the screen.

“What is it?” I asked. Perhaps it sounded sharp in the sudden quiet.

“Nothing,” he said, after a time.

In the car, he sat beside me, his eyelashes dark with dried tears. We drove along Sunrise Boulevard with its signs like beacons: Plexiglas hamburgers and neon car keys; a hot tub filled with turquoise spangles. He asked me how I had liked the movie, and I told him I had found it very moving, sort of heartwarming, really very stirring, hinting at the emotion I had felt without referring to his own. In my own adolescence, my father had waited long enough that my first few beard hairs grew half an inch, fine like baby’s hair. It was winter in New Jersey, and I felt the sparse mustache when I licked my lips to soothe their chap. I had thought of taking his razor or buying my own, but I knew he would notice that I had shaved, and in the last two years I had learned that his reactions were unpredictable. Instead I waited. In the end, he called attention to it at the dinner table in front of my mother in an exchange whose retelling would make him look worse than I’m willing to. But the memory of it troubled my plans. Now I could not imagine a conversation that would have made me comfortable.

When we got home, Elliot went downstairs to reclaim himself with work on his lawn mower engine, and I went to my bedroom and took the photocopied sheet from my pocket. In my medicine cabinet, I had stored the two cans of shaving cream and the small packet of razors. Beside these was a spare aluminum-shafted model I sometimes took to the office to prepare for a late-afternoon meeting, and what I thought then was that this one would better communicate my respect for him. There was ceremony in the gift of such a razor. I crept into his bathroom.

It was as the bathrooms in motels appear. His washcloth folded on the towel bar. His toothpaste and comb stored behind his mirror. I set the two canisters of shaving cream next to the sink and the razor beside these. I took the folded instructions from my pocket and laid them on the counter. The corners were turned up from the curve my hip had forced in the theater, and I smoothed them out against the tiles. I set the cans of shaving foam on opposite corners. I tried different arrangements and avoided my reflection in the mirror. In the end, I refolded the page and left it next to the razor, cupped in the shape it had taken in my pocket, and went back to my room.

 

THE NEXT MORNING, LIZ GOT UP EARLY AND SHOWERED BEFORE us. I found her in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a fawn-colored sweater, and the bright red sneakers she wore in the evenings when we toured our neighborhood looking for weakness. As she peeled white from a section of orange, I almost told her what I had done. I was sure this would be his first morning to use it, and it seemed our shared anticipation might offer some small consolation for all I had withheld.

“Today’s the day,” she said, and for a moment, it confused me. But it was my meeting she meant. “High corner office, for sure,” she said.

Then we heard his footfall on the stairs.

For many years I would tell myself that, at least in the most immediate sense, it didn’t matter; that telling her would not have prepared her for what happened anyway. Our son was fifteen years old, wore twill pants she bought at back-to-school sales each September, and had been on the honor roll every year since the third grade. He told long stories at dinner, holding his knife and fork suspended above the table, and would still fall asleep open-mouthed on a sofa beside us. Sometimes I came home from work to find him standing shoulder to shoulder with her as she sautéed a pan of onions in an intimate silence that she would describe to me with grateful wonder after we switched off our lamps for sleep. Although she was a mother, and over the years she had shared a thousand worries, it seemed to me that until what I drove him to that morning she had no real cause for concern about our son. The evidence must have seemed sudden. The night before he was complimenting her cooking and taking out the garbage unbidden, and twelve hours later he arrived at breakfast: clean socks, pressed shirt, pants and belt, and his scalp shaved to a waxy smoothness that gave off the scent of artificial pine.

In case you’re assuming that baldness was a fashion then among children in California, I can assure you it was not. We lived in a suburb of Sacramento. Sacramento itself, like the capital cities of most states, is a small town, not cosmopolitan, where ticket lines and traffic flows at four-way stops are negotiated with the halting civility of legislature. The suburbs of such cities have the safe, unchanging magic of a village inside a snow globe. The children at his school, at their most radical, wore their sneaker soles down to the canvas and the fine welting on their corduroy pants to the sheen. Some boys persisted with the long hair that had been popular over the last decade, but by far the most common form of rebellious expression was the dirty T-shirt. His appearance could not have been more alien.

“Good morning,” he said, slipping into his chair.

Liz was at the stove, spoon poised to pull a soft-boiled egg from its water. When she turned, her lips were already parted, but her greeting died there, and map shapes of color bloomed at her neck. Elliot looked at me. He had nicked himself slightly, to the right of the crown. Although I was by any measure surprised, I immediately decided that to express this would be a grave error.

“I like your new look,” I said.

He had shaved his mustache too—it had taken me that long to notice this—and the bright pink of the tender skin there called strange attention to his mouth. Before I spoke, his lips had been slightly parted, and they remained so. He did not smile, or furrow his brow, or, as he often did when he was nervous, grasp his glasses delicately at the hinges and set them back on his ears. The egg water spurted and bubbled on the stove. He said, “You don’t think it’s too shiny?”

“Not at all.”

Liz recalled herself. “No, sweetie.”

“It’s very sleek,” I said.

“Yul Brynner,” said Liz.

“Kojak.” This bit of television knowledge had come to me unbidden, and I was grateful for it.

Liz’s spoon dripped water on the tile. In the weird, slow time of shock, it occurred to me that our eggs would be overcooked. Elliot ran a palm over the top of his head. Back and forth. Watching us. “Here,” he said finally. “Feel it.”

And so I did. It was smooth and still cool from the moisture required to shave it bare. Liz crossed the kitchen and laid her hand next to mine emphatically, with a light slap, as if she feared too tentative a touch would betray her alarm. I thought about meeting her eye then, but I did not. I kept my own on the tiny, cold-shrunken pores of his scalp, and a vein there, snaking like a river through difficult terrain. The nick was to the left of this, and small. And there was a flat spot, just behind the crown, that a brief review of his early falls did not account for. I can mark the moment when Liz saw the flat spot with a hitch in her breath like the one that precedes tears of confusion. He looked so vulnerable. What I wanted to do was bend down and kiss him there, but of course I did not. Instead, I broke the silence we had let fall by removing my hand and remarking on how difficult it must have been to achieve such a perfectly close shave. Liz did the same, saying certain parts must have been like shaving a knee, only without being able to look. Or like buttoning a shirt in the dark. But more dangerous than that of course. The nervousness was rising in her, like a bubble, and she turned away from its object, toward the stove.

We ate our eggs hard-boiled, each handling the untested mechanics of this differently but discreetly, I pressing mine between two pieces of toast, Liz stripping the shell over the sink and slicing hers into rounds before she came to the table, and Elliot peeling his over his plate, chips of shell falling like ceiling plaster onto his toast crusts. Inside my shirt, a single drop of perspiration ran down my side and struck my shirt where my belt cinched it close. Instead of his scalp, it was those bits of eggshell that drew my eye. I had built that house twenty-two years before, and you could lift a roof shingle today and find the sheathing beneath dry as paper. Pipes never leaked, or knocked; my floorboards and hinges were silent, but still this misperception held: a snow of ceiling plaster on his breakfast leavings. He ate his egg from the fingertips on one hand, like a small piece of fruit. We turned newspaper pages. We offered to pass each other things across the table, and I left the house for my office as was my custom, at twenty minutes to eight.