IT’S WORTH POINTING OUT THAT ALTHOUGH ROBERT BELSKY HAD been on my mind, at this point he still wasn’t very high on my list of preoccupations. Mostly I felt sorry for him, and irritated that he was, from time to time, able to make me feel awkward in front of my peers about something as trivial as not being free to accept a last-minute invitation. But never had he risen above the level of sideshow curiosity or puzzling case study in human nature. Liz and I had talked about him a few dozen times over the years as we brushed our teeth or fixed breakfast in the kitchen, more often than we talked about any of my other coworkers certainly, but not in the hushed tones and private places we reserved for topics like a bad homeroom teacher or a neighbor who, six years ago with a letter delivered by courier during dinner, had claimed that part of our swimming pool was in his yard.
When I drove to the office that morning, then, my sense of foreboding was attached not to the meeting I was about to attend, but instead to the pure surprise of my son’s behavior. In my car on the Sunrise Boulevard Bridge, moving my foot from gas pedal to brake to keep time with the traffic, the music on the radio became so unsettling, I turned it down first to low and then to a murmur before turning it off altogether. In the river, what at first appeared to be a dog swimming for shore turned out to be a branch. Although I didn’t really need to, I stopped for gas so that I could try calling Liz from a pay phone. Elliot would most likely still be in the kitchen with her, but I might be able to gauge something about her state of mind from her tone. Answering machines were new then, and novel, and when after the sixth ring, her recorded voice came on the line, my chest filled with a mixture of relief and apprehension, and I began to interrupt. But even as I did so, I realized I was alone there on the phone, and that complex of feelings was replaced by embarrassment. I hung up and got back into my car.
In the parking garage, I returned to the car twice—once to retrieve the envelope of papers I’d forgotten, and once to make sure I had remembered to lock the doors—and in the polished granite lobby, I had to remove my suit coat to check the beginning of a sweat. I stepped into the elevator behind my secretary, Elena. She was a pretty Puerto Rican woman who by some harsh chemical process had dyed her black hair an unnerving red. She did not look up from her paperback until we passed the fifth floor, and then she did so abruptly, as if she had detected me suddenly, by smell.
“Up we go,” she said. She reached up and patted a button on her polka-dot blouse. She began every conversation by checking for some unknown humiliation: a missing button, a static-churned skirt front, a run in her hose. “Up, up. Up.”
“Yes,” I said. We shifted our eyes to the lit numbers above our heads. Nine. Ten. Eleven.
She smiled slightly. “The penthouse, maybe?” Word of today’s meeting had traveled among the secretaries, and it was the surprise of this small detail that recalled me. This meeting, I thought suddenly, was unlikely to go well.
We had them once a month. The four most senior engineers in our division, our manager, Don, and Howard Krepps. Don asked us questions to give Howard an overview of our progress and to demonstrate to Howard that he was doing a good job. Other than this, it served mostly to heighten the competitive feeling among us. Some projects were very obviously more important and interesting than others, and as each of us was questioned about our work, the other three had lots of time to consider this inequity. The effects of this lingered in the air as we slogged through a list of administrative details. With new office allocations and the rumors about Don’s retirement, today’s was likely to be particularly tense.
Lately we had been meeting in a windowless conference room down the hall from Howard’s office. It was small and dark, with a poster of chickens from when the floor had been occupied by the Department of Agriculture, but it had its own kitchenette where Howard could disappear for refills of coffee. The building had recently passed a new policy against smoking, and he was trying to quit altogether. Caffeine was one of the instruments of his new discipline.
When I entered the cramped room, everyone but Don was already there. Howard clapped his hands together. “Okay, Luther, why don’t we start with you?”
I glanced at the door.
“Don couldn’t make it today,” he said.
Robert fixed his eyes on me and winked; he had been the chief circulator of rumors about Don’s retirement.
I sat down and took a file from my briefcase. “Okay. Fire away.”
“Where are you on Bottlerock?”
“Still working on the turbine pedestal design.”
“What about South Geysers?”
“About fifty thousand cubic yards of earth are already out, and Lacey said they haven’t seen anything so far that will indicate major changes on the plans for the well pads or the plant foundation.”
In the seventies and eighties we were doing a lot with California’s plans for conversion to alternative energy. The geothermal power plants in Lake County were the highest profile of our projects, and when they’d been assigned to me, I’d felt a rush of excitement I’d tried to hide. This lasted about six months, and then what I found myself trying to suppress instead was a sense of foreboding. The Geysers Known Geothermal Resource Area is the largest geothermal field in the world. Among its hissing fumaroles and boiling springs, there are three hundred productive wells, but back when we arrived to start developing, PG&E and the municipal utilities had already acquired the best sites. The county balked some and required mitigation for wildlife habitat loss. Our plans were mildly contested during certification review—by Camp Beaverbrook, which objected to the impact of heavy construction equipment on the campers who walked along Bottlerock Road, and by an adjoining landowner whose case was argued on the basis that after many millions of dollars in design and construction, we wouldn’t have enough steam to run it anyway. Although it was relatively easy to overcome all of these hurdles, in the end, the landowner’s lawyers were right. We would operate Bottlerock for five years before admitting that although the steam field had been licensed at fifty-five megawatts, it was really only capable of producing fifteen, and we would abandon the steam wells at South Geysers before we even finished construction.
But at the time of this meeting, it seemed that everyone but me was sure that I would be able to tap the source of unlimited power trapped hundreds of feet beneath the surface.
Howard had more questions for me, during which he emptied his coffee and was too focused to rise for more. At one point, he encouraged the others to ask questions as well, but due to some combination of boredom and misplaced envy, no one took him up on this. Ken took out a file for his own presentation and reviewed it. David went to the kitchenette and returned with cocoa in a paper cup. Robert flipped through a long memo from the Personnel Office on changes in health benefits. It was forty minutes before we moved on.
The discussion of everyone else’s work combined took less time than Howard had allotted to my project. Ken was working on some hydroelectric power plants, David on an early proposal for the expansion of the California Aqueduct, and Robert, because he had finished a big project just a few months ago, was left with reviewing shop drawings for a new visitor center. The contractor had prepared them, and it was Belsky’s job to count and verify, for example, that the number of pieces of reinforcing steel intended in our design were actually in the contract submittal. This alone was not enough to fill his time, and so he was also working on a cost estimate.
“Robert, how are the drawings from Cooper?” Howard said.
He sat back in his chair. “Every bolt accounted for, sir.” He tried to smile.
“Seriously. They’re good, but they’ve changed the specs before. There’s nothing missing?”
“No, no. They did a fine job.”
“How about the cost estimate?”
“My son’s fifth-grade math class has it all figured out. If we have to remove three thousand cubic yards of soil, and each truck has a carrying capacity of ten…”
All of us laughed, including Howard, but when we stopped, he said, “I’d like to see a copy of it when you’re done.” Then he closed his notebook. “Okay, just some administrative details left. Safety of Dams called to say they’ve been looking at North Fork since the earthquake—no surprise—and they’ve decided to go ahead and ask us to investigate for any deficiencies.”
I picked up my pen to appear receptive, but my pulse quickened.
“No, Luther,” he said, “you’ve got too much on your plate with Bottlerock and South Geysers. Bob, you do this one. You can go to Luther for backup materials if you need them.”
“No better man to check up on Luther’s work,” Robert said, but he closed his eyes a second too long. Despite the false power it would allow him to feel over me, it was another bad assignment.
After a discussion of budget issues, during which Ken’s eyes actually drifted shut, Howard unfurled a plan of the building on the laminate conference table. The coveted vantage in most office towers is south and west for the light and the sunsets, but in ours it was north and east for the view of the park and the capitol dome. We leaned in, doing our best to pretend we were only interested in gathering the information so we could dispense it to our teams. Howard pointed with a pencil and read off the office numbers without emotion, assigning Ken and David to center offices with views of the park. Robert and I were both assigned corners, but only mine had the view of the dome.
“Come again?” Robert said.
Howard repeated himself.
“Jesus!” He stood, setting his chair teetering on its legs. Howard glanced at his notes, as if Robert’s expletive might have been scripted there. His hand trembled, but this could just as easily have been caffeine or nicotine withdrawal as nervous tension. Ken coughed. David sipped his cocoa, and Howard let the plans roll shut on the table.
Robert picked up his papers to prepare for an exit, but in the heat of his anger, he stormed into the kitchenette and slammed the door. We could see him clearly through a pane of glass, no more than three feet from David’s chair, pretending not to notice his own mistake. He turned the water on.
“Personnel issues, anyone?” Howard said.
Ken cleared his throat and began softly with the latest installment on a strange junior engineer who had been coming to work sometimes as late as two o’clock and did not seem to respond to any of his warnings. It was difficult to fire people inside the agency; Howard recommended Ken talk to the Personnel Director and find out exactly what kind of documentation was required for his file. We all stood and began gathering our things. Robert slammed a cupboard in the kitchenette, and we left him there, the short boar bristles on the back of his neck standing out as he leaned over the sink.
I WON’T TRY TO CLAIM THAT ANY SYMPATHY FOR ROBERT KEPT MY thoughts from returning quickly to my family. I could see how the favor I’d been shown would be an irritation to him, but I had no respect for the self-indulgence involved in storming out of a meeting. Although I’d felt a pressure in my chest even before Howard had read the full list of reassignments—somehow I’d known mine would be better than Belsky’s—this empathy was quickly overwhelmed by irritation, and, I’ll admit it, a ghost’s trace of embarrassment. Somehow it shamed me to see another man giving way so easily to his own worst impulses.
On my office wall were five pictures, framed by Liz one birthday, of the rivers I had helped dam. When I started a new project, I began by visiting the site. In some cases I might have let this task fall to someone else and spared myself the packed suitcase, the wait in the airport, and the oppressive quiet of a hotel room, but I liked walking the ground myself. Some of this was practical—there were things I could glean that reports and photographs might not tell me: the depth of weathered soil to rock; the steepness of the abutments—but there was also the pleasure. Before I left, I always took a picture from some point downstream of where the dam would be, picturing the accumulation of earth, the size and shape of the change I might make as I looked through the viewfinder and snapped the photo.
It is in one of these that I am featured, blurry and incongruous, in the foreground. When I was asked to evaluate the North Fork dam site, I had decided on impulse to take my family with me, and on the shoulder of the road, Liz served sparkling cider out of Dixie cups. Elliot was six then, and he touched his cup to mine and congratulated me. He stood there a moment looking proud of the gesture, his blown hair dark against the pale gray sky. Then he set off ahead of me to climb the steep hill beside us. I left Liz—pregnant one last time—by the car and followed. Stiff shoots of sagebrush broke against our pant legs and released a spiced smell. His breaths were short and determined by my side. At the crest, he asked me for my camera. He positioned me above him, with the gap of the canyon I would seal off behind me, and took this picture. In it, I am smiling in surprise at his request, and my hair is lifting on the wind.
I took a deep breath and moved to the window. My current office had a view of the I Street Bridge over the murky water of the Sacramento River, and although I’ll admit I looked forward to the stately view of the capitol dome, there was something here that soothed me. Cars drove slowly across the bridge, one east, and then one west. I could look straight down out my window, at the tops of the buildings below, little antennas and ducts and maintenance doors and patches of tar, all of it hidden from view as people walked through the clean white seat of our government, and somehow, no matter how anxious I was feeling, each time I did this my lungs would fill fully of their own accord, and I would turn back to my desk, momentarily relieved.
I tried to get some work done, but every fifteen minutes or so, I picked up the phone to see if I could reach Liz. I wanted badly to tell her I wasn’t worried about Elliot, although in fact I was. Why did I want to do this? She was a strong woman, stronger than I was in almost every way, but when I looked at her, even her unusually muscular arms or the set of her jaw when she confronted an unscrupulous salesman (aloud!) about what he was trying to put over on us, somehow all I wanted to do was protect her. As I’ve said, she was the youngest of five sisters, the only one without a job and the last to have children, and while mostly her insecurities only made themselves plain in an excessive attention to my needs, in that last year before Elliot was born, they seemed to consume her. One memory that stands out is the night of a black-tie fund-raiser Trish and her husband were hosting for the Cancer Treatment Center at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. We hit bad traffic coming over from Sacramento, and all through the drive, Liz was sitting up very straight to keep her white taffeta dress from wrinkling, but shortly after we arrived, she disappeared into the kitchen to sit on a stool and play Candy Land with two nieces in velvet dresses. I tried to tell myself she was having a good time, until just before dinner, when her sister took the landing on the stairs beneath a crystal chandelier and toasted the bravery of the children they were supporting, and I saw Liz glance at her own reflection in a gilt mirror. Later I woke in the guest room alone, and I went downstairs to find her sitting on the bottom stair beneath that same mirror. She looked up at me, her cheeks shiny with tears. “It’s just hard being here,” she said. “I’m so glad for her, but it’s hard seeing what she has.”
I think I did a reasonable job of hiding it for her sake, but the truth is the words stung me. The fact that I had not yet managed to get her sustainably pregnant was making me feel more than a little inadequate, and I had begun to fixate irrationally on the other things I could not give her. Across the street, for example, our new neighbor was building a mock Tudor house with a three-car garage, and this had moved me to repaint our house and dig a swimming pool in our yard. After her second miscarriage, although her Ford was only five years old, I had traded it in for a new station wagon that simulated movement toward a future with children. So when the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about Bay Area philanthropy featuring a picture of Trish standing between her two daughters on the porch of their hilltop Victorian and I saw Liz pinning it to our refrigerator, I guess something boiled over inside me. I said, “Is it really so disappointing, what we have?”
She looked genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”
“No black-tie fund-raisers. No big house. No girls in velvet dresses.”
“Oh, Luther,” she said. “I don’t envy Trish because her life is fancy. I envy her because she’s so important.”
“Who cares about the society pages?”
“That’s exactly my point.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a package of ground beef.
I said, “You said she was important.”
“Yes I did.” She took a frying pan from a drawer beneath the stove. “Because she’s a good mother and an activist, not because her name is in the paper.” She peeled back the plastic on the package of meat. I watched her shape it into three hamburger patties. Finally, she shook her head and turned. “I didn’t say she seemed important to other people, Luther. I said she actually is important.”
It was a few hours before my ego receded enough for me to recognize the self-criticism at the heart of her envy, and although at the time I still felt too implicated by the general dissatisfaction it implied to feel any compassion, now whenever I looked back on this moment, my breath caught for her. Occasionally this came mixed with a selfless courage that almost moved me to ask her if she still felt that kind of jealousy, but more often it only made me feel a vague desire to give her something large, like an oven or a sapling, although at times like this—at most times, truthfully—I was at a loss to imagine what she might need.
My afternoon at the office passed with very little work. I did some filing I normally would have given Elena, because after a while the accumulation of minutes I passed picturing Liz emptying the trash can full of Elliot’s hair instead of finishing the memo I had to write was making me feel the beginnings of self-loathing. The filing was easier. I was bending over a drawer when Robert Belsky appeared in my doorway.
“Hail to the Chief,” he said.
“Come on in,” I managed.
“Can I? The inner sanctum?”
He looked up at the ceiling tiles, making a quick count. “Your new one’s not just the view corner, it’s bigger too.”
“More space for you and the investigators to sit.”
He smiled; I had won something with this. “We can set up the polygraph next to that big window,” he said.
“Right.”
He stepped into my office. When I first met him, he had told me he didn’t like my shoes. Never trust a man in Hush Puppies, he had said, laying his brain bare. Now he reached for my desk and picked up one of my family photographs: the three of us in front of our house in the late sixties, Elliot seated on my joined hands and gripping my arms like a boy on a swing. There is a quality to a child’s use of you when he is young: your lap a stepladder, a desk, a drum. Belsky’s thumb pressed on the glass would leave a mark.
He said, “Come out with us tonight. Buy a round of drinks for the losers.”
“I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“We’re government employees. Take off half an hour early. Who are you kidding?”
“Actually, I am leaving a little early, but I’ve got another commitment.”
He grinned. “And with a wife like yours? You dog.”
I tried to imagine what turns of life produced someone like him. It made me angry. Instead of expressing this, I said, “Maybe another time.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, and he set the picture back on my desktop.
As soon as he was gone, I stood and gathered my things, because now I had my lack of social courage to add to my list of distractions. It was almost four thirty. I might as well go. I got into my car, and although I had resolutely avoided thinking about it—there was a vague embarrassment in the predictability of what I would do—when I headed across the river toward Arden Fair Mall, the shame of this was muffled under the familiar excitement that made this kind of errand a habit. I tried to think about what recently had seemed to absorb her, what she had pursued with energy and confidence to the unarguable benefit of her husband and son, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot, I had already decided. Ken’s Cameras was on the east side, near the food court, and as the salesman showed me three different models, his showroom floor smelled less of photo paper and camera plastic than waffle cones. I pretended to listen to his pitch and then settled blindly on the one with the most features. It had a remote control and a screen that collapsed for storage in a metal tube, and I drove home listening to a traffic report to avoid examining my own behavior—the strange impulse to reassure my wife of her worth and purpose with the gift of a slide projector.
When I pulled into the cul-de-sac, they were in the front yard, loading the first leaves of fall into a dark plastic bag. They looked up when I pulled into the cul-de-sac, like a pair of deer alert to the breaking of twigs, and immediately I was struck by the familiar feeling that they had been discussing me.
As I got out of the car, Liz waved.
“Aren’t you industrious,” I said, my heart racing.
“It was Ellie’s idea. He came home and wanted to rake and bag.”
I had been thinking about it all day, but still the stark expanse of his scalp made me feel the pulse in my neck. In the periphery of my vision, I could see a pink-brown worm writhing, exposed by their work. Damp elm leaves were around our feet. I could not look down, the energy between us was so electric. Liz was wearing a yellow-flowered sundress and my hooded sweatshirt and a pair of green rubber boots. For three or four seconds, she was able to hold my gaze, but finally her eyes slid toward him, and I wonder now if already she understood how thoroughly I would disappoint her.
I said, “Is there something I can do to help with dinner, or should I take over here?”
She handed me the bag. “I know what’s cooking. You two finish up.”
The storm had pulled enough to fill two bags, but it was only the first week of November, the tree above us still dense with yellow leaves. We would do this work half-a-dozen times before the season was over. His head rose and fell in front of me, and the leaves made their papery sound. When he was only two years old, he had insisted, one day, on helping, and I saw how one of the pleasures of parenting is the simple lesson that humans are born with a yearning to be of use. He had taken the rake from me, the handle a wild and unwitting weapon in his hands, and I forced myself from warning or assistance. And then again, another pleasure: the surprise of his competence. Within four or five attempts he had the hang of it, gripping the handle low and dragging the leaves with the rake’s big scraping hand.
I said, “We had our senior staff meeting today.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You were right. Safety of Dams decided to ask us for an investigation.”
He stooped again for another armful of leaves. “Is it going to be a hassle for you?”
“No. They assigned it to Robert Belsky so I can keep working on the geothermal project.”
He snorted and released an armful of leaves into the bag, waiting for me to ask him what was funny.
Finally, I did.
He said, “I just hope you like him.”
“I like all of my coworkers.”
“Yeah, but this guy’s looking for mistakes in your work.”
He stooped for more leaves. He’d reached the end of the pile, and what remained was dark and sodden. I watched him draw the wet leaves against his sweatshirt.
I said, “There’s a great deal of trust between good colleagues.”
“I’m just saying it could be pretty tense.”
“We’re all on the same team.”
“Whatever you say.”
“We’re practically like family.”
The bag was too full for this last armful, but he straightened and forced them in anyway, making a sloppy job of it. Then he looked at me. “Then how come I’ve never met any of them?”
“What?”
“If they’re like family, how come I’ve never met them?”
“It never occurred to me that you’d like to.”
“Well, I would.” He blinked at me. There was a dark circle on his sweatshirt where he had pressed the leaves to his chest. “That is, unless you wouldn’t want me showing up at your office.”
“Of course I would.”
“Sure—”
“I’d be proud to introduce you around.”
He snorted. “Take me out for a drink with your boss…”
“Why not?” I said.
When I was fourteen, my father began to test my mother’s patience just like this, abruptly and roughly, like a firefighter sounding a roof for weak zones. Elliot tied off the bag without answering my question and then stooped to tie his shoe, and the view of the pink crown of his head filled me with an uncomfortable mixture of anger and compassion. I closed my eyes.
During dinner, he was quiet, but Liz enjoyed an ease with this she only exhibited in the wake of a frank conversation, and in imagining the uninhibited give-and-take about his haircut that had probably punctuated their half of the raking job, I was forced to acknowledge that his silence now was triggered solely by me. She steered us deftly through conversations about Michael Jackson’s new video and the Falkland Islands and a woman she had seen that day driving in a car filled with live geese. Elliot and I both ate more than we otherwise would, hiding behind the mechanics of chewing and swallowing, but in Liz the tension between us only brought out grace. She served him a second potato and told a joke that made him laugh, and when she did so herself, I could tell that for a moment, in rising to the occasion of our father-son crisis, she had forgotten its burden. The laughter was genuine. She sat back in her chair; her eyelids fluttered; and in the pocket of ease this created, Elliot and I both set down our forks.
In bed that night, she sat cross-legged on our bedspread, sorting nickels into paper sleeves. A textbook on gardening lay open beside her, and as her fingers combed through the loose change, she glanced at it. In twenty-two years with me, she had mastered a posture of easy, indifferent patience. I stepped in and shut the door.
“Well,” I said—a complete sentence.
She laughed, but for the first time that night there was something nervous in it.
I laughed too and then said, “For the record, I’m not worried about it.”
“Me neither,” she said.
“He’s a happy boy, and the evidence, however weird, is still consistent with this.”
“You’re right.”
I said, “He seemed fine tonight.”
She nodded, searching my face, and it is hard to remember if my pulse rose then due to excitement about my surprise or a sudden sense of shame about the sleight of hand it represented.
“I have something for you,” I said.
I had left it behind me in the hall, and I did not wait to check the look on her face before I turned. I opened the door and slid the boxes in and when I stood up to explain she was already blushing. “Oh, Luther,” she said. She wore an expression that used to pass across her face both when Elliot drew her a picture and when he skinned his knee: something like heartache. I wanted to reach out and pass my thumb over her brow, to relax the tension there, but instead I said: “That photo album you made from this summer is so fantastic. You’re the historian in this family; without you we’d lose all sense of ourselves.”
I leaned over the box then and read the features, and somewhere in my monologue about the virtues of these, I slipped into bed and switched off our lamps and trailed off into the dark. An elm branch blew against the window, a soft tick and scrape. When our eyes adjusted, we would still be able to see little. The elm tree stood just outside the window, and its thick canopy obscured any moonlight. In one month, after the last leaf fall, it would be different, our ceiling a shadow theater of blown branches and passing clouds.
She said, “Adolescence is a tough time, Luther. He sees himself change; he might be worried we won’t accept him. It’s probably just a test.”
“Exactly,” I said. Although ordinarily this assurance from her would have relieved me, the abruptness of her return to the subject carried the somehow threatening insight that my gift had not been a digression. That my keyed-up talk of its features had been making my feelings plain all along. Downstairs the dishwasher churned.
“He’s growing up,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Getting ready to leave the nest.”
“Right.”
She said, “In two years, he probably won’t even live here. We’ll be all alone.”
I thought about this. I had that feeling I sometimes had that she was suddenly speaking in code, leading me gently somewhere I did not want to go.
She said, “What will we talk about all day?”
“What?”
“When he’s gone.” When I didn’t respond, she laughed falsely, to maintain her momentum. “Most people would say something like, ‘Our aches and pains.’”
“Really?”
“Or ‘Our golf game.’”
“But I hate golfing.”
She said, “Or, ‘Honey, we don’t talk all that much now.’”
“Well, that’s ridiculous.”
The dishwasher stopped—the strange, long pause before it drained.
She said, “That’s what Eleanor said that one time.”
“What?”
“That thing after her divorce. You remember.”
The talc smell of her lotion came to me, and made me think of her body. I tried to recall. After each phone call, Liz tried to neutralize the subtle poison of her sisters’ comments with exaggerated impersonations I knew she loved them too much to mean: a bossy voice, a dullard’s drone, the piping of a little girl.
“I don’t think I remember.”
“You know.”
She rubbed her feet together, a whispery sound. I wanted to reach under her T-shirt and lay a hand on her stomach, but I knew she would see this for the advance that it clearly would be and take it as a sign that I was not listening, instead of a sure sign that I was.
Her voice grew infinitesimally softer. “She said she had always thought she and Jim were talking but they really weren’t. Not about the things that mattered. She said I might think we’re happy, but…”
“But what?”
I turned my face towards her to read her face but it was too dark to see anything clearly. Not even her lips when she finally made herself say it aloud: “…but maybe I just don’t know that I don’t really know you.”
THAT WEEK I SAW THE FIRST OUTWARD SIGNS THAT MY EVASION was taking its toll. On Saturday afternoon, she came down to the laundry room wearing a yellow satin blouse over a short black skirt I had not seen in years, and when she descended half an hour later to defrost a casserole for Elliot, she was wearing a strapless velvet dress. Before we left, she had changed earrings twice, finally settling on no earrings but a long pendant necklace that drew attention to the dark well between her breasts.
The occasion was a sixtieth birthday party for Don Moraine in the bar at the Capitol Hotel. Earthquake scaffolding still hid the old brick façade, but somehow it retained its grandeur. Management had strung the steel poles with lights and rolled a red carpet down the plank ramp that covered the damaged stairs. Liz had finally settled on a green silk dress with a matching jacket that hid the surprise of bare shoulders, and she moved around the room to each of my colleagues, laying a hand on their forearms. When she was flushed with two vodka tonics and the regard of men, she steered us towards Robert Belsky. He was standing by the buffet table, eating cocktail meatballs directly from the chafing dish. Behind him, his wife held two drinks.
Belsky saw us coming, and he reached out to touch Liz at the small of her back. “How’d you persuade Mr. Big to go slumming tonight? We’re on the first floor here. And no view.” He speared a meatball with his toothpick and winked at me over Liz’s shoulder. “He’s such a big shot now, I thought he’d come with a bigger entourage. Lackeys. Fan clubbers.”
She laughed lightly and looked over his shoulder. “It’s good to see you, Joyce.”
Belsky’s wife had just taken a sip and had an ice cube in her mouth, but she raised her glass in greeting.
“What about me?” Belsky said. “What am I, chopped liver?”
Liz sidestepped away from his touch now, and her embarrassment for Joyce made her flush. She slipped off her fitted jacket.
“Va-voom!” Belsky said.
Joyce laughed. “No kidding. You look fantastic.”
My first year in high school, my father began to comment on other women in front of my mother. She always laughed too, but I can’t help but wonder how the memory of it made her feel when she was alone, surgaring her tea or appraising her reflection in the diamond-shaped mirror above her dresser.
Belsky punched me in the shoulder. “How’d a sap like you ever rate a woman like that?”
“I’m a lucky man.”
“I guess the nickname can stick then.”
“What nickname is that?” Liz said.
“Lucky Luther. I was thinking of changing it now that he’s under the microscope.”
She said, “You can’t be talking about that routine investigation.”
“Jury’s out on routine, sweetheart.”
She rolled her eyes and took a lipstick and mirror from her purse.
He said, “A dam like that one nearly wiped out half of Los Angeles in 1971. It was during an earthquake about the size of the one we had last month.”
She applied a fresh layer and pressed her lips together.
He said, “You never know what they might find.”
Liz snapped her little bag shut and laughed. “I know exactly what they’ll find,” she said, and she kissed me full on the mouth.
She pulled back a few inches and looked me in the eye and smoothed the shoulders of my sport coat. Then she licked her thumb and rubbed the trace of her kiss from my lips, and it was this, not the kiss itself, that made me blush.
“You win,” Belsky said. “The nickname stands.” Joyce tipped back her cup for a last cube of ice, but it clung to the bottom by molecular cohesion. Liz saw this too, and it touched both of us in the same way. We looked at the carpet.
Belsky stabbed another meatball with his toothpick and looked at me, eyebrows raised. “’Course I bet you’re counting on a downgrade in a few months.”
For a moment, I thought he was referring to my wife. “A downgrade in what?”
“Office views.”
I looked at him.
He turned to Liz, as if he were sharing a secret. “Don’s is on the southeast corner. Higher, and closer to Krepps, but no view of the dome.”
I shook my head.
Belsky leaned towards my wife. “That’s what a shoo-in he is,” he whispered, loud enough so I could hear it. Joyce had set her empty cup on the table and was stealing a sip of her husband’s drink. He cupped a hand to Liz’s ear, “He doesn’t even have to think of me as competition.”
We did not stay long after this. We stood and talked with Don and Lorraine for ten minutes about Maui, where they were about to go for Don’s annual vacation, and where I imagined—all right, I’ll admit I couldn’t help thinking about it—he might make his decision about retirement. Two men carrying a cake aflame with candles appeared from the swinging kitchen door behind a row of potted palms, and they placed it on a table near the four of us. Someone dimmed the lights, and Don’s face was lit up by candle fire and affection for his wife, at whom he glanced just before he took a deep breath and blew.
Liz and I shared a piece of cake, standing alone in the corner, and although even after two vodkas she had the judgment to restrain herself from whispers on the subject, she kept cutting looks at Belsky or at Don and then looking at me smugly. She did not really need words. In the two weeks since I’d begun to mislead her, she had been formulating an unwritten list of the differences between Belsky and me. She took us on another neighborhood walk to his house, which she had clearly driven past herself since our last visit, to allow me to see a sloping flagstone driveway that in time would buckle because the contractor had not used edge boards. “You’re more careful,” she had said in bed that night. And when I told her about his reaction to the new office assignments, she had said, “You’re more mature.”
Now she set down our plate, and as she led me towards the door we saw Joyce following Belsky towards the buffet. Liz took me through the lobby, out through the big oak doors into the fresh cool air and the view of the capitol, lit at night in a way that always made me feel quiet and respectful. She took my hand, and it came to me with sudden certainty just how she would exaggerate his rivalrous barbs and harmless flirtations. I was surprised by the dread this made me feel.
“Add two more to the list,” she said. She was grinning but her eyes flitted from my eyes to my mouth and back again.
“What would those be?”
“Not morbidly competitive.”
“And?”
“Better husband,” she said.
THREE NIGHTS LATER WE WOKE TO A SOUND OUTSIDE: SOMETHING striking the east wall near my study and Elliot’s bedroom. Liz rose quickly and opened a window. I joined her there, our hands touching on the sill. We saw no movement in the dark yard, but a girl’s voice drifted up to us, a harsh whisper.
“It’s me. Peggy.”
Elliot’s voice answered. “What?”
“Peggy Lefkowitz. From school.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Come down a second.”
He didn’t answer right away. Crickets pulsed beneath the elm tree. Then he said, “I can’t.”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“You better go,” he said.
“Elliot.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. His window slid shut. I looked at Liz, but she was straining to see something on the lawn. A girl had appeared beneath our window. In the moonlight, I could make out the silver hardware on her leather jacket. She stepped behind our elm tree, and we heard her clothes rustling, and then a liquid pitting. She was urinating on our lawn.
By the time she started to pull up her jeans, Liz was halfway down the stairs. I caught up with her at the kitchen door, and as she threw it open, I worried that in the heat of her indignation, she might provoke her. Although it seems ludicrous now, I thought it was possible that the girl would hit Liz, or knock her down, but it turned out her instincts were a lot better than this. Before Liz had even opened her mouth to confront her, Peggy turned to run.
“Wait!” Liz said.
But she was already running. Liz yelled, “I just want to invite you inside.”
Peggy stopped and regarded Liz for the first time. I was always startled anew to see the range of people who were caught short by her beauty. The girl’s own hair was short on one side, hanging no further than her earlobe, and long, to her shoulder, on the other. “What do you want?” she said.
“I heard you say you wanted to talk to Elliot.”
“So?”
Liz put her hands on her hips in the teasing manner I remembered from her days at the bank. “So why not do it inside where it’s not so damp?”
Then, in another of the string of events that fall that should have inured me to surprise, Peggy allowed herself to be turned, and inside, when Liz offered her something to drink, she asked for milk. She sat at our kitchen table waiting. Her silver rings clinked against the side of the glass. She didn’t wipe her lip after she sipped, and a rim of white masked her dark lipstick.
“Luther,” Liz said—she closed the refrigerator door—“why don’t you go up and get Elliot?”
“Oh,” I said, and could think of nothing further. She and the girl both looked at me, waiting for me to leave.
In the front hall, I paused, hoping to hear what my wife had to say to her, but the sound was muffled except for a surprising shock of laughter: the girl’s. I wiped my T-shirt. “Crazy,” I said quietly, just to test the sound of it, and then looked at my hands: palms, then backs. Stingy nail beds and thick knuckles. My father’s hands. I heard Liz laugh now, and then Peggy, and then Liz together with her. A little fugue of laughter. Then I looked up the stairs and to my embarrassment saw Elliot there, looking down at me over the banister. I opened my mouth to normalize the scene, but he put his finger to his lips and walked back down the hall to his bedroom.
Briefly, excuses for the eavesdropping he had witnessed occurred to me, and a handful of weird explanations for the word I had muttered, but I was able to keep myself from refining these as I walked up the stairs.
When I entered his room, he was seated on the edge of his bed.
“What’s going on?” he said.
On his wall was a calendar with a girl in a swimsuit the color of ripe limes that had not been there the last time I visited. His hands lay open-palmed on his race-car bedspread. It could be disorienting, parenting.
I said, “Your mom was hoping you might come downstairs.”
“Is Peggy in there?”
“Yes, she is.”
“And Mom is talking to her?”
“Yes.”
“Telling her to beat it, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. His face registered no alarm, and the realization that he may have expected this unnerved me. This evening was going somewhere everyone but me seemed to understand. “I think she’s hoping you two might talk before she calls Peggy’s mom.”
He exhaled sharply, just like his mother. “Does she know Peggy has been on probation three times this year?”
“Probably not.”
“Does she know Peggy smokes clove cigarettes?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Does she know Peggy pees in public?”
“She may have surmised that, yes.”
He looked at me fully.
I said, “She peed on our lawn after you closed your window.”
He laughed briefly at this, with what appeared to be genuine appreciation, but stopped abruptly and a sadness seemed to overtake him. “Her hair is weird too,” he said.
“Original, I would have called it.”
He touched his glasses, the stalling gesture that in earlier years was the most frequent prelude to revelation. “You still haven’t invited me to your office.”
“How about Friday?” I said.
For as many as thirty seconds he held still enough for tension to settle on the features of our landscape like strong lighting—how close I’d inadvertently come to him, standing next to his bed; a reddened cuticle around his thumbnail; my hands trembling as I slipped them self-consciously into the pockets of my robe—but whatever he was gathering the courage to say, he thought better of it. He stood and walked past me out of the room.
There was a time when the scenarios presented within my home seemed fairly predictable to me, but following my bald son down the hall at midnight toward a girl in leather who whispered with my wife in the kitchen, I had lost all confidence that I might know how things would unfold. His loose-fitting pajamas preceded me down the stairs, and when I entered, Liz was sitting at the kitchen table. Peggy stood behind her, a pair of scissors in hand. She had cut a good seven inches off the back of Liz’s hair, and the yellow strands lay on the tile, splayed like straw.
Peggy raised the scissors slightly, like waving. “Hi, Elliot.”
Liz looked up at us, brushing loose hair from her chest and shoulders. “Peggy’s giving me a new style. Short in the back and really long bangs. Who has it again?” She turned her head over her shoulder toward Peggy, inquiring.
“Flock of Seagulls,” said Elliot.
Peggy grinned, and Liz turned to him.
“Flock of Seagulls,” she said.
We watched Peggy finish, and then Liz insisted she and I go outside a moment so she could feel the cool air on her bare neck. When she’d closed the door behind us, she explained that this was the only place where Elliot and Peggy could feel sure we were not eavesdropping, and in the cold damp grass she turned back towards the house. It was dark except for our bedroom light, and of course the light from the kitchen, and we could see the two of them at the table, talking. Elliot’s hands stayed on the table, and Peggy’s gestured once or twice, but mostly she kept them still as well, both of them moved to shyness it seemed, by the hour, and by Liz’s impulsiveness maybe, but most of all by the sudden surprise of their privacy.
“What do you suppose they’re talking about?” I said. I could hear the filter on our neighbor’s pool cycle on. I was barefoot, and I was cold.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“You’re not curious?”
“Of course I’m curious; I meant it doesn’t matter to them. They’re making small talk. Whatever it is, it’s not what they’re thinking.”
This made me take her hand.
And in the days that followed, I found myself distracted from Elliot’s change by my wife’s. I watched the nape of her neck as she inclined her head over a pan of bacon, or leaned over the sink to take a cupped handful of water to rinse her mouth at night. When I met her for lunch one day that week, I did not recognize her. I saw her only as an attractive stranger, and when I realized it was my own wife, I felt a flush of excitement that I let pass before I stepped from the door to join her. As much as I had loved her long hair, at moments both the extremity and the contrast of this cut were thrilling. The night she did it, she had pulled off her T-shirt in our bathroom and stood, head bent over the counter, so I could brush the cuttings from her shoulder blades. She was speculating with relish about the crush Peggy had on our son, and her voice faded in and out as I looked at a chain of small pale freckles along her spine. The next morning she woke me in the midst of an unsettling dream to ask me what I thought of the cut, and I struggled from a still-vivid half-world to tell her part of the truth—that I thought she looked beautiful, that a change was fun. But all the while I was distracted by the memory of a short-haired woman who had stepped from behind a curtain and put her hand to my mouth in my dream. I kept track of a weak intention to interject mention of this as we talked, and thought of it again when Liz peeked out of the shower to ask me for a new bar of soap, but in the end I never did. It would only have frightened her. No woman can imagine how little the male desire for variety actually means in the context of love.
I also hid my enjoyment because I believed the haircut was a symptom of her old self-doubt—a sign that she felt her power to help us was waning. One morning she came to the kitchen wearing a purple halter top the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the early days of our marriage, and at the sight of her bare shoulders and the slice of skin at her waist, the boy’s blood rush I felt was checked by a twinge of guilt. The next evening, I found two shopping bags of new clothes in her closet, and although she rarely wore makeup at home, when she raised her wineglass to her lips by the stove that night, I saw that she was wearing lipstick. She slept poorly. When I finally thought to ask her if I should invite him to meet me at my office on Friday—maybe take him out for a drink and talk to him man to man—she was so surprised it took a count of ten seconds for her to gather the words to encourage me. Then several moments of silence passed during which I imagine she conjured, as I did, the phantom words and gestures that might make up such a meeting, and at last her breathing slowed, as it had not in weeks.
AT TEN MINUTES TO FIVE, I TURNED MY DESK CHAIR AND LOOKED out my window. Here and there, people walked head-down in trench coats or leaned towards car doors fumbling with keys, and over the next ten minutes, the numbers swelled. From storefronts, from the tree-flocked park paths, people streamed onto the sidewalks. For his report, Elliot was required to include a small section on the times that had produced my father, and all afternoon I had pictured him at work in the library, winding a microfilm reel, his twill cuffs buttoned and his domed reflection haunting the dark screen of the reader. The white clouds were high and the late sun illumined them. The fan palms along L Street panicked in sudden winds and then calmed, and finally I saw him, his pale head passing into the crowd at the corner of Eleventh Street. He was wearing a cobalt windbreaker, zippered up to the neck, and I was seized by the tenderness that had overcome me so many times that month looking at the slight bumps and flat spots, the nicks and blemishes, the faint trace of a green-blue vein running from temple to crown. He must be cold. Even from my distance, I could see people glancing at him, heads turning as they passed and snapping back just short of a stare when the possibility of illness occurred to them.
That afternoon, I’d made several starts at my door to tell Elena about this meeting, wondering if I should warn her about his appearance so she could hide her alarm. In the end, I settled for telling her only to treat him as she would the most senior of my visitors, offering him a drink, and, if circumstances required him to wait, a chair. Circumstances would not, but I hoped the memory of my instructions would put her in a respectful frame of mind that would help her mask her surprise. Instead, she opened the door a hand’s width, and her eyes fluttered in the way that they did when I pointed out errors in her work. She brushed her dry red hair aside. “He’s here,” she said. Then she took a step backwards, and, as soon as Elliot had slipped into my office, quickly shut the door.
He took off his backpack and set it on the floor. When he straightened, instead of looking at me, he pretended to study the picture he had taken of the bluff that would become the right abutment of North Fork Dam. I had always imagined that at the time he had believed everything in the picture would be in focus; that he had meant just as much to capture me and my laughter in sharp detail as the vast space behind me. I stepped around my desk and took up a position at his side.
“That’s one of my favorite photos,” I said.
“Why?” He touched his glasses at the hinges, setting them back on his ears. Even in my peripheral vision their silver stems drew attention, they were so stark against his bare skin.
I said, “Because I don’t know why you took it.”
“I don’t either.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
In consideration of this mystery, a stillness came over both of us, and without looking I knew that his jaw had relaxed slightly in the way that it did in the dark of a cinema, or on our reading sofa in the moment before he fell fully asleep. We searched the photo for clues: the sliver of sky to the left of the bluff; the blurry green cloud of sagebrush around my boots. In the lower corner his cap lay where it had blown as he framed the shot.
He said, “I showed you that beetle just before.”
“I remember.”
“You were out of breath from climbing up the hill.”
Neither of us moved. For a moment, I felt we could go home, that there was no closer I could be to my son, that this ease would surely cast its warmth on every small choice he made in the future. But then the vent above us breathed a sudden mouthful of cool air, and my son started, his bare scalp feeling it like a touch.
He adjusted his glasses. “For the record, I don’t think Elena likes it either.”
“Likes what?”
“My hairstyle.”
“I’m not sure I like hers.”
He laughed in spite of himself. But he recovered his air of persecution quickly. “I’ll grow it back if it’s embarrassing you.”
“Nonsense. I think it’s very bold.”
“I know you wish you’d brought me here before I cut it.”
“I wish nothing of the sort.”
“Then why are we hanging out in your office with the door closed?”
“You just got here,” I said. “But by all means, let’s go out and meet some of my friends.”
There were half-a-dozen engineers closer at hand, but I wanted to begin with someone I was sure would hide his surprise at Elliot’s baldness. I’d given it some thought. At a Department picnic one summer, I’d watched Ken Gonzales tie and retie the sash on his daughter’s sundress, patiently accepting her counsel on the size of the bow. His door was closed, but when he saw me through the glass, he waved me in.
I said, “I want you to meet my son, Elliot.”
Elliot stepped through the door, and Ken’s eyes widened slightly, but he stood and extended a hand across his desk. “You go to Del Campo?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My son’s at Foothill. On the soccer team. You play soccer?”
“No.”
He had clearly been hoping for a yes, but he made something of it anyway. “That’s good, I guess. I hate to think of you kicking each other in the shins.”
I laughed in the polite way that expresses more gratitude than amusement, and Elliot did too. Ken’s laughter was halting, as if between intervals he was trying to think of a new topic. I was about to relieve him by telling Elliot I wanted him to meet David Shoots, when I heard Belsky’s voice behind us.
“Well, well. And who might this be?”
I turned no more than was necessary to answer his question. “This is my son, Elliot.”
Belsky took a step backwards and placed his hands on his hips in a pose of taking stock. It was an obvious prelude to comment on Elliot’s appearance, but no sooner had he assumed it than the expression on his face changed. I think the possibility of illness had occurred to him. Still, the impulse to say something mocking had already risen, and he needed to satisfy it. “Albright Junior,” he said. “So how does it feel to have your dad named a threat to the people of Sacramento?”
“What?”
“Public Enemy Number One. His big dam’s being investigated.”
Elliot cut a quick glance in my direction. “Fine.”
“Is that on the record or off?” He punched Elliot playfully in the arm, harder than I would have liked.
Ken said, “Those investigations are no big deal. Routine. Red tape.”
Elliot said, “Benign distraction.”
“Benign distraction!” Belsky slapped his stomach. “A regular chip off the old Albright block!”
I laughed. “My wife calls us the twins.”
“I can see why,” said Ken.
“Except for the hair.” Belsky said this with the wide-eyed self-congratulation that he wore when he made any of his jabs, but immediately it froze there. It’s hard to describe, but truly, looking at Elliot recalled some deep store of poster images of young chemotherapy patients, and I think this echo signal of fragility and menace registered even on a radar as weak as Belsky’s. But to my surprise, in the awkward silence, Elliot began to laugh. I’ve thought about it many times since then, and in memory it still seems as it did at that moment: genuine laughter, the most comfort he had shown since his arrival. It relaxed Belsky’s brief spasm of sensitivity; he reached out and punched my son in the arm again, and, this time, without hesitation, Elliot punched him back.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s hipper than I am.”
“Right,” Ken said, winking at Elliot. “Your dad’s a little square.”
“We should get away from him sometime then,” Belsky said. “Your dad’s always turning me down; maybe you’d be up for some fun.”
“Sure,” he said.
The forced casualness of his tone betrayed so much vulnerability even Belsky was moved by it. He had just been baiting me, but now he glanced at me and then back at Elliot. “Uh, you water-ski?”
“Not much,” Elliot said. He had never water-skied in his life.
“I just bought a ski boat for Folsom Lake. I’ve got a kid about your age; maybe I’ll teach you to slalom sometime. If your dad doesn’t mind.”
Elliot looked at me hopefully.
“Of course not,” I said.
I took him down the hall to David’s office and then introduced him to a few Senior Engineers, but with each brief encounter he grew more withdrawn, and finally I clapped my hands together and suggested we get a drink at a place where I sometimes bumped into senior officials from our Department—even politicians he’d recognize from the local news. On the short walk past the capitol, I told him about an article I’d read about a woman who had killed a pedestrian not far from there by trying to eat a bowl of cold breakfast flakes while driving herself to work, but his eyes strayed first to a flag luffing high on a rooftop, and next to a crow pecking at a cellophane wrapper, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was tuning me out completely. At our table, I ordered a scotch and soda and Elliot ordered a root beer, and when the waiter turned his back on us, I felt a ridiculous wave of panic at the loss of his company. In the dim glow, my son’s baldness had a different quality. He looked not sick, but old. He took the fingers on one hand with the other and gave each a brief squeeze, index to pinky, and then began the sequence again. I had seen him do this when another teenager asked him about his favorite bands. Liz tried to assure me that his discomfort around kids his own age was natural for an only child. He had access to an environment free of conflict and judgment and competitive hostility. When I heard her describe this, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would ever choose to leave it, and now I found myself marveling that it was those very guarantees of love and acceptance that seemed to make him suspicious. I felt both an urge to delay our conversation and the need to hurry, and the distance between us made me long for an ambassador’s assistance from Liz.
I said, “I brought your mother to this bar on our second date. She ordered a boilermaker.”
He looked up at me. I’m not sure I can describe the physical details that make up that rare quality of attention one occasionally invites from others. Maybe his angle of incline towards me increased by a degree. Or his eyes, often focused on mine, opened just a millimeter wider. Something charged entered the air between us that was at once a reward and a threat. “What did you have?” he said.
“A ginger ale.”
“Why only a ginger ale?”
“I was driving home later,” I said, but it wasn’t enough. He waited for me to explain, and suddenly the truth occurred to me. “I wanted to appear responsible.”
Even on our second date, it had been clear to me that Liz had been drawn to me by my uneasy caution—that she’d felt empowered by the notion that a certain reserve and numbness to pleasures were hers to cure.
The waiter set down our drinks. Elliot stirred his root beer. The room around us seemed still and dark, other conversations quiet. He said, “Didn’t you ever do anything crazy?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Just…anything. Something kind of wild.”
I looked up at the chandelier and pretended to be thinking. It had false candles topped by twenty-five watt bulbs with orange glass to cast a flamelike light. It hadn’t been dusted in a long time.
He said, “Like did you ever get in any fights?”
“Your mom and I?”
“No. Fistfights. With kids from school.”
I regarded him. If this had been a problem, surely we would have known it by then—seen blood on his clothes, some bruises—but still my pulse quickened. In the dark of the bar, the lower rims of his glasses cast shadows above his cheekbones, making him look tired.
“I never did, no. But I came pretty close. A boy in the class below mine challenged me to a fight.”
“What did you do?”
“I considered skipping school that day, and in the end, although I wasn’t the type to cut classes, I did. I went to the public library and checked out a book on boxing. It showed men in various stances. I decided the uppercut would serve me well, but at that point I still wasn’t sure I would actually go. Finally, I arrived at the fight scene early. I had a vague idea that familiarity with the spot would give me an advantage. Also, that the sooner I got there, the less time I would have to decide not to go. A sort of forced commitment.”
Elliot hadn’t moved since I started. I took a sip of my scotch.
“What happened?” he said.
“He never showed up.”
“He chickened out?”
“I don’t think so. He was much bigger than I was. I’ve always thought it was more likely that he forgot.”
He nodded.
I said, “Or double-booked.”
He laughed, but in that complicated way he had in front of me now—the ease so quickly checked by self-consciousness. In the after-quiet, I was tempted to ask him outright if he’d been fighting, but through what felt then like a sensible discipline I let the silence stand. He picked up his root beer and took a sip. Then he said, “How come you checked out a book?”
“I wanted to imagine what the fight would be like. And I think I also hoped it would prepare me, but I guess that’s a little like training for a marathon by watching one.”
“It probably would have helped a little.”
“Maybe.”
He stirred his drink. “Why didn’t you ask someone to teach you?”
“I didn’t run with a very rough crowd.”
“You could have asked your dad.”
I said, “Until just before I went to the school yard to wait, I wasn’t even sure I planned to fight.”
The period of regular interviews for his paper was over. He had handed in his outline and was writing his rough draft now, but of course his interest had not faded.
“Did you even tell him about it?”
“Who?” I said, although of course I knew what he meant.
“Your dad.”
His eyes were still on me. The fact was I didn’t tell my father, but it was clear to me that Elliot was searching for a new model of conduct to fit his changing circumstances, and to him this might have suggested that distance between a father and son is normal, when the truth is even now I sometimes wake from dreams in which I have told my own father my secrets: about that dog I watched die; or the way, when he entered rooms, I came to expect disappointment.
I said, “No, but I can’t remember why.”
After several seconds during which I feared he might press further, his eyes strayed to a group of men laughing across the room, and the charged quality left the table between us. I recognized one of them as a former coworker named Nathan. He had been at the Department before me, and when I arrived, he had taken me under his wing without seeming to notice the chasm of incompatibility in our personalities. He took me out to lunch at a bar called the Pine Cone where people sat at large common tables, and each time, before long, I found myself making jokes with men I had never met about my own small daily frustrations and getting swept away by the surges of clear-hearted ebullience that filled them all when they watched a home run on the tiny bar screen. We never saw each other outside the workday, and I suspect even back then if asked to list them, he might not have thought to count me among his friends, but the weird truth is that that was the closest I think I have ever been to another man. It didn’t last long though. Shortly after Belsky arrived, Nathan began asking him along too, and something about Belsky’s company—his aggressive humor, or his finger-licking, or his complaints about his wife and children—stripped the lunches of ease and pleasure for me. It wasn’t any kind of principled decision on my part, but I found I started joining Nathan less frequently, until, after a while, I never went at all.
I said, “That one in the purple tie used to work with me.” I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them. “His name is Nathan Sattler. He was passed up for promotion, and he threw a stapler at the wall.”
This was the type of thing I normally would have kept to myself, but it brought Elliot out of his trance. He set the straw in his glass and sat up straight. He said, “Did he deserve the job?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Why didn’t he get it?”
“He has a bad temper.”
He thought about this. “What happened?”
“He was born that way, I guess.”
He smirked. “I mean when he threw the stapler.”
“Oh. Nothing right away. Later that year he was offered a transfer to an office down south.”
“So what’s he doing here?”
“He didn’t take it. He quit to start a consulting firm.”
Within a year he had earned a strong enough reputation to win a small job that had also been bid by Bechtel. Elliot glanced at the men again. Nathan was turned in such a way that he would not see us, and suddenly the contemplation of his success made me grateful for this. He was gesturing wildly, the way he used to in meetings just before he made a point of surprising insight. There was no mistaking these windmilling motions. In meetings they had made me feel superior, but in my son’s company they made me feel self-conscious. I took a sip of my drink. The waiter placed a dish of peanuts on the polished wood table. Elliot asked for another root beer, and when the waiter left, he rotated the ice cubes in his empty glass with his cherry.
“Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course. You can ask me anything.”
He looked up at me now. “Did what that guy at your office said make you uncomfortable?”
“Not at all.”
“Not even a little bit?”
I leaned forward in my chair. I set my drink on the quilted paper coaster. The opportunity I had been waiting for had come, and I wanted his full attention. “Elliot, I think you’re wonderful. I’ve always thought that. Whenever you make a new choice for yourself, I respect it.”
“Not about my haircut,” he said. “About your dam.”
It took me several seconds to even imagine what he meant. “Why would it make me uncomfortable?”
“Because they’re saying there’s something wrong with your design.”
“They’re saying they have more information now than when I designed it.”
“Doesn’t it bug you even a little bit?”
“Doesn’t what bug me?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head slightly, as if the very sight of me were hard to accept. When he opened them, he was squinting with disgust. “The suggestion that you could have screwed up, Dad. That with all your training and experience you could have spent six years building something that big and that expensive in a way that threatens the safety of tens of thousands of people.”
It was difficult, at times, to keep his vulnerability firmly in mind. It was clear to me even then that he knew enough about science to understand that a determination of structural deficiency based on data unavailable during design did not indicate an error of expertise or attention on the part of an engineer. Yet, for reasons I could not yet fully fathom, he wanted to pretend that he did not. Behind him, Nathan’s party rose, laughing, to leave the bar, and at the sharp bark of this, Elliot did not even turn his head. He was focused on me, with that special attention, and then, quite suddenly, on a spot on the table I could not trace.
I said, “If they doubted my competence, Elliot, they wouldn’t have given me the geothermal project. They wouldn’t have just relocated me to the best view corner in the building.”
But his eyes did not rise, and I had the impression that my voice came to him from a great distance. The false flames of the chandelier were a blur above us. Everything in the room seemed faint next to the glow from his inclined head. He stayed this way a long time, until the waiter came back with his root beer. Then he looked up, and I told him I didn’t want to make Liz wait with our dinner. He took a few sips as I counted out the bills from my wallet, and then we left the lobby for home.
OUR BEDROOM CLOSET WAS SPLIT DOWN THE CENTER BY A floor-to-ceiling unit of shelves, a feature I had designed to achieve more shelf space without realizing what a strangeness it would introduce into our undressing. We always ended up on either side of this, enjoying a privacy we did not need. When Liz finally asked me how my drink with our son had gone, she was hidden behind these shelves.
I said, “We went to the lobby of the Capitol Hotel. I told him you’d ordered a boilermaker on our first date there. He liked that.”
“How on earth do you remember that?”
“You wore a spangled halter top.”
She laughed.
“I didn’t mention that part.”
She laughed again, invisible. I tried to picture her. In her bra and jeans. Or her blouse and underpants. Barefoot. Blinking at the shelves. She had made sloppy joes and milk shakes for dinner, and when we sat down she had initiated a game in which each of us quoted lines from movies and the others tried to guess their sources. Both of them were good at this, their memories filled with the words of fictional people I could not even remember having seen, and my inability to offer any material or identify even one of the lines they repeated was the subject of a lot of joking. His laughter seemed a magic trick, and my mind returned to that moment when Belsky had called attention to his hair, but I forced it away. In the car on the way home from the bar, he had been quiet, and I had taken the opportunity to try to think through how I would share what had passed between us with Liz. Now I heard the wicker of our laundry hamper flex, and she stepped around the shelves: PTA T-shirt and underpants.
“So??” she said.
“So what?”
She rolled her eyes. “What did you talk about?”
“Different things.”
“Such as?”
I knew something important hung in the balance, but the thought of telling her how contemptuously he had challenged me filled me with panic. It seemed to me that Elliot’s happiness had been her main consolation in our marriage, and each new twist of his behavior was persuading me that the responsibility for his teenage angst was mine.
I shrugged. “Such as what you ordered on our second date. Such as a guy in the bar I used to know.”
Her shoulders fell. “Do you feel better at least?”
“About what?” I said, although of course I knew what she meant.
She closed her eyes. Even then, I felt sorry for her. When she opened them, she reached up and took my face in her hands and stood on her toes to kiss me on the forehead. “How was work today then?”
“Good.”
“Any pissing from Belsky?”
“I didn’t see him much.”
“That must have been nice,” she said, and she turned away to pick up her jeans. As she stuffed them in the hamper, I wondered if she might be fighting back tears, but she did not let me see her face again until we got into bed. For the first time in our marriage except during a war or a natural disaster, she turned on our bedroom TV, and I watched with her aimlessly—the end of Fantasy Island, the eleven o’clock news, Johnny Carson’s monologue—stealing looks at her face in the flickering glow until she drifted off to sleep.
After our wedding we had moved her things from her parents’ house into my apartment in the bed of my green Ford for a life I saw now as very different from the one she’d wanted. At first, my hesitation to have children had seemed almost to please her—as if my relief at her patience and understanding were their own reward. With every blockade to intimacy, my fears and inhibitions were making of her marriage a more challenging and noble occupation, but her fantasy of tumbling the high walls of my hesitation did not last. I can count the harsh expressions of disappointment she made during our marriage on one hand, and in every case they came during the two years when I stalled and evaded her suggestions that we start a family. I had lain awake many nights worrying silently that I might lose her, until finally it dawned on me that despite all my fear about becoming a father, a child might at least distract her from her discontent. And so he had, but lying beside her now with the Tonight Show Band playing “Johnny’s Theme,” it struck me suddenly that it was not only Elliot’s adolescent judgment I should fear, or his scrutiny, or even his loss, but also how his growing and leaving us alone together would resuscitate Liz’s dissatisfaction with me.
This is all I have to explain the choice I made then. When the idea came to me, it seemed a gift—an obvious solution that would be as much of a salvation to her as it was a relief to me—but a more enlightened part of me was just frightened enough of its potential to make me hesitate. I turned the TV off, because it seemed to me the conversation would be easier to have without that flickering glow to illuminate our faces, and when I did, ghost colors swam before my eyes. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the soft click of her tongue that meant deep dreams. My heart was like a bird behind my ribs. I could not make myself touch her.
“Liz,” I whispered.
Her breathing was steady.
I said it louder: “Liz.”
She gasped and shifted, pulling the sheets. “What?”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
Everything seemed so still, suddenly.
She said, “What is it, sweetheart?”
I said, “I think this week you should go to the Crisis Center and sign up to be a counselor.”
For a few seconds, she didn’t say anything, but it was dark, so I couldn’t see her face.
Then she said, “Why?”
“You’ve wanted to a long time. It’s a noble impulse, and I think you’d be good at it.”
“Why now, I mean?”
“Why not?”
Even in the dark, I knew the face and posture that went with the sigh she made. She said, “I mean why did you wake me up to tell me?”
Again the crazy beating. I said, “I was just thinking about what you said last week about Elliot leaving home soon. About leaving the nest…”
She waited.
“And about what you’ll do when he’s gone.”
“Us,” she said.
“What?”
“Not me, us.”
I was too confused to even formulate a question.
Her voice was sharp in the dark. “I said, ‘What will we do when he’s gone?’ I said, ‘What will we talk about?’”
“Right. Sure,” I said. “Us.”
She waited. Not moving. There were no sounds at all in the house.
I was still blunt to the plain truths of my failings as a spouse, but something in the quality of her silence filled me with panic. I groped for words that would make the suggestion seem the tender encouragement I had hoped it could seem. “The point is, I think you enjoy helping people,” I began. It wasn’t until I’d heard myself say it out loud that it became clear how hurtful my explanation would be: “Volunteering would give you something to do.”